16 Jacques Lacan Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D. AUTHOR: 1) Below are affiliations for each chapter author as they will appear in the contributor list in the front of the book. Please review these carefully and provide any missing information or updates. (This information will be moved to the front matter to create an alphabetical list of contributors at the next stage of production.) 2) So that we may send each contributor a complimentary copy of the book on publication, please update current mailing information for each author (what we have on file is listed below). UPS requires a street address (not a P.O. box) and a phone number. Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D. Personal and Supervising Analyst, The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), San Francisco, California; Guest Professor, The Sigmund Freud University, Vienna, Paris Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D., 1808 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710; 510-527-7614; jeanne.wolffbernstein@gmail.com or jwbernstein@msn.com AUTHOR: Please review heading structure of chapter carefully. As intended? AuTHOR: We ve opted to, for the most part, alternate gender pronouns rather than use the standard he or she and his or her construction because there were too many occurrences. OK? Theoretical Origins Jacques Lacan was one of the most influential psychoanalysts in France. He introduced psychoanalysis to France, a country that had been deeply suspicious of the Germanic roots of psychoanalysis. Had it not been for the particular French character of Lacan, who was a 245
246 Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Second Editon psychiatrist and a close friend to many Surrealist painters and writers, as well an avid reader of literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis may have never entered into the fabric of French culture in such a profound way. Lacan was born in 1901 and died in Paris in 1981. He was born to a bourgeois Catholic family; one of his siblings even went on to become a priest. He pursued his early studies at the prestigious College Stanislav and completed his medical studies in 1931. In 1932, Lacan published his dissertation, Paranoiaic Psychosis and Its Relation to the Personality, in which he analyzes the case of a woman, Aimee, who had attempted to kill a famous actress whom she imagined had spread slander about her. The fundamental insights he gained in his studies of Aimee influenced him throughout his life. What Freud had learned from his early studies on hysteria, Lacan had learned from his work on psychosis, in particular as the director of the St. Anne s Hospital in Paris. Aimee s wish to kill another woman whom she has never met illustrated the unconscious psychic mechanism of merging one s own image with that of an idealized other, whom Aimee then sought to destroy in a wish for self-punishment. Lacan asserted that Aimee demonstrated the whole gamut of paranoiac themes, such as jealousy, persecution, prejudice, grandiosity, dreams of flight, and erotomania, while at the same time maintaining all of her intellectual functioning. In his thinking about Aimee and the psychoanalytic underpinnings of psychosis, Lacan was profoundly influenced by Freud s (1922) paper Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality, which Lacan translated from German into French. From Freud s text, Lacan took the central idea that a paranoiac knowledge (la connaissance paranoiaque) exists at the core of each subjectivity. For Lacan, psychosis became the central subject on which he elaborated his later fundamental concepts of the imaginary, the mirror stage, the importance of language, and the effect of the signifier. His surrealist friends read his article on Aimee with great interest, and the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, in particular, agreed with Lacan s theory that a paranoiac mechanism exists as a powerful force at the core of each person. In pursuing his interest in those psychic phenomena that escape consciousness and are driven primarily by unconscious mechanisms, Lacan shared with Freud an early awareness of what divides the mind, and not so much what cures the mind. How Lacan eventually conceptualized the divided subject finds its theoretical grounds in Freud s 1927 paper Fetishism in which he wrote about the process of Spaltung (division of the ego). Freud had already written about the divided mind when he analyzed the workings of dreams in the first chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams: The chief feature of dreams and of insanity lies in their eccentric trains of thought and their weakness of judgement...in dreams the personality may be split when, for instance, the dreamer s own knowledge is divided between two persons and when, in the dream, the extraneous ego corrects the actual one. This is precisely on a par with the splitting of the personality that is familiar to us in hallucinatory psychosis; the dreamer too hears his own thoughts pronounced by extraneous voices. (Freud 1900, p. 91) Thus in a surprising way, Freud argued early in his work that the ability of the mind to split itself is responsible for the creation of both dreams and psychosis. Throughout his life, Lacan described his own work as simply a return to Freud, whose radical discovery of the unconscious as a linguistically formed psychic apparatus was at risk of disappearing from the psychoanalytic landscape under the aegis of ego psychology. AUTHOR: Paragraph above: Please note rephrasing in Thus in a surprising way, Freud argued early in his work that the ability of the mind to split itself is responsible for the creation of both dreams and psychosis for parallelism. OK? The Ego/Marienbad Congress, 1937 In 1934 Lacan began his psychoanalytic training at the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, where he entered into a training analysis with Rudolf Loewenstein, an influential ego psychologist. (Loewenstein immigrated in 1939 to New York City, where he coauthored a number of articles with Heinz Hartman and Ernst Kris.) In 1937 Lacan left for the international psychoanalytic congress in Marienbad. Upon arriving at The Marienbad Congress as a young and largely unknown psychoanalyst, he found himself surrounded by a majority of psychoanalysts advocating the positive therapeutic results of a strengthened ego. In contrast to their therapeutic findings, however, Lacan had realized that the I (ego) is formed through an illusionary and projective process that alienates the subject from his or her unconscious desire. Realizing that the ego psychol-
Jacques Lacan 247 ogists, including his own analyst, had largely lost sight of the unconscious and had placed the workings of the ego at the center of their theoretical and clinical works, Lacan embarked upon a criticism of their fundamental ideas. In his paper on The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, Lacan (1949) wrote: The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopedic and, lastly, to the assumption of the armor of a alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject s entire mental development. (p. 4) In The Mirror-Stage, which he defines as both a particular stage of development and a permanent, as he says, rigid structure, Lacan explained how the young child, from age 6 to 18 months, forms an image of his body through a Gestalt in the mirror that is far more developed and unified than the child s actual bodily motor capacity. Citing the early observations by Henri Wallon, a French child psychologist, Lacan described how a young infant, as early as 6 months old, may become captivated by his own mirror image and mistake this image for himself. In contrast to a chimpanzee who shows an indifference to a reflection, the young infant greets the perception of his image with jubilation or, as Lacan writes, with jouissance because the infant recognizes in the mirror a body that holds out the illusion of a unity and mastery that he cannot yet experience, because the child has not yet attained control over its own body and is still dependent upon an Other for its own survival. The infant sees its own image