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MOTHER-CHILD RELATION
In order, therefore, to avoid the risk of the [[patient]] losing motivation altogether and breaking off the [[treatment]] prematurely, [[Freud]] recommended that the [[analyst]] must "re-instate [the [[patient]]'s [[suffering]]] elsewhere in the form of some appreciable [[privation]]."<ref>Freud. 1919a. SE XVI. p.163</ref>
 
 
 
 
 
THE EGO AND THE IMAGINARY
 
 
FREUD'S TWO VIEWS OF THE EGO
 
THE REALIST EGO
 
 
THE NARCISSISTIC EGO
 
LACAN AND THE MIRROR PHASE
 
THE REAL PRECONDITIONS OF THE EGO
 
VISION AND SPECULAR IMAGE
 
INFANTILE TRANSITIVISM AND PRIMORDIAL JEALOUSY
 
THE IMAGINARY ANATOMY
 
SUMMARY
 
The [[ego]] is [[split]], [[internal]]ly [[divided]] between [[self]] and [[other]].
 
The [[ego]] can represent the [[subject]] as a [[whole]] only insofar as it denies this [[internal]] rupture and conceives of itself as the source of its own origin and [[unity]].
 
It maintains an [[aggressive]] relation to the [[other]] on whom it depends.
 
It comes to distinguish itself as subject from its own [[body]], over which it establishes a distance and control.
 
(It develops a paranoiac relation to what it knows, for what it knows is bound up with the order of images, the domain of the ego, and not the Real.)
 
(Self-knowledge is not longer possible.)
 
 
 
To sum up the key elements of Lacan's account of the [[mirror stage]:
 
# it marks the child's first recognition of lack or absence;
 
# it signals the moment of the child's recognition of the distinction between self and other;
 
# it represents the child's first concerted attempts to fill the lack by identifying with its own [[specular image]];
 
# the [[specular image]] is a totalized, [[complete]], [[external]] [[image]] - a ''[[gestalt]]'' - of the [[subject]], the [[subject]] as seen from [[outside]];
 
# the visual ''[[gestalt]]'' is in conflict with the [[child]]'s [[fragmentary]], disorganized felt [[reality]];
 
# the discordnace of the visual ''[[gestalt]]'' with the [[subject]]'s perceived [[reality]] means that the [[specular iamge]] remains both a literl [[image]] of itself and an idealized rpresentation.
 
The [[mirror stage]] thus provides the ground for the ''[[ego ideal]]'', the [[image]] of the [[ego]], derived from [[other]]s, which the [[ego]] strives to achieve or live up to;
 
# the [[specular iamge]] positions the child within a spatial field, and, within the [[body]], which is located as a central point within this field;
 
# the [[mirror stage]] initiates the [[child]] into the two-person structure of [[imaginary]] [[identification]]s, orientating it forever towards identification with and dependence on (human) images and representations for its own forms or outline;
 
# the ego can be seen as the sedimentation of images of others which are libidinally invested, through narcissism, by being internalized;
 
# the ego does not uphold reality to the demands of the id; it systematically misrecognizes reality.
 
 
Lacan displaces the ego as the centrla and most secure component of the individual, unsettling the presumptions of a fixed, unified, or natural core of [[identity]], and the subject's capacity to know itself and the world.
 
The certainty the subject brings with it in its claims to knowledge is not, as Descartes argued, a guaranteed or secure foundation for knowledge.
 
It is a funcion of the ivnestment the ego has in maintaining certain images which please it.
 
Rather than a direct relaiton of recognition of reality, the ego only retains a premeditated, imaginary or preconstructed real.
 
 
Lacan's conception of the ego as inherently alienated has..
 
The subject is constituted as such by processes of internalization, introjection, projection, and identification, then there cannot be a universal general subjec,t but only concrete, specific subjects who are produced within a concrete socio-symbolic and family structure.
 
 
 
SEXUALITY AND THE SYMBOLIC ORDER
 
 
FREUD'S TWO THEORIES OF SEXUALITY
 
SEXUALITY AND SIGNIFICATION
 
NEED, DEMAND AND DESIRE
 
OEDIPUS, THE NAME-OF-THE-FATHER, AND THE OTHER
 
 
THE DRIVE AND THE SIGNIFIER
 
The [[drive]] involves the process in which the [[subject]] detaches part of itself, and, in attempting a reincorporation, returns this movement back to the subject's body.
 
This movement outside and back again is only capable of being sustain if the [[object]], the ''[[objet a]]'', is not an actual [[object]], but the "presence of a hollow, a void, which can be occupied ... by any [[object]]."<ref>1977b: 180</ref>
 
The [[absence]] that sustains the [[drive]], the [[absence]] of a real [[object]], is produced only through the [[other]].
 
