Lacan versus Freud: Subverting the Enlightenment
Kay Stockholder
I. Smoke and Mirrors
The mirror stage for Jacques Lacan functions as a founding myth, analogous to and replacing Freud's founding myth, elaborated in Totem and Taboo, of the band of brothers whose murder of the primal father condemns them to perpetual guilt. The first section of this paper will examine the philosophical agenda involved in Lacan's conception of the mirror stage, visible in the logical gaps of this argument; the second will show the ways in which Lacan deploys this conception to rearrange the Freudian landscape; and the third will discuss how Lacan's conception of language, integral to all his thought, is at odds not only with Freud's conception, but entirely undermines Freud's essentially Enlightment world views.
For both Lacan and Freud the founding myth involves circular reasoning, for the myth is posited to underwrite an already elaborated psychological theory. This circularity, however, is more crucially problematic for Lacan than it is for Freud. Freud's myth is cast as a hypothetical historical extension of an otherwise free-standing psychological theory. One can totally reject Totem and Taboo without rejecting Freud's arguments for the unconscious, infantile sexuality, and the Oedipus complex. In contrast, one cannot reject Lacan's existential myth without calling into question the psychology that Lacan bases on its assumptions because the scientific claims of the mirror stage assume the truth of this foundational myth.
In "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," Lacan sketches a conception of the ontology and epistemology of the human psyche which [End Page 361] underlies his massive revision of Freudian thought. Though Lacan presents himself as recovering what he asserts as the "true" Freudian message from the distortions of North American ego psychology, and though commentators speak of the mirror stage as though it were a variation on Freud's theory of narcissism, in fact Lacan's theory subverts the enlightenment ideology upon which Freud's work is based. Ultimately, the differences between Lacan's mirror stage and Freud's narcissism are paradigmatic of the differences between their theories of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the ego, id, and superego, of the Oedipus and castration complexes, the nature of therapy, and their understanding of man's relation to language and culture. By redefining the key Freudian concepts, Lacan severs Freudian theory from its roots in Enlightenment rational individualism and deploys them to serve a version of pre-Enlightenment authoritarianism.
Most commentators on Lacan not only assume the truth of Lacan's description of what children do when first confronted with their mirror images, but also accept Lacan's assertion that the behavior he imputes to them betokens an absolute alienation of the inner being of the infant from the conscious sense of itself it later acquires as a being in the world. 1 Others' claims for the importance of Lacan's theory of the mirror stage are not less sweeping than his own. Lacan rejects the Cartesian "cogito" by which Descartes asserted the validity of human reason, and returns to Descartes' radically skeptical assumption that all experience is an illusion, thrown up by a deceiving God. Substituting a deceiving ego for a deceiving God, Lacan claims that the mirror stage reveals "the ontological structure of the human world," in a way that "accords with my reflections on paranoiac knowledge (Lacan 1977, 2)" 2 For Lacan the ratiocinative self is a grotesque mask, behind which lurks the true subject, which is beyond thought. Though he claims to bring scientific proof to his project, he does not have in mind contemporary scientific endeavor, or what he calls the debased scientism of North America. Rather he invokes the Hegelian conception of wissenschaft in its widest sense of the systematic inquiry by which Hegel described the stages by which Geist, or the evolving human consciousness, [End Page 362] comes into being. It is from Hegel that Lacan gets his conception that the subject finds herself only in confrontation with others, or the Other, that is constituted by the external world. For Hegel, consciousness develops by oppositions, so that the master/slave opposition cannot be overcome until the master and the slave recognize each other as negated aspects of themselves. Lacan purports to validate Hegel's understanding of Science by claiming to use it in elaborating the mirror stage. Fuller significance of this circular argument emerges when Lacan redefines the therapist from a Freudian man of science to a wise man who combines Christ-like love with Hegelian knowledge:
Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, that of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the loftiest, because the undertaking of the psychoanalyst acts in our time as a mediator between the man of care and the subject of absolute knowledge". (1977, 105)
However, even while Lacan invokes the authority of Hegel, he transforms Hegel into an anti-Enlightenment thinker by obscuring the differences between Hegel's and his own epistemology and ontology. Hegel believed in the ultimate capacity of reason fully to comprehend its own situation and to overcome the self-negation, or alienation, that drove history along. The goal for Hegelian man is, by negating the negation, to come to full self-awareness, one akin to the awareness Freud attributed to a fully analyzed subject. While Freud envisioned the possibility of examining the murky depths of the unconscious with the light of consciousness, Lacan believes that ordinary consciousness can legitimately be aware only of its own incapacity. This Lacanian limit to the power of consciousness becomes clear later on when he criticizes Hegel for being a precursor of modern science in so far as he neglected mystic states. He says that "the hour of truth must strike" elsewhere than in consciousness. For Lacan the therapeutic mystic initiation also becomes part of a mystic historical unfolding (1977, 297). In these often obscure references, Lacan inserts Freudian rationalist discourse into a vaguely mystic and spiritual [End Page 363] context. Because Lacan bases such far-reaching claims on his concept of the mirror stage, one should attend closely to the ways in which his philosophic premises intertwine with what he purports to be a purely scientific argument.
Lacan's argument for the mirror stage has both empirical and theoretical components. The first question is to what degree children's behavior conforms to Lacan's description, and the second is whether that behavior would carry the significance that Lacan claims. Lacan contrasts the behavior of the human infant between six and eighteen months in front of the mirror with that of a monkey. The monkey, Lacan asserts, finds his image empty, whereas the helpless infant,
nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. (1977, 1-2)
Upon this empirical claim for the difference between animal and human behavior, Lacan rests his thesis for the absolute and qualitative uniqueness of human subjectivity. Neither Lacan nor his commentators cite specific surveys of infant behavior in front of mirrors, nor have I found one. 3 However, it does not require elaborate studies to observe some obvious aspects of children's behavior, so that it seems permissible here to resort to the same kind of anecdotal evidence upon which Lacan relies.
People report a great variety of infant behavior in front of mirrors. Some children become interested in their own reflections; some regard their parent, or the person who holds them, rather than their own image; some seem intensely interested in the mirror reflections, some mildly so, and some ignore the mirror altogether. Furthermore, it is questionable whether even those infants who manifest interest in their mirror images do so in a way that differs from the interest they manifest in other circumstances. Recently I saw an infant who was just learning to crawl approaching its image in a three-way mirror. It was certainly interested in the various images it saw there, [End Page 364] but it was not clear that it was more interested in its own. Some children do express the happy interest in their own images that Lacan describes, but as Tallies observes, such behavior can also be observed when an infant sees a passing cat, or lies in its crib watching a mobile (1988, 143). The significance that Lacan attaches to the jubilance of children confronted with their mirror images could be confirmed only if it were proven that children manifest such jubilance in no other situation. Therefore, because not all children behave in the ways upon which Lacan bases his conception of the mirror stage, and because Lacan bases his scientific claims upon the literal behavior of children, his concept of the mirror stage along with its far-reaching implications are seriously called into question.
