Guide/Contents

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Reference

Freudian Terrain

Introduction
Summary

The Legacy of Surrealism

Introduction
Summary

The Uses of Philosophy

Introduction
Summary

The Functions of Language

Introduction
Summary

Lacan

Introduction
Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalyst and Teacher
Summary

The Imaginary

Introduction
Summary

From the Imaginary to the Symbolic

Introduction
Summary

The Symbolic

Introduction
The Primacy of the Signifier
Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)
The Symbolic Order
The Purloined Letter
Summary

The Family and the Individual

Introduction
Summary

The Oedipus Complex and the Meaning of the Phallus

Introduction
The Oedipus Complex
The Meaning of the Phallus
The Imaginary Phallus
The Symbolic Phallus

It is through the intervention of the Name-of-the-Father that the imaginary unity between child and mother is broken. The father is assumed to possess something that the child lacks and it is this that the mother desires. It is important here though not to confuse the Name-of-the-Father with the actual father. The Name-of-the-Father is a symbolic function that intrudes itno the illusory world of the child and breaks the imaginary dyad of the mother and child.

The child assumes that the father is one that satisfies the mother’s desire and possesses the phallus. In this sense, argues Lacan, the Oedipus complex involves an element of substitution, that is to say, the subtitution of one signifier, the desire of the mother, for another, the Name-of-the-Father. It is thoruhg this initial act of substitution that the process of signification begins and child enters the symbolic order as a subject of lack. It is also for this reason that Lacan describes the process of symbolization itself as ‘phallic’. It is through the Name-of-the-Father that the phallus is installed as the central organizing signifier of the unconscious. The phallus is the ‘original’ lost object, but only insofar as no one possessed it in the first place. The phallus, therefore, is not like any other signifier, it is the signifier of absence and does not ‘exist’ in its own right as a thing, an object or a bodily organ.

Lacan equates the process of giving up the imaginary phallus with Freud’s account of castration anxiety, but he argues that the process of castration in Freud is more complicated than people generally think. Castration involves not just an anxiety about losing one’s penis but simultaneously the recognition of ‘’lack’’ or ‘’absence’’. The child is concerned about losing its own penis and simultaneously recognizes that the mother does not have a penis. The idea of the penis, therefore, becomes metonymically linked to the recognition of ‘’lack’’. It is in this sense that Lacan argues that the phallus is not simply the penis; it is ‘’ the penis plus the recognition of absence or lack’’. Castration is not the fear that one has already lost, in the case of girls, or will lose, in the case of boys, one’s penis but rather the symbolic process of giving upo the idea that one can be the phallus for the mother. The intervention of the father distances the child from the mother and also places the phallus forever beyond its reach. If the symbolic father is seen to possess the phallus, then the child can only become a subject itself in the symbolic order by renouncing the imaginary phallus. The problem for Lacan is how does one symbolically represent ‘lack’ – something that by definition is not there? His solution is the idea of the ‘veil’. The presence of the veil suggests that there is an object behind it, which the veils covers over, although this is only a presumption on the part of the subject. In this way the veil enables the perpetuation of the idea that the object exists. Thus, both boys and girls can have a relationship to the phallus on the basis that it always remains veiled and out of reach. The phallus provides the vital link between desire and signification. It is desire that drives the process of symbolization. The phallus is the ultimate object of desire that we have lost and alwayss search for but never had in the first place.


To summarize, the phallus stands for that moment of rupture wen the child is forced to recognize the desire of the other; of the mother. “The mother is refused to the child in so far as a prohibition falls on the child’s desire to be what the mother desires.” The phallus, therefore, always belongs somewhere else; it breaks the mother/child dyad and initiates the order of symbolic exchange. In this sense the phallus is both imaginary and symbolic. It is imaginary in that it represents the object presumed to satisfy the mother’s desire; at the same time, it is symbolic in that it stands for the recognition that desire cannot be satisfied. By breaking the imaginary couple “the phallus represents a moment of division which re-enacts the fundamental splitting of the subject itself. As a presence in absence, a ‘seeming’ value, ‘’the phallus is a fraud’’.


The Law of the Father and the Superego

It is through the intervention of the father that the child is precipitated out of the imaginary world of infantile plenitude into the symbolic universe of lack. The Oedupis complex marks this transiiton from imaginary to symbolic, or, as Freud theorized in in such works as ‘’Totem and Taboo’’ (1913) and ‘’Civilization and its Discontents’’ (1930), the transition from nature to culture. The Oedipus complex for Freud marks the origin of civilization, religion, morals and art. It is only through the repression and sublimation of our incestuous desire for our mothers that civilization and culture can development. The Lacanian Name-of-the-Father, therefore, is associated with the prohibition of incest and the instigation of symbolic law. The symbolic order and the process of signification, according to Lacan, is ‘phalluc’ and governed by the paternal metaphor and the imposition of paternal law. The father is seen to embody the socio-symbolic law and the fucntion of the paternal metaphor is to substitute the desire for the mother with the law of the father. This is also the founding moment of the unconscious for Lacan and the point at which the phallus is installed as the central organizing signifier of the unconscious. The internalization of the paternal metaphor also creates something else, though, that Freud designates as the ‘’superego’’. Lacan has developed the notion of the superego in a very specfic and important way.


