14
14
0
On September 9, 1981, Jacques Lacan, French psychoanalyst and semanticist, died at the age of 80. From the article:
"Jacques Lacan - New World Encyclopedia
Part of a series of articles on
PsychoanalysisPsychoanalysis
Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (French IPA: [ʒak la'kɑ̃]) (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor. Lacan’s ‘return to the meaning of Freud’ profoundly changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, which started in 1953 and lasted until his death in 1980, were one of the formative environments of the currency of philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960s and 1970s, and which has come to be known in the Anglophone world as post-structuralism, though it would be a mischaracterization to label Lacan as only a post-structuralist. This entailed a renewed concentration upon the Freudian concepts of the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego conceptualized as a mosaic of identifications, and the centrality of language to any psychoanalytic work. His work has a strong interdisciplinary focus, drawing particularly on linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics, and he has become an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis, particularly within critical theory, and can be regarded as an important figure of twentieth-century French philosophy.
Lacan's work has had a profound impact on the development of psychoanalysis worldwide. Within the Lacanian community itself a number of different schools have emerged, particularly in France, Spain and England, though the vast majority of practitioners are under the auspices of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP), headed by Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law. Outside Europe, Lacanian psychoanalysis has gained particular prominence in the United States, Brazil and Argentina.
Career
Jacques Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest child of Emilie and Alfred Lacan, a salesman of soap and oils. The family was prosperous and middle-class. Jacques attended the Collège Stanislas, a well-known Jesuit high school. Too thin to be accepted into military service, he went straight to medical school in 1920, specializing in psychiatry starting in 1926. He took his clinical training at Sainte-Anne, the major psychiatric hospital in central Paris.
In 1931 he received his license as a forensic psychiatrist, and in 1932 was awarded the Doctorat d'état for his thesis, De la Psychose paranoiaque dans les rapports avec la personnalité, about a young woman's paranoid identification with a famous stage actress. While this thesis drew considerable acclaim outside psychoanalytic circles, particularly among the surrealist artists, it seems to have been ignored by psychoanalysts. But in 1934 he became a candidate for the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. During this period he is said to have befriended the surrealists André Breton and Georges Bataille.
Because Lacan, like Sigmund Freud, apparently destroyed most of the records of his past, and unlike Freud did not reveal much of it later on, it is difficult to distinguish between the many myths, anecdotes, and rumors that have surrounded him. There are, for instance, many contradictory tales about his romantic life with Sylvia Bataille in southern France during World War II and of his attachment to her daughter, Laurance. He married Sylvia in 1953 and had another daughter, Judith.
In any case it is clear that Lacan was very active in the world of Parisian writers, artists and intellectuals during the prewar period. In addition to Breton and Bataille, he was also associated with Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, and Philippe Sollers. He attended the mouvement Psyché founded by Maryse Choisy. Several of his articles were published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and he was present at the first public reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In his studies he had a particular interest in the philosophic work of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger and, alongside many other Parisian intellectuals of the time, he also attended the famous seminars on Hegel given by the Russian emigre philosopher, Alexandre Kojève. Kojève's seminars would have a profound effect on a whole generation of French artists and thinkers.
Beginning in the 1920s, Lacan undertook his own analysis with psychoanalyst Rudolph Loewenstein, which continued until 1938. He presented his first analytic paper on the "Mirror Phase" at the 1936 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad. He was called up to serve in the French army after the German occupation of France and was posted to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. After the war, Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, meeting English analysts Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. He was much influenced by Bion’s analytic work with groups and this contributed to his own later emphasis on study groups (in France, cartels) as a structure with which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis.
In 1951 Lacan started to hold a weekly seminar at the St-Anne Hospital, in Paris, urging what he described as ‘a return to Freud’ and, in particular, to Freud’s concentration upon the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology. Very influential in Parisian cultural life as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, the seminars drew large crowds and continued for nearly 30 years.
Lacan was a member of the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse (SPP), which was a member body of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In 1953, after a disagreement about analytic practice methods, Lacan and many of his colleagues left the SPP to form a new group the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP).
The positive reception of the expression "the return to Freud" and of his report and discourse in Rome—"The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis"[1]—gave Lacan the will to elaborate again on all the analytical concepts. His critique of analytic literature and practice spares almost no one. Lacan's return to Freud is a re-reading in relation with contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology and topology. At Sainte-Anne Hospital he held his seminars[2] every Wednesday and presented cases of patients on Fridays.
Ethical foundations
During this period Lacan wrote, on the basis of his seminars, conferences and addresses in colloquia, the major texts that are found in Écrits in 1966. In his third Seminar 'The Ethics of Psychoanalysis', Lacan defines the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and constructs an ethics for our time, an ethics that would prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the 'discontent of civilization' (Freud). At the roots of the ethics is desire: analysis' only promise is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play of words between 'l'entrée en je' and 'l'entrée en jeu'). 'I must come to the place where the id was', where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails 'the purification of desire'. This text functions throughout the years as the background of Lacan's work. He defends three assertions: psychoanalysis, insofar as it elaborates its theory from its praxis, must have a scientific status; the Freudian discoveries have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; the analytic field is the only one from which it is possible to efficiently interrogate the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.
One of the consequences of the 1953 move was to deprive the new group of membership within the IPA. Starting in 1962 a complex process of negotiation was to take place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan’s practice, with his controversial innovation of variable-length sessions, and the critical stance he took towards much of the accepted orthodoxy of psychoanalytic theory and practice led, in 1963, to a condition being set by the IPA that the registration of the SFP was dependent upon Lacan being removed from the list of training analysts with the organization. Lacan refused such a condition and left the SFP to form his own school which became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP)
Leaving the Sainte-Anne Hospital where he had delivered his seminar up to this point Lacan, with Claude Lévi-Strauss' and Louis Althusser's support, was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He started with the seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure (in his first session he thanks the generosity of Fernand Braudel and Lévi-Strauss). Lacan began to set forth his own teaching on psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues who had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale’s students. He divided the school[3] into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analyzed but haven't become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who have neither completed nor started analysis are welcome); the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (focusing on the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences (Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste à l'Ecole).
During the events of May 1968 Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary a Department of Psychology was set up by his followers at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). In 1969 Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon) where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice till the dissolution of his School in 1980.
Many students of Lacan became important psychoanalysts and/or wrote influential contributions to philosophy and other fields. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, Jacques-Alain Miller, Luce Irigaray, Jean Laplanche, and Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, nearly all attended Lacan's seminars at some point.
The 'Return to Freud'
The whole of Lacan's work can be understood within the context of the intellectual and theoretical legacy of Freud. Lacan himself trained as a psychoanalyst within the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). However, he gradually grew disenchanted and developed a radical critique of the way most analysts in the IPA interpreted Freud. He argued that Freud's insights were betrayed by the three major schools of psychoanalysis within the IPA: Ego psychology, Melanie Klein and Object relations theory. See "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" also known as the "Report of Rome" [4]. His "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the actual texts of Freud himself and a grasp of the way these texts were developed and modified by the analysts Lacan criticizes, the post-Freudians.
"What such a return to Freud involves for me is not a return of the repressed, but rather taking the antithesis constituted by the phase in the history of the psychoanalytic movement since the death of Freud, showing what psychoanalysis is not, and seeking with you the means of revitalizing that which has continued to sustain it, even in deviation…."[5].
Lacan's "return to Freud" represented a turn away from the focus on the ego of the late Freud and post-Freudians and a return to the focus on the unconscious, as expressed in Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue," jokes and the like. Lacan's work was not an interpretation but a translation of Freud into structural-linguistic terms. Lacan argued that these unconscious elements in Freud all emphasized the agency of language in subjective constitution. He reasoned that Freud lived contemporaneously with Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and, principally, had Freud been aware of the work of Saussure, he would have done the same as Saussure did. In this light, Lacan's "return to Freud" could therefore be read as the realization that the pervading agency of the unconscious is to be understood as intimately tied to the functions and dynamics of language, where the signifier is irremediably divorced from the signified in a chronic but generative tension of lack. It is here that Lacan began his work on "correcting" Freud from within.
In "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud"[6], Lacan's principal challenge to Freudian theory is the privilege that it accords to the ego in self-determination. To Lacan "the unconscious is structured like a language." The unconscious, he argued, was not a more primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, but, rather, a formation every bit as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. If the unconscious is structured like a language, then the self is denied any point of reference to which to be 'restored' following trauma or 'identity crisis'. In this way, Lacan's thesis of the structurally dynamic unconscious is also a challenge to the ego psychology that Freud himself had originally opposed.
Major concepts
The mirror stage (le stade du miroir)
The "mirror stage" was the subject of Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalytic theory (Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936). The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of identification, the Ego developing as a result of infant's identifying with its own specular image. At six months the baby still lacks coordination, however, he can recognize himself in the mirror before attaining control over his bodily movements. He sees his image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. This contrast is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with his own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens him with fragmentation, and thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego.[7] The moment of identification is to Lacan a moment of jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery.[8] Yet, the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother. (La relation d'objet) This identification also involves the ideal ego which functions as a promise of future wholeness sustaining the Ego in anticipation.
The mirror stage shows that the Ego is the product of misunderstanding—Lacan's term "méconnaissance" implies a false recognition—and the place where the subject becomes alienated from himself, since the ego is formed outside the self, or Lacanian terms, the process by which the ego is formed in the Mirror Stage is at the same time the institution of alienation from the symbolic determination of being. In this sense méconnaissance is an imaginary misrecognition of a symbolic knowledge that the subject possesses somewhere. It must be emphasized again that the Mirror Stage introduces the subject into the Imaginary order.
He described "The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience," the first of his Écrits. In the early fifties, he no longer considers it as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity; the paradigm of The Imaginary order: It is a phase in which the subject is permanently caught and captivated by his own image.
"the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image." ("Some reflections on the Ego").
As he further develops the concept, the stress falls less on its historical value and ever more on its structural value.[9] In his fourth Seminar, La relation d'objet, Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship."
The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of identification, the Ego being the result of identifying with one own's specular image. At six months the baby still lacks coordination, however, he can recognize himself in the mirror before attaining control over his bodily movements. He sees his image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. This contrast is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with his own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens him with fragmentation, and thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego.[10] The moment of identification is to Lacan a moment of jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery.[11] yet, the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother. (La relation d'objet) This identification also involves the ideal ego which functions as a promise of future wholeness sustaining the Ego in anticipation.
The mirror stage shows that the Ego is the product of misunderstanding ("méconnaissance") and the lieu where the subject becomes alienated from himself. It introduces the subject to into the Imaginary order. It must be said that the mirror stage has also a significant symbolic dimension. The Symbolic order is present in the figure of the adult who is carrying the infant: the moment after the subject has jubilantly assumed his image as his own, he turns his head towards this adult who represents the big Other, as if to call on him to ratify this image. (Tenth Seminar, "L'angoisse," 1962-1963)
Other/other
Although Freud uses the term "other," referring to der Andere (the other person) and "das Andere" (otherness), Lacan's use of the term borrows from Kojève's reading of Hegel.
In 1955 Lacan draws a distinction between 'the little other' (the other) and 'the big Other' (the Other) (The Ego in Freud's Theory). In Lacanian algebra, the big Other is designated A (for French Autre) and the little other is designated a (italicized French 'autre'). He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: 'the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a [12], so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other'[13]. These are technical terms in Lacan's vocabulary.
1. The little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego. He is both the counterpart or the other people in whom the subject perceives a visual likeness (semblable), and the specular image or the reflection of one's body in the mirror. In this way the little other is entirely inscribed in The Imaginary order. See Objet Petit a.
2. The big Other designates a radical alterity, an otherness transcending the illusory otherness of the Imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with language and the law: the big Other is inscribed in The Symbolic order, operating as the Symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The Other is then another subject and also the Symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject.
The meaning of "the Other as another subject" is secondary to the meaning of "the Other as Symbolic order." 'The Other must first of all be considered a locus, the locus in which speech is constituted'[14]. We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense, only when a subject may occupy this position and thereby embody the Other for another subject (Seminar VIII: Le transfert)
When he argues that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject, but in the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond one's conscious control; they come from another place, outside consciousness, and then 'the unconscious is the discourse of the Other'.[15] when conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of physical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene."
"It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child, it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message." (Dylan Evans) The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this Other is not complete, that there is a Lack (manque) in the Other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the Other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete Other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete Other is the 'barred Other'.[16].
The Three Orders
1. The Imaginary
The basis of the Imaginary order is the formation of the Ego in the Mirror Stage: the Ego is constructed by identification with the specular image. The relationship between the Ego and the specular image means that the Ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order" [17]. We may add that this relationship is also narcissistic. Thus the Imaginary is the field of images and imagination, and deception: the main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, similarity.
The Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic order: in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues how the visual field is structured by symbolic laws. Thus the Imaginary involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the Symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has symbolic and imaginary connotations, in its imaginary aspect, language is the "wall of language" which inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. On the other hand, the Imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship with its own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.
Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order by making identification with the analyst the objective of analysis [18]. He proposes the use of the Symbolic as the way to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary: the analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification'[19].
2. The Symbolic
In his Seminar IV "La relation d'objet" Lacan asserts that the concepts of Law and Structure are unthinkable without language: thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. Yet, he does not simply equate this order with language since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper of language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier, that is a dimension in which elements have no positive existence but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.
The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity, that is the Other: the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. Besides it is the realm of the Law which regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. We may add that the Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (das ding an sich and the death drive which goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition" - "the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order."[20]
It is by working in the Symbolic order that the analyst can produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand; these changes will produce imaginary effects since the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.[21] Thus, it is the Symbolic which is determinant of subjectivity, and the Imaginary, made of images and appearances, is the effect of the Symbolic.
3. The Real
Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also located outside the Symbolic. Unlike the latter which is constituted in terms of oppositions, i.e presence/absence, "there is no absence in the Real"[22] Whereas the Symbolic opposition presence/absence implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place" [23] If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements, signifiers, the Real in itself is undifferentiated, it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real," in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things - things originally confused in the "here and now" of the all in the process of coming into being.[24].
Thus the Real is that which is outside language, resisting symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan define the Real as "the impossible' because it is impossible to imagine and impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, being impossibly attainable. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. In his Seminar "La relation d'objet," Lacan reads Freud's case on "Little Hans"." He distinguishes two real elements which intrude and disrupt the child's imaginary pre-oedipical harmony: the real penis which is felt in infantile masturbation and the newly born sister.
Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety in that it lacks any possible mediation, and is "the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence." [25]
Desire
Lacan's désir follows Freud's "wunsch" and its concept is central to his thought. For the aim of the talking cure—psychoanalysis—is precisely to lead the analysand to recognize the truth about his/her desire, yet this is only possible when it is articulated in discourse. Thus, "It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term"[26]; "…what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence," and "That the subject should come to recognize and to name his/her desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world."[27]. Now, although the truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, discourse can never articulate the whole truth about desire: whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover, a surplus.
In The Signification of the Phallus Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function, on one hand it articulates need and on the other acts as a demand for love. So, even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied and this leftover is desire. For Lacan "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second" (article cited). Desire then is the surplus produced by the articulation of need in demand[28]. Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need" (article cited). Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as Slavoj Zizek puts it "desire's raison d'etre is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."
It is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. If they belong to the field of the Other (as opposed to love), desire is one, whereas the drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire (see "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis"). If one can surmise that objet petit a is the object of desire, it is not the object towards which desire tends, but the cause of desire. For desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque). Then desire appears as a social construct since it is always constituted in a dialectical relationship.
Drives
Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between Trieb (drive) and Instinkt (instinct) in that drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually round it. He argues that their aim is not to reach a goal but to follow their aim, which is to circle round the object [29]; then the real source of jouissance is to repeat the movement of this closed circuit. In the same Seminar Lacan posits the drives as both cultural and symbolic (discourse) constructs, to him "the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial." Yet he incorporates the four elements of the drives as defined by Freud (the pressure, the end, the object and the source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and then returns to the erogenous zone. The circuit is structured by the three grammatical voices: 1. the active voice (to see) 2. the reflexive voice (to see oneself) 3. the passive voice (to be seen) The active and reflexive are autoerotic, they lack a subject. It is only the passive one, when the drive completes its circuit, that a new subject appears. So although it is the "passive" voice the drive is essentially active, and Lacan is able to write "to make oneself be seen" instead of "to be seen." The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the "pleasure principle."
Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zone are the lips, the partial object the breast), the anal drive the anus and the feces), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze) and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice). The first two relate to demand and the last two to desire. If the drives are closely related to desire, they are the partial aspects in which desire is realized: again, desire in one and undivided whereas the drives are partial manifestations of desire.
Other important concepts
Name of the Father
Oedipal drama and the Oedipal signification
Objet Petit a
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan
Signifier/ Signified
The Letter
Foreclusion - Foreclosure
Jouissance
Lack (manque)
The Phallus
Das Ding
The gaze
The four discourses
The graph of desire
Sinthome
Lacan's Topology
Writings and seminars
Although Lacan is a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, he made his most significant contributions not in the traditional form of books and journal articles, but through his Seminar lectures–in fact, he explicitly disclaimed publication in his later life. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, conducted over a period of more than two decades, contains the majority of his life's work, though some of these remain yet unpublished. Jacques-Alain Miller, the sole editor of Lacan's seminars, has been regularly conducting since 1984 a series of lectures, "L'orientation lacanienne," within the structure of ParisVIII. These consist in presentations of Lacan's seminars. Miller's teachings has been published in the US by the journal Lacanian Ink.
His only major body of writing, Écrits (1966), are difficult for the layman to read. Lacan explains in Encore—his Seminar from 1973—that his Écrits were not to be understood, but would produce a meaning effect in the reader similar to some mystical texts. Part of the reason for the text's difficulty is the repeated use of Hegelian allusions derived from Kojève's lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit, which virtually every major intellectual figure in France, including Lacan, attended.
Criticism
Although Lacan is often associated with it, he was not without his critics from within the major figures of what is broadly termed postmodernism. Along these lines, Jacques Derrida (though Derrida did not endorse nor associate himself with postmodernism) made a considerable critique of Lacan's analytic writings, accusing him of taking a structuralist approach to psychoanalysis, which was, in fact, the case. Lacan became the subject of Derrida's criticism based on Derrida's general critique of structuralism. According to Derrida, Lacan inherited the Freudian phallocentrism, exemplified primarily in his conception of the phallus as the "primary signifier" that determines the social order of signifiers. It could be said that much of Derrida's critique of Lacan stems from his relationship with Freud: for example, Derrida deconstructs the Freudian conception of "penis envy," upon which female subjectivity is determined as an absence, to show that the primacy of the male phallus entails a hierarchy between phallic presence and absence that ultimately implodes upon itself.
Despite Derrida's critique of Lacan's "phallocentrism," Lacan can be said to enjoy an awkward relationship with feminism and post-feminism. While he is much criticized for adopting (or inheriting from Freud) a phallocentric stance within his psychoanalytic theories, he is also taken by many to provide an accurate portrayal of the gender biases within society. Some critics accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Others, such as Judith Butler and Jane Gallop, have offered readings of Lacan's work that opened up new possibilities for feminist theory, making it difficult to seriously reject Lacan wholesale due to sexism, although specific parts of his work may well be subject to criticism on these grounds. In either case, traditional feminism has profited from Lacan's accounts to show that society has an inherent sexual bias that denigratingly reduces womanhood to a status of deficiency.
Lacan also has his critics from within the psychoanalytic community. François Roustang, in The Lacanian Delusion, called Lacan's output "extravagant" and an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish." Critics from outside psychoanalysis, critical theory and the humanities have often dismissed Lacan and his work in a more or less wholesale fashion. Noam Chomsky described Lacan as "an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan." In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Lacan of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts he does not understand (e. g., confusing irrational numbers and imaginary numbers). Defenders of Lacanian theories dispute the validity of such criticism on the basis of the critics' misunderstanding of Lacan's texts. Bruce Fink, the current major translator of Lacan's works into English, has dismissed Sokal and Bricmont in his book Lacan to the Letter, saying that Sokal and Bricmont have "no idea whatsoever what Lacan is up to," (132) and accusing them of elevating a distaste for Lacan's writing style into an attack on his thought as a whole. Similarly, Arkady Plotnitsky, who is trained in both mathematics and literature, claims in his book The Knowable and the Unknowable that Lacan in fact uses the mathematical concepts more accurately than Socal and Bricmont do.
Trivia
Lacan was the last private owner of Gustave Courbet's provocative painting L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World); he had his stepbrother, the painter André Masson, paint a surrealist variant. The painting was given to the French government by Lacan's heirs after his death because of his having left them with a large burden of back taxes; it now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.
Notes
↑ Jacques Lacan. Écrits: A Selection, transl. by Alan Sheridan, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977, and revised version, 2002, transl. by Bruce Fink)
↑ Seminars. lacan.com.
↑ École de la Cause freudienne Ecole de la Cause freudienne (ECF) (in French) Retrieved April 24, 2009.
↑ Lacan, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis", 1977/2002
↑ Lacan, "The Freudian Thing," 1977/2002.
↑ "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" in Écrits: A Selection, 161-197.
↑ Dylan Evans. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychonalysis. (Routledge, 1996. ISBN [login to see] 221
↑ Lacan, "The Mirror Stage," in Écrits: A Selection, 1977/2002,
↑ Evans
↑ Evans
↑ Lacan, "The Mirror Stage," 1977/2002
↑ Lacan, Jacques. "The Freudian Thing," Écrits: A Selection, 1977/2002
↑ Lacan, "Psychoanalysis and its Teaching," Écrits: A Selection, 1977/2002
↑ Jacques Lacan. The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993)
↑ Jacques Lacan, Seminar on "The Purloined Letter," 1977/2002,
↑ Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious; Seminar V: Les formations de l'inconscient." 1977/2002
↑ Lacan, The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses, 1993.
↑ Lacan, "The Directions of the Treatment." 1977/2002.
↑ Jacques Lacan. "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis," The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Alan Sheridan, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977)
↑ Jacques Lacan. The Seminar, Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Sylvana Tomaselli. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988)
↑ Evans
↑ Lacan, The Seminar, Book II, 1988.
↑ Lacan, "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis," The Seminar XI, 1977.
↑ Lacan, "The Function and Filed of Speech and language in Psychoanalysis," 1977/2002.
↑ Lacan, The Seminar, Book II, 1988.
↑ Jacques Lacan. The Seminar, Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by J. Forrester. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988)
↑ Lacan, The Seminar, Book II. 1988
↑ Evans
↑ Lacan, The Seminar XI, 1977
References
Works by Lacan
Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan lacan.com.
The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968.
Écrits: A Selection, transl. by Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977, and revised version, 2002, transl. by Bruce Fink.
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, transl. by Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
The Seminar, Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by J. Forrester, W.W. Norton & Co., 1988
The Seminar, Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Sylvana Tomaselli, W.W. Norton & Co., 1988.
The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.
The Seminar, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Dennis Porter, W.W. Norton & Co., 1992.
The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Alan Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Co., 1977.
The Seminar XVII, The The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.
The Seminar XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge]], ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.
Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, W.W. Norton & Co., 1990.
Works about Lacan's Work and Theory
Badiou, Alain, The Formulas of L'Etourdit. New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.
Benvenuto, Bice; Roger Kennedy. The Works of Jacques Lacan. London: Free Association Books, 1986.
Bowie, Malcolm, Lacan. Harvard University Press. 1991. (An introduction.) ISBN [login to see] 521
Dor, Joel. The Clinical Lacan. New York: Other Press, 1998. ISBN [login to see] 054
__________. Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language. New York: Other Press, 1998. ISBN [login to see] 047
Elliott, Anthony, and Stephen Frosh, eds. Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture London; and New York: Routledge, 1995. (A recent overview.) ISBN [login to see] 048
Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996. ISBN [login to see] 221
Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. ISBN [login to see] 608
__________. Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely. University of Minnesota, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 219
Forrester, John. Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis. Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985. ISBN [login to see] 615
Fryer, David Ross. The Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan. New York: Other Press, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 889
Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. ISBN [login to see] 437
__________. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. ISBN [login to see] 358
Gherovici, Patricia. The Puerto Rican Syndrome. New York: Other Press, 2003. ISBN [login to see] 757
Harari, Roberto. Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction. New York: Other Press, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 827
__________. Lacan's Seminar on "Anxiety": An Introduction. New York: Other Press, 2001. ISBN [login to see] 368
Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. London: Routledge, 2005. ISBN [login to see] 179
Lander, Romulo. Subjective Experience and the Logic of the Other. New York: Other Press, 2006. ISBN [login to see] 657
Leupin, Alexandre. Lacan Today. New York: Other Press, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 900
Mathelin, Catherine. Lacanian Psychotherpay with Children: The Broken Piano. New York: Other Press, 1999. ISBN [login to see] 016
McGowan, Todd, and Sheila Kunkle. Eds. Lacan and Contemporary Film. New York: Other Press, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 841
Miller, Jacques-Alain. Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety I. New York: Lacanian Ink 26, 2005.
__________. Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety II. New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.
__________. Jacques Lacan's Later Teachings. New York: Lacanian Ink 21, 2003.
__________. The Paradigms of Jouissance. New York, Lacanian Ink 17, 2000.
Moustafa, Safouan. Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis. New York: Other Press, 2004.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN [login to see] 449
Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso, 1986. ISBN [login to see] 581
Roudinesco, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. London: Free Associations Books, 1990.
Roustang, François. The Lacanian Delusion (Odeon), translated by Gregg Sims. Oxford University Press, USA, 1990. ISBN [login to see]
Turkle, Sherry. Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, 2nd ed. Free Association Books, 1992. ISBN [login to see] 104
__________. and Richard Wollheim. ‘Lacan: an exchange’, New York Review of Books 26 (9) (1979): 44.
Sharpe, Matthew. "Lacan, Jacques," Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy [1]
Soler, Colette. What Lacan Said About Women. New York: Other Press, 2006. ISBN [login to see] 701
Van Haute, Philippe. Against Adaptation: Lacan's "Subversion" of the Subject. New York: Other Press, 2002. ISBN [login to see] 658
Van Haute, Philippe, and Tomas Geyskens. Confusion of Tongues: The Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Ferenczi, and Laplanche. New York: Other Press, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 282
Wilden, Anthony. "Jacques Lacan: A partial bibliography," Yale French Studies 36/37 (1966): 263–268.
__________. "The object as a limit of discourse: approaches to the Lacanian real," Prose Studies 11 (3) (1988): 94–120.
__________. Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London and New York: Continuum, 2005.
__________. Jacques Lacan as Reader of Hegel. New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006."
"Jacques Lacan - New World Encyclopedia
Part of a series of articles on
PsychoanalysisPsychoanalysis
Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (French IPA: [ʒak la'kɑ̃]) (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor. Lacan’s ‘return to the meaning of Freud’ profoundly changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, which started in 1953 and lasted until his death in 1980, were one of the formative environments of the currency of philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960s and 1970s, and which has come to be known in the Anglophone world as post-structuralism, though it would be a mischaracterization to label Lacan as only a post-structuralist. This entailed a renewed concentration upon the Freudian concepts of the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego conceptualized as a mosaic of identifications, and the centrality of language to any psychoanalytic work. His work has a strong interdisciplinary focus, drawing particularly on linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics, and he has become an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis, particularly within critical theory, and can be regarded as an important figure of twentieth-century French philosophy.
Lacan's work has had a profound impact on the development of psychoanalysis worldwide. Within the Lacanian community itself a number of different schools have emerged, particularly in France, Spain and England, though the vast majority of practitioners are under the auspices of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP), headed by Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law. Outside Europe, Lacanian psychoanalysis has gained particular prominence in the United States, Brazil and Argentina.
Career
Jacques Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest child of Emilie and Alfred Lacan, a salesman of soap and oils. The family was prosperous and middle-class. Jacques attended the Collège Stanislas, a well-known Jesuit high school. Too thin to be accepted into military service, he went straight to medical school in 1920, specializing in psychiatry starting in 1926. He took his clinical training at Sainte-Anne, the major psychiatric hospital in central Paris.
In 1931 he received his license as a forensic psychiatrist, and in 1932 was awarded the Doctorat d'état for his thesis, De la Psychose paranoiaque dans les rapports avec la personnalité, about a young woman's paranoid identification with a famous stage actress. While this thesis drew considerable acclaim outside psychoanalytic circles, particularly among the surrealist artists, it seems to have been ignored by psychoanalysts. But in 1934 he became a candidate for the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. During this period he is said to have befriended the surrealists André Breton and Georges Bataille.
Because Lacan, like Sigmund Freud, apparently destroyed most of the records of his past, and unlike Freud did not reveal much of it later on, it is difficult to distinguish between the many myths, anecdotes, and rumors that have surrounded him. There are, for instance, many contradictory tales about his romantic life with Sylvia Bataille in southern France during World War II and of his attachment to her daughter, Laurance. He married Sylvia in 1953 and had another daughter, Judith.
In any case it is clear that Lacan was very active in the world of Parisian writers, artists and intellectuals during the prewar period. In addition to Breton and Bataille, he was also associated with Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, and Philippe Sollers. He attended the mouvement Psyché founded by Maryse Choisy. Several of his articles were published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and he was present at the first public reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In his studies he had a particular interest in the philosophic work of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger and, alongside many other Parisian intellectuals of the time, he also attended the famous seminars on Hegel given by the Russian emigre philosopher, Alexandre Kojève. Kojève's seminars would have a profound effect on a whole generation of French artists and thinkers.
Beginning in the 1920s, Lacan undertook his own analysis with psychoanalyst Rudolph Loewenstein, which continued until 1938. He presented his first analytic paper on the "Mirror Phase" at the 1936 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad. He was called up to serve in the French army after the German occupation of France and was posted to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. After the war, Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, meeting English analysts Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. He was much influenced by Bion’s analytic work with groups and this contributed to his own later emphasis on study groups (in France, cartels) as a structure with which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis.
In 1951 Lacan started to hold a weekly seminar at the St-Anne Hospital, in Paris, urging what he described as ‘a return to Freud’ and, in particular, to Freud’s concentration upon the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology. Very influential in Parisian cultural life as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, the seminars drew large crowds and continued for nearly 30 years.
Lacan was a member of the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse (SPP), which was a member body of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In 1953, after a disagreement about analytic practice methods, Lacan and many of his colleagues left the SPP to form a new group the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP).
The positive reception of the expression "the return to Freud" and of his report and discourse in Rome—"The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis"[1]—gave Lacan the will to elaborate again on all the analytical concepts. His critique of analytic literature and practice spares almost no one. Lacan's return to Freud is a re-reading in relation with contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology and topology. At Sainte-Anne Hospital he held his seminars[2] every Wednesday and presented cases of patients on Fridays.
Ethical foundations
During this period Lacan wrote, on the basis of his seminars, conferences and addresses in colloquia, the major texts that are found in Écrits in 1966. In his third Seminar 'The Ethics of Psychoanalysis', Lacan defines the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and constructs an ethics for our time, an ethics that would prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the 'discontent of civilization' (Freud). At the roots of the ethics is desire: analysis' only promise is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play of words between 'l'entrée en je' and 'l'entrée en jeu'). 'I must come to the place where the id was', where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails 'the purification of desire'. This text functions throughout the years as the background of Lacan's work. He defends three assertions: psychoanalysis, insofar as it elaborates its theory from its praxis, must have a scientific status; the Freudian discoveries have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; the analytic field is the only one from which it is possible to efficiently interrogate the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.
One of the consequences of the 1953 move was to deprive the new group of membership within the IPA. Starting in 1962 a complex process of negotiation was to take place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan’s practice, with his controversial innovation of variable-length sessions, and the critical stance he took towards much of the accepted orthodoxy of psychoanalytic theory and practice led, in 1963, to a condition being set by the IPA that the registration of the SFP was dependent upon Lacan being removed from the list of training analysts with the organization. Lacan refused such a condition and left the SFP to form his own school which became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP)
Leaving the Sainte-Anne Hospital where he had delivered his seminar up to this point Lacan, with Claude Lévi-Strauss' and Louis Althusser's support, was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He started with the seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure (in his first session he thanks the generosity of Fernand Braudel and Lévi-Strauss). Lacan began to set forth his own teaching on psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues who had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale’s students. He divided the school[3] into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analyzed but haven't become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who have neither completed nor started analysis are welcome); the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (focusing on the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences (Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste à l'Ecole).
During the events of May 1968 Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary a Department of Psychology was set up by his followers at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). In 1969 Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon) where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice till the dissolution of his School in 1980.
Many students of Lacan became important psychoanalysts and/or wrote influential contributions to philosophy and other fields. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, Jacques-Alain Miller, Luce Irigaray, Jean Laplanche, and Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, nearly all attended Lacan's seminars at some point.
The 'Return to Freud'
The whole of Lacan's work can be understood within the context of the intellectual and theoretical legacy of Freud. Lacan himself trained as a psychoanalyst within the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). However, he gradually grew disenchanted and developed a radical critique of the way most analysts in the IPA interpreted Freud. He argued that Freud's insights were betrayed by the three major schools of psychoanalysis within the IPA: Ego psychology, Melanie Klein and Object relations theory. See "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" also known as the "Report of Rome" [4]. His "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the actual texts of Freud himself and a grasp of the way these texts were developed and modified by the analysts Lacan criticizes, the post-Freudians.
"What such a return to Freud involves for me is not a return of the repressed, but rather taking the antithesis constituted by the phase in the history of the psychoanalytic movement since the death of Freud, showing what psychoanalysis is not, and seeking with you the means of revitalizing that which has continued to sustain it, even in deviation…."[5].
Lacan's "return to Freud" represented a turn away from the focus on the ego of the late Freud and post-Freudians and a return to the focus on the unconscious, as expressed in Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue," jokes and the like. Lacan's work was not an interpretation but a translation of Freud into structural-linguistic terms. Lacan argued that these unconscious elements in Freud all emphasized the agency of language in subjective constitution. He reasoned that Freud lived contemporaneously with Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and, principally, had Freud been aware of the work of Saussure, he would have done the same as Saussure did. In this light, Lacan's "return to Freud" could therefore be read as the realization that the pervading agency of the unconscious is to be understood as intimately tied to the functions and dynamics of language, where the signifier is irremediably divorced from the signified in a chronic but generative tension of lack. It is here that Lacan began his work on "correcting" Freud from within.
In "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud"[6], Lacan's principal challenge to Freudian theory is the privilege that it accords to the ego in self-determination. To Lacan "the unconscious is structured like a language." The unconscious, he argued, was not a more primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, but, rather, a formation every bit as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. If the unconscious is structured like a language, then the self is denied any point of reference to which to be 'restored' following trauma or 'identity crisis'. In this way, Lacan's thesis of the structurally dynamic unconscious is also a challenge to the ego psychology that Freud himself had originally opposed.
Major concepts
The mirror stage (le stade du miroir)
The "mirror stage" was the subject of Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalytic theory (Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936). The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of identification, the Ego developing as a result of infant's identifying with its own specular image. At six months the baby still lacks coordination, however, he can recognize himself in the mirror before attaining control over his bodily movements. He sees his image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. This contrast is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with his own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens him with fragmentation, and thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego.[7] The moment of identification is to Lacan a moment of jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery.[8] Yet, the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother. (La relation d'objet) This identification also involves the ideal ego which functions as a promise of future wholeness sustaining the Ego in anticipation.
The mirror stage shows that the Ego is the product of misunderstanding—Lacan's term "méconnaissance" implies a false recognition—and the place where the subject becomes alienated from himself, since the ego is formed outside the self, or Lacanian terms, the process by which the ego is formed in the Mirror Stage is at the same time the institution of alienation from the symbolic determination of being. In this sense méconnaissance is an imaginary misrecognition of a symbolic knowledge that the subject possesses somewhere. It must be emphasized again that the Mirror Stage introduces the subject into the Imaginary order.
