Écrits by Lacan

Context

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychoanalyst whose contribution to philosophy is based on his reinterpretation of Freud’s writings under the influence of Heidegger, Hegel, Saussure's structuralist linguistics and anthropology. The transcript of his seminars was published in French in 1966.

Hegel

Lacan became acquainted with hegelian dialectics by attending Kojève’s lectures, between 1933 and 1939, at the École des Hauts Études in Paris where Kojève commented on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. It is an anthropological reading of Hegel emphasising a dualistic and negativistic conception of hegelian dialectics.

On the analysis of aggressivity in psychoanalysis Lacan declared in 1948:

“Before Darwin, however, Hegel provided the ultimate theory of the proper function of aggressivity in human ontology, seeming to prophecy the iron law of our time. From the conflict of master and slave, he deduced the entire subjective and objective progress of our history, revealing in these crises the syntheses to be found in the highest forms of the status of the person in the West, from Stoic to the Christian, and even to the future citizen of the Universal State."

He again mentions Hegel's philosophical leadership in Discours de Rome (1953):

"These remarks define the limits within which it is impossible for our technique to fail to recognise the structuring moments of the Hegelian phenomenology: in the first place the master-slave dialectic, or the dialectic of the belle âme and of the law of the heart, and generally whatever enables us to understand how the constitution of the objects is subordinated to the realisation of the subject."

Later Lacan no longer wants to use the hegelian approach as the key of the imaginary, the law of intersubjectivity or the process of alienation, but as a discourse. In this master/slave relationship, the master is knowledge. Lacan is already turning to linguistics as his source.

Heidegger

Heidegger's vision of language reversed the traditional relationship between humans and language. He argued that it went beyond a set of labels for things. It mediated the relationship between individuals and their subjective experience of both internal emotions and sensations, and external things in the world. It was thus not reducible to communication but shaped our concepts of reality and structured social relationships themselves. It formed part of self-recognition since it helped the subject discover the Other.

Heidegger's perspective opposed the empirical conception of language which viewed it as a mirror between subjective experience and external reality making language a set of labels of items in the world. Lacan was inspired by this view of language and described the relationship of humans and language as a field, a place where the individual is placed before biological birth. This led to the psychoanalytical idea that the unconscious has the structure of a language. 

It was Heidegger who first pointed out that it was language that spoke, not the individual, because language preceded speakers, even before their birth. For Lacan the unconscious is made up of structural laws that translate personal experiences into living myth. Lacan takes his concept from Levi Strauss' proposition that myths transcend the individual. Freud understood this process in his clinical practice as symptoms.

Saussure

Saussure’s first semiotic principle is that signs create an arbitrary relationship between a sound-image and a concept. The signified (tree) and the signifier (the word/sound tree) are connected in a random way, not as a necessity. This is obvious since multiple other languages use different signifiers for the same concepts. 

Saussure argued that the basic operation of language is an arbitrary coupling of thoughts and sounds. For the linguist language does not express ideas because ideas do not exist previous to language. For him language differentiates thoughts by coupling thoughts with sounds: the sound of tree or the sound of flower. Language's role is to delimit, not to reference. Saussure expressed it thus:

“Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences."

Saussure’s work is a demonstration of the fact that the coming together of two meaningless processes (thought and sound) creates a third term that is meaningful: a symbol.

Saussure's second principle of semiotics, argues that language functions in succession to form a chain: sentences.

Lacan uses both of Saussure's semiotic principles in his theory of subjectivity and the appearance of desire. In the act of speech Lacan notices that the words in the sentence are unclear until certain points in the chain of words. He concludes that the speaker always experiences a gap between enunciation by the subject and understanding by another. During this interim the subject becomes aware of their reliance on the Other to provide the words of understanding necessary for a meaningful communication. Language becomes the discourse of the Other since the subject must adopt language as a structure of signifiers that they did not create. 

Lacan theorises that the human child is in the frightening situation of needing to use the discourse of the Other to obtain satisfaction of basic bodily needs. The Other retains the power of successful or unsuccessful communication and final satisfaction of the child's needs. Lacan then suggests that this desperate infantile experience of needing and having to use language to obtain satisfaction is what causes the emergence of desire. This is expressed in the question directed to the Other who can gratify the need: What do you want from me?

Freudianism

Lacan's rereading of Freud will be based on the use of linguistics. Contrary to Freud who, claiming to be a natural scientist, had rejected philosophical speculation, Lacan sought to show that psychoanalysis was a philosophical standpoint. For example Lacan suggests that the Freudian unconscious is to be interpreted as the effect of language, understood as symbolic, on human behaviour.

Lacan transposed Freud's concepts using Saussure' structural linguistics which focused on the process of signification, not on the human mind. In short, he treated the unconscious as a language. Freud had assumed that consciousness was prior to language; Lacan argued that human consciousness is constituted by language. 

The author reformulated Freud's Oedipus complex and psychosexual development into the difference between the imaginary stage where the child does not distinguish between self and Other, and the symbolic/linguistic stage of development. The mirror stage is when the infant identifies self as separate from Other. Next is the symbolic stage where the child distinguishes between linguistic oppositions: child/adult, son/father, woman/man. The symbolic domain belongs to the father, symbolised by the phallus as signifier that establishes the modes of other signifiers.

Lacan reformulated the Freudian concepts of displacement and condensation, the dreamwork mechanisms, into Jakobson's linguistic figures: metaphor and metonymy. The author argued that all processes of the desire for unreachable wholeness move in a chain of signifiers, never reaching a stable signified. He illustrated this in his interpretation of Poe's short story The Purloined Letter, as an allegory of the processes of the signifier, in his paper The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.

Commentary on Écrits

Lacan developed his theory of the evolution of the unconscious in three stages of subjectivity: imaginary, symbolic and real. 

He explained the imaginary stage in a 1936 paper called The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I. There the unconscious was presented as an imaginary field in infants. Their incapacity to control their actions creates a need for some outside model. The author argues that they can find this in a mirror reflection or copying others' behaviour.

However, that same image becomes the object of aggression, according to Lacan. This aggressivity is the result of the alienation of the ego where identification finds its unity. For Lacan the ego is an object where the subject finds a self. However in the imaginary stage the ego appears as the Other, thus occasioning a primal violence against it.

The author evolved his theory to a new dimension starting with his Rome Discourse in the 1950s: the symbolic stage. His interest in the anthropological studies of Lévi-Strauss and Saussure's linguistics reveals an alternative to the imaginary. This offered the options of identity through representation or destruction of the object of identity. The symbolic stage partly satisfies both desires.

Lacan reinterprets Saussure's sign structure (the signifier and the signified) as the divided condition of human representation. He maintained that the signified could only become present through the signifier so that the idea can only be present through its representation, not through itself. It is absent. Language thus represents an alienation through the division of signifier and signified. 

Lacan reinterprets Freud's Oedipal complex as the acceptance of this language prohibition of not representing itself, for example the name of the father for the father. This enables him to separate the Freudian development theory from cultural interpretations of the family.

The difference between signifier and signified is experienced by the subject as a gap that it wants to link. This need is what Lacan describes as desire. Language demonstrates this void where the meaning is represented by something else, not by itself. Desire involves a process that destroys the ego, identity, by moving from one signifier to another and creating a new identity each time.

The imaginary allows either pure identification or aggressive destruction, but Lacan finds in the symbolic the ability of psychoanalysis to free desire from these limitations of the imaginary. However, most Freudians view analysis as strengthening the ego, while Lacan understands it as enabling the subject's desire to overcome the imaginary hold of the ego and render identity fluid.

From the '60s Lacan turns to the Freudian hypothesis of the death drive and places it at the centre of psychoanalysis. The process of symbolic desire releases the energies which in the static imaginary could only be expressed aggressively. The symbolic puts the death drive to work in the movement through which language chips away identity.

In the third stage, the real, the actuality of everyday experience comes to life through the mediation of the symbolic and imaginary. He distinguishes between apparent immediate reality and the effects on the unconscious: hysterical symptoms, obsessional rituals, psychotic delusions, sexual fixation and others which he names wirklichkeit (psychic reality).

Lacan describes the infant's predicament as a confrontation with an alien Other on which it bases its subjectivity and relationship to the world. At first he conceived this Other in the imaginary confrontation with a mirror image, later he explained it in terms of symbolic language. Now he comprehends it as real as Das Ding (The Thing) which represents the Other.

The imaginary and the symbolic make up 'reality' to which Lacan opposes the Real. This is a concept that slides between different meanings: materiality or an unstructured area underlying the patterns of the Symbolic. It exists outside of ordinary reality.

The Real became identified with the mother as the source of complete satisfaction in infancy. Later life is then experienced as the attempt to re-experience the Real which is displaced by the Symbolic, socio-linguistic order.

In later writings Lacan describes the Real as the unstructured opposite of reality which encodes it. It is a presence that drives anxiety and compulsion. It is beyond direct experience, yet is expressed in behaviours and perceptions.

Themes 

The ego as a construct

For Lacan, the ego is an imaginary answer to a real problem. He argues that the mind invents a sense of self which is mostly specultive. He concludes that our psychology as adults is based on beliefs that we formed about the world when we were infants. This is a process of building a self-perception and forms a dualism: material reality and the imagined self.

Lacan shares the conception, with Freud, that early childhood is the secret to understanding human self-perception and psychology. They agree on the interpretation of dreams and the Oedipal complex, but not on the subconscious.

What attracted Lacan's attention about children's perception was the phenomenon of understanding their own reflection in the mirror. The author believed that now that children had the opportunity to see themselves in the mirror this has created the response of ego building. He asserts that children were not born with an ego and so must solve the problem of their relationship with the outside world. They begin to do this through the mirror-image, evolve into symbolic thinking through language and then through the Real.

Lacan and Philosophy

Lacan's approach to psychoanalysis and the resulting philosophy have remoulded understanding of subjectivity, language, and the nature of reality.

Structuralism was influenced by Lacan's concept of symbolic order. For him language is a system of signifiers that frames human experience. Linguistcs, literature and cultural creations have incorporated this new insight of the connection between language and reality:

“The unconscious is structured like a language.”

In post-structuralism his concepts changed accepted ideas on identity and knowledge. He proposed a subjectivity which was not static, but split and created by language and social relationships. The result has been a reassessment of the dynamics of power, gender and the connection between language and meaning.

Lacan also influenced feminist theory. He shed light on the unconscious desires that form subjectivity which led to a new understanding of gender relationships and the construction of femininity. His work has enabled critical analysis of patriarchy and accepted gender roles. 

Philosophical Anthropology

The author studied the complex process of building human identity in the mirror-image, desire and the Oedipal complex. His foundational notion is that self is formed through self-recognition and identification with others. This starts with the mirror stage where the infant experiences a double meeting with their own image. This shapes the ego, which Lacan defined as self-perception, a united and meaningful entity. Through this process the child comes to a sense of identity, though it is splintered and dependent on recognition from others.

Lacan's analysis of the Oedipal complex plays a role in his philosophical anthropology. He argues that the child's desire for the parent of the opposite sex and identification with the same-sex parent has a bearing on their gender identity and social relationships. This entangles with symbolism in language and culture, thus forming self and social identity.

Desire is a central point of Lacan's philosophical anthropology. His argument is that desire does not emanate from personal wishes, but is a product of the individual's relationships with others. This concept challenges traditional ideas of desire and underlines the connections between self, culture and society. 

Influence on Aesthetics and Cultural Theory

Lacan's ideas have led to a challenging of notions of artistic expression. He affirms that art does not spring from inner desires, but manifests unconscious and social structures. The artist finds inspiration in the social unconscious and expresses it through symbolic representation:

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

Lacan's notions have also impacted literary criticism through the application of the unconscious and the 'sign' to uncover multiple meanings in literary texts. They are also a framework for understanding narrative structure, symbolism and the evolution of characters. 

In film theory the author has revolutionised the viewers' experience through analysis of how their gaze is a creative force. He also offers insights into the psychological effect of film on the spectator.