Another of Lacan's empirical claims is in principle more difficult to prove, as it concerns the infant's subjective state. Lacan says that the infant suffers greater "motor incapacity and nursling dependence" due to the "prematurity" of its birth (1977, 2) than do primates, and that its perceptual systems are more mature. This combination renders man's relation to nature fundamentally different from that of animals. Because of "a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal months" the relation of man's consciousness to his organic existence is fundamentally altered (1977, 4). There are several problems with this argument. On physiological grounds, Tallis disputes both Lacan's claims that the human child is more premature than other mammals, relative to their life span, and his claim that a child's perceptual system is more mature than its motor coordination:
There is no evidence for an anatomical incompleteness of the pyramidal tract--all the neurons are present at birth--unless 'anatomical' refers to the connectivity of the neurons. If that is what is meant, then the argument falls flat on its face, because the immaturity of the perceptual systems is even greater in this respect as the immense amount of research carried out on the visual cortex over the last thirty years has clearly demonstrated. (1980, 144) [End Page 365]
However, these arguments from anatomy and neurology, though interesting, are not centrally relevant to the question of an infant's consciousness. Even if Lacan were right about neurology, such facts would not confirm his assertions about an infant's subjectivity. He asserts that the child contrasts its "fragmented body" to the wholeness of the specular image. Without this subjective experience there would be no gap between the unity it perceives and its inner experience. 4
There are other grounds upon which to reject Lacan's conception of the mirror stage. Given Lacan's account, a person blind from birth could not achieve full humanity, and neither could those who lived in cultures that had no mirrors. While such people at some point might see a reflection of themselves in water or metal implements, such reflections would not give them stable or unified images of themselves. Furthermore, it is unlikely that all infants prior to acquiring speech would encounter such experiences. While most commentators unquestioningly accept the literal truth of Lacan's description despite these problems, others try to rescue this theory by arguing that it does not depend upon his literal claims. Lemaire (1977, 79) deplores those critics who "have seen fit to use the 'factual' insubstantiality of the phase" to invalidate his work as a whole, but she contradicts herself in also asserting its factuality:
Occurring as it does at the age mentioned in the above discussion of the relationship between the child and his fellow, self-recognition in the mirror (the true mirror stage) is even more important when it comes to the establishment of an alienated ego. (1977, 80)
Ragland-Sullivan also seems embarrassed by Lacan's literal claims. She says that "even in the 1936 version of the theory Lacan clarifies that he is not talking about a mirror per se." 5 She asserts that in his theory "sight-impaired people would also experience a mirror stage," but does not say how they would do so. Accusing Kohut and Winnicott of stealing Lacan's thunder in their object relations theories, she insists that Lacan refers "to the identificatory/perceptual mimicry of [End Page 366] human infants" (1989, 45). However, she tries to have it both ways when she says that "the mirror serves as a metaphor and a structural concept at the same time that it points to a crucial experience in psychic development"(1987, 29). Similarly, Forrester says that "Lacan is clearly aware of the implications of the logical, rather than developmental, argument," and slides quickly from the literal description to discussions of the child's relations to others in its world (1990, 122).
Arguments for the metaphorical rather than the literal force of Lacan's concept of the mirror stage involve some devious strategies. On the one hand, there seems little problem in accepting the mirror stage as a metaphor for the importance of a child's understanding of itself as a "moi," as a being seen by others. Lacan's formulation captures a deeply felt aspect of the ways in which we see ourselves seen by others, or of the process by which our sense of ourselves emerges from the ways in which we see ourselves regarded by others. Discussions of the mirror stage tend often to merge with these fairly commonplace observations about the deeply social nature of human reality.
Therefore, one can easily accept the concept of the mirror stage as a metaphor for our social interdependence, but doing so does not entail accepting the Lacanian claim for a profound alienation as constitutive of human subjectivity. Indeed, as a metaphor for the way in which we "prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet," or for our awareness of being the object of others' "gaze," it has been used powerfully by Irving Goffman to describe the subtleties of role behavior. 6 Lacanian apologists who recognize the obvious failure of the literal argument, nonetheless attribute the same foundational significance to its metaphorical extension. However, as we have seen, Lacan's argument for the ontological and epistemological significance of the mirror stage rests upon its literal occurrence rather than its metaphorical force. If children do not both feel and behave in the way Lacan asserts, then the metaphorical force of his formulation cannot rescue his argument for a primordial psychological alienation.
There is also a self-contradiction at the heart of Lacan's arguments for the mirror stage as radically alienating. If the [End Page 367] child experiences itself as unco-ordinated, and sees a unified and complete image of itself in the mirror, it is not clear on what basis the child could understand that the mirror image has anything to do with itself. Lacan's accounts of the fragmented state of the infant body and the child's behavior are mutually exclusive, for the child's self-recognition would depend upon its having a sense of connection to that image. For the child to recognize its image as its own, it would have to intuit a connection between its inner sensations and the movements it observes in the mirror. It would simultaneously see its image and feel its body, in the process testing the correspondence between the two. The mirror image then would manifest the same amount of coordination, or lack of it, that it feels interior to its own body. Such a connection would involve it in a kind of reality testing in a way that calls into question the alienating function of the image.
Children who behaved as Lacan claims would have to make use of the proprioceptive senses, their inner feelings of their own bodies. David-Ménard (1989, 3), who hews a path somewhere between Lacan and Freud, uses the term "erotogenic body" for a person's felt sense of its own interiority as distinct from its anatomical body. Lacan's omission of an infantile equivalent to adult proprioceptive senses undermines his argument that the child's location of itself in space and time depends upon the alienation of the mirror stage. He argues that the "spatial captation manifested in the mirror stage" (1977, 4) is part of the drama by which the mirror stage "situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction" (1977, 2). At stake here is a foundational philosophic assumption. Lacan buttresses his argument for a fundamental alienation as the ground for human experience with a Kantian conception of space and time as necessary categories of perception. If Lacan could prove that human perception of space and time, that is, all external reality, rests on the illusory wholeness generated in the mirror stage, then he would both seem to prove the existence of the noumenal realm that Kant posits as a logical necessity, and give it an experiential dimension, albeit of a mystical kind. For Kant the logical positing of this noumenal world enables an account for [End Page 368] human freedom and moral action, but it cannot be apprehended in an immediate way by any faculty whatever, neither by Platonic intellect nor mystic intuition. Space and time for Kant are not illusions; along with causality they constitute the phenomenal world. This world is not for Kant, as it is for Lacan, in any sense fictional, so that the child's introduction to it would not point it, as Lacan claims, in a fictional direction. Further, Kant casts no doubt on the benefits of reason used within its proper sphere, even though he argues that reason cannot go beyond the limits of the phenomenal.
