## 1. Historical Overview



Medically trained as a psychiatrist, Lacan's first texts started
appearing in the late 1920s (during the course of his psychiatric
studies), with his publishing activity really taking off in the
subsequent decade. The 1930s see several early Lacanian milestones:
the publication, in 1932, of his doctoral thesis in psychiatry, *De
la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la
personnalite* (On Paranoid Psychosis in its Relations with
the Personality); collaborations with the Surrealist and Dadaist
artistic movements in whose midsts he circulated as a familiar fellow
traveler; entry into analytic training, including a didactic analysis
with Rudolph Lowenstein; attendance at Alexandre Kojeve's
renowned seminars on G.W.F. Hegel's *Phenomenology of
Spirit*; the first presentation of the now-famous theory of the
"mirror stage" at the International Psychoanalytic
Association (IPA) conference at Marienbad in 1936 (a presentation
truncated by Freud's friend and biographer, then-IPA President
Ernest Jones); and, the appearance, in the *Encyclopedie
francaise* in 1938, of a substantial essay on a sizable
swathe of analytic topics entitled *Les complexes familiaux dans la
formation de l'individu: Essai d'analyse d'une
fonction en psychologie* ("The Family Complexes in the
Formation of the Individual: Attempt at an Analysis of a Function in
Psychology"). This crucial period of Lacan's development,
as the immediately preceding already indicates, was marked by the
collision of interests and influences related to psychoanalysis,
psychiatry, philosophy, art, and literature, among other areas. More
specifically, the robustly interdisciplinary combination that came
together for Lacan at this time of Freudian analysis, Hegelian
dialectics, Kojevian pedagogy, and different experiences of
"madness" from numerous perspectives indelibly colors and
permanently inflects the entire rest of Lacan's intellectual
itinerary.



Unsurprisingly, the Second World War was, for Lacan (and, of course,
for history generally), a period of disruption and upheaval. His
psychoanalytic activities were interrupted, including his training
analysis (Lowenstein and Lacan did not concur about whether this
analysis was well and truly completed, with Lacan deciding it was over
and, somewhat controversially, never returning to Lowenstein's
couch). The War provided Lacan with an exposure to military psychiatry
in both France and England, with his five-week visit to the latter
acquainting him with aspects of the British psychoanalytic world
(features of this visit are recounted in "British Psychiatry and
the War" [1947]). A handful of important texts were composed
during and after the War, all of which eventually got reprinted in
Lacan's *magnum opus*, *Ecrits* (1966):
"Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New
Sophism" (1945); "Presentation on Psychical
Causality" (1946); "Aggressiveness in
Psychoanalysis" (1948); and "The Mirror Stage as Formative
of the *I* Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience" (delivered in 1949 at the IPA conference in
Zurich--whereas the 1936 version from Marienbad is lost, this
version is the surviving one made canonical through its inclusion in
*Ecrits*).



The next decade was pivotal in Lacan's trajectory, the time when
he fully came into his own as a leading analytic thinker of great
originality and immense import. A veritable explosion of Lacanian
material was unleashed during this period, including seven annual
seminars and many of the most celebrated essays subsequently collected
in the nine-hundred-page *Ecrits* (a number of these
were hyper-condensed distillations of the results of the annual
seminars). At the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, Lacan
became initiated into and conversant with the structuralism of
Ferdinand de Saussure and his inheritors such as Claude
Levi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson. Levi-Strauss's
1949 book *The Elementary Structures of Kinship* helped launch
the French structuralist movement that flourished during the 1950s and
1960s, an orientation that challenged the theoretical primacy of
existentialism in France. Levi-Strauss
"structuralized" anthropology, as Roland Barthes did for
literary-cultural studies and Louis Althusser for Marxism. Up through
the end of the 1950s--in 1959-1960, a fundamental
reorienting shift arguably occurred in Lacan's
thinking--Lacan fairly can be portrayed as likewise
structuralizing Freudian psychoanalysis. He did so under the banner of
a "return to Freud" according to which, as his most famous
dictum has it, "the unconscious is structured like a
language" (*l'inconscient est structure comme un
langage*). Lacan portrayed himself as the lone defender of a
Freudian orthodoxy in danger of being eclipsed by its alleged
abandonment and betrayal in the post-Freudian analytic universe,
particularly Anglo-American ego psychology as consolidated by the
troika of Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Lacan's former analyst
Lowenstein. Lacan adamantly maintained that a Saussurian-assisted
recovery of the overriding significance of language for analysis both
clinical and metapsychological is the key to faithfully carrying
forward Freud's revolutionary approach to psychical
subjectivity. All of this was announced in detail in the lengthy
founding manifesto of Lacanianism, the 1953 *ecrit*
"The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis" (often referred to as the "Rome
Discourse" because of where it was delivered). This manifesto
coincided with Lacan's participation in an exodus from his
former analytic institute, the Societe Parisienne de
Psychanalyse (SPP), and the founding of a new institute, the
Societe Francaise de Psychanalyse (SFP). The
SPP's move to a medicalized model of analytic training (as per
the scientistic psychiatric paradigm that was dominant in the
institutes of the English-speaking world) was one of the main
precipitators of the departure of the breakaway faction that founded
the SFP.



Also in 1953, Lacan conducted his first annual seminar addressing
*Freud's Papers on Technique* (1953-1954). Lacan
continued giving these right up until shortly before his death, with
*le Seminaire* running continuously for twenty-seven
years. As was the case with Kojeve, Lacan exerted his influence
primarily through his oral teachings. The first decade of *le
Seminaire* (1953-1963) was taught at the
Hopital Sainte-Anne and had an audience consisting mostly of
psychoanalysts. For reasons I will explain shortly, Lacan, in 1964,
moved his seminar first to the Ecole Normale Superieure
(1964-1969) and then to the Faculty of Law across from the
Pantheon (1969-1980). From 1964 onwards, Lacan's
audience startlingly increased in both sheer numbers and breadth of
backgrounds, with artists and academics from various disciplines
across academia joining the more clinically-minded attendees. *Le
Seminaire* became a nodal Parisian intellectual
institution, a kind of hub attracting some of the brightest stars of
the post-War French cultural firmament. For instance, such
philosophers as Jean Hyppolite, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Luce
Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva spent time in Lacan's audience. In
his seminars, Lacan deftly maneuvered within and between a multitude
of theoretical currents, putting psychoanalysis into conversation with
the history of philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism,
structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, and, as already
indicated, just about every discipline represented in the university.
All of the major French philosophers of the generation that came of
age in the 1960s and 1970s engaged with Freudian analysis in one way
or another, and all of them did so in fashions varyingly informed by
Lacan's teachings.



The 1960s were a highly productive and equally tumultuous era in
Lacan's history. In his seventh seminar on *The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis* (1959-1960), Lacan took a sort of turn
fateful for the direction of his later trajectory, initiating an
interrogation of the ways in which language was privileged by his
1950s "return to Freud." The immediately prior years
tirelessly emphasized the essential role of the register of the
Symbolic, namely, the pride of place of analytically modified versions
of Saussurian signifiers in the structures and dynamics of the
unconscious and speaking subjectivity (in the 1930s and 1940s, the
phenomenal-visual register of the Imaginary was to the fore thanks to
the focus on the mirror stage). At the end of the 1950s, with the rise
of the Real as the register of a new focus of Lacan's
thinking--I will say more about Lacan's tripartite register
theory subsequently (see
 2.1
 below)--things and phenomena escaping, resisting, or thwarting
the signifying powers of the socio-linguistic symbolic order became
ever more central in Lacanian theory. These things and phenomena
include Otherness, drives, *jouissance*, and *objet petit
a*, among other Lacanian concepts (see
 2.3,
 2.4.2, and
 2.4.3
 below). This 1959-1960 seminar defensibly can be depicted as a
prescient post-structuralist text *avant la lettre*.