as a whole, and the synthesis of this whole image evokes a tension between the perceived image and the body, which is still felt to be in pieces (corps morcele). Lacan (1949) wrote, the child anticipates at the mental level the conquest of his own body s functional unity, which is still incomplete at the level of volitional motricity at that point in time (p. 91). The mirror in the mirror stage does not simply refer to an actual mirror but also to the visual exchange between the infant and the Other through whose gaze the child identifies with herself. Using the work of Charlotte Buehler, who studied the phenomena of infantile transitivism (i.e., children experiencing the emotional or physical responses of other children, e.g., crying when they see another child being hit), Lacan underscored the fact that an Other is necessary for the constitution of the subject. He theorized that this specular exchange between the infant and the Other was mediated by conscious and unconscious desires of the Other that constitute the infant s subjectivity. It is through the gaze of the Other that the infant/subject comes into being as an object and is delivered to herself through that Other. Therefore, the mirror image is not reflective of the subject s identity but is constitutive of the subject s identity. The infant-subject-to-be wants to become what she perceives in the mirror an ideal image yet in introjecting this superior held-out image, she also introjects an alien/other image that can take the form of a persecutory rather than an ideal image. In this seesawing, projective/introjective process, an internal rivalry is established that leads the subject to want to recapture the original of her mirror image. With the mirror stage, Lacan not only expanded Freud s concept of the ideal ego and the ego ideal, but also provided a radically new way of conceptualizing identification as a specular, desiring, and alienating process. By unmasking the ego as an agent of deception and illusory mastery, Lacan paid tribute to Freud s late realization that the ego is not normal but shares many characteristics with the psychotic one, as Freud described it in his 1937 text Analysis Terminable and Interminable. In order to understand the centrality that desire occupied in the work of Lacan, we need to examine how he arrived at the idea that the truth about one s desire is the essential goal of the analytic talking cure. Lacan emphasized that the human subject is defined by desire, and yet this desire is de-centered, because it is only through and for the Other that the subject comes into being. Because the mother is the first to occupy the position of the Other, it is important to comprehend the function the phallus plays in the mother-infant relationship, how the mother s jouissance enters into the picture, and how the child comes to terms with the lack he discovers in the mother/other ( M/ Other ) through the formation of the objet a. The Other also stands for the site of speech and language, an-other scene, outside consciousness through which the subject, as Freud (1900) had already shown in his Interpretation of Dreams, discovers his desire. Using Freud s early works on the grammar of the unconscious through a transparent of linguistics, Lacan showed how the intricate network of signifiers and signifieds represented the only means by and through which the subject s true desire could be heard and articulated.
248 Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Second Editon Desire When the mirror stage comes to an end, inaugurating a permanent imaginary structure through which the subject identifies with the imago of her counterpart, it brings into focus that the desire of the subject is mediated through the desire of the Other. What I take to be my desire is really what the other desires me to be. Lacan writes: before language, desire exists solely in the single plane of the imaginary relation of the specular image, projected, alienated in the other. The tension it provokes is then deprived of an outcome. That is to say that it has no other outcome Hegel teaches us this than the destruction of the other... But thank God, the subject inhabits the world of the symbol, that is to say a world of others who speak. That is why his desire is susceptible to the mediation of recognition. Without which every human function would simply exhaust itself in the unspecified wish for the destruction of the other as such. (1975/1988, pp. 170 171) AUTHOR: Please indicate what reference the above quote is from. See reference list. In his conceptualization of desire as a desire for and through the other, Lacan was strongly influenced by his studies of Hegel, which he pursued by attending the lectures of Alexandre Kojève (1947) at the Sorbonne. Through the desire of destroying what one wants, the subject becomes aware of himself-as-other in much the same way that children initially refer to themselves as other, by their name, rather than by I. A child will say, Thomas wants a cookie instead of I want a cookie. Thus, a desiring subject is a literal him to himself. As Lacan (1949) says, the subject identifies, in his feeling of Self, with the other s image and that the other s image captivates this feeling in him (p. 147). With the mirror stage, where the formation of the ego (moi) depends on the imago perceived through the Other, a door opens to a theory of desire that understands desire as wanting to be recognized by the Other as Hegel had also theorized in the masterslave dialectic. In contrast to an intersubjective view of desire that moves back and forth between two imaginary poles, Lacan offered a different perspective on desire. He suggested that the Other is a basic structure to one s being. Rather than viewing the Other as an external other person whom one internalizes, Lacan argued, influenced by Sartre (1966), that the Other is a basic internal structure through which desire is mediated (see Lacan 1949, p. 98). He used Freud s case of Dora to illustrate the difference between the Other as an imaginary object and an internal structure through whom subjective desire is mediated: [B]y Freud s own admission, he committed an error with regard to the object of Dora s desire, in as much as he was too focused on the question about the object, because he does not account for the duplicitous subjective fonciere that is implied. He asks himself what Dora desires before he asks himself who desires in Dora. And Freud ends up realizing, in this ballet of 4, Dora, her father, Mr. and Mrs. K., that it was really Mrs. K whom Dora desired, in so much as she is identified in her desire with Mr. K. The question of knowledge is where is the me (ego) of Dora is also resolved since the me (ego) of Dora is Mr. K... In as much as she is Mr. K., all her symptoms take their definitive meaning. (Lacan 1981, p. 197, translation mine) The case of Dora shows the essential structure of the Other and how the subject constructs desire in the place of the Other. Dora desired as though she were Mr. K, and it was that position that structured her whole neurosis. For Lacan, neurosis is always a question, and in the case of the hysterical person, the basic question is Am I a man or a woman? Desire should be distinguished in Lacan s work from demand and need and is not to be constructed in relation to an object but rather in relation to a lack (manque). Need is a biological instinct, such as hunger or thirst, that becomes translated into a demand that can be satisfied or frustrated. For Lacan (1958/1977), 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, the phenomenon of their (Spaltung) (p. 287) Desire, unlike demand, can never be satisfied, because in the moment that it becomes satisfied it is transformed into a demand. The concept of lack is essential to Lacan s overall theory because it is at the center of what is necessary to become a desiring subject. In contrast to Klein or even Winnicott, Lacan viewed lack not as being detrimental to the subject but as being absolutely necessary for the subject to assume its own separate being. It is only through the play of presence and absence that a difference can constitute itself between the M/Other and her child.