By linking space and time to the mirror stage, Lacan tries to underwrite his claims for a primary alienation with Kant's philosophic authority. In doing so, however, he rejects Kant's conception of reason as a limited but crucial instrument. In its stead he posits a semi-mystical realm of being beyond reason and beyond the ego, both of which merely deflect our attention from the realm in which truth lies, which can be glimpsed only by those who complete the Lacanian therapeutic journey. However, Lacan's argument for a radical alienation between the Real and a subject's location of itself in time and space manifests flaws similar to those for the mirror stage itself. A child regarding its mirror image would see itself in relation to other reflected persons or objects. Just as it would have to feel a correspondence, exactly the experience and conception of truth that Lacan denies, between its bodily feeling and the image to know the latter as related to itself, so the relations among the mirror images could have significance only in so far as they corresponded to its experience of the actual world in which it moves. It may be that a child's sense of itself in the world is profoundly changed the first time it perceives its mirror image, but when a child reaches for that image, sees itself doing so and feels the arm that reaches, that new image would be coordinated with the proprioceptive awareness that must coincide with the infant's first effort to reach for an object.
Lacan also argues that the true subject is beyond time as well as space. In one of his more than usually contorted passages, he links the perception of time to the mirror stage, saying that "the fact is that the total form of the body by which [End Page 369] the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him only as a "Gestalt" (1977, 2), and,
This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation--and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality. . . . (1977, 4)
It is hard to imagine that so young an infant experiences a sense of futurity, or intuits itself as travelling a temporal road towards a distant maturity. Presumably a child develops some sense of time from the gap between its desires and their satisfaction, a gap that opens at birth and widens as the child matures. By the time a child anticipates the reappearance of an object that has been temporarily obscured, an important Piagetian moment, its intertwined sense of both time and space must be firmly entrenched.
On all levels, then, the phenomena to which Lacan appeals themselves preclude any radical divide for the child between the Kantian categories and a timeless and spaceless Real, regardless of the epistemological problem of knowing what lies beyond our mental categories. The analogue for the situation Lacan describes would be that of a kitten mistaking itself for an image of a lion, in which case it would be in some trouble.
Lacan claims further support for his argument for primary alienation of the mirror stage in the phenomena of hysterical symptoms and post-amputation phantom pains, neither of which correspond to neural anatomy. While these phenomena provide strong evidence for the psycho-somatic basis of our experience, they do not support Lacan's claim. While an hysterical paralysis of an arm may express a repressed impulse to strike out at a parent, it does so because we correctly experience our arms as functionally specific. While our capacity to move our arms is related to neural and [End Page 370] muscular structures that go beyond them, skeletally they are discreet. Therefore the cultural symbolization of body parts is embedded in a transcultural physical reality. The same argument applies to phantom pains experienced by those who have lost a limb; such experience relates to the proprioceptive sense, and cannot prove a fundamental divide between the organism and the psyche.
While Lacan simultaneously assumes the mantle of and perverts Hegelian and Kantian philosophy, his chief target is Darwinism. Lacan's anti-Darwinism, which in turn bears upon the role of reason in human affairs, emerges in connection with his discussion of infantile pleasure, or the jubilance he attributes to the infant. This relates to Lacan's claims that the infant facing the mirror "overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support . . . " (1977, 1), and that there occurs at this moment a "jubilant assumption of his specular image" by the child who is "still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence" (1977, 2). Given Lacan's account of the complete discordance between the child's image and its reality, and given that he attributes no pleasure to the child's sense of itself or of its relation to the adult who holds it, there is no way to explain this reaction. Even if under these conditions the infant could recognize the image as its own, its jubilance would imply a previous state of unpleasant feeling, and a vague desire to be like the adults around it. For it to feel such discontent would suggest that the desire to be other than it is in the present is built into its organism. Were that so, its pleasure would derive from reassurance that in time it would overcome its already felt deficiencies, and its identification with the image would then not be a misrecognition. Once again, Lacan's assumptions about infantile behavior would confirm a deep continuity from the infant's biological organism to its developing consciousness.
Lacan directs another shaft against Darwinism in his conception of infantile jubilance. Lacan says that the contrasting size of the mirror image "fixes it in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him" (1977, 2). The mention of the inverted symmetry of the mirror image emphasizes the discordance [End Page 371] between the image and infant, or, as MacCannel (1986, 70) says, it is a prelude to the function of the Other in the Symbolic as "an inverted image of the self," but the "turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him" refer back to the infant's "jubilant activity." But now it appears that it is not so much that the infant's jubilant motions express an inner feeling, but that jubilance overtakes it from a source beyond itself. Rather than making movements, it is moved like an automaton, alienated from its own body, by this mysterious power. Lacan also asserts that this mirror image
symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion. (1977, 3-4)
This foreign turbulence, unrelated to the child's feelings, conforms with his conception, developed more fully later, of jouissance as unrelated to biology, drives, or instincts. The "libidinal dynamism" (1977, 2) that he attributes to the movements he associates with the mirror stage involve an "erotic relation, in which the human individual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him from himself . . . " (1977, 19). He adds that "each great instinctual metamorphosis" (that is, what Freud called the pre-genital phases) is composed of "a conjunction of the subject's history and the unthinkable innateness of his desire" (1977, 19-20). The word 'innateness' might suggest a biological arena, but 'unthinkable,' removes desire from an arena that can, in principle, be approached by ordinary scientific understanding. The jubilance, as a predecessor of jouissance, thus conceived as independent of bodily sensation or drives, becomes in principle mysterious. It is not mysterious as it is for Freud in the sense of being unknown. Freud readily admits that there is much to be discovered, and perhaps much that will never be discovered, about Eros, about the relation of sexuality to mind and body. But Lacan renders [End Page 372] it in principle unknowable, a mystic force that moves through, but is independent of, biological life. This force becomes the basis for Lacan's mystic reorientation of Freudian theory.
