Talk:Lack
In psychoanalysis, particularly in the teaching of Jacques Lacan, the concept of lack (French: manque) refers to a structural condition that is constitutive of the human subject. Unlike empirical absence or unmet biological need, lack is a foundational feature of the subject's relation to language, desire, and the symbolic order. It denotes not a deficiency to be filled, but a constitutive gap—an irreducible incompleteness that shapes the subject’s identity and psychic life.
Lacan reinterprets Freud’s metapsychology through structural linguistics and poststructuralist thought, arguing that lack is generated by the subject’s entry into language. Because no signifier can fully represent the subject, and no final signifier can close the symbolic system, the subject is permanently split and desire is perpetually sustained.
Translator’s Note
The French term manque is usually rendered in English as lack. In the expression manque-à-être (literally, “lack of being”), Lacan proposed the neologism want-to-be to emphasize its ontological dimension. This term refers not to what the subject lacks materially, but to a constitutive incompleteness in its being.[1]
Lack and Desire
For Lacan, lack is the structural condition of desire. Desire does not originate from the absence of a specific object but from a fundamental lack that no object can satisfy. As Lacan writes in Seminar VIII, “It is the lack which causes desire to arise.”[2]
Lacan differentiates desire from need and demand. While need is oriented toward biological satisfaction and demand articulates need in language, desire arises in the space opened by the failure of language to capture being. Desire is therefore not to be understood as a quest for an attainable goal, but as a persistent effect of symbolic incompleteness.
Lack of Being (manque-à-être)
In Lacan’s early seminars (mid-1950s), lack is formulated primarily as a lack of being (manque-à-être). This refers not to something the subject fails to have, but to a structural insufficiency within its being itself. As he puts it:
“Desire is a relation of being to lack. The lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn't the lack of this or that, but the lack of being whereby the being exists.”[3]
The subject is never fully present to itself, as it is constituted through signifiers that defer its identity. This ontological gap explains why the subject is always "elsewhere" in its representations and relations.
Lacan distinguishes this lack of being from the lack of having (manque-à-avoir), which pertains to concrete objects or symbolic attributes. The former is existential and structural; the latter is situational and tied to demand.[4]
Lack of an Object
Beginning with Seminar IV'', Lacan systematizes three modalities of lack in relation to the three registers of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic.[5]
| AGENT | MODE OF LACK | LACKED OBJECT |
|---|---|---|
| Symbolic mother | Imaginary frustration | Real breast |
| Imaginary father | Real privation | Symbolic phallus |
| Real father | Symbolic castration | Imaginary phallus |
Frustration
Frustration is an imaginary form of lack involving the real object (e.g., the maternal breast). The symbolic mother is the agent who withholds the object. This form of lack is affective and tied to demand.
Privation
Privation is a real lack of a symbolic object—the symbolic phallus—which was never present in the first place. The imaginary father is its agent, and its absence introduces an irreparable gap.
Castration
Castration is a symbolic lack of an imaginary object. It does not involve anatomical loss but the symbolic prohibition that inscribes the subject within language and law. Castration is central to Lacan’s concept of lack and becomes almost synonymous with it in clinical contexts.
Lack in the Other and the Signifier
In the late 1950s, Lacan elaborates the structural dimension of lack through the concept of the barred Other (Ⱥ), representing the incompleteness of the symbolic order. The Other, as the site of language, does not contain a final signifier that would ground meaning. The absence of such a master-signifier is expressed algebraically as S(Ⱥ)—the signifier of the lack in the Other.
This lack is not accidental but structural: the symbolic order always fails to provide closure. Lacan writes of the “missing signifier” as –1, signifying a lack that cannot be resolved. The subject emerges in relation to this absent signifier and is thus constituted by lack.
Clinical and Theoretical Implications
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, lack is not an obstacle to be overcome but the structural basis of subjectivity and desire. Symptoms, fantasies, and neuroses often function to mask or manage this lack, converting a lack of being into a lack of having.
The object a, introduced later in Lacan’s work, represents the object-cause of desire—not the object of desire, but the object that marks and sustains its trajectory. Fantasy serves to organize the subject’s relation to lack by staging imaginary scenarios around this lost object.
In analysis, the goal is not to fill lack, but to allow the subject to assume it—to encounter the structural gap that underlies its symptom and desire. The analyst’s position, Lacan emphasizes, is to embody the lack in the Other, not to supply a meaning or object that would falsely complete the subject.
See Also
- Desire
- Demand (psychoanalysis)
- Castration (psychoanalysis)
- Phallus
- Object a
- Signifier
- Other (psychoanalysis)
References
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1977, p. 259.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre VIII: Le transfert (1960–1961), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1991, p. 139.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954–1955), trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 223.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 730.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre IV: La relation d’objet (1956–1957), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1994, p. 269.