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[[Lacan]] introduced the distinction between the [[ego]] and what he called the [[subject]]. ''The [[ego]] is [[imaginary]], whereas the [[subject]] is linked by [[Lacan]] to the [[symbolic]]''. It is a fundamentally [[split]] or divided entity: split by the [[law]]s of [[language]] to which it is subordinate, and split to the extent that it does not know what it wants. This divided subject does not have any one representation, but emerges rather at moment of discontinuity: for example, in a slip of the tongue or a bungled action.
=====EditExamples of Neurosis: 1. The Hysteric=====[[Neurosis]] itself, [[Lacan]] thinks, is a sort of question asked by the [[subject]] by means of the [[ego]]. The [[identification]] is used to ask a question. For the [[hysteric]], the question is: ''What is it to be a woman''? =====Examples of Neurosis: 2. The Obsessional=====For the [[obsessional]], the question is: ''Am I alive or dead''? He will spend his life never acting, but waiting. When he has a problem, he won't get on the telephone, but will brood and think interminably. His life is mortified by rituals, habits, rules. When it comes to action, he would rather that someone else act in his place, thus avoiding any real vital struggle with another living being. (Living outside myself in this way, I become a sort of living corpse.) ((Freud had linked this picture to an unconscious resolution of a problem with the father. Rather than really fighting things out, the son imagines his feature is already dead. Lacan's version focuses on the place of the ego here. The obsessional not only awaits the death of his master, but identifies with the master as already dead. Hence the mortified quality so common in obsession.)) (I live my life according to strict routines and daily rituals, avoiding any encounter with sexuality not organized by myself.) =====Structural Anthropology=====It is the task of [[analysis]], [[Lacan]] argues, to indicate to the [[subject]] the place of the [[ego]] and to turn the stagnatory [[image]]s which [[captive]] him into part of the associative material. ''Analysis thus involves the full assumption by the [[subject]] of his or her history'': the images of the [[ego]] have to be integrated into this symbolic text. Analysis is thus a passage to the symbolic at this moment in Lacan's work, and he is continually elaborating his theory of this register with input from other fields, [[structural anthropology]] in particular. Lacan's friend, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, was engaged in similar research at the time. He showed how symbolic structures which are not consciously perceived can organize and govern the workings of a society, and, indeed, the mind of the individual. Lacan was especially interested in Lévi-Strauss's use of the mathematical group, a theme which he returned to several times in his own work. =====Mathematical Models=====During the 1940s and 1950s many new mathematical methods had been introduced into [[anthropology]]: algebraic structures, structures of order and topologies. What interested Lacan in the early and mid 1950s was the algebraic side. An equation in mathematics could be associated with a group of permutations, and group theory is the part of [[mathematics]] which pays special attention to the properties of such groups. (Lacan had the idea that a neurosis might obey laws which could be studied in exactly the same way - that it might consist of a group of rules for permutation.) An initial situation - such as the details of the marriage of one's parents - would be transformed into certain rules in one's own life, completely unconsciously, to generate situations - such as one's own marriage or love life - which both repeated the initial situation and transformed it in important ways. The laws of this transformation process could be given the same mathematical formalization that anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss were employing.
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