The wedge that Lacan drives between the instrumental intelligence, in the development of which the child lags behind the chimpanzee, and the human subject that the child manifests in its jubilance, becomes particularly important in his discussion of the ego and human aggressivity. Instead of conceiving aggression as a manifestation of a Darwinian drive for survival, he locates it entirely in the Hegelian struggle for recognition deriving from the mirror stage. This element of his thinking is clear when he says that the success of Darwin's theory was due to the fact that Darwin
projected the predations of Victorian society and the economic euphoria that sanctioned for that society the social devastation that it initiated on a planetary scale, and to the fact that it justified its predations by the image of a laissez-faire of the strongest predators in competition for their natural prey. (1977, 26)
Lacan's arguments against Darwinism are haunted by contradictions similar to those we have already noted. The single biological fact that Lacan repeatedly asserts is human prematurity, that is, the relatively undeveloped state of the human infant. His arguments for the irrelevance of biology for the human condition rest on the supposition of a child's "intro-organic and relational discordance during the first six months, when be bears the signs, neurological and humoral, of a physiological natal prematuration" (1977, 19). But he makes a significant exception; to emphasize the primacy of the mirror stage over biology, he resorts to animal behavior, citing a piece of biological experimentation that finds that the gonads of a female pigeon will not mature unless it "should see another member of its species, of either sex." But if it doesn't, then "the desired effect may be obtained merely by placing the individual within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror" (1977, 3). Wilden (1968, 160) generalizes the way in which what Lacan calls transitivism functions as an alternative for the [End Page 373] literal mirror stage in animals; "without the visual presence of others, the maturing process is delayed, although it can be restored to a more nearly normal tempo by placing a mirror in the animal's cage". 7 Forrester (1990, 120-21) comments that this "reliance on animal ethology may seem surprising in view of Lacan's critique of naturalism." After asserting that Lacan did not treat biology phobically, he concludes that "what animal behavior indicated to him was the universal function of the image in sexual behavior--the universal function of deception and displacement." However, Lacan discriminates between animal and human reactions to images when he says that the animal has
a limited number of pre-established correspondences between its imaginary structure and whatever interests it in its umvelt, namely whatever is important for the perpetuation of individuals, themselves a function of the perpetuation of the type of the species. . . . For man the other has a captivating value, on account of the anticipation that is represented by the unitary image as it is perceived either in the mirror or in the entire reality of the fellow being. (1988a, 125)
Lacan's account, in contrast to Freud's, of animal instinctual behavior omits entirely an animal's sense of smell as the source of erotic excitation. By attributing animal sexual behavior only to its sight, Lacan deepens the sense of import of the mirror stage. But doing so threatens to link human behavior to a biological base. He counters this danger, and deepens the divide between the human organism and the human subject, by asserting that eroticism belongs to the organism. However, unlike the animal which is not born prematurely and which therefore has its erotic instincts aroused by a corresponding image external to it, the child, because of its chaotic inner organism, is erotically aroused by a misrecognition. But if, as I have been arguing, even Lacan's empirical claims in fact suggest that the infant's inner state must at least partially correspond to its self-image for any recognition to occur, then his argument not only fails, but reverses itself. The importance [End Page 374] of images confirms the link for the developing child between its inner sense and its sense of itself as an entity in the world, at the same time confirming the link between animal and human experience. All of the infantile experiences that are offered in support of the mirror stage, like those of movement, space, and time that are supposed to occur in front of a mirror, support the contrary thesis that the pulses of the body cooperate with the perceptions of the mind in creating our sense of reality. If so, the Darwinian instinct for survival is not a socially induced distortion, but is rather, as Freud argues, the instinctual ground of the ego.
Furthermore, Lacan's use of the mirror stage to separate desire from ego structures bears on his dismissal of love and affection, which he represents as mere strategies to obtain the illusory gratifications of the ego. This aspect of his thought appears most sharply in his discussion of transitivism, whereby a child will identify with and confuse itself with its peers, a phenomenon from which Lacan seeks corroboration for the empirical claims of the mirror stage. In "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" Lacan makes the same claim for this behavior as for mirror behavior when he says that on these "occasions the child anticipates on the mental plane the conquest of the functional unity of his own body, which, at that stage, is still incomplete on the plane of voluntary motility" (1977, 18). During the mirror stage "one will record the emotional reactions and the articulated evidences of a normal transitivism. The child who strikes another says that he has been struck; the child who sees another fall, cries" (1977, 18). It isn't clear whether Lacan means that the child literally mistakes the other child for itself, or whether he means identification in the more ordinary and looser sense. It would seem to be the former when he says that the infant takes "as equivalent his own action and that of the other" in saying that "François hit me whereas it was him who hit François. There is an unstable mirror between the child and his fellow being". (1988a, 169). Archard (1984, 66) claims that in this theory of transitivism, Lacan makes up for cultural objections to his theory of the mirror stage. Wilden rolls these two into one when he says that the mirror stage [End Page 375]
derives its name from the importance of mirror relationships in childhood. The significance of children's attempts to appropriate or control their own image in a mirror is that their actions are symptomatic of these deeper relationships. (1968, 160)
And MacCannell (1986, 63) also argues that the lack of personal identification in Lacan's mirror stage accounts for "the absolute 'transitivism' one observes in children after this point." If these transitive relations are analogous to the mirror stage, the same objections apply, for if a child's cry at another's hurt did not derive from a correct recognition of shared vulnerability, it would have no reason to cry.
Lacan uses this merger of transitivism with the mirror stage to found all adult relations upon efforts to force those upon whom one depends to sustain the delusion of being a unified and coherent entity. These relations constitute what Lacan calls the register of the Imaginary. In this pre-linguistic stage, or pre-Symbolic register, there are only dyadic relations. The adult relations that extend from the mirror stage are condemned to remain forever confined within Hegel's master/slave paradigm, in which one tries to win from another (small o) the recognition of oneself as a totality. If one succeeds, one hates that person for sustaining the alienation upon which that recognition is based, and if one fails one hates the person for refusing the needed recognition. One is thus condemned to the perpetual struggle to win from the other the recognition that can only condemn one to an alienated and false existence that defines all love relations. Lacan bases his view of love on two grounds; first, that the child sees the parent's unified image as a forever rebuking reminder of its own inadequacy, and second, that once the child perceives itself as perceived by others all its relationships consist in the Hegelian struggle for recognition by the other. Insofar as one wins the recognition, then one is the master who has the power to force the other to recognize him, but because the recognition is always false, one remains unrecognized, and remains therefore in the slave position.