He described "The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience," the first of his Écrits. In the early fifties, he no longer considers it as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity; the paradigm of The Imaginary order: It is a phase in which the subject is permanently caught and captivated by his own image.
"the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image." ("Some reflections on the Ego").
As he further develops the concept, the stress falls less on its historical value and ever more on its structural value.[9] In his fourth Seminar, La relation d'objet, Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship."
The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of identification, the Ego being the result of identifying with one own's specular image. At six months the baby still lacks coordination, however, he can recognize himself in the mirror before attaining control over his bodily movements. He sees his image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. This contrast is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with his own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens him with fragmentation, and thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego.[10] The moment of identification is to Lacan a moment of jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery.[11] yet, the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother. (La relation d'objet) This identification also involves the ideal ego which functions as a promise of future wholeness sustaining the Ego in anticipation.
The mirror stage shows that the Ego is the product of misunderstanding ("méconnaissance") and the lieu where the subject becomes alienated from himself. It introduces the subject to into the Imaginary order. It must be said that the mirror stage has also a significant symbolic dimension. The Symbolic order is present in the figure of the adult who is carrying the infant: the moment after the subject has jubilantly assumed his image as his own, he turns his head towards this adult who represents the big Other, as if to call on him to ratify this image. (Tenth Seminar, "L'angoisse," 1962-1963)
Other/other
Although Freud uses the term "other," referring to der Andere (the other person) and "das Andere" (otherness), Lacan's use of the term borrows from Kojève's reading of Hegel.
In 1955 Lacan draws a distinction between 'the little other' (the other) and 'the big Other' (the Other) (The Ego in Freud's Theory). In Lacanian algebra, the big Other is designated A (for French Autre) and the little other is designated a (italicized French 'autre'). He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: 'the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a [12], so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other'[13]. These are technical terms in Lacan's vocabulary.
1. The little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego. He is both the counterpart or the other people in whom the subject perceives a visual likeness (semblable), and the specular image or the reflection of one's body in the mirror. In this way the little other is entirely inscribed in The Imaginary order. See Objet Petit a.
2. The big Other designates a radical alterity, an otherness transcending the illusory otherness of the Imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with language and the law: the big Other is inscribed in The Symbolic order, operating as the Symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The Other is then another subject and also the Symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject.
The meaning of "the Other as another subject" is secondary to the meaning of "the Other as Symbolic order." 'The Other must first of all be considered a locus, the locus in which speech is constituted'[14]. We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense, only when a subject may occupy this position and thereby embody the Other for another subject (Seminar VIII: Le transfert)
When he argues that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject, but in the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond one's conscious control; they come from another place, outside consciousness, and then 'the unconscious is the discourse of the Other'.[15] when conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of physical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene."
"It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child, it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message." (Dylan Evans) The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this Other is not complete, that there is a Lack (manque) in the Other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the Other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete Other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete Other is the 'barred Other'.[16].
The Three Orders
1. The Imaginary
The basis of the Imaginary order is the formation of the Ego in the Mirror Stage: the Ego is constructed by identification with the specular image. The relationship between the Ego and the specular image means that the Ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order" [17]. We may add that this relationship is also narcissistic. Thus the Imaginary is the field of images and imagination, and deception: the main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, similarity.
The Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic order: in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues how the visual field is structured by symbolic laws. Thus the Imaginary involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the Symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has symbolic and imaginary connotations, in its imaginary aspect, language is the "wall of language" which inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. On the other hand, the Imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship with its own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.
Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order by making identification with the analyst the objective of analysis [18]. He proposes the use of the Symbolic as the way to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary: the analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification'[19].
2. The Symbolic
In his Seminar IV "La relation d'objet" Lacan asserts that the concepts of Law and Structure are unthinkable without language: thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. Yet, he does not simply equate this order with language since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper of language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier, that is a dimension in which elements have no positive existence but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.
The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity, that is the Other: the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. Besides it is the realm of the Law which regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. We may add that the Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (das ding an sich and the death drive which goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition" - "the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order."[20]
It is by working in the Symbolic order that the analyst can produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand; these changes will produce imaginary effects since the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.[21] Thus, it is the Symbolic which is determinant of subjectivity, and the Imaginary, made of images and appearances, is the effect of the Symbolic.
3. The Real
Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also located outside the Symbolic. Unlike the latter which is constituted in terms of oppositions, i.e presence/absence, "there is no absence in the Real"[22] Whereas the Symbolic opposition presence/absence implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place" [23] If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements, signifiers, the Real in itself is undifferentiated, it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real," in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things - things originally confused in the "here and now" of the all in the process of coming into being.[24].
Thus the Real is that which is outside language, resisting symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan define the Real as "the impossible' because it is impossible to imagine and impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, being impossibly attainable. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. In his Seminar "La relation d'objet," Lacan reads Freud's case on "Little Hans"." He distinguishes two real elements which intrude and disrupt the child's imaginary pre-oedipical harmony: the real penis which is felt in infantile masturbation and the newly born sister.
Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety in that it lacks any possible mediation, and is "the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence." [25]
Desire
Lacan's désir follows Freud's "wunsch" and its concept is central to his thought. For the aim of the talking cure—psychoanalysis—is precisely to lead the analysand to recognize the truth about his/her desire, yet this is only possible when it is articulated in discourse. Thus, "It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term"[26]; "…what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence," and "That the subject should come to recognize and to name his/her desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world."[27]. Now, although the truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, discourse can never articulate the whole truth about desire: whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover, a surplus.
In The Signification of the Phallus Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function, on one hand it articulates need and on the other acts as a demand for love. So, even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied and this leftover is desire. For Lacan "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second" (article cited). Desire then is the surplus produced by the articulation of need in demand[28]. Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need" (article cited). Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as Slavoj Zizek puts it "desire's raison d'etre is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."
It is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. If they belong to the field of the Other (as opposed to love), desire is one, whereas the drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire (see "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis"). If one can surmise that objet petit a is the object of desire, it is not the object towards which desire tends, but the cause of desire. For desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque). Then desire appears as a social construct since it is always constituted in a dialectical relationship.
Drives
Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between Trieb (drive) and Instinkt (instinct) in that drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually round it. He argues that their aim is not to reach a goal but to follow their aim, which is to circle round the object [29]; then the real source of jouissance is to repeat the movement of this closed circuit. In the same Seminar Lacan posits the drives as both cultural and symbolic (discourse) constructs, to him "the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial." Yet he incorporates the four elements of the drives as defined by Freud (the pressure, the end, the object and the source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and then returns to the erogenous zone. The circuit is structured by the three grammatical voices: 1. the active voice (to see) 2. the reflexive voice (to see oneself) 3. the passive voice (to be seen) The active and reflexive are autoerotic, they lack a subject. It is only the passive one, when the drive completes its circuit, that a new subject appears. So although it is the "passive" voice the drive is essentially active, and Lacan is able to write "to make oneself be seen" instead of "to be seen." The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the "pleasure principle."
Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zone are the lips, the partial object the breast), the anal drive the anus and the feces), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze) and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice). The first two relate to demand and the last two to desire. If the drives are closely related to desire, they are the partial aspects in which desire is realized: again, desire in one and undivided whereas the drives are partial manifestations of desire.
Other important concepts
Name of the Father
Oedipal drama and the Oedipal signification
Objet Petit a
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan
Signifier/ Signified
The Letter
Foreclusion - Foreclosure
Jouissance
Lack (manque)
The Phallus
Das Ding
The gaze
The four discourses
The graph of desire
Sinthome
Lacan's Topology
Writings and seminars
Although Lacan is a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, he made his most significant contributions not in the traditional form of books and journal articles, but through his Seminar lectures–in fact, he explicitly disclaimed publication in his later life. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, conducted over a period of more than two decades, contains the majority of his life's work, though some of these remain yet unpublished. Jacques-Alain Miller, the sole editor of Lacan's seminars, has been regularly conducting since 1984 a series of lectures, "L'orientation lacanienne," within the structure of ParisVIII. These consist in presentations of Lacan's seminars. Miller's teachings has been published in the US by the journal Lacanian Ink.
His only major body of writing, Écrits (1966), are difficult for the layman to read. Lacan explains in Encore—his Seminar from 1973—that his Écrits were not to be understood, but would produce a meaning effect in the reader similar to some mystical texts. Part of the reason for the text's difficulty is the repeated use of Hegelian allusions derived from Kojève's lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit, which virtually every major intellectual figure in France, including Lacan, attended.
Criticism
Although Lacan is often associated with it, he was not without his critics from within the major figures of what is broadly termed postmodernism. Along these lines, Jacques Derrida (though Derrida did not endorse nor associate himself with postmodernism) made a considerable critique of Lacan's analytic writings, accusing him of taking a structuralist approach to psychoanalysis, which was, in fact, the case. Lacan became the subject of Derrida's criticism based on Derrida's general critique of structuralism. According to Derrida, Lacan inherited the Freudian phallocentrism, exemplified primarily in his conception of the phallus as the "primary signifier" that determines the social order of signifiers. It could be said that much of Derrida's critique of Lacan stems from his relationship with Freud: for example, Derrida deconstructs the Freudian conception of "penis envy," upon which female subjectivity is determined as an absence, to show that the primacy of the male phallus entails a hierarchy between phallic presence and absence that ultimately implodes upon itself.
Despite Derrida's critique of Lacan's "phallocentrism," Lacan can be said to enjoy an awkward relationship with feminism and post-feminism. While he is much criticized for adopting (or inheriting from Freud) a phallocentric stance within his psychoanalytic theories, he is also taken by many to provide an accurate portrayal of the gender biases within society. Some critics accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Others, such as Judith Butler and Jane Gallop, have offered readings of Lacan's work that opened up new possibilities for feminist theory, making it difficult to seriously reject Lacan wholesale due to sexism, although specific parts of his work may well be subject to criticism on these grounds. In either case, traditional feminism has profited from Lacan's accounts to show that society has an inherent sexual bias that denigratingly reduces womanhood to a status of deficiency.
Lacan also has his critics from within the psychoanalytic community. François Roustang, in The Lacanian Delusion, called Lacan's output "extravagant" and an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish." Critics from outside psychoanalysis, critical theory and the humanities have often dismissed Lacan and his work in a more or less wholesale fashion. Noam Chomsky described Lacan as "an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan." In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Lacan of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts he does not understand (e. g., confusing irrational numbers and imaginary numbers). Defenders of Lacanian theories dispute the validity of such criticism on the basis of the critics' misunderstanding of Lacan's texts. Bruce Fink, the current major translator of Lacan's works into English, has dismissed Sokal and Bricmont in his book Lacan to the Letter, saying that Sokal and Bricmont have "no idea whatsoever what Lacan is up to," (132) and accusing them of elevating a distaste for Lacan's writing style into an attack on his thought as a whole. Similarly, Arkady Plotnitsky, who is trained in both mathematics and literature, claims in his book The Knowable and the Unknowable that Lacan in fact uses the mathematical concepts more accurately than Socal and Bricmont do.
Trivia
Lacan was the last private owner of Gustave Courbet's provocative painting L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World); he had his stepbrother, the painter André Masson, paint a surrealist variant. The painting was given to the French government by Lacan's heirs after his death because of his having left them with a large burden of back taxes; it now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.
Notes
↑ Jacques Lacan. Écrits: A Selection, transl. by Alan Sheridan, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977, and revised version, 2002, transl. by Bruce Fink)
↑ Seminars. lacan.com.
↑ École de la Cause freudienne Ecole de la Cause freudienne (ECF) (in French) Retrieved April 24, 2009.
↑ Lacan, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis", 1977/2002
↑ Lacan, "The Freudian Thing," 1977/2002.
↑ "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" in Écrits: A Selection, 161-197.
↑ Dylan Evans. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychonalysis. (Routledge, 1996. ISBN [login to see] 221
↑ Lacan, "The Mirror Stage," in Écrits: A Selection, 1977/2002,
↑ Evans
↑ Evans
↑ Lacan, "The Mirror Stage," 1977/2002
↑ Lacan, Jacques. "The Freudian Thing," Écrits: A Selection, 1977/2002
↑ Lacan, "Psychoanalysis and its Teaching," Écrits: A Selection, 1977/2002
↑ Jacques Lacan. The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993)
↑ Jacques Lacan, Seminar on "The Purloined Letter," 1977/2002,
↑ Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious; Seminar V: Les formations de l'inconscient." 1977/2002
↑ Lacan, The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses, 1993.
↑ Lacan, "The Directions of the Treatment." 1977/2002.
↑ Jacques Lacan. "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis," The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Alan Sheridan, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977)
↑ Jacques Lacan. The Seminar, Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Sylvana Tomaselli. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988)
↑ Evans
↑ Lacan, The Seminar, Book II, 1988.
↑ Lacan, "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis," The Seminar XI, 1977.
↑ Lacan, "The Function and Filed of Speech and language in Psychoanalysis," 1977/2002.
↑ Lacan, The Seminar, Book II, 1988.
↑ Jacques Lacan. The Seminar, Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by J. Forrester. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988)
↑ Lacan, The Seminar, Book II. 1988
↑ Evans
↑ Lacan, The Seminar XI, 1977
References
Works by Lacan
Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan lacan.com.
The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968.
Écrits: A Selection, transl. by Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977, and revised version, 2002, transl. by Bruce Fink.
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, transl. by Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
The Seminar, Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by J. Forrester, W.W. Norton & Co., 1988
The Seminar, Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Sylvana Tomaselli, W.W. Norton & Co., 1988.
The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.
The Seminar, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Dennis Porter, W.W. Norton & Co., 1992.
The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Alan Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Co., 1977.
The Seminar XVII, The The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.
The Seminar XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge]], ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.
Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, W.W. Norton & Co., 1990.
Works about Lacan's Work and Theory
Badiou, Alain, The Formulas of L'Etourdit. New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.
Benvenuto, Bice; Roger Kennedy. The Works of Jacques Lacan. London: Free Association Books, 1986.
Bowie, Malcolm, Lacan. Harvard University Press. 1991. (An introduction.) ISBN [login to see] 521
Dor, Joel. The Clinical Lacan. New York: Other Press, 1998. ISBN [login to see] 054
__________. Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language. New York: Other Press, 1998. ISBN [login to see] 047
Elliott, Anthony, and Stephen Frosh, eds. Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture London; and New York: Routledge, 1995. (A recent overview.) ISBN [login to see] 048
Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996. ISBN [login to see] 221
Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. ISBN [login to see] 608
__________. Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely. University of Minnesota, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 219
Forrester, John. Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis. Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985. ISBN [login to see] 615
Fryer, David Ross. The Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan. New York: Other Press, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 889
Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. ISBN [login to see] 437
__________. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. ISBN [login to see] 358
Gherovici, Patricia. The Puerto Rican Syndrome. New York: Other Press, 2003. ISBN [login to see] 757
Harari, Roberto. Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction. New York: Other Press, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 827
__________. Lacan's Seminar on "Anxiety": An Introduction. New York: Other Press, 2001. ISBN [login to see] 368
Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. London: Routledge, 2005. ISBN [login to see] 179
Lander, Romulo. Subjective Experience and the Logic of the Other. New York: Other Press, 2006. ISBN [login to see] 657
Leupin, Alexandre. Lacan Today. New York: Other Press, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 900
Mathelin, Catherine. Lacanian Psychotherpay with Children: The Broken Piano. New York: Other Press, 1999. ISBN [login to see] 016
McGowan, Todd, and Sheila Kunkle. Eds. Lacan and Contemporary Film. New York: Other Press, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 841
Miller, Jacques-Alain. Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety I. New York: Lacanian Ink 26, 2005.
__________. Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety II. New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.
__________. Jacques Lacan's Later Teachings. New York: Lacanian Ink 21, 2003.
__________. The Paradigms of Jouissance. New York, Lacanian Ink 17, 2000.
Moustafa, Safouan. Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis. New York: Other Press, 2004.
Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN [login to see] 449
Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso, 1986. ISBN [login to see] 581
Roudinesco, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. London: Free Associations Books, 1990.
Roustang, François. The Lacanian Delusion (Odeon), translated by Gregg Sims. Oxford University Press, USA, 1990. ISBN [login to see]
Turkle, Sherry. Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, 2nd ed. Free Association Books, 1992. ISBN [login to see] 104
__________. and Richard Wollheim. ‘Lacan: an exchange’, New York Review of Books 26 (9) (1979): 44.
Sharpe, Matthew. "Lacan, Jacques," Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy [1]
Soler, Colette. What Lacan Said About Women. New York: Other Press, 2006. ISBN [login to see] 701
Van Haute, Philippe. Against Adaptation: Lacan's "Subversion" of the Subject. New York: Other Press, 2002. ISBN [login to see] 658
Van Haute, Philippe, and Tomas Geyskens. Confusion of Tongues: The Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Ferenczi, and Laplanche. New York: Other Press, 2004. ISBN [login to see] 282
Wilden, Anthony. "Jacques Lacan: A partial bibliography," Yale French Studies 36/37 (1966): 263–268.
__________. "The object as a limit of discourse: approaches to the Lacanian real," Prose Studies 11 (3) (1988): 94–120.
__________. Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London and New York: Continuum, 2005.
__________. Jacques Lacan as Reader of Hegel. New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006."
Jacques Lacan - New World Encyclopedia
Posted from newworldencyclopedia.org
World History
Philosophy
Psychology
Literature
Writer
Posted >1 y ago
Responses: 5
8
8
0
Introduction to Theory of Literature (ENGL 300) In this lecture on psychoanalytic criticism, Professor Paul Fry explores the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's i...
Thank you, my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on September 9, 1981 French psychoanalyst and semanticist Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan died at the age of 80.
13. Jacques Lacan in Theory
In this lecture on psychoanalytic criticism, Professor Paul Fry explores the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's interest in Freud and distaste for post-Freudian "ego psychologists" are briefly mentioned, and his clinical work on "the mirror stage" is discussed in depth. The relationship in Lacanian thought, between metaphor and metonymy is explored through the image of the point de capiton. The correlation between language and the unconscious, and the distinction between desire and need, are also explained, with reference to Hugo's "Boaz Asleep."
00:00 - Chapter 1. Peter Brooks and Lacan
09:03 - Chapter 2. Lacan and Freudian Scholarship
15:51 - Chapter 3. The Mirror Stage
22:18 - Chapter 4. Language and the Unconscious
30:25 - Chapter 5. Metonymy, Metaphor, and Desire
37:03 - Chapter 6. What Is Desire?
46:50 - Chapter 7. Slavoj Žižek
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkAXsR5WINc
Images:
1. Jacques Lacan - shrink from hell or the greatest psychoanalyst since Freud.
2. Jacques Lacan on the street.
3. Jacques Lacan - The Three Lacks.
4. Lacan's Four Orders.
Background from {[https://iep.utm.edu/lacweb/]}
"Jacques Lacan (1901—1981)
It would be fair to say that there are few twentieth century thinkers who have had such a far-reaching influence on subsequent intellectual life in the humanities as Jacques Lacan. Lacan's "return to the meaning of Freud" profoundly changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. His seminars in the 1950s were one of the formative environments of the currency of philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960s and'70s, and which has come to be known in the Anglophone world as "post-structuralism."
Both inside and outside of France, Lacan's work has also been profoundly important in the fields of aesthetics, literary criticism and film theory. Through the work of Louis Pierre Althusser (and more lately Ernesto Laclau, Jannis Stavrokakis and Slavoj Zizek), Lacanian theory has also left its mark on political theory, and particularly the analysis of ideology and institutional reproduction.
This article seeks to outline something of the philosophical heritage and importance of Lacan's theoretical work. After introducing Lacan, it focuses primarily on Lacan's philosophical anthropology, philosophy of language, psychoanalysis and philosophy of ethics.
Table of Contents
Biographical and General Introduction
Biography
Intellectual Biography
Theoretical Project
Lacan's Philosophical Anthropology
The Mirror Stage
Desire is the Desire of the Other
Oedipal Complex, Castration, Name of the Father, and the Big Other
The Law and Symbolic Identification
Summary
Lacan's Diagnostic Categories
Lacan's Philosophy of Language
Language and Law
Psychoanalysis as Interpretation
The Curative Efficacy of the "Talking Cure"
Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Ethics
Master Signifiers, and the Decentred Nature of Belief
Lacan's Conception of Fantasy
The Lacanian Subjects, and Ethics
References and Further Reading
1. Biographical and General Introduction
a. Biography
Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was born in Paris on April 13 1901 to a family of solid Catholic tradition, and was educated at a Jesuit school. After completing his baccalauréat he commenced studying medicine and later psychiatry. In 1927, Lacan commenced clinical training and began to work at psychiatric institutions, meeting and working with (amongst others) the famous psychiatrist Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault. His doctoral thesis, on paranoid psychosis, was passed in 1932. In 1934, he became a member of La Societe Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP), and commenced an analysis lasting until the outbreak of the war. During the Nazi occupation of France, Lacan ceased all official professional activity in protest against those he called "the enemies of human kind." Following the war, he rejoined the SPP, and it was in the post-war period that he rose to become a renowned and controversial figure in the international psychoanalytic community, eventually banned in 1962 from the International Psychoanalytic Association for his unorthodox views on the calling and practice of psychoanalysis. Lacan's career as both a theoretician and practicioner did not end with this excommunication, however. In 1963, he founded L'Ecole Freudienne de Paris (EFP), a school devoted to the training of analysts and the practicing of psychoanalysis according to Lacanian stipulations. In 1980, having single-handedly dissolved the EFP, he then constituted the Ecole for "La Cause Freudienne," saying: "It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian." Lacan died in Paris on September 9, 1981.
b. Intellectual Biography
Lacan's first major theoretical publication was his piece "On the Mirror Stage as Formative of the I." This piece originally appeared in 1936. Its publication was followed by an extended period wherein he published little. In 1949, though, it was re-presented to wider recognition. In 1953, on the back of the success of his Rome dissertation to the SPP on "The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis," Lacan then inaugurated the seminar series that he was to continue to convene annually (albeit in different institutional guises) until his death. It was in this forum that he developed and ceaselessly revised the ideas with which his name has become associated. Although Lacan was famously ambivalent about publication, the seminars were transcribed by various of his followers, and several have been translated into English. Lacan published a selection of his most important essays in 1966 in the collection Ecrits. An abridged version of this text is available in an English-language edition (see References and Further Reading).
c. Theoretical Project
Lacan's avowed theoretical intention, from at least 1953, was the attempt to reformalize what he termed "the Freudian field." His substantial corpus of writings, speeches and seminars can be read as an attempt to unify and reground what are the four interlinking aspirations of Freud's theoretical writings:
a theory of psychoanalytic practice as a curative procedure;
the generation of a systematic metapsychology capable of providing the basis for
the formalization of a diagnostic heuristic of mental illness; and
the construction of an account of the development of the "civilized" human psyche.
Lacan brought to this project, however, a keen knowledge of the latest developments in the human sciences, drawing especially on structuralist linguistics, the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, topology, and game theory. Moreover, as Jacques Derrida has remarked, Lacan's work is characterized by an engagement with modern philosophy (notably Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre) unmatched by other psychoanalytic theorists, especially informed by his attendance at Andre Kojeve's hugely influential Paris lectures on Hegel from 1933-1939.
2. Lacan's Philosophical Anthropology
a. The Mirror Stage
Lacan's article "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I" (1936, 1949) lays out the parameters of a doctrine that he never foreswore, and which has subsequently become something of a post-structuralist mantra: namely, that human identity is "decentred." The key observation of Lacan's essay concerns the behaviour of infants between the ages of 6 and 18 months. At this age, Lacan notes, children become capable of recognizing their mirror image. This is not a dispassionate experience, either. It is a recognition that brings the child great pleasure. For Lacan, we can only explain this "jubilation" as a testimony to how, in the recognition of its mirror-image, the child is having its first anticipation of itself as a unified and separate individual. Before this time, Lacan contends (drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic observation), the child is little more than a "body in bits and pieces," unable to clearly separate I and Other, and wholly dependant for its survival (for a length of time unique in the animal kingdom) upon its first nurturers.
The implications of this observation on the mirror stage, in Lacan's reckoning, are far-reaching. They turn around the fact that, if it holds, then the genesis of individuals' sense of individuation can in no way be held to issue from the "organic" or "natural" development of any inner wealth supposed to be innate within them. The I is an Other from the ground up, for Lacan (echoing and developing a conception of the ego already mapped out in Freud's Ego and Id). The truth of this dictum, as Lacan comments in "Aggressivity and Psychoanalysis," is evident in infantile transitivity: that phenomenon wherein one infant hit by another yet proclaims: "I hit him!" and visa-versa. It is more simply registered in the fact that it remains a permanent possibility of adult human experience for us to speak and think of ourselves in the second or third person. What is decisive in these phenomena, according to Lacan, is that the ego is at base an object: an artificial projection of subjective unity modelled on the visual images of objects and others that the individual confronts in the world. Identification with the ego, Lacan accordingly maintains, is what underlies the unavoidable component of aggressivity in human behaviour especially evident amongst infants, and which Freud recognised in his Three Essays on Sexuality when he stressed the primordial ambivalence of children towards their love object(s) (in the oral phase, to love is to devour; in the anal phase, it is to master or destroy…).
b. Desire is the Desire of the Other
It is on the basis of this fundamental understanding of identity that Lacan maintained throughout his career that desire is the desire of the Other. What is meant by him in this formulation is not the triviality that humans desire others, when they sexually desire (an observation which is not universally true). Again developing Freud's theorization of sexuality, Lacan's contention is rather that what psychoanalysis reveals is that human-beings need to learn how and what to desire. Lacanian theory does not deny that infants are always born into the world with basic biological needs that need constant or periodic satisfaction. Lacan's stress, however, is that, from a very early age, the child's attempts to satisfy these needs become caught up in the dialectics of its exchanges with others. Because its sense of self is only ever garnered from identifying with the images of these others (or itself in the mirror, as a kind of other), Lacan argues that it demonstrably belongs to humans to desire---directly---as or through another or others. We get a sense of his meaning when we consider such social phenomena as fashion. As the squabbling of children more readily testifies, it is fully possible for an object to become desirable for individuals because they perceive that others desire it, such that when these others' desire is withdrawn, the object also loses its allure.
Lacan articulates this decentring of desire when he contends that what has happened to the biological needs of the individual is that they have become inseparable from, and importantly subordinated to, the vicissitudes of its demand for the recognition and love of other people. Events as apparently "natural" as the passing or holding back of stool, he remarks in Ecrits, become episodes in the chronicle of the child's relationship with its parents, expressive of its compliance or rebellion. A hungry child may even refuse to eat food if it perceives that this food is offered less as a token of love than one of its parents' dissatisfaction or impatience.
In this light, Lacan's important recourse to game theory also becomes explicable. For game theory involves precisely the attempt to formalize the possibilities available to individuals in situations where their decisions concerning their wants can in principle both affect and be affected by the decisions of others. As Lacan's article in the Ecrits on the "Direction of the Treatment" spells out, he takes it that the analytic situation, as theorized by Freud around the notion of transference (see Part 2), is precisely such a situation. In that essay, Lacan focuses on the dream of the butcher's wife in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. The said "butcher's wife" thought that she had had a dream which was proof of the invalidity of Freud's theory that dreams are always encoded wish-fulfillments. As Freud comments, however, this dream becomes explicable when one considers how, after a patient has entered into analysis, her wishes are constructed (at least in part) in relation to the perceived wishes of the analyst. In this case, at least one of the wishes expressed by the dream was the woman's wish that Freud's desire (for his theory to be correct) be thwarted. In the same way, Lacan details how the deeper unconscious wish expressed in the manifest content of the dream (which featured the woman attempting to stage a dinner party with only one piece of smoked salmon) can only be comprehended as the coded fulfilment of a desire that her husband would not fulfill her every wish, and leave her with an unsatisfied desire.
c. Oedipal Complex, Castration, Name of the Father, and the Big Other
The principle that desire is the desire of the Other is also decisive in how Lacan reformulates Freud's theory of the child's socialisation through the resolution of its Oedipal complex in its fifth or sixth year. Lacan agrees with Freud that this event is decisive both in the development of the individual, and in the aetiology of any possible subsequent mental illness. However, in trying to understand this stage of subjective development, Lacan distances himself from Freud's emphasis on the biological organ of the penis. Lacan talks instead of the phallus. What he is primarily referring to is what the child perceives it is that the mother desires. Because the child's own desire is structured by its relationships with its first nurturer (usually in Western societies the mother), it is thus the desire of the mother, for Lacan, that is the decisive stake in what transpires with the Oedipus complex and its resolution. In its first years, Lacan contends, the child devotes itself to trying to fathom what it is that the mother desires, so that it can try to make itself the phallus for the mother- a fully satisfying love-object. At around the time of its fifth or sixth desire, however, the father will normally intervene in a way that lastingly thwarts this Oedipal aspiration. The ensuing renunciation of the aspiration to be the phallic Thing for the mother, and not any physical event or its threat, is what Lacan calls castration, and it is thus a function to which he thinks both boys and girls are normally submitted.
The child's acceptance of its castration marks the resolution of its Oedipal complex, Lacan holds, again shadowing Freud. The Oedipal child remains committed to its project of trying to fathom and fulfil this desire. It accordingly (and famously) perceives the father as a rival and threat to its dearest aspirations. Because of this, in a maverick theoretical conjunction, Lacan indeed likens the father-child relation at this point (at least as it is perceived by the child) to the famous "struggle to the death for pure recognition" dramatized in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. In this struggle, of course, the child invariably loses. But everything turns, according to Lacanian theory, on whether this loss constitutes a violent humiliation for the child or whether, as in Hegel's account of "Lordship and Bondage," its resolution involves the founding of a pact between the parties, bound by the solemnification of mutually recognised Law.
If the castration complex is to normalize the child, Lacan argues, what the child must be made to perceive is that what satisfies or orders the desire of the mother is not any visible (imaginary) feature of the father (his obviously better physical endowments, and so on). The child must come to see that the whims of the mother are themselves ordered by a Law that exceeds and tames them. This law is what Lacan famously dubs the name (nom) of the father, trading on a felicitous homonymy in French between nom (name) and non (the "no!" to incestuous union). When the father intervenes, (at least when he is what Lacan calls the symbolic father) Lacan's argument is that he does so less as a living enjoying individual than as the delegate and spokesperson of a body of social Law and convention that is also recognised by the mother, as a socialised being, to be decisive. This body of nomoi is what Lacan calls the big Other of the child's given sociolinguistic community. Insofar as the force of its Law is what the child at castration perceives to be what moves the mother and gives the father's words their "performative force" (Austin), Lacan also calls it the "phallic order."
d. The Law and Symbolic Identification
The Law of the father is in this way theorised by Lacan as the necessary mediator between the child and the mother. A castrating acceptance of its sovereignity precipitates the child out of its ambivalent attempts to be the fully satisfying Thing for the mother. As Lacan quips, when the child accedes to castration, it accedes to the impossibility of it directly satisfying its incestous wish. If things go well, however, it will go away with "title deeds in its pocket" that guarantee that, when the time comes (and if it plays by the rules), it can at least have a satisficing substitute for its first lost love-object. What has occurred, in this event, is that the individual's imaginary identifications (or "ideal egos") that exclusively characterised its infantile years have been supplemented by an identification of an entirely different order: what Lacan calls a symbolic identification with an "ego ideal." This is precisely identification with and within something that cannot be seen, touched, devoured, or mastered: namely, the words, norms and directives of its given cultural collective. Symbolic identification is always idenification with a normatively circumscribed way of organising the social-intersubjective space within which the subject can take on its most lasting imaginary identifications: (For example, the hysterical-vulnerable female identifies at the symbolic level with the patriarchal way of structuring social relations between sexes, outside of which her imaginary identification would be meaningless).
e. Summary
So, to repeat and summarise: Lacan's philosophical anthropology (his answer to the question: what is it to be human?) involves several important reformulations of Freudian tenets. By drawing on Hegel, game theory, and contemporary observations of infant behaviour, he lays greater systematic emphasis than Freud had on the intersubjective constitution of human desire. In this feature at least, his philosophical anthropology is united with that of philosophers such as Levinas, Honneth and Habermas. Equally, since for Lacan human desire is "the desire of the other," what he contends is at stake in the child's socialisation is its aspiration to be the fully satisfying object for the mother, a function which is finally (or at least norm-ally) fulfilled by the Law-bearing words of the father. Human-being, for Lacan, is thus (as decentred) vitally a speaking animal (what he calls a parle-etre); one whose desire comes to be "inmixed" with the imperatives of, and stipulated within, the natural language of its society. [see Part 2] Particularly, Lacan picks up on certain cues within Freud's texts (and those of Saint Paul) to emphasise the dialectical structuration of human desire in relation to the prohibitions of Law. If the Law of the father denies immediate access to what the child takes to be the fully satisfying object (as expounded above), from this point on, Lacan argues, (at least neurotic) desire is necessarily articulated in the interstices of what is permitted by the big Other. And it is characterised by an innate and "fatal" attraction to what it prohibits as such, which is why he placed such central emphasis throughout his career on the enigmatic Freudian notion of a death drive.
f. Lacan's Diagnostic Categories
Finally, it should be noted that, because of Lacan's reformulations of several of Freud's key notions, Lacan's diagnostic heuristic differs markedly from Freud's. For Lacan, what is decisive in understanding mental illness is not the conflict between the embattled ego and its two more "irrational" psychic bedfellows, the superego and the id. It is how the subject bears up with respect to the condition of being a castrated animal forced to pursue its desire on "the inverted ladder of the signifier," within the phallic order of its society's big Other. The question to be asked, for Lacan, is: how fully has the subject acceded to its symbolic castration?, and- as such- how fully has it overcome the transitivity and aggressivity characteristic of the earlier infantile stages of its development?
As in Freud, Lacan stipulates three major classes of mental illness, all of which are situated by him with respect to the terms of this question, and which (as such) are elevated by him to something like three existential bearings towards the condition of being a decentred socialised animal. According to the Lacanian conceptualization, the neurotic is someone who has submitted to castration, but not without remainder. His/her symptoms stand testimony to a lasting refusal of, and resentment towards, the castrating agency of the big Other. The pervert is someone who has only partially acceded to castration. For him/her, the Law does not function wholly to repress or render inaccessible what s/he deeply desires (the maternal body). Because of this, this Law comes itself (either in its prosecution, or in its sufferance) to function as the object of her/his desire. Finally, the psychotic is someone who has never acceded (or been drawn to accede) to the symbolic order of social interchange bound by the name of the father. For him/her, this order of the big Other, in which people follow the Law "because it is the Law" can thus only ever appear to be a semblance. As is most clear in the delusions of paranoiacs, s/he will thus permanently be prey to the delusion that there must be some "Other of the big Other" (for example: aliens, the CIA, God) behind the scenes, pulling the strings of the social charade.
3. Lacan's Philosophy of Language
The component of Lacanian theory for which it is perhaps most famous, and which has most baffled its critics, is the emphasis Lacan laid on language in his attempt to formalize psychoanalysis. From the 1950s, in complete opposition to any Jungian or romantic conceptions, Lacan instead described the unconscious as a kind of discourse: the discourse of the Other.
