Lacan Concepts I

Still struggling to grasp Lacan’s terms and feeling like there’s a long way to go. This the first installment in a series of notes (to come) on Lacan’s concepts. I read an introductory book by Darian Leader and Judy Groves together with some other books. And some of my summary is the exact copy of their words.

The Imaginary: the Mirror stage

-       The starting point: the ego is characterized by its falsifying function. The ego’s task is to maintain a false appearance of coherence and completeness.

-       The construction of the ego: the truth of the ego emerges when the ego-centric world collapses and the difference between self and other arises as a fundamental question.

-       Hegelian

The Symbolic

a. Symptoms and words

-       symptoms and actions are the words trapped in the body. Words, in other words,  are the very essence of symptoms.

-       what are the words?: it consists of the signifier and the signified and the meaning is to be revealed through the web of signifying chains. In other words, meaning (or the group of meanings) arises through the links between the words. Therefore, there is a priority of the signifier. (priority of the “place”)

-       Signifiers form networks to which we have little conscious access but which will govern our life. They organize the world, the very texture of which is symbolic.

b. the Ideal

-       one is bound to its image by words and names: Thus, there is an identification which is both beyond and in a sense prior to the identification with the image: a symbolic identification with a signifying element.

-       Here, the symbolic identification with an “ideal” element removes the subject from being completely at the mercy of the imaginary images. They come from another register, the symbolic, which serve to ground the subject—that is, to give him a “place” in the structure.

c. The distinction b/w Ego Ideal and Ideal Ego

-       The Ideal ego is the image we assume and the Ego Ideal is the symbolic point which gives us a place and supplies the point from which we are looked at. In other words, if my Ideal Ego is Fredric Jameson, then the question is who is it that I am identifying with Jameson for?

d. Language and the Unconscious

-       the central property of a linguistic system is discontinuity: language functions through the difference of its elements.

-       (so, the (linguistic) discontinuity is set in opposition to the imaginary because the imaginary register is rendered possible in the process of trying to avoid the dimension of lack or absence. And of course this endeavor is inauthentic, since the real problem of the imaginary is that it is based on the discontinuity/gap/lack between/in the child’s uncoordinated body and the envelope of the whole image assumed.)

-       the unconscious is structured like a language; it is constituted by a series of chains of signifying elements. This is why symptoms are words trapped in the body. (when a symptom is translated/connected with the rest of the signifying chains, there will be an effect on the symptom.)

e. Speech and Language

-       language is a structure, speech is an act.

-       speaking determines one’s position as a speaker. It gives one a place. (the words I use mean more than I mean in using them).

-       speech supposes the existence of an other, a place from which you are heard, from which you are recognized. In other words, the other is the place of language, external to the speaker, but at the same time, internal.

The Real

a. definition: the Real is that which is not symbolized.

-       All these three constitute the “three registers of human reality”. (what we call reality is thus a sort of amalgam of the symbolic and the imaginary. Imaginary to the extent that we are situated in the specular register where the ego tries to rationalize our actions; symbolic to the extent that things around us have meanings.)

-       The real represents what is excluded from our reality.

Ego and Subject (the imaginary and the symbolic)

a. the primacy of “place”

-       the first step in analysis is to reveal not what the patient is saying, but from where they are speaking—to reveal where their imaginary alienation is situated. (here, “I” must be separated from the ego.)

-       The ego is imaginary, while the subject is linked to the symbolic.

The Name of the Father 

a. definition

-       a symbolic function in the symbolic chain in which the relation of man and woman is structured. Not the biological father.

b. the Phallus

- there are three terms between Mother and the child: mother, the child, and the object of the mother’s desire—the phallus. The child tries to become the third term—to be the phallus for the mother.

Revised Theory of Language

-       In 58 as opposed to 53, a new theory of language is forwarded. The early study focused on the alienation in the register of the imaginary; now alienation is situated in the register of language. If speech is seen as giving a sort of identity to a subject, language has the role of blocking identity.

Demand, Need, Desire, Wish

- The object of need become pulverized by the dimension of language: what matters now is not the object (ice-cream), but the sign of love. Speaking thus introduces a particular form of loss into the world. To speak is to make the object vanish precisely because one is always speaking to someone else.

- In other words, the object of need become eclipsed in the demand.

- Lacan adds a third register: desire

- Desire takes up what has been eclipsed at the level of need (the dimension represented by the mythical icecream) and introduces an absolute condition in opposition to the absolutely unconditioned nature of demand.

- here is the moment when “fetishism” enters.

- Enjoyment is determined strictly by the presence of “fetishistic” element: the complementary relationship between Juissance and Fetishism is essential for the function of desire.

- If demand is demand for an object, desire has nothing as its object: nothing in the sense of “lack taken as an object”.

- wish and desire: wish is only an alibi. What really matters is why the supposed wish-fulfillment has taken the form it took (in your dream).

- In conclusion: Lacan says, if we aim to track down desire, we want to do it by focusing not on the message, but rather on the points of redundancy—the little details which do not really need to be there.

- then, what is it that desire desires? Lacan’s answer: no-thing, an absent one, the maternal phallus.

- Here we need to distinguish two different conceptions of phallus. 1) as an imaginary object, an imaginary lack 2) as a signifier, a symbol of desire. The failure to distinguish these two dimensions leads to a clinical case. And the intervention of the father (the name of the father or the symbolic) is precisely for this distinction: in other words, the castration takes place when one enters the symbolic.

Foreclosure (back to the REAL)

-       when an element is foreclosed, it can’t return in the symbolic because it never existed in the first place. And it returns not in the symbolic but in the real. (for example, in the form of hallucinations).

-       What a psychotic delusion does is to supply the missing signification (thus the signifier) in the place of the hole opened up by the absence of the name of the father. A delusion, after all, gives the meaning to the world.

-       Madness is an exercise of the most rigorous logic.