Lacan for Beginners

Theory of the Mirror Phase and Mimicry

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. So how does the child come to master its relation to its body? How does it respond to its prematuration? Lacans answer is in the theory of the mirror phase. He draws our attention, in later texts, to an ethological curiosity, known as mimicry. 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.

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 coloring, 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 a image outside himself, be it a real mirror image or simply the image of another child.

In the 1938 encyclopedia article, this idea is used to give a brilliant explanation of the inexplicable swings in a child's behavior 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 wich 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.

Desire

Demand is ultimately a demand for love, and, for this reason, unsatisfiable. If someone asks you if you love them and you say yes, that will not stop them from asking you again and again and again. The impossibility of really proving one's love once and for all is well known. Hence demand is a continuing spiral. But Lacan adds something more. To need and demand, he adds the register of desire. Desire takes up what has been eclipsed at the level of need (the dimension represented by the mythical water) introduces an absolute condition in opposition to the absolutely unconditional nature of demand.

We can see this in cases where human desire literally has an absolute condition, in fetishism. -> I can only reach sexual enjoyment when a particular object or trait is present in my partner, like a ribbon or a certain pair of boots. Enjoyment is determined strictly by the presence of this element.

Lack

Although the example of fetishism is an extreme one, Lacan shows that it is at the horizon of all desire for the man. A man's choice of partner will always contain some reference to inhuman details: the color of the partners hair, her eyes etc There is nothin human about such abstract features. Desire is thus linked to conditions in contrast to the register of demand.

Part of the work of analysis is to try to tease out the subject's desire from his incessant demands. The neurotic is someone who privileges demand, who hides his desire beneath the imposing presence of demand.

If demand is demand for an object, desire has nothing as its object: nothing in the sense of "lack taken as an object". Some clinical structures show the difference clearly. The anorexic, for example, in refusing to eat gives a place to desire beyond demand. To the mother's demand for the child to eat, the latter offers a symbolic refusal, maintaining a desire centering on the "nothing" which is eaten. Into the relation with the mother, a lack is thereby introduced, something which marks out clearly the tension between demand and desire.

Desire and Wish

Desire itself will emerge in little details, and hence Lacan's insistence on hunting it down, on searching for desire in between the lines, where it is least obvious. The emphasis on detail here is fully Freudian. After all, Freud had shown that when an unconscious current is repressed, since it cannot enter consciousness, it displaces itself on to tiny details and it is only in following these derivatives that we will mobilize the rest of the complex in question.

It's important to distinguish what Lacan calls desire from what we would ordinarily call a wish. A wish is something you want consciously. But desire is fundamentally barred from consciousness. Freud had made the distinction earlier in his work on dreams. A dream may represent some obvious wish. Your are freezing and starving in the middle of the North-Pole. You fall asleep and dream of a fine four-poster bed and a bowl of caviar. It would seem that the dream fulfills a wish, to find food and shelter. But this wish is only an alibi: what really matters is why, in your dream, the supposed fulfillment has taken the form of a four-poster bad and a bowl of caviar. Why not just a normal bed and a bowl of soup? Desire is simply equivalent to the process of distortion which has turned the wish for shelter and food into this particular image, these particular details. If you dream of passing an exam in a certain place the night before sitting a real exam, desire is more likely to be found not in the idea of passing the exam (a wish) than in the detail of the place in question (why this place than rather another).

Distortion and Desire

Desire is thus a very peculiar thing. Lacan elaborates a theory of desire as something very strange, very odd: it has nothing to do with wishes, but consists of linguistic mechanisms which twist and distort certain elements into others. A slip of the tongue would provide another example. You say one thing instead of something else and you don not know why. Desire is present because one element has been distorted and modified by another one. We can deduce the presence of desire in clinical work by paying attentino to these processes as they repeat themselves and to the points of rupture, distortion and opacity in a patient's associations.

