Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
"The unconscious is structured like a language"
In the last twenty-odd years Freudian psychoanalysis has been criticized for its anti-feminism, but even more for its claims to universal validity. Freud's suggestion that the Oedipal model is of all times and all places has become increasingly controversial. As a consequence, many psychoanalytically interested critics have turned to Jacques Lacan whose work avoids the fixed developmental scheme that Freud proposed and instead proposes a relational structure that allows for difference. In fact, what Lacan seeks to do in his Ecrits is to reinterpret or rewrite Freudianism in light of struturalist and post-structuralist theories of discourse; in ways relevant to all those concerned with the question of the human subject, its place and function in society, and above all its relationship to language.
A. Lacan's Model of the Human Psyche: Similar to Freud, Lacan devises a three-part model for human psyche as Lacan names and orders them: the Imaginary order, the Mirror stage, and the Symbolic order, each of which interacting with the others.
1. The Imaginary: From our birth until somewhere around 6 months, we function primarily in the Imaginary order—that is, the part of the psyche that contains our wishes, our fantasies, and most importantly, our images. It is when there is no clear distinction between subject and object, itself and the external world, a condition in which we lack any defined centre of self; that is, what 'self' we have seems to pass into objects, and objects pass into it, in a ceaseless closed exchange. In other words, the child does not know that its body is not the world. In this pre-Oedipal state, the child lives in a 'symbiotic' relation (in Kristeva's terms) with its mother's body which blurs any sharp boundary between the two: the infant is joyfully united with its mother. In this pre-verbal phase, the infant relies on images as a means of perceiving and interpreting the world. Consequently, its image of itself is always in flux because it is not able to differentiate where one image stops and another begins.
While we are passing through the imaginary order, one great consuming passion dominates our existence: the desire for our mother. Mother, we believe, can fulfill all our wishes just as we can fulfill all of hers. But we, like our mothers before us, must learn that we are separate entities who can never be totally unified with our mothers. Lacan says that such unity and wholeness are an illusion. In short, the imaginary for Lacan is precisely this realm of images in which we make identifications, but in the very act of doing so are led to misperceive and misrecognize ourselves. As the child grows up, it will continue to make such imaginary identifications with objects, and this is how its ego will be built up.
2. The Mirror Stage: is somewhere between 6 and 18 months old. It is where the child's first development of an ego, of an integrated self image, begins to happen. The child, who is still physically uncoordinated, not good at physical activities, finds reflected back to itself in the mirror a gratifying unified image of itself. Its relation to this image is still of an 'imaginary' kind—the image in the mirror both is and is not itself; there is still a blurring distinction of subject and object.
In other words, the child contemplated itself before the mirror as a kind of 'signifier', a 'fullness', a whole and unblemished identity, and the image it sees in the mirror as a kind of 'signified'. Here, signifier and signified are harmoniously united. World now is a world of plentitude, with no lacks or exclusions of any kind. No gap has yet opened up between signifier and the signified, subject and world.
The image the child sees in the mirror is in this sense an 'alienated' one: the child 'misrecognizes' itself in it, finds in the image a pleasing unity which it does not actually experience in its own body. That is to say, in the mirror stage we are confronted with the 'mirror' image the world gives back to us. But that image, just like the image we see in actual mirror, is a distortion that leads to a 'misrecognition'. Still, that misrecognition is the basis for what we see as our identity.
However, it is upon this misrecognition of the self that the child builds its conception of self. In this stage the child literally sees itself in a mirror while metaphorically seeing itself in its mother's image at the same time. Observing this mirror image permits the child to perceive images that have discrete boundaries, allowing it to become aware of itself as an independent being that is separate from its mother. This mirror of the child as a whole and complete being is an ideal, an illusion because unlike the actual mirror image, the child is not in full control of itself. It cannot, for example, move its body as it wants or eat when it desires.
