The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis

The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis (1953) This paper, often called the 'Rome Report' or the 'Rome Discourse', marked Lacan's break with the analytic establishment and the formation of his own school of psychoanalytic thought. The paper, the founding statement of Lac ani an theory, defines psychoanalysis as a practice of speech and a theory of the speaking subject.7 It is in this text, written in 1953, that Lacan begins to talk like Lacan. Psychoanalysis, he asserts, is distinguished from other disciplines in that the analyst works on the subject's speech. He points out that Freud often referred to language, particularly when he was focusing on the unconscious. After all, language is the 'talking cure'. The theory of the three interacting orders, the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, first appears in detail in this paper. I will briefly explain these concepts here, but will leave a fuller discussion of them till the next chapter. These orders can be conceived as different planes of existence which: though interconnected, are independent realities, each order being concerned with different functions. At any moment each may be implicated in the redefinition of the others. The Imaginary order includes the field of phantasies and images. It evolves out of the mirror phase, but extends into the adult

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Lacan's Ecrits: A review 85 subject's relationships with others. The prototype of the typical imaginary relationship is the infant before the mirror, fascinated with its image. The Imaginary order also seems to include preverbal structures, for example, the various 'primitive' phantasies of children, psychotic and perverse patients. The Symbolic order is concerned with the function of symbols and symbolic systems. Language belongs to the Symbolic order and, in Lacan's view, it is,through language that the subject can repfCsent desires and feelings. It is through the Symbolic order that the subject is constituted. The Real order is the most elusive of these categories, and is linked to the dimensions of sexuality and death. It seems to be a domain outside the subject. The Real is the domain of the inexpressible, of what cannot be spoken about, for it does not belong to language. It is the order where the subject meets with inexpressible enjoyment and death. ' In the 'Rome Discourse' Lacan's main emphasis is on the function and independence of the Symbolic order. Lacan illustrates the early insertion into the Symbolic order by the story Freud tells of his eighteen-month-old grandson playing the 'fort-da' game. (The child had a cotton reel on a piece of string which he alternatively threw away and pulled back.) Freud said that the game was related to the disappearance and appearance of the mother.s He suggested that by the repetition of this game of presence and absence the child seemed to cope with his mother's comings and goings, and tried to 'wean' himself from her. Freud noted that the child had turned a passive experience into an active one. Lacan stresses the point that speech is the dimension by which' the subject's desires are expressed and articulated. It is only when ardculated and named before the other (for example, the analyst) that desires are recognised. It is also only with speech that subjects can fully recognise their histories. With the introduction of the language system, individuals can put themselves and their pasts in question. Subjects can restructure events after they have occurred. Indeed, it is well known that all of us are constantly rearranging our memories, histories and identities. Let us examine'the relationship between the imaginary and the symbolic. The imaginary is made up of imagos. An imago is an unconscious image or cliche which orients the way in which the subject apprehends other people. In the imaginary mode (or 86 Jacques Lacan register), one's understanding of other people is shaped by one's own imagos. The perceived other is actually, at least in part, a projection. Psychoanalysis is an attempt to recognise the subject's imagos in order to ascertain the deforming effect upon the subject's understanding of his or her relationships. The point is not to give up the imagos, which is an impossible task, nor to create better ones. In the symbolic register, the subject understands these imagos as structuring projections. Lacan condemns ego-psychology as hopelessly mired in the imaginary because it promotes an identification between the analysand's ego and the analyst's. The ego, for Lacan, is an imago. The enterprise of ego-psychology reshapes the analysand's imagos into ones that better correspond to 'reality' - that is, the, analyst's imagos. Ecrits is full of attacks on ego-psychology; because he regards it as a betrayal of psychoanalysis, a repression of the unconscious, and a manipulation of patients. One of his main criticisms is that it never gets beyond 'the language of the ego'. Lacan describes two types of speech: on the one hand the speech which takes its orders from the ego (empty speech) and is addressed to the other (with a little 0), the imaginary counterpart, through whom the subject is alienated. On the other hand, there is full speech, addressed to the Other, which is beyond the language ordered by the ego. The subject of this speech is the subject of the unconscious. Thus, Lacan can say: the unconscious is the discourse of the Other. For Lacan, the subject's truth is not to be found in the ego. Instead it is to be found in another place, which Lacan called the place or 'locus' of the Other (with a capital 0) at another level. Even if the patient lies, or is silent, or remembers nothing, what s/he cannot say or remember can be rediscovered elsewhere, in another locality. This was, after all, Freud's basic discovery: the subject speaks most truthfully, or the truth anyway slips out, when the ego's censorship is reduced, for example through dreams, " jokes, slips of the tongue or pen .. In contrast with the practice of ego-psychologists, Lacan suggests that the analyst should be a mirror (but not a mirror stage). S/he can serve as a screen for the analysand's personality or values or knowledge. It is not the analyst's ego but his or her neutrality that should mirror the analysand. And obviously, the analyst should be able to distinguish the two registers in the patient's

Lacan's Ecrits: A review 87 speech. The analyst is addressed both as the other through whom the patient's desire is alienated, and as the Other, to whom the analysand's true speech is addressed.