Difference between revisions of "Introducing Lacan"

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The narcissistic imaginary register which Lacan had elaborated in such detail in his early work is now shown to rest on a symbolic foundation: ''the relation to the image will be structured by language''.  (My relation with myself is constructed "from the outside."  I learn who I am because others tell me.)  Images are caught up in a complex symbolic web which manoeuvres them, combines them and organizes their relations.
 
The narcissistic imaginary register which Lacan had elaborated in such detail in his early work is now shown to rest on a symbolic foundation: ''the relation to the image will be structured by language''.  (My relation with myself is constructed "from the outside."  I learn who I am because others tell me.)  Images are caught up in a complex symbolic web which manoeuvres them, combines them and organizes their relations.
  
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=====Ego Ideal and Ideal Ego=====
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Hence, Lacan's differentiation of ''ego ideal'' and ''ideal ego'', two terms which we can find at some points in the work of Freud.  In Lacan's formulation of 1953, ''the ideal ego is the iamge you assume and the ego ideal is the symbolic point which gives you a place and supplies the point from which you are looked at''.  If you drive a car fast, it might be because you assume the iamge of some race driver.  You identify with him, and this would involve the ideal ego.  But the real question is, ''who is it that you are identifying with this racing driver for''?  (Who you drive fast, who do you think is watching you?)  This is the dimension of the [[ego ideal]].  CLinically, pointing out to a patient an ideal ego identification usually has little effect: to dislodge it, an appeal must be made to the symbolic dimension, to the register of the ego ideal.
  
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=====Structural Linguistics=====
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What characterizes the symbolic register here is something very particular.  Thinkers influences by developments in linguistics had the idea that any [[structure]] is a [[linguistic]] one if it has the simple quality of being based on a system of differences.  ''A word is a word because it is different from other words'': "cat" has its value because it is different from "mat", "fat" and "cot", for example.  ''It takes on its value because it is an element in a system of differences''.
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 +
Thus ''the central property of a linguistic system is discontinuity'', the existence of a series of differential elements.  Discontinuity means gaps: there is a space between elements.  This discontinuity is set in opposition by Lacan to the imaginary register which strives to avoid the dimension of lack or absence.  This endeavor is of course inauthentic, since the imaginary itself is based on a serious and troubling form of discontinuity, ''the gap between the child's uncoordinated body and the envelope of the whole image which it assumes''.
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=====The Unconscious and Language=====
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If the ego is imaginary, the unconscious for Lacan is structured like a language; that is, it is constituted by a series of chains of signifying elements.  Like an infernal translating machine, it turns words into symptoms, it inscribes signifiers into the flesh or turns them into tormenting thoughts or compulsions.  ''A symptom may be literally a word trapped in the body''.  Remember that all that children really know about their internal organs is what their parents tell them.  The inside of their body is thus made up of words.  Doctors are familiar with patients who complain of pains when a biological cause is clearly absent.  This does not mean that the pain is false: it is exactly the same pain, perhaps even a greater one, as if it were caused by some real physical determinant.  (I suffer from the idea that I associate with the idea of a particular organ.)  To relieve the pain, the repressed ideas need to be linked to the rest of the [[signifying chain]].  They have to undergo a new translation.
  
 
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=====Edit=====

Revision as of 23:36, 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.

The US government had commissioned a survey in the early 1930s involving the rather macabre task of examining the stomaches of some 60,000 Neartic birds to confirm this diagnosis by counting the insects which had been swallowed. The ones which had disguised themselves were no less frequent than their most honest companions. So if evolutionary biology cannot provide an answer to the question of mimetism with the idea of protection from predators, how can it be explained?

Roger Caillois, a French thinker fascinated with the theme of masks, games and the relation of the human to the animal kingdom, argued that there was a sort of natural law whereby organisms become captured in their environment. They will thus take on the coloring, for example, of the space around them.

