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Book Review- Lacan by Lionel Bailey

12-08-2024 • Ryan Prendergast

There is a contradiction in human desire, which prevents a simple answer to the simple question: "What do you want"? From apathy over what to eat for dinner to torturous dissatisfaction on what to do with one's life, uncertainty plagues humanity. It feels natural to long, but it's not obvious why. Surely, the animal who knows what he wants-- whether food, activity, or entertainment-- would outcompete the anxious one, plagued by uncertainty? Yet humans, the most uncertain of creatures, thrive. Why?

Even people who do sit down and reflect and think really hard and try to come up with an answer for "what do I want, fundamentally" come up frustratingly short. They tend to speak in dubious negations, writing down maxims like "being is where it is not", and become religious or meditators or psychedelicists. Lost to the world of woo.

Psychoanalysis offers a striking answer for why desire is alienating, and it does so while avoiding much of the floofiness of Woo. The answer: it's built into the way that humans become conscious. It's structural and inherent, like a magnet's attraction to the opposing pole. Desire is alienating because it is the desire of "The Other" -Lacan.

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a psychoanalyst, a disciple of Sigmund Freud. He built upon the Freudian theories of psychosexual development and unconscious desires, expanding them into a narrative of why and how humans desire. Like other narrative simplifications of complicated systems, I'm not sure how literally true Lacan's ideas are, if at all. But as a framework for understanding the contradictions of human psychology, I'm blown away.

As a psychoanalyst and a public intellectual and most of all a French psychoanalytical public intellectual, Lacan was prone to the redefinition of common words to give them specific directional meanings. The Real, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Other, the object cause of desire, jouissance, the phallus, the Thing, signifier, signified. All of these concepts are defined to answer a few central questions: What do humans desire? Why do they desire such things? Where does desire live? And how is it created? I'll trace his ideas as he does: through the development of human consciousness, and how a person develops his place in the world.

The Birth of Consciousness

Consciousness doesn't exist, and then it does. At what point does the baby become aware of itself? For Lacan, there is an easy and explicit answer: the mirror stage.

A baby looks into a mirror and recognizes himself. Unlike the bear in the wild who attacks the mirror, the baby looks at the mirror and sees "me". But consciousness requires more than that. Self consciousness develops at precisely the moment when the baby recognizes that it is NOT him in the mirror. The image he sees of himself in the mirror is just that--an image-- and not himself. Me but not me. I see myself, but it's not truly me; it's an image of me. This is a moment of identification (literally, he sees himself as the object in the mirror), and he invents a concept of "myself". This moment is the invention of the ego, and it is the first time that the baby experiences a sense of self separate from its environment.

The moment of self-consciousness is the first step on the formation of desire. We move chronologically through the baby's life.

The Baby's Development

To Lacan, the stage of development from blabbering, incoherent infant to speaking, walking toddler is the origin of desire and its structure. We trace a story that's perhaps a little too-neat-to-be-true, but is neat nevertheless.

The infant's entire world is his mother. At the moment of the mirror stage, he recognizes himself as separate from his mother, and he also recognizes that his mother perceives him as an image, like the one he saw of himself in the mirror. Nevertheless, the infant is entirely dependent on the mother-- for food, moving around, rest. The infant is helpless on his own. We transcribe the infants worldview as such:

Mother is all powerful. Mother gives me food, gives me life.

For some intangible reason, mother takes care of me. When I cry, she consoles me. When I'm hungry, she feeds me.

There must be some reason that Mother takes care of me. There must be something about ME. Something about ME that she wants, I am what she wants.

However, Mother doesn't always take care of Baby. Every baby pushes its limits to the point it is ignored. Throwing food on the floor, declaring food disgusting, crying senselessly-- every parent at some point draws the line and refuses to give in to the baby's demands. Furthermore, simple pragmatism prevents the baby from commanding Mother's attention 24 hours a day. Mother has to go to work; Mother has to go to bed. To the baby, this is startling:

Mother is all-powerful, and I am what Mother wants. But Mother doesn't always give me what I want. Mother does other things.

This is tension; this is torture. It demands resolution. If mother is all powerful, and I am what Mother wants, then why would she not give me what I want? Is she some arbitrary and capricious tyrant? Resolution comes in accepting what Lacan calls the Paternal Metaphor, whereby the name of the Father comes to stand for "Mother must". Mother and Father here don't have to literally be the mother and father, as they are used metaphorically. "Mother" is the primary caretaker of the baby, and Father is the primary excuse the mother has for leaving the baby (could be the father, work, etc). The baby accepts that Mother is not all-powerful, that Mother must submit to the rules and demands of some other authority, and the demands of this other authority can be symbolized by the name of the Father. That is to say, that the father's name stands-in as a symbol for the rules and laws mother must abide by.

The acceptance of the paternal metaphor introduces the first symbol, a term Lacan borrows from Saussarian Linguistics, meaning "phrase-image". The distinction between signal and signified is commonly explained as "the map is not the territory": a map of St Louis is not literally St Louis, while simultaneously representing it.

