Three psychic agencies in Lacan’s Theorisation of the Subject

In two lectures in 1953 Jacques Lacan proposed three orders that he believed to be the key registers of human subjectivity and according to which all psychoanalytical phenomena can be described: Imaginary, Symbolic and Real. As Bracha Ettinger notes; these ‘levels of human reality […] are revealed in language through speech (parole). [1] The method outlined in the lectures involved a return to the texts of Sigmund Freud and attempted to define and develop the different psychic agencies introduced by Freud – id, ego and superego – beyond the idea of stages through which the human subject passes.

The subject’s imaginary dimension was the focus of Lacan’s first theory of subjectivity developed between the early 1930s and the beginning of his 1953 seminar. For both Freud and Lacan, the psychic agency of the Ego coincides not with the unconscious subject but refers to the individual’s relation with the image of the ‘similar other’ and with the individual’s own body. Lacan argued that between the ages of six and eighteen months, infants begin to recognize their mirror image, an experience that brings the child pleasure. The pleasure is linked to the child’s anticipation of itself as a unified and separate individual. Before this, the child does not identify itself as separate from its first carer (usually in Western culture, the mother) for whom it is totally dependent on for its survival. The Imaginary is the field of conscious thoughts and of identifications with the Ego; itself an Imaginary construction distinct from the subject of the unconscious.[2]  For Lacan, the ego is an imaginary construction of subjective unity based on the visual images of objects and others that the individual encounters. Although these objective images of self and others are alienating and obstruct the subject from self-realisation, they are nonetheless necessary as ‘there is no subject without Ego’.[3]  Identification with the Ego, as Freud recognized, is linked to aggressivity in human behaviour and to devouring (in oral phase), mastery of and destroying (in anal phase) their love objects.

In part, Lacan was arguing against predominantly North American psychoanalytical practices aimed at strengthening the ego, and an understanding of the ego’s role in facilitating the individual's adaptation to the environment. So-called ego psychology, premised on Freud’s first, realist view of the ego, focused on ways of strengthening and reinforcing the Ego to enable it ‘to accept and satisfy some of the id’s wishes while conforming to social expectation’.[4] Here, the ego is conceptualised as that which mediates between ‘two terms which are […] given and unquestioned, the id being a function of biology, and reality an unalterable, ahistorical system, ‘civilisation’’.[5]  This conservative relation is problematic for Lacan, as is ego-psychology’s aim to reach a proscribed, pre-selected goal through the transmission of normative ideals.[6] As a critique of ego psychology Lacan’s conceptualisation of the Imaginary emphasizes Freud’s second, narcissistic account of the ego which ‘cannot be readily separated either from its own internal processes (e.g. the flow of libido) or from external objects (with which it identifies and on which it may model itself) in which the ego is able to take itself as its own libidinal object’.[7] The ego does not establish libidinal relations with external objects distinct from itself rather it is ‘simply the boundary that is established to surround the libidinal reservoir.’[8]

It is precisely such a narcissistic structure of mutual identifications that informs the dyadic imaginary mother/child relation in which ‘each defines the identity of the other in a closed circuit’.[9]  However, exchange is not possible between two individuals for whom there is no ‘third term’. That is, ‘this relation does not provide the conditions for social, linguistic, and economic exchange relations, although it provides some of their preconditions’.[10] And so, the mother/child relation must be submitted to symbolic regulation. It is the father – not the real or genetic father but the imaginary father – that acts as an ‘incarnation’ or ‘delegate’ of the symbolic Father. Freud described the father’s intervention in to the mother/child relation as the Oedipus Complex, and for Lacan it constitutes the passage from the Imaginary order to the Symbolic order and thus to sexed and speaking subjectivity. The recognition that the subject does not and cannot possess the phallus constitutes the resolution of the Oedipus complex in that it replaces the body of the mother with the phallus as signifier. The child’s acceptance of its ‘castration’ marks the resolution of the Oedipus Complex.

The concept of desire is also decisive to Lacan’s understanding of subjectivity through the resolution of the Oedipal complex. From an early age, the child attempts to satisfy basic biological needs which, in turn, are mediated through exchanges with others. The particular relational qualities of these exchanges become a vehicle through which a child’s need for recognition and love is obtained. The child’s desire is structured around its relationship with its mother (and/or first carer), and so, for Lacan, the child desires what it perceives to be the desire of the mother: the phallus. It believes that there is some Thing that would fully satisfy the mother, and attempts to make itself such an object of desire, and in this sense the child desires the desire of the ‘Other’. The father’s intervention brings to an end the child’s quest to be the phallic Thing for the mother. In the ‘normal’ course of development, the child accepts its castration and entry in to the Symbolic order. It is made to see that what the mother desires is not an imaginary feature of the father, but rather that her desires are regulated by a Symbolic Phallus, the Symbolic order. When the child as subject accedes to the Symbolic, the aspiration of transgressive enjoyment – jouissance – with the mother is denied to her. In addition, Lacan argues that the passage to subjectivity is possible only in relation to a complex sexual dialectic’.[11] In other words, ‘the subject cannot have access to the symbolic order without confronting the problem of sexual difference’.[12]

