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[[Jacques Lacan]] posits a distinction between human beings and other animals, that is, between 'human society' and 'animal society'.<ref>S1 p.223</ref>
The basis of this distinction is [[language]]; humans have [[language]], whereas animals merely have [[codes]].
As a result, animal psychology is entirely dominated by the imaginary, whereas human psychology is complicated by the additional dimension of the [[symbolic]].
[[Lacan]] adopts the traditional anthropological opposition between [[nauture]] and [[culture]] (culture being, in Lacanian terms, the [[symbolic]] [[order]]).
Like [[Claude Levi-Strauss]] and other anthropologists, [[Lacan]] points to the [[prohibition]] of [[incest]] as the kernel of the [[law|legal]] [[structure]]] which differentiates [[culture]] from [[nature]].
<blockquote>"The primordial Law is therefore that which in regulating marriage superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature abandoned to the law of mating."<ref>E. p.66</ref></blockquote>
The regulation of kinship by the [[incest]] [[taboo]] points to the fact that the [[paternal function]] is at the heart of the rift between humans and animals.
By insribing a line of descent from male to male and thus ordering a series of generations, the [[Father]] marks the difference between the [[symbolic]] and the [[imaginary]].
In other words, what is unique about human beings is not that they lack the imaginary dimension of animal psychology, but that in human beings this imaginary order is distorted by the added dimension of the [[symbolic]].
[[Lacan]] uses the term '[[nature]]' to denote the idea that there is a 'natural order' in human existence.
This great fantasy of nature underlies modern psychology, which attempts to explain human behavior by reference to ethological categories such as [[instinct]] and [[adaptation]].
[[Lacan]] is highly critical of all such attempts to explain the phenomena in terms of [[nature]].
He argues that they are based on a failure to recognize the importance of the [[symbolic order]], which radically [[alienation|alienates]] human beings from natural givens.
In the human world, even "those significations that are closest to need, significations that are relative to the most purely biological insertion into a nutrittive and captivating environment, primordial significations, are, in theri sequence and in their very foundation, subject to the laws of the signifier.<ref>S3. 198</ref>
Lacan thus argued that 'the Freudian discovery teaches us that all natural harmony in man is profoundly disconcerted."<ref>S3. 83</ref>
THere is not even a pure natural state at the beginning in which the human subject might exist before being caught up in the [[symbolic]] [[order]].
[[Need]] is never present in a pure pre-linguistic state in the human being: such a 'mythical' pre-linguistic [[need]] can only be hypothesized after it has been articulated in [[demand]].
The [[absence]] of a natural order in human existence can be seen most clearly in human [[sexuality]].
[[Freud]] and [[Lacan]] both argue that even [[sexuality]], which might seem to be the [[signification]] closest to nature in the human being, is completely caught up in the cultural order; there is no such thing, for the human being, as a natural sexual relationship.
One consequence of this is that [[perversion]] cannot be defined by reference to a supposed natural or biological norm governing [[sexuality]].
Whereas animal [[instincts]] are relatively invariable, human [[sexuality]] is governed by [[drive]]s which are extremely variable and do not aim at a [[biology|biological]] function.
==See Also==
* [[law]]
* [[prohibition]]
* [[biology]]
== References ==
<references/>
[[Category:Culture]]
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]
[[Category:Anthropology]]
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]
