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Lacanion Psychoanalysis PDF
Lacanion Psychoanalysis PDF
Introduction
For understanding the major Lacanian concepts such as the development of
the infant, the function of ego, the treatment of unconscious and other related
issues and their relevance to literary analysis and interpretation, it is essential
to note that his greatest contribution to literary studies is the way he
reinterpreted Sigmund Freud and reformulated Freudian theories so as to make
them compatible for literary studies. The credit of establishing Psychoanalysis
as a distinctive field of study, as is well known, ultimately goes to Freud, the
real originator of Psychoanalysis, whose study of psyche is primarily based on
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the principle of causality and determinism (Homer 2005:4). M.A.R. Habib
rightly points out:
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Freud opens up a number of literary critical avenues: the linking of a
creative work to an in-depth study of an author’s psychology, using a
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vastly altered conception of human subjectivity; the tracing in art of
primal psychological tendencies and conflicts; and the understanding
of art and literature as integrally recurring human obsessions, fear, and
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anything enters mental life, it never perishes. He even shows that unconscious
comes into existence when we are very young through repression, expunging
from consciousness unhappy psychological events. In fact, the concept of the
‘unconscious’ formulated by him and later modified by Lacan made it the
most vital and debatable subject matter of psychoanalysis.
Prior to Freud, the working of the mind was taken mostly as a
conscious phenomenon but Freud devised the typographical divisions of the
mind into the conscious, the unconscious and the preconscious. Later, he
named them as the id (forming the reservoir of libido or psychic energy), the
ego (representing conscious life) and the superego (functioning as the voice of
conscience and censorship). Freud stated:
That the ego represents the organized part of the psyche in contrast to
the unorganized elements of the unconscious (the id) and argues: the
ego is that part of the id that has been modified by direct influence of
the external world…. The ego represents what may be called reason
and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions
(see Donald E. Hall. Subjectivity: 61)
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the Real.
It must be, however, pointed out that Lacan reinterpreted Freud in the
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light of Structuralist and Post Structuralist theories and thus changed
psychoanalysis from an essentially humanist philosophy or theory to a Post
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Structuralist one. One of the basic premises of humanism was the notion of a
stable self with free will and self-determination that Freud’s notion of the
unconscious questioned and destabilized. By bringing the contents of the
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saying that the unconscious is always at work and the being of everything.
The distinctive feature of Lacanian theory, however, is its emphasis on
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While focusing on relations between signifiers, he argues that the elements in
the unconscious — wishes, desires, and images — form signifier and these
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signifiers form a signifying chain: one signifier has meaning only because it is
not some other signifier. Like other Post-structural theoreticians, he stated that
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there are no signifieds; there is nothing that a signifier ultimately refers to. If
there were, then the meaning of any particular signifier would be relatively
stable: there would be, in Saussure’s terms, a relation of signification between
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signifier and signified, and that relation would create or guarantee some kind
of meaning. Lacan believes that the relations of signification don’t exist rather;
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there are only the negative relations, relations of value, where one signifies
what it is because it is not something else. Because of this lack of signifieds,
he says, the chain of signifiers (See, Lacan’s Seminar XI ) is constantly sliding
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and shifting and circulating. There is no anchor, nothing that ultimately gives
meaning or stability to the whole system.
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standards of socially acceptable thought and behaviour.
Like Freud, Lacan’s infant initiates as something inseparable from its
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mother: that is, the child, having no sense of ‘self’ or ‘individuated identity’,
is not conscious of its body as a coherent unified whole and can hardly
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differentiate between self and other, between itself and mother. In other words,
the most crucial factor for the baby is feeding which mother gratifies and it
feels as though it and she are only one entity or individual. At this stage,
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breast or a bottle when it feels hunger and gets hugged when it needs safety.
After passing through the phase of needs, the child normally switches
over to the phase of demands where it has to separate itself from its mother in
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order to form its own identity: a pre-requisite for entry into civilization and
culture. In other words, when the child feels the discrepancy between its inner
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needs and the outer satisfaction of those needs, it learns that our own world is
not the whole world. It finds that it is not autonomous but there is an outside
something, an ‘Other’ who feeds it or more generally, on whom it is
dependent.
Keeping these things in view, it becomes obvious that the demands of
the baby are not satisfiable with objects because a demand is always a demand
for recognition or love from another. This awareness of separation, or the fact
of otherness, creates an anxiety, a sense of loss. The baby then demands a
reunion, a return to that original sense of fullness and non- separation that it
had earlier. However, all this seems to be impossible because once the baby
‘knows’ and its knowledge shifts from an unconscious level to a higher
awareness level it comes to realize that the idea of an “Other” exists. Hence,
demand is the demand for the fullness and the completeness which is
impossible, because that lack, or absence, the sense of “otherness”, is the
condition for the baby to become or emerge as an independent self or subject.
This is where Lacan’s Mirror Stage exists.
Lacan’s désir follows Freud’s concept of Wunsch and it is central to
Lacanian theories because the aim of the talking cure — psychoanalysis — is
precisely to lead the analysand to uncover the truth about their desire, though
this is only possible if that desire is articulated or spoken. Lacan says that
desire is named in the presence of the other. He believes that the subject
should come to recognize and to name his/her desire because 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. Therefore, what is important is to
teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence.