This rather nightmare vision of human relations first [End Page 376] appears in Lacan's description of the child held by a "human support." Lacan here reduces the person holding the child to the level of a contraption, thereby excluding from his considerations the child's awareness of and reactions to that person. A child held by a parent would simultaneously viscerally experience and see the movements that accompany whatever emotional ambiance is created by the parent. There then would be no misrecognition, but rather a correct recognition of itself as an object visible to itself, and to others, in the same way as others are visible to it. Such a recognition, whether it occurred in relation to a mirror image or more generally as the child interacts with others, would be an important part of a child's development, but would not sustain Lacan's assertion that this stage creates an irrevocable gap between the child's inner sense of itself, the Real, and its social existence. Insofar as one conceives of the subject as being constituted at the point at which it recognizes its own exteriority to others, the subject so constituted would be at the intersection of its bodily sense of self and a sense of self as an object in the world perceptible to others. It would follow that the ego would be, as Freud argues, a faculty that develops from the organism's efforts to negotiate between its interiority and the external world. Further, if a child looked upon the image of the person holding it, and simultaneously felt the embrace of the person it saw in reflection, its capacity to correlate its visual sensations with inner and tactile ones would be increased rather than diminished. A child's behavior in front of mirrors or with others does not suggest a radical gap, but rather suggests a merger of self awareness with awareness of the reflected image and with the sensations and feelings generated by the person in whose arms it rests. This social dimension of the child's experience would interpenetrate the earliest recognition of its own image, as well as its proprioceptive or visceral sense in relation to the world. This combination of visceral sensation, the emotional ambience created by the parent, and the awareness of itself as a separate entity would become the condition of and the ground for developing the capacity to give and accept love. As we all know, love can be full of problems, but Lacan has failed to prove that in principle all [End Page 377] love is reduced to a struggle for dominion that ends only in death, or that desire is intrinsically death-oriented and therefore inevitably frustrated rather than gratified in love.
In summary then, one could only imagine the situation that Lacan describes if one held a child to a window, told him that it was a mirror, and persuaded him that he was looking at himself when in fact he was looking at another. It is difficult to imagine succeeding in this deception, but if one did, that child would be in the situation Lacan describes as common to all humanity; it would be entirely vulnerable to the manipulation of images and at a loss to relate its inner senses of itself to its experience of the world. As afloat in a world of images such a person would be, so would we be if Lacan's arguments were correct for what occurs in the mirror stage. However, far from providing evidence of a fundamental alienation that constitutes the subject, Lacan's account of the mirror experience rather supports the argument for a subject constituted in the intersection of felt bodily experiences, the sense of itself as being visible to others, and whatever emotional ambience accompanies the experience of encountering its mirror image. A subject so constituted from the intertwining of these early experiences does not have an absolute or trans-historical existence, but it does have a limited autonomy. For such a subject adult love relations, however embattled and imperfect, constitute the primary source of creature satisfaction. And the faculty of reason that derives from an ego grounded in our organism's drive for survival, however embattled by the contending forces of destructive inner drives and by their extension into irrational superego interdictions, constitutes our most reliable guide by which to adjust ourselves to changing circumstances and make the compromises necessary to manage in an imperfect world. Freud's paradigmatic play, Oedipus Rex, challenges such a subject to negotiate the tangled webs of human relationships. As we will see in the following sections, Lacan, by substituting Oedipus at Colonus for Freud's paradigmatic play, dismisses life's ordinary problems as mere smoke and mirrors that distract man from life's central challenge, which is to confront death. [End Page 378]
II. Redesigning the Freudian Landscape
Lacan equates his mirror stage to Freud's conception of narcissism. He refers to the ego as the "golem of narcissism" (1977, 124), and to being seduced and captured in "the veil of the narcissistic image" (1977, 195). In fact, however, the two derive from and lead to radically opposed world views. On the surface Lacan's formulation of the mirror stage may sound like an adaptation of Freud's argument in "On Narcissism," that
the individual does actually carry on a twofold existence: one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in a chain, which he serves against his will, or at least involuntarily. The individual himself regards sexuality as one of his own ends; whereas from another point of view he is an appendage to his germ-plasm. (1914, 78)
Freud contrasts the libido instincts to the ego instincts, which derive from the individual's drive for self-preservation, while Lacan omits the latter entirely from his theory, as we have seen from his scornful comments on Darwinism. His exclusion of a Darwinian self-preservative drive from the human psyche eliminates the distinction Freud makes between primary and secondary narcissism, a central distinction for Freud, who arrives at the theory of narcissism as a consequence of finding that some people whose "libidinal development has suffered some disturbance . . . have taken as a model not their mother but their own selves" (1914, 87). Freud relates this attachment to the self at the expense of others to a primary narcissism that, he claims, is common to all people. Seeing it as an aspect of infantile auto-eroticism that will in the course of time shape the ego, he says,
The first auto-erotic sexual satisfactions are experienced in connection with vital functions which serve the purpose of self-preservation. The sexual instincts are at the outset attached to the satisfaction of the ego-instincts; only later do they become independent of these, and even then we have an indication of that original attachment [End Page 379] in the fact that the persons who are concerned with a child's feeding, care, and protection become his earliest sexual objects. . . . (1914, 87)
For Freud, then, primary narcissism consists in an infant's visceral sense of its satisfactions, which unites nascent erotic and self-preservative drives with its perceptions of other persons and developing love for them. There is no sharp division between the stage at which it does not distinguish itself from the world, and that at which it does; rather the two stages shade into each other as the child's pleasure in itself extends to its perceptions of others who are from the beginning associated with that pleasure. Further, its developing ego is already in place, and primary narcissism involves the child's erotic drives taking for their object its self, including its own self-preservative drives. The ego then is not constituted, as it is for Lacan, in mistaking an image for reality, but rather is founded in those aspects of our organic relation to our environment, being fed and protected from dangers, without which we cannot survive.
Secondary narcissism develops only later, after the child, having passed through the Oedipal stage, has developed an ego-ideal, or what Freud later calls a super-ego. Narcissistic people are those who suffer from secondary narcissism. Such people either cannot love others, or if they do, they choose other persons who either compensate for what they feel as their failures to live up to their ego ideal, or who replicate the kind of person they take themselves to be. It is this condition, one that Freud considers pathological, that Lacan posits as the human norm.
Freud's conception of secondary narcissism most closely approximates Lacan's mirror stage, but with another difference. Even for this kind of person, secondary narcissism develops on a continuum with and incorporates primary narcissism. Therefore both persons whose love flows from their narcissism, and those whose loving is less bound to their self-images, incorporate their infantile experience into their adult choices, and both achieve some degree of real gratification. Such gratification may not be permanent or complete; it [End Page 380] may not fill all of the heart's desires, but it is nonetheless deeply connected to a profound and inward sense of bodily well-being. This view of love relationships contrasts sharply with Lacan's. For Freud "we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love" (1914, 85), "a real happy love corresponds to the primal condition in which object-libido and ego-libido cannot be distinguished" (1914, 100).
For Freud, the merger of one's self-love with love for another is the foundation of whatever happiness is available for human beings, but Lacan's redefinition of the Freudian ego as constituted in an illusion renders the love experience merely one form of the nightmarish Hegelian master/slave struggle. In Lacan's formulation such gratifications are not real, because in erasing the distinction between primary and secondary narcissism, Lacan also obliterates the distinction between the ego and the super-ego, and in the process he also transforms the concepts of castration, the death drive, the Oedipal drama, and of therapy so as to produce an entirely different topography of the individual's relation to the world.