There are at least three interrelated concerns that inform the construction of what one might call Lacan's "philosophy of language." The first is the central argument that the child's castration is the decisive point in its becoming a speaking subject. The second is his taking very seriously what might be termed the "interpretive paradigm" in Freud's texts, according to which Freud repeatedly described symptoms, slips and dreams as symbolic phenomena capable of interpretation. -The third is Lacan's desire to try to understand the efficacy of psychoanalytic interpretation as a curative procedure that relies solely on what Freud called in The Question of Lay Analysis the "magical" power of the word.
a. Language and Law
In Part 1, in recounting Lacan's view on the resolution of the Oedipal complex, one reason why Lacan allocated language such importance was touched upon. For Lacan, it is only when the child accedes to castration and the Law of the father, that s/he becomes fully competent as a language-speaker within his/her given social collective. By contrast, individuals suffering from psychosis, Lacan stresses (in line with a vast wealth of psychological research), are prone to characteristic linguistic dysfunctions and inabilities. Already from this, then, we can outline a first crucial feature of Lacan's "philosophy of language." Like the later Wittgenstein, Lacan's position is that to learn a language is to learn a set of rules or laws for the use and combination of words. Accordingly, for him too, "learning is based on believing" (Wittgenstein). Particularly, Lacan asserts a lasting link between the capacity of subjects to perceive the world as a set of discrete identifiable objects, and their acceptance of the unconditional authority of a body of convention. We will return to this below.
b. Psychoanalysis as Interpretation
Lacan's contention concerning human-being as a parle-etre, put most broadly, is that when the subject learns its mother tongue, everything from its sense of how the world is, to the way it experiences its biological body, are over-determined by its accession to this order of language. This is the clearest register of the debt that Lacan owes to phenomenology. From Heidegger, he accepts the notion that to be a subject is to experience the world as a meaningful totality, and that language is crucial to this capability. Aligning Freud with the theories of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, Lacan developed a psychoanalytic conception of how the body is caught in the play of meaning-formation between subjects, and expressive of the subjectivity that "lives" through it, as well as being an objectificable tool for the performance of instrumental activities. For Lacan, that is, "the unconscious" does not name only some other part of the mental apparatus than consciousness. It names all that about a subject, including bodily manifestations and identifications with others and "external" objects that insist beyond his/her conscious control.
Freud had already commented in the Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis that the unconscious can be compared to a language without a grammar. Lacan, using structuralist linguistics, attempted to systematize this contention, arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language, and that "it speaks"/ca parle. A symptom, Lacan (for example) claimed, is to be read as a kind of embodied corporeal metaphor. As Freud had argued, he takes it that what is at stake within a symptom is a repressed desire abhorrent to the consciously accepted self-conception and values of the subject. This desire, if it is to gain satisfaction at all, accordingly needs to be expressed indirectly. For example, a residual infantile desire to masturbate may find satisfaction indirectly in a compulsive ritual the subject feels compelled to repeat.
Just as one might metaphorically describe one's love as a rose, Lacan argues, here we have a repressed desire being metaphorically expressed in some apparently dissimilar bodily activity. Equally, drawing on certain moments within Freud's papers "On the Psychology of Love," Lacan argues that desire is structured as a metonymy. In metonymy, one designates a whole object (for example, a car) by naming one part of it (for example: "a set of wheels"). Lacan's argument is that, equally, since castration denies subjects full access to their first love object (the mother), their choice of subsequent love objects is the choice of a series of objects that each resemble in part the lost object (perhaps they have the same hair, or look at him/her the same way the mother did …). According to Lacan, the unconscious uses the multivalent resources of the natural language into which the subject has been inducted (what he calls "the battery of the signifier") to give indirect vent to the desires that the subject cannot consciously avow.
Lacan's Freudian argument is that a directly comparable process occurs in formations of the unconscious as in jokes. As Freud detailed in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the "punch line" of jokes pack their punch by condensing in one statement, or even one word, two chains of meaning. The first of these is what the previous words and cues of the joke, and our shared norms for interpretation, lead us to expect. The second is a wholly different chain of associations, whose clash with what we had expected produces our sense of amusement. In the same way, Lacan observed that, for example, when an analysand makes a "slip of the tongue," what has taken place is that the unconscious has employed such means as homonymy, the merging of two words, the forgetting or mispronunciation of certain words, or a slippage of pronoun or tense, etc., to intimate a whole chain of associations which the subject did not intend, but through which his unconscious desire is given indirect expression.
Lacan argues that what the consideration of jokes, symptoms and slips thus shows are a number of features of how it is that human beings form sense in language. The first thing is that the sentence is the absolutely basal unit of meaning. Before a sentence ends, Lacan notes, the sense of each individual word or signifier is uncertain. It is only when the sentence is completed that their sense is fixed, or---as Lacan variously put it---"quilted." Before this time, they are what he calls "floating signifiers," like to the leading premises of a joke.
The sense of this position can be easily demonstrated. One need only begin a sentence by proffering a subject, but then cease speaking before a verb and/or predicate is assigned to this in accordance with linguistic convention. For example, if I say: "when I was young I…" or "it's not like…," my interlocutor will be understandably want to know what it is that I mean. At the end of the sentence, by contrast, the sense of the beginning words becomes clear, as when I finish the first of the above utterances by saying "when I was young I ran a lot," or whatever.
This understanding of sentences as the basic unit of sense, and of how it is that signifiers "float" until any given sentence is finished, is what informs Lacan's emphasis on the future anterior tense. Sense, he argues, is always something that "will have been." It is anticipated but not confirmed, when we hear uttered the beginning of a sentence (see transference below). Or else, at sentence's end, it is something that we now see with the benefit of "twenty twenty hindsight" to have been intended all along. This is why, in Seminar I, Lacan even quips that the meaning of symptoms do not come from the past, but from the future. Before the work of interpretation, a symptom is a floating signifier, whose meaning is unclear to the analysand, and also to the analyst. As the analytic work proceeds, however, an interpretation is achieved at some later time that casts the whole behavior into relief in a wholly different light, and makes its sense clear.
c. The Curative Efficacy of the "Talking Cure"
Lacan's emphasis on language is also over-determined by an elementary recollection that, if Freud's intervention promised anything, it is that speaking with another person in strictly controlled circumstances can be a curative experience for people suffering from forms of mental illness. The analysand comes to the analyst with his troubling symptoms, and the analyst, at certain decisive points, offers interpretations of these behaviors that retrospectively make their meaning clear. And this is not simply an intellectual exercise. As Freud stressed, there is knowledge of the unconscious, and then there is knowledge that has effects upon it. A successful psychoanalytic interpretation is one that has effects even upon the biological reality of the body, changing the subject's bearing towards the world, and dissolving his/her symptoms.
The need to explain this power of words and language is a clear and lasting motive behind Lacan's understanding of language. His central and basal hypothesis concerning it can be stated in the following way. In a symptom, as we saw above, an unconscious desire seeks to make itself manifest. The symptom is recounted to the analyst, or else repeated in the way the subject responds to the analyst in the sessions. Then an interpretation is offered by the analyst, which recognizes or symbolizes the force of the desire at work in the symptom, and the symptom disappears. So here the recognition of a desire at the same time satisfies the desire. What this can accordingly only mean is that the unconscious desire given voice in the symptom is itself, from the start, at least in part a desire for recognition. This is an absolutely central Lacanian insight, wherein he again shows the influence of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit upon his most central concepts. It synchronizes exactly with the philosophical anthropology recounted above, and Lacan's stricture concerning how human desire is always caught up in the dialectics of individuals' exchanges with others.
But, for Lacan, it also shows something vital about the language in or as which the subjects' repressed desires are trying to find a vent. This is that language is above all a social pact. As Lacan wrote in the Ecrits: "As a rule everyone knows that others will remain, like himself, inaccessible to the constraints of reason, outside an acceptance in principle of a rule of debate that does not come into force without an explicit or implicit agreement as to what is called its basis, which is almost always tantamount to an anticipated agreement to what is at stake... I shall expect nothing therefore of these rules except the good faith of the Other, and, as a last resort, will make use of them, if I think fit or if I am forced to, only to amuse bad faith..." (Lacan, 2001: 154-155). Lacan's idea is that to speak is to presuppose a body a conventions that ensue that, even if my immediate auditor doesn't "get it," the true meaning of what I wish to convey always will emerge, and be registered in some "Other" place. (Note that here is another meaning of the big Other touched upon in Part 1. The big Other is the place, tribunal, collective or single person which we presuppose will register the truth of what we say, whenever we speak.)
This is why Lacan's philosophy of language is to be read in strong opposition to any philosophical account (whether Lockean, descriptivist or phenomenological) which argues that meaning is formed prior to the communicative act. Lacan defines speech as a process in which the subjects get their meanings back from the Other in an inverted form. Think once more of what is involved in psychoanalytic interpretation. Here the meaning of a symptom is rendered by the analyst. What this means, for Lacan, is that the symptom not only bears upon the subject's past relations to others. If it can be dissolved by an Other's interpretation, this is because it is formed with an eye to this interpretation from the start. To quote Slavoj Zizek on this Lacanian notion of how the symptom is from the start addressed to an Other supposed to know its truth: "The symptom arises where the world failed, where the circuit of symbolic communication was broken: it is a kind of "prolongation of communication by other means'": the failed, repressed word articulates itself in a coded, ciphered form.
The implication of this is that the symptom can not only be interpreted but is, so to speak, formed with an eye to its interpretation … in the psychoanalytic cure the symptom is always addressed to the analyst, it is an appeal to him to deliver its hidden message … This … is the basic point: in its very constitution, the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very formation is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning …" (Zizek, 1989: 73). Even the key meaning of transference, for Lacan, is this supposition that there is an Other supposed to know the truth of my communicative acts, even down to the most apparently meaningless "slips" and symptomatic behaviours. In terms of the previous section, transference is the condition of possibility for the quilting of the meaning of floating signifiers that occurs even in the most basic sentences, as we saw. What occurs in a psychoanalytic interpretation is simply one more consequential version of this process. The subject, by speaking, addresses himself to some Other supposed to know her/his truth, and at the end of this process, the signifiers he offers to the Other are quilted, and return to him "in an inverted form."
What has occurred at this point, on Lacan's reckoning, is that the previously unquilted signifiers finding voice in the manifestations of his unconscious are integrated into the subject's symbolic universe: the way s/he understands the world, in the terms of his/her community's natural language. They have been subjectivised; which means that now s/he can recognise them as not wholly alien intrusions into his/her identity, but an integral part of this identity. Lacan's stress is thus always, when he talks of psychoanalytic interpretation, that this interpretation does not add new content to the subject's self-understanding, so much as affect the form of this understanding. An interpretation, that is, realigns the way the s/he sees her past, reordering the signifiers in which his/her self-understanding has come to be ordered. A crucial Lacanian category in theorising this process is that of the "master signifier." Master signifiers are those signifiers to which a subject's identity are most intimately bound. Standard examples are words like "Australian," "democrat," "decency," "genuineness." They are words which will typically be proffered by subjects as naming something like what Kant would have called ends in themselves. They designate values and ideals that the subject will be unwilling and unable to question without pulling the semantic carpet from beneath their own feet.
Lacan's understanding of how these "master signifiers" function is a multi-layered one, as we shall see in more detail in Part 3. It is certainly true to say, though, that the importance of these signifiers comes from how a subject's identification with them commits them to certain orderings of all the rest of the signifiers. For example, if someone identifies himself as a "communist," the meanings of a whole array of other signifiers are ordered in quite different ways than for someone who thinks of himself as a "liberal." "Freedom" for him comes to mean "freedom from the exploitative practices enshrined in capitalism and hidden beneath liberal ideological rhetoric." "Democracy" comes to mean "the dictatorship of the proletariat." "Equality" comes to mean something like "what ensues once the sham of the capitalist "equal right to trade" is unmasked."
What Lacan argues is involved in the psychoanalytic process, then, is the elevation of new "master signifiers" which enable the subject to reorder their sense of themselves and of their relations to others. Previously, for example, a person may have identified with a conception of "decency" that has led him to repress aspects of his own libidinal makeup, which then return in neurotic symptoms. What analysis will properly lead him to do is identify himself with a different set of "master signifiers," which re-signify the signifiers he had unconsciously been addressing to the Other in his symptoms, reducing their traumatic charge by integrating them into his symbolic (self-)understanding.
4. Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Ethics
Whereas Freud never systematically spoke on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan devoted his pivotal seventh seminar (in 1959-1960) to precisely this topic. Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis goes to some lengths to stress that the position on ethics Lacan is concerned to develop is concerned solely with the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Its central topic, in line with what we examined in Part 1 concerning the intersubjective structuration of subjective desire and identity, is the desire of the analyst as that Other addressed by the patient and implicated in the way s/he structures his/her desire through the transference. Nevertheless, it remains that Lacan develops his position through explicit engagement with Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, as well as Kant's practical writings, and the texts of Marquis de Sade. Moreover, Lacan's ethics accord with his metapsychological premises, examined in Section 2, and his theorization of language, examined in Section 3.
In this Section 4, accordingly, we will see Lacan's understanding of ethics as a sophisticated position that, disavowals notwithstanding, can be read as a consistent post-Kantian philosophy of ethics. Section 4 is divided into three sub-sections. The first two develop further Lacan's metapsychological and philosophical tenets. The first sub-section involves a further elaboration of the Lacanian conception of the "master signifiers." The second sub-section involves an exposition of Lacan's notion of the "fundamental fantasy." The final sub-section then examines Lacan's later notion of "traversing the fantasy" as the basis of his ethical position.
a. Master Signifiers, and the Decentred Nature of Belief
As I stated at the end of Part 2, Lacan assigns great importance in his theorization of the psychoanalytic process to what he calls "master signifiers." These are those signifiers that the subject most deeply identifies with, and which accordingly have a key role in the way s/he gives meaning to the world. As was stressed, Lacan's idea about these signifiers is that their primary importance is less any positive content that they add to the subject's field of symbolic sense. It is rather the efficacy they have in reorienting the subject with respect to all of the other signifiers which structure his/her sense of herself and the world. It is precisely this primarily structural or formal function that underlies the crucial Lacanian claim that master signifiers are actually "empty signifiers" or "signifiers without a signified."
As with all of Lacan's key formulations, the notion that the master signifiers are "signifiers without signified" is a complex one. Even the key idea is the following. The concept or referent (or both) signified by any "master signifier" will always be something impossible for any one individual to fully comprehend. For example, "Australian-ness" would seem to be what is aimed at when someone proffers the self-identification: "I am an Australian." The Lacanian question here is: what is "Australian" being used by the subject to designate here? Is "Australian-ness" something that inheres in everyone who is born in Australia? Or is it a characteristic that is passed on through the medium of culture primarily? Does it, perhaps, name most deeply some virtues or qualities of character all Australians supposedly have? However, even if we take it that all "Australians" share some basic virtues, which are these? Can a closed list everyone would agree upon be feasibly drawn up? Is it not easy to think of other peoples who share in valuing each individual trait we standardly call "Australian" (for example: courage, disrespect for pomposity)? And, since "Australian" would seem to have to aim at a singular entity, not a collection, or else some grounding quality of character that could perhaps unite all of the others, which is this? And is this "essential" quality- again- simply biological, perhaps genetic, or is it metaphysical, or what?
What Lacan's account of "master signifiers" thus emphasizes is the gap between two things. The first is our initial certainty about the nature of such an apparently obvious thing as "Australian-ness." (We may even get vexed when asked by someone). The second thing is the difficulty that we have of putting this certainty into words, or naming something that would correspond to the "essence" of "Australian-ness," beneath all the different appearances.
What Lacan indeed argues, in line with his emphasis on the decentred self, is that our ongoing and usually unquestioning use of these words represents another clear case of how the construction of sense depends on the transferential supposition of "Others supposed to know." Though we ourselves can never simply state what "Australian-ness," etc. is, that is, Lacan argues that what is nevertheless efficient in generating our belief in (and identification with) this elusive "thing" is a conviction that nevertheless other people certainly know its nature, or seem to. Just as we desire through the Other, for this reason Lacanian theory also maintains that belief is always belief through an Other. (For example, in the Christian religion, priests would be the designated Others supposed to know the meaning of the Christian mystery vouchsafing believers' faith.)
At this point, it is appropriate to recall from Part 1 Lacan's thesis that castration marks the point wherein the child is made to renounce its aspiration to be the phallic Thing for the mother. A subject's castration amounts at base, for Lacan, to the acceptance that it is the injunctions of the father- and through his name the conventions of the big Other of society- that govern the desire of the mother. The "master signifiers" are also what Lacan calls phallic signifiers. The reason is exactly that- despite the difficulty of locating any simple referent for them- they nevertheless are the words that seem to intimate to subjects what "really matters" about human existence. While no Christian believer may know what "God" is, nevertheless s/he will be in no doubt of the transcendent importance of whatever It is that this word names.
Lacan thus is drawing together his philosophical anthropology and his theorization of language when he defends the position that it is the consequence of "castration" that subjects are debarred from immediate knowledge of what it is that the "phallic signifiers" signify. He is also arguing, in the psychoanalytic field, a position profoundly akin to the Kantian postulation that finite human subjects are debarred from immediate access to things in themselves. Lacan's argument is that it is this lost "signified," which would as it were be "more real" than the other things that the subject can readily signify, that is what is primordially repressed when the subject accedes to becoming a speaking subject at castration. When the subject accedes to the symbolic, he repeats, the Real of aspired-to incestuous union, and the sexualized transgressive enjoyment or jouissance it would afford, is necessarily debarred.
b. Lacan's Conception of Fantasy
If the neurotic subject does not to forego the Oedipal supposition that there is some Thing that would fully satisfy the desire of the mother, it is because s/he constructs fantasies about the nature of this lost Thing, and how s/he stands towards it. The primary means s/he deploys in this process is what we recounted above, when we noted how the difficulty in knowing the referent of the phallic master signifiers obliges subjects to construct their beliefs concerning it in a "decentred" manner, through the Others. While the subject accepts that the Real phallic Thing is lost to him/her, that is, in his/her fantasmatic life s/he yet supposes that there are Others who do know what it is that phallic signifiers refer to, and have more direct access to the Real of jousissance. In line with this, Lacan's further argument is indeed that the deepest fantasmatic postulation of subjects is always that the Real Phallic Thing that s/he has been debarred from must be held in reserve by the "big Other" whose law it is that discernibly structures the mother's desire.
What follows from this is the position that the manifestations of the unconscious represent small unconscious rebellions of subjects against the losses that they take themselves to have endured when they acceded to socialization. They are all under-girded by the more basic fantasmatic structuration of identity as constituted by the loss endured at castration. This is why Lacan talks of a fundamental fantasy, and argues that it is above all this fundamental fantasy that is at stake in psychoanalysis.
Lacan strived to formalize the invariant structure of this "fundamental fantasy" in the matheme: $ a. This matheme indicates that: "$," the "barred" subject which is divided by castration between attraction to and repulsion from the Object of its unconscious desire, is correlative to ('') the fantasised lost object. This object, designated in the matheme as "a," is called by Lacan the "object petit a," or else the object cause of desire. Lacan holds that the subject always stabilizes its position with respect to the Real Thing by constructing a fantasy about how the debarred Thing is held in the big Other, manifesting only in a series of metonymic or partial objects (the gaze or voice of his/her love objects, a hair style, or some other "little piece of the Real") that can be enjoyed as compensation for its primordial loss of the maternal Thing.
Lacan's argument is that the fundamental psychological "gain" from the fundamental fantasy is the following. The fundamental fantasy represents what occurred at castration in the terms of a narrative of possession and loss. This fantasm thus consoles the subject by positing that s/he at one point did have the phallic Thing, but that then, at castration, it was taken away from him/her by the Other. What this of course means is that, since the Thing was taken away from the subject, perhaps also It can be regained by him/her. It is this promise, Lacan maintains, that usually structures neurotic human desire. What the fantasy serves to hide from the subject, then, is the possibility that a fully satisfying sexual relationship with the mother, or any metonymic substitute for her, is not only prohibited, but was never possible anyway. As I recounted in Part 1, the Lacanian view, which is informed by observation of infantile behavior, is that the mother-child relationship before castration is not Edenic, but characterized by imaginary transitivity and aggressivity.
This is why Lacan quips in Seminar XX that "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship" and elsewhere that the "Woman," with a capital "W," "does not exist." Note then that the deepest logic of castration, according to Lacan, is a profoundly paradoxical one. The "no!" of the father prohibits something that is impossible. Its very prohibition, however, gives rise in the subject to the fantasmatic supposition that the Thing in question is one that is attainable but only being debarred. Lacan thus asserts that the fundamental fantasy is there to veil from the subject the terminal nature of its loss at castration. This is not simply a speculation, however. It is supported by telling evidences that he adduces.
The key point that supports Lacan's position is the stipulation the objet petit is an anamorphotic object. What this means can be seen by looking at even the most well-known exemplar of the Lacanian objet petit a: the "object gaze." Contrary to how it is sometimes read, the Lacanian "gaze" is anything but the intrusive and masterful male gaze on the world. For Lacan, gaze is indeed a "blind spot" in the subject's perception of visible reality, "disturbing its transparent visibility" (Zizek, 1999a: 79). What it bears witness to is the subject's inability to fully frame the objects that appear within his/her field of vision. The classic example of the object-gaze from Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is the floating skull at the feet of Holbein's Ambassadors. What is singular about this "thing" is that it can literally only be seen from "awry," and at the cost that the rest of the picture appears at that moment out of focus. From this point on the canvas, Lacan comments, it is as if the painting regards us. What he means is that the skull reminds us that we, and with us our desires and fantasies, are implicated in how the scene appears.
Here then is another meaning to $ a: the objet petit a, for Lacan, as something that can only operate its fascination upon individuals who bear a partial perspective upon it, is that object that "re-presents" the subject within the world of objects that it takes itself to be a wholly "external" perspective upon. If a subject thus happens upon it too directly, it disappears, or else---as in psychosis and the well-known filmic motif of what happens when one encounter one's double---the cost is that one's usual sense of how the rest of the world is must dissipate. What this indicates is that the object petit a, or at least the fascinating effect the object which bears it has upon the subject who is under its thrall, has no "objective" reality independently of this subject. The logical consequence of this, though, as Lacan stipulates, is that this supposedly "lost" object can never really have been lost by the subject, since s/he can never have possessed it in the first place. This is why Lacan argues the apparently chimerical position that the objet petit a is by definition an object that has come into being in being lost.
c. The Lacanian Subjects, and Ethics
Lacan argues that the subject is "the subject of the signifier." One meaning of this claim at least is that there is no subject proper that is not a speaking subject, who has been subject to castration and the law of the father. I shall return to this formulation below, though, for its full meaning only becomes evident when another crucial claim that Lacan makes concerning the subject is properly examined. This is the apparently contradictory claim that the subject as such, at the same time as being a linguistic subject, lacks a signifier. There is no subject without language, Lacan wants to say, and yet the subject constitutively lacks a place in language.
At the broadest level, in this claim Lacan is simply restating in the language of structuralist linguistics a claim already made by Sartre, and before him Kojeve and Hegel (and arguably Kant). This is the claim that the subject is not an object capable of being adequately named within a natural language, like other objects can be ("table," "chair," or so on). It is no-thing. One of the clearest points of influence of Kojeve's Heideggerian Hegelianism on Lacan is the emphasis he places on the subject as correlative to a lack of being (manqué-a-etre/want-to-be), especially in the 1950's. Lacan articulates his position concerning the subject by way of a fundamental distinction between the ego or "moi"/"me" and the subject intimated by the shifter "je"/"I." The subject is a split subject, Lacan claims, not only insofar as---Freud dixit---it has consciousness and an unconscious.
When Lacan says the subject is split, he means also that, as a subject of language, it will always evince the following two levels. The first is the ego, or subject of the enunciated. This is the self wherein the subject perceives/anticipates its imaginary unity. Since the ego is an object, according to Lacan, it is capable of being predicated about like any other object. I can say of myself more or less truthfully that "I am fat," or "honest," or anything else. What my enunciated sentence will speak about in these cases, for Lacan, is my ego.
But this is to be distinguished from a second "level" of subjectivity: the subject of the enunciation. Here as elsewhere, Lacan's position turns around his philosophy of language examined in detail in Part 2. The distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated follows from Lacan's understanding of what "speech-act" theorists like Austin or John Searle would call the "performative dimension" to language. Speech-act theorists emphasise that the words of given speech-acts are never enunciated in a vacuum. They are always uttered in a certain context, between language speakers. And through the utterances, subjects effectively do things (hence Austin's title How to Do Things With Words). This is particularly evident in cases like commands or promises. When I make a promise (say: I promise I'll meet you at 5:15) I do not primarily make a claim about an existing state of affairs. It is what I have done that matters. What I have done is make a pledge to meet you at some future time.
Lacan's key argument, alongside that of Austin here, is that all linguistic acts have two important dimensions. The first is what Austin would call the constative dimension. Lacan calls this the level of what is enunciated. Words aim to express or represent factual states of affairs in the world. The second is the performative dimension, that Lacan calls the "level of the enunciation." The subject of the unconscious is the subject of the enunciation, Lacan insists. This is one way he expresses the elementary Freudian hypothesis that, in symptoms and parapraxes, the subject says more than s/he intended to say. What s/he intended will usually be captured in the explicit content of what s/he has enunciated. Nevertheless, in his/her body language, or in a second chain of signification indicated by her/his mispronunciation (etc.), something other than what s/he intended will be conveyed to the analyst. This second chain of signification as it were "happens"- it is performed for the "Other supposed to know" before it can be explicitly and consciously enunciated by the speaking individual.
Lacan's distinction between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciated can be exposed further through examining his treatment of the liar paradox. This is the paradox of someone saying: "I am a liar." The paradox is that, if we suppose the proposition true ("person x is a liar"), we at the same time then have no reason to believe he is telling the truth when he says: "I am a liar." As a liar, he can only be lying when he says this. But what this means is that we must suppose that he is a sincere truth-telling person. Lacan argues that this is a paradox only insofar as we have wrongly collapsed the distinction between the subject enunciated in the sentence, and the subject of the enunciation. A better understanding of the meaning of this utterance can be garnered by presenting the speech-act in both its two dimensions, as a case wherein (to formalize): person x says: "I am a liar." The point is that the "I" in the spoken sentence here is what Lacan calls "the subject of the enunciated." Of this ego, it may (or may not) be true that s/he is a liar. Yet, this ego is in no way to be identified with what we have called "person x" in the above formalization. "Person x" here is not the subject spoken about. S/he is the person speaking. And Lacan's point is that it this subject of the enunciation that addresses itself to the Other supposed to know in analysis, despite whatever egoic plays and ploys the analysand might masquerade before his/her analyst in what s/he enunciates. The hysteric, Lacan thus says, is someone who tells the truth about his/her desire (at the level of enunciation) in the guise of lying or at least being indifferent to the factual truths of which she speaks (at the level of the enunciated). The obsessional, by contrast, lies or dissembles the truth of his/her involvement in what s/he speaks about (at the level of enunciation) in the guise of always telling the truth (at the level of what s/he enunciates).
Lacan's position is that, when subjects wish to speak about themselves, the subject of enunciation is always either anticipated- at the beginning of the speech-act; or else missed- at the end of the speech-act, whence it has come to be falsely identified with the ego. In line with his prioritization of the future anterior, he comments that the subject always "will have been." In philosophical terms, we can say that the Lacanian subject is a presupposition of any speech-act (someone will always be speaking), yet impossible to fill out with any substantial content.
It is for this reason that Slavoj Zizek has recently drawn a parallel between it and Kant's unity of apperception in The Critique of Pure Reason. Lacan himself, in his seminar on the logic of fantasy, strove to articulate his meaning by a revision of Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum: "I am not where I think." The key to this formulation is the opposition between thinking and being. Lacan is saying that, at the point of my thought and speech (the subject of enunciation), there I have no substantial being that could be known. Equally, "I am not where I think" draws out the necessary misapprehension of the nature of the subject in what s/he enunciates. If Lacan's subject thus seems a direct psychoanalytic restatement of Sartre/Kojeve's position, however, it needs to be read in conjunction with his doctrines concerning the "master signifier" and the "fundamental fantasy." Lacan says that master signifiers "represent the subject for other signifiers."
Given his identification of the subject with a lack of being, a first register of this remark becomes clear. The master signifiers, as examined above, have no particular enunciated content or signified, according to Lacan. But the Lacanian position is precisely that this lack of enunciated content is correlative to the subject. In this way, his theorisation of the subject depends not only on a phenomenological analysis, as (for example) Sartre's does in Being and Nothingness. If the subject is the subject "of the lack of the signifier," Lacan means not only that it cannot be objectified at the point of its thinking, as I examined above. The subject is---directly---something that emerges at the point of- and because of- a lack in the field of signification, on his reckoning. This was already intimated above, in the section on the "logics of the fantasy," which recounted Lacan's position concerning how it is that subjects develop regimes of fantasy concerning what Others are supposed to know in order to ground their own belief in, and identification with, the master signifiers. The point to be emphasised now is that these master signifiers, if they are to function, cannot do without this subjective investment of fantasy. Lacan's famous claim there is no metalanguage is meant to imply only this: that there is no field of sense that can be "quilted," and attain to a semblance of consistency, unless subjects have invested their partial, biased perspective upon that field.
This is even the final and most difficult register to what Lacan aimed to express in the matheme: $ a. As we saw in Part 3, ii., the subject is correlative to the fantasmatically posed lost object/referent of the master signifiers. We can now state a further level of what Lacan implied in this matheme, though. This is that in fantasy what subjects misrecognize is not simply the non-existence of the incestuous-maternal Thing. What subjects primordially repress is the necessity of subjects' implication in the play of signification that has over-determined the symbolic coordinates of their lives. The archetypal neurotic subject-position, Lacan notes, is one of victimization. It is the Others who have sinned, and not the subject. S/he has only suffered.
What is of course occluded by these considerations (which may be right or wrong from a moral or legal perspective) is how the subject has invested him/herself in the events of his/her life. Firstly, there is the fantasmatic investment of the subject in the "Others supposed to enjoy," who are supposed not to have been made to undergo the castrating losses that s/he has undergone. As Lacan reads Freud's later postulation of the superego, this psychical agency is constructed around residual fantasies of the Oedipal father supposed to have access to the sovereign jouissance of the mother's body denied to the child. Secondly, what is occluded is what Freud already theorised when he spoke of subjects' adaption to and "gain" from their illness, as a way of organising their access to jouissance in defiance of the demands of the big Other. Even if the subject has undergone the most frightful trauma, Lacan argues, what matters is how this trauma has come to be signified subsequently and retrospectively by the subject around the fundamental fantasy. S/he must be made to avow that the subject-position they have taken up towards their life is something that they have subjectified, and have an ongoing stake in.
This is why, in Seminar II, Lacan quips that the injunction of psychoanalysis is mange ton dasein!- eat your existence! He means that at the close of the analysis, the subject should come to internalise and so surpass the way that it has so far organised your life and relations to Others. It is this point, accordingly, that the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis is announced. Lacan's name for what occurs at the end of the cure is traversing the fantasy. But since what the fantasy does, for Lacan, is veil from the subject his/her own implication in and responsibility for how s/he experiences the world, to traverse the fantasy is to reavow subjective responsibility. To traverse the fantasy, Lacan theorizes, is to cease positing that the Other has taken the "lost" object of desire. It is to accept that this object is something posited by oneself as a means to compensate for the experienced trauma of castration. One comes to accept that castration is not an event with a winner (the father) and a loser (the subject), but a structurally necessary factum for human-beings as such, to which all speaking subjects have been subjected. What equally follows is the giving up of the resentful and acquisitive project of trying to reclaim the objet petit a from the Other, and "settling the scores."
This gives way to an identification with the place of this object that is at once within the fabric of the world, and yet which stands out from it. (Note that this is one Lacanian reading of "where It was, there I shall be"). The subject who has traversed the fantasy, for Lacan, is the subject who has not ceded on its desire. This desire is no longer fixed by the coordinates of the fundamental fantasy. S/he is able to accept that the fully satisfying sexual object, that which would fulfil the sovereign desire of the mother, does not exist. S/he is thus equally open to accepting that the big Other, and/or any concrete Other supposed by the subject to be its authoritive representative(s), does not have what s/he has "lost." Lacan puts this by saying that what the subject can now avow is that the Other does not Exist: that it, too, lacks, and what it does and wants depends upon the interventions of the subject. The subject is, finally, able to thereby accept that what it took to be its place in the order of the Other is not a finally fixed thing. It can now avow without reserve that it is a lacking subject, or, as Lacan will also say, a subject of desire, but that the metonymic sliding of this desire has no final term. Rather than being ceaselessly caught in the lure of the object-cause of desire, this desire is now free to circle around on itself, as it were, and desire only itself, in what is a point of strange final proximity between Lacan and the Nietzcheanism he scarcely ever mentioned in his works.
5. References and Further Reading
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I trans. John Forrester. Edited by J.A. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni. Press, 1988).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. Edited by J.A. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses trans. Russell Grigg. Edited by J.A. Miller (W. Norton: Kent, 2000).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992).
Lacan, Jacques. SeminarXX: Encore! Trans. Bruce Fink (W. Norton: New York, 1975).
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object Of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).
Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood (London and New York, 1992).
Author Information
Matthew Sharpe
Email: [login to see] .au
University of Melbourne, Australia"
FYI MSgt David HoffmanSgt (Join to see)SFC (Join to see)cmsgt-rickey-denickeLTC (Join to see)Sgt John H.PVT Mark ZehnerSGT Robert R.CPT Tommy CurtisSGT (Join to see) SGT Steve McFarlandCol Carl WhickerSP5 Billy MullinsSFC David XantenSGT Mark AndersonCW4 Craig UrbanSSG Michael NollCPT Daniel CoxSFC David Reid, M.S, PHR, SHRM-CP, DTM
13. Jacques Lacan in Theory
In this lecture on psychoanalytic criticism, Professor Paul Fry explores the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's interest in Freud and distaste for post-Freudian "ego psychologists" are briefly mentioned, and his clinical work on "the mirror stage" is discussed in depth. The relationship in Lacanian thought, between metaphor and metonymy is explored through the image of the point de capiton. The correlation between language and the unconscious, and the distinction between desire and need, are also explained, with reference to Hugo's "Boaz Asleep."
00:00 - Chapter 1. Peter Brooks and Lacan
09:03 - Chapter 2. Lacan and Freudian Scholarship
15:51 - Chapter 3. The Mirror Stage
22:18 - Chapter 4. Language and the Unconscious
30:25 - Chapter 5. Metonymy, Metaphor, and Desire
37:03 - Chapter 6. What Is Desire?
46:50 - Chapter 7. Slavoj Žižek
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkAXsR5WINc
Images:
1. Jacques Lacan - shrink from hell or the greatest psychoanalyst since Freud.
2. Jacques Lacan on the street.
3. Jacques Lacan - The Three Lacks.
4. Lacan's Four Orders.
Background from {[https://iep.utm.edu/lacweb/]}
"Jacques Lacan (1901—1981)
It would be fair to say that there are few twentieth century thinkers who have had such a far-reaching influence on subsequent intellectual life in the humanities as Jacques Lacan. Lacan's "return to the meaning of Freud" profoundly changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. His seminars in the 1950s were one of the formative environments of the currency of philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960s and'70s, and which has come to be known in the Anglophone world as "post-structuralism."
Both inside and outside of France, Lacan's work has also been profoundly important in the fields of aesthetics, literary criticism and film theory. Through the work of Louis Pierre Althusser (and more lately Ernesto Laclau, Jannis Stavrokakis and Slavoj Zizek), Lacanian theory has also left its mark on political theory, and particularly the analysis of ideology and institutional reproduction.
This article seeks to outline something of the philosophical heritage and importance of Lacan's theoretical work. After introducing Lacan, it focuses primarily on Lacan's philosophical anthropology, philosophy of language, psychoanalysis and philosophy of ethics.
