Introducing Lacan E-Book

Darian Leader

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 100

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Jacques Lacan is now regarded as a major psychoanalytical theorist alongside Freud and Jung, although recognition has been delayed by fierce arguments over his ideas. Written by a leading Lacanian analyst, "Introducing Lacan" guides the reader through his innovations, including his work on paranoia, his addition of structural linguistics to Freudianism and his ideas on the infant 'mirror phase'. It also traces Lacan's influence in postmodern critical thinking on art, literature, philosophy and feminism. This is the ideal introduction for anyone intrigued by Lacan's ideas but discouraged by the complexity of his writings.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39-41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-184831-183-1

Text copyright © 1995 Darian Leader

Illustrations copyright © 2013 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Surrealist Movement

Beginnings in Psychiatry

Paranoia

The Case of Aimée

Analysis

Studies in Philosophy

Marriage

The Marienbad Congress

Theory of the Mirror Phase ...

... and Mimicry

Captured in an Image

The Imaginary

Ego and alienation

Negative Hallucination

The Falsifying Ego

The Construction of the Ego

In the Second World War

Return to Freud

Signifiers and Signified

The Symbolic

The Ideal

Ego Ideal and Ideal Ego

Structuralist Linguistics

The Unconscious and Language

The Variable Session

Speech and Language

The Real

The Psychoanalytic Institution

Ego and Subject

Examples of Neurosis: 1. The Hysteric

Examples of Neurosis: 2. The Obsessional

Structural Anthropology

Mathematical Models

The Name of the Father

The Phallus

The Symbolic Network

Is Lacan a Structuralist?

Loss and Language

Desire

And Lack …

Desire and Wish

The Maternal Phallus

The Missing Phallus

The Oedipus Complex …

The Castration Complex

A Clinical Example

The Phallus and Language

The Name of the Father

The Structure of Psychosis

The Triggering of Psychosis

The Logic of Psychosis

The Graph of Desire

The Symbol (A)

Symbols (A) and s(A)

Symbol d and $ D

S(): Signifier of the Impossible

A Clinical Example

S(): Link to Phantasy

The Real Object

Lost Objects

The Phantasy Remainder

Identity

Formula for Phantasy

Clinical Implications

Creon and Antigone

The Founding of the École Freudienne de Paris

Transference and Supposed Knowledge

Transference and the Object

Jouissance

Repetition

Regulating Jouissance

Language and Castration

The Pass

The Events of May 1968

Lalangue

Logic of Sexuation

All Men …

Supplementary Jouissance

Not-all

In Clinical Practice

Topology and Knots

RSI

Knots

Sinthome

Seminar on Joyce

Dissolution

Note on the Text

Further Reading

Books on Lacan

Biography

Acknowledgements

Index

Born on 13 April 1901, Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was the first child of Charles Marie Alfred Lacan and Émilie Philippine Marie Baudry. Alfred Lacan was the Paris sales representative of a large provincial firm. The family lived in comfortable conditions in the Boulevard du Beaumarchais before moving to the Montparnasse area where Jacques entered the prestigious Catholic school, the Collège Stanislas.

An outstanding pupil, he excelled in religious studies and Latin. As a teenager, Jacques Lacan developed a passion for philosophy, adorning the walls of his bedroom with a plan of the structure of Spinoza’s Ethics, a text which would always remain dear to him and which he would quote at the start of his doctoral dissertation in medicine.

The Surrealist Movement

Lacan took up the study of medicine in 1920 and specialized in psychiatry from 1926. During this period, he was active in the busy Parisian world of the writers, artists and intellectuals who made up the Surrealist movement. He frequented Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop on the Left Bank, along with the likes of André Gide and Paul Claudel and, at the age of seventeen, met James Joyce.

Three years later, I was present at the first public reading of Joyce’s ULYSSES in the legendary bookshop, Shakespeare & Co.