Captured in an Image

Lacan developed this thesis in his work on the mirror phase, combining it with observations from child psychology and social theory and argued for a similar form of imaginary capture for the organism in an external image. (The child identifies with an image outside himself, be it an actual mirror image or simlply the image of another child. The apparent completeness of this image gives the child a new mastery over the body.)

In the 1938 encyclopedia article, this idea is used to give a brilliant explanation of the inexplicable swings in a child's behavior from the tyrannical or seductive attitude to its opposite. Rather than linking this to a conflict between two individuals, the child and the spectator in this instance, Lacan argues that it derives from a conflict internal to each of them, resulting from an identification with the other party. This is an organizing principle of development rather than a single moment in childhood. (If I have identified with an image outside myself, I can do things I couldn't do before.)

The Imaginary

Mastery of one's motor functions and an entry into the human world of space and movement is thus at the prince of a fundamental alienation. Lacan calls the register in which this identification takes place "the imaginary", emphasizing the importance of the visual field and the specular relation which underlies the child's captivation in the image.

Ego and alienation

Lacan shows how this alienation in the image corresponds with the [[ego]: the ego is constituted by an alienating identification, based on an initial lack of completeness in the body and nervous system.

Lacan's thesis provided a response to the question posed by Freud in his famous 1914 paper on Narcissism. If the ego is the seat of narcissism and if narcissism does not exist from the start of life, what must happen for narcissism to emerge? Some "new psychical action" must take place to constitute the ego, but Freud didn't say what it was. With the mirror phase, Lacan had found an answer.

Negative Hallucination
The Falsifying Ego

In other words, rationalizations of the hypnotized persons' actions wer eproduced which had the function of glossing over the true state of affairs. Whereas other commentators had drawn attention to this falsifying character of the ego in the isolated context of negative hallucination, Freud and Lacan saw it as the basic characteristic of the ego at all times.

As with the ego of the mirror phase, its task is to maintain a false appearance of coherence and completeness. Thus analysis must be mistrustful and subversive of material which stems from the ego domain.) Any theory of psychoanalysis which involved the idea of the analyst making an alliance or pact with the patient's ego was thus fundamentally ill-starred. It could only result in a mutual deception.

In this early part of Lacan's work, the human subject oscillates between two poles: the image, which is alienating, and the real body, which is in pieces. In his work of the 1930s and early 1940s, Lacan often attempts to show the presence of these images of the fragmented body beneath the classic psychoanalytic complexes.

(The phantasy of fragmentation may be found beneath the more celebrated phantasy of castration. (He developed the thesis that in paranoia we can witness a sort of decomposition which illustrates clearly the stages in the "normal" constitution of the image and of reality as such.

The Construction of the Ego

For example, the motifs of mirrored images, telepathic communication, observation and external persecution so common in paranoia may be understood as fundamental building blocks in the constitution of the ego. If the ego is constructed on an image outside ourselves, if our identity if given in an alienation.... (The truth of the ego emerges precisely in madness where the world seems to dissolve and the difference between self and other is radically put in question.)

In our day-to-day relationship with other people, we are unaware of these criteria, even if many works of art, notably those of Dali, try to capture this idea. (Lacan was thus led to the theory that human knowledge is in its very essence paranoiac.)

It is in paranoia that we can see so clearly the components, the steps which go to make up the relation to the world which madness can remind us of.

(Although Lacan's theory of the image at this date is often explained in terms of the influence of surrealism, it owes much more to certain currents in French psychiatry such as the work of Joseph Capgras and those psychiatric thinkers interested in problems of recognition, doubling and the image. Lacan often returned to the notion of the mirror phase to reformulate it during his teaching. It never stayed static. There is no one theory of the mirror phase in Lacan's work, but several.)

