Psychoanalyst Catherine Millot, writing about her relationship with Lacan, describes him as “extremely impatient if he was forced to wait, even at a red light or a level crossing. If he was not served promptly in a restaurant, he soon obtained satisfaction by uttering a resounding cry or a sigh that resembled a cry.” 

The word traffic is etymologically bound up in notions of frustration and satisfaction. Early nominative meanings, such as the French trafique and Italian traffico, translate as trade, an exchange of goods. Traffic as a verb is suggestive of a more illicit commerce: drug trafficking, human trafficking, arms trafficking. While of uncertain origin, one possible root is the informal Latin transfricare, “to rub across.”  

Under the header “Mechanical Agitation” in Three Essays, Freud describes the “The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway-travel exercises such a fascinating effect upon older children . . . A compulsive link of this kind between railway-travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable characteristic of the sensations of movement.” 

Traffic has a particular rhythm. A periodicity. Its rhythmic qualities are embedded in the way we speak about it; words become caught up in the meanings they signify — the repetition of o‘s in monotonous, the geometry of l‘s in parallel. We feel the syncopation, the mechanical agitation, when we say “stop-and-go” and “bumper-to-bumper.” Hitched together by hyphens, the words move along only as fast as the slowest syllable. 

“The sexual instincts behave auto-erotically at first; they obtain their satisfaction in the subject’s own body and therefore do not find themselves in the situation of frustration [Versagung] which was what necessitated the institution of the reality principle; and when, later on, the process of finding an object begins, it is soon interrupted by the long period of latency, which delays sexual development until puberty” (Freud).

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear — desire in the object relation. 

“Furthermore, Freud never speaks of frustration. He speaks of Versagung” (Lacan). Freud uses the German Versagung to describe states of frustration, or rather, of denial, refusal. But these states are not always those where one is faced with the absence of an externally gratifying object, e.g., a red light instead of a green light. Frustration is internal, and then projected outward. I am sitting impatiently in traffic, urging the cars in front of me to move faster. I am also the traffic; I am contributing to the delay as much as the other drivers in front of me. I am the traffic I am stuck in. 

Lacan’s assertion that Freud speaks of Versagung, not frustration, is founded on a more careful reading of the noun. Versagung contains both frustration and its opposite. The German prefix Ver-, being like dis-, operates as a negation that hitches itself to the affirmative meaning of the word: as in disobey, disagree, dissatisfaction. The words maintain both a meaning and its reversal. 

When Freud writes of the situation of Versagung, it is a scenario of both frustration and satisfaction, that the one is turned into the other back-and-forth. 

For this frustration to not become unbearable (road rage), we might look for different yet still immediate ways to gain satisfaction (“uttering a resounding cry,” laying on the horn). These means are auto-erotic, self-contained, satisfaction that can be had in the car while stuck in traffic. 

Drive Theory

“Item one. The highway people were broadening this section of Self-Storage Parkway into three lanes, but the construction served to reduce the extant two lanes to just one; the right lane was closed off with orange cones, even in sections where no construction was ongoing and the lane looked clear and navigable. And, of course, single-lane traffic always moves exactly as fast as the very slowest vehicle in line. Item two. There were, as mentioned, traffic lights every eighth- to quarter-mile, and yet the single southbound lane’s line of traffic was substantially longer than the distance between any two such traffic lights, so that our progress was dependent not just on the color of the next traffic light ahead but also on the colors of the two or three lights beyond that” (Wallace).

“On Sunday evenings when the traffic was always heavy, he [Lacan] was used to driving on the hard shoulder and overtaking the line of cars stuck in the queue, whose drivers grew furious at being overtaken on the right and would suddenly swing their cars out into his path even though this risked causing a collision” (Millot). 

This is the rub with traffic; it always moves exactly as fast as the very slowest vehicle. The young neurotic finds pleasure in this rhythmic friction (transfricare). Someone with slightly more ego strength, but not enough to delay gratification for very long, becomes extremely impatient (Lacan at a red light). 

The distance between the two is doubly variable; “Progress is dependent not just on the color of the next traffic light ahead but also on the colors of the two or three lights beyond that.” The periodicity of frustration and satisfaction.   

The speed of traffic is inversely proportional to the speed at which I fall asleep. 

“It is well known that rocking is habitually used to induce sleep in restless children. The shaking produced by driving in carriages and later by railway-travel exercises such a fascinating effect on older children that every boy, at any rate, has at one time or another in his life wanted to be an engine driver or a coachman” (Freud).

Death Drive

“On their way home, Heidegger and his wife had stopped at Guitrancourt where they stayed for a few days. Lacan had shown them around the region in his car, driving at breakneck speed as usual, in complete disregard of Frau Heidegger’s cries of panic” (Millot). 

“Once he’d [Lacan] been in a tunnel, driving his little car, when he saw a lorry overtaking another vehicle and heading towards him. He continued to step on the gas and forced the lorry driver to back down” (Ibid.).

The Oedipal nature of the scenes above becomes clear when we read them as what they are: dreams, fantasies, vignettes of an Oedipal victory. My little car forces daddy/bigger car out of tunnel/mommy. Freud tells us that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. Every road, in the final analysis, is a dead end. 

References

Freud, S. (1905) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In A. Freud (Ed.), J. Strachey (Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. (1901- 1905) (Vol. VII, pp. 123–246). Hogarth Press.

Millot, C. (2018). Life With Lacan. A. Brown (Trans.), Polity Press.

Wallace, D. F. (2011). The Pale King. Little, Brown.

Lacan, J. The Object Relation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV, Polity Press.