A friend of André Breton and Salvador Dali, he was to become Picasso’s personal physician and a contributor to several Surrealist publications from the early 1930s.

Beginnings in Psychiatry

His internship at St-Anne hospital, starting in 1926, and at the Infirmerie Spéciale des Aliénés de la Préfecture de Police, in 1928, gave Lacan a particular interest in the study of paranoia. Later he would say that …

My only real master in psychiatry was Gaȅtan Gatian de Clérambault.

Lacan singled out his concept of “mental automatism”. This brought together many seemingly disparate phenomena of madness under the common motif of something being imposed from “outside”: the echo of thoughts or a commentary on one’s actions, for example.

The form of a particular psychosis would then be determined by how one made sense of these elements which lacked an initial content. Lacan would say that this concept was the closest that contemporary French psychiatry got to a structural analysis, with its emphasis on the imposition of formal elements beyond the “conscious” control of the subject.

Paranoia

In 1932, Lacan completed his doctoral thesis on paranoia, Paranoid Psychosis and its Relations to the Personality, a study which had a great influence on many of the Surrealists.

I REFERRED TO LACAN’S WORK IN THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE SURREALIST REVIEW, MINOTAURE, IN 1993.(SALVAD OR DALI)

I often contributed to MINOTAURE.

I CHAMPIONED THE POETRY OF THE PATIENT, AIMÉE, THAT LACAN DESCRIBED IN HIS 1932 THESIS.(PAUL ELUARD)

The Case of Aimée

The thesis contains a detailed analysis of a woman, named Aimée after the heroine of one of her unpublished novels, who had attempted to stab a well-known Parisian actress, Huguette Duflos. The case was widely reported in the press at the time, and Lacan tried gradually to piece together the logic behind her apparently irrational act. His thesis introduced a new concept into the psychiatric milieu, that of “self-punishment paranoia”. Lacan argued that, in striking the actress, Aimée was in fact striking herself: Duflos represented a woman with freedom and social prestige, exactly the sort of woman that Aimée aspired to become.

In her ideas of persecution, it was this figure that she saw as the source of threats to her and her young son. The ideal image was thus both the object of her hate and of her aspiration. Lacan was especially interested here in this complex relation to images and the ideas of identity to be found in paranoia. In her subsequent arrest and confinement, she found the punishment which was a real source of the act itself. She understood, at a certain level, that she was herself the object of punishment.

Lacan’s analysis of the case shows many of the features which would later become central to his work: narcissism, the image, the ideal, and how the personality could extend beyond the limits of the body and be constituted within a complex social network. The actress represented a part of Aimée herself, indicating how the identity of a human being could include elements well outside the biological boundaries of the body. In a sense, Aimée’s identity was literally outside herself.

Analysis

Around the same time that Lacan completed his thesis, he began his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which continued until 1938. Loewenstein had been analysed by Freud’s student Hans Sachs.

FREUDSACHSLOEWENSTEINI LATER EMIGRATED TO THE USA WHERE I BECAME WELL KNOWN FOR MY WORK IN ESTABLISHING THE PROGRAMME OF EGO PSYCHOLOGY.

Studies in Philosophy

Instead of confining himself to the standard texts in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Lacan read widely, with a special interest in the philosophic work of Karl Jaspers, G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. He attended the seminars on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève together with many of the thinkers who would leave their mark on French intellectual life, Georges Bataille, Raymond Aron, Pierre Klossowski and Raymond Queneau.

HEGEL HEIDEGGER BATAILLE QUENEAU

Marriage

In 1934, Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin, the sister of his friend the surgeon Sylvain Blondin. Three children were born from this marriage, Caroline in 1934, Thibaut in 1939 and Sibylle in 1940.

The Marienbad Congress

Lacan made his first intervention at the annual Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, held at Marienbad, in 1936. He developed the thesis of the “mirror phase”.

But my paper was interrupted by the chairman of the session, Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer.