In the Second World War

With the German Occupation of France, Lacan was called up to serve in the French army and then posted to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. A relationship began between Lacan and Sylvia Bataille (née Maklèes), whom he was later to marry. She was the wife of the writer and theorist Georges Bataille, although the two had been separated since 1933. She was well known for her roles in the films of Jean Renoir, the most famous of these perhaps being the heroine in Une Partie de Campagne. During the Occupation, Lacan made frequent trips from Paris to the South of France to see her, and in 1941 their daughter Judith was born.

Lacan took the decision not to publish anything during the war years. In 1945, after the war had ended, he visited England for a five-week study trip, described in the article "English Psychiatry and the War" (1947). He had a special admiration, he said, for the English during the war, and he reviewed the work of Wilfred Bion and John Rickman whom he had met during his stay. (They tried to use psychoanalytic ideas in the rehabilitation of army misfits).

Lacan was especially interested in their work with small groups. Rather than being organized around the presence of an authority figure with whom they were supposed to identify, these groups were centered on activities. (A group forms round a task or activity, indicating a different sort of identificatory process.) This sensitivity to problems of identification was praised by Lacan and he claimed that Britain's success in the war was in no small part a consequence of introducing such ideas to the military.

Return to Freud

From 1951, Lacan held a weekly seminar in which he urged what he called a return to Freud. (He advocated a careful rereading, focusing on the constant reference to language and its functions in Freud's work.) The Interpretation of Dreams, the Project of 1895, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious all deal with operations which are fundamentally of a linguistic nature, from associations between words to the very structure of symptoms themselves.

Freud had already spoken of "symptoms joining in the conversation" as early as 1895. (A patient might have sudden pains at precise moments in her speech. The pain would indicate that something had been left unsaid, showing how physical sensations themselves could be linguistic, sending a message to be picked up by the analyst.)

Symptoms and Speech

(Freud showed how symptoms and actions could literally be words trapped in the body. A woman who wishes to have a child jumps from an embankment, the word she uses for "jump" (niederkommen) being identical with the word meaning "be delivered of a child". A man's attraction to women with a "shine" on the nose could be traced to the verbal equivalence between the word for "shine" in German (Glanz) and the English word "glance".)

A whole neurosis could be organized by words and the relation between them. The case of the Rat Man discussed by Freud shows how a massive network of symptoms, compulsions and actions depended on the links between the words Spielratte (gambler), heiraten (to marry) and raten (instalments). Words became the very stuff of symptoms, the fabric of the life and torment of human beings.

Signifiers and Signified

Crucial to Lacan's programme of a return to Freud is the distinction between signifier and signified. According to a well-known definition, a a signifier is an acoustic image ( like a word, a signified is a concept. The signified has a kind of priority and we use signifiers to gain access to signifieds: or, put more simply, to say what we mean. A word gives us access to a meaning. The passage from word to meaning seems simple enough. We can ask for some object, the listener will understand our meaning and respond with the object. Language is thus all about communicating with each other. We use words to convey meanings and intentions.

But Lacan saw things differently. Rather than supposing a transparency between signifier and signified, an easy access from word to meaning, he claimed there was a real barrier, a resistance. (A word does not reveal its meaning so simply. Rather, it leads on to other words in a linguistic chain, just like one meaning itself leads to others.)

(The Rat Man's raten does not point to the meaning "instalments" but to other linguistic elements like heiraten and Spielratte, even though he might not have been aware of these links at all. The group of meanings is organized by the links between the words. There is thus a priority of the signifier, of the material, verbal element in psychic life.)

The Symbolic

From the start of the 1950s, Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, linguistic, into which a child is born. These preced the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals and histories of the parents. Even before a child is born, the parents have talked about him or her, chosen a name, mapped out his or her future. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence.

This idea has obvious conseuqneces for the theory of the mirror phase. If Lacan had first stressed the imaginary identification, he now discussed its symbolic side. If the child is captured in an image, he or she will still assume signifiers from the speech of the parents as elements of identification. (As a mother raises the baby to see its reflection, she might say, "you've got grandma's eyes" or "you look just like your father." These are symbolic pronouncements since they situated the child in a lineage, in a symbolic universe.) The baby is bound to its image by words and names, by linguistic representations. A mother who keeps telling her son "What a bad boy you are!" may end up with either a villain or a saint. The identity of the child will depend on how he or she assumes the words of the parents.