The superego emerges through the transition from nature to culture via the internalization of the incest taboo and is often associated with the development of moral conscience. Lacan retains this association between the superego and the law and poitns to an inherent paradox that Freud did not himself develop. In ‘’Totem and Taboo’’ Freud argued that the prohibition against incest provided the foundation for all subsequent social laws. In other words, the most fundmanetal desire of all human subjects is the desire for incest and its prohibition represents the governing principle of all societies. For Lacan, the superego is located in the symbolic order and retains a close but paradoxical relationship to the law. As with the law, the prohibition operates only iwhtin the realm of culture and its purpose is always to exclude incest:

“Freud designates the prohibition of incest as the underlying principle of the pimordial law, the law of which all other cultural developments are no more than consequences and ramifications. And at the same time he identifies incest as the fundmental desire.[1]

The law, in other words, is founded upon that which it seeks to exlcude, or, to put it another way, the desire to break and transgress the law is the very precondition for the existence of the law itself. On the one hnad, the superego is a symbolic structure that regulates the subject’s desire, and, on the other, there is this senseless, blind imperativeness to it. As Lacan says in seminar XX, nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego: “The superego is the imperative of ‘’jouissance’’ – Enjoy!”[2] The superego, therefore, is at once the law and its own destruction or that which undermines the law. The superego emerges at the point where the law – the public or social law – fails and, at this very point of failure, the law is compelled, as Zizek puts it, “to search for support in an ‘’ilegal’’ enjoyment.”[3] The superego is, in a sense, the dialectical contrary of the pbulic law; it is what Zizek calls its obscene ‘nightly’ law – that dark underside that always necessarily accompanies the public law. According to psychoanalysis, there is simply no way a subject can avoid this tension ebtween the law and the desire to transgress it and this manifests itself as ‘guilt’. Indeed, for psychoanalysis, we are not simply guilty if we break th elaw and commit icnest, but rather we are always –already guuilty of the ‘’desire’’ to commit incest. Hence, the ultiamte paradox of the superego: “the more we submit ourselves to the superego imperative, the greater its pressure, the more we feel guilty.”[4]


The Two Fathers

It is through the identification with the Oedipal father that the incest prohibition is internalized and Oedipal desire abandoned and it is this process, for Freud, that constitues the superego. But what we find here in Freud is not one notion of the father but ‘’two’’. There is first of all the father of the Oedipus complex, who intervenes and disrupts the relationship between mother and child and thus denies the child’s access ot the mother’s desire. This is the father who transmits the laws to the child – the law of the incest prohibition – and subordiantes the child’s desire to the law. It is important to keep in mind, though, that this father is himself subject to the law.

Second, there si the primal father of ‘’Totem and Taboo’’, who is perceived to be outside the law. In Freud’s myth of origins the primal father is a figure of absolute power; the father who aggregates to himself the owmen and wealth of the primal ahorde by expelling his sons and rivals. What distinguishes this tyrannical figure from the Oedipal father is that he is not himself subordinated to the law – the law that prohibits his son’s access to the omwn of the horde. This other father, therefore – the cruel and licentious one – is the reverse side of the law. Both fathers function psychically at the level of the superego.


Identification with the primal father involves amn ambiguous process whereby the suibject simultaneously identifies with authority, the law and, at the same time, the illicit desires that would trasngress and undermine the law. As with the notion of the superego itself, the father functions in a peculiarly paradoxical way. He is simultnaeously the agency of authority and a figure outside the law who actively transgresses the law that he imposes upon others. The subject, therefore, is faced with its subordination to authority and the regualtion of its desires through the internalization of a signifier that is itself beyond the law. At a psychic level, an overly punishing superego and subordiantion to the symbolic law is one way in which the subject comes to resolve this unbearable situation. And yet, by implication, if one must exert strong measures to prohibit something, there msut be a correspondingly strong desire to commit the crime.

This vicious cycle of transgressiona nd punishment operates in the social domain through Zizek’s anlaysis of racism and anti-semitism.


Racism, Anti-Semitism and the Imperative to Enjoyment!


Summary

From the Symbolic to the Real

Introduction
Summary


The Subject of the Unconscious

Introduction
Formations of the Unconscious
The Unconscious as Gap or Rupture
The Unconscious is Structured like a Language
The Unconscious is the Discourse of the Other
Alienation and Separation
The Lacanian Subject
The Drive
Hamlet and the Tragedy of Desire
Summary

The Psychoanalyst as Textual Analyst

Introduction
Summary

The Real

Das Ding (The Thing)
Unconscious Fantasy
Summary

The Impossible Real

Introduction
Summary

Sexual Difference

Introduction
Freud and the Enigma of Feminine Sexuality
To Have or to Be the Phallus?
Femininity as Masquerade
The Woman Does Not Exist
Encore: The Theory of Sexuation
Masculinity
Femininity
There is No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship
Courtly Love
Summary

Sexuality and Science

Introduction
Summary

Sexuality, Love and Feminism

Introduction
Summary

Lacan and Film

Introduction
Summary

Lacan and Literature

Introduction
Summary

After Lacan

Introduction
The Social-Ideological Fantasy
Literary Theory
Film as Fantasy
Summary
  1. Lacan 1986, 67
  2. 1975, 3
  3. 1994, 54
  4. Zizek 1994, 67