For Freud the ego, grounded in survival instincts, is most closely bound up with rational action, whereas for Lacan it generates all individual and collective human ills. To render the full import of Lacan's revamping of the Freudian ego, as well as its relationship to the related conceptions of the superego or ego-ideal, I will first supply the necessary Freudian conceptual context. As we have seen in the discussion of primary narcissism, Freud locates the formation of the ego, "a coherent organization of mental processes," in the infant's experience of its own body (1923, 17). Freud conceives psychological ego functions, the sense of one's self as an entity, as an extension of, and structured in analogy to, the organism's perceptual systems. "The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego" (1923, 26); it develops as the child becomes aware of itself as a bounded entity and extends from the senses by which the child negotiates itself in the external world. On this level the ego is that which coordinates the child's awareness of things outside of itself with its bodily experience of pleasure and pain. It is the psychic equivalent of the proprioceptive senses. Initially distinct, [End Page 381] the erotic drives fuse with the ego by the agency of primary narcissism, so that the maturing ego takes as its task to wrest from a recalcitrant world as full a range of libidinous satisfactions as is consistent with survival.
As the child develops more complex emotions, and its quest for pleasure sometimes arouses parental disapproval, the ego's task of negotiating between the external and internal world grows more complex. Other persons are involved in the earliest development of primary narcissism, upon whom both pleasure and survival depend. The fusion of internal and external stimulae is so complete that Freud describes the ego as "a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes," one that "contains the history of those object-choices" (1923, 29). The ego represses those manifestations of early attachments that threaten psychic survival, that are not "ego-syntonic," thereby severing the ego and the id. But the divide is not absolute; the ego "is not sharply separated from the id; its lower portion merges into it. . . .The repressed merges into the id as well" (1923, 24), so that the ego becomes a conduit through which erotic and survival drives are shaped in relation to actual people in the world. Adapting Plato's analogy between a horse and rider for reason's relationship to passion, Freud says that while "the rider tries to [guide the horse] with his own strength, . . . the ego uses borrowed forces." The interconnection between these sometimes contending forces appears when he says that for a rider to stay on his horse, he
is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own. (1923, 25)
In this formulation, a strong ego involves sufficient psychic energy to employ one's intelligence and reason in the search for means to satisfy one's drives and desires as fully as possible in ways that do not jeopardize one's ordinary well-being. The ego "transforms the object-cathexes of the id into ego-structures." Therefore, "psychoanalysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id" (1923, 55). Seeing the ego as that which assesses what is possible does not [End Page 382] entail a therapy of conformity, as Lacan claims in his diatribes against American ego psychology. Rather it entails an ego that decides whether to change the world when that is possible, or conform to it when it is not.
Defining the ego as generated when the child takes itself to be the unified and spatially located mirror image, Lacan argues that it is necessarily aggressive because it is always enraged at the alienation which constituted it. At the same time, it erotically seizes upon those objects that it needs in order to confirm itself in its false autonomy. Lacan says that,
It is in this erotic relation, in which the human individual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him from himself, that are to be found the energy and the form on which this organization of the passions that he will call his ego is based. (1977, 19)
Therefore, human aggression and competitiveness do not arise, as they do for Freud, from the frustrations civilization imposes on man's animal instincts; on the contrary Lacan asserts that aggressivity "has nothing to do with the animal aggressivity of frustrated desire" (1977, 42). The mirror image constitutes the first transference, and is the basis for all other transference relationships, either in the therapeutic situation, or in falling in love.
In the register of the Imaginary, the mental correlate of the Mirror stage, all ego relations are antagonistic in two directions. On the one hand the subject projects onto the person who stands in for his mirror image his own rage at his alienated state. On the other hand, the mirror image or the person who substitutes for it challenges the subject to be in reality the self-contained and unified entity it takes the image, or now the other, to be. Lacking such inner unity, it tries to master the other, and fears that its failure to do so will catapult it back into its fragmented and disjointed reality. Lacan offers as proof his patients' dreams of dismemberment that reproduce the nightmare images portrayed by Hieronymus Bosch whose works form "an atlas of all the aggressive images that [End Page 383] torment mankind" (1977, 11). This primordial nightmare includes as well
the imago of the mother's body . . . [her] internal empire, the historical atlas of the intestinal divisions in which the images of the father and brothers (virtual or real), in which the voracious aggression of the subject himself, dispute their deleterious dominance over her sacred regions. (1977, 20-21)
To lose the struggle with the other constitutes falling into the "madness that lies behind the walls of asylums" (1977, 7). It is to be psychotic, like Schreber, who, because he defined his ego as victim, paranoically experienced himself attacked by God (1977, 124), and returned to the mirror stage "at which his body was merely a collection of colonies of foreign 'nerves,' a sort of sump for fragments detached from the identities of his persecutors" (1977, 209). For fear of falling into a Boschian nightmare or psychosis, each person must force the other to recognize her as the unified being she is not, so that ego relations are locked in Hegel's master/slave struggle. Lacan's vision of the master/slave struggle as defining social relations under capitalism, rather than a stage of the development of consciousness, derives from Alexander Kojève's lectures on Hegel (1969), which shaped the French understanding of Hegel. As we will see later, on this basis Lacan casts himself not only as master psychoanalyst, but as healer of cultural ills.
On the one hand, then, the ego is the specular image of an ever retreating lure of maturity, in relation to which the person will forever be found wanting. On the other hand, Lacan transfers to the ego formation the production of guilt that Freud will assign to the super-ego. In an oblique reference to original sin, Lacan sees modern man locked in ego-relations that cause an "isolation of the soul ever more akin to its original dereliction" (1977, 27). The therapist's task is to release the analysand from the symptoms generated by his refusal to abandon false ego images and enter the Symbolic. Guilt arises from the primal alienation by which the ego is constituted; it becomes a psychological analogue to original [End Page 384] sin. It does not arise, as it does for Freud, from the failure to meet specific parental and social norms that one has introjected; rather it is the corollary of having an ego.
The triumph of the ego is responsible for what Lacan sees as the distortion of psychoanalytic practice by North American ego analysts who, in the name of an adaptive theory of cure, establish Master/Slave relations with their analysands, whereas for Lacan the therapist's task is to initiate the patient into higher mysteries. On the historical level, ego manifests itself in the Darwinian world view that is responsible for
the economic euphoria that sanctioned for that society the social devastation that it initiated on a planetary scale, and to the fact that it justified its predations by the image of a laissez-faire of the strongest predators in competition for their natural prey. (1977, 26)
The technological control enjoyed by emancipated modern man derives from the ego which "structures human knowledge as paranoiac" (1977, 3). In short, the unchecked proliferation of ego structures is responsible for "the utilitarian conception of man that reinforces it, in an ever more advanced realization of man as individual" (1977, 27), exactly the realization that was Freud's therapeutic goal. Lacan argues that he brings out Freud's true meaning by rewriting "Where the id was, there the ego shall be" to mean that "'There where it was . . . it is my duty that I should come to being'" (1977, 129) because he replaces the concept of the id with a mystical pre-lapsarian plenitude that he calls the Real. But Freud's conception of the id and ego, and of their relation to the superego, permits no such interpretation.