An earthquake in Lacan's professional and personal histories hit
him in 1963. For ten years (1953-1963), the SFP, following its
creation after the defections from the SPP, was being scrutinized at
length by the IPA as a training institute applying for IPA membership.
To cut a long story short, the IPA ended up offering the SFP an
ultimatum: It could be admitted only if Lacan was struck from its list
of training analysts. Lacan's non-standard
"variable-length sessions," deviating from the
fixed-length session rules of IPA orthodoxy, was the main reason for
the IPA's withholding of its recognition from him. The SFP
accepted this condition, stripping Lacan of his standing within it. In
the aftermath of what he understandably experienced as a deeply
wounding betrayal, he abandoned his original plans for a
1963-1964 seminar on *The Names-of-the-Father* (only its
opening session of November 20, 1963 was given), relocated his
teaching from the Hopital Sainte-Anne to the Ecole
Normale Superieure, and conducted his deservedly renowned
eleventh seminar of 1964, *The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis* (with Lacan identifying these four concepts as the
unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive). This
seminar's opening session involved Lacan discussing his
SFP-brokered "excommunication" from the IPA, with him
comparing himself to Baruch Spinoza and the latter's expulsion
from the Jewish community for being a heretic. However traumatic this
blow, it seemed to prompt Lacan to come even more into his own, to
forge a distinctly Lacanian battery of ideas and terms--and this
by contrast with the more familiar Freudian language and apparatus of
the first decade of *le Seminaire* (1953-1963).
Although not without many precedents in his prior work, a Lacanianism
distinct from Freudianism began to emerge clearly into view in the
mid-1960s. In the shadow of his rejection by the IPA and departure
from the SFP, Lacan founded his own analytic organization, the
Ecole freudienne de Paris. This new institutional framework
(and freedom) provided him with a setting in which to experiment with
novel approaches to analytic teaching and training.



In 1966, Lacan's hulking tome *Ecrits* was
published by Editions du Seuil. Prior to this, Lacan had
published only a single book, his thesis in psychiatry (1932). The
nine-hundred-page *Ecrits* gathered together many of
Lacan's most important articles and essays into a single volume,
covering a thirty-year stretch from 1936 to 1966. These
"writings" provide very daunting and demanding paths of
entry into Lacanian thinking (the annual seminars are comparatively
more reader-friendly and transparent). Although the
*Ecrits* bear no small portion of responsibility for
Lacan's reputation as a "difficult" (if not
deliberately obscurantist) thinker, this book became a bestseller upon
its initial release in France. Its success elevated Lacan into his
fame as the French Freud in the eyes of France's reading public.
During this time, Lacan's audience for *le
Seminaire* continued to swell, with his influence growing
to cover ever-wider circles of Paris-centered intellectual and
cultural life.



Throughout his career, Lacan exhibited a serious interest in various
branches of mathematical and formal disciplines. This goes as far back
as the 1940s, with the recourse to game theory in "Logical Time
and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty." The turn to
structuralism at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s
reinforced these formalistic tendencies, with Lacan, in the 1950s,
already drawing upon not only game theory, Levi-Straussian
anthropology, and Jakobsonian phonology, but also the history of
mathematics and topology. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, more and
more diagrams, graphs, and symbolizations appeared peppered throughout
Lacan's lectures and writings, testifying to a steadily
intensifying trend toward formalization. By the late 1960s and,
especially, the 1970s, discussions of logic, topology, and knot theory
were prominent (sometimes even dominant) features of Lacanian
discourse. In relation to Lacan, the 1970s could be characterized as
the decade of the "matheme," Lacan's neologism for a
unit of formalization (*qua* a mathematical-style
symbolization) distilling and fixing the core significance of a
specific Lacanian analytic concept-term. Lacan hoped thereby to avoid
being misinterpreted in the ways that Freud's deceptively
accessible employments of natural language allegedly allowed most
non-Lacanian post-Freudians to perpetrate. Additionally, topology, as
a science of surfaces, provided Lacan with resources for his regular
assaults on the crude, popular images of psychoanalysis as a
"depth psychology," with these images relying upon the
simplistic two- and three-dimensional Euclidean spaces of spontaneous
picture thinking. Topological figures and constructions undermining
the intuitions of this picture thinking assisted Lacan in recasting
the unconscious as an ensemble of contortions, curvings, folding,
inflections, twists, and turns immanent and internal to a single plane
of minded subjectivity accessible to rigorous, rational
(psycho)analysis.



In addition to the pursuit of formalization via mathemes, the seminars
of the final decade of Lacan's teachings also were preoccupied
with reflections on his register theory, especially the register of
the Real, and sexual difference (reflections often intertwined with
each other). The program of formalization ostensibly enabled Lacan to
reveal with exactitude the precise limits of the sayable and the
representable, thereby touching upon the Real through showing what is
not pinned down fully and adequately within the coordinates of the
accessible, familiar "reality" co-constituted through the
other two registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic (see
 2.1
 below). Various aspects and facets of things sexual came to be
associated by the later Lacan with the enigmatic evasiveness of the
Real, including sexual difference. In one of his most famous seminars,
the twentieth (*Encore*, 1972-1973), he theorized sexual
difference as "sexuation," depicting the non-biological,
denaturalized subject-positions of masculinity and femininity in terms
of formal logic. Therein, he purported to uncover an inherent,
ineliminable structural discrepancy/gap separating the sexes, an
inescapable condemnation of sexed subjects to being essentially,
necessarily out-of-sync with each other (and even with themselves as
split subjects). Lacan summarized this with an infamous one-liner:
"*Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel*" (There is
no sexual relationship). This declaration scandalized many at the
time. Moreover, the twentieth seminar in particular as well as
connected portions of Lacan's corpus from this same period
served as powerful catalysts for crucial developments in French
feminist thinking during the 1970s.



In 1980, near the end of his life, Lacan saw fit to disband his
school, the Ecole freudienne. This decision was controversial
and triggered factional infighting amongst his followers. Lacan died
in 1981. His son-in-law and editor of *le Seminaire*,
Jacques-Alain Miller--when he was a student of Althusser's
at the ENS, Miller met Lacan for the first time in 1964 as an attendee
of Lacan's eleventh seminar--founded the Ecole de la
Cause freudienne as a successor to the Ecole freudienne on the
heels of the latter's "dissolution." Miller has
since retained publishing control over Lacan's texts, editing
the Champ freudien book series in which official
"established" versions of the annual seminars and other
Lacanian writings appear.



