Difference between revisions of "Introducing Lacan"

From No Subject - Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis
Jump to: navigation, search
(Edit)
(Theory of the Mirror Phase)
Line 51: Line 51:
 
=====Theory of the Mirror Phase=====
 
=====Theory of the Mirror Phase=====
 
''[[Humans]] are [[born]] [[helplessness|prematurely]].'' Left to themselves, they would probably [[die]].  They are always [[born]] too [[time|early]].  They can't walk or [[speech|talk]] at [[birth]]: they have a very partial [[mastery]] of their motor functions and, at the [[biology|biological level]], they are hardly [[complete]].  The [[infant]] can't pick things up or move towards or away from things.  So how does the child come to [[master]] its relation to its [[body]]?  How does it respond to its "[[prematuration]]"?
 
''[[Humans]] are [[born]] [[helplessness|prematurely]].'' Left to themselves, they would probably [[die]].  They are always [[born]] too [[time|early]].  They can't walk or [[speech|talk]] at [[birth]]: they have a very partial [[mastery]] of their motor functions and, at the [[biology|biological level]], they are hardly [[complete]].  The [[infant]] can't pick things up or move towards or away from things.  So how does the child come to [[master]] its relation to its [[body]]?  How does it respond to its "[[prematuration]]"?
 +
 +
=====... and Mimicry=====
 +
[[Lacan]]'s answer is in the theory of the [[mirror phase]]. He draws our attention, in later texts, to an [[enthological]] curiosity, known as "[[mimicry]]."  Certain beasts have the habit of assuming the insignia and coloring of their surroundings.  Hence a stick insect may choose to look like a stick.  The obvious explanation for this phenomenon is that it protects the animal against predators.  But what many investigators found was that those animals which assumed an [[image]] or disguise were just as likely to be eaten as those which didn't.
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
 +
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
 +
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
 +
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
 +
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
 +
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
 +
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
 +
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
 +
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
 +
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
 +
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
 +
 +
 +
=====Edit=====
  
 
=====Edit=====
 
=====Edit=====

Revision as of 12:43, 15 November 2006

Family

Born on 13 April 1901, Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was the first child of Charles Marie Alfred Lacan and Émilie Philippine Marie Baudry. Alfred Lacan was the Paris sales representative of a large provincial firm. The family lived in comfortable conditions in the Boulevard du Beaumarchais before moving to the Montparnasse area where Jacques entered the prestigious Catholic school, the Collège Stanislas.

Education

An outstanding pupil, he excelled in religious studies and Latin. As a teenager, Jacques Lacan developed a passion for philosophy, adorning the walls of his bedroom with a plan of the structure of Spinoza's Ethics, a text which would always remain dear to him and which he would quote at the start of his doctoral dissertation in medicine.

The Surrealist Movement

Lacan took up the study of medicine in 1920 and specialized in psychiatry from 1926. During this period, he was active in the busy Parisian world of the writers, artists and intellectuals who made up the surrealist movement.

He frequented Adirenne Monnier's booshop on the Left Bank, along with the lies of AndrE Gide and Paul Claudel and, at the age of seventeen, met James Joyce.

A friend of André Breton and Salvador Dali, he was to become Picasso's personal physician and a contributor to several Surrealist publications from the early 1930s.

(Three years later he was present at he first public reaing of Joyce's Ulysses in the legendary bookshop, Shakespeare & Co.)

Beginnings in Psychiatry

His internship at St-Anne hospital, starting in 1926, and at the Infirmerie Spéciale des Aliénés de la Préfecture de Police, in 1928, gave Lacan a particular interest in the study of paranoia.

Later he would say that "My only real master in psychiatry was Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault."

Lacan singled out his concept of "mental automatism". This brought together many seemingly disparate phnomena of madness under the common motif of something being imposed from 'outside': the echo of thoughts or a commentary on one's actions, for example.

The form of a particular psychosis would then be determined by how one made sense of these elements which lacked an initial content. Lacan would say that this concept was the closest that contemporary French psychiatry got to a structural analysis, with its emphasis on the imposition of formal elements beyond the "conscious" control of the subject.

Paranoia

In 1932, Lacan completed his doctoral thesis on paranoia, Paranoid Psychosis and its Relation to the Personality, a study which had a great influence on many of the Surrealists.

The Case of Aimée

The thesis contains a detailed analysis of a woman, named Aimée after the heroine of one of her unpublished novels, who had attempted to stab a well-known Parisian acctress, Huguette Duflos. The case was widely reported in the press at the time, and Lacan tried gradually to piece together the logic behind her apparently irrational act. His thesis introduced a new concept into the psychiatric milieu, that of "self-punishment paranoia". Lacan argued that, in striking the actress, Aimée was in fact striking herself: Duflos represented a woman with freedom and social prestige, exactly the sort of woman that Aimée aspired to become.

In her ideas of persecution, it was this figure that she saw as the source of threats to her and her young son. The ideal image was thus both the object of her hate and of her aspiration. Lacan was especially interested here in this complex relation to images and the ideas of identity to be found in paranoia. In her subsequent arrest and confinement, she found the punishment which was a real source of the act itself. She understood, at a certain level, that she was herself the object of punishment.

Lacan's analysis of the case shows many of the features which would later become central to his work: narcissism, the image, the ideal, and how the personality could extend beyond the limits of the body and be constituted within a complex social network. The actress represented a part of Aimée herself, indicating how the identity of a human being could include elements well outside the biological boundaries of the body. In a sense, Aimée's identity was literally outside of herself.

Analysis

Around the time that Lacan completed his thesis, he began his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which continued until 1938. Loewenstein had been analyzed by Freud's student Hans Sachs.

Studies in Philosophy

Instead of confining himself to the standard texts in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Lacan read widely, with a special interest in the philosophical work of Karl Jaspers, G.W.F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. He attended the seminars on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève together with many of the thinkers who would leave their mark on French intellectual life, Georges Bataille, Raymond Aron, Pierre Klossowski and Raymond Queneau.

Marriage

In 1934, Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin, the sister of his friend the surgeon Sylvain Blondin. Three children were born from this marriage, Caroline in |1934, Thibaut in 1939 and Sibylle in 1940.

The Marienbad Congress

Lacan made his first intervention at the annual Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, held at Marienbad, in 1936. He developed the thesis of the "mirror phase." The original text of this paper is lost, but the brilliant article on the family which Lacan contributed to the Encyclopédie Française in 1938, together with a later version of the paper, presents the argument clearly.

Theory of the Mirror Phase

Humans are born prematurely. Left to themselves, they would probably die. They are always born too early. They can't walk or talk at birth: they have a very partial mastery of their motor functions and, at the biological level, they are hardly complete. The infant can't pick things up or move towards or away from things. So how does the child come to master its relation to its body? How does it respond to its "prematuration"?

... and Mimicry

Lacan's answer is in the theory of the mirror phase. He draws our attention, in later texts, to an enthological curiosity, known as "mimicry." Certain beasts have the habit of assuming the insignia and coloring of their surroundings. Hence a stick insect may choose to look like a stick. The obvious explanation for this phenomenon is that it protects the animal against predators. But what many investigators found was that those animals which assumed an image or disguise were just as likely to be eaten as those which didn't.

Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit
Edit