Analytical psychology according to Jacques Lacan

• TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Personality

Jacques Lacan, a pioneering psychoanalyst who emphasized the relationship between language and the unconscious, radically reinterpreted Freud in the light of philosophy and structuralist linguistics. Lacan’s theories of the unconscious (that it is “structured like a language”) and the mirror phase significantly reshaped the discourse of psychoanalysis and cultural theory.

Introduction

According to Freudian psychoanalysis, desire is biological and driven by sexual force or libido. Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), however, regards desire as a drive to regain an original ontological unity that can never be achieved because of the psychic split resulting from what he called the "mirror stage" as well as the Freudian Oedipal phase. Desire emerges from this split or lack, which it tries, continually, to fill. Desire expresses itself through language.

Lacan believed that his form of psychoanalysis was not a departure from, but a return to, the original principles of Freudian analysis. Lacan’s readers have long complained about the difficulty of his prose, which is characterized by a seeming lack of linearity and an often impenetrable style. Many of Lacan’s commentators have likened his discursive style to a rebus or puzzle, designed to communicate the idea that no truth about psychic life can ever be wholly and fully expressed through language because the psyche is always split against itself, and language is the result of absence and difference.

The Mirror Stage

Central to Lacanian psychoanalysis is the celebrated mirror stage. Lacan argues that a child’s ego begins to emerge only between the ages of six and eighteen months when the child first sees their reflection in a mirror. This experience is illusory, according to Lacan, because the child’s actual experience of their own body is never that of a clearly delineated whole in the child’s full control, so the reflection seems to have a wholeness and mastery that the actual child lacks. Lacan’s observations on the mirror stage relied heavily on the earlier work of the American psychologist and philosopher James Mark Baldwin (1861–1934).

Desire emerges from the perceived distance between the actual or lived experience of the child’s own body and the reflection it first sees in the mirror. The child envies the perfection of the mirror image or the mirroring response of their parents, says Lacan, and this lack, or manque, is permanent because there will always be a gap or existential distance between the subjective experience of the body and the complete image in the mirror, or the apparent wholeness of others.

Desire begins at the mirror stage in the psychic development of the young child. The apparent completeness of the reflected image gives the otherwise helpless child a sense of mastery over their own body, but this sense of self-mastery is as illusory as it is frustrating. Lacan urged his fellow psychoanalysts to reassess their focus on the patient’s ego and turn their attention back to the unconscious because of what he termed “the falsifying character of the ego.” Lacan argued that psychoanalysis should return to Freud and abandon their fascination with the ultimately untrustworthy ego of the patient.

Lacan believed that his theory of the mirror stage answered two fundamental questions raised by Freud’s 1914 essay “On Narcissism”: What “Psychical Action” takes place to bring the ego into being? And if we are not narcissists from the earliest stages of life, what causes narcissism to emerge? According to Lacan, the mechanism of the mirror stage answers both of these questions.

The Oedipus Complex

Lacan, like Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), believed that individuals are socialized by passing through the three stages of the Oedipus complex: seduction, the primal scene, and the castration phase, the last of which Lacan reconfigured as the Father’s “No.” In the so-called seduction phase, the child is attracted to the original object of desire, which is the body of the mother. In the primal scene, or primal stage, the child witnesses the father having sexual intercourse with the mother, and this is followed by the castration phase, wherein the father restricts the child’s access to the mother under threat of castration. The law of the father, or Father’s “No,” causes the child to redirect desire from the mother to what Lacan calls the “Other”—a hypothetical “place” in the unconscious that allows the individual to later project desire onto other persons—other, that is, than the mother.

Lacan holds that there are three registers in the subject’s psychosexual development: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. These somewhat correspond to the Freudian oral, anal, and genital stages and are indirectly related to the three stages of the Oedipus complex.

At the level of the imaginary, the pre-Oedipal infant inhabits a world without clear subject-object distinctions. The child thinks that it is coextensive with the mother’s body. While the child perceives the mother’s body as nurturing and pleasurable, it also entertains fantasies that the mother’s body might overwhelm and destroy it. This yields alternating fantasies of incorporation and assault, whereby the child is both blissful in their identification with the body of the mother and frightfully aggressive toward it. At this stage of development, the child inhabits a world of images. The mirror stage is the most important moment of imaginary misidentification, or méconnaissance.