The Ideal

There is thus an identification which is beyond and in a sense prior to the identification with the image: a symbolic identification with a signifying element. (If narcissism is about one's relation to one's image, this shows how narcissism is not only imagianry but includes a symbolic dimension as well.) Lacan calls this an identification with the Ideal, a term which is not intended to suggest anything perfect or literally "ideal". This ideal is not conscious. The child does not suddently decide to put himself or herself in the shoes of some ancestor or family member. Rather, the speech which he or she hears as a child will be incorporated, forming a kernal of insignia which are unconscious. Their existence may be deduced from clinical material. Analysis reveals the central identifications, how the subject has 'become' what a parent prophesied or how he or she has repeated the mistakes of a grandparent. (The symbolic operates beyond the conscious control or understanding of the plays involved.)

The key to the theory of identification here is that symbolic identification with an ideal element removes the subject from being completely at the mercy of the imaginary images which captivate him or her. They come from another register, the symbolic, and thus serve to ground the subject, to give him a base, in this structure. (To take on a place in the symbolic world means leaving the world of the image.)

The narcissistic imaginary register which Lacan had elaborated in such detail in his early work is now shown to rest on a symbolic foundation: the relation to the image will be structured by language. (My relation with myself is constructed "from the outside." I learn who I am because others tell me.) Images are caught up in a complex symbolic web which manoeuvres them, combines them and organizes their relations.

Ego Ideal and Ideal Ego

Hence, Lacan's differentiation of ego ideal and ideal ego, two terms which we can find at some points in the work of Freud. In Lacan's formulation of 1953, the ideal ego is the iamge you assume and the ego ideal is the symbolic point which gives you a place and supplies the point from which you are looked at. If you drive a car fast, it might be because you assume the iamge of some race driver. You identify with him, and this would involve the ideal ego. But the real question is, who is it that you are identifying with this racing driver for? (Who you drive fast, who do you think is watching you?) This is the dimension of the ego ideal. CLinically, pointing out to a patient an ideal ego identification usually has little effect: to dislodge it, an appeal must be made to the symbolic dimension, to the register of the ego ideal.

Structural Linguistics

What characterizes the symbolic register here is something very particular. Thinkers influences by developments in linguistics had the idea that any structure is a linguistic one if it has the simple quality of being based on a system of differences. A word is a word because it is different from other words: "cat" has its value because it is different from "mat", "fat" and "cot", for example. It takes on its value because it is an element in a system of differences.

Thus the central property of a linguistic system is discontinuity, the existence of a series of differential elements. Discontinuity means gaps: there is a space between elements. This discontinuity is set in opposition by Lacan to the imaginary register which strives to avoid the dimension of lack or absence. This endeavor is of course inauthentic, since the imaginary itself is based on a serious and troubling form of discontinuity, the gap between the child's uncoordinated body and the envelope of the whole image which it assumes.

The Unconscious and Language

If the ego is imaginary, the unconscious for Lacan is structured like a language; that is, it is constituted by a series of chains of signifying elements. Like an infernal translating machine, it turns words into symptoms, it inscribes signifiers into the flesh or turns them into tormenting thoughts or compulsions. A symptom may be literally a word trapped in the body. Remember that all that children really know about their internal organs is what their parents tell them. The inside of their body is thus made up of words. Doctors are familiar with patients who complain of pains when a biological cause is clearly absent. This does not mean that the pain is false: it is exactly the same pain, perhaps even a greater one, as if it were caused by some real physical determinant. (I suffer from the idea that I associate with the idea of a particular organ.) To relieve the pain, the repressed ideas need to be linked to the rest of the signifying chain. They have to undergo a new translation.

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