Lacan advocates as compensation for the original sin of ego formation a pre-Enlightenment, anti-individualistic, anti-rational, and authoritarian conception of human life and society. In a seldom-quoted passage, but one which expresses attitudes that pervade his work, Lacan deplores
the increasing absence of all those saturations of the superego and ego-ideal that are realized in all kinds or [End Page 385] organic forms in traditional societies, forms that extend from the rituals of everyday intimacy to the periodical festivals in which the community manifests itself. We no longer know them except in their most obviously degraded aspects. Furthermore, in abolishing the cosmic polarity of the male and female principles, our society undergoes all the psychological effects proper to the modern phenomenon known as the 'battle between the sexes'--a vast community of such effects, at the limit between the 'democratic' anarchy of the passions and their desperate leveling down by the 'great winged hornet' of narcissistic tyranny. (1977, 26-27)
In order to emerge from contemporary "barbarism" we need "the wisdom of Plato" to restore us to the "rituals of everyday intimacy" of traditional society. These views on man, society, and authority derive from the divide Lacan cleaves between human psychology and species and physical existence. If, as Lacan claims, our own survival needs provide no inner structure of self-restraint, then it would follow that we should be subject to the kind of Platonic authoritarianism that Lacan suggests in the above quotation. Given Lacan's understanding of what the ego is, his therapeutic goal must necessarily be to circumvent it by positing a "subject" that exists apart from it. The best one could do with such an ego would be to get it to submit, as Lacan suggests in the passage quoted above. Though Lacan deplores pragmatic adaptation as a therapeutic goal, logically he should be content with such a goal for all except those chosen few who are worthy of the glimpse of Diana that Lacan uses as a figure of Truth (1977, 124). 8
While Lacan admits that his conception of the ego departs from what the ego psychologists have made the topographic model of "The Ego and the Id," he argues that Freud's later work distorted his earlier views which, by implication, are closer to his own. It is true that Freud's later topographical model emphasizes the ego, but it develops rather than supersedes his earlier dynamic model. Freud takes pains to remind his readers that the boundaries between the structural entities are indistinct and permeable. The ego does become more [End Page 386] sharply defined, as Freud attributes some of the functions that he formerly included in the ego to the id, or the superego. But he preserves the possibility of a merger between the ego and id that he developed in "On Narcissism," in which he says that in illness the ego interests, ordinarily turned towards the outer world, and the libido, ordinarily turned toward a loved person, become "indistinguishable from each other" (1914, 82) when both converge on the body. In Instincts and their Vicissitudes Freud attributes to the ego some of the properties that later characterize the id:
The ego hates, abhors and pursues with intent to destroy all objects which are a source of pleasurable feeling for it, without taking into account whether they mean a frustration of sexual satisfaction or of the satisfaction of self-preservative needs. (1915, 138)
The later work, more firmly hooking the ego to the perceptual system and to self-preservation, eliminates confusion about the boundary between the ego and the id which derives from an earlier formulation in which Freud in Two Principles of Mental Functioning distinguishes between a "pleasure-ego [which] can do nothing but wish . . . [and the] reality-ego," which has to do with self-preservation (1911, 223 italics Freud's). This split ego appears also in Mourning and Melancholia in which Freud says that the "libidinal cathexes" withdraw "to the place in the ego from which [they] had proceeded" and become subject to the "critical agency." This agency merges with the ego when he adds that "the ego debases itself and rages against itself" (1917, 257). Though one may prefer Freud's earlier formulation to the later more schematic version, the point here is that no Freudian formulation accords with Lacan's. 9
Lacan's concept of the ego, in which the subject is structured as "a rival with himself" (1977, 22), merges into it most of what Freud attributes to the superego. In Freudian theory the superego considerably complicates and darkens the psychological landscape. While the ego represents one portion of the id, another dynamic generates the superego or ego-ideal. The latter term is one he uses in his earlier writings, but [End Page 387] later it merges with the former. In "On Narcissism" the ego-ideal is that which the child "substitutes for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal" (1914, 88n). This function later becomes one side of a two-sided coin. In the topographical model, the concept retains its first meaning, but merges with that of the superego, which emphasizes the guilt produced by the person's failure to realize his ideal self-image. Since in this later work Freud uses the two terms interchangeably, I will confine myself to the term superego.
The superego originates in relation to other persons, usually parents. As it enters into the Oedipal phase, it perceives its mother and father as separate persons, and both loves and competes with both of them. Leaving aside the complexities that derive from his theory of bi-sexuality and of what Freud calls the complete or two-phased Oedipal configuration, the most significant aspect of the superego lies in its genesis in the Oedipal drama. In simplified terms, the boy's nascent eroticism intensifies his already affectionate relation to his mother, so that he enters into an ambivalent and potentially competitive relation with his father, with whom he identifies and whose place he covets. The girl's identification with her mother acquires ambivalence and hostility when her nascent eroticism intensifies her affection for her father. The child's ego incorporates these parental identifications, but when the child succumbs to the parental prohibitions, the portion of the ego that renounces its erotic claims on one or the other parent "confronts the other contents of the ego as an ego-ideal or super-ego" (1923, 34,italics Freud's). Since the superego is initially part of the ego, it carries forward the "earliest object-choices of the id," but the residual feelings that derive from those early choices merge with the fear and anxiety consequent upon their prohibition. It "represents an energetic reaction-formation" (1923, 34) against those same loved persons. The child's compensation for renouncing its Oedipal claim is a reaffirmed identification with one or the other parent that permits it to introject, to make its own, the parental prohibition. But that identification has a double valence; on the one hand, on its basis the child develops its image of the kind of person it wishes to become, but on the other hand, the child is prohibited [End Page 388] from being that kind of person--that is, the child may not take the place of its same-sex parent in relation to the parent of the opposite sex.
