Lack of Being

Want of Being

Want of Being/Lack of Being 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...