The Symbolic is the psychic register in which the subject recognises herself in the ‘Other’ rather than in the ‘Imaginary other’. The specificity of the Lacanian Other can be very succinctly described as the site of ‘radical alterity’.[13] The Other is another subject in terms of its radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness and also is the Symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject.[14] However, it is ‘only possible to speak of the Other as a subject in […] the sense that a subject may occupy this position and thereby “embody” the Other for another subject’.[15] Whereas the little other is ‘entirely inscribed in the Imaginary order’ and is ‘not really other, but a reflection and projection of the ego’, the Other designates an otherness which goes beyond the illusionary otherness of the Imaginary precisely because it is inassimilable through identification.[16] It is in this sense that the Other denotes Woman as the Other sex and in his early thinking Lacan places Woman within the unsignifiable register of the Real. Wholly inscribed in the order of the Symbolic, the Other is the place where speech originates: it equates to language and the law. It is the mother is the one who first takes the place of the Other for the child because she is the one who receives the child’s primitive utterances and retroactively decodes and sanctions them as a particular message’.[17] The castration complex is formed when the child discovers the incompleteness and lack in the Other. There is always a missing signifier in the Other, and the symbolic Phallus signifies that lack.

A Phallic signifier for Lacan is a sign without any referent. Although absence is its core feature, it doesn’t refer to something that is lost (as a trace does) but to other signifiers. Within the Symbolic sphere we can know ‘lack’ only as an absence (an absence of signifier), and then only with reference to another signifier, the Phallus, its binary opposite. The phallic signifier, then, denotes one thing only by reference to its binary opposite: presence/absence, active/passive, masculine/feminine. As Bracha Ettinger notes, it is in this precise sense that Woman is positioned as the Other sex, defined negatively as the lack signified by, and as the opposite of the Phallus, and thus remaining placeless within the Symbolic. This leaves the difference of Woman, and the feminine, unsignified, and thus foreclosed. Ettinger shows that for Lacan, language is entirely Phallic, and anything that escapes Phallic definition escapes culture and meaning. Any passage to the Symbolic occurs through the process of ‘castration’ and turns the object of this passage into a Phallic object.

“Castration” refers to the death of the “thing” in language; to the impossibility of actually touching through language, to the total separation of the Real from the Symbolic, but also to separation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic: the Other which signifies is no longer the (pointed at, reflected, identified with, and loved) mother but the Symbolic Other. Naming involves destroying the “thing” and replacing it with a symbol.[18]

For Lacan, the acceptance of the rules of language and the laws of society are aligned with the Oedipus complex. Entry into language, into the symbolic sphere is possible because of the child’s acceptance of paternal law – the laws, controls, and restrictions that frame desire and communication. The centrality of language to subject formation is guaranteed by the paternal Law, to the Name-of-the- Father. This is what Lacan means when he speaks of the Other. ‘The Other as Law, the Other of the Other, corresponds to the Name-of-the-Father: this is precisely what allows the resolution of the Oedipus complex, and consequently the detachment of the subject from the disquieting relation he entered with the mother’.[19] By way of this signifier of signifiers, the Name-of-the-Father encircles all other signifiers and in this phase of Lacan’s work the symbolic Other is self- enclosed and independent of the Real which lies outside its domain.

The Real is that which the Symbolic expels as it establishes its self. It is outside language (i.e. it is linked to impulses and instincts) and is that which can neither be symbolised nor has been symbolised. Whereas the Symbolic is a set of signifiers - differentiated, discrete elements, the Real, as that which is above all associated with the concept of trauma,[20] is undifferentiated - without gaps, breaks, fissures, cuts or cleaves. In his earlier work Lacan identified the Real as that which is beyond the Symbolic and the Imaginary and which acts as a limit to both, but in his later seminars he modified his earlier insistence on the separation between the psychic registers and gave attention to the possibility of a more dynamic relation emerging between them. In another early text, ‘Matrix: Beyond the Phallus,’ Ettinger draws attention to his particular suggestion that it is not unconscious subjectivity that is structured as a language at the expense of the Real, but rather that ‘language gives a structure to only one particular aspect of the unconscious: the Other, while a group of elements closely related to the network of the real: the Thing and the object a, become contributors to unconscious subjectivity revealed by phantasy, relativising the importance of the signifying chain of Lacan’s early theory’.[21]

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis, then, the Real is linked to the trauma that occurs when there is an encounter with that which is beyond or unavailable to signification. The impact of events or experiences in the Real being without passage to the Imaginary and Symbolic psychic registers can be neither understood nor processed, provoking a permanent rupture at the very core of the subject. Lacan suggests that actual trauma occurs not at the moment of encountering the Real but later through attempts to activate symbolic meaning. Unassimilated at the time, the traumatic event returns in phenomena, such as dreams and flashbacks, which repeat and re-appear yet which are unavailable to consciousness. In this way trauma can be understood as a structural condition of Lacanian subjectivity.








Notes

1. Ettinger, ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, 181.

2. Ibid.,13.

3.  Ettinger, ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, 182.

4.  Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction, 26.

5.  Ibid.

6. Ibid., 27.

7. Ibid., 29.

8. Ibid., 30.

9. Ibid., 67.

10. Ibid., 67.

11.  Evans, Introductory dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis, 127.

12.  Ibid.

13. Ibid.,133.

14.  Ibid.

15.  Ibid.

16.  Ibid.

17.  Ibid.

18.  Ettinger, “Matrix and Metramorphosis,” 191.

19.  Chiesa, Subjectivity and otherness: a philosophical reading of Lacan, 107.

20.  Homer, Jacques Lacan, 83.

21.  Ettinger, “Matrix: Beyond The Phallus,” 12.

(See also, Chiesa, Subjectivity and otherness: a philosophical reading of Lacan)