Jacques Lacan 249 AUTHOR: Please clarify reference quoted above as Lacan 1958/1977; no such reference appears in reference list. Also, parenthetical Spaltung in quote is there text missing just before this? Or does it appear this way in the original? Phallus Lack is more comprehensively translated from the French manque-a-etre to the English neologism want to be (see 1977, p. xi). For Lacan, the mother does not just become a mother but also remains a woman, and being a woman raises the question of what she lacks and desires as a woman. As such she perceives her child as the phantastic/impossible object the imaginary phallus that could plug up her lack. The imaginary phallus is perceived by the child as that which she desires beyond the child and the child seeks to identify with this object (Evans YEAR, p. 142). The phallus is an imaginary thing that circulates between mother and child; it is something that can neither be reached nor fulfilled, yet it is crucial in its impossible position between the mother and the child. The mother-infant relationship is never dyadic because it is initially mediated through the imaginary phallus and later mediated through the position of the symbolic father. The high frequency of postpartum depression sheds light on how difficult a period this is for many women. What if the infant does not mesh with the mother s fantasies and does not patch up her internal lack and void? As much as a baby carries the potential of filling up a mother s imaginary desire, the baby also carries the potential of tearing her apart. When a mother gives birth, she is both at her most fragile and most omnipotent, because a baby can hold the potential of plugging her up or of failing her. Because the child is at the mercy of the mother s jouissance, a capricious, passionate, and enigmatic lust, the child is helpless when faced with the mother s omnipotence. A mother can then long for a fetishistic solution and use her baby to patch up her own internal fragmentation. In order to understand early mother-child dynamics, the question of their relationship to the phallus is of utmost consideration. AUTHOR: Above, please indicate which reference is intended by 1977 in first sentence above, and please provide reference for Evans. The Other The first Other is the specular M/Other whose want to be the child attempts to fulfill and complete. The infant comes into the world as an object of love, hate, desire, or rejection, and its entire being is subjected to the forces of maternal jouissance. It is through the mother s gaze and enigmatic desires for the child that the child identifies with what the mother desires her to be. This mirroring/imaginary relationship is held at the same time in a symbolic framework represented by the second Other through the symbolic figure of the Father. The paternal role fulfills the function of the third, which separates and divides the child from the mother. It is through the name and the no of the symbolic father (nom and no are homonyms in French) that the child is pulled out of the imaginary register and given a separate and distinct place in the symbolic world. For the child to move from one position to the other, from being the object of the mother s jouissance to accepting the name of the father, the child must find a credible and respectable figure in this symbolic function for whom she can give up the satisfaction gained from being in the dyadic position with the mother. The child must also encounter a figure in the dyadic position who can release the child into the social world. A sacrifice of satisfaction is involved in this transmission from a dyadic to a triadic position. For the child to become a separate, speaking subject, she must recognize that the maternal figure is not entirely invested in her, but that the mother s desire is directed elsewhere. However, when the child does not encounter a credible figure in the position of the third with the name of the father being foreclosed, the child is imprisoned in a universe of maternal jouissance. Without access to the symbolic order, the subject creates psychotic substitutions for the Other in form of hallucinatory or persecutory figures, as Freud s case of Schreber illustrates. Castration thus refers to the structural movement when the child realizes the mother s lack and her own inability to complete her. This lack thrusts the child into the larger social and cultural world. Through the acceptance of the name-of-thefather and the separation from the mother, the child traverses the incestuous laws because he renounces
250 Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Second Editon the desire to remain the exclusive object of the mother and subordinates herself to the laws of the symbolic father. The repression of incestuous desire for the mother is inextricably linked with the child s entrance into language because the child begins to substitute words for this fundamental loss. The third definition for the Other is that it constitutes the keeper of signifiers. Through his studies about psychosis, Lacan affirmed that the signifier (the sound/image of a word) has no meaning in and of itself and can exist by itself. In its ability to isolate itself out from other signifiers, it determines the signified (the meaning arbitrarily connected to the sound of word/ image.) Structuralism/The Other Lacan reread Freud s work through the lens of structuralism and linguistics and posited that the human subject is constituted not only by drives and unconscious desires but also by structural forces that cannot be grasped on an experiential basis. They are laws that exist beyond the individual s subjectivity and history that shape the subject s core. Language, for instance, is a structure not only that we speak; it is a structure by which we are spoken. Language precedes the subject and thus structures the subject in the fundamental way that the subject thinks, feels, acts, and desires. Language is not a tool we use but a structure by which we are shaped in our innermost being. When we learn a language, we also absorb its organization, grammar, culture, and laws. For Lacan and the object relations and relational theorists alike, the Other is primary. However, for Lacan, the idea of the Other goes beyond the actual person of a primary actual or fantasized figure. Instead, Lacan s idea of an Other exists as a formal structure with its particular laws that traverse the subject and the others upon whom he depends. The Other also constitutes the unconscious that informs our conscious life just as the laws of language inform the way we speak, dream, and create fantasies. AUTHOR: Paragraph above: Please note rephrasing from Language, for instance, is a structure not only that we speak but by which we are spoken to Language, for instance, is a structure not only that we speak; it