Continental
Lacan
Emblematic and problematic.
He wants to ”put concepts to work” in psychoanalysis. He takes concepts that he thinks are useful and try to incorporate them in psychoanalysis.
Is the key to understand the project of the younger generations in France. If you understand Lacan, you have access to 60-70 French theory.
Focus on the Other and alienation today, in the imaginary and symbolic. Was a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. Was expelled from the EPA, ecole psychoanalytique, because he was coming up with his own interpretation of Freud which is quite different from earlier. He started his own school which is today still quite influential at Paris 8.
Arthur Rimbaud: ”Car je est un autre” (Because I am another; from a cryptic poem written under the France commune)
Lacan quotes this sentence, because self-hood is an otherness. The self does not exist as an identity that matches with itself, but it is itself alterity.
Lacan elaborates this through a structuralist return to a Freud. He wants to bypass anglo-saxon interpretations of Freud which gets closer to the cognitive sciences that were coming up at the time.
The unconscious is structured as a language. The rules of language are the rules of the unconscious, it is a symbolic system and structure.
In Freud, the unconscious ’thinks’. The dream thought content obeys grammatical rules. This is important for Lacan. And Saussure showed us that there is meaning in language without a subject, the subject is not the meaning-giving instance. Meaning is there entirely automatised by the interplay of different things in a system. As such, the unconscious is a machine that infinitely produces meanings, but most of them have no sense. It is a kind of empty, but productive, thinking.
As such you need to understand three dimensions in Lacan: The RSI, the real, the symbolic. and the imaginary.
Lacan takes much time to study each one of these by themselves. When doing this, he ends up overturning structuralist theory, and as such also becoming a post-structuralist.
Between the RSI, we find object a, the object of all desire.
In psychosis, these three spheres become differently knotted, they lose their coherence, and they become independent. The imaginary no longer covers the real, and the symbolic, but has rather become independent, as in paranoia, when imagination runs rampant.
The Object a, or the phallus, is the signifier of our desire. It is a non-object, but it fuels our engagement with the word. It is that which escapes us constantly, but constantly motivates us to move further. Desire is a lack that keeps us productive. If the obejct of desire is no longer motivating our behaviour we become depressive.
The imaginary Other, and the symbolic Other.
He creates a lot of things called Mathema, mathems. They are symbolic abbreviations, inspired by Frege’s Begriffschrift, for logical operations. Since Lacan is influenced by Saussure, he also believes in the middle-structuralist phase that he is the one who will bring an exact basis onto the psychoanalytic science.
He distinguishes the imaginary Other by writing autre, and the symbolic Other as Autre. Autre is the unconscious, language structure.
Don’t read Ecrits on the bible, they are super difficult. Start with the seminars.
For Lacan, the imaginary and symbolic are interwoven, which means we exist both imaginarily and symbolically. We are in part ’alienated’ through images of ourselves and other, and in part alienated in language. However, the symbolic still precedes everything. The young infant operates purely on images. But as soon as the symbolic is anchored, the images become symbolic parts (???).
This is the key to the obtaining of a self-hood however, as there is no self outside of alienation. The ’I’ emerges as a function of the Other.
”This distinction between the Other with a big O, that is, the Other in so far as it is not known, and the other with a small o, that is, the other who is me, the source of all knowledge, is fundamental.”
The Imaginary other is closer to the ’I’, than to what I know (Autre) about me. Knowledge is the production of an imaginary. We believe in our knowledge, and try to identify ourselves through our knowledge and what we know, but this is a function of the imaginary. You create yourself by this wisdom and understanding, but it is completely imaginary. The imaginary is here not pejorative, contrasted with authenticity. There is some truth, but this truth can only be expressed in the imaginary.
Our fears and desires are from another in ourselves. Lacan writes the subject as a divided subject, an S with a dash through it, as the subject is not unitary. We are divided from ourselves. Someone else in ourselves is constantly fearing and expressing themselves in me.
The imaginary other (a).
Ego, I, or Me = imaginary other
Each time you say ”I”, it is not me, but an imaginary other in myself. The imaginary other is me insofar as I am alienated in an outside image. I identify myself with an exterior image, and this is what I am interiorily too.
As such, Lacan institutes the core of questions about interority and exteriority in the self. We represent ourselves naively as physical beings which are visible from the outside, and with an inside that is not viewable to others. This is one way of seeing the problem says Freud, but if you speak with schizophrenic people who communicate via thought, or who suffer the stealing of thought from others, the border of the exterior is no longer there. As such, we can represent ourselves without the membrane of inside and outside. As such we see that the seperation is part of a structuration which happens throughout childhood, it is a development and something learned. It is not something that is there from the beginning. It can as such be altered and made differently.
The genesis of the ’i’ is the result of the process of the imaginary formation of oneself. It is both the formation of the ’I’ and the formation of the body. As such the body image becomes very important at this stage, because it is the result of the formation of the ’I’.