3. The Symbolic: With the transition from the Imaginaryto the Symbolic, in which we submit to language and reason, we lose a feeling of wholeness, of undifferentiated being, that, again as in Freud, will forever haunt us. Whereas the mother dominates the imaginary order, the father dominates the symbolic order. In this phase we learn language. Lacan would argue that in actuality language masters us because he believes that language shapes our identity as separate beings and molds our psyches. The child must now resign itself to the fact that it can never have any direct access to reality, in particular to the now prohibited body of the mother. It has been banished from this 'full', imaginary possession into the 'empty' world of language. Empty because it is just an endless process of difference and absence.
B. The Process of 'I'dentity Construction: Since the social and personal configuration in which we find ourselves at a given point will inevitably change, identity is not something fixed and stable, it is a process that will never lead to completion. That is to say, identity is not only subject to constant change, it can also never be coherent. Since our identity is constituted in interaction with what is outside of us and reflects us, it is relational, a notion that introduces the idea of difference into the process of identity construction.
1- We have been forced to consign many of our pre-verbal fantasies, drives, etc to our unconscious.
2- Since our identity is constructed in interaction and does not originate in ourselves it always depends on 'others'
3- Since we have left whatever is pre-verbal behind and have entered—and subjected ourselves to—the realm of language, identity can be said to be a linguistic construct: we are constructed in language. That language, however, is not our own and could never express what we would want to say if we had access to our unconsciousness.
1. Desire: Because we do not have access to this preverbal self we are ever after left with a lack. This loss of our original state results in desire, or an unspecific but deep-felt longing that can never be fulfilled, but can only temporarily satisfy itself with symbolic substitutes. As the appearance of the father divides the child from the mother's body, desires are driven underground into the unconscious at the same time.
2. Repression: Lacan sees repression as the direct effect of entry into the social order. There is a direct connection between the repressive character of language and culture and the coming into being of the unconscious. We may expect everything that is ideologically undesirable within a given culture to have found refuge in the unconsciousness of its members.
3. The Unconscious: in Lacan's terms is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a 'sliding of the signified beneath the signifier', as a constant fading and evaporating of meaning, a bizarre 'modernist' text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.
4. Split: is a radical division in the Symbolic order between the conscious life of the ego and the unconscious or repressed desire. Every individual must recognize that he or she will forever be a splinted self, never again able to experience the wholeness and joy of being one with his or her mother in the imaginary order.
5. others: For Lacan, we need the response and recognition of others and of the Other to arrive at what we experience as our identity. Our 'subjectivity is constructed in interaction with others', individuals who resemble us in one way or another but who are also irrevocably different. We become ourselves by way of other perspectives and other views of who we are.
6. Other or great other (grande autre): This 'Other'—'the locus from which the question of the subject's existence may be presented to him'—is not a concrete individual, although it may be embodied in one (father or mother, for instance), but stands for the larger social order, the one which predetermines our role before we enter the Symbolic by the practices of the society into which it has been born.
7. Objet petit a: During the mirror stage, we come to recognize certain objects—what Lacan calls objet petit a—as being separate images from ourselves. These objects include eliminating bodily wastes, our mother's voice and breasts, and our own speech sounds. When these objects or sounds are not present, we yearn for them. Lacan says, such objects become for us symbols of lack, or a split, and this sense of lack will continue to plague us for the rest of our lives. Objet petit a is, in fact, substitute objects with which we try vainly to fill the split or the gap at the very centre of our being. We move among substitutes for substitutes, metaphors of metaphors, never able to recover the pure self-identity and self-completion which we knew in the imaginary. The world containing these objects is what Lacan calls the real order. (see transcendental signifier)
8. Phallocentrism: Using linguistic principles formulated by the founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, Lacan declares that we differentiate between individual sounds and words on the basis of difference, and that in the symbolic order we learn to differentiate between male and female. This process of leaning gender identity is base on difference and loss. Whereas in the Imaginary order, we delight in the presence of mother, in the Symbolic order, we learn that our father represents cultural norms and laws. This is what feminist critics refer to as phallocentrism.
9. Castration: Lacan maintains that the Symbolic order is a form of castration for both sexes. In Lacan's view, castration is symbolic, not literal, and represents each person's loss of wholeness and his or her acceptance of society's rules.