 
 
For [[Lacan]], the [[drive]] is located somewhere ''between'' the [[eye]] and the [[gaze]].
 
The [[scopic]] [[drive]] must be distinguished from [[vision]].
 
The [[gaze]] demonstrates the ''excess'' of the [[drive]] over [[geometrical]] or in [[Lacan]]'s term, "geometral" or flat [[optics]], a perspectival [[optics]].
 
Perspective represents the reception of ''light'', a light which conforms to the laws of physics and the rules governing projection and the point-for-point representation of space.
 
This may explain why it is so difficult to mape the gaze.
 
[[Lacan]] refers to [[Diderot]]'s observation, in ''Lettre sur les aveugles a l'usage de ceux qui voient'', that the geometral perspective of the Cartesian subject is a perspective understandable even by the blind, for whom the gaze is not experienced.
 
 
<blockquote>The geometral space of vision - even if we include those imagianry aprts in the virtual space of the mirror, of which, as you know, I have spoken at length - is perfectly reconstructible, imaginable, by a blind man. What is at issue in geometral perspective is simply the mapping of space, not sight.<ref>1977b. p.86</ref></blockquote>
 
This may be why Lacan resorts to topological figures, objects represented from impossible perspectives to capture something of the enigma fo the gaze.
 
Lacan exemplifies the failure of perspective to capture the desire entailed by the gaze in the peculiar fascination of the spectator with anamorphic images, images that distort, stretch, and contort perspective in their remapping, reprojection of perspectival space.
 
He refers to Hans holbein's painting of 1533, 'The Ambassadors'.
 
Between the two figures in the foreground hovers a barely discernable ghostly distortion of death's head, the image of the skull to which the spectator is irresistably drawn.
 
(The Ambassadors is reproduced on the front cover of the Four Fundamental Concepts.)
 
 
For Lacan, the formula best capturing the complexity of the scopic drive is the statement, from Paul Valery, "I saw myself seeing myself.<ref>p. 74, 80</ref>
 
This makes clear that the subject cannot be reduced to the sum of its anatomical functions.
 
<blockquote>''I warm myself by warming myself'' is a reference to the body as body - I feel that sensation of warmth which, from some point inside me, is diffused and located me as body. Whereas in the ''I see myself seeing myself'', there is no such sensation of being absorbed by vision."<ref>1977b. p.80</ref></blockquote>
 
Referring to Merleau-Ponty's ''The Visible and the Invisible'', in which seeing is defined interms of what it is impossible to see, Lacan affirms that seeing is a function both of the subject looking from a singular, perspectival point - in which case, what it sees it located ''outside'' itself ('Perception is not inme, ... it is on the objects that it apprehends."<ref>1977b. p.80</ref>); it is also contingent on the possibility of being seen.
 
The gaze is thus, like the phallus itself, the driver under which the subject's identity and certainty fail.
 
The subject is necessarily alienated, for it is defined on Lacan's model as seeable, shown, being seen, without being able to see either its observer or itself.
 
Sartre's definition of the Look implies the inprinciple reversibility of observer and observed.
 
But Lacan's point is quite different: for him the possibility of being observed is always primary.
 
TO occupy a place in the scopic field is to be able to see, but more significantly, to be seen.
 
The gaze is what ensures that when I see, at the same time, "I am ''photo-graphed''.<ref>1977b. p.106</ref>
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
SUMMARY
 
 
Sexual drives are not the effects of nature or biology, but are the consequences of the introduction of a gap, lack, or absence in the child's life.
 
Sexual drives are marked by the lack (of a fixed object).
 
The sexual drives mimic or simualte the biological processes and organs marked as signficiant by biological instincts.
 
Although they appear to be innate and predetermined in aims, objects, and sources, sexual drives are highly malleable, variable, and culturally specific.
 
The aims and objects the drive develops are effects of the social and familial meaning o the child's body and pleasures.
 
 
In its pre-oedipal forms, sexual drives are chaotic, anarchic and ciruculate throughout the child's body, in many regions that have little dto do with sexualiyt.
 
in its oeidpalized forms, sexual drives become hierarchized under the priamcy of the genitals and the aims of heteroseuxal genital reproductive sexuality.
 
Sexual drives always take the objet a as their privileged object: the objet a is both a part of the child's body, and what can be detached from the body in order to become an external object.
 
The lack is not given, but an effect of signification.
 
It is for this reason that sexuality, desire, is marked by the search for particular meanings.
 
Sexuality is a consequence of the necessity of representing biological needs in signifying systems.
 
