Psychoanalysis: Lacan (Lexicon) Flashcards
leje, or subject
Split, unstable, fictive
The story of ourselves is a split, filled with lack
Identification
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.
Imago (imaginary order)
Mirror Stage, the Other
The register with the closest links to what people experience as non-psychoanalytic quotidian reality.
That which is fictional, simulated, virtual, etcetera.
mirror stage
human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an “I”. The infant identifies with the image, which serves as a gestalt of the infant’s emerging perceptions of selfhood, but because the image of a unified body does not correspond with the underdeveloped infant’s physical vulnerability and weakness, this imago is established as an Ideal-I toward which the subject will perpetually strive throughout their life.
dehinscence, or splitting
Metaphor
Humans are born prematurely leading to the “dehiscence at the heart of the organism” which persists throughout our existence.
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Significantly, these are stages in developmental processes, and for Lacan the term is not strictly metaphorical, but refers to the primordial nature of the human subject as physically uncoordinated and psychically split.
social (symbolic order)
The social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law.
Once a child enters into language and accepts the rules and dictates of society, it is able to deal with others. The symbolic is made possible because of your acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father, entering into a community of others.
mésconaissances
To “misconstrue” or “misrecognize,”
Lacan stresses that in the mirror stage the image the infant sees in the mirror does not correspond to the actual physical reality the infant experiences. The infant’s “recognition” of their reflection is an instance of méconnaissance. Throughout the life of the individual, the ego sustains its sense of singularity and autonomy through an ongoing misrecognition of the actual conditions of its existence–in particular, of the fact that its existence depends on others and on the symbolic systems of culture.
The Real
The state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. Only as neo-natal children were we close to this state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need. A baby needs and seeks to satisfy those needs with no sense for any separation between itself and the external world or the world of others.
Lacan represents this state of nature as a time of fullness or completeness that is subsequently lost through the entrance into language. As far as humans are concerned, however, “the real is impossible,” in so far as we cannot express it in language because the entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real. The Real works in tension with the imaginary order and the symbolic order.
phallus
What the child perceives it is that the mother desires.
The young child devotes itself to trying to fathom what it is that the mother desires, so that it can try to make itself the phallus for the mother- a fully satisfying love-object. At around the time of its fifth or sixth desire, however, the father will normally intervene in a way that lastingly thwarts this Oedipal aspiration. The ensuing renunciation of the aspiration to be the phallic Thing for the mother, and not any physical event or its threat, is what Lacan calls castration, and it is thus a function to which he thinks both boys and girls are normally submitted.
Lack
In constructing our fantasy-version of reality, we establish coordinates for our desire; we situate both ourselves and our object of desire, as well as the relation between. Our desires therefore necessarily rely on lack, since fantasy, by definition, does not correspond to anything in the real. Our object of desire (what Lacan terms the “objet petit a”) is a way for us to establish coordinates for our own desire. At the heart of desire is a misregognition of fullness where there is really nothing but a screen for our own narcissistic projections. It is that lack at the heart of desire that ensures we continue to desire. To come too close to our object of desire threatens to uncover the lack that is, in fact, necessary for our desire to persist, so that, ultimately, desire is most interested not in fully attaining the object of desire but in keeping our distance, thus allowing desire to persist. Because desire is articulated through fantasy, it is driven to some extent by its own impossibility.
the Other [cap]
The Other represents “other people,” other subjects whom the individual encounters in social life, but for Lacan it also stands for language and the conventions of social life organized under the category of the law. Because language and the codes of human societies pre-exist any individual human being, these systems are “other” to the individual subject. The fact that subjects, themselves internally alienated, must employ the Other of language and the law to interact with other subjects is crucial to Lacan’s theory of the psyche as well as to its practical application in therapy.
need/desire
Desire has little to do with material sexuality for Lacan; rather, in social structures and strictures, in the fantasy version of reality that forever dominated our lives after our entrance into language.
Even our unconscious desires are, in other words, organized by the linguistic system that Lacan terms the symbolic order or “the big Other.” Our desire is never properly our own, but is created through fantasies that are caught up in cultural ideologies rather than material sexuality.
In constructing our fantasy-version of reality, we establish coordinates for our desire; we situate both ourselves and our object of desire, as well as the relation between.
demand/love
Every demand is at its core a demand for love
being/having
Paradox of human existence: you can have the phallus but not be the phallus, or, you can be the phallus and not have the phallus.
law of the father
The laws and restrictions that control both your desire and the rules of communication, according to Lacan. The Name-of-the-Father is closely bound up with the superego, the Phallus, the symbolic order, and the Oedipus complex.