## 2. Fundamental Concepts


### 2.1 Register Theory



The theory of the three registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and
the Real forms the skeletal framework for the various concepts and
phases of most of Lacan's intellectual itinerary. His
characterizations of each of the three registers, as well as of their
relations with each other, undergo multiple revisions and shifts over
the many years of his labors. As will become increasingly evident in
what follows, the majority of Lacanian concepts are defined in
connection with all three registers. By the 1970s, with his
meditations on the topological figure of the Borromean knot--this
knotting of three rings, pictured on the coat of arms of the Borromeo
family, is arranged such that if one ring is broken, all three are set
free in disconnection--Lacan emphasizes the mutual dependence of
the registers on one another. Hence, loosely speaking, the Imaginary,
the Symbolic, and the Real can be thought of as the three fundamental
dimensions of psychical subjectivity *a la* Lacan.
Furthermore, scholars sometimes segment Lacan's evolution into
three main periods, with each period being distinguished by the
priority of one of the registers: the early Lacan of the Imaginary
(1930s and 1940s), the middle Lacan of the Symbolic (1950s), and the
late Lacan of the Real (1960s and 1970s). However, such a neat and
clean periodization should be taken with several grains of salt, since
intricate continuities and discontinuities not conforming to this
early-middle-late schema are to be found across the entire lengthy
span of Lacan's teachings.


#### 2.1.1 The Imaginary



Lacan tends to associate (albeit not exclusively) the Imaginary with
the restricted spheres of consciousness and self-awareness. It is the
register with the closest links to what people experience as
non-psychoanalytic quotidian reality. Who and what one
"imagines" other persons to be, what one thereby
"imagines" they mean when communicatively interacting, who
and what one "imagines" oneself to be, including from the
imagined perspectives of others--all of the preceding is
encompassed under the heading of this register. Such a description
indicates the ways in which the Imaginary points to core analytic
ideas like transference, fantasy, and the ego. In particular, the
Imaginary is central to Lacan's account(s) of ego-formation (as
per the mirror stage--see
 2.2
 below).



As Lacan integrates his early work of the 1930s and 1940s with his
structuralism-informed theories of the 1950s, he comes to emphasize
the dependence of the Imaginary on the Symbolic. This dependency means
that more sensory-perceptual phenomena (images and experiences of
one's body, affects as consciously lived emotions, envisionings
of the thoughts and feelings of others, etc.) are shaped, steered, and
(over)determined by socio-linguistic structures and dynamics. With the
growing importance of the Real in the 1960s and the Borromean knots of
the 1970s, it becomes clear that Lacan conceives of the Imaginary as
bound up with both of the other two registers (incidentally, the
Imaginary and the Symbolic, when taken together as mutually
integrated, constitute the field of "reality," itself
contrasted with the Real). In fact, it could be maintained that the
Imaginary invariably involves category mistakes. More specifically, it
is the register in which the other two registers are mistaken for each
other: What is Real is misrecognized as Symbolic (for example, as in
particular sorts of obsessional-neurotic and paranoid-psychotic
symptoms, certain meaningless contingent occurrences at the level of
the material world of non-human objects are viewed as though they were
meaningful signs full of deep significance to be deciphered and
interpreted) and what is Symbolic is misrecognized as Real (for
example, as in psychosomatic-type "conversion symptoms,"
unconscious mental conflicts encoded in language and ideas are
suffered as bodily afflictions and ailments).



With his choice of the word "imaginary," Lacan indeed
intends to designate that which is fictional, simulated, virtual, and
the like. However, the phenomena of the Imaginary are necessary
illusions (to put it in Kantian locution) or real abstractions (to put
it in Marxian parlance). This signals two points. First, as one of
Lacan's three basic, essential registers, the Imaginary is an
intrinsic, unavoidable dimension of the existences of speaking
psychical subjects; just as an analysis cannot (and should not try to)
rid the analysand of his/her unconscious, so too is it neither
possible nor desirable to liquidate the illusions of this register.
Second, the fictional abstractions of the Imaginary, far from being
merely "unreal" as ineffective, inconsequential
epiphenomena, are integral to and have very concrete effects upon
actual, factual human realities.


#### 2.1.2 The Symbolic



The Lacanian Symbolic initially is theorized on the basis of resources
provided by structuralism. Tied to natural languages as characterized
by Saussure and specific post-Saussurians, this register also refers
to the customs, institutions, laws, mores, norms, practices, rituals,
rules, traditions, and so on of cultures and societies (with these
things being entwined in various ways with language). Lacan's
phrase "symbolic order," which encompasses all of the
preceding, can be understood as roughly equivalent to what Hegel
designates as "objective spirit." This non-natural
universe is an elaborate set of inter-subjective and trans-subjective
contexts into which individual human beings are thrown at birth (along
the lines of Heideggerian *Geworfenheit*), a pre-existing order
preparing places for them in advance and influencing the vicissitudes
of their ensuing lives.



According to Lacan, one of the (if not the) most significant and
indispensable conditions of possibility for singular subjectivity is
the collective symbolic order (sometimes named "the big
Other," a phrase to be unpacked further shortly--see
 2.3
 below). Individual subjects are what they are in and through the
mediation of the socio-linguistic arrangements and constellations of
the register of the Symbolic. Especially during the period of the
"return to Freud," the analytic unconscious (*qua*
"structured like a language") is depicted as kinetic
networks of interlinked signifiers (i.e., "signifying
chains"). Rendered thusly, the unconscious, being of a Symbolic
(anti-)nature in and of itself, is to be interpretively engaged with
via the Symbolic medium of speech, namely, the very substance of the
being-in-itself of the speaking subject (*parletre*) of
the unconscious. Furthermore, the Lacanian unconscious is structured
like "*un langage*" and not "*une
langue*." Although both French words translate into English
as "language," the former (*langage*) refers to
logics and structures of syntax and semantics not necessarily specific
to particular natural languages, whereas the latter (*langue*),
which also could be translated into English as "tongue,"
does refer to the notion of a natural language. Hence, Lacan is not
saying that the unconscious is structured like French, German,
English, Spanish, or any other particular natural language.



Although the register of the Symbolic comes to the fore only with
Lacan's structuralist phase of the 1950s, it arguably is not
without its precursors in his earlier texts. Already in 1938, the idea
of the "complex" in the encyclopedia article on "The
Family Complexes" anticipates how Lacan recasts the Freudian
Oedipus complex via Levi-Straussian structural anthropology.
Similarly, the prisoners' dilemma scenario narrated in
1945's "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated
Certainty" illustrates how a formal, game-theoretic apparatus
governs the lived experiences of subjects inserted into it. Moreover,
the 1949 *ecrit* on "The Mirror Stage" hints
at the enabling background presence of a socio-symbolic milieu
(incarnated first and foremost by parental caregivers) as the trigger
prompting the child's identification with mirrored images of
him/her-self (as I will discuss subsequently here, this hint is
expanded and embellished upon by Lacan in 1960s-era revisions of the
mirror stage--see
 2.2
 below).



Despite the rise to prominence of the register of the Real beginning
around 1959-1960, the Symbolic continues to play pivotal roles
in Lacan's teachings right up until the start of the 1980s. For
instance, in *Seminar XVII* (1969-1970) and the
contemporaneous interview "*Radiophonie*," Lacan
forges his theory of the "four discourses" (those of the
"master", "university,"
"hysteric," and "analyst") to reflect the
interlinked permutations of multiple kinds of "social
links" configuring the relations between speaking subjects. More
generally, the later Lacan remains reliant on the notion of the Real
sides of the Symbolic, these being signifiers in their meaningless,
nonsensical materiality as visible marks and audible sounds (i.e.,
"letters" in Lacan's technical sense)--and this
by contrast with the Imaginary sides of the Symbolic, in which
signifiers are paired with signifieds to form meaningful, significant
signs (*a la* Saussure's classic explanation of
successful communication via natural language). Such senseless
signifiers and their enchainings amount to a late Lacanian rendition
of Freudian primary processes as the thinking distinctive of
unconscious mindedness.