is a structure by which we are spoken. OK? Freud s early texts on dreams, jokes, and parapraxes created the background for Lacan s link to structural linguistics. He equated Freud s theory about condensation and displacement with Roman Jakobson s concepts of metaphor and metonymy. Instead of viewing the unconscious as either a cauldron of instinctual drives or a hotbed of phantasized object relations, Lacan saw the unconscious as structured like a language that functions according to the same operational modes (i.e., condensation and displacement) as any language. The unconscious finds its roots in the discourse of the first Others, the parents of the child. Before the child is born, it is already symbolized as an entity in their minds; thus projections, wishes, and desires are already imbued into the child before she is born. The parents unconscious and conscious signifiers become the cornerstones of the child s unconscious. Signifier and Signified Lacan borrowed from Ferdinand de Saussure the concepts of signifier and signified. Signifier means the sound-image of a word and signified denotes the meaning we associate with that word. Saussure s important discovery was that the sound of a word and the meaning connected to it were of an arbitrary nature. In contrast to images, words are there to differentiate between the signs the combination of signifier/signified. Lacan reversed Saussure s proposed connection between the signifier and the signified. Saussure s signified (concept) over the signifier (sound-image) became Lacan s signifier over the signified. Signifier and signified are separated by a bar, which echoes Freud s censorship and is referred to by Lacan as the bar of repression (Figure 16 1). PREPRESS: Figure 16 1 should be placed about here after proof review. The reason Lacan made this significant change was because he wanted to underscore that the signifier does not represent the signified and that meanings constantly shift between the various signifiers, a shift that accounts for the successful outcome of a joke or the structure of a dream. We hear the word (signifier) weight but can also phonetically hear the signifier wait. In dreams and jokes, words have to be efficient in order to convey a multiplicity of meanings at the same time. In addition, Lacan wanted to demonstrate
Jacques Lacan 251 that the insignificant the stuff that slides underneath the bar is what counts, recounts, and speaks. Faithful to Freud s essential teachings about dreams, Lacan demonstrated how unintended meanings emerge that structure and disrupt the subject s conscious discourse and reveal unconscious intents. These signifying units are connected to one another in a signifying chain of interconnected links that Lacan described in the following way: We can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that the meaning insists but that none of its elements consists in the signification of which it is at the moment capable. We are forced, then, to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier (1977, p. 153). AUTHOR: Last sentence above and last sentence below, please confirm which 1977 reference is intended. Repressed wishes hide and slide between the signifiers and attach themselves to words, which have double meanings so as to sidestep the censor. The signifier then functions as a sort of double-agent for what cannot be directly expressed in a dream. Given the powerful position of the signifier/signified, Lacan was not defining the ego as the true subject but was identifying the subject of the unconscious as the true subject that is speaking and that needs to be listened to. The child thrown into the world of the language of the Other and at the mercy of the M/Other s jouissance finds his true desire on another scene. That I is another is a realization won not only through the mirror stage but also through the displacing and substitutive character of language. Lacan wrote, Entstellung, translated as distortion or transposition is what Freud shows to be the general precondition for the functioning of the dream, and it is what I designated, following Saussure, as the sliding of the signified under the signifier, which is always active in discourse (1977, p. 160) A thinking exists about which the subject knows nothing, which articulates itself on another level according to its own internal rules. It emerges where the I cannot be found, in the gaps and failed actions that intrude upon the conscious discourse. Symbolic, Imaginary, Real Lacan s three structures the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real are not mental forces but dimensions of human experience that structure the intrapsychic life of the subject. In contrast to a developmental perspective, Lacan adopted a structural perspective, situating the subject within these three interrelated registers at the same time (Figure 16 2). PREPRESS: Figure 16 2 should be placed about here after proof review. Although the imaginary is primarily a register of images, identifications, fixations, resemblances, and idealizations, it is simultaneously held and structured by the symbolic order, which is the dimension of speech, language, order, law, and culture. The imaginary order primarily functions at the level of sameness and illusion it informs paranoiac knowledge, for instance whereas the symbolic register operates at the level of difference and separateness, bringing order into a largely confusing realm of mirroring relations. The third order of the real is the realm that resists language, containing the unsymbolizable and unspeakable elements that continuously inform and affect life. The real is outside of language and opposes any kind of symbolization. Lacan described the real as impossible because the real cannot be integrated into the symbolic or the imaginary and yet it surrounds and punctures them at all times. The very entrance into language marks the irrevocable separation from the real. The real continues to exert its influence throughout life because it is the bedrock against which all fantasies and words fail. Lacan asserted that what cannot be symbolized will return from the real, as seen in the case of the psychotic persons whose words are foreclosed from the symbolic order and return to them from the real. A similar phenomenon can be observed in dreams and slips of the tongue, in which a word/signifier suddenly breaks into speech, seemingly coming from nowhere. With the dimension of the real, Lacan offered a distinct way to understand trauma. Trauma breaks into the subject s psyche, leaving the subject speechless and without any point of reference. It is only through the gradual work of symbolization that some traumatic experiences can be recast into words, thus losing their powerful grip on the subject, who can begin to integrate them into the larger fabric of her life.