The original text of this paper is lost, but the brilliant article on the family which Lacan contributed to the Encyclopédie Française in 1938, together with a later version of the paper, presents the argument clearly.

Theory of the Mirror Phase …

Humans are born prematurely. Left to themselves, they would probably die. They are always born too early. They can’t walk or talk at birth: they have a very partial mastery of their motor functions and, at the biological level, they are hardly complete.

I CAN’T PICK THINGS UP OR MOVE TOWARDS OR AWAY FROM THINGS.

So how does the child come to master its relation to its body? How does I it respond to its “prematuration”?

… and Mimicry

Lacan’s answer is in the theory of the mirror phase. He draws our attention, in later texts, to an ethological curiosity, known as “mimicry”.

Certain beasts have the habit of assuming the insignia and colouring of their surroundings.

Hence a stick insect may choose to look like a stick. The obvious explanation for this phenomenon is that it protects the animal against predators. But what many investigators found was that those animals which assumed an image or disguise were just as likely to be eaten as those which didn’t.

The US government had commissioned a survey in the early 1930s involving the rather macabre task of examining the stomachs of some 60,000 Nearctic birds to confirm this diagnosis by counting the insects which had been swallowed. The ones which had disguised themselves were no less frequent than their more honest companions.

So if evolutionary biology cannot provide an answer to the question of mimetism with the idea of protection from predators, how can it be explained?

Roger Caillois, a French thinker fascinated with the theme of masks, games and the relation of the human to the animal kingdom, argued that there was a sort of natural law whereby organisms become captured in their environment. They will thus take on the colouring, for example, of the space around them.

Captured in an Image

Lacan developed this thesis in his work on the mirror phase, combining it with observations from child psychology and social theory and argued for a similar form of imaginary capture for the organism in an external image

The child identifies with an image outside himself, be it an actual mirror image or simply the image of another child.

THE APPARENT COMPLETENESS OF THIS IMAGE GIVES ME A NEW MASTERY OVER THE BODY.

In the 1938 encyclopedia article, this idea is used to give a brilliant explanation of the inexplicable swings in a child’s behaviour from a tyrannical or seductive attitude to its opposite. Rather than linking this to a conflict between two individuals, the child and the spectator in this instance, Lacan argues that it derives from a conflict internal to each of them, resulting from an identification with the other party. This is an organizing principle of development rather than a single moment in childhood. If I have identified with an image outside myself, I can do things I couldn’t do before.

The Imaginary

Mastery of one’s motor functions and an entry into the human world of space and movement is thus at the price of a fundamental alienation. Lacan calls the register in which this identification takes place “the imaginary”, emphasizing the importance of the visual field and the specular relation which underlies the child’s captivation in the image.

BUT ALL THIS AT A PRICE. IF I AM IN THE PLACE OF ANOTHER CHILD, WHEN HE’S STRUCK, I WILL CRY. IF HE WANTS SOMETHING, I’LL WANT IT TOO, BECAUSE I AM IN HIS PLACE. I AM TRAPPED IN AN IMAGE FUNDAMENTALLY ALIEN TO ME, OUTSIDE ME.

Ego and alienation

Lacan shows how this alienation in the image corresponds with the ego: the ego is constituted by an alienating identification, based on an initial lack of completeness in the body and nervous system.

If the ego is the seat of narcissism and if narcissism does not exist from the start of life, what must happen for narcissism to emerge?

My thesis provided a response to the question posed by Freud in his famous 1914 paper on Narcissism.

SOME “NEW PSYCHICAL ACTION” MUST TAKE PLACE TO CONSTITUTE THE EGO, BUT I DIDN’T SAY WHAT THIS WAS.

With the mirror phase, Lacan had found an answer.

Negative Hallucination

If the ego seems whole and complete, beyond it is only the fragmented, uncoordinated state of the body.

The ego is thus always an inauthentic agency, functioning to conceal a disturbing lack of unity.