If language has a capacity to transmit a message, it also has a redundant side. It's the difference between a letter and a telegram. The telegram conveys the minimum information content quickly, whereas the letter may dwell on details, use rhetorical devices and bow to the requirements of etiquette. Now, if we aim to track down desire, Lacan says, we will do best by focusing not on the message, but rather on the points of redundancy, the little details which do not really need to be there. Why a bowl of caviar rather that just caviar?

The Maternal Phallus

If desire ere is a process of distortion, a force at work in between signifiers, ow can we speak about an object of desire? I would seem, on the contrary, as if desire did not have any object. Lacan replies that the object is of a very particular kind: an absent one. It is not any absent object but, for Lacan at this moment in his work, a very precise one: the maternal phallus. Freud and his followers, despite many disagreements, had always stressed the centrality of the castration complex. The key is less the possession by the subject of a phallus, but rather whether the mother has one or not.

The Phallus is not the same thing as the penis: it is the penis plus the idea of lack.

If you think that you might lose your penis and that other people do not have this organ, the idea of loss will become linked to the organ in question. It will never be a penis again. In Freudian theory it will be a penis plus the idea of its absence. Hence what one searches for in the mother cannot be seen: how can one see something which is not there?

Jouissance

Lacan's work in the 1960's became increasingly concerned with trying to formulate a logic of what he called jouissance, a word which is in fact part of English literary heritage, appearing in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene and other writing of the 16th century. It may mean enjoyment, as it is usually translated, but in general it is Lacan's way of referring to anything which is too much for the organism to bear. Jouissance is felt 99% of the time as unbearable suffering. It is real, in the Lacanian sense of the word, something outside symbolization and meaning, constant and always returning to the same place to bring you suffering.

Too much excitation, stimulation or, perhaps, much too little, as might be seen in certain inertial states.

The problem is that what we experience as unbearable suffering is experienced by the unconscious drives as, on the contrary, a satisfaction.

Repetition

Freud and his early followers had come to the conclusion by the early 1920's that psychic life was not just reducible to the linguistic formulas and mechanisms of the unconscious. One could interpret a symptom brilliantly, but it would now go away. It refused to budge. After all, it is a fact that people continue making the same mistakes, the same ill-starred decisions throughout their lives which bring them pain and grief.

Freud was led to the idea of the existence of a silent force in the organism which was intent on self-destruction, feeding off the suffering we feel consciously. He linked this to the compulsion humans have to repeat things.

There is no learning from the past for most people, precisely because it is in their very best interests to suffer. Jouissance is thus the real opponent in psychoanalytic practice, and Lacan approached it conceptually in a number of different ways. The field of psychoanalysis was thus by no means occupied only by language. The real has now become central in the form of jouissance, real to the extent that it is outside meaning and signification. A different, deadly and heterogeneous presence was at work - jouissance - showing how Lacan's work cannot be reduced, as it often is, to emphazising the importance of language. It is the relation of language to jouissance that has now become the central research problem.

To go back to Lacan's early work, Jacques-Alain Miller has pointed out how we can find the characteristics of jouissance in the place given to the imaginary register in the early 50s: an inertia, something tht blocks the progress of free association, something lethal. But now Lacan dissociates his idea of jouissance from the register of the image. Although it operates more silently in neurosis, it emerges from its shadowy domain to invade the life of the psychotic, overwhelming the schizophrenic in his or her body, or the paranoiac in his or her ideas of persecution. In paranoia, jouissance is linked to something outside.

Regulating Jouissance

Human life now comes to have a definite purpose: to regulate jouissance. We are born with jouissance in the body, a surplus excitation or bombardment of stimulation which the organism has to rid itself of. As we grow older, it is drained from the body: weaning, education, the rules and regulations of the social world... And yet, a little bit remains, caught in the body's edges or erotogenic zones, privileged areas of excitation. And, crucially for psychoanalysis, in symptoms. A symptom, something in mind or body which intrudes into your life and brings you misery, represents a portion of jouissance which has not beeb dislodged, which has come back to disrupt your existence.