252 Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Second Editon Evolution of Lacan s Thought, 1959 1962 Objet a During the years of 1959 1962, a profound change occurred in the work of Lacan during which he altered his thinking from an emphasis on desire toward a focus on jouissance. His critique of the concept of the object in object relations theory led him to a new formulation of the object, which he defines as the objet a. The development of this new concept went through several transformations. Lacan agreed with Freud s idea that the object is always a lost object (described by Freud [1905] in Three Essays on Sexuality) that can only be found through substitutes. At the core of any relationship to an object a permanent loss exists that cannot be repaired. Instead of analyzing good or bad object relationships, Lacan argued that the relationship to the primary loss of the object has to be analyzed. His shift from the object to the lack of the object created a new dimension for the psychoanalytic treatment of neurosis. A hysterical person, for instance, constructs her desire by making the other s object of desire into the object of her own desire. She wants to be the unique object of the other s desire and will turn anything into the kind of scenario that makes her the object of the other s desire. By always searching for ways to become the object of the other s desire, she does not have to face her own lack. She maintains her own desire as unsatisfied as a means of persistently searching for new ways of becoming the essential object to the Other. In contrast, an obsessional person turns the demand of the Other into the object of his desire. He is terrified of the Other s desire and transforms it into a demand, which becomes his object. Either he makes the Other wait so that the question for him becomes the object, or he turns the demand into an obligation that he can then fulfill for the Other. Either neurotic construction is thus inscribed around the lack and so is unconsciously constructed to avoid it. In Lacan s seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1959 1960), objet a refers to the central lack at the heart of desire and to the central void at the core of the unconscious. Lacan rediscovered Freud s (1915) concept of primary repression by affirming that a hole exists at the center of the unconscious that cannot be filled or put into words. Through the process of primary repression (Ur-verdraengung), primary perceptions are inscribed into the unconscious along different stratifications that form a memory that remains inaccessible to the subject. Unconscious processes are set into motion through primal repression that exert a constant force upon secondary repression from around this void, which Lacan equated with the objet a. Lacan divided the original lost object on account of symbolization into two parts, the one which is lost and the other that is the thing (das Ding) that also represents the forbidden/incestuous mother. In concordance with Freud s (1895) Nebenmenschkomplex (complex of the fellow human being), during which the infant divides the primary object into something familiar and something estranged (which Freud called Das Ding), Lacan wrote, The Ding is the element that is initially isolated by the subject in his experience of the Nebenmensch as being by its very nature alien, Fremde. The complex of the object is in two parts, there is a division, a difference in the approach to judgment... The object will be there when in the end all conditions have been fulfilled-it is of course, clear that what is supposed to be found cannot be found again. It is in its nature that the object as such is lost. It will never be found again. Something is there while one waits for something better, or worse, but which one wants. (Lacan 1959 1960, p. 52) He continued to explain that the mother-child relationship is not so much based on frustration, dependence, and satisfaction but instead is structured in the unconscious by the relation to The Thing, which is the incestuous desire for the mother that can never be satisfied. With The Thing (i.e., with the mother qua object of incest) at the center, desire becomes a movement circulating around the forbidden object that it can never reach. With this attraction for the forbidden, an early erotic transgression is inscribed in this circulating drive, and it is here that Lacan mentioned jouissance for the first time as the pleasure turning to pain when the limit toward a forbidden object is transgressed. The very thing the subject deeply longs for in her unconscious produces inevitable pain, and it is this pain in pleasure jouissance into which she is hooked in complex, symptomatic ways. In the seminar L Iden tification, Lacan (1960 1961) contrasted the specular image i(a) to the petit objet a. He returned once again to his early theory of paranoiac knowledge and illustrated that the process of identification is illusory, as the schema L illustrates (Figure 16 3).
Jacques Lacan 253 PREPRESS: Figure 16 3 should be placed about here after proof review. We identify along the imaginary axis with what we mistake to be the object of the other s desire. We negotiate the loss from the Other by hanging onto a fragment, a leftover piece that always reminds us of this early separation and in so doing acts as the cause of our desire. The objet a becomes increasingly a part of the real and assumes the notion of the unobtainable, which is the cause of desire rather than the object of desire. The objet a is now the object that sets desire in motion, acting as the cause behind it. The objet a becomes constituted in the primary moment of separation from the mother through which the subject then constitutes itself. Lacan identified four kinds of objet a: the gaze, the voice, the feces, and the breast, which serve as memorials of this early loss into symbolization. The objet a cannot be found in a relationship; it can only be momentarily apprehended in a gaze, a tone of voice, a smell, or a fleeting sensation, and every subject has a particular objet a in correspondence to his separation from the mother. Something reminds the person unconsciously of the separation from the object of incestuous desire and fixates him in that particular constellation. The goal of any analysis is to apprehend the subject s engagement with the cause of the other s desire so that the subject has a more informed sense of what is driving him in this unconscious desire. In his seminar on anxiety (L Angoisse), Lacan (1962 1963) arrived at one more transformation of the objet a. In this seminar, he discussed Winnicott s concept of the transitional object and began to speak about the objet a as a transferrable object (un objet cessible): The most decisive moment in the anxiety involved, the weaning anxiety, is not so much that the breast is missing on a particular occasion when the subject needs it, but rather that the little child gives up the breast to which he is appended, as a part of himself (p. 362, translation mine). Here Lacan argued that the infant gives up a part of itself when it gives up the breast, and in so doing identifies with that lost part of itself. The infant makes the mother s breast a part of itself and thus experiences the loss of the breast as a loss of itself and not of the mother. This transferable object, which Lacan equated with Winnicott s transitional object, led Lacan to the important conclusion that a primordial identification takes place prior to the mirror stage, in which the infant identifies with a lost part of itself. This constitutes a pre-specular identificatory moment for the infant long before it identifies itself with its alienating mirror image and mistakes that mirror image for itself. The infant is thus faced with the