what i did for my presentation on Jacques Lacan

For our presentation on Jacques Lacan I sent out emails to the three other members of my group and met with them after class a couple times to delegate which sections of the Psychoanalytic pieces of theory each member was to present on. In addition to sending out numerous emails to bounce ideas off of team members--both suggesting and listening to others' suggestions--I also printed out each of my group members' handouts which the class received on the day we presented. For my portion--on Jacques Lacan's essay, The Mirror Stage, I put many hours into understanding its key concepts so that I could present them to the class in an informative and clear way; I talked for hours on the phone with an English Grad. Student, Cesar Soto, to get some more insight on Lacan, and on the essay's principles. My handout (below) is an amalgamation of the Rivkin text's Introduction on Psychoanalysis coupled with the Norton Anthology of Criticism's introduction on Lacan. 

Lacan’s The Mirror Stage (Essentially describes the fundamental role of FORM for humans) 

·       Lacan as a Neo Freudian:

o   Developed a Structuralist theory of Psychoanalysis based on linguistic theory of Saussure; “the French Freud”

o   The Ego is not unified, as Object Relationists suggest; it is blind to the drives of the Id (the unconscious); it remains blind to its own placement and construction in and by LANGUAGE

o   Before pre-existing Language assigns us an “I,” we have no sense of self; language gives us identity

o   There is no unified self like the Object Relationists suggested before him

·       The Mirror Stage as a process of self-identifaction:

o   The child sees themselves in the mirror and attains a false sense of wholeness and autonomy

o   This Mirror Stage, though, must be abandoned as the child enters the Social World through The Symbolic Order

o   The child enters the Social World when the father says “no” with the incest taboo that declares the Mother as an inappropriate and different object for and from him

o   The Child learns his place is the Symbolic Order; with the initiation of the Symbolic, the child represses his original desire for the Mother

§  Lacan compares this to the fashion the signifier makes the signified absent; The acceptance of repression and entry into the Symbolic is itself comparable to langue in that  once one learns to name something, one accepts separation from it

§  By naming something a human sacrifices the object because the mere presence of the sign/word/signifier is the absence of the signified/idea behind it

o   The passage from Imaginary to Symbolic orders = there occurs an installation of a combined linguistic/psychological separation of the child both from its initial object—the Mother

o   We learn to be social, to have social identities, by learning to say no, to sacrifice or give up both the initial contact one has with the natural world and with one’s first human objects

o   Our whole life consists of attempts to come to terms with Signifier/Signified separation, a lack of being

o   Our insatiable desire is a product of us trying to substitute an object for the initially absent mother object

o   We cannot ever find an object to embody what we ultimately/ideally—we slide along a chain of signifiers, whereas each signifier represents a part of a whole, not a whole in itself—we are forever incomplete this way

o   Lacan says that we are split form ourselves and that we can never possibly attain wholeness in a world of objects; the ego deludes us with ideals

o   Lack defines our being (As I Lay Dying: Addie’s Chapter); The chain of Signifiers we live in/operate in represent our desires that never arrive at the Real (the cause of our desires which we can only access through Signifiers; but Signifiers only distance us from our desires as we “name” objects of desire)---human desire is carried by signifiers which stand in for a lack that can never be filled in; the unconscious resides in the signifiers of language; language is relative because the signified is dissolved into the unconscious

·       Facts to help your understanding of The Mirror Stage:

o   Our being, the child’s being, is founded on our initial lack of being—this occurs when we are ripped from an imaginary sense of fullness and separated from the object that provided us with it--our Mothers; the Id overpowers the Ego and

o   Our identity is given to us from society and we are alienated in the process

o   Linguistic structures preexist the subject (the child) and are not created by him

o   “The Other”: designates the Symbolic dimension itself insofar as the subject has to relate to it—the very fact of speaking routes everything through the Other

§  In The Mirror Stage, this “other” for the child is its Mother

§  The child’s symbiotic relationship with the mother creates a sense of false narcissistic sense of unity in him; the child assumes the mother is himself and he “wants her to want” him

§  The lost object/the other/the mother is one that the subject/child never had, the loss brought into being by symbolization itself

§  For the child, the mother is, in fact, not there for him, not a total body form, not entirely focused on the child without other relationships (with the father, etc.)