According to Lacan, it is the father who disrupts the closed dyadic relationship between mother and child. The father signifies what Lacan calls the law, or the law of the father, which is always, in the first instance, the incest taboo. The child’s intensely libidinal relationship with their mother’s body is opened to the wider world of family and society by the figure of the father. The father’s appearance divides the child from the mother’s body and drives the child’s desire for their mother into the unconscious. Therefore, the law and unconscious desire for the mother emerge at the same time, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The child’s experience of the father’s presence is also their first experience of sexual difference, and with it comes the dim awareness that there is someone else other than the mother in their world. The Father’s “No” deflects the child’s desire from the mother to the Other. Lacan identified the Other as a hypothetical place in the unconscious that can be projected onto human counterparts by subjects. Lacan held that the Other is never fully grasped because the nature of desire is such that its object is always beyond its reach.

Language and the Symbolic

This is the point at which the child enters the register of the symbolic. It is at this stage, according to Lacan, that the child also enters into the language system. Absence, lack, and separation characterize the language system, according to Lacan, because language names things that are not immediately present (signifieds) and substitutes words (signifiers) for them. This is also the beginning of socialization, says Lacan. Just as the child realizes that sexual identity is the result of an originary difference between mother and father, it comes to grasp that language itself is an unending chain of differences and that the terms of language are what they are only by excluding one another. Signs always presuppose the absence of the objects they signify—an insight that Lacan inherited from structuralist anthropology and linguistics.

The loss of the precious object that is the mother’s body drives desire to seek its satisfaction in incomplete or partial objects, none of which can ever fully satisfy the longing bred by the loss of the maternal body. People try vainly to settle for substitute objects, or what Lacan calls the object little o (to distinguish it from the capital O in Other). Lacan’s thinking was heavily influenced by structuralist thinkers such as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and linguists Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson. Lacan’s chief claim, based on his readings of Saussure and Jakobson, is that the unconscious is “structured like a language.” Lacan refashioned Freud’s terminology of psychic condensation and displacement by translating them into what Lacan believed to be their equivalent rhetorical terms: metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor works by condensing two separate images into a single symbol through substitution, while metonymy operates by association—using a part to represent the whole (such as “crown” for “king”) or using contiguous elements (such as “sea” and “boat”).

The presence of the father teaches the child that it must assume a predefined social and familial role over which it exercises no control—a role that is defined by the sexual difference between mother and father, the exclusion of the child from the sexual relationship that exists between the mother and the father, and the child’s relinquishment of the earlier and intense bonds that existed between itself and the mother’s body. This situation of absence, exclusion, and difference is symbolized by the phallus, a universal signifier or metonymic presence that indicates the fundamental lack or absence that lies at the heart of being itself—the manque à être, as Lacan calls it.

The Real and Jouissance

Finally, Lacan posits a register called the real—not the empirical world but rather the ineffable realm of constancy beyond the field of speech. According to Lacan, the reality that is given to consciousness is no more and no less than an amalgam of the imaginary (the specular and imagistic world of the rationalizing ego, with all of its self-delusions, defenses, and falsifications) and the symbolic (the meaningful social world of language). Lacan resists defining the real in any explicit or easily codifiable way. In his later work in the 1960s, Lacan discussed the register of the real in the light of his work on jouissance, a term that is loosely translated as “enjoyment” but that is much more complex.

According to Lacan, jouissance is any experience that is too much for the organism to bear. Usually, it is experienced as suffering—an unbearable pain that is experienced as a kind of satisfaction by the unconscious drives. According to Lacan, this is what lies at the heart of the Freudian repetition compulsion—namely, an unconscious, and unconsciously satisfying, wish to suffer. Healthy human life is about the regulation of jouissance. Children’s bodies are prone to overexcitation and overstimulation because they are full of jouissance, which is slowly drained from the body of the child after its encounter with the law of the father and its entry into the register of the symbolic. Portions of jouissance linked to especially intense bodily memories from childhood can become “caught” or centered in the body and manifest as symptoms. Lacan reconfigured Freud’s theory of castration by redefining it as the loss of jouissance from the body. More broadly, Lacan says that the entry into language itself is castration because it introduces the idea of lack or absence into the world.

Lacanian Clinical Practice

For Lacan, human subjects construct themselves through language. One of the chief goals of Lacanian clinical practice is to create a space wherein the patient can experience and release jouissance through speech without the disintegration of the sense of self. The analyst will then determine where a patient lies on a diagnostic continuum—neurotic (obsessional or hysteric), perverse, or psychotic.

Psychotic patients, according to Lacanian analysis, are most greatly disconnected at the level of language, or the symbolic. The Lacanian analyst works with the disjointed speech of the psychotic to allow them to live within and to express, through language, the world of signifiers without significant discontinuity.

The perverse patient, on the other hand, is often drawn to a fetish object. The fetish object is a compliant one, and it allows the patient to experience jouissance without having to relive the experience of castration that was attendant on the Father’s “No.” The perverse patient engages in an act of substitution, whereby a complicit object grants a sense of release—a real or simulated experience of jouissance—while allowing them to avoid the painful sense of separation from the Other, or the presymbolic mother.