object which it mistakes for itself in front of it and has to let go of something that it believes to be itself. This profound early, pre-imaginary anguished loss of one part of oneself is at the root of human existence. The objet a also gains increasing significance in the clinical realm because it is the analyst who has to situate herself as the semblance of the objet a, the cause of the analysand s desire in the treatment. In Lacan s seminar on identification, the objet a became more and more clearly defined as the object of the drive that can only be seized in a conjugation of a subjective, active, or self-reflexive form. The concept of the fantasm becomes crucial here because it articulates the relation between the objet a and the subject. The fantasm represents the basic unconscious structure through which the subject organizes desire in relation to the objet a. For instance, a subject may always want to see/hear, or may always want to be seen/heard, or may always want to see/hear himself as a means of safeguarding access to his jouissance, which lies beyond his desire. Returning to Freud s notion that there is no direct relationship between the object and the drive and that the object is merely soldered together with the drive, what installs itself between the drive and the object is a fantasm. The fantasm arrives at some articulation of how the drive engages the object, guaranteeing a constant flow of jouissance. The subject is typically passionately attached and fixated on his fantasm perverse, abject or depressing, and humiliating as it may be so as not to lose the fundamental autoerotic source of his jouissance. The task of analysis is to reduce the power the basic fantasm yields over the object of the drive. By trying to drain the jouissance from behind the fantasm, analysis attempts to diminish the force the fantasm occupies over the subject s life. Jouissance In order to understand the direction of a Lacanian analysis, it is important to clarify the concept of jouissance and the role it plays in the formation of symptoms. Lacan s definition of jouissance changed as well over time, both in theory and in clinical practice. Whereas jubilation might have sufficed as a translation for the moment the infant recognizes itself in the mirror during the mirror stage, it does no justice to
254 Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Second Editon Lacan s later uses of jouissance. Jouissance has many facets and has emerged as one of the most useful clinical idea for analytic treatment. It is a legal term, referring to the right to enjoy the use of a thing as opposed to possessing it. It is an enjoyment that is pursued for its own sake, having no limit or visible aim attached to it. It is of no serviceable use, yet the human being is so constructed that it cannot do without this useless lust. Lacan linked and contrasted jouissance with desire. Whereas desire implies a lack one can only desire what one does not have jouissance implies an excess of gratification, readily turning its pursuit of pleasure into an abyss of tension and pain. It has also been compared to Freud s concept of the death drive because it seeks gratification for its own sake, disregarding limits and boundaries and compelling the subject to risk everything for an often dangerous pursuit. Jouissance is also central to a revised understand of symptom formation. Whereas a symptom was initially thought to be a purely linguistic phenomenon, a message that was written into the body, ready to be deciphered by the Other, Freud and Lacan realized that symptoms do not readily dissolve but instead stubbornly refuse to be reached by words. This realization led Lacan to define jouissance as excess pleasure/ tension residing at the core of each symptom. The subject is deeply attached her symptom because the symptom provides an autoerotic, unconscious source of painful pleasure that the subject is loath to sacrifice. Jouissance, objet a, the basic fantasm, and the symptom/sinthome are elements of the real that cannot be grasped in symbolic or tangible terms. Yet the four clinical structures Lacan laid out as hysteria, obsession, perversion, and psychosis can be conceptualized as distinct answers to five fundamental questions that lie at the genesis of each subjectivity: What does the Other want from me? How can I have or be something to fill up the Other s lack? How can I answer the M/Other s enigmatic demand? What am I for whom? What is my function in the desire of the Other? Clinical Structures Psychosis No other clinical structure explains the significance of language and the independence of the signifier over the signified as well as the structure of psychosis. Psychosis represents the laboratory for the splitting of the mind, something Freud had already discovered in his treatise on dreams. Modeling his theory of psychosis on Freud s analysis of the Schreiber case and on his own clinical studies of psychosis at St. Anne s Hospital, Lacan showed how the psychotic subject forecloses the name-of-the-father. What the subject finds in place of the name-of-the father is a hole, because he cannot forgo the initial maternal satisfaction and thus remains in the grip of being the unique phallic object to complete the mother s lack. The function of the symbolic father is to render the child s identification with the object of the mother s desire impossible. Yet in the case of the psychotic subject, the father cannot intervene as a third, and the mother and child remain fixated in a folie à deux. What cannot be symbolized remains a hole in the symbolic and reappears in the form of a hallucination or delusion from the order of the real. The psychotic speaks, but his words have no symbolic value. Words cannot re-present things, they are things, and the psychotic feels bombarded and persecuted by words that he hears as special commands directed to him. Unlike the neurotic subject who is the speaker, the psychotic subject is the receiver of messages from the other; he has the certitude that he is the object of the other s jouissance. When the paternal function fails so dramatically, as in the case of the psychotic subject, no limit can be established and no absence can be created, and in its place an excess amount of jouissance is produced from which the psychotic subject cannot protect himself. Paragraph above: Note change of psychotic and neurotic to psychotic subject and neurotic subject. OK? AUTHOR: I have edited the heading and subheadings of the following section to eliminate an extra heading and for consistent style with other sections. OK as edited? Perversion The perverse structure is most akin to the psychotic one, and perversions often functions as the next best defense against psychosis. Similar to the psychotic
