8. Psychoanalysis, Post-structuralism and Feminism- Jacques Lacan-"The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I"

Question 1

Jacques Lacan

Answer 1

• Taking his start from the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan both radicalizes and criticizes the former’s theses with the help of the insights of structuralism and linguistics.
• Among his foremost contributions to psychoanalysis are four different, but interconnected theses:
  1) that the I develops through what he calls the mirror stage
  2) that the unconscious is structured like a language
  3) that the subject is a desiring object whose desire is created through a perpetual lack, and thus is forever delayed and never fulfilled
  4) that the human psyche is structured along the triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real

Question 2

The mirror stage

Answer 2

-Between the age of 6 and 18 months, a child goes through a mirror stage.

-In the mirror, the child realizes for the first time that it is an “own” and whole subject (and not a disconnected ensemble of extremities and organs), and leaves the former symbiotic relationship with his environment behind.
This realization, which is sometimes greeted by a “jubilant” gesture has, however, different and ambivalent consequences.

-One result is that it allows for a narcissistic identification of the ego itself, a “Groessen-Ich”, as Freud called it. In its reflection in the mirror, the child sees itself as a whole and coordinated self – a state which it, however, at this stage hasn’t reached. It will try to attain the mastery promised in this imaginary self his/her whole life.

-While this discrepancy leads to the identification with an imaginary picture – the mirror picture – it also creates an experience of fragmentation – a split into the imaginary, coherent self and a yet uncoordinated, bodily self.
Seeing itself also allows the child to realize how it is perceived from the outside.

-The outside is what constitutes the Symbolic order.
It is manifested by the adult who might be carrying the child.

• However, the child experiences this stage also as a loss, in that the former, symbiotic relationship to a nurturing environment – mainly, to the breast of the mother – is severed.
• This Symbolic order will, moreover, forbid the return to this pre-Symbolic stage, in that it intervenes as what Lacan, in a play of phonemes, calls the non/nom du père, who steps in between the child and the mother as desired object (Oedipus complex).
• Through the mirror stage, thus both the Imaginary – the relationship to an idealized I – is created, as well as the initiation into the Symbolic order, which stands for the restriction (and sublimation) of the drives.
• Through it, the I is also alienated from itself, in that from now on the subject will always have to negotiate both between the self that it “is” and the idealized self of the Imaginary (“The I is not the I”, Lacan), and between the (impossible) fulfillment its desire for the mother and the “no” of the father, who metaphorically stands for all society and its rules (to which belongs, among other’s, the incest taboo).

Question 3

The Symbolic Order

Answer 3

• With the “no” of the father, the child is initiated into the symbolic order, which is – language.
• With this initiation, the subject becomes subject by being subjected to the Symbolic order, which comprises everything from language to the economy of exchange (cf. Irigaray) and social norms in general.
• The turn away from the mother thus leads to socialization proper, at the cost of a desire that will remain forever unfulfilled.
• Moreover, the symbolic order will also make the attainment of the imaginary I problematic, as it obstructs the omnipotence fantasies connected with it.

Question 4

The Real

Answer 4

• The Real is arguably the most opaque term in Lacan’s triad. Contrary to what it seems to suggest, the Real is not the “real world outside” (which is rather the Symbolic), but the authentic rest of that which cannot be captured by either the Imaginary or the Symbolic.
• It comes close to Freud’s concept of “Es”, of an unconscious that, although not representable, has a determining presence – a ‘presence’ although, as we’ve seen in Derrida, this presence “is” never “present”, but can only be deciphered in its traces.
• It constitutes some horror or trauma – arguably, but not exclusively, the trauma of being disconnected from the first object of desire, the mother, but also a pool of residues remaining from unsuccessful operations of sublimation of drives.
• It is that which does not arouse pleasure, which cannot be enjoyed, which resists possession or jouissance.

-What Lacan thus calls the “Real,” and Freud calls “Es” are thus not really “transcendental signifieds”, as they are neither concepts (nor “are” they,), and as they cannot be transferred into the realm of signification (only by the process of distortion that metaphor or metonymy imply).
The dreamwork, as well as the psychoanalytic process, are thus basically interpretations of highly elusive signifiers.

Question 5

The unrepresentable

Answer 5

• What makes this Real, or the unconscious, unrepresentable is that the human psyche works like a language.
• What Freud has described in his Interpretation of Dreams – that dreams constitute the attempt, by means of condensation and displacement – to make the unconscious “readable” – is taken up by Lacan in two ways:
  1) To transfer the Real into the Symbolic is practically impossible. The Real relates to the Symbolic as the Signified to the Signifier. The “bar” between both that he uses in his essay basically constitutes the human psyche which tries to put into signifiers a signified which it cannot reach.
  2) In dreams – when the conscious control of the unconscious is lowered – the unconscious is translated, by processes both metonymical and metaphorical – into the (still hardly decipherable) language of dreams. That is why dreams cannot be deciphered literally – if, that is, a mouse appears in a dream, she doesn’t have any ‘literal’ connection to either a ‘real’ mouse or the concept of ‘mouse’.