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From the beginning of his teaching, Lacan noted that for [[Freud]] the [[object]] is fundamentally lost, and the subject spends his [[life]] [[looking]] for it. The object of [[psychoanalysis]] is the lack of an object, and this [[lacking]] object is at the heart of being. Lacan started elaborating on this [[notion]] of a lack of being in 1957, when he set [[about]] describing the [[oedipal]] crisis in [[terms]] of the [[dialectic]] of desire and the question of the [[phallus]].
During the [[mirror]] [[stage]], the [[infant]] [[identifies]] with a certain point within the [[maternal]] [[space]]. In fact, what the subject takes for its own being is an [[other]], both an [[image]] in the mirror and an alter ego. This fundamental [[alienation]] establishes misapprehension whereby one's being is confused with one's ego. From the beginning the subject is torn. He is [[divided]] between the [[place]] from which he sees himself, and the image, the other with which he identifies. From this perspective, a human being can never [[experience]] a [[wholeness]] that would amount to being.
Because [[language]] allows the [[child]] to [[symbolize]] the [[mother]]'s alternating [[presence]] and [[absence]], it makes it [[impossible]] for the child to become one with the mother. From this point on, a gap is introduced between the mother and child and any [[illusion]] of [[totality]] is broken. The subject experiences his lack of being, and when [[father]] later appears to put the phallus into play, he proves the lack of being of the maternal phallus. "[T]he child's desire manages to [[identify]] with the mother's [[want]]-to-be" (Lacan, 2002, p. 197). This desire begins as a quest for an object that might fill this lack.
Paradoxically the subject, as an effect of the [[symbolic]] (trapped within language), can only use language to [[search]] for the [[lost object]]. As Lacan wrote, "The being of language is the nonbeing of [[objects]]" (p. 253). Being is only a "lack of being," and the [[thing]] that could fill this lack is [[forbidden]]. This [[prohibition]] maintains desire. Thus desire appears as the [[metonymy]] of a lack of being whose [[signifier]] is the phallus that marks what the mother [[lacks]]. The subject's being is lack, and the cut that produced [[the symbolic]] is the [[object a]], which is the [[real]] insofar as it is articulated in the symbolic and which is also a gap that the ego as image occupies. The image of the [[body]], the principal mirage, indicates the place of desire insofar as it is desire for [[nothing]]. This is the relation of human beings with their own lack of being. But at the same [[time]], the image is what prevents the human being from [[seeing]] it.
ALAIN VANIER
See also: [[Subject's castration]]; [[Symbolic, the (Lacan)]].
[[Bibliography]]
* Lacan, Jacques. (1958-1959). Le Séminaire-Livre VI, Le désir et son interpretation (unpublished seminar).
* ——. (1997). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The ethics of psychoanalysis, (1959-1960) (Dennis Porter, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
* ——. (2002).Écrits: A selection. (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.