o   The child goes through a process of self-identification from the Real to the Symbolic

§  The function of the mother is as the “Other,” who is not ENTIRELY focused on the child

§  The child’s father functions as both the instatement of language and the prohibition of incest (this refers to the “no” of the father)—think Oedipus Complex

·       The 3 orders (The Real, The Imaginary, The Symbolic)

o   The Real can only be studied in its effects on the other two dimensions/orders for Lacan—the Imaginary, the Symbolic

§  An impossible wholeness of self, plentitude of desire satisfaction (joissance), and continuity of signifier and signified or word and object—this the child associates with the Mother—the Mother represents wholeness for the child; this false sense of wholeness and agency is a result of a concealing of an initial separation that is instilled permanently in the child

o    The Imaginary: originates in the human’s fascination with FORM—think Plato’s forms

§  Lacan’s essay (The Mirror Stage) denotes the founding moment of the Imaginary; the infant’s recognition of its image in the mirror

§  The baby forgets how weak it is and identifies with the wholeness of a/its reflected form—this suggests that the human “self” comes into being through a fundamentally aesthetic recognition; the self-image of the baby causes a fictitious identification/recognition for its image, which is “over there”

§  The baby is essentially dictating the efforts of the subject, itself, “I”, toward a totality and autonomy it can never attain

§  The Imaginary =the relation between the self and its image

o   The Symbolic: the dimension of symbolization into which the human’s body, to the extent that he or she begins to SPEAK, must translate itself:

§  The dimension of articulation that is actually a structure of relations rather than things

§  Socio-culturally prescribed; the social languages that identify us and lend us identites, al of which exceed consciousness and never assume the form of knowable or conscious identities

§  Symbolic language which assigns social roles and dictates proper behavior in society; it is like language and assigns identity according to the binary opposition of presence or absence

o   Helpful Insights on Lacan’s philosophy:

§  For Lacan, the unconscious= a form of rhetorical energy designed both to disguise and to express those desires, which exist in Psychoanalysis in their effects

·       Lacan: “The unconscious is structured like a language”

·       The unconscious is not a language in and of itself but is structured like a foreign one

·       The unconscious speaks rhetorically through dreams, symptoms of somebody; the body—through its senses—provides the unconscious with the raw material it uses to express itself

§  Signs: systematically and unconsciously constitute all social codes, conventions, and prohibitions; we are acculturated by signs—even before we begin to speak, we are already being spoken

§  Language + Desire:  as soon as man begins to speak, he must launder everything important or even routine about his bodily life through linguistic structures that don’t exactly correspond to biological requirements; this is to say that DESIRE is what by definition remains un-satisfiable

o   Applying Lacanian theory to Texts

§  Apply the Mirror Stage (the Real and the Imaginary) to a certain point in a character’s life; explain when/how/why that character develops a false sense of wholeness when looking in the mirror/looking glass

·       You can also color another character’s interaction with the main character; how does the main character get a false sense of wholeness/agency from the way the other character treats them?

·       Lacan talks of the “gap” between the infant and the mirror, a gap which defines us throughout our self-actualization/identification process—what constitutes the “gap” in a text?

§  Apply the shattering of the Imaginary by the Symbolic (the father figure)

·       You can denote a point of self-realization within a greater context in a main character’s lifespan; who symbolizes the father in a text? How so?

§  Apply Lacan’s theory of Signifiers and Signified:

·       How is a character alienated by his desire to define something or someone? How does he lose the sense of its essence/signified idea in naming/defining it?

·       How is a character’s unconscious desire carried by Signifiers?

o   Lets try it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCQqC9xgbfk

§  American Psycho—protagonist is Patrick Bateman, a psychotic serial killer who is also a member of the upper crest, up-and-coming Wall Street Capitalist in 1980’s America

§  What does he reveal about his sense of self, of the “I,” in his monologue? What does he value most?

§  What kind of Language does he use in describing his routine, his identity? How does his use of Language play into Lacan’s theory that Signifiers overshadow the Signified?

§  When he says, “…and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there,” how does he summarize, or put a spin on, Lacan’s theory on Language and the unconscious as related to personality and identity? What does this say about Language and Signifiers, about how language defines and alienates us in the fissure between the word and its meaning?

                           

Works Cited

Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2004.

Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.