Lacan 101

Filip Latkovic
Who was Jacques Lacan?
- Born 1901 in Paris. Lacan

- Deeply influenced by philosophy from an early age; pages of

Spinoza’s Ethics he stuck to his room’s walls at 16 years old.

- Was deemed “too skinny” for military service, so studied medicine

at the University of Paris, specializing in psychiatry.

- Was involved in the avant-garde and surrealist movement,

befriending Salvador Dalí, Georges Bataille, and Pablo Picasso.
Also friends with Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir.

- Later got deeply influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis.

Lacan and Salvador Dalí, 1975
The Mirror Stage
- Lacan’s first major theory is that of the mirror stage. When baby is born, ego not yet formed; “self, me, I” doesn’t exist.

- The baby, from 6-18 months, forms ego through identification with its mirror (specular) image.

- It sees its ideal ego (“ideal version of me”) in its specular image; its mirror image is perfect, whole, complete, whilst baby still
feels imperfect, fractured, incomplete (ie. can’t walk on its own yet, can’t speak, can’t see itself). We thus feel mix of
jealousy/hatred for our mirror image, and narcissistic love towards it when we recognize it as different but the same as us.

- But our ego is never able to be as good as our ideal ego, so we constantly go through life trying to be like our mirror image, but
always end up feeling incomplete.

- Mirrors need not be real mirrors; can be our mother/primary caregiver, who mirrors back our behaviors to us (ie. if we get angry
and they get angry, they confirm that we are bad, angry babies).

- Identification with mirror image is done through language, and is fundamentally a misidentification (misrecognition -
méconnaisance).
Jouissance
- Pleasure works according to the “pleasure principle”: Freudian way of saying that
pleasure is when our drives attain their satisfaction through being fulfilled.

- Jouissance is not pleasure - it is beyond pleasure, at the point pleasure becomes

painful simultaneously.

- Example: when baby sees its specular image and feels pleasure at identifying with it
and (mis)recognizing itself as it, but pain that the image is so much better.

- Other example: when we wait for something, excited, we feel jouissance, that
painful excitement that borders on anxiety.
Register Theory: Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic

- The Real: Register where subject-object distinction not present -

ego absent. Mirror stage: pre-seeing oneself in mirror. Register
of pure jouissance and trauma. Anxiety. Register of subject prior
to entry into language. The Real is NOT reality.

- The Imaginary: Realm of the mirror (specular) image, ideal ego,

and misrecognition.

- The Symbolic: The realm of the Big Other, society, laws, and
language that is the true conditioner of our reality.
Big Other vs. Little Other

- The Big Other (or Other) is the entity we assume

to be in control of the universe, and the
Symbolic with all its elements - which is the
universe - such as the mother for the baby, or
God, or simply society; triadic relationship.
Lacan also goes on to say it is the “treasure
trove of signifiers”.

- The little other (or other) is the specular image,

and the way we see other people around us in a
dyadic relationship. The big Other intervenes
when there is conflict between us and a little
other, transforming dyad into triad.
Saussurean Structural Linguistics
- Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) found language (sign)
was comprised of the signifier and signified.

- Signifier is the way a sign appears, the “sound-image” (de

Saussure) of the sign, such as the way we hear words, the
structural elements of a traffic light (ie. shape, color, etc.), etc.

- Signified is the meaning of the sign that is bound up with a

signifier, because without signifiers there is no signified, and
vice versa. Both combine to create sign.

- The signifier and sign combine arbitrarily, but are like “two
sides of a sheet of paper” (de Saussure).
Objet a, desire, and language
- For Lacan, language fundamentally alienates us from reality. It creates us,
likewise.

- Unlike de Saussure, for Lacan, fundamental element of a language is the

signifier, not both signifier and signified; signified is just another collection
of signifiers.

- When we express a biological need into words (demand), we also demand

love that can never be fulfilled; this incessant demand for love is desire.

- Desire is caused by a lack, a lack of this love, this love that is provided by,
first, the m(O)ther as Big Other. This lacking love is objet a, as the
object-cause of desire.

- Circling perpetually around objet a, and never being able to attain that
lacking object, is what creates jouissance, and is the law of our everyday
lives.
The Oedipus Complex
- The Oedipus complex is a Freudian theory which speaks to the intense rivalry a child feels with his
same-sex parent for possession of his other-sex parent..

- Lacan conceived of the Oedipus complex differently, in three “times”:

1) The child realizes that he is not the sole object of the mOther’s desire, and assumes that the mOther
desires the Imaginary phallus. Baby attempts to then be Imaginary phallus for mom.
2) Privation - the Imaginary father bars child from being the object of mom’s desire. It is the first
imposition of the Father’s “No!” on the Oedipal dynamic.
3) Castration - the Real father is seen to possess the phallus, and that it’s no use to struggle against
daddy. Thus the child is castrated, and can only have the phallus by identifying with daddy (forms
superego and, consequently, ego-ideal).
The Name-of-the-Father
- The father’s name which names the desire of the mOther during the
castration stage of the Oedipus complex. Ie. “Daddy = who mommy wants”

- Accepting the Name-of-the-Father is essential for subject’s entry from world of

Real and Imaginary into the trans-subjective world of the Symbolic and Law.

- Failure to accept the Name-of-the-Father whilst recognizing it exists

(disavowal) leads to perversion, whilst not even accepting it exists
(foreclosure) leads to psychosis.
 Logical Time

(Fink, 1997)