Jacques Lacan 255 subject, the perverse subject is also the passive object of the mother s excessive maternal jouissance. She is the instrument of the Other s enjoyment and comes close to being the phallic extension and object of the mother. What differentiates the perverse subject from the psychotic subject is that she encounters a figure in the third position but that figure is one to take the law into her own hands. A triadic structure exists, but it is perverted. The law as we know it is not foreclosed but disavowed. The perverse subject does not obey the regular societal rules but instead invents her own rules by which she faithfully lives. She gets a kick out of challenging societal rules and enjoys transgressing the law as a means of evoking anxiety and trepidation in the Other. She derives much satisfaction from the embarrassment and anguish witnessed in the Other. For the perverse subject, the tables are turned around; the Other now becomes an instrument for pleasure, and she is compelled, without knowing why, to pursue of path of pleasure that extols her mighty stance. Few perverse patients seek analysis, but when they do, Lacan used to say that they do not come to discover knowledge about themselves but instead come to get a rise out of their analyst. Obsession The obsessive person has been typically in early childhood the supplement to the mother s unfulfilled desire. He has received too much of the mother s jouissance and maintains desire as impossible by negating the desire of the Other. Instead of seeking to fulfill the Other s desire and becoming the special one to the Other, the obsessional person annuls the Other s desire and negates it. The obsessional individual needs to be in charge, planning every aspect of his life in great detail. Everything is organized so that nothing unexpected can occur. The obsessional person plugs up the Other s lack to avoid becoming the object of the other s desire. He constantly needs to demonstrate that he is the master of his own desire and does not need the Other to fulfill his own desire. The encounter with the desiring Other becomes the most frightening encounter for this person. His jouissance derives from her incessant thinking, planning, and speaking, and his words serve to keep the Other at a distance. Hysteria The hysterical person does not identify with her lack but instead points toward the lack in the Other. The hysterical individual senses that her mother is incomplete and constructs herself as the one to complete her. She constitutes herself as the one the Other desires, so that her status to be desired rests assured. She looks for a master in the Other over whom she can reign. The hysterical person typically attempts to become what the other desires her to be as a means of denying her own castration, yet she always encounters dissatisfaction in the end. In her unfulfillment, she keeps her own desire alive. Position of the Analyst, Transference, and the Work of Analysis The analyst has to agree to stand in for the unconscious and make the unconscious present through his absence. The analyst positions himself between the patient s wishes for idealizations and the objet a, which he is called upon to represent on behalf of the patient s unconscious desire. In not giving into the analysand s demands for love, knowledge, and advice, the analyst creates a realm within which the patient is led back to the source of her own alienation. Holding onto the position of the cause of desire and not becoming caught in the web of the analysand s object of desire leads in the transference to something other than an identification with the analyst. Instead of interpreting the object relations within the transference, the Lacanian analyst listens to the analysand s manifestations of unconscious desire through her slips of the tongue, parapraxes, and bungled actions. Because the subject is divided between knowledge and truth, the analyst formed in a Lacanian tradition turns an ear to the truth of the unconscious desire and away from interpretations inspiring idealizations or identification with the analyst. The invitation to free associate allows the analysand to speak freely and without any consideration for logic or rationality. It is through this free use of speech that the analysand articulates signifiers that point and erupt as indicators of her unconscious desire. Interpretations are therefore not offered to explain or convey meanings but to evoke more speech, opening up further passages to the unconscious. For Lacan, a good interpretation resembles a hybrid between a quo-
256 Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Second Editon tation of the patient s own words (often in an inverse form) and a metaphor that does not nail down a meaning or inform the analysand of a hidden meaning but opens the patient s discourse to a multiplicity of meanings. Although the analysand invests the analyst with a great deal of knowledge and projects that he is the subject supposed to know, the analyst in fact knows nothing, and it is this nothingness that is the greatest gift he can give. Akin to Lacan s definition of love as giving something you don t have to somebody you don t know, the analyst s most significant gift is to offer nothingness a non-narcissistic ego that in turn elicits speech. By speaking from within the position of the objet a, the analyst stands in the place of the unspeakable, of that which waits to be expressed. The analyst s desire is thus passionately restricted to discovering on behalf of the patient her unconscious desire and to allow her the space to speak at the rim of the unspeakable and discover the signifiers that have determined her desire. Transference In 1964, Lacan defined transference as the attribution of knowledge to a subject: As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists, there is transference (1973, p. 232). The fuel of any transference relationship is the analysand s investment into the figure of the analyst as the one who knows and who is expected to have some knowledge about the analysand. The trick is to maintain this investment while redirecting the presumed knowledge to the analysand herself. Why? Because it is the analysand who walks into analysis with a knowledge she has repressed and cannot bear to have. The analyst does not inform the analysand, but through investment into the analysand s unconscious and free association the analyst creates the space for the analysand to hear herself and to listen to what speaks from inside her repressed unconscious desire. Lacan distinguishes between imaginary and symbolic transference. The imaginary transference is constructed between the analyst s and analysand s egos and specular counterparts. Strong emotions of love and hate, idealization and contempt, and futility and strong need typically unfold along this imaginary axis (see schema L, the axis between a and a [Figure 16 3]). The symbolic transference pertains to the repetition of structures and the aspect of history that repeats itself in the life of the analysand and across generations. Through frustrating the analysand s demands for knowledge and love, a frustration is created that allows for the analysand s unconscious desire to speak through dreams, enactments, mistakes, and surprises. Lacan cautioned to interpret the transference directly because such explanatory interpretations risk positioning the analyst into yet another idealized figure who knows and understands, thus repeating the cycle of imaginary configurations. Hence it remains crucial during the psychoanalytic cure that the analyst maintain the place of and for the Other so that the analysand can find the place from which her desire was constructed for the Other. AUTHOR: Above, please clarify reference cited as 1973. No reference with that year appears in reference list. End of Cure For the subject to speak in his own name, he must have crossed the plane of identification and traversed the fundamental fantasm in order to reach a change in subjective position toward the Other. Crossing the plane of identification involves the analysand s profound recognition that his whole subjectivity was constructed through and for an Other. All the imaginary relations formed along the imaginary axis between the me and the idealized ego are put into question and show their fragile face. Because there is no longer a guarantee of those signifiers that define the subject s being, the analysand is forced to confront both the void of the Other and the void inside of himself. Robbed of all identifications (imaginary and symbolic), the subject comes face to face with the unconscious and the ways he has been led away from his original desire. It is this confrontation with the void, with this kernel of no one holding the strings to his being, that brings the subject to the edge of the real. The analysand has to be brought to this brink of nothingness as a desiring subject to speak his own desire. The fundamental fantasy is a deeply held unconscious construction that embeds the subject s solution to the Other s quest. The fantasm installs itself around the way the infant deals with the loss of the primary object and represents a lasting structure through which the subject defines desire toward the Other. The aim of the drive is to obtain satisfaction not so much through the object but through the fantasm attached to the object. Hence the subject is intensely fixated upon