When Lacan mentions "structure," a word to which he has
frequent recourse, he usually is thinking of his register of the
Symbolic. Between the periods of his "return to Freud" and
later teachings, Lacan reconsiders and alters what is conceptualized
under the heading of the "like a language" (*comme un
langage*) part of his fundamental claim that, "the
unconscious is structured like a language." However, from the
1950s until his death, his specific rendition of Freud's
discovery consistently holds to the thesis that, "the
unconscious is structured." That is to say, the unconscious, as
bound up with that which is Symbolic, is an intricate, labyrinthine
web of ideational representations interconnected in multiple
sophisticated manners. Contrary to the crudeness of commonplace vulgar
picturings of Freudian analysis as an irrationalist, neo-romantic
psychology of the unruly natural depths, the unconscious is not the
id, namely, an anarchic seething cauldron of unthinking animalistic
instincts (i.e., something unstructured).


#### 2.1.3 The Real



The register of the Real is tricky to encapsulate and evades being
pinned down through succinct definitions. Lacan's numerous and
shifting pronouncements apropos the Real are themselves partly
responsible for this absence of straightforwardness. But, rather than
being just a barrier to grasping the Real, this absence is itself
revelatory of this register. To be more precise, as that which is
foreign to Imaginary-Symbolic reality--this reality is the realm
containing conscious apprehension, communicable significance, and the
like--the Real is intrinsically elusive, resisting by nature
capture in the comprehensibly meaningful formulations of
concatenations of Imaginary-Symbolic signs. It is, as Lacan stresses
again and again, an "impossibility"
*vis-a-vis* reality.



Lacan's earliest employments of the term "Real" use
it to refer to material being(s) *an sich*, namely, to physical
existents handled as roughly equivalent to Kant's
things-in-themselves. The Real hence would be whatever is beyond,
behind, or beneath phenomenal appearances accessible to the direct
experiences of first-person awareness. This characterization of the
Real persists into the first versions of Lacan's mature register
theory as initially elaborated throughout the 1950s. During this
decade of the "return to Freud," the Real also gets
connected to Lacan's contemporaneously emerging conceptions of
psychosis and Otherness (the latter to be addressed soon--see
 2.3
 below). Additionally, in the 1950s, Lacan tends to speak of the Real
as an absolute fullness, a pure plenum devoid of the negativities of
absences, antagonisms, gaps, lacks, splits, etc. Portrayed thusly, the
Symbolic is primarily responsible for injecting such negativities into
the Real. For instance, only though the powers of language can
material being in itself be said to be "missing" things,
since, on its own, this dimension of being always is simply whatever
it is in its dumb, idiotic presence as never more and never less than
sheer, indifferent plenitude.



As I noted above, the seventh seminar of 1959-1960 marks a shift
away from the privileging of the Symbolic over the course of the 1950s
and toward prioritizing the Real. The Real prior to *Seminar
VII* tends to be depicted in non-dialectical and/or quasi-Kantian
terms. Although Kant is one of the main explicit foci during this
academic year, Lacan's sustained reformulation of the Real in
this seminar introduces quasi-Hegelian dialectical features into it,
thereby nuancing and complicating his ideas about this register. The
new Real involves convergences of opposites as a register of volatile
oscillations and unstable reversals between excesses and lacks,
surpluses and deficits, flooding presences and draining absences. In
the seventh seminar, Lacan puts forward the figure of the mother as
the key analytic referent justifying this rendition of the Real (a
figure he relates to another figure, that of "the Lady" in
the courtly love tradition). In the beginning of the
psychical-libidinal subject's ontogentic life history, the
maternal caretaker is, at one and the same time, both overwhelmingly,
stiflingly present or near and, in her strange, impenetrable alterity,
also frustratingly, uncontrollably absent or inaccessible; there is
either too much or too little of her, never the right balanced amount.
With the passage of time and the temporal transformations of the
libidinal economy, the mother, as this archaic Real Other, becomes the
forever unattainable "Sovereign Good," the fixed vanishing
point, of all desiring (what Lacan calls, in dialogue with the history
of philosophy as well as Freud, "*das Ding*"
[*la Chose*, the Thing]).



Throughout the 1960s and up through the end of Lacan's
teachings, the Real takes on an ever increasing number of aspects and
connotations. It becomes both a transcendence troubling and thwarting
Imaginary-Symbolic reality and its language from without as well as an
immanence perturbing and subverting reality/language from within. It
comes to be associated with libidinal negativities (*objet petit
a*, *jouissance*, and sexual difference, all to be
discussed later--see
 2.3,
 2.4.2, and
 2.4.3
 below), material meaninglessness both linguistic (see
 2.1.2
 above) and non-linguistic, contingent traumatic events, unbearable
bodily intensities, anxiety, and death.



As regards the unconscious as the principle concern of psychoanalysis,
the later Lacan combines his earlier emphasis on socio-linguistic
formations (*a la* "the unconscious is structured
like a language") with a subsequent stress on forces and factors
internal but irreducible to these formations. After the 1950s, Real
dimensions are added to the unconscious, with its Symbolic dimensions
being made to orbit around black holes of unsymbolizability impossible
to represent via the signifier-like ideational representations
(Freud's *Vorstellungen*) of the language-like sides of
the unconscious. Nonetheless, the rise of the Real in Lacan's
teachings does not amount to him converting to any sort of analytic
recapitulation of mysticisms or negative theologies. Instead, for
Lacan, analysis both theoretical and clinical permits delineating and
tracking the Real with conceptual precision, if only as an exercise in
pinpointing the exact limits of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and their
overlappings.


### 2.2 The Mirror Stage, the Ego, and the Subject



The account of the mirror stage is perhaps Lacan's most famous
theoretical contribution (maybe even more famous than the well-known
thesis apropos the unconscious as "structured like a
language"). Initially developed in the 1930s, this account
involves a number of interrelated ingredients. Lacan offers the
narrative of this stage as an explanation specifically for the genesis
and functions of the Freudian psychical agency of the ego
(*Ich*, *moi*). One of the psychoanalytic and
philosophical upshots of the mirror stage, a crucial one in
Lacan's eyes, is that the ego is an object rather than a
subject. In other words, the ego, despite conscious senses to the
contrary, is not a locus of autonomous agency, the seat of a free,
true "I" determining its own fate. This portrait of the
ego-as-object is at the heart of Lacan's lifelong critical
polemics against Anglo-American ego psychology, with the ego
psychologists seeking to strengthen their patients' egos by
appealing to supposed autonomous and "conflict-free" sides
of these psychical agencies. Against this, Lacan views the ego as
thoroughly compromised and inherently neurotic to its very core, as a
passionate defense of a constitutive ignorance of the unconscious.



To stay at this more general metapsychological level for a little
while longer, Lacan eventually forges, partly on the basis of the
mirror stage, a distinction between the ego (*moi*) and the
subject (*sujet*, a word freighted with philosophical
baggage--Lacan knowingly adds this word and its philosophical
vocabulary to analytic discourse, although Freud did not speak of
"the subject" and was wary of philosophy). Appearances
notwithstanding, the ego is, when all is said and done, an inert,
fixed bundle of objectified coordinates, a libidinally invested and
reified entity. By contrast with the ego and the illusory sense of
fictional selfhood it supports, the psychoanalytic subject of
Lacanianism is an unconscious kinetic negativity defying capture by
and within ego-level identificatory constructs. The Lacanian
enunciating subject of the unconscious speaks through the ego while
remaining irreducibly distinct from it.