Table of Contents
Biographical and General Introduction
Biography
Intellectual Biography
Theoretical Project
Lacan's Philosophical Anthropology
The Mirror Stage
Desire is the Desire of the Other
Oedipal Complex, Castration, Name of the Father, and the Big Other
The Law and Symbolic Identification
Summary
Lacan's Diagnostic Categories
Lacan's Philosophy of Language
Language and Law
Psychoanalysis as Interpretation
The Curative Efficacy of the "Talking Cure"
Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Ethics
Master Signifiers, and the Decentred Nature of Belief
Lacan's Conception of Fantasy
The Lacanian Subjects, and Ethics
References and Further Reading
1. Biographical and General Introduction
a. Biography
Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was born in Paris on April 13 1901 to a family of solid Catholic tradition, and was educated at a Jesuit school. After completing his baccalauréat he commenced studying medicine and later psychiatry. In 1927, Lacan commenced clinical training and began to work at psychiatric institutions, meeting and working with (amongst others) the famous psychiatrist Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault. His doctoral thesis, on paranoid psychosis, was passed in 1932. In 1934, he became a member of La Societe Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP), and commenced an analysis lasting until the outbreak of the war. During the Nazi occupation of France, Lacan ceased all official professional activity in protest against those he called "the enemies of human kind." Following the war, he rejoined the SPP, and it was in the post-war period that he rose to become a renowned and controversial figure in the international psychoanalytic community, eventually banned in 1962 from the International Psychoanalytic Association for his unorthodox views on the calling and practice of psychoanalysis. Lacan's career as both a theoretician and practicioner did not end with this excommunication, however. In 1963, he founded L'Ecole Freudienne de Paris (EFP), a school devoted to the training of analysts and the practicing of psychoanalysis according to Lacanian stipulations. In 1980, having single-handedly dissolved the EFP, he then constituted the Ecole for "La Cause Freudienne," saying: "It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian." Lacan died in Paris on September 9, 1981.
b. Intellectual Biography
Lacan's first major theoretical publication was his piece "On the Mirror Stage as Formative of the I." This piece originally appeared in 1936. Its publication was followed by an extended period wherein he published little. In 1949, though, it was re-presented to wider recognition. In 1953, on the back of the success of his Rome dissertation to the SPP on "The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis," Lacan then inaugurated the seminar series that he was to continue to convene annually (albeit in different institutional guises) until his death. It was in this forum that he developed and ceaselessly revised the ideas with which his name has become associated. Although Lacan was famously ambivalent about publication, the seminars were transcribed by various of his followers, and several have been translated into English. Lacan published a selection of his most important essays in 1966 in the collection Ecrits. An abridged version of this text is available in an English-language edition (see References and Further Reading).
c. Theoretical Project
Lacan's avowed theoretical intention, from at least 1953, was the attempt to reformalize what he termed "the Freudian field." His substantial corpus of writings, speeches and seminars can be read as an attempt to unify and reground what are the four interlinking aspirations of Freud's theoretical writings:
a theory of psychoanalytic practice as a curative procedure;
the generation of a systematic metapsychology capable of providing the basis for
the formalization of a diagnostic heuristic of mental illness; and
the construction of an account of the development of the "civilized" human psyche.
Lacan brought to this project, however, a keen knowledge of the latest developments in the human sciences, drawing especially on structuralist linguistics, the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, topology, and game theory. Moreover, as Jacques Derrida has remarked, Lacan's work is characterized by an engagement with modern philosophy (notably Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre) unmatched by other psychoanalytic theorists, especially informed by his attendance at Andre Kojeve's hugely influential Paris lectures on Hegel from 1933-1939.
2. Lacan's Philosophical Anthropology
a. The Mirror Stage
Lacan's article "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I" (1936, 1949) lays out the parameters of a doctrine that he never foreswore, and which has subsequently become something of a post-structuralist mantra: namely, that human identity is "decentred." The key observation of Lacan's essay concerns the behaviour of infants between the ages of 6 and 18 months. At this age, Lacan notes, children become capable of recognizing their mirror image. This is not a dispassionate experience, either. It is a recognition that brings the child great pleasure. For Lacan, we can only explain this "jubilation" as a testimony to how, in the recognition of its mirror-image, the child is having its first anticipation of itself as a unified and separate individual. Before this time, Lacan contends (drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic observation), the child is little more than a "body in bits and pieces," unable to clearly separate I and Other, and wholly dependant for its survival (for a length of time unique in the animal kingdom) upon its first nurturers.
The implications of this observation on the mirror stage, in Lacan's reckoning, are far-reaching. They turn around the fact that, if it holds, then the genesis of individuals' sense of individuation can in no way be held to issue from the "organic" or "natural" development of any inner wealth supposed to be innate within them. The I is an Other from the ground up, for Lacan (echoing and developing a conception of the ego already mapped out in Freud's Ego and Id). The truth of this dictum, as Lacan comments in "Aggressivity and Psychoanalysis," is evident in infantile transitivity: that phenomenon wherein one infant hit by another yet proclaims: "I hit him!" and visa-versa. It is more simply registered in the fact that it remains a permanent possibility of adult human experience for us to speak and think of ourselves in the second or third person. What is decisive in these phenomena, according to Lacan, is that the ego is at base an object: an artificial projection of subjective unity modelled on the visual images of objects and others that the individual confronts in the world. Identification with the ego, Lacan accordingly maintains, is what underlies the unavoidable component of aggressivity in human behaviour especially evident amongst infants, and which Freud recognised in his Three Essays on Sexuality when he stressed the primordial ambivalence of children towards their love object(s) (in the oral phase, to love is to devour; in the anal phase, it is to master or destroy…).
b. Desire is the Desire of the Other
It is on the basis of this fundamental understanding of identity that Lacan maintained throughout his career that desire is the desire of the Other. What is meant by him in this formulation is not the triviality that humans desire others, when they sexually desire (an observation which is not universally true). Again developing Freud's theorization of sexuality, Lacan's contention is rather that what psychoanalysis reveals is that human-beings need to learn how and what to desire. Lacanian theory does not deny that infants are always born into the world with basic biological needs that need constant or periodic satisfaction. Lacan's stress, however, is that, from a very early age, the child's attempts to satisfy these needs become caught up in the dialectics of its exchanges with others. Because its sense of self is only ever garnered from identifying with the images of these others (or itself in the mirror, as a kind of other), Lacan argues that it demonstrably belongs to humans to desire---directly---as or through another or others. We get a sense of his meaning when we consider such social phenomena as fashion. As the squabbling of children more readily testifies, it is fully possible for an object to become desirable for individuals because they perceive that others desire it, such that when these others' desire is withdrawn, the object also loses its allure.
Lacan articulates this decentring of desire when he contends that what has happened to the biological needs of the individual is that they have become inseparable from, and importantly subordinated to, the vicissitudes of its demand for the recognition and love of other people. Events as apparently "natural" as the passing or holding back of stool, he remarks in Ecrits, become episodes in the chronicle of the child's relationship with its parents, expressive of its compliance or rebellion. A hungry child may even refuse to eat food if it perceives that this food is offered less as a token of love than one of its parents' dissatisfaction or impatience.
In this light, Lacan's important recourse to game theory also becomes explicable. For game theory involves precisely the attempt to formalize the possibilities available to individuals in situations where their decisions concerning their wants can in principle both affect and be affected by the decisions of others. As Lacan's article in the Ecrits on the "Direction of the Treatment" spells out, he takes it that the analytic situation, as theorized by Freud around the notion of transference (see Part 2), is precisely such a situation. In that essay, Lacan focuses on the dream of the butcher's wife in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. The said "butcher's wife" thought that she had had a dream which was proof of the invalidity of Freud's theory that dreams are always encoded wish-fulfillments. As Freud comments, however, this dream becomes explicable when one considers how, after a patient has entered into analysis, her wishes are constructed (at least in part) in relation to the perceived wishes of the analyst. In this case, at least one of the wishes expressed by the dream was the woman's wish that Freud's desire (for his theory to be correct) be thwarted. In the same way, Lacan details how the deeper unconscious wish expressed in the manifest content of the dream (which featured the woman attempting to stage a dinner party with only one piece of smoked salmon) can only be comprehended as the coded fulfilment of a desire that her husband would not fulfill her every wish, and leave her with an unsatisfied desire.
c. Oedipal Complex, Castration, Name of the Father, and the Big Other
The principle that desire is the desire of the Other is also decisive in how Lacan reformulates Freud's theory of the child's socialisation through the resolution of its Oedipal complex in its fifth or sixth year. Lacan agrees with Freud that this event is decisive both in the development of the individual, and in the aetiology of any possible subsequent mental illness. However, in trying to understand this stage of subjective development, Lacan distances himself from Freud's emphasis on the biological organ of the penis. Lacan talks instead of the phallus. What he is primarily referring to is what the child perceives it is that the mother desires. Because the child's own desire is structured by its relationships with its first nurturer (usually in Western societies the mother), it is thus the desire of the mother, for Lacan, that is the decisive stake in what transpires with the Oedipus complex and its resolution. In its first years, Lacan contends, the child devotes itself to trying to fathom what it is that the mother desires, so that it can try to make itself the phallus for the mother- a fully satisfying love-object. At around the time of its fifth or sixth desire, however, the father will normally intervene in a way that lastingly thwarts this Oedipal aspiration. The ensuing renunciation of the aspiration to be the phallic Thing for the mother, and not any physical event or its threat, is what Lacan calls castration, and it is thus a function to which he thinks both boys and girls are normally submitted.
The child's acceptance of its castration marks the resolution of its Oedipal complex, Lacan holds, again shadowing Freud. The Oedipal child remains committed to its project of trying to fathom and fulfil this desire. It accordingly (and famously) perceives the father as a rival and threat to its dearest aspirations. Because of this, in a maverick theoretical conjunction, Lacan indeed likens the father-child relation at this point (at least as it is perceived by the child) to the famous "struggle to the death for pure recognition" dramatized in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. In this struggle, of course, the child invariably loses. But everything turns, according to Lacanian theory, on whether this loss constitutes a violent humiliation for the child or whether, as in Hegel's account of "Lordship and Bondage," its resolution involves the founding of a pact between the parties, bound by the solemnification of mutually recognised Law.
If the castration complex is to normalize the child, Lacan argues, what the child must be made to perceive is that what satisfies or orders the desire of the mother is not any visible (imaginary) feature of the father (his obviously better physical endowments, and so on). The child must come to see that the whims of the mother are themselves ordered by a Law that exceeds and tames them. This law is what Lacan famously dubs the name (nom) of the father, trading on a felicitous homonymy in French between nom (name) and non (the "no!" to incestuous union). When the father intervenes, (at least when he is what Lacan calls the symbolic father) Lacan's argument is that he does so less as a living enjoying individual than as the delegate and spokesperson of a body of social Law and convention that is also recognised by the mother, as a socialised being, to be decisive. This body of nomoi is what Lacan calls the big Other of the child's given sociolinguistic community. Insofar as the force of its Law is what the child at castration perceives to be what moves the mother and gives the father's words their "performative force" (Austin), Lacan also calls it the "phallic order."
d. The Law and Symbolic Identification
The Law of the father is in this way theorised by Lacan as the necessary mediator between the child and the mother. A castrating acceptance of its sovereignity precipitates the child out of its ambivalent attempts to be the fully satisfying Thing for the mother. As Lacan quips, when the child accedes to castration, it accedes to the impossibility of it directly satisfying its incestous wish. If things go well, however, it will go away with "title deeds in its pocket" that guarantee that, when the time comes (and if it plays by the rules), it can at least have a satisficing substitute for its first lost love-object. What has occurred, in this event, is that the individual's imaginary identifications (or "ideal egos") that exclusively characterised its infantile years have been supplemented by an identification of an entirely different order: what Lacan calls a symbolic identification with an "ego ideal." This is precisely identification with and within something that cannot be seen, touched, devoured, or mastered: namely, the words, norms and directives of its given cultural collective. Symbolic identification is always idenification with a normatively circumscribed way of organising the social-intersubjective space within which the subject can take on its most lasting imaginary identifications: (For example, the hysterical-vulnerable female identifies at the symbolic level with the patriarchal way of structuring social relations between sexes, outside of which her imaginary identification would be meaningless).
e. Summary
So, to repeat and summarise: Lacan's philosophical anthropology (his answer to the question: what is it to be human?) involves several important reformulations of Freudian tenets. By drawing on Hegel, game theory, and contemporary observations of infant behaviour, he lays greater systematic emphasis than Freud had on the intersubjective constitution of human desire. In this feature at least, his philosophical anthropology is united with that of philosophers such as Levinas, Honneth and Habermas. Equally, since for Lacan human desire is "the desire of the other," what he contends is at stake in the child's socialisation is its aspiration to be the fully satisfying object for the mother, a function which is finally (or at least norm-ally) fulfilled by the Law-bearing words of the father. Human-being, for Lacan, is thus (as decentred) vitally a speaking animal (what he calls a parle-etre); one whose desire comes to be "inmixed" with the imperatives of, and stipulated within, the natural language of its society. [see Part 2] Particularly, Lacan picks up on certain cues within Freud's texts (and those of Saint Paul) to emphasise the dialectical structuration of human desire in relation to the prohibitions of Law. If the Law of the father denies immediate access to what the child takes to be the fully satisfying object (as expounded above), from this point on, Lacan argues, (at least neurotic) desire is necessarily articulated in the interstices of what is permitted by the big Other. And it is characterised by an innate and "fatal" attraction to what it prohibits as such, which is why he placed such central emphasis throughout his career on the enigmatic Freudian notion of a death drive.
f. Lacan's Diagnostic Categories
Finally, it should be noted that, because of Lacan's reformulations of several of Freud's key notions, Lacan's diagnostic heuristic differs markedly from Freud's. For Lacan, what is decisive in understanding mental illness is not the conflict between the embattled ego and its two more "irrational" psychic bedfellows, the superego and the id. It is how the subject bears up with respect to the condition of being a castrated animal forced to pursue its desire on "the inverted ladder of the signifier," within the phallic order of its society's big Other. The question to be asked, for Lacan, is: how fully has the subject acceded to its symbolic castration?, and- as such- how fully has it overcome the transitivity and aggressivity characteristic of the earlier infantile stages of its development?
As in Freud, Lacan stipulates three major classes of mental illness, all of which are situated by him with respect to the terms of this question, and which (as such) are elevated by him to something like three existential bearings towards the condition of being a decentred socialised animal. According to the Lacanian conceptualization, the neurotic is someone who has submitted to castration, but not without remainder. His/her symptoms stand testimony to a lasting refusal of, and resentment towards, the castrating agency of the big Other. The pervert is someone who has only partially acceded to castration. For him/her, the Law does not function wholly to repress or render inaccessible what s/he deeply desires (the maternal body). Because of this, this Law comes itself (either in its prosecution, or in its sufferance) to function as the object of her/his desire. Finally, the psychotic is someone who has never acceded (or been drawn to accede) to the symbolic order of social interchange bound by the name of the father. For him/her, this order of the big Other, in which people follow the Law "because it is the Law" can thus only ever appear to be a semblance. As is most clear in the delusions of paranoiacs, s/he will thus permanently be prey to the delusion that there must be some "Other of the big Other" (for example: aliens, the CIA, God) behind the scenes, pulling the strings of the social charade.
3. Lacan's Philosophy of Language
The component of Lacanian theory for which it is perhaps most famous, and which has most baffled its critics, is the emphasis Lacan laid on language in his attempt to formalize psychoanalysis. From the 1950s, in complete opposition to any Jungian or romantic conceptions, Lacan instead described the unconscious as a kind of discourse: the discourse of the Other.
There are at least three interrelated concerns that inform the construction of what one might call Lacan's "philosophy of language." The first is the central argument that the child's castration is the decisive point in its becoming a speaking subject. The second is his taking very seriously what might be termed the "interpretive paradigm" in Freud's texts, according to which Freud repeatedly described symptoms, slips and dreams as symbolic phenomena capable of interpretation. -The third is Lacan's desire to try to understand the efficacy of psychoanalytic interpretation as a curative procedure that relies solely on what Freud called in The Question of Lay Analysis the "magical" power of the word.
a. Language and Law
In Part 1, in recounting Lacan's view on the resolution of the Oedipal complex, one reason why Lacan allocated language such importance was touched upon. For Lacan, it is only when the child accedes to castration and the Law of the father, that s/he becomes fully competent as a language-speaker within his/her given social collective. By contrast, individuals suffering from psychosis, Lacan stresses (in line with a vast wealth of psychological research), are prone to characteristic linguistic dysfunctions and inabilities. Already from this, then, we can outline a first crucial feature of Lacan's "philosophy of language." Like the later Wittgenstein, Lacan's position is that to learn a language is to learn a set of rules or laws for the use and combination of words. Accordingly, for him too, "learning is based on believing" (Wittgenstein). Particularly, Lacan asserts a lasting link between the capacity of subjects to perceive the world as a set of discrete identifiable objects, and their acceptance of the unconditional authority of a body of convention. We will return to this below.
b. Psychoanalysis as Interpretation
Lacan's contention concerning human-being as a parle-etre, put most broadly, is that when the subject learns its mother tongue, everything from its sense of how the world is, to the way it experiences its biological body, are over-determined by its accession to this order of language. This is the clearest register of the debt that Lacan owes to phenomenology. From Heidegger, he accepts the notion that to be a subject is to experience the world as a meaningful totality, and that language is crucial to this capability. Aligning Freud with the theories of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, Lacan developed a psychoanalytic conception of how the body is caught in the play of meaning-formation between subjects, and expressive of the subjectivity that "lives" through it, as well as being an objectificable tool for the performance of instrumental activities. For Lacan, that is, "the unconscious" does not name only some other part of the mental apparatus than consciousness. It names all that about a subject, including bodily manifestations and identifications with others and "external" objects that insist beyond his/her conscious control.
Freud had already commented in the Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis that the unconscious can be compared to a language without a grammar. Lacan, using structuralist linguistics, attempted to systematize this contention, arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language, and that "it speaks"/ca parle. A symptom, Lacan (for example) claimed, is to be read as a kind of embodied corporeal metaphor. As Freud had argued, he takes it that what is at stake within a symptom is a repressed desire abhorrent to the consciously accepted self-conception and values of the subject. This desire, if it is to gain satisfaction at all, accordingly needs to be expressed indirectly. For example, a residual infantile desire to masturbate may find satisfaction indirectly in a compulsive ritual the subject feels compelled to repeat.
Just as one might metaphorically describe one's love as a rose, Lacan argues, here we have a repressed desire being metaphorically expressed in some apparently dissimilar bodily activity. Equally, drawing on certain moments within Freud's papers "On the Psychology of Love," Lacan argues that desire is structured as a metonymy. In metonymy, one designates a whole object (for example, a car) by naming one part of it (for example: "a set of wheels"). Lacan's argument is that, equally, since castration denies subjects full access to their first love object (the mother), their choice of subsequent love objects is the choice of a series of objects that each resemble in part the lost object (perhaps they have the same hair, or look at him/her the same way the mother did …). According to Lacan, the unconscious uses the multivalent resources of the natural language into which the subject has been inducted (what he calls "the battery of the signifier") to give indirect vent to the desires that the subject cannot consciously avow.
Lacan's Freudian argument is that a directly comparable process occurs in formations of the unconscious as in jokes. As Freud detailed in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the "punch line" of jokes pack their punch by condensing in one statement, or even one word, two chains of meaning. The first of these is what the previous words and cues of the joke, and our shared norms for interpretation, lead us to expect. The second is a wholly different chain of associations, whose clash with what we had expected produces our sense of amusement. In the same way, Lacan observed that, for example, when an analysand makes a "slip of the tongue," what has taken place is that the unconscious has employed such means as homonymy, the merging of two words, the forgetting or mispronunciation of certain words, or a slippage of pronoun or tense, etc., to intimate a whole chain of associations which the subject did not intend, but through which his unconscious desire is given indirect expression.
Lacan argues that what the consideration of jokes, symptoms and slips thus shows are a number of features of how it is that human beings form sense in language. The first thing is that the sentence is the absolutely basal unit of meaning. Before a sentence ends, Lacan notes, the sense of each individual word or signifier is uncertain. It is only when the sentence is completed that their sense is fixed, or---as Lacan variously put it---"quilted." Before this time, they are what he calls "floating signifiers," like to the leading premises of a joke.
The sense of this position can be easily demonstrated. One need only begin a sentence by proffering a subject, but then cease speaking before a verb and/or predicate is assigned to this in accordance with linguistic convention. For example, if I say: "when I was young I…" or "it's not like…," my interlocutor will be understandably want to know what it is that I mean. At the end of the sentence, by contrast, the sense of the beginning words becomes clear, as when I finish the first of the above utterances by saying "when I was young I ran a lot," or whatever.
This understanding of sentences as the basic unit of sense, and of how it is that signifiers "float" until any given sentence is finished, is what informs Lacan's emphasis on the future anterior tense. Sense, he argues, is always something that "will have been." It is anticipated but not confirmed, when we hear uttered the beginning of a sentence (see transference below). Or else, at sentence's end, it is something that we now see with the benefit of "twenty twenty hindsight" to have been intended all along. This is why, in Seminar I, Lacan even quips that the meaning of symptoms do not come from the past, but from the future. Before the work of interpretation, a symptom is a floating signifier, whose meaning is unclear to the analysand, and also to the analyst. As the analytic work proceeds, however, an interpretation is achieved at some later time that casts the whole behavior into relief in a wholly different light, and makes its sense clear.
c. The Curative Efficacy of the "Talking Cure"
Lacan's emphasis on language is also over-determined by an elementary recollection that, if Freud's intervention promised anything, it is that speaking with another person in strictly controlled circumstances can be a curative experience for people suffering from forms of mental illness. The analysand comes to the analyst with his troubling symptoms, and the analyst, at certain decisive points, offers interpretations of these behaviors that retrospectively make their meaning clear. And this is not simply an intellectual exercise. As Freud stressed, there is knowledge of the unconscious, and then there is knowledge that has effects upon it. A successful psychoanalytic interpretation is one that has effects even upon the biological reality of the body, changing the subject's bearing towards the world, and dissolving his/her symptoms.
The need to explain this power of words and language is a clear and lasting motive behind Lacan's understanding of language. His central and basal hypothesis concerning it can be stated in the following way. In a symptom, as we saw above, an unconscious desire seeks to make itself manifest. The symptom is recounted to the analyst, or else repeated in the way the subject responds to the analyst in the sessions. Then an interpretation is offered by the analyst, which recognizes or symbolizes the force of the desire at work in the symptom, and the symptom disappears. So here the recognition of a desire at the same time satisfies the desire. What this can accordingly only mean is that the unconscious desire given voice in the symptom is itself, from the start, at least in part a desire for recognition. This is an absolutely central Lacanian insight, wherein he again shows the influence of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit upon his most central concepts. It synchronizes exactly with the philosophical anthropology recounted above, and Lacan's stricture concerning how human desire is always caught up in the dialectics of individuals' exchanges with others.
But, for Lacan, it also shows something vital about the language in or as which the subjects' repressed desires are trying to find a vent. This is that language is above all a social pact. As Lacan wrote in the Ecrits: "As a rule everyone knows that others will remain, like himself, inaccessible to the constraints of reason, outside an acceptance in principle of a rule of debate that does not come into force without an explicit or implicit agreement as to what is called its basis, which is almost always tantamount to an anticipated agreement to what is at stake... I shall expect nothing therefore of these rules except the good faith of the Other, and, as a last resort, will make use of them, if I think fit or if I am forced to, only to amuse bad faith..." (Lacan, 2001: 154-155). Lacan's idea is that to speak is to presuppose a body a conventions that ensue that, even if my immediate auditor doesn't "get it," the true meaning of what I wish to convey always will emerge, and be registered in some "Other" place. (Note that here is another meaning of the big Other touched upon in Part 1. The big Other is the place, tribunal, collective or single person which we presuppose will register the truth of what we say, whenever we speak.)
This is why Lacan's philosophy of language is to be read in strong opposition to any philosophical account (whether Lockean, descriptivist or phenomenological) which argues that meaning is formed prior to the communicative act. Lacan defines speech as a process in which the subjects get their meanings back from the Other in an inverted form. Think once more of what is involved in psychoanalytic interpretation. Here the meaning of a symptom is rendered by the analyst. What this means, for Lacan, is that the symptom not only bears upon the subject's past relations to others. If it can be dissolved by an Other's interpretation, this is because it is formed with an eye to this interpretation from the start. To quote Slavoj Zizek on this Lacanian notion of how the symptom is from the start addressed to an Other supposed to know its truth: "The symptom arises where the world failed, where the circuit of symbolic communication was broken: it is a kind of "prolongation of communication by other means'": the failed, repressed word articulates itself in a coded, ciphered form.
The implication of this is that the symptom can not only be interpreted but is, so to speak, formed with an eye to its interpretation … in the psychoanalytic cure the symptom is always addressed to the analyst, it is an appeal to him to deliver its hidden message … This … is the basic point: in its very constitution, the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very formation is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning …" (Zizek, 1989: 73). Even the key meaning of transference, for Lacan, is this supposition that there is an Other supposed to know the truth of my communicative acts, even down to the most apparently meaningless "slips" and symptomatic behaviours. In terms of the previous section, transference is the condition of possibility for the quilting of the meaning of floating signifiers that occurs even in the most basic sentences, as we saw. What occurs in a psychoanalytic interpretation is simply one more consequential version of this process. The subject, by speaking, addresses himself to some Other supposed to know her/his truth, and at the end of this process, the signifiers he offers to the Other are quilted, and return to him "in an inverted form."
What has occurred at this point, on Lacan's reckoning, is that the previously unquilted signifiers finding voice in the manifestations of his unconscious are integrated into the subject's symbolic universe: the way s/he understands the world, in the terms of his/her community's natural language. They have been subjectivised; which means that now s/he can recognise them as not wholly alien intrusions into his/her identity, but an integral part of this identity. Lacan's stress is thus always, when he talks of psychoanalytic interpretation, that this interpretation does not add new content to the subject's self-understanding, so much as affect the form of this understanding. An interpretation, that is, realigns the way the s/he sees her past, reordering the signifiers in which his/her self-understanding has come to be ordered. A crucial Lacanian category in theorising this process is that of the "master signifier." Master signifiers are those signifiers to which a subject's identity are most intimately bound. Standard examples are words like "Australian," "democrat," "decency," "genuineness." They are words which will typically be proffered by subjects as naming something like what Kant would have called ends in themselves. They designate values and ideals that the subject will be unwilling and unable to question without pulling the semantic carpet from beneath their own feet.
Lacan's understanding of how these "master signifiers" function is a multi-layered one, as we shall see in more detail in Part 3. It is certainly true to say, though, that the importance of these signifiers comes from how a subject's identification with them commits them to certain orderings of all the rest of the signifiers. For example, if someone identifies himself as a "communist," the meanings of a whole array of other signifiers are ordered in quite different ways than for someone who thinks of himself as a "liberal." "Freedom" for him comes to mean "freedom from the exploitative practices enshrined in capitalism and hidden beneath liberal ideological rhetoric." "Democracy" comes to mean "the dictatorship of the proletariat." "Equality" comes to mean something like "what ensues once the sham of the capitalist "equal right to trade" is unmasked."
What Lacan argues is involved in the psychoanalytic process, then, is the elevation of new "master signifiers" which enable the subject to reorder their sense of themselves and of their relations to others. Previously, for example, a person may have identified with a conception of "decency" that has led him to repress aspects of his own libidinal makeup, which then return in neurotic symptoms. What analysis will properly lead him to do is identify himself with a different set of "master signifiers," which re-signify the signifiers he had unconsciously been addressing to the Other in his symptoms, reducing their traumatic charge by integrating them into his symbolic (self-)understanding.
4. Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Ethics
Whereas Freud never systematically spoke on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan devoted his pivotal seventh seminar (in 1959-1960) to precisely this topic. Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis goes to some lengths to stress that the position on ethics Lacan is concerned to develop is concerned solely with the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Its central topic, in line with what we examined in Part 1 concerning the intersubjective structuration of subjective desire and identity, is the desire of the analyst as that Other addressed by the patient and implicated in the way s/he structures his/her desire through the transference. Nevertheless, it remains that Lacan develops his position through explicit engagement with Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, as well as Kant's practical writings, and the texts of Marquis de Sade. Moreover, Lacan's ethics accord with his metapsychological premises, examined in Section 2, and his theorization of language, examined in Section 3.
In this Section 4, accordingly, we will see Lacan's understanding of ethics as a sophisticated position that, disavowals notwithstanding, can be read as a consistent post-Kantian philosophy of ethics. Section 4 is divided into three sub-sections. The first two develop further Lacan's metapsychological and philosophical tenets. The first sub-section involves a further elaboration of the Lacanian conception of the "master signifiers." The second sub-section involves an exposition of Lacan's notion of the "fundamental fantasy." The final sub-section then examines Lacan's later notion of "traversing the fantasy" as the basis of his ethical position.
a. Master Signifiers, and the Decentred Nature of Belief
As I stated at the end of Part 2, Lacan assigns great importance in his theorization of the psychoanalytic process to what he calls "master signifiers." These are those signifiers that the subject most deeply identifies with, and which accordingly have a key role in the way s/he gives meaning to the world. As was stressed, Lacan's idea about these signifiers is that their primary importance is less any positive content that they add to the subject's field of symbolic sense. It is rather the efficacy they have in reorienting the subject with respect to all of the other signifiers which structure his/her sense of herself and the world. It is precisely this primarily structural or formal function that underlies the crucial Lacanian claim that master signifiers are actually "empty signifiers" or "signifiers without a signified."
As with all of Lacan's key formulations, the notion that the master signifiers are "signifiers without signified" is a complex one. Even the key idea is the following. The concept or referent (or both) signified by any "master signifier" will always be something impossible for any one individual to fully comprehend. For example, "Australian-ness" would seem to be what is aimed at when someone proffers the self-identification: "I am an Australian." The Lacanian question here is: what is "Australian" being used by the subject to designate here? Is "Australian-ness" something that inheres in everyone who is born in Australia? Or is it a characteristic that is passed on through the medium of culture primarily? Does it, perhaps, name most deeply some virtues or qualities of character all Australians supposedly have? However, even if we take it that all "Australians" share some basic virtues, which are these? Can a closed list everyone would agree upon be feasibly drawn up? Is it not easy to think of other peoples who share in valuing each individual trait we standardly call "Australian" (for example: courage, disrespect for pomposity)? And, since "Australian" would seem to have to aim at a singular entity, not a collection, or else some grounding quality of character that could perhaps unite all of the others, which is this? And is this "essential" quality- again- simply biological, perhaps genetic, or is it metaphysical, or what?
What Lacan's account of "master signifiers" thus emphasizes is the gap between two things. The first is our initial certainty about the nature of such an apparently obvious thing as "Australian-ness." (We may even get vexed when asked by someone). The second thing is the difficulty that we have of putting this certainty into words, or naming something that would correspond to the "essence" of "Australian-ness," beneath all the different appearances.
What Lacan indeed argues, in line with his emphasis on the decentred self, is that our ongoing and usually unquestioning use of these words represents another clear case of how the construction of sense depends on the transferential supposition of "Others supposed to know." Though we ourselves can never simply state what "Australian-ness," etc. is, that is, Lacan argues that what is nevertheless efficient in generating our belief in (and identification with) this elusive "thing" is a conviction that nevertheless other people certainly know its nature, or seem to. Just as we desire through the Other, for this reason Lacanian theory also maintains that belief is always belief through an Other. (For example, in the Christian religion, priests would be the designated Others supposed to know the meaning of the Christian mystery vouchsafing believers' faith.)
At this point, it is appropriate to recall from Part 1 Lacan's thesis that castration marks the point wherein the child is made to renounce its aspiration to be the phallic Thing for the mother. A subject's castration amounts at base, for Lacan, to the acceptance that it is the injunctions of the father- and through his name the conventions of the big Other of society- that govern the desire of the mother. The "master signifiers" are also what Lacan calls phallic signifiers. The reason is exactly that- despite the difficulty of locating any simple referent for them- they nevertheless are the words that seem to intimate to subjects what "really matters" about human existence. While no Christian believer may know what "God" is, nevertheless s/he will be in no doubt of the transcendent importance of whatever It is that this word names.
Lacan thus is drawing together his philosophical anthropology and his theorization of language when he defends the position that it is the consequence of "castration" that subjects are debarred from immediate knowledge of what it is that the "phallic signifiers" signify. He is also arguing, in the psychoanalytic field, a position profoundly akin to the Kantian postulation that finite human subjects are debarred from immediate access to things in themselves. Lacan's argument is that it is this lost "signified," which would as it were be "more real" than the other things that the subject can readily signify, that is what is primordially repressed when the subject accedes to becoming a speaking subject at castration. When the subject accedes to the symbolic, he repeats, the Real of aspired-to incestuous union, and the sexualized transgressive enjoyment or jouissance it would afford, is necessarily debarred.
b. Lacan's Conception of Fantasy
If the neurotic subject does not to forego the Oedipal supposition that there is some Thing that would fully satisfy the desire of the mother, it is because s/he constructs fantasies about the nature of this lost Thing, and how s/he stands towards it. The primary means s/he deploys in this process is what we recounted above, when we noted how the difficulty in knowing the referent of the phallic master signifiers obliges subjects to construct their beliefs concerning it in a "decentred" manner, through the Others. While the subject accepts that the Real phallic Thing is lost to him/her, that is, in his/her fantasmatic life s/he yet supposes that there are Others who do know what it is that phallic signifiers refer to, and have more direct access to the Real of jousissance. In line with this, Lacan's further argument is indeed that the deepest fantasmatic postulation of subjects is always that the Real Phallic Thing that s/he has been debarred from must be held in reserve by the "big Other" whose law it is that discernibly structures the mother's desire.
What follows from this is the position that the manifestations of the unconscious represent small unconscious rebellions of subjects against the losses that they take themselves to have endured when they acceded to socialization. They are all under-girded by the more basic fantasmatic structuration of identity as constituted by the loss endured at castration. This is why Lacan talks of a fundamental fantasy, and argues that it is above all this fundamental fantasy that is at stake in psychoanalysis.
Lacan strived to formalize the invariant structure of this "fundamental fantasy" in the matheme: $ a. This matheme indicates that: "$," the "barred" subject which is divided by castration between attraction to and repulsion from the Object of its unconscious desire, is correlative to ('') the fantasised lost object. This object, designated in the matheme as "a," is called by Lacan the "object petit a," or else the object cause of desire. Lacan holds that the subject always stabilizes its position with respect to the Real Thing by constructing a fantasy about how the debarred Thing is held in the big Other, manifesting only in a series of metonymic or partial objects (the gaze or voice of his/her love objects, a hair style, or some other "little piece of the Real") that can be enjoyed as compensation for its primordial loss of the maternal Thing.
Lacan's argument is that the fundamental psychological "gain" from the fundamental fantasy is the following. The fundamental fantasy represents what occurred at castration in the terms of a narrative of possession and loss. This fantasm thus consoles the subject by positing that s/he at one point did have the phallic Thing, but that then, at castration, it was taken away from him/her by the Other. What this of course means is that, since the Thing was taken away from the subject, perhaps also It can be regained by him/her. It is this promise, Lacan maintains, that usually structures neurotic human desire. What the fantasy serves to hide from the subject, then, is the possibility that a fully satisfying sexual relationship with the mother, or any metonymic substitute for her, is not only prohibited, but was never possible anyway. As I recounted in Part 1, the Lacanian view, which is informed by observation of infantile behavior, is that the mother-child relationship before castration is not Edenic, but characterized by imaginary transitivity and aggressivity.
