Enjoyment/Jouissance

Jouissance, or enjoyment, does not equate simply to pleasure. In the Freudian sense, enjoyment is located beyond the pleasure principle. In his clinical practice, Freud had already observed incidents of self-harm and the strange compulsion in certain patients to keep revisiting the very experiences that were so disturbing and traumatic for them. This paradoxical phenomenon of deriving a kind of satisfaction through suffering, or pleasure through pain is what Lacan designates as jouissance.