Returning to a tighter focus on the mirror stage proper, Lacan,
relying on empirical data from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries, posits that very young children, between the ages of six
and eighteen months, quickly acquire the ability to identify their own
images in reflective surfaces. At this time, infants are lacking in
most physical and mental abilities possessed by older human beings.
Prior to Lacan, Freud already highlights how a biologically dictated
prematurational helplessness (*Hilflosigkeit*) naturally
predestines the human being to the predominance of social nurture over
material nature due to the protracted period of total reliance on
other persons for one's life-or-death vital requirements.
Following Freud here, Lacan fleshes out this helplessness into which
birth throws neonates, describing in detail the anatomical,
physiological, cognitive, emotional, and motivational facets of this
natural condition of post-birth prematurity.



This initial state of helpless "motor impotence and nursling
dependence" entails the infant experiencing a swirl of negative
affects: anxiety, distress, frustration, and so on. To the young
child, motivated by these negative affects, a crucial component of the
enthralling lure exerted by the fascinating image of his/her body is
this image's promise that he/she can overcome his/her
*Hilflosigkeit* and be a unified, pulled-together whole, an
integrated, coordinated totality like the bigger, more mature others
he/she sees around him/her-self (however, according to Lacan,
individuals spend their entire lives, beginning thusly, chasing in
vain after an unattainable state of harmony and mastery first falsely
promised by the mirror). This *imago-Gestalt* of virtual
wholeness, identified with by the infant in a jubilant moment of
"Aha!," lays down the imagistic nucleus of the thereafter
ontogenetically accreting ego as a series of self-objectifications in
images and, soon after with the event of language acquisition, words
too.



For Lacan, identification with the *imago-Gestalt* of the
*moi* entails alienation--and this for additional reasons
over and above those given in the preceding paragraphs. Already in the
1949 *ecrit* on the mirror stage, mention is made of
"some prop, human or artificial" supporting the infant as
he/she gazes into the mirror and looks at him/her-self. In 1949, Lacan
seems to think of this prop more as artificial than human, referring
to the "*trotte-bebe*" (walker)
leaned on by the child. But, in subsequent revisitations of the mirror
stage during the 1960s, Lacan dramatically highlights the supporting
role of fellow human beings instead. In so doing, he argues that the
infant is encouraged to identify with the mirror image as
"me" by verbal and gestural prompts issuing from the
bigger other(s) holding him/her up in front of the reflective surface
(for example, the utterance "That's you there!"
accompanied by pointing and grinning). This later shift of emphasis
has two crucial consequences. First, the Imaginary register of the
mirror does not precede the Symbolic register of language and
sociality in a linear chronology of developmental stages (as the
earlier text of "The Mirror Stage" might be at risk of
suggesting); if anything, socio-linguistic variables (for instance,
the words and body language of parents) are the causal triggers of the
child's investment in select sensory-perceptual experiences
(such as the body image in the mirror). Second, this means that the
imagistic nucleus of the ego is suffused from the get-go with the
destinal "discourse of the Other"--in this case,
fateful significations (in Lacanese, "unary traits")
coming from caregivers' narratives articulated simultaneously
along with their encouragements to the child to recognize him/her-self
in the mirror ("What a handsome boy!," "What a
beautiful girl!," "You're going to grow up to be big
and strong, just like your daddy," etc.).



As a result of all of the above, Lacan considers the recognition that
happens in the mirror stage to amount to "misrecognition"
(*meconnaissance*). This likewise holds throughout life
for all ensuing experiences of "recognizing" oneself as
being a particular kind of "I," namely, taking
*qua* imagining oneself to be a certain sort of ego-level self
(apropos Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, it always pays to remember
William Wordsworth's line, "The child is the father of the
man"). The ego is not only a congealed, heteronomous object
rather than fluid, autonomous subject, but also, in its very origins,
a repository for the projected desires and fantasies of larger others;
the child's image is a receptacle for his/her parents'
dreams and wishes, with his/her body image being always-already
overwritten by signifiers flowing from the libidinal economies of
other speaking beings. Hence, recognizing the ego as "me,"
as embodying and representing an authentic, private, unique selfhood
that is most genuinely my own, is tantamount to misrecognizing that,
at root, the ego ultimately is an alienating foreign introject through
which I am seduced and subjected by others' conscious and
unconscious wants and machinations. To borrow one of Lacan's
many neologisms, the ego ultimately is something
"extimate" (i.e., intimately exterior, an internal
externality) insofar as it crystallizes "the desire of the
Other" (*qua* others' conscious and unconscious
wants and machinations). Or, as the Lacan of the eleventh seminar
would put it, there is something in the me more than the me itself to
the extent that this *moi* essentially is a coagulation of
inter-subjective and trans-subjective alien influences.



Finally, Lacan's utilization of the idea of the mirror is not
exclusively literal. Although he often talks of mirrors as shiny
reflective surfaces, he does not limit mirroring to being a visible
physical phenomenon alone. Most importantly, other persons'
speech, gestures, postures, moods, facial expressions, and so on
frequently can be said to "mirror" back to one an
"image" of oneself, namely, a conveyed sense of how one
"appears" from other perspectives.


### 2.3 Otherness, the Oedipus Complex, and Sexuation



Throughout his teachings, Lacan regularly utilizes the terms
"other" (with a lower-case o) and "Other"
(with a capital O). Given an understanding of Lacan's register
theory and the mirror stage (see
 2.1
 and
 2.2
 above), these terms can be clarified with relative ease and brevity.
The lower-case-o other designates the Imaginary ego and its
accompanying alter-egos. By speaking of the ego itself as an
"other," Lacan further underscores its alien and
alienating status as spelled out in the immediately preceding
sub-section here (see
 2.2
 above). Additionally, when relating to others as alter-egos, one does
so on the basis of what one "imagines" about them (often
imagining them to be "like me," to share a set of
lowest-common-denominator thoughts, feelings, and inclinations making
them comprehensible to me). These transference-style imaginings are
fictions taming and domesticating the mysterious, unsettling
foreignness of one's conspecifics, thereby rendering social life
tolerable and navigable.



The capital-O Other refers to two additional types of otherness
corresponding to the registers of the Symbolic and the Real. The first
type of Other is Lacan's "big Other" *qua*
symbolic order, namely, the overarching "objective spirit"
of trans-individual socio-linguistic structures configuring the fields
of inter-subjective interactions. Relatedly, the Symbolic big Other
also can refer to (often fantasmatic/fictional) ideas of anonymous
authoritative power and/or knowledge (whether that of God, Nature,
History, Society, State, Party, Science, or the analyst as the
"subject supposed to know" [*sujet suppose
savoir*] as per Lacan's distinctive account of analytic
transference). But, as already becomes evident in Lacan's first
few annual seminars of the early 1950s, there also is a Real dimension
to Otherness. This particular incarnation of the Real, about which
Lacan goes into greatest detail when addressing both love and
psychosis, is the provocative, perturbing enigma of the Other as an
unknowable "*x*," an unfathomable abyss of
withdrawn-yet-proximate alterity (in his 1895 *Project for a
Scientific Psychology*, to which Lacan refers repeatedly, Freud
depicts this alterity in the guise of the *Nebenmensch als
Ding* [Neighbor-as-Thing]).