Jacques Lacan 257 the fantasm perverse, abject or depressing, and humiliating as it may be so as not to lose the fundamental source of unconscious pleasure/jouissance that is attached to the object of the drive. The fantasm constitutes the important link between the subject s drive behind the subject s desire and functions as the essential protection against the primary loss of the Other. Crossing the fundamental fantasm eventually spells out to the subject how her relations to the Other have been compromised so as not to lose an important source of jouissance through a rigid way of finding unconscious pleasure in suffering or dominating or making herself useless or useful to the Other. It takes years to arrive at such a construction, but when it finally emerges, it always surprises the analysand and analyst alike in the simplicity in which it arrives. Why am I not the most important object to you? was one patient s way to reconstruct his previous idealized and failed relationships. In a constant pursuit of crafting himself as the most necessary and useful person to the Other, he had continuously reconfigured the erotically filled relation to the primary Other through a number of unreachable and rejecting women in his life. In the end, then, the symptom that may have brought an analysand into an analysis is no longer experienced as a foreign body but as a body that is familiar to the subject, something that she can live with and accept as a reminder of the separation from the Other and as a construction of her own being. KEY POINTS Lacan understood his own writings as a radical return to Freud, to the discovery of the divided subject who is split by an unconscious desire located in the desire of the Other. Instead of privileging the Other as an external figure, Lacan anchored human subjectivity in the basic structures of language, culture, and the unconscious. The subject does not use language to express himself; instead language precedes the subject and structures him in his innermost thoughts and desires. Instead of a developmental schema, Lacan proposed a structural model in which the subject lives within the three interrelated registers of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. While the imaginary describes the world of images and illusions, and the symbolic the world of language and laws, it is the realm of the real, of the un-symbolizable and inexpressible dimensions, that punctures human existence in powerfully invisible ways. In the Lacanian clinic, the analyst s desire is passionately restricted to discovering the analysand s unconscious desire. Whereas the figure of the analyst is invested with the fantasy of being the subject-supposed to know, she instead assumes the position of the objet a, the cause of desire, which in turn allows the analysand to speak at the edge of the unspeakable and discover the signifiers that have shaped his unconscious desire. Jouissance refers to excess unconscious pleasure that is unserviceable but provides an endless source of painful pleasure for any symptom formation. Through the naming of one s desire and the ensuing realization of one s lack, jouissance is thought to be diminished in the subject s speaking body.
258 Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Second Editon References Lacan J: La Relation d Objet, Livre IV (1956 1957). Paris, France, Editions du Seuil, 1994 AUTHOR: Please provide reference for Evans as cited in text. Felman S: Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987 AUTHOR: Reference above not cited in text. Please cite or delete. Freud S: Project for a scientific psychology (1895), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 1. Translated and edited by Strachey J. London, Hogarth, 1950, pp 283 398 Freud S: The interpretation of dreams (1900), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vols 4 and 5. Translated and edited by Strachey J. London, Hogarth, 1953, pp 1 715 Freud S: Three essays on the theory of sexuality (1905), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 7. Translated and edited by Strachey J. London, Hogarth, 1953, pp 123 246 Freud S: Repression (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 14. Translated and edited by Strachey J. London, Hogarth, 1957, pp 141 145 Freud S: Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality (1922), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 18. Translated and edited by Strachey J. London, Hogarth, 1955, pp 221 234 Freud S: Fetishism (1927), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 21. Translated and edited by Strachey J. London, Hogarth, 1962, pp 153 157 Freud S: Analysis terminable and interminable (1937),, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 23. Translated and edited by Strachey J. London, Hogarth, 1964, pp 209 254 Kojeve A: Introduction to the reading of Hegel (1947), in Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University, 1991 Lacan J: De la Psychose Paranoiaque dans ses Rapports Avec la Personalite (1932), in D Ecrits sur la Paranoia. Paris, France, Editions du Seuil, 1975 Lacan J: The mirror-stage as formative of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience (1949), in Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Sheridan A. New York, WW Norton, 1977, pp XX XX Lacan J: Les Psychoses, Livre III (1955 1956). Paris, France, Editions du Seuil, 1981 AUTHOR: Reference above not cited in text. Please cite or delete. Lacan J: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Book VII (1959 1960). Translated by Porter D. New York, WW Norton, 1992 Lacan J: L Identification (1960 1961). Paris, France, Association Freudienne Internationale, 1995 Lacan J: Le Seminaire, Livre X: L Angoisse (1962 1963). Paris, France, Editions du Seuil, 2004 Lacan J: L Acte Psychanalytique (1967 1968). Paris, France, Association Freudienne Internationale, 2001 AUTHOR: Reference above not cited in text. Please cite or delete. Lacan J: Freud s Papers on Technique, 1953 1954 (1954). Paris, France, Editions du Seuil, 1975 AUTHOR: Reference above not cited in text. Please cite or delete. Lacan J: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Sheridan A. New York, WW Norton, 1977 AUTHOR: Reference above not cited in text. Please cite or delete. Sartre JP: Being and Nothingness. New York, Washington Square Press, 1966 Verhaege P: On Being Normal and Other Disorders. New York, Other Press, 2004 AUTHOR: Reference above not cited in text. Please cite or delete. Zizek S: The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, Verso, 1989 AUTHOR: Reference above not cited in text. Please cite or delete.
Jacques Lacan 259 AUTHOR: I created the title for Figure 16 1 based on the text. OK? Please edit as needed. AUTHOR: All three legends would benefit by your adding brief description, as figure note, of process depicted. AUTHOR: Figure 16 3: Please indicate whether a prime is indicated anywhere in the diagram. Is there a prime symbol missing on one of the a s? S_ S FIGURE 16 1. Signifier over the signified. (Es) S a other imaginary relation unconscious FIGURE 16 2. The Borromean Knot. (ego) a A Other FIGURE 16 3. Schema L.