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For Jacques [[Lacan]], [[human ]] [[being ]] is a "[[lack ]] of being." That was how he designated the [[subject]]'s fundamental emptiness as it was caused by the first [[symbolization ]] and by the fact that [[desire ]] originates in [[castration]].

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.

See also: [[Subject's castration]]; [[Symbolic, the (Lacan)]].[[Bibliography]]