For Lacan, the Freudian Oedipus complex stages the drama of the
child's laborious struggles to situate him/her-self
*vis-a-vis* all three register-theoretic dimensions of
Otherness. Thanks particularly to what he takes from his engagements
with structuralism, Lacan, throughout his career, is careful to avoid
a pseudo-Freudian reification of the bourgeois nuclear family, with a
mother and father biologically sexed female and male respectively. The
maternal and paternal Oedipal personas are psychical-subjective
positions, namely, socio-cultural (i.e., non-natural, non-biological)
roles that potentially can be played by any number of possible persons
of various sexes/genders.



That noted, in the Lacanian version of the Oedipus complex, the
maternal figure initially features for the infant as a Real Other
(i.e., the *Nebenmensch als Ding*)--more specifically, as
an obscure omnipotent presence who is the source of all-important love
(more will be said about Lacan's concept of love--see
 2.4.1
 below). But, because of the combination of her obscurity and
importance, the mother *qua* Real Other also is a source of
deeply unsettling anxiety for the very young child. She seemingly
threatens her offspring with being alternately too smothering or too
withdrawn, too much or not enough. In his/her anxiousness about
controlling the ultimately uncontrollable presence (and absence) of
this mysterious and indispensable maternal Other, the child confronts
the question, "What does the (m)Other want?" The
infant's gradual formation of an ego as per the temporally
elongated processes delineated in Lacan's account of the mirror
stage (see
 2.2
 above) is, in part, a response to this riddle (albeit in a broader
sense, with the child constructing an ego-level identity informed by
the perceived wants of Others in addition to the mother, such as the
father).



In relation to the immediately preceding, Lacan's Oedipal father
is an Other with both Symbolic and Real faces. On the Symbolic side,
the paternal figure represents the answer to the question, "What
does the maternal Other want?" In Lacan's terminology, the
child's alighting upon the paternal third party in the family
romance of the Oedipal social triangle as the solution to the puzzle
of the maternal figure's enigmatic intentionality amounts to
"the desire of the mother," as an unknown, being replaced
by "the paternal metaphor." Directly connected to this,
Lacan (re)defines the phallus (which is not the penis) as the
structural function of whatever "*x*" the child
hypothesizes the paternal figure possesses making him the focus of the
maternal figure's desire, that is, the possession enabling the
father to domesticate and control the mother's otherwise
unpredictable desire. Also at the level of the Symbolic, the paternal
function involves bringing to bear within the child's familial
sphere the disciplinary and prohibitory features of the family's
enveloping symbolic order as their socio-linguistic milieu (this
entails such impositions as weaning, toilet training, exogamy, and
"castration" in the Freudian-Lacanian sense--see
 2.4.1
 below). As for Real Otherness here, this would be the version of the
paternal figure mythically portrayed by Freud in *Totem and
Taboo* (1913), namely, the tyrannical, enjoying-without-restraints
"primal father" (*Urvater*) of the savage fraternal
horde, the exception to the otherwise universal law of (symbolic)
castration. This Real *Urvater* arguably is a fantasy-construct
generated in and by the Oedipus complex, with the child imagining an
obscene, dark, *jouissance*-saturated underbelly behind the
Symbolic facade of paternal authority and its rules.



The child's identifications with maternal and paternal Others
are distributed across Real and Symbolic dimensions. However,
different subjects-in-formation distribute their identifications
differently. Freud, in his reconsiderations of earlier renditions of
the Oedipus complex, came to highlight an asymmetry between Oedipal
dynamics for young boys and girls, repudiating the idea of girls
undergoing an "Electra complex" as the symmetrical
counterpart to the Oedipus complex. Skipping over a lot of details and
cutting a long story short, the later Lacan, when taking up the topic
of sexual difference, preserves this Freudian emphasis on asymmetry.
In this vein, Lacan introduces the idea of sexuation as the Real of
sexual difference, namely, as an impenetrable, opaque facticity of
this difference continually prompting and yet perpetually resisting
being adequately translated into the terms of Imaginary and Symbolic
realities. As neither biologically given sex nor socially constructed
gender, the Real of sexuation is what is responsible for the absence
of an exhaustively representable, symbolizable natural and/or cultural
relationship between sexuated positions (as per Lacan's
statement, "*Il n'y a pas de rapport
sexuel*"). The structural-psychical positions of masculinity
and femininity embody constitutively out-of-synch and inherently
incommensurable subjective stances, incompatible (yet interacting)
arrangements of distinct sorts of libidinal economies.


### 2.4 The Libidinal Economy



Freud's metapsychology of the libidinal economy, of the
underlying motivational mechanisms of psychical life, is grounded on
his theory of drive (*Trieb*, and not *Instinkt*,
despite many English mistranslations of *Trieb* as
"instinct"). Lacan elaborates upon and extends this
Freudian theoretical framework. In the process, he reworks some of
Freud's concepts and adds other concepts of his own.


#### 2.4.1 Need-Demand-Desire and Castration



Need, demand, and desire form a conceptual-terminological triad in
Lacanian theory. Needs are biologically innate vital requirements for
the human being as a living organism. Humans are born saddled with
such imperatives from the very start, although, as per Freudian
*Hilflosigkeit*, they are powerless on their own to satisfy
these bodily dictates for a protracted initial period lasting well
into childhood (see
 2.2
 above).



The combination of being prematurationally helpless but having
unavoidable needs means that, over the course of physical and mental
development, the infant must come to articulate its needs to bigger
others. These others (as three-dimensional O/others along the lines of
Lacan's register theory--see
 2.3
 above) are addressed as those capable of assisting in the meeting and
quelling of needs. Of course, crying, screaming, gesticulating, and
the like are early expressions of needs, being the fashions in which
infants prior to acquiring language per se alert the older individuals
around them of their requirements. Even at this early stage, the
infant is forced to rely on his/her thus-addressed significant others
to interpret the "meaning" of his/her cries, screams, and
gesticulations ("Ah, you're hungry," "Uh oh,
that means you're tired," "So, it's time to
change your diaper," etc.). Through these spontaneous
interpretations, others, whether knowingly or not, participate with
the pre-verbal child in shaping links between needs and the socially
mediated significance of the expressions of needs. These others
thereby lend the child's noises and movements the significance
of being "demands," with this amounting to a kind of
assistance provided over and above the assistance of meeting bare
needs themselves. Now, this is not to say that there are no natural
correlations whatsoever between needs and their pre-verbal expressions
hardwired into babies' behavioral repertoires. But, arguably,
infants are not immediately and automatically self-consciously aware
of these correlations as such, with caretakers' responses being
key aids in helping the child become explicitly cognizant of
need-expression couplings.



