Lecture Notes on Jacques Lacan | E 341, Study notes of English Language

Download Lecture Notes on Jacques Lacan | E 341 and more Study notes English Language in PDF only on Docsity! 11 October Jacques Lacan French psychoanalyst who in 1950’s onwards began developing his theories. Brings together Freud’s ideas with structuralist and post-structuralist linguistic theory. Freud’s aim in psychoanalysis was to uncover aspects of the unconscious and bring it into the realm of consciousness in order to understand impact of id on ego and cure any neuroses emerging from that: “Where id was, there shall ego be.” For Lacan this aim of giving the ego control over the id or having the conscious “I” replace the unconscious is impossible. According to Lacan, the ego or “I” is only an illusion, a product of the unconscious itself. Thus, for Lacan the unconscious is “the nucleus of our being”. Ego does not have power to control according to Lacan. Freud’s tripartite model of the mind – id, ego, superego – charts how the demands of the id are repressed by the injunctions of the superego and a child becomes a civilized, well-socialized and productive ego-controlled self. Lacan, on the other hand, has no such faith in the ego. He argues that this sense of a self that is rational and in control is an illusion. His essay on the Mirror Stage discusses how an infant gets the illusion of what we know as a “self”. Before the Mirror Stage The infant starts out without any sense of an individual or coherent identity. An infant will play with or suck upon parts of its own body – its fist or toes – with as much enthusiasm as an external object such as a bottle or a breast or a toy. In this baby’s world there is no difference between self and other, between itself and the mother. There is no consciousness of anything except NEED. Need is for concrete things: the infant needs milk when it is hungry; needs to be changed when it is wet and uncomfortable; needs to be held or hugged when it needs warmth and safety. The infant driven by pure need does not distinguish between itself and the objects that meet its needs. There is no recognition that the thumb it is sucking is its own or that the breast is a part of another person. There is only NEED and the satisfaction of those needs. This phase Lacan terms the realm of the REAL: In the Real, there is no consciousness of separation between I and you, subject and object, self and other, infant and mother. The Real as a psychic realm is a world of undifferentiated wholeness, a world without boundaries, a world of completeness and fullness where there are only needs and satisfaction of those needs. Complete “happiness” (in adult terms, not in infant terms who is nothing yet but a bundle driven by instinctive need) or satisfaction is possible in the realm of the Real. “Growing up” means moving from this world of primal wholeness and unity: the infant must separate from its mother, realize that the world is not just a flux without differences but a world inhabited by all kinds of ‘others’. Thus at the root of an infant’s growth into ‘functional human being in civilized society’ lies a breaking up of this original sense of fullness and wholeness; a primal LOSS wherein the sense of a non-differentiated completeness must give way to separation. Between the ages of 6 to 18 months the infant begins to shift from the wholeness of the Real to a consciousness of a difference between its body and the world around. With this consciousness, the infant shifts from having only Need to have DEMANDS. With the idea of separation, comes the sense of anxiety, the awareness of Loss or LACK that destroys the earlier sense of undifferentiated fullness. Demands are, in that sense, dependent upon the dawning awareness that the infant is indeed separate from its mother, and that other things exist in the world apart from it. The infant’s Demand then is a demand for that sense of complete satisfaction and wholeness now lost. This LOSS is of course fundamental to the process of individuation and separation that is needed for “normal” growth into adulthood. This is when Lacan’s MIRROR STAGE happens. Mirror stage is best understood as part metaphorical, part real explanation of how the ego or “I” or our sense of “self” is created. At this age – between 6 and 18 months – the baby or child hasn’t yet mastered its own body; it doesn’t have control over its own movements, and it doesn’t have a sense of its body as a whole. At this time, experiencing its body as fragmented, the child sees its image in the mirror. The Real: Need and satisfaction; no consciousness of an “I” but experience of fullness and wholeness; primal unity of mother and infant, no distinction between self and other. Imaginary Order: Demand; beginning of awareness that ‘others’ exist – and in that recognition of others, beginning awareness of an ‘I’ distinct from others; sense of primal unity, fullness and wholeness begins breaking up; this leads to experience of loss, of LACK; but through the mirror stage investment in a fictional, whole, stable self – the Imago – which seems to offer that lure of wholeness but of course never can, for the absence, the Lack always lurking within. Then, the child is introduced to the realm of language, which is the Symbolic Order. (Linguistic signs are, after all, symbols.) The Imaginary and Symbolic realms are overlapping, in the sense that the Imaginary, which is the formation of an alienating sense of self on which the conscious ‘I’ is founded. The mirror-stage is, according to Lacan (who, we must remember, revises Freud, not rejects him) in the pre-Oedipal phase. Lacan uses Freud’s Oedipal triangle to frame his theory of psychic development from infancy to the subject’s entry