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. On
the basis of this fundamental understanding, Lacan maintained throughout his
career that desire is the desire of the Other.
Lacanian theory, as analysed above, does not deny that infants are
always born into the world with basic biological needs that require 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
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from identifying with the images of these others, Lacan argues that it
demonstrably belongs to humans to desire- directly- as or through another or
others.
The Mirror Stage io
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It remains “one of the most frequently anthologized and referenced of Lacan’s
texts” and is concerned with the formation of the ego through the
identification with an image of the self. It describes the formation of the Ego
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via the process of objectification: the Ego being the result of feeling dissention
between one’s perceived visual appearance and one’s perceived emotional
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understanding of the role of images and the constructed nature of the self
through the philosophical category of the dialectic. Dialectical thought, as
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conceived by Hegel, foregrounds the contradictory nature of all things, as all
phenomena can be said to contain their opposite; their own notion. Out of this
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relationship or unity of opposites something new will emerge in an endless
process of transformation. It was Hegel’s great insight, contends Lacan, to
reveal how ‘each human being is in the being of the other’ (Miller 1988:72).
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stable, whole, unified self that we see in the mirror becomes a compensation
for having lost the original oneness with the mother’s body.
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In short, according to Lacan, we lose our unity with the mother’s body
once we enter into culture because the child’s self-concept, its ego or
“Identity” will never match up to its own being. The child’s image in the
mirror is both smaller and more stable than the child, and is always “other”.
The child, for the rest of its life, will misrecognize its self as “Other”, as the
image in the mirror that provides an illusion of self and of master. The mirror
stage cements a self or other dichotomy, where the child projects its ideas of
self or Other dichotomy, where previously the child had known only “Other,”
but not “self.” For Lacan, the identification of “self’ is always in terms of
Other.
Lacan uses the term “Other” in a number of ways, which make it even
harder to grasp. First, and perhaps the easiest, is in the sense where “other” is
the “not-me”, but becomes “me” in the mirror stage. Lacan also uses an idea
of Other, with a capital “O”, to distinguish between the concept of the other
and actual others. The image the child sees in the mirror is an Other, and it
gives the child the idea of other as a structural possibility, one which makes
possible the structural possibility of “I” or self. In other words, the child
encounters actual others: its own image, other people and understand the idea
of “Otherness,” things that are not itself. Lacan refers to this loss of object of
desire as objet petit a, or object small a with the letter a standing for autre, the
French word for other. 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. 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, being Symbolic insofar as it is particularized
for each subject. 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. 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’. When
conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud’s concept of physical
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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
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who receives the child’s primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a
particular message.
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A study of the Lacanian mirror stage reveals that this stage marks the
child’s first recognition or understanding of lack or absence and its search for
the moment of the distinction between self and other. It also provides the
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grounds for the ego ideal, the image of the ego, derived from others, which the
ego strives to achieve or live up to. Besides, the mirror stage initiates the child
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the three orders or states of human mental disposition: the imaginary order, the
symbolic order, and the real (Habib 2008:91).
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immersions in the imaginary order. For Lacan, this separation constitutes our
most important experience of loss, and it is one that will haunt us all our lives.
A study of the Lacanian concept of the Imaginary indicates that this
stage is equated to the child’s first entry into the social life where it gradually
understands its difference from mother which turns out to be the base of its
own individual identity, an identity which is fundamentally alienated. The
symbolic, marked by the concept of desire, represents adulthood or the
structure of language or the discourse of law that we have to enter into in order
to become speaking subject or normal subjects of the society.
Language is empty because it is an endless process of difference and
absence: instead of being able to possess anything in its fullness, the child
simply moves from one to another, along a linguistic chain which is
potentially infinite. One signifier implies another and that another, and so on
ad infinitum: the ‘metaphorical’ world of the mirror has yielded ground to the
metonymic chain of signifiers, meanings, or signifieds which will be
produced; but no object or person can ever be fully ‘present’ in this chain.
This endless movement from one signifier to another is what Lacan means by
desire. All desire springs from lack, which it strives continually to fill. Human
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language works by such lack: the absence of the real objects designated by
signs point to the fact that words have meaning only by virtue of the absence
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and exclusion of others. To enter language, then, is to become a prey to desire:
language, Lacan remarks, is ‘what hollows being into desire’.
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The Symbolic
Tyson very rightly points out that “in entering the Symbolic Order—
the world of language— we’re entering a world of loss and lack”(Tyson
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present”(Tyson 2006:31).
Tyson adds further:
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lack, marks the split into conscious and unconscious mind. It is repression that
first creates the unconscious. Indeed, Lacan’s famous statement that “the
unconscious is structured like a language”(Miller 1992: 12) implies among
other things, “the way in which unconscious desire is always seeking our lost
object of desire, the fantasy mother of our preverbal experience, just as
language is always seeking ways to put into words the world of objects we
inhabit as adults that didn’t need words when we felt as preverbal infants, one
with them”(Tyson 2006:30). It is only in the absence of a desired object that
language becomes necessary, and through the use of language that a self
comes into existence. The form of that existence is both desiring and
linguistic.