This is why Lacan quips in Seminar XX that "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship" and elsewhere that the "Woman," with a capital "W," "does not exist." Note then that the deepest logic of castration, according to Lacan, is a profoundly paradoxical one. The "no!" of the father prohibits something that is impossible. Its very prohibition, however, gives rise in the subject to the fantasmatic supposition that the Thing in question is one that is attainable but only being debarred. Lacan thus asserts that the fundamental fantasy is there to veil from the subject the terminal nature of its loss at castration. This is not simply a speculation, however. It is supported by telling evidences that he adduces.
The key point that supports Lacan's position is the stipulation the objet petit is an anamorphotic object. What this means can be seen by looking at even the most well-known exemplar of the Lacanian objet petit a: the "object gaze." Contrary to how it is sometimes read, the Lacanian "gaze" is anything but the intrusive and masterful male gaze on the world. For Lacan, gaze is indeed a "blind spot" in the subject's perception of visible reality, "disturbing its transparent visibility" (Zizek, 1999a: 79). What it bears witness to is the subject's inability to fully frame the objects that appear within his/her field of vision. The classic example of the object-gaze from Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is the floating skull at the feet of Holbein's Ambassadors. What is singular about this "thing" is that it can literally only be seen from "awry," and at the cost that the rest of the picture appears at that moment out of focus. From this point on the canvas, Lacan comments, it is as if the painting regards us. What he means is that the skull reminds us that we, and with us our desires and fantasies, are implicated in how the scene appears.
Here then is another meaning to $ a: the objet petit a, for Lacan, as something that can only operate its fascination upon individuals who bear a partial perspective upon it, is that object that "re-presents" the subject within the world of objects that it takes itself to be a wholly "external" perspective upon. If a subject thus happens upon it too directly, it disappears, or else---as in psychosis and the well-known filmic motif of what happens when one encounter one's double---the cost is that one's usual sense of how the rest of the world is must dissipate. What this indicates is that the object petit a, or at least the fascinating effect the object which bears it has upon the subject who is under its thrall, has no "objective" reality independently of this subject. The logical consequence of this, though, as Lacan stipulates, is that this supposedly "lost" object can never really have been lost by the subject, since s/he can never have possessed it in the first place. This is why Lacan argues the apparently chimerical position that the objet petit a is by definition an object that has come into being in being lost.
c. The Lacanian Subjects, and Ethics
Lacan argues that the subject is "the subject of the signifier." One meaning of this claim at least is that there is no subject proper that is not a speaking subject, who has been subject to castration and the law of the father. I shall return to this formulation below, though, for its full meaning only becomes evident when another crucial claim that Lacan makes concerning the subject is properly examined. This is the apparently contradictory claim that the subject as such, at the same time as being a linguistic subject, lacks a signifier. There is no subject without language, Lacan wants to say, and yet the subject constitutively lacks a place in language.
At the broadest level, in this claim Lacan is simply restating in the language of structuralist linguistics a claim already made by Sartre, and before him Kojeve and Hegel (and arguably Kant). This is the claim that the subject is not an object capable of being adequately named within a natural language, like other objects can be ("table," "chair," or so on). It is no-thing. One of the clearest points of influence of Kojeve's Heideggerian Hegelianism on Lacan is the emphasis he places on the subject as correlative to a lack of being (manqué-a-etre/want-to-be), especially in the 1950's. Lacan articulates his position concerning the subject by way of a fundamental distinction between the ego or "moi"/"me" and the subject intimated by the shifter "je"/"I." The subject is a split subject, Lacan claims, not only insofar as---Freud dixit---it has consciousness and an unconscious.
When Lacan says the subject is split, he means also that, as a subject of language, it will always evince the following two levels. The first is the ego, or subject of the enunciated. This is the self wherein the subject perceives/anticipates its imaginary unity. Since the ego is an object, according to Lacan, it is capable of being predicated about like any other object. I can say of myself more or less truthfully that "I am fat," or "honest," or anything else. What my enunciated sentence will speak about in these cases, for Lacan, is my ego.
But this is to be distinguished from a second "level" of subjectivity: the subject of the enunciation. Here as elsewhere, Lacan's position turns around his philosophy of language examined in detail in Part 2. The distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated follows from Lacan's understanding of what "speech-act" theorists like Austin or John Searle would call the "performative dimension" to language. Speech-act theorists emphasise that the words of given speech-acts are never enunciated in a vacuum. They are always uttered in a certain context, between language speakers. And through the utterances, subjects effectively do things (hence Austin's title How to Do Things With Words). This is particularly evident in cases like commands or promises. When I make a promise (say: I promise I'll meet you at 5:15) I do not primarily make a claim about an existing state of affairs. It is what I have done that matters. What I have done is make a pledge to meet you at some future time.
Lacan's key argument, alongside that of Austin here, is that all linguistic acts have two important dimensions. The first is what Austin would call the constative dimension. Lacan calls this the level of what is enunciated. Words aim to express or represent factual states of affairs in the world. The second is the performative dimension, that Lacan calls the "level of the enunciation." The subject of the unconscious is the subject of the enunciation, Lacan insists. This is one way he expresses the elementary Freudian hypothesis that, in symptoms and parapraxes, the subject says more than s/he intended to say. What s/he intended will usually be captured in the explicit content of what s/he has enunciated. Nevertheless, in his/her body language, or in a second chain of signification indicated by her/his mispronunciation (etc.), something other than what s/he intended will be conveyed to the analyst. This second chain of signification as it were "happens"- it is performed for the "Other supposed to know" before it can be explicitly and consciously enunciated by the speaking individual.
Lacan's distinction between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of the enunciated can be exposed further through examining his treatment of the liar paradox. This is the paradox of someone saying: "I am a liar." The paradox is that, if we suppose the proposition true ("person x is a liar"), we at the same time then have no reason to believe he is telling the truth when he says: "I am a liar." As a liar, he can only be lying when he says this. But what this means is that we must suppose that he is a sincere truth-telling person. Lacan argues that this is a paradox only insofar as we have wrongly collapsed the distinction between the subject enunciated in the sentence, and the subject of the enunciation. A better understanding of the meaning of this utterance can be garnered by presenting the speech-act in both its two dimensions, as a case wherein (to formalize): person x says: "I am a liar." The point is that the "I" in the spoken sentence here is what Lacan calls "the subject of the enunciated." Of this ego, it may (or may not) be true that s/he is a liar. Yet, this ego is in no way to be identified with what we have called "person x" in the above formalization. "Person x" here is not the subject spoken about. S/he is the person speaking. And Lacan's point is that it this subject of the enunciation that addresses itself to the Other supposed to know in analysis, despite whatever egoic plays and ploys the analysand might masquerade before his/her analyst in what s/he enunciates. The hysteric, Lacan thus says, is someone who tells the truth about his/her desire (at the level of enunciation) in the guise of lying or at least being indifferent to the factual truths of which she speaks (at the level of the enunciated). The obsessional, by contrast, lies or dissembles the truth of his/her involvement in what s/he speaks about (at the level of enunciation) in the guise of always telling the truth (at the level of what s/he enunciates).
Lacan's position is that, when subjects wish to speak about themselves, the subject of enunciation is always either anticipated- at the beginning of the speech-act; or else missed- at the end of the speech-act, whence it has come to be falsely identified with the ego. In line with his prioritization of the future anterior, he comments that the subject always "will have been." In philosophical terms, we can say that the Lacanian subject is a presupposition of any speech-act (someone will always be speaking), yet impossible to fill out with any substantial content.
It is for this reason that Slavoj Zizek has recently drawn a parallel between it and Kant's unity of apperception in The Critique of Pure Reason. Lacan himself, in his seminar on the logic of fantasy, strove to articulate his meaning by a revision of Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum: "I am not where I think." The key to this formulation is the opposition between thinking and being. Lacan is saying that, at the point of my thought and speech (the subject of enunciation), there I have no substantial being that could be known. Equally, "I am not where I think" draws out the necessary misapprehension of the nature of the subject in what s/he enunciates. If Lacan's subject thus seems a direct psychoanalytic restatement of Sartre/Kojeve's position, however, it needs to be read in conjunction with his doctrines concerning the "master signifier" and the "fundamental fantasy." Lacan says that master signifiers "represent the subject for other signifiers."
Given his identification of the subject with a lack of being, a first register of this remark becomes clear. The master signifiers, as examined above, have no particular enunciated content or signified, according to Lacan. But the Lacanian position is precisely that this lack of enunciated content is correlative to the subject. In this way, his theorisation of the subject depends not only on a phenomenological analysis, as (for example) Sartre's does in Being and Nothingness. If the subject is the subject "of the lack of the signifier," Lacan means not only that it cannot be objectified at the point of its thinking, as I examined above. The subject is---directly---something that emerges at the point of- and because of- a lack in the field of signification, on his reckoning. This was already intimated above, in the section on the "logics of the fantasy," which recounted Lacan's position concerning how it is that subjects develop regimes of fantasy concerning what Others are supposed to know in order to ground their own belief in, and identification with, the master signifiers. The point to be emphasised now is that these master signifiers, if they are to function, cannot do without this subjective investment of fantasy. Lacan's famous claim there is no metalanguage is meant to imply only this: that there is no field of sense that can be "quilted," and attain to a semblance of consistency, unless subjects have invested their partial, biased perspective upon that field.
This is even the final and most difficult register to what Lacan aimed to express in the matheme: $ a. As we saw in Part 3, ii., the subject is correlative to the fantasmatically posed lost object/referent of the master signifiers. We can now state a further level of what Lacan implied in this matheme, though. This is that in fantasy what subjects misrecognize is not simply the non-existence of the incestuous-maternal Thing. What subjects primordially repress is the necessity of subjects' implication in the play of signification that has over-determined the symbolic coordinates of their lives. The archetypal neurotic subject-position, Lacan notes, is one of victimization. It is the Others who have sinned, and not the subject. S/he has only suffered.
What is of course occluded by these considerations (which may be right or wrong from a moral or legal perspective) is how the subject has invested him/herself in the events of his/her life. Firstly, there is the fantasmatic investment of the subject in the "Others supposed to enjoy," who are supposed not to have been made to undergo the castrating losses that s/he has undergone. As Lacan reads Freud's later postulation of the superego, this psychical agency is constructed around residual fantasies of the Oedipal father supposed to have access to the sovereign jouissance of the mother's body denied to the child. Secondly, what is occluded is what Freud already theorised when he spoke of subjects' adaption to and "gain" from their illness, as a way of organising their access to jouissance in defiance of the demands of the big Other. Even if the subject has undergone the most frightful trauma, Lacan argues, what matters is how this trauma has come to be signified subsequently and retrospectively by the subject around the fundamental fantasy. S/he must be made to avow that the subject-position they have taken up towards their life is something that they have subjectified, and have an ongoing stake in.
This is why, in Seminar II, Lacan quips that the injunction of psychoanalysis is mange ton dasein!- eat your existence! He means that at the close of the analysis, the subject should come to internalise and so surpass the way that it has so far organised your life and relations to Others. It is this point, accordingly, that the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis is announced. Lacan's name for what occurs at the end of the cure is traversing the fantasy. But since what the fantasy does, for Lacan, is veil from the subject his/her own implication in and responsibility for how s/he experiences the world, to traverse the fantasy is to reavow subjective responsibility. To traverse the fantasy, Lacan theorizes, is to cease positing that the Other has taken the "lost" object of desire. It is to accept that this object is something posited by oneself as a means to compensate for the experienced trauma of castration. One comes to accept that castration is not an event with a winner (the father) and a loser (the subject), but a structurally necessary factum for human-beings as such, to which all speaking subjects have been subjected. What equally follows is the giving up of the resentful and acquisitive project of trying to reclaim the objet petit a from the Other, and "settling the scores."
This gives way to an identification with the place of this object that is at once within the fabric of the world, and yet which stands out from it. (Note that this is one Lacanian reading of "where It was, there I shall be"). The subject who has traversed the fantasy, for Lacan, is the subject who has not ceded on its desire. This desire is no longer fixed by the coordinates of the fundamental fantasy. S/he is able to accept that the fully satisfying sexual object, that which would fulfil the sovereign desire of the mother, does not exist. S/he is thus equally open to accepting that the big Other, and/or any concrete Other supposed by the subject to be its authoritive representative(s), does not have what s/he has "lost." Lacan puts this by saying that what the subject can now avow is that the Other does not Exist: that it, too, lacks, and what it does and wants depends upon the interventions of the subject. The subject is, finally, able to thereby accept that what it took to be its place in the order of the Other is not a finally fixed thing. It can now avow without reserve that it is a lacking subject, or, as Lacan will also say, a subject of desire, but that the metonymic sliding of this desire has no final term. Rather than being ceaselessly caught in the lure of the object-cause of desire, this desire is now free to circle around on itself, as it were, and desire only itself, in what is a point of strange final proximity between Lacan and the Nietzcheanism he scarcely ever mentioned in his works.
5. References and Further Reading
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I trans. John Forrester. Edited by J.A. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni. Press, 1988).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. Edited by J.A. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses trans. Russell Grigg. Edited by J.A. Miller (W. Norton: Kent, 2000).
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992).
Lacan, Jacques. SeminarXX: Encore! Trans. Bruce Fink (W. Norton: New York, 1975).
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object Of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).
Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood (London and New York, 1992).
Author Information
Matthew Sharpe
Email: [login to see] .au
University of Melbourne, Australia"
FYI MSgt David HoffmanSgt (Join to see)SFC (Join to see)cmsgt-rickey-denickeLTC (Join to see)Sgt John H.PVT Mark ZehnerSGT Robert R.CPT Tommy CurtisSGT (Join to see) SGT Steve McFarlandCol Carl WhickerSP5 Billy MullinsSFC David XantenSGT Mark AndersonCW4 Craig UrbanSSG Michael NollCPT Daniel CoxSFC David Reid, M.S, PHR, SHRM-CP, DTM
(8)
(0)
LTC Stephen F.
Background from { https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/]}
Jacques Lacan
First published Tue Apr 2, 2013; substantive revision Tue Jul 10, 2018
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 to September 9, 1981) was a major figure in Parisian intellectual life for much of the twentieth century. Sometimes referred to as “the French Freud,” he is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis. His teachings and writings explore the significance of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious both within the theory and practice of analysis itself as well as in connection with a wide range of other disciplines. Particularly for those interested in the philosophical dimensions of Freudian thought, Lacan’s oeuvre is invaluable. Over the course of the past fifty-plus years, Lacanian ideas have become central to the various receptions of things psychoanalytic in Continental philosophical circles especially.
• 1. Historical Overview
• 2. Fundamental Concepts
o 2.1 Register Theory
o 2.2 The Mirror Stage, the Ego, and the Subject
o 2.3 Otherness, the Oedipus Complex, and Sexuation
o 2.4 The Libidinal Economy
• Bibliography
o A. Primary Sources
o B. Secondary Literature on Lacan in English
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries
________________________________________
1. Historical Overview
Medically trained as a psychiatrist, Lacan’s first texts started appearing in the late 1920s (during the course of his psychiatric studies), with his publishing activity really taking off in the subsequent decade. The 1930s see several early Lacanian milestones: the publication, in 1932, of his doctoral thesis in psychiatry, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (On Paranoid Psychosis in its Relations with the Personality); collaborations with the Surrealist and Dadaist artistic movements in whose midsts he circulated as a familiar fellow traveler; entry into analytic training, including a didactic analysis with Rudolph Lowenstein; attendance at Alexandre Kojève’s renowned seminars on G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; the first presentation of the now-famous theory of the “mirror stage” at the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) conference at Marienbad in 1936 (a presentation truncated by Freud’s friend and biographer, then-IPA President Ernest Jones); and, the appearance, in the Encyclopédie française in 1938, of a substantial essay on a sizable swathe of analytic topics entitled Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie (“The Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual: Attempt at an Analysis of a Function in Psychology”). This crucial period of Lacan’s development, as the immediately preceding already indicates, was marked by the collision of interests and influences related to psychoanalysis, psychiatry, philosophy, art, and literature, among other areas. More specifically, the robustly interdisciplinary combination that came together for Lacan at this time of Freudian analysis, Hegelian dialectics, Kojèvian pedagogy, and different experiences of “madness” from numerous perspectives indelibly colors and permanently inflects the entire rest of Lacan’s intellectual itinerary.
Unsurprisingly, the Second World War was, for Lacan (and, of course, for history generally), a period of disruption and upheaval. His psychoanalytic activities were interrupted, including his training analysis (Lowenstein and Lacan did not concur about whether this analysis was well and truly completed, with Lacan deciding it was over and, somewhat controversially, never returning to Lowenstein’s couch). The War provided Lacan with an exposure to military psychiatry in both France and England, with his five-week visit to the latter acquainting him with aspects of the British psychoanalytic world (features of this visit are recounted in “British Psychiatry and the War” [1947]). A handful of important texts were composed during and after the War, all of which eventually got reprinted in Lacan’s magnum opus, Écrits (1966): “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism” (1945); “Presentation on Psychical Causality” (1946); “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” (1948); and “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (delivered in 1949 at the IPA conference in Zurich—whereas the 1936 version from Marienbad is lost, this version is the surviving one made canonical through its inclusion in Écrits).
The next decade was pivotal in Lacan’s trajectory, the time when he fully came into his own as a leading analytic thinker of great originality and immense import. A veritable explosion of Lacanian material was unleashed during this period, including seven annual seminars and many of the most celebrated essays subsequently collected in the nine-hundred-page Écrits (a number of these were hyper-condensed distillations of the results of the annual seminars). At the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, Lacan became initiated into and conversant with the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and his inheritors such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson. Lévi-Strauss’s 1949 book The Elementary Structures of Kinship helped launch the French structuralist movement that flourished during the 1950s and 1960s, an orientation that challenged the theoretical primacy of existentialism in France. Lévi-Strauss “structuralized” anthropology, as Roland Barthes did for literary-cultural studies and Louis Althusser for Marxism. Up through the end of the 1950s—in 1959–1960, a fundamental reorienting shift arguably occurred in Lacan’s thinking—Lacan fairly can be portrayed as likewise structuralizing Freudian psychoanalysis. He did so under the banner of a “return to Freud” according to which, as his most famous dictum has it, “the unconscious is structured like a language” (l’inconscient est structuré comme un langage). Lacan portrayed himself as the lone defender of a Freudian orthodoxy in danger of being eclipsed by its alleged abandonment and betrayal in the post-Freudian analytic universe, particularly Anglo-American ego psychology as consolidated by the troika of Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Lacan’s former analyst Lowenstein. Lacan adamantly maintained that a Saussurian-assisted recovery of the overriding significance of language for analysis both clinical and metapsychological is the key to faithfully carrying forward Freud’s revolutionary approach to psychical subjectivity. All of this was announced in detail in the lengthy founding manifesto of Lacanianism, the 1953 écrit “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (often referred to as the “Rome Discourse” because of where it was delivered). This manifesto coincided with Lacan’s participation in an exodus from his former analytic institute, the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse (SPP), and the founding of a new institute, the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). The SPP’s move to a medicalized model of analytic training (as per the scientistic psychiatric paradigm that was dominant in the institutes of the English-speaking world) was one of the main precipitators of the departure of the breakaway faction that founded the SFP.
Also in 1953, Lacan conducted his first annual seminar addressing Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953–1954). Lacan continued giving these right up until shortly before his death, with le Séminaire running continuously for twenty-seven years. As was the case with Kojève, Lacan exerted his influence primarily through his oral teachings. The first decade of le Séminaire (1953–1963) was taught at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne and had an audience consisting mostly of psychoanalysts. For reasons I will explain shortly, Lacan, in 1964, moved his seminar first to the École Normale Supérieure (1964–1969) and then to the Faculty of Law across from the Panthéon (1969–1980). From 1964 onwards, Lacan’s audience startlingly increased in both sheer numbers and breadth of backgrounds, with artists and academics from various disciplines across academia joining the more clinically-minded attendees. Le Séminaire became a nodal Parisian intellectual institution, a kind of hub attracting some of the brightest stars of the post-War French cultural firmament. For instance, such philosophers as Jean Hyppolite, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva spent time in Lacan’s audience. In his seminars, Lacan deftly maneuvered within and between a multitude of theoretical currents, putting psychoanalysis into conversation with the history of philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, and, as already indicated, just about every discipline represented in the university. All of the major French philosophers of the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s engaged with Freudian analysis in one way or another, and all of them did so in fashions varyingly informed by Lacan’s teachings.
The 1960s were a highly productive and equally tumultuous era in Lacan’s history. In his seventh seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), Lacan took a sort of turn fateful for the direction of his later trajectory, initiating an interrogation of the ways in which language was privileged by his 1950s “return to Freud.” The immediately prior years tirelessly emphasized the essential role of the register of the Symbolic, namely, the pride of place of analytically modified versions of Saussurian signifiers in the structures and dynamics of the unconscious and speaking subjectivity (in the 1930s and 1940s, the phenomenal-visual register of the Imaginary was to the fore thanks to the focus on the mirror stage). At the end of the 1950s, with the rise of the Real as the register of a new focus of Lacan’s thinking—I will say more about Lacan’s tripartite register theory subsequently (see 2.1 below)—things and phenomena escaping, resisting, or thwarting the signifying powers of the socio-linguistic symbolic order became ever more central in Lacanian theory. These things and phenomena include Otherness, drives, jouissance, and objet petit a, among other Lacanian concepts (see 2.3, 2.4.2, and 2.4.3 below). This 1959–1960 seminar defensibly can be depicted as a prescient post-structuralist text avant la lettre.
An earthquake in Lacan’s professional and personal histories hit him in 1963. For ten years (1953–1963), the SFP, following its creation after the defections from the SPP, was being scrutinized at length by the IPA as a training institute applying for IPA membership. To cut a long story short, the IPA ended up offering the SFP an ultimatum: It could be admitted only if Lacan was struck from its list of training analysts. Lacan’s non-standard “variable-length sessions,” deviating from the fixed-length session rules of IPA orthodoxy, was the main reason for the IPA’s withholding of its recognition from him. The SFP accepted this condition, stripping Lacan of his standing within it. In the aftermath of what he understandably experienced as a deeply wounding betrayal, he abandoned his original plans for a 1963–1964 seminar on The Names-of-the-Father (only its opening session of November 20, 1963 was given), relocated his teaching from the Hôpital Sainte-Anne to the École Normale Supérieure, and conducted his deservedly renowned eleventh seminar of 1964, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (with Lacan identifying these four concepts as the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive). This seminar’s opening session involved Lacan discussing his SFP-brokered “excommunication” from the IPA, with him comparing himself to Baruch Spinoza and the latter’s expulsion from the Jewish community for being a heretic. However traumatic this blow, it seemed to prompt Lacan to come even more into his own, to forge a distinctly Lacanian battery of ideas and terms—and this by contrast with the more familiar Freudian language and apparatus of the first decade of le Séminaire (1953–1963). Although not without many precedents in his prior work, a Lacanianism distinct from Freudianism began to emerge clearly into view in the mid-1960s. In the shadow of his rejection by the IPA and departure from the SFP, Lacan founded his own analytic organization, the École freudienne de Paris. This new institutional framework (and freedom) provided him with a setting in which to experiment with novel approaches to analytic teaching and training.
In 1966, Lacan’s hulking tome Écrits was published by Éditions du Seuil. Prior to this, Lacan had published only a single book, his thesis in psychiatry (1932). The nine-hundred-page Écrits gathered together many of Lacan’s most important articles and essays into a single volume, covering a thirty-year stretch from 1936 to 1966. These “writings” provide very daunting and demanding paths of entry into Lacanian thinking (the annual seminars are comparatively more reader-friendly and transparent). Although the Écrits bear no small portion of responsibility for Lacan’s reputation as a “difficult” (if not deliberately obscurantist) thinker, this book became a bestseller upon its initial release in France. Its success elevated Lacan into his fame as the French Freud in the eyes of France’s reading public. During this time, Lacan’s audience for le Séminaire continued to swell, with his influence growing to cover ever-wider circles of Paris-centered intellectual and cultural life.
Throughout his career, Lacan exhibited a serious interest in various branches of mathematical and formal disciplines. This goes as far back as the 1940s, with the recourse to game theory in “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty.” The turn to structuralism at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s reinforced these formalistic tendencies, with Lacan, in the 1950s, already drawing upon not only game theory, Lévi-Straussian anthropology, and Jakobsonian phonology, but also the history of mathematics and topology. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, more and more diagrams, graphs, and symbolizations appeared peppered throughout Lacan’s lectures and writings, testifying to a steadily intensifying trend toward formalization. By the late 1960s and, especially, the 1970s, discussions of logic, topology, and knot theory were prominent (sometimes even dominant) features of Lacanian discourse. In relation to Lacan, the 1970s could be characterized as the decade of the “matheme,” Lacan’s neologism for a unit of formalization (qua a mathematical-style symbolization) distilling and fixing the core significance of a specific Lacanian analytic concept-term. Lacan hoped thereby to avoid being misinterpreted in the ways that Freud’s deceptively accessible employments of natural language allegedly allowed most non-Lacanian post-Freudians to perpetrate. Additionally, topology, as a science of surfaces, provided Lacan with resources for his regular assaults on the crude, popular images of psychoanalysis as a “depth psychology,” with these images relying upon the simplistic two- and three-dimensional Euclidean spaces of spontaneous picture thinking. Topological figures and constructions undermining the intuitions of this picture thinking assisted Lacan in recasting the unconscious as an ensemble of contortions, curvings, folding, inflections, twists, and turns immanent and internal to a single plane of minded subjectivity accessible to rigorous, rational (psycho)analysis.
In addition to the pursuit of formalization via mathemes, the seminars of the final decade of Lacan’s teachings also were preoccupied with reflections on his register theory, especially the register of the Real, and sexual difference (reflections often intertwined with each other). The program of formalization ostensibly enabled Lacan to reveal with exactitude the precise limits of the sayable and the representable, thereby touching upon the Real through showing what is not pinned down fully and adequately within the coordinates of the accessible, familiar “reality” co-constituted through the other two registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic (see 2.1 below). Various aspects and facets of things sexual came to be associated by the later Lacan with the enigmatic evasiveness of the Real, including sexual difference. In one of his most famous seminars, the twentieth (Encore, 1972–1973), he theorized sexual difference as “sexuation,” depicting the non-biological, denaturalized subject-positions of masculinity and femininity in terms of formal logic. Therein, he purported to uncover an inherent, ineliminable structural discrepancy/gap separating the sexes, an inescapable condemnation of sexed subjects to being essentially, necessarily out-of-sync with each other (and even with themselves as split subjects). Lacan summarized this with an infamous one-liner: “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” (There is no sexual relationship). This declaration scandalized many at the time. Moreover, the twentieth seminar in particular as well as connected portions of Lacan’s corpus from this same period served as powerful catalysts for crucial developments in French feminist thinking during the 1970s.
In 1980, near the end of his life, Lacan saw fit to disband his school, the École freudienne. This decision was controversial and triggered factional infighting amongst his followers. Lacan died in 1981. His son-in-law and editor of le Séminaire, Jacques-Alain Miller—when he was a student of Althusser’s at the ENS, Miller met Lacan for the first time in 1964 as an attendee of Lacan’s eleventh seminar—founded the École de la Cause freudienne as a successor to the École freudienne on the heels of the latter’s “dissolution.” Miller has since retained publishing control over Lacan’s texts, editing the Champ freudien book series in which official “established” versions of the annual seminars and other Lacanian writings appear.
2. Fundamental Concepts
2.1 Register Theory
The theory of the three registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real forms the skeletal framework for the various concepts and phases of most of Lacan’s intellectual itinerary. His characterizations of each of the three registers, as well as of their relations with each other, undergo multiple revisions and shifts over the many years of his labors. As will become increasingly evident in what follows, the majority of Lacanian concepts are defined in connection with all three registers. By the 1970s, with his meditations on the topological figure of the Borromean knot—this knotting of three rings, pictured on the coat of arms of the Borromeo family, is arranged such that if one ring is broken, all three are set free in disconnection—Lacan emphasizes the mutual dependence of the registers on one another. Hence, loosely speaking, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real can be thought of as the three fundamental dimensions of psychical subjectivity à la Lacan. Furthermore, scholars sometimes segment Lacan’s evolution into three main periods, with each period being distinguished by the priority of one of the registers: the early Lacan of the Imaginary (1930s and 1940s), the middle Lacan of the Symbolic (1950s), and the late Lacan of the Real (1960s and 1970s). However, such a neat and clean periodization should be taken with several grains of salt, since intricate continuities and discontinuities not conforming to this early-middle-late schema are to be found across the entire lengthy span of Lacan’s teachings.
2.1.1 The Imaginary
Lacan tends to associate (albeit not exclusively) the Imaginary with the restricted spheres of consciousness and self-awareness. It is the register with the closest links to what people experience as non-psychoanalytic quotidian reality. Who and what one “imagines” other persons to be, what one thereby “imagines” they mean when communicatively interacting, who and what one “imagines” oneself to be, including from the imagined perspectives of others—all of the preceding is encompassed under the heading of this register. Such a description indicates the ways in which the Imaginary points to core analytic ideas like transference, fantasy, and the ego. In particular, the Imaginary is central to Lacan’s account(s) of ego-formation (as per the mirror stage—see 2.2 below).
As Lacan integrates his early work of the 1930s and 1940s with his structuralism-informed theories of the 1950s, he comes to emphasize the dependence of the Imaginary on the Symbolic. This dependency means that more sensory-perceptual phenomena (images and experiences of one’s body, affects as consciously lived emotions, envisionings of the thoughts and feelings of others, etc.) are shaped, steered, and (over)determined by socio-linguistic structures and dynamics. With the growing importance of the Real in the 1960s and the Borromean knots of the 1970s, it becomes clear that Lacan conceives of the Imaginary as bound up with both of the other two registers (incidentally, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, when taken together as mutually integrated, constitute the field of “reality,” itself contrasted with the Real). In fact, it could be maintained that the Imaginary invariably involves category mistakes. More specifically, it is the register in which the other two registers are mistaken for each other: What is Real is misrecognized as Symbolic (for example, as in particular sorts of obsessional-neurotic and paranoid-psychotic symptoms, certain meaningless contingent occurrences at the level of the material world of non-human objects are viewed as though they were meaningful signs full of deep significance to be deciphered and interpreted) and what is Symbolic is misrecognized as Real (for example, as in psychosomatic-type “conversion symptoms,” unconscious mental conflicts encoded in language and ideas are suffered as bodily afflictions and ailments).
With his choice of the word “imaginary,” Lacan indeed intends to designate that which is fictional, simulated, virtual, and the like. However, the phenomena of the Imaginary are necessary illusions (to put it in Kantian locution) or real abstractions (to put it in Marxian parlance). This signals two points. First, as one of Lacan’s three basic, essential registers, the Imaginary is an intrinsic, unavoidable dimension of the existences of speaking psychical subjects; just as an analysis cannot (and should not try to) rid the analysand of his/her unconscious, so too is it neither possible nor desirable to liquidate the illusions of this register. Second, the fictional abstractions of the Imaginary, far from being merely “unreal” as ineffective, inconsequential epiphenomena, are integral to and have very concrete effects upon actual, factual human realities.
2.1.2 The Symbolic
The Lacanian Symbolic initially is theorized on the basis of resources provided by structuralism. Tied to natural languages as characterized by Saussure and specific post-Saussurians, this register also refers to the customs, institutions, laws, mores, norms, practices, rituals, rules, traditions, and so on of cultures and societies (with these things being entwined in various ways with language). Lacan’s phrase “symbolic order,” which encompasses all of the preceding, can be understood as roughly equivalent to what Hegel designates as “objective spirit.” This non-natural universe is an elaborate set of inter-subjective and trans-subjective contexts into which individual human beings are thrown at birth (along the lines of Heideggerian Geworfenheit), a pre-existing order preparing places for them in advance and influencing the vicissitudes of their ensuing lives.
According to Lacan, one of the (if not the) most significant and indispensable conditions of possibility for singular subjectivity is the collective symbolic order (sometimes named “the big Other,” a phrase to be unpacked further shortly—see 2.3 below). Individual subjects are what they are in and through the mediation of the socio-linguistic arrangements and constellations of the register of the Symbolic. Especially during the period of the “return to Freud,” the analytic unconscious (qua “structured like a language”) is depicted as kinetic networks of interlinked signifiers (i.e., “signifying chains”). Rendered thusly, the unconscious, being of a Symbolic (anti-)nature in and of itself, is to be interpretively engaged with via the Symbolic medium of speech, namely, the very substance of the being-in-itself of the speaking subject (parlêtre) of the unconscious. Furthermore, the Lacanian unconscious is structured like “un langage” and not “une langue.” Although both French words translate into English as “language,” the former (langage) refers to logics and structures of syntax and semantics not necessarily specific to particular natural languages, whereas the latter (langue), which also could be translated into English as “tongue,” does refer to the notion of a natural language. Hence, Lacan is not saying that the unconscious is structured like French, German, English, Spanish, or any other particular natural language.
Although the register of the Symbolic comes to the fore only with Lacan’s structuralist phase of the 1950s, it arguably is not without its precursors in his earlier texts. Already in 1938, the idea of the “complex” in the encyclopedia article on “The Family Complexes” anticipates how Lacan recasts the Freudian Oedipus complex via Lévi-Straussian structural anthropology. Similarly, the prisoners’ dilemma scenario narrated in 1945’s “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” illustrates how a formal, game-theoretic apparatus governs the lived experiences of subjects inserted into it. Moreover, the 1949 écrit on “The Mirror Stage” hints at the enabling background presence of a socio-symbolic milieu (incarnated first and foremost by parental caregivers) as the trigger prompting the child’s identification with mirrored images of him/her-self (as I will discuss subsequently here, this hint is expanded and embellished upon by Lacan in 1960s-era revisions of the mirror stage—see 2.2 below).
Despite the rise to prominence of the register of the Real beginning around 1959–1960, the Symbolic continues to play pivotal roles in Lacan’s teachings right up until the start of the 1980s. For instance, in Seminar XVII (1969–1970) and the contemporaneous interview “Radiophonie,” Lacan forges his theory of the “four discourses” (those of the “master”, “university,” “hysteric,” and “analyst”) to reflect the interlinked permutations of multiple kinds of “social links” configuring the relations between speaking subjects. More generally, the later Lacan remains reliant on the notion of the Real sides of the Symbolic, these being signifiers in their meaningless, nonsensical materiality as visible marks and audible sounds (i.e., “letters” in Lacan’s technical sense)—and this by contrast with the Imaginary sides of the Symbolic, in which signifiers are paired with signifieds to form meaningful, significant signs (à la Saussure’s classic explanation of successful communication via natural language). Such senseless signifiers and their enchainings amount to a late Lacanian rendition of Freudian primary processes as the thinking distinctive of unconscious mindedness.
When Lacan mentions “structure,” a word to which he has frequent recourse, he usually is thinking of his register of the Symbolic. Between the periods of his “return to Freud” and later teachings, Lacan reconsiders and alters what is conceptualized under the heading of the “like a language” (comme un langage) part of his fundamental claim that, “the unconscious is structured like a language.” However, from the 1950s until his death, his specific rendition of Freud’s discovery consistently holds to the thesis that, “the unconscious is structured.” That is to say, the unconscious, as bound up with that which is Symbolic, is an intricate, labyrinthine web of ideational representations interconnected in multiple sophisticated manners. Contrary to the crudeness of commonplace vulgar picturings of Freudian analysis as an irrationalist, neo-romantic psychology of the unruly natural depths, the unconscious is not the id, namely, an anarchic seething cauldron of unthinking animalistic instincts (i.e., something unstructured).