10. Sex vs. Gender: For Lacan, what sex we are is biologically determined, but our gender or our sexuality is culturally created. Society decrees, for example, that little boys should play with cars and little girls with dolls. These cultural rules are enforced by the father. It is by accepting the necessity of sexual difference, of distinct gender roles, that the child is socialized.
11. Transcendental Signified: By the entry of father, phallus signifies sexual difference. Phallus symbolically is the object that gives meaning to all other objects. In other words, for Lacan, it is the ultimate symbol of power. Presence of the father, symbolized by the phallus, teaches the child that it must take up a place in the family which is defined by sexual difference, by exclusion (it cannot be its parent's lover) and by absence (it must relinquish its earlier bonds to the mother's body).
12. Subject of enunciation vs. subject of enunciating: For instance, when I say 'Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,' this 'I' is different from the 'I' which pronounces it. The former is the subject of the pronounced sentence or 'subject of enunciation', the latter is the actual speaking human person or 'the subject of enunciating'. According to Lacan these two 'I's are never united. One can only designate oneself in language by a convenient pronoun. I cannot 'mean' and 'be' simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes's "I think, therefore I am' as I am not where I think, and I think where I am not".
13. The Ego: is a function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it.
14. Ideology: Ideology might be seen in Lacanian terms as 'the Other' whose 'misrecognition of us becomes incorporated in our identity. The misrepresentation that it reflects back leads us to misrepresents what we are to ourselves—a formulation that evokes Althusser's definition of ideology—and this misrepresentation becomes a cornerstone of our identity. We may expect everything that is ideologically undesirable within a given culture to have found refuge in the unconsciousness of its members. If we see 'ideology' in psychoanalytic terms, that is as the conscious dimension of a given society, then we may posit an unconscious where everything that ideology represses—social inequality, unequal opportunity, the lack of freedom of subject—is waiting to break to the surface. We may then examine the language that ideology uses for such purposes. The social unconsciousness just like our individual unconsciousness will succeed in getting past the censor.
C. Lacanian analysis of literature
1. Act of enunciation vs. act of enunciating: There we can make an analogy between above discussion and 'acts of enunciation' known as literature. The "enunciation" itself refers to the realist literature draws our attention to how something is said. Part of the power of such text lies in their suppression of what might be called their modes of production, how they got to be what they are; in this sense, they have a curious resemblance to human ego which tends to repress the process of its own making. On the other hand, "act of enunciating" is associated to with the content of the piece of literature or what is said. Many modernist works make the act of enunciating, the process of their own composition, part of the actual "content". They do this so that they will not be mistaken for absolute truth—so that the reader will be encouraged to reflect critically on the partial, particular ways they construct reality, and so to recognize how it might all have happened differently.
2. Ideology and literature: Lacanian psychoanalysis can be used to hypothesize a sort of social, or political, unconscious that manifests itself in literary texts whenever it catches the conscious off-guard, usually in passages that from the point of view of the conscious (that is, ideology) seem trivial or irrelevant.
3. The Real order: In examining a text, Lacan also looks for the remotest and most unreachable part of the human psyche, the real order. On the one hand, the real order consists of the physical world, including the material universe and every thing in it; on the other hand, it symbolizes all that a person is not. Or as Lacan would say, the real order contains countless objet petit a, objects that continually function for us as symbols of primordial lack. Because these objects, indeed, the entire physical universe are and can never be parts of ourselves, we can never experience or really know them except through language. In addition, as Lacan contends, language causes our fragmentation in the first place.
4. Jouissance: In Lacan's theory, literature has the particular ability to capture jouissance—that is, to call up a brief moment of joy or terror or desire that somehow arises from deep within our unconscious psyche and reminds us of a time of perfect wholeness when we were incapable of differentiating among images from the real order. Lacan frequently finds such moments of joy in the writings of Poe, Shakespeare, and Joyce.
D. Suggestions for further reading:
Hans Bertens, Literary Theory: The Basics.
Charles E Bressler, Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice.
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection.
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction.