Jacques Lacan

 

Lacan refashioned Freudian psychiatry, and suggested that the unconscious was structured like a language, thereby giving a key role to semiotics and dissolving the usual boundaries between the rational and irrational. Though without foundation, the view supported many aspects of Postmodernism, and is therefore attractive to those fighting repression in western society.

Lacan's theories are difficult to grasp, but extend psychoanalytical thought in several directions. Lacan's unconscious is structured like a language, which gives language a key role in construction our picture of the world, but also allows the unconscious to enter into that understanding and dissolve essential distinctions between fantasy and reality. There are no primordial archetypes (Jung) or entities beyond the reach of language (Freud) or logical-sensorimotor structures (Piaget). As do other psychoanalysts, Lacan sees mental illness as a product of early childhood difficulties (notably imbalance between the Imaginary and the Symbolic) but children progressively gain a self-identity by passing through pre-mirror, mirror and post-mirror stages of development.

 

More importantly, Lacan's language referred to itself and was to be read by Saussurean semiotics. To the extent that Lacan sees language, and indeed all discourse, as permeated by the unconscious and so lacking in truth or stability, he is a Poststructuralist.

 

Lacan replaced Freud's postulated oral, anal and genital stages of child development with his own pre-mirror, mirror and post-mirror stages. During its first six months of existence, the child gradually fills the gap between bodily sensations and its perceptions of the outside world with symbols: fantasies with which its consciousness is merged. Then, over the next year or so, the child begins to recognize the outside as an extension or mirror of its own bodily image, absorbing at the same time an awareness of outside language: the meaning of the Other. But in the next, post-mirror stage, when the child begins to speak for itself, these traces of meaning are repressed because they represent something from the child has separated. But desire remains, hedged about by prohibitions and compromises, into adulthood, and provides the Id with its own logic, language and intentionality. From this early stage too comes any neurosis or psychosis that the adult may subsequently suffer from, these resulting from imbalances between the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real.

 

Unfortunately, Lacan was a perplexity, even to his own profession. The mirror stage is pure supposition. Speech, according to Freud, appears with the Oedipus complex, and thus much later than Lacan's model would allow. The unconscious is not structured like a language, not on the evidence to date, and documentation by case history is very poor.

Nonetheless, Lacan's concept of a split in consciousness as we enter adulthood was attractive to those contesting the "closure" and single viewpoints of traditional literature. Lacan's unconscious, which permeates all discourse, and thus undermines all the supposed stabilities of social and public life, was employed by left-wing thinkers viewing modern capitalism as repressive and irrational. Much has passed into history, and we should see Lacan in context — in flight from a Catholic background, friendly through his wife with the Surrealists, applying his own brand of Freudianism to the events of May 1968 and beyond. But despite the dubious nature of Lacan's concept, his influence lives on. Alienation in modern life, it is argued, comes not only from capitalism, but because we are inevitably alienated on entering the Symbolic realm of public language. In the deepest possible way, we were split at the source of gender. The Imaginary realm of the fused and fluid corresponded to the feminine, but once we employ public language we are thrown into a masculine world of order, identity, coherence and prohibition, a theme taken up by feminist critics.

An extended version, with references and internet listings, is to be found on TextEtc.

 

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Jacques Lacan

 

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