2.1.3 The Real
The register of the Real is tricky to encapsulate and evades being pinned down through succinct definitions. Lacan’s numerous and shifting pronouncements apropos the Real are themselves partly responsible for this absence of straightforwardness. But, rather than being just a barrier to grasping the Real, this absence is itself revelatory of this register. To be more precise, as that which is foreign to Imaginary-Symbolic reality—this reality is the realm containing conscious apprehension, communicable significance, and the like—the Real is intrinsically elusive, resisting by nature capture in the comprehensibly meaningful formulations of concatenations of Imaginary-Symbolic signs. It is, as Lacan stresses again and again, an “impossibility” vis-à-vis reality.
Lacan’s earliest employments of the term “Real” use it to refer to material being(s) an sich, namely, to physical existents handled as roughly equivalent to Kant’s things-in-themselves. The Real hence would be whatever is beyond, behind, or beneath phenomenal appearances accessible to the direct experiences of first-person awareness. This characterization of the Real persists into the first versions of Lacan’s mature register theory as initially elaborated throughout the 1950s. During this decade of the “return to Freud,” the Real also gets connected to Lacan’s contemporaneously emerging conceptions of psychosis and Otherness (the latter to be addressed soon—see 2.3 below). Additionally, in the 1950s, Lacan tends to speak of the Real as an absolute fullness, a pure plenum devoid of the negativities of absences, antagonisms, gaps, lacks, splits, etc. Portrayed thusly, the Symbolic is primarily responsible for injecting such negativities into the Real. For instance, only though the powers of language can material being in itself be said to be “missing” things, since, on its own, this dimension of being always is simply whatever it is in its dumb, idiotic presence as never more and never less than sheer, indifferent plenitude.
As I noted above, the seventh seminar of 1959–1960 marks a shift away from the privileging of the Symbolic over the course of the 1950s and toward prioritizing the Real. The Real prior to Seminar VII tends to be depicted in non-dialectical and/or quasi-Kantian terms. Although Kant is one of the main explicit foci during this academic year, Lacan’s sustained reformulation of the Real in this seminar introduces quasi-Hegelian dialectical features into it, thereby nuancing and complicating his ideas about this register. The new Real involves convergences of opposites as a register of volatile oscillations and unstable reversals between excesses and lacks, surpluses and deficits, flooding presences and draining absences. In the seventh seminar, Lacan puts forward the figure of the mother as the key analytic referent justifying this rendition of the Real (a figure he relates to another figure, that of “the Lady” in the courtly love tradition). In the beginning of the psychical-libidinal subject’s ontogentic life history, the maternal caretaker is, at one and the same time, both overwhelmingly, stiflingly present or near and, in her strange, impenetrable alterity, also frustratingly, uncontrollably absent or inaccessible; there is either too much or too little of her, never the right balanced amount. With the passage of time and the temporal transformations of the libidinal economy, the mother, as this archaic Real Other, becomes the forever unattainable “Sovereign Good,” the fixed vanishing point, of all desiring (what Lacan calls, in dialogue with the history of philosophy as well as Freud, “das Ding” [la Chose, the Thing]).
Throughout the 1960s and up through the end of Lacan’s teachings, the Real takes on an ever increasing number of aspects and connotations. It becomes both a transcendence troubling and thwarting Imaginary-Symbolic reality and its language from without as well as an immanence perturbing and subverting reality/language from within. It comes to be associated with libidinal negativities (objet petit a, jouissance, and sexual difference, all to be discussed later—see 2.3, 2.4.2, and 2.4.3 below), material meaninglessness both linguistic (see 2.1.2 above) and non-linguistic, contingent traumatic events, unbearable bodily intensities, anxiety, and death.
As regards the unconscious as the principle concern of psychoanalysis, the later Lacan combines his earlier emphasis on socio-linguistic formations (à la “the unconscious is structured like a language”) with a subsequent stress on forces and factors internal but irreducible to these formations. After the 1950s, Real dimensions are added to the unconscious, with its Symbolic dimensions being made to orbit around black holes of unsymbolizability impossible to represent via the signifier-like ideational representations (Freud’s Vorstellungen) of the language-like sides of the unconscious. Nonetheless, the rise of the Real in Lacan’s teachings does not amount to him converting to any sort of analytic recapitulation of mysticisms or negative theologies. Instead, for Lacan, analysis both theoretical and clinical permits delineating and tracking the Real with conceptual precision, if only as an exercise in pinpointing the exact limits of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and their overlappings.
2.2 The Mirror Stage, the Ego, and the Subject
The account of the mirror stage is perhaps Lacan’s most famous theoretical contribution (maybe even more famous than the well-known thesis apropos the unconscious as “structured like a language”). Initially developed in the 1930s, this account involves a number of interrelated ingredients. Lacan offers the narrative of this stage as an explanation specifically for the genesis and functions of the Freudian psychical agency of the ego (Ich, moi). One of the psychoanalytic and philosophical upshots of the mirror stage, a crucial one in Lacan’s eyes, is that the ego is an object rather than a subject. In other words, the ego, despite conscious senses to the contrary, is not a locus of autonomous agency, the seat of a free, true “I” determining its own fate. This portrait of the ego-as-object is at the heart of Lacan’s lifelong critical polemics against Anglo-American ego psychology, with the ego psychologists seeking to strengthen their patients’ egos by appealing to supposed autonomous and “conflict-free” sides of these psychical agencies. Against this, Lacan views the ego as thoroughly compromised and inherently neurotic to its very core, as a passionate defense of a constitutive ignorance of the unconscious.
To stay at this more general metapsychological level for a little while longer, Lacan eventually forges, partly on the basis of the mirror stage, a distinction between the ego (moi) and the subject (sujet, a word freighted with philosophical baggage—Lacan knowingly adds this word and its philosophical vocabulary to analytic discourse, although Freud did not speak of “the subject” and was wary of philosophy). Appearances notwithstanding, the ego is, when all is said and done, an inert, fixed bundle of objectified coordinates, a libidinally invested and reified entity. By contrast with the ego and the illusory sense of fictional selfhood it supports, the psychoanalytic subject of Lacanianism is an unconscious kinetic negativity defying capture by and within ego-level identificatory constructs. The Lacanian enunciating subject of the unconscious speaks through the ego while remaining irreducibly distinct from it.
Returning to a tighter focus on the mirror stage proper, Lacan, relying on empirical data from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, posits that very young children, between the ages of six and eighteen months, quickly acquire the ability to identify their own images in reflective surfaces. At this time, infants are lacking in most physical and mental abilities possessed by older human beings. Prior to Lacan, Freud already highlights how a biologically dictated prematurational helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) naturally predestines the human being to the predominance of social nurture over material nature due to the protracted period of total reliance on other persons for one’s life-or-death vital requirements. Following Freud here, Lacan fleshes out this helplessness into which birth throws neonates, describing in detail the anatomical, physiological, cognitive, emotional, and motivational facets of this natural condition of post-birth prematurity.
This initial state of helpless “motor impotence and nursling dependence” entails the infant experiencing a swirl of negative affects: anxiety, distress, frustration, and so on. To the young child, motivated by these negative affects, a crucial component of the enthralling lure exerted by the fascinating image of his/her body is this image’s promise that he/she can overcome his/her Hilflosigkeit and be a unified, pulled-together whole, an integrated, coordinated totality like the bigger, more mature others he/she sees around him/her-self (however, according to Lacan, individuals spend their entire lives, beginning thusly, chasing in vain after an unattainable state of harmony and mastery first falsely promised by the mirror). This imago-Gestalt of virtual wholeness, identified with by the infant in a jubilant moment of “Aha!,” lays down the imagistic nucleus of the thereafter ontogenetically accreting ego as a series of self-objectifications in images and, soon after with the event of language acquisition, words too.
For Lacan, identification with the imago-Gestalt of the moi entails alienation—and this for additional reasons over and above those given in the preceding paragraphs. Already in the 1949 écrit on the mirror stage, mention is made of “some prop, human or artificial” supporting the infant as he/she gazes into the mirror and looks at him/her-self. In 1949, Lacan seems to think of this prop more as artificial than human, referring to the “trotte-bébé” (walker) leaned on by the child. But, in subsequent revisitations of the mirror stage during the 1960s, Lacan dramatically highlights the supporting role of fellow human beings instead. In so doing, he argues that the infant is encouraged to identify with the mirror image as “me” by verbal and gestural prompts issuing from the bigger other(s) holding him/her up in front of the reflective surface (for example, the utterance “That’s you there!” accompanied by pointing and grinning). This later shift of emphasis has two crucial consequences. First, the Imaginary register of the mirror does not precede the Symbolic register of language and sociality in a linear chronology of developmental stages (as the earlier text of “The Mirror Stage” might be at risk of suggesting); if anything, socio-linguistic variables (for instance, the words and body language of parents) are the causal triggers of the child’s investment in select sensory-perceptual experiences (such as the body image in the mirror). Second, this means that the imagistic nucleus of the ego is suffused from the get-go with the destinal “discourse of the Other”—in this case, fateful significations (in Lacanese, “unary traits”) coming from caregivers’ narratives articulated simultaneously along with their encouragements to the child to recognize him/her-self in the mirror (“What a handsome boy!,” “What a beautiful girl!,” “You’re going to grow up to be big and strong, just like your daddy,” etc.).
As a result of all of the above, Lacan considers the recognition that happens in the mirror stage to amount to “misrecognition” (méconnaissance). This likewise holds throughout life for all ensuing experiences of “recognizing” oneself as being a particular kind of “I,” namely, taking qua imagining oneself to be a certain sort of ego-level self (apropos Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, it always pays to remember William Wordsworth’s line, “The child is the father of the man”). The ego is not only a congealed, heteronomous object rather than fluid, autonomous subject, but also, in its very origins, a repository for the projected desires and fantasies of larger others; the child’s image is a receptacle for his/her parents’ dreams and wishes, with his/her body image being always-already overwritten by signifiers flowing from the libidinal economies of other speaking beings. Hence, recognizing the ego as “me,” as embodying and representing an authentic, private, unique selfhood that is most genuinely my own, is tantamount to misrecognizing that, at root, the ego ultimately is an alienating foreign introject through which I am seduced and subjected by others’ conscious and unconscious wants and machinations. To borrow one of Lacan’s many neologisms, the ego ultimately is something “extimate” (i.e., intimately exterior, an internal externality) insofar as it crystallizes “the desire of the Other” (qua others’ conscious and unconscious wants and machinations). Or, as the Lacan of the eleventh seminar would put it, there is something in the me more than the me itself to the extent that this moi essentially is a coagulation of inter-subjective and trans-subjective alien influences.
Finally, Lacan’s utilization of the idea of the mirror is not exclusively literal. Although he often talks of mirrors as shiny reflective surfaces, he does not limit mirroring to being a visible physical phenomenon alone. Most importantly, other persons’ speech, gestures, postures, moods, facial expressions, and so on frequently can be said to “mirror” back to one an “image” of oneself, namely, a conveyed sense of how one “appears” from other perspectives.
2.3 Otherness, the Oedipus Complex, and Sexuation
Throughout his teachings, Lacan regularly utilizes the terms “other” (with a lower-case o) and “Other” (with a capital O). Given an understanding of Lacan’s register theory and the mirror stage (see 2.1 and 2.2 above), these terms can be clarified with relative ease and brevity. The lower-case-o other designates the Imaginary ego and its accompanying alter-egos. By speaking of the ego itself as an “other,” Lacan further underscores its alien and alienating status as spelled out in the immediately preceding sub-section here (see 2.2 above). Additionally, when relating to others as alter-egos, one does so on the basis of what one “imagines” about them (often imagining them to be “like me,” to share a set of lowest-common-denominator thoughts, feelings, and inclinations making them comprehensible to me). These transference-style imaginings are fictions taming and domesticating the mysterious, unsettling foreignness of one’s conspecifics, thereby rendering social life tolerable and navigable.
The capital-O Other refers to two additional types of otherness corresponding to the registers of the Symbolic and the Real. The first type of Other is Lacan’s “big Other” qua symbolic order, namely, the overarching “objective spirit” of trans-individual socio-linguistic structures configuring the fields of inter-subjective interactions. Relatedly, the Symbolic big Other also can refer to (often fantasmatic/fictional) ideas of anonymous authoritative power and/or knowledge (whether that of God, Nature, History, Society, State, Party, Science, or the analyst as the “subject supposed to know” [sujet supposé savoir] as per Lacan’s distinctive account of analytic transference). But, as already becomes evident in Lacan’s first few annual seminars of the early 1950s, there also is a Real dimension to Otherness. This particular incarnation of the Real, about which Lacan goes into greatest detail when addressing both love and psychosis, is the provocative, perturbing enigma of the Other as an unknowable “x,” an unfathomable abyss of withdrawn-yet-proximate alterity (in his 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, to which Lacan refers repeatedly, Freud depicts this alterity in the guise of the Nebenmensch als Ding [Neighbor-as-Thing]).
For Lacan, the Freudian Oedipus complex stages the drama of the child’s laborious struggles to situate him/her-self vis-à-vis all three register-theoretic dimensions of Otherness. Thanks particularly to what he takes from his engagements with structuralism, Lacan, throughout his career, is careful to avoid a pseudo-Freudian reification of the bourgeois nuclear family, with a mother and father biologically sexed female and male respectively. The maternal and paternal Oedipal personas are psychical-subjective positions, namely, socio-cultural (i.e., non-natural, non-biological) roles that potentially can be played by any number of possible persons of various sexes/genders.
That noted, in the Lacanian version of the Oedipus complex, the maternal figure initially features for the infant as a Real Other (i.e., the Nebenmensch als Ding)—more specifically, as an obscure omnipotent presence who is the source of all-important love (more will be said about Lacan’s concept of love—see 2.4.1 below). But, because of the combination of her obscurity and importance, the mother qua Real Other also is a source of deeply unsettling anxiety for the very young child. She seemingly threatens her offspring with being alternately too smothering or too withdrawn, too much or not enough. In his/her anxiousness about controlling the ultimately uncontrollable presence (and absence) of this mysterious and indispensable maternal Other, the child confronts the question, “What does the (m)Other want?” The infant’s gradual formation of an ego as per the temporally elongated processes delineated in Lacan’s account of the mirror stage (see 2.2 above) is, in part, a response to this riddle (albeit in a broader sense, with the child constructing an ego-level identity informed by the perceived wants of Others in addition to the mother, such as the father).
In relation to the immediately preceding, Lacan’s Oedipal father is an Other with both Symbolic and Real faces. On the Symbolic side, the paternal figure represents the answer to the question, “What does the maternal Other want?” In Lacan’s terminology, the child’s alighting upon the paternal third party in the family romance of the Oedipal social triangle as the solution to the puzzle of the maternal figure’s enigmatic intentionality amounts to “the desire of the mother,” as an unknown, being replaced by “the paternal metaphor.” Directly connected to this, Lacan (re)defines the phallus (which is not the penis) as the structural function of whatever “x” the child hypothesizes the paternal figure possesses making him the focus of the maternal figure’s desire, that is, the possession enabling the father to domesticate and control the mother’s otherwise unpredictable desire. Also at the level of the Symbolic, the paternal function involves bringing to bear within the child’s familial sphere the disciplinary and prohibitory features of the family’s enveloping symbolic order as their socio-linguistic milieu (this entails such impositions as weaning, toilet training, exogamy, and “castration” in the Freudian-Lacanian sense—see 2.4.1 below). As for Real Otherness here, this would be the version of the paternal figure mythically portrayed by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913), namely, the tyrannical, enjoying-without-restraints “primal father” (Urvater) of the savage fraternal horde, the exception to the otherwise universal law of (symbolic) castration. This Real Urvater arguably is a fantasy-construct generated in and by the Oedipus complex, with the child imagining an obscene, dark, jouissance-saturated underbelly behind the Symbolic façade of paternal authority and its rules.
The child’s identifications with maternal and paternal Others are distributed across Real and Symbolic dimensions. However, different subjects-in-formation distribute their identifications differently. Freud, in his reconsiderations of earlier renditions of the Oedipus complex, came to highlight an asymmetry between Oedipal dynamics for young boys and girls, repudiating the idea of girls undergoing an “Electra complex” as the symmetrical counterpart to the Oedipus complex. Skipping over a lot of details and cutting a long story short, the later Lacan, when taking up the topic of sexual difference, preserves this Freudian emphasis on asymmetry. In this vein, Lacan introduces the idea of sexuation as the Real of sexual difference, namely, as an impenetrable, opaque facticity of this difference continually prompting and yet perpetually resisting being adequately translated into the terms of Imaginary and Symbolic realities. As neither biologically given sex nor socially constructed gender, the Real of sexuation is what is responsible for the absence of an exhaustively representable, symbolizable natural and/or cultural relationship between sexuated positions (as per Lacan’s statement, “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel”). The structural-psychical positions of masculinity and femininity embody constitutively out-of-synch and inherently incommensurable subjective stances, incompatible (yet interacting) arrangements of distinct sorts of libidinal economies.
2.4 The Libidinal Economy
Freud’s metapsychology of the libidinal economy, of the underlying motivational mechanisms of psychical life, is grounded on his theory of drive (Trieb, and not Instinkt, despite many English mistranslations of Trieb as “instinct”). Lacan elaborates upon and extends this Freudian theoretical framework. In the process, he reworks some of Freud’s concepts and adds other concepts of his own.
2.4.1 Need-Demand-Desire and Castration
Need, demand, and desire form a conceptual-terminological triad in Lacanian theory. Needs are biologically innate vital requirements for the human being as a living organism. Humans are born saddled with such imperatives from the very start, although, as per Freudian Hilflosigkeit, they are powerless on their own to satisfy these bodily dictates for a protracted initial period lasting well into childhood (see 2.2 above).
The combination of being prematurationally helpless but having unavoidable needs means that, over the course of physical and mental development, the infant must come to articulate its needs to bigger others. These others (as three-dimensional O/others along the lines of Lacan’s register theory—see 2.3 above) are addressed as those capable of assisting in the meeting and quelling of needs. Of course, crying, screaming, gesticulating, and the like are early expressions of needs, being the fashions in which infants prior to acquiring language per se alert the older individuals around them of their requirements. Even at this early stage, the infant is forced to rely on his/her thus-addressed significant others to interpret the “meaning” of his/her cries, screams, and gesticulations (“Ah, you’re hungry,” “Uh oh, that means you’re tired,” “So, it’s time to change your diaper,” etc.). Through these spontaneous interpretations, others, whether knowingly or not, participate with the pre-verbal child in shaping links between needs and the socially mediated significance of the expressions of needs. These others thereby lend the child’s noises and movements the significance of being “demands,” with this amounting to a kind of assistance provided over and above the assistance of meeting bare needs themselves. Now, this is not to say that there are no natural correlations whatsoever between needs and their pre-verbal expressions hardwired into babies’ behavioral repertoires. But, arguably, infants are not immediately and automatically self-consciously aware of these correlations as such, with caretakers’ responses being key aids in helping the child become explicitly cognizant of need-expression couplings.
As the infant continues maturing, soon acquiring language, the influences of others and Others (especially inter-subjective others as conveyors of the signs and signifiers of the big Other qua trans-subjective symbolic order—see 2.1.2 and 2.3 above) increasingly exert themselves on the forming of associative connections between needs and demands. For example, as part of socialization and education, parents typically begin to introduce the discipline of insisting that the child articulate his/her requirements and urges in specific manners (“Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’” “Ask nicely,” “In this household, we do not yell when we’re hungry,” and so on). The child learns that he/she must accept, internalize, and speak “the discourse of the Other” (in this instance, the parents) in order to get his/her needs recognized, acknowledged, and addressed in a satisfactory fashion. In short, he/she must make demands couched in terms and conventions imposed by O/others’ socio-symbolic regimes. Lacan maintains that natural bodily needs hence, via the inter- and trans-subjective dynamics of demand, are “overwritten” by the signifiers of an ultimately Symbolic Otherness, an overwriting through which the bases of the libidinal economy are denaturalized and subjected to socio-cultural forces and factors. Much of this beds down in the young, nascent subject’s psyche, thereafter exerting (often in unconscious ways) decisive effects on this person’s libidinal economy throughout his/her life.
In his 1958 écrit “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan provides a succinct formula for defining “desire” in relation to both need and demand. He stipulates that desire is what remains after need is subtracted from demand. What, exactly, does this equation mean? Through being translated into demands, needs come to be saddled with surpluses of more-than-biological significances; vital requirements take on the excess baggage of meanings over and above the level of brute, simple organic survival. Largely by virtue of what O/others add to the child’s experiences of needs through superimposing interpretations of these needs as socio-symbolic demands, the meeting of the child’s needs in response to his/her demands makes these needs into, first and foremost, litmus tests of where he/she stands in relation to these thus-addressed significant O/others. Being given specific items of food by a parent in response to a demand expressing hunger can indicate to the child not only that the parent understands that a need to eat has to be met, but also, and more importantly, that he/she is loved by the parent, that he/she enjoys a privileged position in relation to the parent’s attention and priorities. Lacan therefore asserts that each and every demand is, at bottom, a demand for love. Returning to the equation “demand – need = desire,” what is desired when a demand is addressed to another is not so much the meeting of the thus-expressed need, but, in addition to this, the very love of another.
Parents of children are all too familiar with seemingly endless series of demands from the little ones (“I want a sandwich,” “OK, here’s a sandwich”… “I want a lollipop,” “OK, here’s a lollipop”… “I want a new toy,” “OK, here’s a new toy”… and on and on until an exhausted parental “No” is pronounced and wearily defended against vigorous protests). Adults, whether parents or not, also are aware of a similar desiring restlessness in themselves, an inability to acquire an object or attain a success that would be “IT” (with-a-capital-I-and-T), the final be-all-and-end-all telos of wanting and wishing satisfying them for good forever after. Similarly, an adult in a romantic relationship never is content with being told that he/she is loved by the beloved only once; he/she insists upon repetitions ad infinitum of the affirmation by the significant other that, “I love you” (as if no affirmation is ever quite enough). With both children and adults, margins of dissatisfaction, perpetually resurfacing itches that never can be scratched just right, are to be explained, according to Lacan, through a clarification of the essence of the “love” demanded in all demands in excessive addition to the gratification of corresponding needs. What is being requested is an impossibility impossible on the basis of the register-theoretic version of O/otherness à la Lacanianism (see 2.1 and 2.3 above): the non-objectifiable negativity of the kinetic, slippery heart of Real Otherness (i.e., the always-on-the-move affection, focus, etc. of the Real Other’s desiring core both conscious and unconscious) being objectified as the positivity of a static, stable thing (i.e., a special object able to be gift-wrapped and handed over as part of the response to demand). Employing once again the example of hunger, while the O/other can respond to demands for food with the provision of nourishing substances answering to the need for nourishment, he/she is constitutively incapable of turning the nucleus of his/her desiring being (i.e., the non-object of his/her “love”) into one tangible object among others to be bestowed along with food and the like. As will be discussed here shortly (see 2.4.3 below), conscious and unconscious fantasies are aroused on the sides of desiring demanders—and, everyone is a desiring demander—by the necessary, inevitable dissatisfactions accompanying desires. These fantasies cover over the impossibility of bringing desires to satisfying ends. They do so by constructing scenarios in which there is a yet-to-be-(re)obtained object that really is “IT.” Moreover, in these fantasmatic scenarios, answers to questions of Real Others’ inscrutable desires (“What does the Other want, and want specifically of me?”) are staged.
As should be evident by now, the intervention of the signifiers of the symbolic order (i.e., the discourses of big Others) is integral to the genesis of the need-demand-desire triad. Through the intrusion of these signifiers cutting into both the body and mind of the young child, a proto-subjective being of need, passing through the demands of discipline (in both sense of the genitive), is transformed into a subject of desire. Such a subject is “barred”—Lacan’s matheme for the barred subject of desire is $—alienated from its natural needs and derailed onto the tracks of non-natural desires doomed never to reach enjoyable destinations. In connection with his revisions of the Oedipus complex (see 2.3 above), Lacan turns Freudian castration into “symbolic castration.” The latter, rather than being a real or imagined scene in which a specific threat to bodily integrity is issued, designates the dual somatic and psychical discombobulating effects upon the premature human animal caused by insertion into and subjection to surrounding socio-symbolic contexts, of being made to depend on the foreignness of signifiers and everything they bring with them.
2.4.2 Drive and Jouissance
In Freud’s drive theory, sublimation amounts to a drive finding a means to secure satisfaction (Befriedigung) in the face of “aim-inhibition” (i.e., a blockage of its prior path to an earlier aimed-at drive-object). But, as Lacan observes, Freud also oddly defines the aim (Ziel) of any and every drive as satisfaction. Therefore, how can a drive achieve satisfaction if its aim (defined as the achievement of satisfaction) is inhibited? Lacan’s response to this apparent Freudian contradiction is to put forward a distinction between the aim and “goal” of the drive as a metapsychological entity: While the aim of a drive can be and inevitably is inhibited, its (true) goal always is reached—and this because its goal is nothing other than enjoying the ceaseless movement of repetitively rotating around whatever blockages land on its path.
According to a certain widely accepted reading appealing to the immediately above (promoted by Slavoj Žižek and the Slovenian School of Lacanian theory), Lacan distinguishes between desire and drive. As seen (see 2.4.1 above), an essential characteristic of desire is its restlessness, its ongoing agitated searching and futile striving. No object it gets its hands on is ever quite “IT.” Whereas desire is stuck with its dissatisfied drifting from object to object and ever onward (in a structured movement akin to the “spurious/bad infinite” as per Hegel), drive derives a perverse enjoyment from this desire-fuelled libidinal circling around the vanishing point of the impossible-qua-unattainable. There where desire is frustrated, drive is gratified. Drive gains its satisfaction through vampirically feeding off of the dissatisfaction of desire.
Like the register of the Real with which it is most closely associated, jouissance, a notion that comes to the fore at the end of the 1950s, is difficult to encapsulate in succinct defining formulas. By the end of Lacan’s itinerary at the start of the 1980s, this term had taken on a plethora of significations, dividing and sub-dividing into a wide array of distinct-but-related concepts. In English-language Lacanian scholarship, jouissance almost always is left untranslated, since its English equivalent, “enjoyment,” fails to capture the specifically sexual connotations of the original French word.
The best way to begin getting a sense of what Lacan means by jouissance is through reference to the Lacanian distinction between drive and desire (see 2.4.2 above) in conjunction with select stipulations by Freud regarding the infamous death drive (Todestrieb) of Freud’s later dual drive theory (first laid out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)). Like Freud’s Todestrieb, Lacan’s jouissance is “beyond the pleasure principle” (this being another reason why the English “enjoyment,” as synonymous with pleasure, is an inappropriate translation). The post-1920 Freud muses that all drives might be said to be death drives, meaning that each and every drive perhaps works, at least in certain respects at certain times, contrary to the pursuit of the pleasurable as balance, gratification, homeostasis, satisfaction, and so on. Along these same lines, the Lacanian drive extracts “enjoyment” from the thwartings and failures of desire; whereas the latter is oriented by the tantalizingly elusive telos of pleasure qua satisfaction, the former generates its jouissance-beyond-pleasure precisely through the inhibiting of desire itself. The many possible sadistic and masochistic implications of this side of the libidinal economy are not difficult to imagine.
One of several clinical phenomena pushing Freud into dethroning the pleasure principle in 1920 as the formerly hegemonic ruler of the psyche in its entirety is “repetition compulsion” (Wiederholungszwang)—specifically, the psyche’s perplexing, spontaneous compulsive repeating of that which is painful and/or traumatic (examples of this include post-traumatic disorders, so-called “negative therapeutic reaction,” and the recurrent types of self-defeats unconsciously arranged by neurotics for themselves). One of the theoretical functions of the death drive is to account for whatever disregards or disrupts the reign of the pleasure principle as a fundamental “law” of mental life. In Lacan’s conceptual apparatus, jouissance sometimes likewise refers to an overriding force/tendency compelling repetitions of experiences or events upsetting the calm, delicate equilibrium of psychical subjectivity’s Imaginary-Symbolic reality (hence the association of jouissance with the Real).
In the process of the neonate as a biological being acquiring both an ego and a speaking subjectivity—this involves the living organism being submitted to the mediating matrices of Imaginary-Symbolic realities—the human creature supposedly loses, through symbolic castration (see 2.4.1 above), access to an immediate, undiluted jouissance in its raw, unmitigated intensities (whether this is an actual, factual occurrence in linear, chronological ontogeny or an après-coup, retrospective fantasy is a complicated issue in Lacanian theory). The jouissance presumably lost to the speaking subject returns only in the guises of what might be labeled “limit experiences,” namely, encounters with that which is annihilating, inassimilable, overwhelming, traumatic, or unbearable. Similarly, jouissance, in this vein, is related to transgressive violations, the breaching of boundaries and breaking of barriers. It is difficult, if not impossible, for the parlêtre to accommodate, tolerate, and digest. The speaking being is forced to cohabitate uneasily with its always problematic jouissance.
2.4.3 Fantasy and Object a
In line with Freud’s discussions of fantasizing in psychical life, Lacan treats fantasies, particularly those functioning at the level of fundamental formations of the unconscious, as schematizations (in a quasi-Kantian respect) of desiring subjectivity. Put differently, the wants and wishes of a particular subject are shaped and governed by a peculiar skeletal template, an idiosyncratic and paradigmatic Ur-scene, in which this desiring subject is positioned in a specific manner vis-à-vis a specific object of its desire. This fundamental template/scene is an unconscious formation operating as a transcendental condition of possibility for the subject’s libidinal economy in all its crucial, symptomatic manifestations. Lacan’s matheme for the fantasy is $ ◊ a. The $ stands for the subject of desire brought into being by the barring/splitting consequences of Others’ mediating influences (see 2.3 and 2.4.1 above).
The a stands for objet petit a, that is, object a as the “object-cause of desire.” Lacan employs this latter phrase for object a because this “object” is a spectral, virtual construct of what would qualify as “IT” for the desiring subject (see 2.4.1 above), with this libidinal-transcendental schema of desire’s object (i.e., a) “causing” select given empirical objects in a person’s libidinal-amorous history and experience to be desired as stand-ins for “IT.” However, these substitutes are always and necessarily inadequate and unsatisfactory due to an insurmountable, ineliminable gap between the more-than-empirical fantasmatic objet a originating in the subject’s unconscious past and the empirical objects present and future incarnating it. These latter objects are situated in Imaginary-Symbolic reality, condemned partially and imperfectly to embody an interminably receding and elusive surplus (i.e., the impossible-qua-Real dimension of object a).
To refer back one last time to the matheme of fantasy ($ ◊ a), the diamond-shaped “lozenge” (poinçon) ◊ can be read as a condensation of four symbols: one, ∧ (the logical symbol for conjunction [“and”]); two, ∨ (the logical symbol for disjunction [“or”]); three, > (the mathematical symbol for “greater than”); and, four, < (the mathematical symbol for “less than”). As per Lacan’s matheme, the subject’s desires are scripted and orchestrated by an unconscious fundamental fantasy in which the desiring subject ($) is positioned in relation to its corresponding object-cause of desire (a). Hence, ∧, ∨, >, and < represent, in a deliberately loose and open fashion, possible variants of this positioning of $ vis-à-vis a. Singular subjects flesh out conjunction, disjunction, being “greater than,” and being “less than” in their own styles, namely, as their unique fantasies of merger or symbiosis (conjunction), scorn or refusal (disjunction), mastery or domination (“greater than”), slavery or submission (“less than”), and any number of other possible particularizations of these four basic categories of rapport.
In some of Lacan’s earlier presentations of the mirror stage, the a serves as an abbreviation for autre (other). More precisely, in this context, a refers primarily to the little-o-other as the Imaginary ego (see 2.2 and 2.3 above). The ego is an “other,” a not-me misrecognized as “me,” insofar as it is brought into existence through a combination of an object external to the (proto-)subject (i.e., the imago-Gestalt of the body image) and the interests of Symbolic and Real Others investing this object through words and behaviors. Within the framework of the mirror stage, a (usually as a’) also designates alter-egos as the Imaginary partners with which the ego itself is inextricably intertwined, invariably defining itself through reference to these partners.
Furthermore, there indeed is a thread of continuity between the a of the mirror stage and object a: Both ego (as a) and fantasy (with its a) unconsciously are the subject’s fateful answers to the questions, “What does the Other want?” and “How must I position myself with respect to the desire of the Other?” (see 2.3 above). Lacan’s a, like the rest of his mathemes, is deliberately handled as akin to an algebraic variable. It is a placeholder for any number of particular types of determinants: what an Other desires, what I must be so as to be the object of an Other’s desire, what would at last lay to rest my restless strivings and yearnings, what would do so for a significant Other to whom I remain attached, etc. But, in all cases, a reflects Lacan’s Hegelian-Kojèvian slogan having it that, “man’s desire is the desire of the Other.”
Bibliography
Several remarks are warranted about the bibliographies of primary and secondary Lacanian literature below. As regards primary sources, only fifteen of Lacan’s twenty-six annual seminars have been published by Jacques-Alain Miller through the Champ freudien series. As of the end of 2012, the following seminars are available in official editions: I, II, III, IV, V, VII, VIII, X, XI, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, and XXIII. Of these, only seven have been published as authorized English translations by W.W. Norton and Company: I, II, III, VII, XI, XVII, and XX. The primary sources listed below are the available book-length texts by Lacan. These lists do not include various separate essay-length pieces scattered across numerous places.
As regards secondary sources, I have been highly selective in compiling the list that follows. There are mountains of literature on Lacan in multiple languages. Moreover, these bodies of scholarship cover Lacan’s ideas from a vast array of disciplinary angles. Considering the context of this overview, the secondary sources listed below are, for the most part, books in English with more of a philosophical/theoretical focus.
A. Primary Sources
Work by Lacan in French
1. 2001, Autres écrits [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Includes:
o 1938, “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie”.
o 1947, “La psychiatrie anglaise et la guerre”.
2. 1966, Écrits, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
3. 2011, Je parle aux murs: Entretiens de la chapelle de Sainte-Anne [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
4. 2005, Mon enseignement [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
5. 2007, Le mythe individuel du névrosé, ou Poésie et verité dans la névrose [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
6. 2005, Des noms-du-père [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
7. 1932, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, suivi de Premiers écrits sur la paranoïa, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
8. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan,
a. Livre I: Les écrits techniques de Freud, 1953–1954 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
b. Livre II: Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, 1954–1955 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978.
c. Livre III: Les psychoses, 1955–1956 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981.
d. Livre IV: La relation d’objet, 1956–1957 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994.
e. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 1957–1958 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998.
f. Livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation, 1958–1959 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2013.
g. Livre VII: L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959–1960 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986.
h. Livre VIII: Le transfert, 1960–1961 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001 (seconde édition corrigée).
i. Livre X: L’angoisse, 1962–1963 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004.
j. Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 1964 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973.
k. Livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006.
l. Livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse, 1969–1970 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991.
m. Livre XVIII: D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006.
n. Livre XIX: …ou pire, 1971–1972 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011.
o. Livre XX: Encore, 1972–1973 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
p. Livre XXIII: Le sinthome, 1975–1976 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005.
9. 1973, Télévision, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
10. 2005, Le triomphe de la religion, précédé de Discours aux catholiques [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Work by Lacan in English Translation
1. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English [trans. Bruce Fink], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006. Includes:
o 1945, “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism”
o 1946, “Presentation on Psychical Causality”
o 1948, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis”
o 1949, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”
2. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne [ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose; trans. Jacqueline Rose], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1982.
3. My Teaching [trans. David Macey], London: Verso, 2008.
4. On the Names-of-the-Father [trans. Bruce Fink], Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
5. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
o Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. John Forrester], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988.
o Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Sylvana Tomaselli], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988.
o Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Russell Grigg], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993.
o Book V: Formations of the Unconscious, 1957–1958 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Russell Grigg], Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
o Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Dennis Porter], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992.
o Book XIII: Transference, 1961–1962 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Bruce Fink], Cambridge: Polity, 2015.
o Book X: Anxiety, 1962–1963 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. A.R. Price], Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
o Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Alan Sheridan], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977.
o Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Russell Grigg], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007.
o Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Bruce Fink], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998.
o Book XXIII: The Sinthome, 1975–1976 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. A.R. Price], Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
6. Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at Sainte-Anne Hospital [trans. A.R. Price], Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
7. Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment [ed. Joan Copjec], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990.