As the infant continues maturing, soon acquiring language, the
influences of others and Others (especially inter-subjective others as
conveyors of the signs and signifiers of the big Other *qua*
trans-subjective symbolic order--see
 2.1.2
 and
 2.3
 above) increasingly exert themselves on the forming of associative
connections between needs and demands. For example, as part of
socialization and education, parents typically begin to introduce the
discipline of insisting that the child articulate his/her requirements
and urges in specific manners ("Say 'please' and
'thank you,'" "Ask nicely," "In
this household, we do not yell when we're hungry," and so
on). The child learns that he/she must accept, internalize, and speak
"the discourse of the Other" (in this instance, the
parents) in order to get his/her needs recognized, acknowledged, and
addressed in a satisfactory fashion. In short, he/she must make
demands couched in terms and conventions imposed by O/others'
socio-symbolic regimes. Lacan maintains that natural bodily needs
hence, via the inter- and trans-subjective dynamics of demand, are
"overwritten" by the signifiers of an ultimately Symbolic
Otherness, an overwriting through which the bases of the libidinal
economy are denaturalized and subjected to socio-cultural forces and
factors. Much of this beds down in the young, nascent subject's
psyche, thereafter exerting (often in unconscious ways) decisive
effects on this person's libidinal economy throughout his/her
life.



In his 1958 *ecrit* "The Signification of the
Phallus," Lacan provides a succinct formula for defining
"desire" in relation to both need and demand. He
stipulates that desire is what remains after need is subtracted from
demand. What, exactly, does this equation mean? Through being
translated into demands, needs come to be saddled with surpluses of
more-than-biological significances; vital requirements take on the
excess baggage of meanings over and above the level of brute, simple
organic survival. Largely by virtue of what O/others add to the
child's experiences of needs through superimposing
interpretations of these needs as socio-symbolic demands, the meeting
of the child's needs in response to his/her demands makes these
needs into, first and foremost, litmus tests of where he/she stands in
relation to these thus-addressed significant O/others. Being given
specific items of food by a parent in response to a demand expressing
hunger can indicate to the child not only that the parent understands
that a need to eat has to be met, but also, and more importantly, that
he/she is loved by the parent, that he/she enjoys a privileged
position in relation to the parent's attention and priorities.
Lacan therefore asserts that each and every demand is, at bottom, a
demand for love. Returning to the equation "demand - need
= desire," what is desired when a demand is addressed to another
is not so much the meeting of the thus-expressed need, but, in
addition to this, the very love of another.



Parents of children are all too familiar with seemingly endless series
of demands from the little ones ("I want a sandwich,"
"OK, here's a sandwich"... "I want a
lollipop," "OK, here's a lollipop"...
"I want a new toy," "OK, here's a new
toy"... and on and on until an exhausted parental
"No" is pronounced and wearily defended against vigorous
protests). Adults, whether parents or not, also are aware of a similar
desiring restlessness in themselves, an inability to acquire an object
or attain a success that would be "IT"
(with-a-capital-I-and-T), the final be-all-and-end-all *telos*
of wanting and wishing satisfying them for good forever after.
Similarly, an adult in a romantic relationship never is content with
being told that he/she is loved by the beloved only once; he/she
insists upon repetitions *ad infinitum* of the affirmation by
the significant other that, "I love you" (as if no
affirmation is ever quite enough). With both children and adults,
margins of dissatisfaction, perpetually resurfacing itches that never
can be scratched just right, are to be explained, according to Lacan,
through a clarification of the essence of the "love"
demanded in all demands in excessive addition to the gratification of
corresponding needs. What is being requested is an impossibility
impossible on the basis of the register-theoretic version of
O/otherness *a la* Lacanianism (see
 2.1
 and
 2.3
 above): the non-objectifiable negativity of the kinetic, slippery
heart of Real Otherness (i.e., the always-on-the-move affection,
focus, etc. of the Real Other's desiring core both conscious and
unconscious) being objectified as the positivity of a static, stable
thing (i.e., a special object able to be gift-wrapped and handed over
as part of the response to demand). Employing once again the example
of hunger, while the O/other can respond to demands for food with the
provision of nourishing substances answering to the need for
nourishment, he/she is constitutively incapable of turning the nucleus
of his/her desiring being (i.e., the non-object of his/her
"love") into one tangible object among others to be
bestowed along with food and the like. As will be discussed here
shortly (see
 2.4.3
 below), conscious and unconscious fantasies are aroused on the sides
of desiring demanders--and, everyone is a desiring
demander--by the necessary, inevitable dissatisfactions
accompanying desires. These fantasies cover over the impossibility of
bringing desires to satisfying ends. They do so by constructing
scenarios in which there is a yet-to-be-(re)obtained object that
really is "IT." Moreover, in these fantasmatic scenarios,
answers to questions of Real Others' inscrutable desires
("What does the Other want, and want specifically of me?")
are staged.



As should be evident by now, the intervention of the signifiers of the
symbolic order (i.e., the discourses of big Others) is integral to the
genesis of the need-demand-desire triad. Through the intrusion of
these signifiers cutting into both the body and mind of the young
child, a proto-subjective being of need, passing through the demands
of discipline (in both sense of the genitive), is transformed into a
subject of desire. Such a subject is
"barred"--Lacan's matheme for the barred
subject of desire is $--alienated from its natural needs and
derailed onto the tracks of non-natural desires doomed never to reach
enjoyable destinations. In connection with his revisions of the
Oedipus complex (see
 2.3
 above), Lacan turns Freudian castration into "symbolic
castration." The latter, rather than being a real or imagined
scene in which a specific threat to bodily integrity is issued,
designates the dual somatic and psychical discombobulating effects
upon the premature human animal caused by insertion into and
subjection to surrounding socio-symbolic contexts, of being made to
depend on the foreignness of signifiers and everything they bring with
them.


#### 2.4.2 Drive and *Jouissance*



In Freud's drive theory, sublimation amounts to a drive finding
a means to secure satisfaction (*Befriedigung*) in the face of
"aim-inhibition" (i.e., a blockage of its prior path to an
earlier aimed-at drive-object). But, as Lacan observes, Freud also
oddly defines the aim (*Ziel*) of any and every drive as
satisfaction. Therefore, how can a drive achieve satisfaction if its
aim (defined as the achievement of satisfaction) is inhibited?
Lacan's response to this apparent Freudian contradiction is to
put forward a distinction between the aim and "goal" of
the drive as a metapsychological entity: While the aim of a drive can
be and inevitably is inhibited, its (true) goal always is
reached--and this because its goal is nothing other than enjoying
the ceaseless movement of repetitively rotating around whatever
blockages land on its path.



According to a certain widely accepted reading appealing to the
immediately above (promoted by Slavoj Zizek and the
Slovenian School of Lacanian theory), Lacan distinguishes between
desire and drive. As seen (see
 2.4.1
 above), an essential characteristic of desire is its restlessness,
its ongoing agitated searching and futile striving. No object it gets
its hands on is ever quite "IT." Whereas desire is stuck
with its dissatisfied drifting from object to object and ever onward
(in a structured movement akin to the "spurious/bad
infinite" as per Hegel), drive derives a perverse enjoyment from
this desire-fuelled libidinal circling around the vanishing point of
the impossible-*qua*-unattainable. There where desire is
frustrated, drive is gratified. Drive gains its satisfaction through
vampirically feeding off of the dissatisfaction of desire.



Like the register of the Real with which it is most closely
associated, *jouissance*, a notion that comes to the fore at
the end of the 1950s, is difficult to encapsulate in succinct defining
formulas. By the end of Lacan's itinerary at the start of the
1980s, this term had taken on a plethora of significations, dividing
and sub-dividing into a wide array of distinct-but-related concepts.
In English-language Lacanian scholarship, *jouissance* almost
always is left untranslated, since its English equivalent,
"enjoyment," fails to capture the specifically sexual
connotations of the original French word.