Lacan is here influenced by Charlotte Buhler’s Mirror Stage. Between 6-18 months, children become able to identify themselves with their own mirror image. As such there is a function of recognition which kicks in in the child. This is both strange and important. We go to a mirror and see whether we look good or not. But what do we really see in the mirror? Not ourselves, it is a distorted image outside of myself with which I somehow identify. If we go through this distortion, we can understand that it is very strange to identify myself with a lot of different things that exist outside of myself, I somehow exist outside of my body in things, not just the mirror. We project ourselves onto things constantly.
For Buhler, it is important for a child to be able to project the coherency of one’s body outside itself, as this is how the child can acquire a sense of unity in its own body. It can see itself only in the mirror as a unified body. One cannot otherwise get access to such a moment. In order to have consciousness of the unity and limits of one’s body, we need to integrate in our self-hood the gaze from the outside. We need to integrate otherness in ourselves. After this stage, infants develop much better control of their movements. Before this stage, children shake and do a whole lot of movement for no reason, because they have no awarness of their members. This is why swaddling is something most cultures do.
Before: young infant does not have unified body, their experience is fragmented.
[Some people say that because children can smile back within 5 seconds of being born, they have actually integrated the other into themselves somehow, as they are able to mimic what the other does, and as such the mirror stage is not even neeeded.]
First acquisition of a proper self happens through the mirror image, the specular image. We perceive the totality of our being in exteriority. The identity of everything lies entirely outside of itself. The center of interiority lies in exteriority. These topological forms are very important for Lacan because they can also be inverted.
Once we integrate the outside, we have a sense of our own unity.
Through the body image we obtain control of our movement through the external visualisation. At the same there is a consciousness that emerges about the seperateness of ourselves from the world. The limit begins to institue an understanding of where my body ends and begins, and this is important for not being psychotic. In psychosis the border between inside and outside is broken down.
However the interorisation of the body image is also the moment that alienation begins. It is imaginary alienation. Alienation is the becoming other of the self.
We become the very image that we see outside of ourselves. It is not a problem if we identify with our own image. But once this has been installed as a valuabale function, nothing prevents the self from identifying itself with other images that are not images of the self. As such, here starts a series of imaginary identification with an infinite amount of things. Jealousy etc. etc. are all identified with this funciton. With the body image starts an unstoppable automatic identification with all around us. This is both dangerous and good, as we get for example empathy. Without the mirror iamge we wouldn’t be able to identify with the other.
As such, the ego is a result of a series of identifications with others. The ego is exchangable and our own desires are the desires of others that have been internalised.
The first images with which we identify, are actually the immediate face of the other, as parents and caregivers etc.
You hate only someone else insofar as they are part of yourself as an imaginary identification. All love and hate is narcisistic. With the identification on the specular level, desires are communicated beyond the image. The identification with the other’s image is not simply the function that occurs on the level of the imaginary, but goes deeper, as I acquire an interiority that goes along with this kind of exteriority.
In adopting someone’s body posture, gestures and behaviour, we also reproduce the psychological stances that accompany these senorimotor patterns. Each time we do something, it is actually a kind of quote of someone else that I perform and actualise in myself. The ’I’ is like an onion, because you can peel and it has several layers. The first layers we dislike and throw away, it is the result of all past identifications, and there is no real core of the union.
[In Freud: the Ich-ideal versus Ideal-ich: the ideal ego is close to the imaginary ego, the I that I strive to become. I want to realise the ideal ego, the future I. The Ich-ideal is the ideal of the ego, close to the super-ego, but the positive version of it. All these are parts of the idea of ego.
Schilder The Image of the Body: goes deep into the image of the body. This is the sphere of the imaginary. We express our desires according to imaginary versions of ourselves. The basic structure of the imaginary is the image. It always has to do with an identification that happens outside ourselves. Our sexual organs are highly psychologically invested are constantly projected outside of ourselves. The body throws itself towards the other, but also towards non-human bodies. We see indications of sexual body parts in things that are not at all bodies, this is a reason to say that the body operates this projections of its own image quasi-automatically.]
”It’s because the human ego is the other and because in the beginning the subject is closer to the form of the other than to the emergance of his own tendency. He is orginally a collection of desires- there you have the true sense of the expression fragmented body – and the intial synthesis of the egi is essentially an alter ego, it is alienated. The desiring human subject is constructed around a center which is the other insofar as he gives the subject his unity, and the first encounter with the object is with the object as object of the other’s desire.”
Kojeve: The desire is the desire of the other
Kojeve is anthropological reading of Hegel, and an appropriation of Heidegger into anthropological existence. All knots come together in Kojeve’s reading of Hegel. Kojeve focuses on what in Hegel is the dialectic of master and servant.
”My object of desire is the other’s object of desire”.
The servant has power over the master as the servant can say that they no longer recognise the master’s position. What the master desires for, is to have the desire of the servant. The servant has to strive to become as the master. The master wants to be desired by the servant. The desire of the master as such wants the desire of the other. I desire as the other, from their place, and I do not only want the other to desire me, but I also want to have that very desire in me. And not only do I identify with the desire of the other, but as such I also wants the object of the other’s desire.
In desire, there are multiple kind of enmeshments in which the border between me and the other become obsolete, in a circular structure of the other. The desire of myself is not at all my desire.
As such, the other will become my concurrent. And by this, self-consciousness is the self-struggle with another human being.