The obsessional neurotic fears loss of control. Obsessional neurotics struggle to control and contain the upwelling of desire and the accompanying experience of jouissance. The obsessional neurotic speaks the language of mastery and order and attempts to exercise control well beyond their purview. The analyst is sensitive to dichotomizing tendencies in the patient’s speech (order and disorder, right and wrong). According to Lacan, the patient’s fantasy is that the upwelling of jouissance will alienate those around them and leave havoc in its wake. The analyst works with the obsessional neurotic to help the patient meet their needs without limiting defenses—to experience and speak desire without the fear of losing self-control.

Hysterics experience a deep and debilitating sense of lack that leads to a feeling of alienation from the Other. Once the hysteric obtains the imaginary object of the mother’s desire, they wish to be rid of it—sometimes almost violently. The goal of Lacanian analysis when working with hysterics is to move them beyond the dichotomy of having/not having to help them achieve satisfactory levels of comfort with themselves and to find a neutral space where the sense of lack is not all-consuming.

The Case of Aimée

Lacan’s early work on paranoia dealt with the case of a patient he called Aimée (Marguerite Anzieu), who was arrested by the Paris police in the attempted stabbing of a famous actress, Huguette Duflos. Lacan first encountered Aimée in 1931 at Sainte-Anne’s Hospital, where he had begun his clinical training as a légiste medicale, or forensic psychiatrist, four years earlier. Lacan’s patient, the subject of numerous press accounts and much public speculation, came to believe that her young son was about to be murdered by Duflos. One night, Aimée attended a play that featured the famous Parisian actress and suddenly lunged from the crowd of theatergoers, brandishing a knife. Aimée was promptly arrested and given over to Lacan’s care.

Lacan conducted an exhaustive number of analytic interviews with Aimée. Lacan was able to reconstruct the trajectory of Aimée’s descent into what he termed "self-punishment paranoia." Aimée both feared and admired Duflos, and she came to believe that the actress—really her ideal image of the actress—posed a danger to her and her young child. Duflos’s ideal image was the object of Aimée’s intense hatred as well as her excessive fascination, writes Lacan, and in attacking Duflos, the deluded woman was really punishing herself.

In one especially striking memory, Aimée recalled (falsely) reading an article in a newspaper in which the actress allegedly told an interviewer that she was planning to kill Aimée and her young son. Aimée, therefore, regarded her attack on Duflos as an act of preemptive self-defense based on a misrecognition. Aimée finally found the real punishment she unconsciously craved (her jouissance) in her public humiliation, arrest, and confinement.

Lacan was struck by the relationship between memory (or, in this case, false memory) and identity. One sees in Lacan’s early analysis of Aimée many of the most significant elements of his psychoanalytic theory, including the mirror stage, the imaginary, jouissance and its role in paranoia, and the power of misidentification.

Lacan’s detailed analysis of the case of Aimée in his 1932 doctoral thesis, De la psychose paranoïaque dans les rapports avec la personnalité (Paranoid psychosis and its relations to the personality), laid the groundwork for much of his later work on the nature of identity, the genesis of narcissism, the power of the image, and the fundamentally social character of personality. From 1933 onward, Lacan was known as a specialist in the diagnosis and treatment of paranoia. His densely textured doctoral dissertation was widely circulated among artists and poets identified with the Surrealist movement, and Lacan wrote regularly for Minotaure, a Surrealist review published between 1933 and 1939 by Albert Skira. Many of Lacan’s interpreters regard his work with philosopher Alexandre Kojèveas (1902–1968) as a theoretical turning point and the genesis of his thinking on the psychological significance of lack, loss, and absence.

In 1936, Lacan presented his paper “Le stade du miroir” (The mirror stage) at the fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress, held at Marienbad, Czechoslovakia (modern-day Czech Republic and Slovakia), in August of 1936 under the chairmanship of the preeminent British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones. In this seminal essay, since lost, Lacan outlined his theory of the mirror stage. His theory of self-mastery through mimicry, in which the young child responds to its prematuration or defenselessness by identifying with images outside itself, was influenced by the anthropological insights of Roger Caillois.

Lacan’s radical revision of psychoanalysis, which he regarded as a return to Freud, led to his eventual ejection from the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP) in 1963. Lacan founded a new school in 1964, first called the École Française de Psychanalyse (French School of Psychoanalysis) and then later the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) (Freudian School of Paris). Lacan dissolved the EFP in 1980 and died a year later, leaving behind a body of work that continues to influence psychoanalytic studies, philosophy, and literary and cultural theory.

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