Jacques Marie Émile Lacan
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Jacques Marie Emile Lacan was born on April 13, 1901, and died on September 9, 1981. He was a French psychoanalyst and a philosopher and was a very controversial figure on the French psychoanalytic scene. He was a polymathic intellectual presence across a number of fields of human inquiry, whose work has had strong influences on psychiatry, psychoanalysis, philosophy, literary and critical theory, and film studies. A selection from his writings entitled Écrits and Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, both published in 1977, and translated by Alan Sheridan, were the books that brought him to the attention of students of literature and theory in the Anglophone world.
His work is notoriously gnomic and enigmatic as well as being prone to change, as his ideas on core concepts—such as the unconscious, the other, the phallus, the mirror stage, desire, the drive, and his triadic system of understanding knowledge: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real—all underwent changes over the course of his life and work. His work has become even more influential after his death. He gained an international reputation as an original interpreter of Sigmund Freud’s work.
We will discuss following in detail in this blog, jump to the respective text with the help of links below: 👇
The Mirror Stage and the imaginary register
In 1936, Lacan presented a paper to the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad, Germany on the Mirror Stage of development. Human beings are born in an immature state, only gradually being able to walk and talk, and Lacan wondered how children developed their relationship to their bodies. He postulated, based on animal behavior and child observation studies, that children between the ages 6 and 18 months, identify with their image in a mirror and that this gives the child the jubilant perception of itself as whole and complete, in contrast to the child’s inner experience of being fragmented and disconnected.
Lacan called this false image of wholeness in the mirror, the “ego.” His use of the word “ego” was different from Freud’s as Lacan frequently put “new wine into old bottles.” At the same time, Lacan called his entire work a “return to Freud,” believing that his was a closer and more accurate reading of Freud than how others understood Freud. “Alienation” was the term that Lacan used to describe the tension between the child’s inner uncoordinated and disconnected perception of self and the integrated image in the mirror.
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Following his description of the Mirror Stage, Lacan made a profound leap. He postulated that the child’s false perception of self in the mirror is characteristic of one of the three so-called registers, or orders, in which human beings experience the world. He called this first register the “Imaginary register", related to the word image and not to “imagination” or “imagining.” The “imaginary” register is the world of sensations-visual, olfactory, auditory, and tactile and is the register we use to compare ourselves to others. When we meet a patient for the first time, or anyone else for that matter, our initial impression takes place in the “imaginary register. We are indeed “judging a book by its cover.”
Signifier and Signified
Structuralism and semiotics encouraged the use of the linguistic theories of Swiss Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Lacan takes the term ‘signifier’ from the work of the Saussure. According to Saussure, the signifier is the phonological element of the SIGN; not the actual sound itself, but the mental image of such a sound… the signifier is the ‘acoustic image’ which signifies a SIGNIFIED. The signified has the same status as the SIGNIFIER both from equal sides of the sign.
Lacan, on the other hand, asserts the supremacy of the signifier and argues that the signified is a mere effect of the play of signifiers, an effect of the process of signification produced by metaphor. In other words, the “signified is not given but produced”. Lacan argues that the relation between signifier and signified is highly volatile.
Secondly, Lacan asserts the existence of an order of ‘pure signifiers,' where signifiers exist before signified, this order of purely logical structure is the unconscious. This amounts to a destruction of Saussure’s concept of the sign; for Lacan, a language is not composed of the sign but of signifiers. This is why a word’s meaning changes over time. Lacan argued that we are represented by language, by special objects called ‘words.' Lacan’s technical term for ‘word’ is ‘signifier’ Lacan says that “the signifier represents the subject for another signifier”.
The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic
This concept is one of the crucial concepts in Lacanian theory. By the 1960s Lacan had a broad theory of the psyche or mind, with three different categories “the imaginary, the symbolic and the real.” Lacan use of the term ‘real’ as substantive dates back to an early paper, published in 1936.
“The real is not an account of reality or the ‘objective world’ but a kind of recurring impossibility, a return of the repressed…The real is about impossibilities the impossibilities of language and life.”
The sense of unified selfhood is one of the most significant defining movements in the development of subjectivity. Before the sense of self-emerges, the young child exists in a realm which Lacan calls the ‘imaginary,' in which there is no distinction between self and other, and there is a kind of idealized identification with the mother. Then between six months and eighteen moths comes what he calls the ‘mirror stage.' When the child sees its reflection in the mirror and begins to conceive of itself as a unified being, separate from the rest of the world. At this stage, the child enters into the language system, essentially a system which is concerned with lack and separation. The real emerges as that which is outside the language and inassimilable to symbolization.
The real is ‘the impossible’ because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order, and impossible to attain anyway. Lacan's concept of Need, Demand, and Desire. Lacan divides the psychological development of a child into three different stages they are ‘need’ ‘demand’ and ‘desire.' According to Lacan newly born child is mostly in need of food, a mother feeds him. When an infant gets older mother feeds him less, and talks to that child more. In this stage, a mother is feeding his child language, words, and signifiers. Lacan says “less feeding convert into the pleasure of language."
