Jacques Lacan

(13 April 1901- 9 September 1981)

Johnston, Adrian. ‘Jacques Lacan’. In The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri
Nodelman, Summer 2024. Metaphysics
Research Lab, Stanford University, 2024.
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2
024/entries/lacan/.
Jacques Lacan:
Medically trained as a psychiatrist

Influenced by psychoanalysis, psychiatry, philosophy, art, literature and mathematics

among other areas

The robustly interdisciplinary combination that comes together in Lacanian work include
Freudian analysis, Hegelian dialectics, Kojèvian pedagogy, and different experiences of
“madness” from numerous perspectives

Other influences: the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and his inheritors such as
Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson

Known as French Freud

Greatly influenced later developments in philosophy: Jean Hyppolite, Michel Foucault,

Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva
Three Register Theory: Borromean knot/rings
● The Imaginary
● The Symbolic
● The Real
The Imaginary (1):
Associated (albeit not exclusively) with the restricted spheres of consciousness
and self-awareness

The Imaginary encompasses: 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

Dependence of the Imaginary on the Symbolic: 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
The Imaginary (2):
Imaginary as bound up with both of the other two registers:

the Imaginary and the Symbolic, when taken together as mutually integrated,
constitute the field of “reality,” itself contrasted with the Real

Imaginary invariably involves category mistakes: What is Real is misrecognized as

Symbolic; what is Symbolic is misrecognized as Real

the phenomena of the Imaginary are necessary illusions (to put it in Kantian
locution) or real abstractions (to put it in Marxian parlance)

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
The Symbolic (1):
The customs, institutions, laws, mores, norms, practices, rituals, rules,
traditions, and so on of cultures and societies

The non-natural universe is an elaborate set of inter-subjective and

trans-subjective contexts into which individual human beings are thrown at birth; a
pre-existing order preparing places for them in advance and influencing the
vicissitudes of their ensuing lives.

Individual subjects are what they are in and through the mediation of the
socio-linguistic arrangements and constellations of the register of the
Symbolic.
The Symbolic and the Unconscious (2):
The analytic unconscious (qua “structured like a language”) is depicted as
kinetic networks of interlinked signifiers (i.e., “signifying chains”).

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 (parlêtre) of the
unconscious

“The unconscious is structured”: the unconscious is not the id, namely, an

anarchic seething cauldron of unthinking animalistic instincts (i.e.,
something unstructured).
The Real (1):
The register of the Real is tricky to encapsulate and evades being pinned
down through succinct definitions.

The Real is intrinsically elusive, resisting by nature capture in the comprehensively

meaningful formulations of concatenations of Imaginary-Symbolic signs.

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.
The Real (2):
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.

Real having Quasi-Hegelian dialectical features: 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.
The Mirror Stage, the Ego, and the Subject (1):
The Mirror Stage:

Offers explanation for the genesis and functions of the Freudian psychical agency of the ego
(Ich, moi).

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.

[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 (I CAN, I WILL, I MUST)]

The ego as thoroughly compromised and inherently neurotic to its very core

(Freud: Unconscious as a seat of repressed desire)

The Mirror Stage, the Ego, and the Subject (2):
Lacan makes a distinction between the ego (moi) and the subject (sujet)

The (psychic) ego: an inert, fixed bundle of objectified coordinates, a libidinally invested and
reified entity.

The psychoanalytic subject: 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.
The Mirror Stage, the Ego, and the Subject (3):
Mirror Stage and Pre-maturational helplessness (Hilflosigkeit):

Freud 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.

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.

Encounter with imago-Gestalt in a reflective surface (an ‘Aha!’ moment): enthralling lure exerted
by the fascinating image of his/her body is this image’s promise that he/she can overcome
his/her Hilflosigkeit (helplessness) and be a unified, pulled together whole, an integrated,
coordinated totality like the bigger, more mature others he/she sees around him/her-self.

“Aha!,” moment lays down the imagistic nucleus of the ego as a series of self-objectifications in
images and, soon after with the event of language acquisition, words too.
The Mirror Stage, the Ego, and the Subject (4):
Mirror Stage and the influence of the Other(s):

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

1. The Imaginary register of the mirror does not precede the Symbolic register of language
and sociality in a linear chronology of developmental stages; 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).
2. Second, this means that the imagistic nucleus of the ego is suffused from the get-go with
the destinal “discourse of the Other.”
The Mirror Stage, the Ego, and the Subject (5):
Mirror Stage and the influence of the Other(s):

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.

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.
Otherness (1):
1. other (other with lowercase ‘o’; objet petit a): Imaginary ego and its accompanying
alter-egos

Other indicates alien and alienating status

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
transferencestyle imaginings are fictions taming and domesticating the mysterious, unsettling
foreignness of one’s conspecifics, thereby rendering social life tolerable and navigable.
Otherness (2):
2. Big Other (other with capital ‘O’):

a. Big Other qua Symbolic Order: of trans-individual socio-linguistic structures configuring

the fields of intersubjective interactions

Relatedly, the Symbolic big Other also can refer to (often fantasmatic/fictional) ideas
of anonymous authoritative power and/or knowledge (God, Religion, Society, State,
Party,…)

b. Real Other: unknowable ‘x’; alterity (Neighbour-as-Thing)

Maternal and Paternal as big Others (1):
The Freudian Oedipus complex: resolves the question of ‘what the mother want’ through
conceiving of ‘castration anxiety’; elimination of the father; leading to incest; and thus,
Oedipus complex

Lacan: 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.
Lacan’s Oedipal father is an Other with both Symbolic and Real faces.

1. On the Symbolic side, the paternal figure represents the answer to the question, “What
does the maternal Other want?”

As 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.
Maternal and Paternal as big Others (2):
2. 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
façade of paternal authority and its rules.
The Libidinal Economy: Need-Demand-Desire and Castration
The libidinal economy: the underlying motivational mechanisms of psychical life (desiring
machine)

Freud: drive (Trieb)

Lacan: Need-demand-desire and castration

Freudian Hilflosigkeit: Infants are powerless on their own to satisfy these bodily dictates for a
protracted initial period lasting well into childhood

Discourse of the other: ‘Ask politely’; ‘say thank you’; ‘In this house, we don’t yell when we are
hungry.’

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.
The Libidinal Economy: Need-Demand-Desire and Castration (2)
Desire = Demand - Need

Desire = surpluses of more-than-biological significances

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.

Desiring restlessness: 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.

Impossibility of desire fulfilment: 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).
The Libidinal Economy: Need-Demand-Desire and Castration (3)
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.”

Symbolic Castration: 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.
Fantasy and object a (objet petit a):
Fantasies: particularly those functioning at the level of fundamental formations of the
unconscious, as schematizations of the desiring subjectivity.

Lacanian matheme for fantasy is:

$⬦a
$ = barred subject
⬦ = envelopment-development-conjunction-disjunction
= union and intersection
= alienation and separation

a = autre (other)
Drive and jouissance
Freudian Drive (Trieb)/desire: aim -> satisfaction
-> aim-inhibition -> suppression
-> sublimation (-> satisfaction)
Lacan: 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.
Lacan: aim and goal are distinct
Lacan distinguishes between desire and drive.

Desire: 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.”

Drive: it 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.
Drive and jouissance
Freudian Drive (Trieb)/desire: aim -> satisfaction
-> aim-inhibition -> suppression
-> sublimation (-> satisfaction)
Lacan: 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.
Lacan: aim and goal are distinct
Lacan distinguishes between desire and drive.

Desire: 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.”

Drive: it 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.