The Symbolic and the Imaginary are overlapping, as there is no clear
marker or division between the two. In fact, in some respects they always
coexist because the Symbolic order is the structure of language itself and we
have to enter into it in order to emerge as speaking subjects, and to designate
ourselves by “I.” The foundation for having a self lies in the Imaginary
projection of the self onto the specular image; the other in the mirror and
having a self is expressed in saying “I,” which can only occur within the
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Symbolic. The Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic order: in The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues how the visual field
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is structured by symbolic laws. Thus, the Imaginary involves a linguistic
dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the Symbolic, the signified and
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signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has Symbolic and
Imaginary connotations; in its Imaginary aspect, language is itself the “wall of
language” which inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. On the other
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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
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Real, Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual
display and courtship love. He accuses major psychoanalytic schools of
reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order by making
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identification with the analyst the objective of analysis. He proposes the use of
the Symbolic as the way to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary:
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symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality.
The Lacanian concept of the ‘Real’ is certainly a difficult concept and
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as such beyond the comprehension of meaning of an average reader because it
lies almost outside the world created by ideologies, which our societies
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generally use in order to explain ‘existence’. According to Tyson:
One way to think of the Real is as that which is beyond all meaning —
making systems that which lie outside the world created by the
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values or eternal truths but only a curtain that is embroidered and makes
everything bleak. The ‘existence’ behind the curtain is the Real, but it is
beyond the competence of every individual to see or experience the truth of
reality which Lacan calls the trauma of the Real. According to him, it gives us
only the realization that the reality, hidden beneath the ideologies society has
created, is beyond our capacity to control:
The trauma of the Real gives us only the realization that the
reality hidden beneath the ideologies society has created is a reality
beyond our capacity to know and explain and therefore certainly
beyond our capacity to control (Tyson 2006:32).
For Lacan, the real is impossible: that which occurs beyond the entire
framework of signification. The real is a sign of its own absence, pointing to
itself as merely signifier. 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.” Whereas
the Symbolic opposition presence/absence implies the possibility that
something may be missing from the Symbolic, “the Real is always in its
place”.
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For Lacan, the ego is just the narcissistic process whereby we bolster
up a fictive sense of unitary selfhood by finding something in the world with
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which we can identify ‘self’. Lacan’s theory teaches that our ability to gain
definite access to the essence of things is possible only through language.
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Being humans, we are trapped within the universe of discourse, and it is
impossible to conceive or articulate or express whatever is outside without
articulating it within the discursive field in one of its forms like desire. It is
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now evident that meaning is constantly shifting despite the fact that language
always carries meaning; it is incapable of fixating it. As human beings, it is
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always our desire to articulate our demands in a well-formed language but our
desires never get materialized because of the slippery nature of language
which makes us persistently conscious of our ‘lack’ or ‘failure’ to
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neutralizing this lack. In this way, Lacanian theory is but another version of
social constructionism.
According to Lois Tyson (Tyson 2006:33) the most reliable way to
interpret a literary work through a Lacanian lens is to explore the ways in
which the text might be structured by some of the Lacanian concepts and see
what this exploration can reveal. Such an exploration shall focus on the
following: (i.)Do any characters, events, or episodes in the narrative seem to
embody the Imaginary Order, in which case they would involve some kind of
private and either fantasy or delusional world? (ii.)What parts of the text seem
formed by the Symbolic Order? That is, where do we see ideology and social
norms in control of characters’ behaviour and narrative events? & (iii.) Does
any part of the text seem to operate as a representative of the Real, of that
dimension of existence that remains so terrifyingly beyond our ability to
comprehend it that our impulse is to flee it, to repress and deny it?
Taking a clue from Lois Tyson, one can think of analyzing & interpreting
the major literary artifacts from ‘Lacanian Perspective’ in order to search for
newer meanings or explore modern dimensions which have so far otherwise
remained unexplored or untouched in the literary artifacts.
Works Cited:
Freud, A. 1966.‘The Ego and The Mechanisms of Defence’, The Writing of
Anna Freud, Vol. 2, New York: International Universities Press.
Habib, M. A . R. 2008. Modern Literary Criticism and Theory: A History,
USA: Blackwell Publishing.
Hall, Donald E. Subjectivity (the New Critical Idiom), London: Routledge.
Homer, Sean.2005. Jacques Lacan (Critical Idiom Series), London:
Routledge.
Jacques, Lacan. “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconsciousness”, in
David Lodge, David with Wood, Nigel. 2007. (ed) Modern Criticism and
Theory: A Reader. New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, ‘‘The Ego in Freud'
and in the’ Technique of Psychoanalysis’ 1954-1955, ed. J.A. Miller, trans. S.
Tomaselli, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tyson, Lois.2006. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, London:
Routledge.
Vice, Sue (ed).1996. Psychoanalytical Criticism: A Reader. United Kingdom:
Polity Press.
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