”The said paranoid (paranoiaque, different from paranoide, as a clinical state, the syndrome of persecution) knowledge is knowledge founded on the rivalry of jealousy, over the course of the primary identification I have tried to define byt means of the mirror stage.”
What is at stake in paranoia, is the jealousy triggered by the imaginary identification with the other.
If identification runs freely, we will all become paranoiacques.
- I desire the other.
- I desire as the other from the place of the other.
- my object of desire is the other’s object of desire.
The symbolic Other
Brings pacification and peace to the master-slave relationship. This happens through language, which is the realm in which things and humans stand for something else, ie. They symbolise something (symbolic positions).
The object of your desire is expressed through different objects. So there is a further determination of desire which before the child is just random. The young infant identifies with everyone, randomly. Once you enter the symbolic, knowing that you are from such and such, the scope of your imaginary identifications will be limited to the kind of things that reflect your symbolic likeness. Once you are in the symbolic, your superego forbids you from doing things not of your stature.
”This rivalrous and competetive ground for the object is precisely what is overcome in speech insofar as this involves a third party. Speech is always a pact, an agreement, people get on with one another, they agree – this is yours, this is mine, this is this, that is that.”
As soon as you speak, there is always at least a third party. We are reaching out to this third party to explain that we want to talk about something, this third party being the norm. It is up to the strains of the subject to overcome these barriers, but there is a fixed system as soon as you talk, which limits imaginary desire.
As such, the symbolic provides a normative social system which acts as a third instance wthat mediates between me and you by assigning to each one of us a proper domain, a task and a social role. Every social norm, law or rule is expressed and grasped by language.
Through language, things have meaning, they symbolise something and meanings are socially powerful which perform a certain normative pressure. Giving a certain name, a symbol, to someone, is to anchor them into a framework of a normative system.
”The unity of speech insofar as it founds the position of the two subjects is made apparent here.”
Language for Lacan has apophantic (has the capacity to show and say the truth; Aristotles distinguishes the Logos apophantikos [This is propositional statements more or less, the things that are shown by speech in truth how it is] from the Logos Semantikos [semantic speech, speech that refers to something: A wish or a prayer is not this]) dimension. It is a place of truth and lies. The revealing natrue of speech is at the same time responsible for its inherent tendency to fraud. Speeking the truth is the tendency which allows us to lie. Truth makes lies; and lies makes truths. Language is both.
”What the subject tells me is always fundamentally related to a possible feint, in which he sends me, and I receive, the message in an inverted form. There you have both sides of the structure, foundational speech and lying speech which is deceptive as such”.
Language is not reliable:
”The system of language, at whatever point you hold of it, never results in an index finger directly indicating a point of reality; it’s the whole of reality that is covered by the entire network of language.”
In Saussure you have meaning without the thing that it is attached to.
When you say that you are something, there is no fixed relationship between what you say and the reality. Nothing in a things existence indexes the notion of what it is said to be. As such the level of language and reality are related, but they aren’t fixed to each other.
”If a man who thingks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so”
Existence is something else than the symbolic system. What you truly are is not at all related to what you call yourself. It is very dangerous to identify too strongly with the position alotted to you in society, you are not that, but intrinsically much more and different. As such, Lacan overturns the function of speech as the showing of truth, because ultimately is language capable of showing things truly and falsely, but everything that language in truth is false. Because no one is a king despite serving that role. Every state of affairs that language shows to be truely so is the result of believing in the consistency of the symbolic system. If you become schizophrenic you cut yourself off from the symbolic system, and see things for the flux of symbols and meanings that they are.
We are wherever we are taken.
The real are things insofar as they are abstracted from the symbolic, and as such as how they insist on us.
Joissance: what we look for in sexual arousal, where pleasure is achieved but through the form of the symbolic, but always related to the harm I inflict on myself by subjecting myself under the symbolic. If I receive a lot of pleasure from riding a ferrari, it is because of a major lack I have. The kind of joissance that Lacan talks about is a pleasure always related to suffering. This goes back to the death drive, all desire for life is desire for death.
The real is what it is when it is abstracted from form.
Lacan radicalises Saussure (lol)
(a) Signs have no consistency → unstable combination of signifier and signifed
(b)
Every signifier is open in its signifcation. This is how the unconscious works. This is what Freud called Transposition. One signifier can signify something else. The unconscious operates through metaphor (condensation) and metonymy (translation).
The mutability of the sign: One and the acousting image generates more than 1 signification
Lacan then empties language from signification. Language means nothing, and neither does the unconscious.
Psychoanalytical treatment then is to realise the kind of meaning that this message has for me in my unconscious here and now, and realise that it can have another meaning. I can rename things and introduce a kind of solidity into the solidified structure under which I suffer. There is no truth that psychoanalysis can make me understand. But rather, it helps with liquidifying the solid structures that we internalise and live under.
In the unconscious, there is only a mad language talking in us, and we suffer from these choices that are completely contingent.
As such, psychoanalytic practice: no interpretation of unconscious content, but creative displacement of unconscious expressions.
Our unconscious is built on entirely contingent events that cannot be taken apart.