into the realm of language, the most important gateway into the adult world. Freud speaks of the infant’s desire to (sexually) merge with the mother. In Lacan’s schema, one of the first forms of consciousness an infant has is the awareness of an other, which is experienced as a Lack, a breaking up of the original sense of fullness. The earliest and most important ‘other’ in the infant’s life is the ‘mother’. The mother is first registered in the consciousness as separate, distinct, and causes the sense of Lack or loss or fragmentation the infant begins to experience. Lack is DESIRE: there is no desire without lack. The first desire the infant experiences is for the ‘mother’ – in Freud’s Oedipal formulation this is the (male) child’s sexual desire for the mother; in Lacan’s terms, the desire is that the split of self-other be healed and that original primal unity be returned. In Freud’s view, what breaks this Oedipal desire up, for boys anyway, is the father, who threatens castration. The father threatens to make the boy experience further lack, the absence of the penis, in punishment for his desire to possess the mother. For Lacan, the obstacle posed by the father is the first ‘no’ that suggests the impossibility of the child to ever repossess that primal symbiotic mother. The threat of castration is a metaphor for the idea of the Lack as a structural concept in the psyche. This original Desire evoked by Lack is – like Freud’s Oedipal desire for the mother – driven underground into the unconscious but it never disappears. It manifests in the conscious as a never ending desire in adult life for ‘others’ that will complete the broken, fragmented ‘self’; the quest or desire for objects, people, experiences that will ‘complete’ us symbolizes that unspeakable primal sense of Lack that can never be filled and the birth of Desire that can never be satisfied. As a child, all of this attempt to negotiate Lack and deal with Desire is happening at the same time that the child is being initiated into the world of language, and the two processes dovetail with each other especially because of the nature of the linguistic system. Because after all, language is a system that functions on ‘lack’ or absence – just as the ‘self’ emerges as a psychological concept by separating and differentiating itself from ‘other’, so too words ‘mean’ only be separating and differentiating themselves from other words. Lacan uses Freud’s observation of Little Hans’s fort-da game to explain the link between loss of mother and the entry into language The fort-da game shows the child’s understanding of symbolization – the little spool he throws away symbolizes the loss of the mother – it replaces an absence with a symbol. In that process, the second absence – that of the spool which is thrown away and disappears – is displaced by another symbol, the linguistic signifier “fort”. Hans is using language to negotiate the idea of absence and the idea of Otherness as a category or structural possibility of the psyche. (Objects like the toy are the ‘other’ with the small ‘o’ but the lost unity through a separated other is as a structural category the ‘Other’ with the capital ‘O’ – this is the Other that one seeks in all the others one desires.) We can see in this that language functions exactly as does the unconscious in its attempt to come to terms with Lack or absence Linguistic signs are signifiers of a signified that is forever absent, they only refer to other signifiers and can never ‘fill’ the absence. There is a fundamental bar or difference between the realm of the signifier and the signified, the word and its referent or meaning. This is just how the relationship between Lack and Desire, unconscious and conscious, works. Thus Lacan’s famous statement, “The unconscious is structured like a language.” Also, Freud says in his concept of “dream work” that the unconscious manifests itself in dreams not directly by obliquely, through displacement and condensation. Displacement and condensation become in Lacan’s terms, Metaphor and Metonymy. Unconscious original Desire can never be conveyed directly, it is always displaced on to other objects and conveyed by different terms. Lacan says these ideas – of other and Other, of lack and absence, of the (mis)identification of self with o/ Other – are all worked out on an individual level with each child, but they form the basic structures of the Symbolic order. In Freud’s Oedipal triangle, it is the angry father that says ‘no’ to the child, forces it to accept that the mother will always be absent for him, and that he has to find other substitutes for her. In Lacan’s theory, Freud’s angry father is translated into the realm of language, the Symbolic Order all of us must enter in order to become ‘adults’. Language, like Freud’s Oedipal state ruled, by father, forces us to accept absence – the signified will never be actually captured and we must make do with substitutes, with signifiers that symbolize the missing ‘actual’ meaning. Submission to the rules of language itself is like submission to the Law of the Father – sometime called Name of the Father and sometimes just called Law. To become a speaking subject, you have to be subjected to, you have to obey, the laws and rules of language. The Symbolic Order, ruled by the ‘Law-of-the Father’ is the realm of language, of culture, of adult life. We are born into language, which – as we know from Structuralism and Post structuralism – constitutes our reality and structures our consciousness. We need to follow the rules of the linguistic system to enter into the adult world. It is the acceptance of prohibition and restraints, of possible punishments for non-compliance, the world of patriarchal logic and order.