The best way to begin getting a sense of what Lacan means by
*jouissance* is through reference to the Lacanian distinction
between drive and desire (see
 2.4.2
 above) in conjunction with select stipulations by Freud regarding the
infamous death drive (*Todestrieb*) of Freud's later dual
drive theory (first laid out in *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*
(1920)). Like Freud's *Todestrieb*, Lacan's
*jouissance* is "beyond the pleasure principle"
(this being another reason why the English "enjoyment," as
synonymous with pleasure, is an inappropriate translation). The
post-1920 Freud muses that all drives might be said to be death
drives, meaning that each and every drive perhaps works, at least in
certain respects at certain times, contrary to the pursuit of the
pleasurable as balance, gratification, homeostasis, satisfaction, and
so on. Along these same lines, the Lacanian drive extracts
"enjoyment" from the thwartings and failures of desire;
whereas the latter is oriented by the tantalizingly elusive
*telos* of pleasure *qua* satisfaction, the former
generates its *jouissance*-beyond-pleasure precisely through
the inhibiting of desire itself. The many possible sadistic and
masochistic implications of this side of the libidinal economy are not
difficult to imagine.



One of several clinical phenomena pushing Freud into dethroning the
pleasure principle in 1920 as the formerly hegemonic ruler of the
psyche in its entirety is "repetition compulsion"
(*Wiederholungszwang*)--specifically, the psyche's
perplexing, spontaneous compulsive repeating of that which is painful
and/or traumatic (examples of this include post-traumatic disorders,
so-called "negative therapeutic reaction," and the
recurrent types of self-defeats unconsciously arranged by neurotics
for themselves). One of the theoretical functions of the death drive
is to account for whatever disregards or disrupts the reign of the
pleasure principle as a fundamental "law" of mental life.
In Lacan's conceptual apparatus, *jouissance* sometimes
likewise refers to an overriding force/tendency compelling repetitions
of experiences or events upsetting the calm, delicate equilibrium of
psychical subjectivity's Imaginary-Symbolic reality (hence the
association of *jouissance* with the Real).



In the process of the neonate as a biological being acquiring both an
ego and a speaking subjectivity--this involves the living
organism being submitted to the mediating matrices of
Imaginary-Symbolic realities--the human creature supposedly
loses, through symbolic castration (see
 2.4.1
 above), access to an immediate, undiluted *jouissance* in its
raw, unmitigated intensities (whether this is an actual, factual
occurrence in linear, chronological ontogeny or an
*apres-coup*, retrospective fantasy is a complicated
issue in Lacanian theory). The *jouissance* presumably lost to
the speaking subject returns only in the guises of what might be
labeled "limit experiences," namely, encounters with that
which is annihilating, inassimilable, overwhelming, traumatic, or
unbearable. Similarly, *jouissance*, in this vein, is related
to transgressive violations, the breaching of boundaries and breaking
of barriers. It is difficult, if not impossible, for the
*parletre* to accommodate, tolerate, and digest. The
speaking being is forced to cohabitate uneasily with its always
problematic *jouissance*.


#### 2.4.3 Fantasy and Object *a*



In line with Freud's discussions of fantasizing in psychical
life, Lacan treats fantasies, particularly those functioning at the
level of fundamental formations of the unconscious, as schematizations
(in a quasi-Kantian respect) of desiring subjectivity. Put
differently, the wants and wishes of a particular subject are shaped
and governed by a peculiar skeletal template, an idiosyncratic and
paradigmatic *Ur*-scene, in which this desiring subject is
positioned in a specific manner *vis-a-vis* a specific
object of its desire. This fundamental template/scene is an
unconscious formation operating as a transcendental condition of
possibility for the subject's libidinal economy in all its
crucial, symptomatic manifestations. Lacan's matheme for the
fantasy is $ * *a*. The $ stands for the subject of desire
brought into being by the barring/splitting consequences of
Others' mediating influences (see
 2.3
 and
 2.4.1
 above).



The *a* stands for *objet petit a*, that is, object
*a* as the "object-cause of desire." Lacan employs
this latter phrase for object *a* because this
"object" is a spectral, virtual construct of what would
qualify as "IT" for the desiring subject (see
 2.4.1
 above), with this libidinal-transcendental schema of desire's
object (i.e., *a*) "causing" select given empirical
objects in a person's libidinal-amorous history and experience
to be desired as stand-ins for "IT." However, these
substitutes are always and necessarily inadequate and unsatisfactory
due to an insurmountable, ineliminable gap between the
more-than-empirical fantasmatic *objet a* originating in the
subject's unconscious past and the empirical objects present and
future incarnating it. These latter objects are situated in
Imaginary-Symbolic reality, condemned partially and imperfectly to
embody an interminably receding and elusive surplus (i.e., the
impossible-*qua*-Real dimension of object *a*).



To refer back one last time to the matheme of fantasy ($ *
*a*), the diamond-shaped "lozenge"
(*poincon*) * can be read as a condensation of four
symbols: one, [?] (the logical symbol for conjunction
["and"]); two, [?] (the logical symbol for disjunction
["or"]); three, > (the mathematical symbol for
"greater than"); and, four, < (the mathematical symbol
for "less than"). As per Lacan's matheme, the
subject's desires are scripted and orchestrated by an
unconscious fundamental fantasy in which the desiring subject ($) is
positioned in relation to its corresponding object-cause of desire
(*a*). Hence, [?], [?], >, and < represent, in a
deliberately loose and open fashion, possible variants of this
positioning of $ *vis-a-vis a*. Singular subjects flesh
out conjunction, disjunction, being "greater than," and
being "less than" in their own styles, namely, as their
unique fantasies of merger or symbiosis (conjunction), scorn or
refusal (disjunction), mastery or domination ("greater
than"), slavery or submission ("less than"), and any
number of other possible particularizations of these four basic
categories of rapport.



In some of Lacan's earlier presentations of the mirror stage,
the *a* serves as an abbreviation for *autre* (other).
More precisely, in this context, *a* refers primarily to the
little-o-other as the Imaginary ego (see
 2.2
 and
 2.3
 above). The ego is an "other," a not-me misrecognized as
"me," insofar as it is brought into existence through a
combination of an object external to the (proto-)subject (i.e., the
*imago-Gestalt* of the body image) and the interests of
Symbolic and Real Others investing this object through words and
behaviors. Within the framework of the mirror stage, *a*
(usually as *a*') also designates alter-egos as the
Imaginary partners with which the ego itself is inextricably
intertwined, invariably defining itself through reference to these
partners.



Furthermore, there indeed is a thread of continuity between the
*a* of the mirror stage and object *a*: Both ego (as
*a*) and fantasy (with its *a*) unconsciously are the
subject's fateful answers to the questions, "What does the
Other want?" and "How must I position myself with respect
to the desire of the Other?" (see
 2.3
 above). Lacan's *a*, like the rest of his mathemes, is
deliberately handled as akin to an algebraic variable. It is a
placeholder for any number of particular types of determinants: what
an Other desires, what I must be so as to be the object of an
Other's desire, what would at last lay to rest my restless
strivings and yearnings, what would do so for a significant Other to
whom I remain attached, etc. But, in all cases, *a* reflects
Lacan's Hegelian-Kojevian slogan having it that,
"man's desire is the desire of the Other."