It's at this moment, when the child acquires language by "crossing the bar of metaphor" between signifier and signified, that he becomes fully conscious. He understands an intangible set of rules and norms which he symbolizes with the Name of the Father. And in that moment of symbolization, something is split in his consciousness, what Lacan call his Subject. There is something missing in the map's symbolization of the territory, and likewise there is something missing in the paternal metaphor's articulation of "what the mother wants".

This moment is a tremendous loss for the child, who previously understood himself to be the object of his mother's desire. The quality of being wholly desired, Lacan calls the Phallus (again, this is metaphorical). The child who once believed himself to possess the phallus now understands himself to have lost it. He lost it (although really he never had it), and for the rest of his life he will chase its fragments in things he think might give it back to him. He sees fragments of the phallus in the world-- maybe if he masters electric guitar, maybe if he can run the fastest marathon, maybe then he will be whole again.

This is the genesis of desire. The introduction of language causes his subject to split, and he loses the fantasy of omnipotence he enjoyed in the phallus. This moment, the loss of the phallus, lays the foundation for desire. As the child's world expands, he meets and talks with new people and the paternal metaphor grows into a set of phrases and symbols called The Other. His understanding of himself and others is governed by language, symbols, and social rules.

Desire

Desire is the byproduct of language in the other. It is the result of the impossibility to fully articulate demands or, well, anything.

Desire arises where need and demand diverge. Language allows us to articulate demands—what we ask of others—but in doing so, it transforms raw need into something symbolic and incomplete. What is spoken is never quite what we truly need. The baby says "bottle" or "mama" but what it needs is something that's not quite that. The gap between demand and need is where desire is born, endlessly circling around the unattainable object of fulfillment.

More sophisticated language doesn't solve this, because its fulfillment becomes more complex!

Back to our starting questions: Why does one desire? Whence does desire arise? By what process?

Desire grows around objects that fulfill a psychological need rather than a physical one. You don't know what you want for dinner because it isn't about dinner-- it's about the impossible, unspoken, alienated aspect of your wants. You're not asking "what do I want?", but rather, "what will make me feel whole?" and the answer to that is "nothing". That's the nature of desire.

What this all means

I skipped a bunch-- this is the starting point of Lacan's theory of consciousness and desire. His writing quickly get wordy and complex: for example, he plots the topological vector-space of all aspects of desire, the three dimensions being the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. He was a fan of pseudo-mathematical formulations of metaphorical processes. His precise definition of the paternal metaphor is:

S1 / s1 x S2 / s2 -> S2 / (S1 / s1)

S1- signifier of the mother's desire
s1- signified idea of the object of mother's desire, phallus
S2- Signifier of the father
s2- signified idea of the father

We also didn't touch the primary source for his theories, which is psychoanalysis. Lacan split his work between the university seminar and the insane asylum, attempting to understand and cure France's craziest patients. His therapy practice, to those familiar with what is today called Therapy (CBT), would appear weird, bizarre, and unscientific: a mostly silent Lacan occasionally interjects with puns or nonsense phrases, and ends sessions seemingly randomly. Take this clip of a former patient of his, recalling how he interrupted her session to jump out of his seat, touch her check, and whisper the phrase "geste à peau" (gesture), a pun on Gestapo.

Lacan believed language to be the root of all ills. He wrote that the unconscious was structured itself as a language of signifiers-- signifiers which were repressed from the conscious. His goal as an analyst was to become a perfectly transparent mirror, so that the patient sees himself through the eyes of The Other. In that perfect mirror state, as the patient speaks, either the patient independently discovers or Lacan guides him towards his "master signifier" organizing his unconscious. In that moment, the patient's master signifier is spoken, and the patient's Subject is articulated, the ultimate goal of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Why he matters

Lacan is the most important psychoanalyst since Freud, and his influence continues to grow since his death. Ironically, much of the interest in his work comes from OUTSIDE psychoanalysis. Within the psychoanalytical mainstream, he remains an outcast due to personal and political battles he waged with the psychoanalytical accreditation boards during his lifetime. The actual substance of the disagreements, specifics about proper training and session organization, are mostly irrelevant. The academy at large found him a cocky asshole and banished him from accreditation, and barred future analysts from calling themselves Lacanian.

Lacan's work has found unexpected support in philosophy. His work, even if it's not literally true as a description of the development of the toddler, nevertheless is profoundly interesting. It provides a compelling answer for why people desire what they desire: they seek wholeness by attaining in themselves what The Other desires. I want to be what I think you want, and this recursive, alienated structure drives human longing.

Lacan makes a compelling case for language as the foundation of psychology. The unconscious operates like a language, governed by the same rules of metaphor and substitution. A person can be understood by their "master signifiers": key words and ideas that shape the unconscious, carrying meanings far beyond their literal definitions and structuring how one sees himself and the world.

I suspect that there are hundreds of interesting low-hanging results from applying a Lacanian mindset to different intellectual fields. Some applications I'd like to see:

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