The constitution of the subject as a sexual and desiring being at the same time produces subjects as sexually differentiated, i.e., as active and therefore masculine or passive and thus feminine.
 
By meas of oedipalization, the child of either sex is separated from its first love object, the mother, and positioned within the larger social and symbolic environment of its culture.
 
It is by means of the contorl or the repression of sexual drives that the unconscious is formed.
 
the unconscious is the residue of repressed and renounced pre-oedipal drives.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LANGUAGE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
 
THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS
 
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
 
THE PRIMARY PROCESS
 
DREAM INTERPRETATION
 
THE UNCONSCIOUS IS STRUCTURED LIKE A LANGUAGE
 
THE SIGNIFIER
 
METAPHOR AND METONYMY
 
LACANIAN ALGORITHMS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
 
THE PATERNAL METAPHOR
 
FREUD'S DREAM
 
SUMMARY
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
SEXUAL RELATIONS
 
THE PENIS AND THE PHALLUS
 
THE PHALLUS AND POWER
 
ANACLISIS, NARCISSISM, AND ROMANTIC LOVE
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LACAN AND ROMANTIC LOVE
 
[[Lacan]] argues that both [[sex]]es are constituted as [[sexually different]], as [[sexed]] [[subject]]s, only with reference to the [[phallic]] [[signifier]].
 
[[Masculine]] and [[feminine]] [[position]]s are a function, not of [[biology]] but of the very [[structure]] of [[language]].
 
(In [[French]] as in [[English]], the verb is modified by its conjugation with either ''[[being]]'' (''Etre'') or ''having'' (''avoir'').)
 
The two [[sex]]es are [[position]]ed as such in the mode of being (for the [[feminine]]), and having (for the [[masculine]]), the [[phallus]].
 
<blockquote>But one may, simply by reference to the function of the [[phallus]], indicate the [[structure]]s that will govern the relations between the [[sex]]es. [...] Let us say that these relations will turn around a 'to be' and a 'to have', which, by referring to a [[signifier]], the [[phallus]], have the opposed effect, on the one ahnd, of giving [[reality]] to the [[subject]] in this [[signifier]], and, on the other, of derealizing the relations to be [[signified]]."<ref>Lacan 1977a: 289</ref></blockquote>
 
Through the [[phallus]], each [[sex]] is [[position]]ed as a [[speaking]] [[being]].
 
Through the [[phallus]], the ''[reality]]'' of anatomical [[sex]] becomes bound up with the meanings and values that a [[culture]] gives to [[anatomy]].
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
'THERE IS NO SEXUAL RELATION'
 
For [[Lacan]], [[love]] is an entanglement, a [[knot]], of [[imaginary]] [[gratification]]s and [[symbolic]] [[desire]]s.
 
[[Love]] is always [[structure]]d with reference to the [[phallus]].
 
The [[subject]] [[demand]]s a [[wholeness]], [[unity]], and [[completion]] which it imagines the [[other]] can bestow on it.
 
The [[symbolic]], on the other hand, requires a [[subject]] irrevocably [[split]], [[divided]] by [[language]], governed by the [[phallus]] and the [[Other]].
 
[[Love]] relations aspire to a union or [[unity]] that is strictly [[impossible]].
 
The two can never become One.
 
The [[desire]] for the One is, for [[Lacan]], the [[desire]] of the [[other]], the [[Other]] beyond the [[other]].
 
The [[Other]] always intervenes between the [[subject]] and the [[other]].
 
There is no direct, unmediated relation between the [[sex]]es.
 
The obstacle to [[love]] is not external; it is the internal condition of [[human]] [[subjectivity]] and [[sexuality]], constituted as they are by a rift governed by the [[Other]].
 
 
COURTLY LOVE
 
[[Courtly love]] is a [[masculine]] way of refusing to recognie this fundamental rupture.
 
[[Lacan]] focuses on the [[male]] [[ideal]] of One-ness or union with his sexual partner.
 
[[Lacan]] asserts that [[woman]] is ''not-all'' (which he represents pseudo-algebraically as ExOP - to be read as "not all subjects are phallic,' or its logical equivalent, 'there is a subject who is not phallic.')
 
This definition is a device for revealing the masculine myths and phantasies invested in representing [[woman]] as ''all''.
 
She is defined as ''not-a'' partly through a reversal of her [[myth]]ical status for the [[man]], especially the [[myth]] of [[unity]] that posits [[love]] as a form of self-[[completion]].
 
 
[[Lacan]] makes it clear that this [[demand]] for One is a [[demand]] for an [[impossible]] [[harmony]] and complementarity between the [[sex]]es.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LACAN AND FEMININITY
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