What child does, a child starts learning language swallowing the signifiers that mother has been feeding him, with pain and pleasure. In this way, the baby identifies the management of his suffering ‘motherer,' with mother tongue. After completing the first phase of ‘need,' there is a kind of progression from 'need' to 'demand.'
The English word ‘demand’ is perhaps closer to the English words ‘ask for’ and ‘request.' In the 1956-57 seminar that Lacan discusses this issue and says “baby’s cry to the mother…cry is not merely an institutional signal but is inserted in a synchronic world of cries organized in a linguistic structure long before the child is capable of articulating recognizable words." After child learning a language, it starts demanding the objects. For example, a child asks for some ‘banana’ and after giving ‘banana’ child ask for ‘chocolate’ even giving ‘banana, ’ and ‘chocolate’ child demand will not fulfill. According to Lacan “Child is asking for the object that doesn’t exist." After this stage, there is a kind of psychological progression in a child, from 'need' to 'demand' and then on to 'desire.'
Before going to the details on Lacan concept of ‘desire,' there is another Lacanian concept of ‘symbolic father' needs our attention. The symbolic father is not the same as the biological father. The symbolic father is any agency that separated the young from its mother. For example, mother going to the ‘job,' ‘job’ becomes the symbolic father. Lacan theory of the ‘symbolic father’ is necessary for understanding the relation of ‘need,' ‘demand,' and ‘desire.' Desire is another difficult idea Lacan argued because according to him desire is another word for ‘lack.'
Here, Sigmund Freud talks about 'Oedipus Complex' also, we will not go in detail about it, in this blog.
Desire can be something which is missing, desire often hides, and it can be something lacking. According to him, desire will be revealed in dreams, slips of the tongue and symptoms. Once a child got the proof that mother cannot provide all that things the child demands for, and then a child is able to begin to start identifying its own desire. However, when Lacan talks about desire, it is not any kind of desire he is referring to, but always he talks of is about unconscious desire.
This is not because Lacan sees conscious desire as unimportant, but simply because it is unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis.
"Unconscious desire is entirely sexual the motives of the unconscious are limited… to sexual desire… The other great generic desire, that of hunger, is not represented.”
The aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to lead the analyser to recognize the truth about his desire.
Lacan's contribution to literary critical theory:
Lacan's famous utterances is that the unconscious is structured like a language. By this he means that the unconscious used linguistic means of self- expression and that the unconscious is an orderly network, as complex as the structure of language. What the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language.
How this theory is used in some of the literary works:
Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist a Young Man helps us to make better sense of how a boy's identity emerges in Lacan's re-reading. A sense of separation and loss expands Stephen's language. His mind moves back and forth between an attractive maternal image and a threatening paternal one. There are 'sunderings' from both parents and these contribute to his growth when he sets off in a new direction to find another world after one of his worlds has been threatened. The 'sunderings' in Stephen's case are tied up with Lacanian notions about lack, desire and movement from the Imaginary to the Symbolic order.
In the same way Prufrock in T.S.Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" in the light of the Lacanian formulations on lack and desire. Prufrock's basic problem is that he is enmeshed in divergent pulls of desire and his awareness of various kinds of lack. These go into the making of his otherness and a general unease of otherness always surrounds him. A line like: "It is impossible to say just what I mean" points to the lack of a neat fit between the signified and the signifier.
Psychoanalysis has been helpful in an understanding of works such as Shakespeare's Hamlet and D.H.Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. A considerable part of literary language (especially poetic language) relies heavily on 'displacement', 'condensation' and on the metaphorical dimensions provided by them. If we believe with deconstructionalists like Paul de Mail and J. Hillis Miller that all language is innately figural then these features of literary language become all the more crucial to any understanding of the literary use of language.
Objections by Feminist Critics:
A number of feminist critics find Freud's and Lacan's ideas problematic. There is a biologism in Freud's theories. What has been seen as especially objectionable is the Freudian notion that women on account of suffering from 'penis envy' (lack of the male organ) and 'castration complex' get defined negatively, in relation to a male norm. Asserting the female body as plenitude, a positive force and a source of multiple physical capacities. Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, three French women thinkers, have tackled this issue quite capably. French feminist theory relies heavily on psychoanalysis.
Conclusion
Sigmund Freud being the father of psychoanalysis advocated the structure of unconscious. Jokes, bunglings, misreadings, failures of memory and unaccountable slips of the tongue all belong to the same category of 'the unconscious.' Through the interpretation of dreams, slips of tongues and jokes... Lacan theories have revolutionized the clinical practice of psychoanalysis and continue to have a significant impact in fields as diverse as philosophy, literary criticism, and film studies. Lacanian model of psychoanalysis on the basis of language is found to be an effective tool of literary criticism in order to probe into the very act of creating a work of literature by an author as well as experiencing a work of literature by a reader.
“I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.”
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Some of the literary works mentioned in the blog:
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References:
[1] Hill, Philip. Lacan for Beginners. India: Orient Black Swan.
[2] Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. New Delhi: Viva Books.
[3] MEG, IGNOU, India Study material.
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