8. The Triumph of Religion, preceded by Discourse to Catholics [trans. Bruce Fink], Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
Primary Literature by Others
1. Freud, S., 1966, Project for a Scientific Psychology, in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [ed. and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson], vol. I, London: The Hogarth Press, pp. 281–397.
2. Freud, S., 1958, Totem and Taboo, in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [ed. and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson], vol. XIII, London: The Hogarth Press, pp. ix-162.
3. Freud, S., 1955, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [ed. and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson], vol. XVIII, London: The Hogarth Press, pp. 1–64.
4. Hegel, G.W.F., 1977, Phenomenology of Spirit [trans. A.V. Miller], Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5. Kojève, A., 1969, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit [ed. Allan Bloom; trans. James H. Nichols, Jr.], Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
6. Lévi-Strauss, C., 1969, The Elementary Structures of Kinship [trans. J.H. Bell and J.R. von Sturmer], Boston: Beacon Press.
B. Secondary Literature on Lacan in English
1. Ansermet, François and Pierre Magistretti, 2007, Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity, Experience, and the Unconscious [trans. Susan Fairfield], New York: Other Press.
2. Barnard, Suzanne and Bruce Fink (eds.), 2002, Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, Albany: State University of New York Press.
3. Boothby, Richard, 1991, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud, New York: Routledge.
4. –––, 2001, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan, New York: Routledge.
5. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 1991, Lacan: The Absolute Master [trans. Douglas Brick], Stanford: Stanford University Press.
6. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 2000, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London: Verso.
7. Chiesa, Lorenzo, 2016, The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
8. –––, 2007, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
9. Clemens, Justin and Russell Grigg (eds.), 2006, Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, Durham: Duke University Press.
10. Copjec, Joan, 1994, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
11. –––, 2002, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
12. Cutrofello, Andrew, 1997, Imagining Otherwise: Metapsychology and the Analytic A Posteriori, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
13. De Kesel, Marc, 2009, Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII [trans. Sigi Jottkandt], Albany: State University of New York Press
14. De Waelhens, Alphonse and Wilfried Ver Eecke, 2001, Phenomenology and Lacan on Schizophrenia, After the Decade of the Brain, Leuven: Leuven University Press.
15. Dolar, Mladen, 2006, A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
16. Dor, Joël, 1998, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language [ed. Judith Feher Gurewich; trans. Susan Fairfield], New York: Other Press.
17. Evans, Dylan, 1996, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge.
18. Eyers, Tom, 2012, Lacan and the Concept of the “Real”, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
19. Fink, Bruce, 1995, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
20. –––, 1997. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
21. –––, 2004, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
22. –––, 2015, Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference, Cambridge: Polity.
23. Feldstein, Richard, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (eds.), 1995, Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Albany: State University of New York Press.
24. ––– (eds.), 1996, Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, Albany: State University of New York Press.
25. Forrester, John, 1990, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
26. Grosz, Elizabeth, 1990, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, New York: Routledge.
27. Homer, Sean, 2005, Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge.
28. Johnston, Adrian, 2005, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
29. –––, 2008, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
30. –––, 2009, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
31. –––, 2013, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
32. –––, 2013, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: Volume One, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
33. –––, 2017, Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan’s ‘The Freudian Thing’, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
34. Johnston, Adrian and Catherine Malabou, 2013, Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neurobiology, New York: Columbia University Press.
35. Julien, Philippe, 1994, Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary [trans. Devra Beck Simiu], New York: New York University Press.
36. Lemaire, Anika, 1977, Jacques Lacan [trans. David Macey], New York: Routledge.
37. Marini, Marcelle, 1992, Jacques Lacan: The French Context [trans. Anne Tomiche], New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
38. Nancy, Jean-Luc and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 1992, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan [trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew], Albany: State University of New York Press.
39. Nasio, Juan-David, 1998, Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan [trans. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul], Albany: State University of New York Press.
40. Nobus, Dany, 2000, Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge.
41. ––– (ed.), 1998, Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, New York: Other Press.
42. Pluth, Ed, 2007, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject, Albany: State University of New York Press.
43. Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.), 2003, The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
44. Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 1990, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985 [trans. Jeffrey Mehlman], Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
45. –––, 1997, Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System of Thought [trans. Barbara Bray], New York: Columbia University Press.
46. Salecl, Renata (ed.), 2000, Sexuation, Durham: Duke University Press.
47. Soler, Colette, 2006, What Lacan Said About Women: A Psychoanalytic Study [trans. John Holland], New York: Other Press.
48. Stavrakakis, Yannis, 1999, Lacan and the Political, New York: Routledge.
49. –––, 2007, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
50. Turkle, Sherry, 1981, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
51. Philippe Van Haute, 2002, Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion” of the Subject, a Close Reading [trans. Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk], New York: Other Press.
52. Paul Verhaeghe, 1997, Does the Woman Exist?: From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine [trans. Marc du Ry], New York: Other Press.
53. –––, 2001, Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive, New York: Other Press.
54. –––, 2004, On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics [trans. Sigi Jottkandt], New York: Other Press.
55. Žižek, Slavoj, 1991, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
56. –––, 2001, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, New York: Routledge, second edition.
57. –––, 2006, How to Read Lacan, London: Granta Publications.
58. ––– (ed.), 1992, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan… But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, London: Verso.
59. ––– (ed.), 1998, Cogito and the Unconscious, Durham: Duke University Press.
60. ––– (ed.), 2006, Lacan: The Silent Partners, London: Verso.
61. Žižek, Slavoj and Renata Salecl (eds.), 1996, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, Durham: Duke University Press.
62. Zupančič, Alenka, 2000, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, London: Verso.
63. –––, 2003, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
64. –––, 2008, The Odd One In: On Comedy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
FYI SFC Jay ThompsonCpl James R. " Jim" Gossett JrPVT Kenneth Krause SPC Jon O.SP5 Jeannie CarleSPC Chris Bayner-CwikPO1 Jerome NewlandTSgt David L. Maj Kim Patterson Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D.LTC Greg Henning LTC Bill Koski COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. Maj Marty Hogan Maj William W. 'Bill' Price Maj Robert Thornton Cynthia Croft
Jacques Lacan
First published Tue Apr 2, 2013; substantive revision Tue Jul 10, 2018
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 to September 9, 1981) was a major figure in Parisian intellectual life for much of the twentieth century. Sometimes referred to as “the French Freud,” he is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis. His teachings and writings explore the significance of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious both within the theory and practice of analysis itself as well as in connection with a wide range of other disciplines. Particularly for those interested in the philosophical dimensions of Freudian thought, Lacan’s oeuvre is invaluable. Over the course of the past fifty-plus years, Lacanian ideas have become central to the various receptions of things psychoanalytic in Continental philosophical circles especially.
• 1. Historical Overview
• 2. Fundamental Concepts
o 2.1 Register Theory
o 2.2 The Mirror Stage, the Ego, and the Subject
o 2.3 Otherness, the Oedipus Complex, and Sexuation
o 2.4 The Libidinal Economy
• Bibliography
o A. Primary Sources
o B. Secondary Literature on Lacan in English
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries
________________________________________
1. Historical Overview
Medically trained as a psychiatrist, Lacan’s first texts started appearing in the late 1920s (during the course of his psychiatric studies), with his publishing activity really taking off in the subsequent decade. The 1930s see several early Lacanian milestones: the publication, in 1932, of his doctoral thesis in psychiatry, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (On Paranoid Psychosis in its Relations with the Personality); collaborations with the Surrealist and Dadaist artistic movements in whose midsts he circulated as a familiar fellow traveler; entry into analytic training, including a didactic analysis with Rudolph Lowenstein; attendance at Alexandre Kojève’s renowned seminars on G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; the first presentation of the now-famous theory of the “mirror stage” at the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) conference at Marienbad in 1936 (a presentation truncated by Freud’s friend and biographer, then-IPA President Ernest Jones); and, the appearance, in the Encyclopédie française in 1938, of a substantial essay on a sizable swathe of analytic topics entitled Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie (“The Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual: Attempt at an Analysis of a Function in Psychology”). This crucial period of Lacan’s development, as the immediately preceding already indicates, was marked by the collision of interests and influences related to psychoanalysis, psychiatry, philosophy, art, and literature, among other areas. More specifically, the robustly interdisciplinary combination that came together for Lacan at this time of Freudian analysis, Hegelian dialectics, Kojèvian pedagogy, and different experiences of “madness” from numerous perspectives indelibly colors and permanently inflects the entire rest of Lacan’s intellectual itinerary.
Unsurprisingly, the Second World War was, for Lacan (and, of course, for history generally), a period of disruption and upheaval. His psychoanalytic activities were interrupted, including his training analysis (Lowenstein and Lacan did not concur about whether this analysis was well and truly completed, with Lacan deciding it was over and, somewhat controversially, never returning to Lowenstein’s couch). The War provided Lacan with an exposure to military psychiatry in both France and England, with his five-week visit to the latter acquainting him with aspects of the British psychoanalytic world (features of this visit are recounted in “British Psychiatry and the War” [1947]). A handful of important texts were composed during and after the War, all of which eventually got reprinted in Lacan’s magnum opus, Écrits (1966): “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism” (1945); “Presentation on Psychical Causality” (1946); “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” (1948); and “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (delivered in 1949 at the IPA conference in Zurich—whereas the 1936 version from Marienbad is lost, this version is the surviving one made canonical through its inclusion in Écrits).
The next decade was pivotal in Lacan’s trajectory, the time when he fully came into his own as a leading analytic thinker of great originality and immense import. A veritable explosion of Lacanian material was unleashed during this period, including seven annual seminars and many of the most celebrated essays subsequently collected in the nine-hundred-page Écrits (a number of these were hyper-condensed distillations of the results of the annual seminars). At the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, Lacan became initiated into and conversant with the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and his inheritors such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson. Lévi-Strauss’s 1949 book The Elementary Structures of Kinship helped launch the French structuralist movement that flourished during the 1950s and 1960s, an orientation that challenged the theoretical primacy of existentialism in France. Lévi-Strauss “structuralized” anthropology, as Roland Barthes did for literary-cultural studies and Louis Althusser for Marxism. Up through the end of the 1950s—in 1959–1960, a fundamental reorienting shift arguably occurred in Lacan’s thinking—Lacan fairly can be portrayed as likewise structuralizing Freudian psychoanalysis. He did so under the banner of a “return to Freud” according to which, as his most famous dictum has it, “the unconscious is structured like a language” (l’inconscient est structuré comme un langage). Lacan portrayed himself as the lone defender of a Freudian orthodoxy in danger of being eclipsed by its alleged abandonment and betrayal in the post-Freudian analytic universe, particularly Anglo-American ego psychology as consolidated by the troika of Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Lacan’s former analyst Lowenstein. Lacan adamantly maintained that a Saussurian-assisted recovery of the overriding significance of language for analysis both clinical and metapsychological is the key to faithfully carrying forward Freud’s revolutionary approach to psychical subjectivity. All of this was announced in detail in the lengthy founding manifesto of Lacanianism, the 1953 écrit “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (often referred to as the “Rome Discourse” because of where it was delivered). This manifesto coincided with Lacan’s participation in an exodus from his former analytic institute, the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse (SPP), and the founding of a new institute, the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). The SPP’s move to a medicalized model of analytic training (as per the scientistic psychiatric paradigm that was dominant in the institutes of the English-speaking world) was one of the main precipitators of the departure of the breakaway faction that founded the SFP.
Also in 1953, Lacan conducted his first annual seminar addressing Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953–1954). Lacan continued giving these right up until shortly before his death, with le Séminaire running continuously for twenty-seven years. As was the case with Kojève, Lacan exerted his influence primarily through his oral teachings. The first decade of le Séminaire (1953–1963) was taught at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne and had an audience consisting mostly of psychoanalysts. For reasons I will explain shortly, Lacan, in 1964, moved his seminar first to the École Normale Supérieure (1964–1969) and then to the Faculty of Law across from the Panthéon (1969–1980). From 1964 onwards, Lacan’s audience startlingly increased in both sheer numbers and breadth of backgrounds, with artists and academics from various disciplines across academia joining the more clinically-minded attendees. Le Séminaire became a nodal Parisian intellectual institution, a kind of hub attracting some of the brightest stars of the post-War French cultural firmament. For instance, such philosophers as Jean Hyppolite, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva spent time in Lacan’s audience. In his seminars, Lacan deftly maneuvered within and between a multitude of theoretical currents, putting psychoanalysis into conversation with the history of philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, and, as already indicated, just about every discipline represented in the university. All of the major French philosophers of the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s engaged with Freudian analysis in one way or another, and all of them did so in fashions varyingly informed by Lacan’s teachings.
The 1960s were a highly productive and equally tumultuous era in Lacan’s history. In his seventh seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), Lacan took a sort of turn fateful for the direction of his later trajectory, initiating an interrogation of the ways in which language was privileged by his 1950s “return to Freud.” The immediately prior years tirelessly emphasized the essential role of the register of the Symbolic, namely, the pride of place of analytically modified versions of Saussurian signifiers in the structures and dynamics of the unconscious and speaking subjectivity (in the 1930s and 1940s, the phenomenal-visual register of the Imaginary was to the fore thanks to the focus on the mirror stage). At the end of the 1950s, with the rise of the Real as the register of a new focus of Lacan’s thinking—I will say more about Lacan’s tripartite register theory subsequently (see 2.1 below)—things and phenomena escaping, resisting, or thwarting the signifying powers of the socio-linguistic symbolic order became ever more central in Lacanian theory. These things and phenomena include Otherness, drives, jouissance, and objet petit a, among other Lacanian concepts (see 2.3, 2.4.2, and 2.4.3 below). This 1959–1960 seminar defensibly can be depicted as a prescient post-structuralist text avant la lettre.
An earthquake in Lacan’s professional and personal histories hit him in 1963. For ten years (1953–1963), the SFP, following its creation after the defections from the SPP, was being scrutinized at length by the IPA as a training institute applying for IPA membership. To cut a long story short, the IPA ended up offering the SFP an ultimatum: It could be admitted only if Lacan was struck from its list of training analysts. Lacan’s non-standard “variable-length sessions,” deviating from the fixed-length session rules of IPA orthodoxy, was the main reason for the IPA’s withholding of its recognition from him. The SFP accepted this condition, stripping Lacan of his standing within it. In the aftermath of what he understandably experienced as a deeply wounding betrayal, he abandoned his original plans for a 1963–1964 seminar on The Names-of-the-Father (only its opening session of November 20, 1963 was given), relocated his teaching from the Hôpital Sainte-Anne to the École Normale Supérieure, and conducted his deservedly renowned eleventh seminar of 1964, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (with Lacan identifying these four concepts as the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive). This seminar’s opening session involved Lacan discussing his SFP-brokered “excommunication” from the IPA, with him comparing himself to Baruch Spinoza and the latter’s expulsion from the Jewish community for being a heretic. However traumatic this blow, it seemed to prompt Lacan to come even more into his own, to forge a distinctly Lacanian battery of ideas and terms—and this by contrast with the more familiar Freudian language and apparatus of the first decade of le Séminaire (1953–1963). Although not without many precedents in his prior work, a Lacanianism distinct from Freudianism began to emerge clearly into view in the mid-1960s. In the shadow of his rejection by the IPA and departure from the SFP, Lacan founded his own analytic organization, the École freudienne de Paris. This new institutional framework (and freedom) provided him with a setting in which to experiment with novel approaches to analytic teaching and training.
In 1966, Lacan’s hulking tome Écrits was published by Éditions du Seuil. Prior to this, Lacan had published only a single book, his thesis in psychiatry (1932). The nine-hundred-page Écrits gathered together many of Lacan’s most important articles and essays into a single volume, covering a thirty-year stretch from 1936 to 1966. These “writings” provide very daunting and demanding paths of entry into Lacanian thinking (the annual seminars are comparatively more reader-friendly and transparent). Although the Écrits bear no small portion of responsibility for Lacan’s reputation as a “difficult” (if not deliberately obscurantist) thinker, this book became a bestseller upon its initial release in France. Its success elevated Lacan into his fame as the French Freud in the eyes of France’s reading public. During this time, Lacan’s audience for le Séminaire continued to swell, with his influence growing to cover ever-wider circles of Paris-centered intellectual and cultural life.
Throughout his career, Lacan exhibited a serious interest in various branches of mathematical and formal disciplines. This goes as far back as the 1940s, with the recourse to game theory in “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty.” The turn to structuralism at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s reinforced these formalistic tendencies, with Lacan, in the 1950s, already drawing upon not only game theory, Lévi-Straussian anthropology, and Jakobsonian phonology, but also the history of mathematics and topology. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, more and more diagrams, graphs, and symbolizations appeared peppered throughout Lacan’s lectures and writings, testifying to a steadily intensifying trend toward formalization. By the late 1960s and, especially, the 1970s, discussions of logic, topology, and knot theory were prominent (sometimes even dominant) features of Lacanian discourse. In relation to Lacan, the 1970s could be characterized as the decade of the “matheme,” Lacan’s neologism for a unit of formalization (qua a mathematical-style symbolization) distilling and fixing the core significance of a specific Lacanian analytic concept-term. Lacan hoped thereby to avoid being misinterpreted in the ways that Freud’s deceptively accessible employments of natural language allegedly allowed most non-Lacanian post-Freudians to perpetrate. Additionally, topology, as a science of surfaces, provided Lacan with resources for his regular assaults on the crude, popular images of psychoanalysis as a “depth psychology,” with these images relying upon the simplistic two- and three-dimensional Euclidean spaces of spontaneous picture thinking. Topological figures and constructions undermining the intuitions of this picture thinking assisted Lacan in recasting the unconscious as an ensemble of contortions, curvings, folding, inflections, twists, and turns immanent and internal to a single plane of minded subjectivity accessible to rigorous, rational (psycho)analysis.
In addition to the pursuit of formalization via mathemes, the seminars of the final decade of Lacan’s teachings also were preoccupied with reflections on his register theory, especially the register of the Real, and sexual difference (reflections often intertwined with each other). The program of formalization ostensibly enabled Lacan to reveal with exactitude the precise limits of the sayable and the representable, thereby touching upon the Real through showing what is not pinned down fully and adequately within the coordinates of the accessible, familiar “reality” co-constituted through the other two registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic (see 2.1 below). Various aspects and facets of things sexual came to be associated by the later Lacan with the enigmatic evasiveness of the Real, including sexual difference. In one of his most famous seminars, the twentieth (Encore, 1972–1973), he theorized sexual difference as “sexuation,” depicting the non-biological, denaturalized subject-positions of masculinity and femininity in terms of formal logic. Therein, he purported to uncover an inherent, ineliminable structural discrepancy/gap separating the sexes, an inescapable condemnation of sexed subjects to being essentially, necessarily out-of-sync with each other (and even with themselves as split subjects). Lacan summarized this with an infamous one-liner: “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” (There is no sexual relationship). This declaration scandalized many at the time. Moreover, the twentieth seminar in particular as well as connected portions of Lacan’s corpus from this same period served as powerful catalysts for crucial developments in French feminist thinking during the 1970s.
In 1980, near the end of his life, Lacan saw fit to disband his school, the École freudienne. This decision was controversial and triggered factional infighting amongst his followers. Lacan died in 1981. His son-in-law and editor of le Séminaire, Jacques-Alain Miller—when he was a student of Althusser’s at the ENS, Miller met Lacan for the first time in 1964 as an attendee of Lacan’s eleventh seminar—founded the École de la Cause freudienne as a successor to the École freudienne on the heels of the latter’s “dissolution.” Miller has since retained publishing control over Lacan’s texts, editing the Champ freudien book series in which official “established” versions of the annual seminars and other Lacanian writings appear.
2. Fundamental Concepts
2.1 Register Theory
The theory of the three registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real forms the skeletal framework for the various concepts and phases of most of Lacan’s intellectual itinerary. His characterizations of each of the three registers, as well as of their relations with each other, undergo multiple revisions and shifts over the many years of his labors. As will become increasingly evident in what follows, the majority of Lacanian concepts are defined in connection with all three registers. By the 1970s, with his meditations on the topological figure of the Borromean knot—this knotting of three rings, pictured on the coat of arms of the Borromeo family, is arranged such that if one ring is broken, all three are set free in disconnection—Lacan emphasizes the mutual dependence of the registers on one another. Hence, loosely speaking, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real can be thought of as the three fundamental dimensions of psychical subjectivity à la Lacan. Furthermore, scholars sometimes segment Lacan’s evolution into three main periods, with each period being distinguished by the priority of one of the registers: the early Lacan of the Imaginary (1930s and 1940s), the middle Lacan of the Symbolic (1950s), and the late Lacan of the Real (1960s and 1970s). However, such a neat and clean periodization should be taken with several grains of salt, since intricate continuities and discontinuities not conforming to this early-middle-late schema are to be found across the entire lengthy span of Lacan’s teachings.
2.1.1 The Imaginary
Lacan tends to associate (albeit not exclusively) the Imaginary with the restricted spheres of consciousness and self-awareness. It is the register with the closest links to what people experience as non-psychoanalytic quotidian reality. Who and what one “imagines” other persons to be, what one thereby “imagines” they mean when communicatively interacting, who and what one “imagines” oneself to be, including from the imagined perspectives of others—all of the preceding is encompassed under the heading of this register. Such a description indicates the ways in which the Imaginary points to core analytic ideas like transference, fantasy, and the ego. In particular, the Imaginary is central to Lacan’s account(s) of ego-formation (as per the mirror stage—see 2.2 below).
As Lacan integrates his early work of the 1930s and 1940s with his structuralism-informed theories of the 1950s, he comes to emphasize the dependence of the Imaginary on the Symbolic. This dependency means that more sensory-perceptual phenomena (images and experiences of one’s body, affects as consciously lived emotions, envisionings of the thoughts and feelings of others, etc.) are shaped, steered, and (over)determined by socio-linguistic structures and dynamics. With the growing importance of the Real in the 1960s and the Borromean knots of the 1970s, it becomes clear that Lacan conceives of the Imaginary as bound up with both of the other two registers (incidentally, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, when taken together as mutually integrated, constitute the field of “reality,” itself contrasted with the Real). In fact, it could be maintained that the Imaginary invariably involves category mistakes. More specifically, it is the register in which the other two registers are mistaken for each other: What is Real is misrecognized as Symbolic (for example, as in particular sorts of obsessional-neurotic and paranoid-psychotic symptoms, certain meaningless contingent occurrences at the level of the material world of non-human objects are viewed as though they were meaningful signs full of deep significance to be deciphered and interpreted) and what is Symbolic is misrecognized as Real (for example, as in psychosomatic-type “conversion symptoms,” unconscious mental conflicts encoded in language and ideas are suffered as bodily afflictions and ailments).
With his choice of the word “imaginary,” Lacan indeed intends to designate that which is fictional, simulated, virtual, and the like. However, the phenomena of the Imaginary are necessary illusions (to put it in Kantian locution) or real abstractions (to put it in Marxian parlance). This signals two points. First, as one of Lacan’s three basic, essential registers, the Imaginary is an intrinsic, unavoidable dimension of the existences of speaking psychical subjects; just as an analysis cannot (and should not try to) rid the analysand of his/her unconscious, so too is it neither possible nor desirable to liquidate the illusions of this register. Second, the fictional abstractions of the Imaginary, far from being merely “unreal” as ineffective, inconsequential epiphenomena, are integral to and have very concrete effects upon actual, factual human realities.
2.1.2 The Symbolic
The Lacanian Symbolic initially is theorized on the basis of resources provided by structuralism. Tied to natural languages as characterized by Saussure and specific post-Saussurians, this register also refers to the customs, institutions, laws, mores, norms, practices, rituals, rules, traditions, and so on of cultures and societies (with these things being entwined in various ways with language). Lacan’s phrase “symbolic order,” which encompasses all of the preceding, can be understood as roughly equivalent to what Hegel designates as “objective spirit.” This non-natural universe is an elaborate set of inter-subjective and trans-subjective contexts into which individual human beings are thrown at birth (along the lines of Heideggerian Geworfenheit), a pre-existing order preparing places for them in advance and influencing the vicissitudes of their ensuing lives.
According to Lacan, one of the (if not the) most significant and indispensable conditions of possibility for singular subjectivity is the collective symbolic order (sometimes named “the big Other,” a phrase to be unpacked further shortly—see 2.3 below). Individual subjects are what they are in and through the mediation of the socio-linguistic arrangements and constellations of the register of the Symbolic. Especially during the period of the “return to Freud,” the analytic unconscious (qua “structured like a language”) is depicted as kinetic networks of interlinked signifiers (i.e., “signifying chains”). Rendered thusly, the unconscious, being of a Symbolic (anti-)nature in and of itself, is to be interpretively engaged with via the Symbolic medium of speech, namely, the very substance of the being-in-itself of the speaking subject (parlêtre) of the unconscious. Furthermore, the Lacanian unconscious is structured like “un langage” and not “une langue.” Although both French words translate into English as “language,” the former (langage) refers to logics and structures of syntax and semantics not necessarily specific to particular natural languages, whereas the latter (langue), which also could be translated into English as “tongue,” does refer to the notion of a natural language. Hence, Lacan is not saying that the unconscious is structured like French, German, English, Spanish, or any other particular natural language.
Although the register of the Symbolic comes to the fore only with Lacan’s structuralist phase of the 1950s, it arguably is not without its precursors in his earlier texts. Already in 1938, the idea of the “complex” in the encyclopedia article on “The Family Complexes” anticipates how Lacan recasts the Freudian Oedipus complex via Lévi-Straussian structural anthropology. Similarly, the prisoners’ dilemma scenario narrated in 1945’s “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” illustrates how a formal, game-theoretic apparatus governs the lived experiences of subjects inserted into it. Moreover, the 1949 écrit on “The Mirror Stage” hints at the enabling background presence of a socio-symbolic milieu (incarnated first and foremost by parental caregivers) as the trigger prompting the child’s identification with mirrored images of him/her-self (as I will discuss subsequently here, this hint is expanded and embellished upon by Lacan in 1960s-era revisions of the mirror stage—see 2.2 below).
Despite the rise to prominence of the register of the Real beginning around 1959–1960, the Symbolic continues to play pivotal roles in Lacan’s teachings right up until the start of the 1980s. For instance, in Seminar XVII (1969–1970) and the contemporaneous interview “Radiophonie,” Lacan forges his theory of the “four discourses” (those of the “master”, “university,” “hysteric,” and “analyst”) to reflect the interlinked permutations of multiple kinds of “social links” configuring the relations between speaking subjects. More generally, the later Lacan remains reliant on the notion of the Real sides of the Symbolic, these being signifiers in their meaningless, nonsensical materiality as visible marks and audible sounds (i.e., “letters” in Lacan’s technical sense)—and this by contrast with the Imaginary sides of the Symbolic, in which signifiers are paired with signifieds to form meaningful, significant signs (à la Saussure’s classic explanation of successful communication via natural language). Such senseless signifiers and their enchainings amount to a late Lacanian rendition of Freudian primary processes as the thinking distinctive of unconscious mindedness.
When Lacan mentions “structure,” a word to which he has frequent recourse, he usually is thinking of his register of the Symbolic. Between the periods of his “return to Freud” and later teachings, Lacan reconsiders and alters what is conceptualized under the heading of the “like a language” (comme un langage) part of his fundamental claim that, “the unconscious is structured like a language.” However, from the 1950s until his death, his specific rendition of Freud’s discovery consistently holds to the thesis that, “the unconscious is structured.” That is to say, the unconscious, as bound up with that which is Symbolic, is an intricate, labyrinthine web of ideational representations interconnected in multiple sophisticated manners. Contrary to the crudeness of commonplace vulgar picturings of Freudian analysis as an irrationalist, neo-romantic psychology of the unruly natural depths, the unconscious is not the id, namely, an anarchic seething cauldron of unthinking animalistic instincts (i.e., something unstructured).
2.1.3 The Real
The register of the Real is tricky to encapsulate and evades being pinned down through succinct definitions. Lacan’s numerous and shifting pronouncements apropos the Real are themselves partly responsible for this absence of straightforwardness. But, rather than being just a barrier to grasping the Real, this absence is itself revelatory of this register. To be more precise, as that which is foreign to Imaginary-Symbolic reality—this reality is the realm containing conscious apprehension, communicable significance, and the like—the Real is intrinsically elusive, resisting by nature capture in the comprehensibly meaningful formulations of concatenations of Imaginary-Symbolic signs. It is, as Lacan stresses again and again, an “impossibility” vis-à-vis reality.
Lacan’s earliest employments of the term “Real” use it to refer to material being(s) an sich, namely, to physical existents handled as roughly equivalent to Kant’s things-in-themselves. The Real hence would be whatever is beyond, behind, or beneath phenomenal appearances accessible to the direct experiences of first-person awareness. This characterization of the Real persists into the first versions of Lacan’s mature register theory as initially elaborated throughout the 1950s. During this decade of the “return to Freud,” the Real also gets connected to Lacan’s contemporaneously emerging conceptions of psychosis and Otherness (the latter to be addressed soon—see 2.3 below). Additionally, in the 1950s, Lacan tends to speak of the Real as an absolute fullness, a pure plenum devoid of the negativities of absences, antagonisms, gaps, lacks, splits, etc. Portrayed thusly, the Symbolic is primarily responsible for injecting such negativities into the Real. For instance, only though the powers of language can material being in itself be said to be “missing” things, since, on its own, this dimension of being always is simply whatever it is in its dumb, idiotic presence as never more and never less than sheer, indifferent plenitude.
As I noted above, the seventh seminar of 1959–1960 marks a shift away from the privileging of the Symbolic over the course of the 1950s and toward prioritizing the Real. The Real prior to Seminar VII tends to be depicted in non-dialectical and/or quasi-Kantian terms. Although Kant is one of the main explicit foci during this academic year, Lacan’s sustained reformulation of the Real in this seminar introduces quasi-Hegelian dialectical features into it, thereby nuancing and complicating his ideas about this register. The new Real involves convergences of opposites as a register of volatile oscillations and unstable reversals between excesses and lacks, surpluses and deficits, flooding presences and draining absences. In the seventh seminar, Lacan puts forward the figure of the mother as the key analytic referent justifying this rendition of the Real (a figure he relates to another figure, that of “the Lady” in the courtly love tradition). In the beginning of the psychical-libidinal subject’s ontogentic life history, the maternal caretaker is, at one and the same time, both overwhelmingly, stiflingly present or near and, in her strange, impenetrable alterity, also frustratingly, uncontrollably absent or inaccessible; there is either too much or too little of her, never the right balanced amount. With the passage of time and the temporal transformations of the libidinal economy, the mother, as this archaic Real Other, becomes the forever unattainable “Sovereign Good,” the fixed vanishing point, of all desiring (what Lacan calls, in dialogue with the history of philosophy as well as Freud, “das Ding” [la Chose, the Thing]).
Throughout the 1960s and up through the end of Lacan’s teachings, the Real takes on an ever increasing number of aspects and connotations. It becomes both a transcendence troubling and thwarting Imaginary-Symbolic reality and its language from without as well as an immanence perturbing and subverting reality/language from within. It comes to be associated with libidinal negativities (objet petit a, jouissance, and sexual difference, all to be discussed later—see 2.3, 2.4.2, and 2.4.3 below), material meaninglessness both linguistic (see 2.1.2 above) and non-linguistic, contingent traumatic events, unbearable bodily intensities, anxiety, and death.
As regards the unconscious as the principle concern of psychoanalysis, the later Lacan combines his earlier emphasis on socio-linguistic formations (à la “the unconscious is structured like a language”) with a subsequent stress on forces and factors internal but irreducible to these formations. After the 1950s, Real dimensions are added to the unconscious, with its Symbolic dimensions being made to orbit around black holes of unsymbolizability impossible to represent via the signifier-like ideational representations (Freud’s Vorstellungen) of the language-like sides of the unconscious. Nonetheless, the rise of the Real in Lacan’s teachings does not amount to him converting to any sort of analytic recapitulation of mysticisms or negative theologies. Instead, for Lacan, analysis both theoretical and clinical permits delineating and tracking the Real with conceptual precision, if only as an exercise in pinpointing the exact limits of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and their overlappings.
2.2 The Mirror Stage, the Ego, and the Subject
The account of the mirror stage is perhaps Lacan’s most famous theoretical contribution (maybe even more famous than the well-known thesis apropos the unconscious as “structured like a language”). Initially developed in the 1930s, this account involves a number of interrelated ingredients. Lacan offers the narrative of this stage as an explanation specifically for the genesis and functions of the Freudian psychical agency of the ego (Ich, moi). One of the psychoanalytic and philosophical upshots of the mirror stage, a crucial one in Lacan’s eyes, is that the ego is an object rather than a subject. In other words, the ego, despite conscious senses to the contrary, is not a locus of autonomous agency, the seat of a free, true “I” determining its own fate. This portrait of the ego-as-object is at the heart of Lacan’s lifelong critical polemics against Anglo-American ego psychology, with the ego psychologists seeking to strengthen their patients’ egos by appealing to supposed autonomous and “conflict-free” sides of these psychical agencies. Against this, Lacan views the ego as thoroughly compromised and inherently neurotic to its very core, as a passionate defense of a constitutive ignorance of the unconscious.
To stay at this more general metapsychological level for a little while longer, Lacan eventually forges, partly on the basis of the mirror stage, a distinction between the ego (moi) and the subject (sujet, a word freighted with philosophical baggage—Lacan knowingly adds this word and its philosophical vocabulary to analytic discourse, although Freud did not speak of “the subject” and was wary of philosophy). Appearances notwithstanding, the ego is, when all is said and done, an inert, fixed bundle of objectified coordinates, a libidinally invested and reified entity. By contrast with the ego and the illusory sense of fictional selfhood it supports, the psychoanalytic subject of Lacanianism is an unconscious kinetic negativity defying capture by and within ego-level identificatory constructs. The Lacanian enunciating subject of the unconscious speaks through the ego while remaining irreducibly distinct from it.
Returning to a tighter focus on the mirror stage proper, Lacan, relying on empirical data from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, posits that very young children, between the ages of six and eighteen months, quickly acquire the ability to identify their own images in reflective surfaces. At this time, infants are lacking in most physical and mental abilities possessed by older human beings. Prior to Lacan, Freud already highlights how a biologically dictated prematurational helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) naturally predestines the human being to the predominance of social nurture over material nature due to the protracted period of total reliance on other persons for one’s life-or-death vital requirements. Following Freud here, Lacan fleshes out this helplessness into which birth throws neonates, describing in detail the anatomical, physiological, cognitive, emotional, and motivational facets of this natural condition of post-birth prematurity.
This initial state of helpless “motor impotence and nursling dependence” entails the infant experiencing a swirl of negative affects: anxiety, distress, frustration, and so on. To the young child, motivated by these negative affects, a crucial component of the enthralling lure exerted by the fascinating image of his/her body is this image’s promise that he/she can overcome his/her Hilflosigkeit and be a unified, pulled-together whole, an integrated, coordinated totality like the bigger, more mature others he/she sees around him/her-self (however, according to Lacan, individuals spend their entire lives, beginning thusly, chasing in vain after an unattainable state of harmony and mastery first falsely promised by the mirror). This imago-Gestalt of virtual wholeness, identified with by the infant in a jubilant moment of “Aha!,” lays down the imagistic nucleus of the thereafter ontogenetically accreting ego as a series of self-objectifications in images and, soon after with the event of language acquisition, words too.
For Lacan, identification with the imago-Gestalt of the moi entails alienation—and this for additional reasons over and above those given in the preceding paragraphs. Already in the 1949 écrit on the mirror stage, mention is made of “some prop, human or artificial” supporting the infant as he/she gazes into the mirror and looks at him/her-self. In 1949, Lacan seems to think of this prop more as artificial than human, referring to the “trotte-bébé” (walker) leaned on by the child. But, in subsequent revisitations of the mirror stage during the 1960s, Lacan dramatically highlights the supporting role of fellow human beings instead. In so doing, he argues that the infant is encouraged to identify with the mirror image as “me” by verbal and gestural prompts issuing from the bigger other(s) holding him/her up in front of the reflective surface (for example, the utterance “That’s you there!” accompanied by pointing and grinning). This later shift of emphasis has two crucial consequences. First, the Imaginary register of the mirror does not precede the Symbolic register of language and sociality in a linear chronology of developmental stages (as the earlier text of “The Mirror Stage” might be at risk of suggesting); if anything, socio-linguistic variables (for instance, the words and body language of parents) are the causal triggers of the child’s investment in select sensory-perceptual experiences (such as the body image in the mirror). Second, this means that the imagistic nucleus of the ego is suffused from the get-go with the destinal “discourse of the Other”—in this case, fateful significations (in Lacanese, “unary traits”) coming from caregivers’ narratives articulated simultaneously along with their encouragements to the child to recognize him/her-self in the mirror (“What a handsome boy!,” “What a beautiful girl!,” “You’re going to grow up to be big and strong, just like your daddy,” etc.).
As a result of all of the above, Lacan considers the recognition that happens in the mirror stage to amount to “misrecognition” (méconnaissance). This likewise holds throughout life for all ensuing experiences of “recognizing” oneself as being a particular kind of “I,” namely, taking qua imagining oneself to be a certain sort of ego-level self (apropos Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, it always pays to remember William Wordsworth’s line, “The child is the father of the man”). The ego is not only a congealed, heteronomous object rather than fluid, autonomous subject, but also, in its very origins, a repository for the projected desires and fantasies of larger others; the child’s image is a receptacle for his/her parents’ dreams and wishes, with his/her body image being always-already overwritten by signifiers flowing from the libidinal economies of other speaking beings. Hence, recognizing the ego as “me,” as embodying and representing an authentic, private, unique selfhood that is most genuinely my own, is tantamount to misrecognizing that, at root, the ego ultimately is an alienating foreign introject through which I am seduced and subjected by others’ conscious and unconscious wants and machinations. To borrow one of Lacan’s many neologisms, the ego ultimately is something “extimate” (i.e., intimately exterior, an internal externality) insofar as it crystallizes “the desire of the Other” (qua others’ conscious and unconscious wants and machinations). Or, as the Lacan of the eleventh seminar would put it, there is something in the me more than the me itself to the extent that this moi essentially is a coagulation of inter-subjective and trans-subjective alien influences.
Finally, Lacan’s utilization of the idea of the mirror is not exclusively literal. Although he often talks of mirrors as shiny reflective surfaces, he does not limit mirroring to being a visible physical phenomenon alone. Most importantly, other persons’ speech, gestures, postures, moods, facial expressions, and so on frequently can be said to “mirror” back to one an “image” of oneself, namely, a conveyed sense of how one “appears” from other perspectives.
2.3 Otherness, the Oedipus Complex, and Sexuation
Throughout his teachings, Lacan regularly utilizes the terms “other” (with a lower-case o) and “Other” (with a capital O). Given an understanding of Lacan’s register theory and the mirror stage (see 2.1 and 2.2 above), these terms can be clarified with relative ease and brevity. The lower-case-o other designates the Imaginary ego and its accompanying alter-egos. By speaking of the ego itself as an “other,” Lacan further underscores its alien and alienating status as spelled out in the immediately preceding sub-section here (see 2.2 above). Additionally, when relating to others as alter-egos, one does so on the basis of what one “imagines” about them (often imagining them to be “like me,” to share a set of lowest-common-denominator thoughts, feelings, and inclinations making them comprehensible to me). These transference-style imaginings are fictions taming and domesticating the mysterious, unsettling foreignness of one’s conspecifics, thereby rendering social life tolerable and navigable.
The capital-O Other refers to two additional types of otherness corresponding to the registers of the Symbolic and the Real. The first type of Other is Lacan’s “big Other” qua symbolic order, namely, the overarching “objective spirit” of trans-individual socio-linguistic structures configuring the fields of inter-subjective interactions. Relatedly, the Symbolic big Other also can refer to (often fantasmatic/fictional) ideas of anonymous authoritative power and/or knowledge (whether that of God, Nature, History, Society, State, Party, Science, or the analyst as the “subject supposed to know” [sujet supposé savoir] as per Lacan’s distinctive account of analytic transference). But, as already becomes evident in Lacan’s first few annual seminars of the early 1950s, there also is a Real dimension to Otherness. This particular incarnation of the Real, about which Lacan goes into greatest detail when addressing both love and psychosis, is the provocative, perturbing enigma of the Other as an unknowable “x,” an unfathomable abyss of withdrawn-yet-proximate alterity (in his 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, to which Lacan refers repeatedly, Freud depicts this alterity in the guise of the Nebenmensch als Ding [Neighbor-as-Thing]).
For Lacan, the Freudian Oedipus complex stages the drama of the child’s laborious struggles to situate him/her-self vis-à-vis all three register-theoretic dimensions of Otherness. Thanks particularly to what he takes from his engagements with structuralism, Lacan, throughout his career, is careful to avoid a pseudo-Freudian reification of the bourgeois nuclear family, with a mother and father biologically sexed female and male respectively. The maternal and paternal Oedipal personas are psychical-subjective positions, namely, socio-cultural (i.e., non-natural, non-biological) roles that potentially can be played by any number of possible persons of various sexes/genders.
That noted, in the Lacanian version of the Oedipus complex, the maternal figure initially features for the infant as a Real Other (i.e., the Nebenmensch als Ding)—more specifically, as an obscure omnipotent presence who is the source of all-important love (more will be said about Lacan’s concept of love—see 2.4.1 below). But, because of the combination of her obscurity and importance, the mother qua Real Other also is a source of deeply unsettling anxiety for the very young child. She seemingly threatens her offspring with being alternately too smothering or too withdrawn, too much or not enough. In his/her anxiousness about controlling the ultimately uncontrollable presence (and absence) of this mysterious and indispensable maternal Other, the child confronts the question, “What does the (m)Other want?” The infant’s gradual formation of an ego as per the temporally elongated processes delineated in Lacan’s account of the mirror stage (see 2.2 above) is, in part, a response to this riddle (albeit in a broader sense, with the child constructing an ego-level identity informed by the perceived wants of Others in addition to the mother, such as the father).
In relation to the immediately preceding, Lacan’s Oedipal father is an Other with both Symbolic and Real faces. On the Symbolic side, the paternal figure represents the answer to the question, “What does the maternal Other want?” In Lacan’s terminology, the child’s alighting upon the paternal third party in the family romance of the Oedipal social triangle as the solution to the puzzle of the maternal figure’s enigmatic intentionality amounts to “the desire of the mother,” as an unknown, being replaced by “the paternal metaphor.” Directly connected to this, Lacan (re)defines the phallus (which is not the penis) as the structural function of whatever “x” the child hypothesizes the paternal figure possesses making him the focus of the maternal figure’s desire, that is, the possession enabling the father to domesticate and control the mother’s otherwise unpredictable desire. Also at the level of the Symbolic, the paternal function involves bringing to bear within the child’s familial sphere the disciplinary and prohibitory features of the family’s enveloping symbolic order as their socio-linguistic milieu (this entails such impositions as weaning, toilet training, exogamy, and “castration” in the Freudian-Lacanian sense—see 2.4.1 below). As for Real Otherness here, this would be the version of the paternal figure mythically portrayed by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913), namely, the tyrannical, enjoying-without-restraints “primal father” (Urvater) of the savage fraternal horde, the exception to the otherwise universal law of (symbolic) castration. This Real Urvater arguably is a fantasy-construct generated in and by the Oedipus complex, with the child imagining an obscene, dark, jouissance-saturated underbelly behind the Symbolic façade of paternal authority and its rules.
The child’s identifications with maternal and paternal Others are distributed across Real and Symbolic dimensions. However, different subjects-in-formation distribute their identifications differently. Freud, in his reconsiderations of earlier renditions of the Oedipus complex, came to highlight an asymmetry between Oedipal dynamics for young boys and girls, repudiating the idea of girls undergoing an “Electra complex” as the symmetrical counterpart to the Oedipus complex. Skipping over a lot of details and cutting a long story short, the later Lacan, when taking up the topic of sexual difference, preserves this Freudian emphasis on asymmetry. In this vein, Lacan introduces the idea of sexuation as the Real of sexual difference, namely, as an impenetrable, opaque facticity of this difference continually prompting and yet perpetually resisting being adequately translated into the terms of Imaginary and Symbolic realities. As neither biologically given sex nor socially constructed gender, the Real of sexuation is what is responsible for the absence of an exhaustively representable, symbolizable natural and/or cultural relationship between sexuated positions (as per Lacan’s statement, “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel”). The structural-psychical positions of masculinity and femininity embody constitutively out-of-synch and inherently incommensurable subjective stances, incompatible (yet interacting) arrangements of distinct sorts of libidinal economies.
2.4 The Libidinal Economy
Freud’s metapsychology of the libidinal economy, of the underlying motivational mechanisms of psychical life, is grounded on his theory of drive (Trieb, and not Instinkt, despite many English mistranslations of Trieb as “instinct”). Lacan elaborates upon and extends this Freudian theoretical framework. In the process, he reworks some of Freud’s concepts and adds other concepts of his own.
2.4.1 Need-Demand-Desire and Castration
Need, demand, and desire form a conceptual-terminological triad in Lacanian theory. Needs are biologically innate vital requirements for the human being as a living organism. Humans are born saddled with such imperatives from the very start, although, as per Freudian Hilflosigkeit, they are powerless on their own to satisfy these bodily dictates for a protracted initial period lasting well into childhood (see 2.2 above).
The combination of being prematurationally helpless but having unavoidable needs means that, over the course of physical and mental development, the infant must come to articulate its needs to bigger others. These others (as three-dimensional O/others along the lines of Lacan’s register theory—see 2.3 above) are addressed as those capable of assisting in the meeting and quelling of needs. Of course, crying, screaming, gesticulating, and the like are early expressions of needs, being the fashions in which infants prior to acquiring language per se alert the older individuals around them of their requirements. Even at this early stage, the infant is forced to rely on his/her thus-addressed significant others to interpret the “meaning” of his/her cries, screams, and gesticulations (“Ah, you’re hungry,” “Uh oh, that means you’re tired,” “So, it’s time to change your diaper,” etc.). Through these spontaneous interpretations, others, whether knowingly or not, participate with the pre-verbal child in shaping links between needs and the socially mediated significance of the expressions of needs. These others thereby lend the child’s noises and movements the significance of being “demands,” with this amounting to a kind of assistance provided over and above the assistance of meeting bare needs themselves. Now, this is not to say that there are no natural correlations whatsoever between needs and their pre-verbal expressions hardwired into babies’ behavioral repertoires. But, arguably, infants are not immediately and automatically self-consciously aware of these correlations as such, with caretakers’ responses being key aids in helping the child become explicitly cognizant of need-expression couplings.
As the infant continues maturing, soon acquiring language, the influences of others and Others (especially inter-subjective others as conveyors of the signs and signifiers of the big Other qua trans-subjective symbolic order—see 2.1.2 and 2.3 above) increasingly exert themselves on the forming of associative connections between needs and demands. For example, as part of socialization and education, parents typically begin to introduce the discipline of insisting that the child articulate his/her requirements and urges in specific manners (“Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’” “Ask nicely,” “In this household, we do not yell when we’re hungry,” and so on). The child learns that he/she must accept, internalize, and speak “the discourse of the Other” (in this instance, the parents) in order to get his/her needs recognized, acknowledged, and addressed in a satisfactory fashion. In short, he/she must make demands couched in terms and conventions imposed by O/others’ socio-symbolic regimes. Lacan maintains that natural bodily needs hence, via the inter- and trans-subjective dynamics of demand, are “overwritten” by the signifiers of an ultimately Symbolic Otherness, an overwriting through which the bases of the libidinal economy are denaturalized and subjected to socio-cultural forces and factors. Much of this beds down in the young, nascent subject’s psyche, thereafter exerting (often in unconscious ways) decisive effects on this person’s libidinal economy throughout his/her life.
In his 1958 écrit “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan provides a succinct formula for defining “desire” in relation to both need and demand. He stipulates that desire is what remains after need is subtracted from demand. What, exactly, does this equation mean? Through being translated into demands, needs come to be saddled with surpluses of more-than-biological significances; vital requirements take on the excess baggage of meanings over and above the level of brute, simple organic survival. Largely by virtue of what O/others add to the child’s experiences of needs through superimposing interpretations of these needs as socio-symbolic demands, the meeting of the child’s needs in response to his/her demands makes these needs into, first and foremost, litmus tests of where he/she stands in relation to these thus-addressed significant O/others. Being given specific items of food by a parent in response to a demand expressing hunger can indicate to the child not only that the parent understands that a need to eat has to be met, but also, and more importantly, that he/she is loved by the parent, that he/she enjoys a privileged position in relation to the parent’s attention and priorities. Lacan therefore asserts that each and every demand is, at bottom, a demand for love. Returning to the equation “demand – need = desire,” what is desired when a demand is addressed to another is not so much the meeting of the thus-expressed need, but, in addition to this, the very love of another.
Parents of children are all too familiar with seemingly endless series of demands from the little ones (“I want a sandwich,” “OK, here’s a sandwich”… “I want a lollipop,” “OK, here’s a lollipop”… “I want a new toy,” “OK, here’s a new toy”… and on and on until an exhausted parental “No” is pronounced and wearily defended against vigorous protests). Adults, whether parents or not, also are aware of a similar desiring restlessness in themselves, an inability to acquire an object or attain a success that would be “IT” (with-a-capital-I-and-T), the final be-all-and-end-all telos of wanting and wishing satisfying them for good forever after. Similarly, an adult in a romantic relationship never is content with being told that he/she is loved by the beloved only once; he/she insists upon repetitions ad infinitum of the affirmation by the significant other that, “I love you” (as if no affirmation is ever quite enough). With both children and adults, margins of dissatisfaction, perpetually resurfacing itches that never can be scratched just right, are to be explained, according to Lacan, through a clarification of the essence of the “love” demanded in all demands in excessive addition to the gratification of corresponding needs. What is being requested is an impossibility impossible on the basis of the register-theoretic version of O/otherness à la Lacanianism (see 2.1 and 2.3 above): the non-objectifiable negativity of the kinetic, slippery heart of Real Otherness (i.e., the always-on-the-move affection, focus, etc. of the Real Other’s desiring core both conscious and unconscious) being objectified as the positivity of a static, stable thing (i.e., a special object able to be gift-wrapped and handed over as part of the response to demand). Employing once again the example of hunger, while the O/other can respond to demands for food with the provision of nourishing substances answering to the need for nourishment, he/she is constitutively incapable of turning the nucleus of his/her desiring being (i.e., the non-object of his/her “love”) into one tangible object among others to be bestowed along with food and the like. As will be discussed here shortly (see 2.4.3 below), conscious and unconscious fantasies are aroused on the sides of desiring demanders—and, everyone is a desiring demander—by the necessary, inevitable dissatisfactions accompanying desires. These fantasies cover over the impossibility of bringing desires to satisfying ends. They do so by constructing scenarios in which there is a yet-to-be-(re)obtained object that really is “IT.” Moreover, in these fantasmatic scenarios, answers to questions of Real Others’ inscrutable desires (“What does the Other want, and want specifically of me?”) are staged.
As should be evident by now, the intervention of the signifiers of the symbolic order (i.e., the discourses of big Others) is integral to the genesis of the need-demand-desire triad. Through the intrusion of these signifiers cutting into both the body and mind of the young child, a proto-subjective being of need, passing through the demands of discipline (in both sense of the genitive), is transformed into a subject of desire. Such a subject is “barred”—Lacan’s matheme for the barred subject of desire is $—alienated from its natural needs and derailed onto the tracks of non-natural desires doomed never to reach enjoyable destinations. In connection with his revisions of the Oedipus complex (see 2.3 above), Lacan turns Freudian castration into “symbolic castration.” The latter, rather than being a real or imagined scene in which a specific threat to bodily integrity is issued, designates the dual somatic and psychical discombobulating effects upon the premature human animal caused by insertion into and subjection to surrounding socio-symbolic contexts, of being made to depend on the foreignness of signifiers and everything they bring with them.
2.4.2 Drive and Jouissance
In Freud’s drive theory, sublimation amounts to a drive finding a means to secure satisfaction (Befriedigung) in the face of “aim-inhibition” (i.e., a blockage of its prior path to an earlier aimed-at drive-object). But, as Lacan observes, Freud also oddly defines the aim (Ziel) of any and every drive as satisfaction. Therefore, how can a drive achieve satisfaction if its aim (defined as the achievement of satisfaction) is inhibited? Lacan’s response to this apparent Freudian contradiction is to put forward a distinction between the aim and “goal” of the drive as a metapsychological entity: While the aim of a drive can be and inevitably is inhibited, its (true) goal always is reached—and this because its goal is nothing other than enjoying the ceaseless movement of repetitively rotating around whatever blockages land on its path.
According to a certain widely accepted reading appealing to the immediately above (promoted by Slavoj Žižek and the Slovenian School of Lacanian theory), Lacan distinguishes between desire and drive. As seen (see 2.4.1 above), an essential characteristic of desire is its restlessness, its ongoing agitated searching and futile striving. No object it gets its hands on is ever quite “IT.” Whereas desire is stuck with its dissatisfied drifting from object to object and ever onward (in a structured movement akin to the “spurious/bad infinite” as per Hegel), drive derives a perverse enjoyment from this desire-fuelled libidinal circling around the vanishing point of the impossible-qua-unattainable. There where desire is frustrated, drive is gratified. Drive gains its satisfaction through vampirically feeding off of the dissatisfaction of desire.
Like the register of the Real with which it is most closely associated, jouissance, a notion that comes to the fore at the end of the 1950s, is difficult to encapsulate in succinct defining formulas. By the end of Lacan’s itinerary at the start of the 1980s, this term had taken on a plethora of significations, dividing and sub-dividing into a wide array of distinct-but-related concepts. In English-language Lacanian scholarship, jouissance almost always is left untranslated, since its English equivalent, “enjoyment,” fails to capture the specifically sexual connotations of the original French word.
The best way to begin getting a sense of what Lacan means by jouissance is through reference to the Lacanian distinction between drive and desire (see 2.4.2 above) in conjunction with select stipulations by Freud regarding the infamous death drive (Todestrieb) of Freud’s later dual drive theory (first laid out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)). Like Freud’s Todestrieb, Lacan’s jouissance is “beyond the pleasure principle” (this being another reason why the English “enjoyment,” as synonymous with pleasure, is an inappropriate translation). The post-1920 Freud muses that all drives might be said to be death drives, meaning that each and every drive perhaps works, at least in certain respects at certain times, contrary to the pursuit of the pleasurable as balance, gratification, homeostasis, satisfaction, and so on. Along these same lines, the Lacanian drive extracts “enjoyment” from the thwartings and failures of desire; whereas the latter is oriented by the tantalizingly elusive telos of pleasure qua satisfaction, the former generates its jouissance-beyond-pleasure precisely through the inhibiting of desire itself. The many possible sadistic and masochistic implications of this side of the libidinal economy are not difficult to imagine.
One of several clinical phenomena pushing Freud into dethroning the pleasure principle in 1920 as the formerly hegemonic ruler of the psyche in its entirety is “repetition compulsion” (Wiederholungszwang)—specifically, the psyche’s perplexing, spontaneous compulsive repeating of that which is painful and/or traumatic (examples of this include post-traumatic disorders, so-called “negative therapeutic reaction,” and the recurrent types of self-defeats unconsciously arranged by neurotics for themselves). One of the theoretical functions of the death drive is to account for whatever disregards or disrupts the reign of the pleasure principle as a fundamental “law” of mental life. In Lacan’s conceptual apparatus, jouissance sometimes likewise refers to an overriding force/tendency compelling repetitions of experiences or events upsetting the calm, delicate equilibrium of psychical subjectivity’s Imaginary-Symbolic reality (hence the association of jouissance with the Real).
In the process of the neonate as a biological being acquiring both an ego and a speaking subjectivity—this involves the living organism being submitted to the mediating matrices of Imaginary-Symbolic realities—the human creature supposedly loses, through symbolic castration (see 2.4.1 above), access to an immediate, undiluted jouissance in its raw, unmitigated intensities (whether this is an actual, factual occurrence in linear, chronological ontogeny or an après-coup, retrospective fantasy is a complicated issue in Lacanian theory). The jouissance presumably lost to the speaking subject returns only in the guises of what might be labeled “limit experiences,” namely, encounters with that which is annihilating, inassimilable, overwhelming, traumatic, or unbearable. Similarly, jouissance, in this vein, is related to transgressive violations, the breaching of boundaries and breaking of barriers. It is difficult, if not impossible, for the parlêtre to accommodate, tolerate, and digest. The speaking being is forced to cohabitate uneasily with its always problematic jouissance.
2.4.3 Fantasy and Object a
In line with Freud’s discussions of fantasizing in psychical life, Lacan treats fantasies, particularly those functioning at the level of fundamental formations of the unconscious, as schematizations (in a quasi-Kantian respect) of desiring subjectivity. Put differently, the wants and wishes of a particular subject are shaped and governed by a peculiar skeletal template, an idiosyncratic and paradigmatic Ur-scene, in which this desiring subject is positioned in a specific manner vis-à-vis a specific object of its desire. This fundamental template/scene is an unconscious formation operating as a transcendental condition of possibility for the subject’s libidinal economy in all its crucial, symptomatic manifestations. Lacan’s matheme for the fantasy is $ ◊ a. The $ stands for the subject of desire brought into being by the barring/splitting consequences of Others’ mediating influences (see 2.3 and 2.4.1 above).
The a stands for objet petit a, that is, object a as the “object-cause of desire.” Lacan employs this latter phrase for object a because this “object” is a spectral, virtual construct of what would qualify as “IT” for the desiring subject (see 2.4.1 above), with this libidinal-transcendental schema of desire’s object (i.e., a) “causing” select given empirical objects in a person’s libidinal-amorous history and experience to be desired as stand-ins for “IT.” However, these substitutes are always and necessarily inadequate and unsatisfactory due to an insurmountable, ineliminable gap between the more-than-empirical fantasmatic objet a originating in the subject’s unconscious past and the empirical objects present and future incarnating it. These latter objects are situated in Imaginary-Symbolic reality, condemned partially and imperfectly to embody an interminably receding and elusive surplus (i.e., the impossible-qua-Real dimension of object a).
To refer back one last time to the matheme of fantasy ($ ◊ a), the diamond-shaped “lozenge” (poinçon) ◊ can be read as a condensation of four symbols: one, ∧ (the logical symbol for conjunction [“and”]); two, ∨ (the logical symbol for disjunction [“or”]); three, > (the mathematical symbol for “greater than”); and, four, < (the mathematical symbol for “less than”). As per Lacan’s matheme, the subject’s desires are scripted and orchestrated by an unconscious fundamental fantasy in which the desiring subject ($) is positioned in relation to its corresponding object-cause of desire (a). Hence, ∧, ∨, >, and < represent, in a deliberately loose and open fashion, possible variants of this positioning of $ vis-à-vis a. Singular subjects flesh out conjunction, disjunction, being “greater than,” and being “less than” in their own styles, namely, as their unique fantasies of merger or symbiosis (conjunction), scorn or refusal (disjunction), mastery or domination (“greater than”), slavery or submission (“less than”), and any number of other possible particularizations of these four basic categories of rapport.
In some of Lacan’s earlier presentations of the mirror stage, the a serves as an abbreviation for autre (other). More precisely, in this context, a refers primarily to the little-o-other as the Imaginary ego (see 2.2 and 2.3 above). The ego is an “other,” a not-me misrecognized as “me,” insofar as it is brought into existence through a combination of an object external to the (proto-)subject (i.e., the imago-Gestalt of the body image) and the interests of Symbolic and Real Others investing this object through words and behaviors. Within the framework of the mirror stage, a (usually as a’) also designates alter-egos as the Imaginary partners with which the ego itself is inextricably intertwined, invariably defining itself through reference to these partners.
Furthermore, there indeed is a thread of continuity between the a of the mirror stage and object a: Both ego (as a) and fantasy (with its a) unconsciously are the subject’s fateful answers to the questions, “What does the Other want?” and “How must I position myself with respect to the desire of the Other?” (see 2.3 above). Lacan’s a, like the rest of his mathemes, is deliberately handled as akin to an algebraic variable. It is a placeholder for any number of particular types of determinants: what an Other desires, what I must be so as to be the object of an Other’s desire, what would at last lay to rest my restless strivings and yearnings, what would do so for a significant Other to whom I remain attached, etc. But, in all cases, a reflects Lacan’s Hegelian-Kojèvian slogan having it that, “man’s desire is the desire of the Other.”
Bibliography
Several remarks are warranted about the bibliographies of primary and secondary Lacanian literature below. As regards primary sources, only fifteen of Lacan’s twenty-six annual seminars have been published by Jacques-Alain Miller through the Champ freudien series. As of the end of 2012, the following seminars are available in official editions: I, II, III, IV, V, VII, VIII, X, XI, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, and XXIII. Of these, only seven have been published as authorized English translations by W.W. Norton and Company: I, II, III, VII, XI, XVII, and XX. The primary sources listed below are the available book-length texts by Lacan. These lists do not include various separate essay-length pieces scattered across numerous places.
As regards secondary sources, I have been highly selective in compiling the list that follows. There are mountains of literature on Lacan in multiple languages. Moreover, these bodies of scholarship cover Lacan’s ideas from a vast array of disciplinary angles. Considering the context of this overview, the secondary sources listed below are, for the most part, books in English with more of a philosophical/theoretical focus.
A. Primary Sources
Work by Lacan in French
1. 2001, Autres écrits [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Includes:
o 1938, “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie”.
o 1947, “La psychiatrie anglaise et la guerre”.
2. 1966, Écrits, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
3. 2011, Je parle aux murs: Entretiens de la chapelle de Sainte-Anne [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
4. 2005, Mon enseignement [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
5. 2007, Le mythe individuel du névrosé, ou Poésie et verité dans la névrose [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
6. 2005, Des noms-du-père [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
7. 1932, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, suivi de Premiers écrits sur la paranoïa, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
8. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan,
a. Livre I: Les écrits techniques de Freud, 1953–1954 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
b. Livre II: Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, 1954–1955 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978.
c. Livre III: Les psychoses, 1955–1956 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981.
d. Livre IV: La relation d’objet, 1956–1957 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994.
e. Livre V: Les formations de l’inconscient, 1957–1958 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998.
f. Livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation, 1958–1959 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2013.
g. Livre VII: L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959–1960 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986.
h. Livre VIII: Le transfert, 1960–1961 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001 (seconde édition corrigée).
i. Livre X: L’angoisse, 1962–1963 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004.
j. Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, 1964 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973.
k. Livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006.
l. Livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse, 1969–1970 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991.
m. Livre XVIII: D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, 1971 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006.
n. Livre XIX: …ou pire, 1971–1972 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011.
o. Livre XX: Encore, 1972–1973 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975.
p. Livre XXIII: Le sinthome, 1975–1976 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005.
9. 1973, Télévision, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
10. 2005, Le triomphe de la religion, précédé de Discours aux catholiques [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller], Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Work by Lacan in English Translation
1. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English [trans. Bruce Fink], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006. Includes:
o 1945, “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism”
o 1946, “Presentation on Psychical Causality”
o 1948, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis”
o 1949, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”
2. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne [ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose; trans. Jacqueline Rose], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1982.
3. My Teaching [trans. David Macey], London: Verso, 2008.
4. On the Names-of-the-Father [trans. Bruce Fink], Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
5. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
o Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. John Forrester], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988.
o Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Sylvana Tomaselli], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988.
o Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Russell Grigg], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993.
o Book V: Formations of the Unconscious, 1957–1958 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Russell Grigg], Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
o Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Dennis Porter], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992.
o Book XIII: Transference, 1961–1962 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Bruce Fink], Cambridge: Polity, 2015.
o Book X: Anxiety, 1962–1963 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. A.R. Price], Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
o Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Alan Sheridan], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1977.
o Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Russell Grigg], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007.
o Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. Bruce Fink], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1998.
o Book XXIII: The Sinthome, 1975–1976 [ed. Jacques-Alain Miller; trans. A.R. Price], Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
6. Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at Sainte-Anne Hospital [trans. A.R. Price], Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
7. Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment [ed. Joan Copjec], New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990.
8. The Triumph of Religion, preceded by Discourse to Catholics [trans. Bruce Fink], Cambridge: Polity, 2013.
Primary Literature by Others
1. Freud, S., 1966, Project for a Scientific Psychology, in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [ed. and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson], vol. I, London: The Hogarth Press, pp. 281–397.
2. Freud, S., 1958, Totem and Taboo, in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [ed. and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson], vol. XIII, London: The Hogarth Press, pp. ix-162.
3. Freud, S., 1955, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [ed. and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson], vol. XVIII, London: The Hogarth Press, pp. 1–64.
4. Hegel, G.W.F., 1977, Phenomenology of Spirit [trans. A.V. Miller], Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5. Kojève, A., 1969, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit [ed. Allan Bloom; trans. James H. Nichols, Jr.], Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
6. Lévi-Strauss, C., 1969, The Elementary Structures of Kinship [trans. J.H. Bell and J.R. von Sturmer], Boston: Beacon Press.
B. Secondary Literature on Lacan in English
1. Ansermet, François and Pierre Magistretti, 2007, Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity, Experience, and the Unconscious [trans. Susan Fairfield], New York: Other Press.
2. Barnard, Suzanne and Bruce Fink (eds.), 2002, Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, Albany: State University of New York Press.
3. Boothby, Richard, 1991, Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud, New York: Routledge.
4. –––, 2001, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan, New York: Routledge.
5. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 1991, Lacan: The Absolute Master [trans. Douglas Brick], Stanford: Stanford University Press.
6. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 2000, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London: Verso.
7. Chiesa, Lorenzo, 2016, The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
8. –––, 2007, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
9. Clemens, Justin and Russell Grigg (eds.), 2006, Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, Durham: Duke University Press.
10. Copjec, Joan, 1994, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
11. –––, 2002, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
12. Cutrofello, Andrew, 1997, Imagining Otherwise: Metapsychology and the Analytic A Posteriori, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
13. De Kesel, Marc, 2009, Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII [trans. Sigi Jottkandt], Albany: State University of New York Press
14. De Waelhens, Alphonse and Wilfried Ver Eecke, 2001, Phenomenology and Lacan on Schizophrenia, After the Decade of the Brain, Leuven: Leuven University Press.
15. Dolar, Mladen, 2006, A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
16. Dor, Joël, 1998, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language [ed. Judith Feher Gurewich; trans. Susan Fairfield], New York: Other Press.
17. Evans, Dylan, 1996, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge.
18. Eyers, Tom, 2012, Lacan and the Concept of the “Real”, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
19. Fink, Bruce, 1995, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
20. –––, 1997. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
21. –––, 2004, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
22. –––, 2015, Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference, Cambridge: Polity.
23. Feldstein, Richard, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (eds.), 1995, Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Albany: State University of New York Press.
24. ––– (eds.), 1996, Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, Albany: State University of New York Press.
25. Forrester, John, 1990, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
26. Grosz, Elizabeth, 1990, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, New York: Routledge.
27. Homer, Sean, 2005, Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge.
28. Johnston, Adrian, 2005, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
29. –––, 2008, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
30. –––, 2009, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
31. –––, 2013, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
32. –––, 2013, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism: Volume One, The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
33. –––, 2017, Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan’s ‘The Freudian Thing’, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
34. Johnston, Adrian and Catherine Malabou, 2013, Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neurobiology, New York: Columbia University Press.
35. Julien, Philippe, 1994, Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary [trans. Devra Beck Simiu], New York: New York University Press.
36. Lemaire, Anika, 1977, Jacques Lacan [trans. David Macey], New York: Routledge.
37. Marini, Marcelle, 1992, Jacques Lacan: The French Context [trans. Anne Tomiche], New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
38. Nancy, Jean-Luc and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, 1992, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan [trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew], Albany: State University of New York Press.
39. Nasio, Juan-David, 1998, Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan [trans. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul], Albany: State University of New York Press.
40. Nobus, Dany, 2000, Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis, New York: Routledge.
41. ––– (ed.), 1998, Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, New York: Other Press.
42. Pluth, Ed, 2007, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject, Albany: State University of New York Press.
43. Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.), 2003, The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
44. Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 1990, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985 [trans. Jeffrey Mehlman], Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
45. –––, 1997, Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System of Thought [trans. Barbara Bray], New York: Columbia University Press.
46. Salecl, Renata (ed.), 2000, Sexuation, Durham: Duke University Press.
47. Soler, Colette, 2006, What Lacan Said About Women: A Psychoanalytic Study [trans. John Holland], New York: Other Press.
48. Stavrakakis, Yannis, 1999, Lacan and the Political, New York: Routledge.
49. –––, 2007, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
50. Turkle, Sherry, 1981, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
51. Philippe Van Haute, 2002, Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion” of the Subject, a Close Reading [trans. Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk], New York: Other Press.
52. Paul Verhaeghe, 1997, Does the Woman Exist?: From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine [trans. Marc du Ry], New York: Other Press.
53. –––, 2001, Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive, New York: Other Press.
54. –––, 2004, On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics [trans. Sigi Jottkandt], New York: Other Press.
55. Žižek, Slavoj, 1991, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
56. –––, 2001, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, New York: Routledge, second edition.
57. –––, 2006, How to Read Lacan, London: Granta Publications.
58. ––– (ed.), 1992, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan… But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, London: Verso.
59. ––– (ed.), 1998, Cogito and the Unconscious, Durham: Duke University Press.
60. ––– (ed.), 2006, Lacan: The Silent Partners, London: Verso.
61. Žižek, Slavoj and Renata Salecl (eds.), 1996, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, Durham: Duke University Press.
62. Zupančič, Alenka, 2000, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, London: Verso.
63. –––, 2003, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
64. –––, 2008, The Odd One In: On Comedy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
FYI SFC Jay ThompsonCpl James R. " Jim" Gossett JrPVT Kenneth Krause SPC Jon O.SP5 Jeannie CarleSPC Chris Bayner-CwikPO1 Jerome NewlandTSgt David L. Maj Kim Patterson Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D.LTC Greg Henning LTC Bill Koski COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. Maj Marty Hogan Maj William W. 'Bill' Price Maj Robert Thornton Cynthia Croft
(3)
(0)
LTC Stephen F.
FYI SPC Margaret Higgins LTC Wayne Brandon LTC (Join to see) Lt Col John (Jack) ChristensenCPT Scott Sharon SSG William Jones SSG Donald H "Don" Bates PO3 William Hetrick PO3 Lynn Spalding SPC Mark Huddleston SGT Rick Colburn CPL Dave Hoover SPC Margaret Higgins SSgt Brian Brakke SCPO Morris Ramsey Sgt Albert Castro
(1)
(0)
SP5 Jeannie Carle
OK. I WILL come back to this. I have a HUGE love for Psychology etc and his name is completely new to me. I SHALL return. Just too much to take in at 0300.
(3)
(0)
4
4
0
4
4
0
Read This Next
Continue with Facebook 
Continue with Google