This conception of the superego as closing the Oedipal stage is crucial for Freud's view of the human condition. Under pressure of castration fears, along with "the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading" (1923, 34), the boy child, relinquishing its Oedipal claims, bonds with his father and internalizes the cultural standards along with parental prohibitions. In this way the child forms a conscience in accord with the "moral and aesthetic" trends of his world, and establishes in himself the potential for becoming a self-regulating member of society. In a somewhat ironical move to appease those who are distressed by his bleak assessment of the human condition, Freud says that "here we have that higher nature . . ., the representative of our relation to our parents" (1923, 36). The source of the irony emerges when he develops the more forbidding aspects of the superego, but, on its positive side, it marks the stage at which the child, at least the boy, establishes himself as a self-regulating social being. 10
Having transferred to the ego the major attributes of the Freudian superego, Lacan seldom uses the latter term. When he does, he associates the superego with the Imaginary and pre-linguistic, rather than the Symbolic or social and linguistic. With a reference to Melanie Klein's theory of the child's introjection of "bad internal objects," he relates the superego to the meconnaissance of the mirror stage, which, he says, "enables us to situate as perfectly original the first formation of the superego" (1977, 21). The superego then becomes a repository of infantile identifications, which "in the broken link of the symbolic chain, raise from the imaginary that obscene, ferocious figure in which we must see the true signification of the superego" (1977, 143). Elsewhere he uses the term somewhat differently. The superego is that which condemns the son to reproduce the mistakes of his father (1988b, 89), or to carry from the Imaginary images of the father that distort the subject's apprehension of the Law of the Symbolic. He describes it as a "disruptive, almost demonic" extension of the interiorized images of the rejecting and [End Page 389] desiring mother (1988b, 251), and refers to a character in Moliere's Amphitryon as "a man of the super-ego, who is always wanting to elevate himself to the dignity of the ideals of the father, of the master, and who imagines that is how he will attain the object of his desire" (1988b, 266). Lacan associates it with the Law (that is, the realm of language in the symbolic) but only as a distorting carryover that has been translated into language in the form of senseless and blind prohibitions (1988a, 102). Though Lacan distinguishes the ego-ideal from the superego, they end up being the pleasurable or unpleasurable experiences of a single phenomenon. The ego-ideal is what the child first saw "appearing in the form of the parent holding him up before the mirror" (1973, 257). Therefore, the term overlaps with the unified image of the mirror stage with which the child identifes, attempts to emulate, and loves in the only way possible within the Lacanian system (1988a, 138-39).
However, the most philosophically crucial element of Lacan's revision of the Freudian superego is his chronological reversal of the superego and the Oedipal stage. As we have seen, Lacan relates the superego to the pre-Oedipal, Imaginary register, rather than seeing it as catapulting the child from the Oedipal stage into the adult realm of self-regulation, a realm that Lacan replaces with his conception of the Symbolic register. Since the superego does not bring the Oedipal phase to a close, nothing does. For Lacan the Oedipal phase has no resolution. Neurotic ills do not arise, as they do for Freud, from a failure to cast off the filial fear, guilts, and inadequacies that prevent one from assuming the fullness of rational individualistic self-reliance. Rather Lacan considers psychic ills to arise from the failure to inaugurate the Oedipal configuration. Taking the "failures of Oedipal identification" as the source of neurotic symptoms, he thinks it is an error that "the effects of the complex were first perceived in failures to resolve it" (1977, 24-25, italics his). Therefore, since for Lacan entry into the Oedipal triad is synonymous with entry into the Symbolic, the world of Law, culture, and traditions, there can be no question of resolution, or of qualifying the need for a total submission to authority. The normative state for Lacan is [End Page 390] one in which the person continues to define himself as subject, not only to authority in a modern abstract sense, but to a pre-modern, paternally imbued image of authority. Any sense of a personal and self-regulating conscience arises from distorting ego images.
Connected to this revision of the Oedipus complex is Lacan's revision of the castration complex. For Freud, castration fears, originating at the time the boy realizes that the girl lacks a penis, are mobilized when the Oedipal phase brings him into competition with his father. A castration complex occurs when an unsatisfactorily resolved Oedipal configuration leaves the person in a continuing fear that deprives him of his powers, either of his actual sexual potency, or of the psychic extension of potency as confidence in his powers in relation to authority. The therapeutic goal is to diminish the fear that is itself castrating. Lacan, however, moves castration back to the primordial gap of the mirror stage. That is, it is the human condition to be castrated, and the possession of a penis misleads the male into pretending to himself that he isn't. Therefore, in failing to enter into the Oedipal phase one holds onto the mirage of phallic power given by ego images. The therapeutic goal is for the subject to accept that he is castrated, and so submit to paternal authority in the Oedipal stage as a prelude to submitting to the Law. The Oedipal phase and the father's prohibition constitute the Symbolic Law in which the actual father of the pre-Oedipal Imaginary stage is transformed into the Name of the Father of the "field of culture," which is identical to the "field of the Other--which, strictly speaking, is the Oedipus complex" (1973, 204). Therefore one takes one's place as "subject" in the double and interdependent senses in which Lacan intends the term. 11
These revamped conceptions of the Oedipal configuration and castration cohere with Lacan's valorization of pre-modern forms of authority, which he expresses as the Name of the Father, a formulation that equates social and cultural authority with the paternal. This conception underlies his vision of those traditional festivals that he equates with "a cultural normativity bound up from the dawn of history with the imago of the father" (1977, 22), as well as his scorn for [End Page 391] those emigré therapists "on the other side of the Atlantic" who, in espousing "the autonomous ego," sold out to the abstract positivism and objectification of that world (1977, 230, italics his).
In contrast, Freud's ideal involves a conception of a rational legal authority, of limited jurisdiction and abstracted away from familial emotions to which one at least presumes one has freely consented. This is why Freud sees the superego develop only as the concluding phase of the Oedipal constellation. Though he equates the superego with conscience, Freud does not rest on it whatever hopes he has for the human species. Being, as Freud puts it, the heir of the Oedipus complex, the superego not only internalizes the cultural norms of the society; it also expresses "the most powerful impulses and most important libidinal vicissitudes of the id" (1923, 36). The full consequences of Lacan's absorption of Freud's conception of the superego into the ego emerge when he discusses the relations between the superego and the id. These relations involve the death instinct, another Freudian formulation that Lacan renegotiates.
In Freud's conception the infantile id combines representations of life-preservative instincts that later, with the help of the senses and intelligence that Freud calls the "system Pcpt.," become the ego, with representations of erotic drives that are manifested in varying ways as the child passes through the infantile sexual stages. In time the id becomes the locus as well of desires that have been repressed under the weight of social prohibition, where they combine with anger generated by that repression, and the "impulses of jealous rivalry against . . . brother and sisters" (1923, 37). The ego's task is to master the id because,
if the ego has not succeeded in properly mastering the Oedipus complex, the energetic cathexis of the latter, springing from the id will come into operation once more in the reaction-formation of the ego-ideal. (1923, 39)
However, from the time of Beyond the Pleasure Principle the erotic drives include a death instinct that complicates the [End Page 392] picture. By this Freud means that life itself has a tendency to rid itself of the tension that constitutes it and return to primal inertness, a conception that relates to his view that sexual pleasure consists in release of tension.
In addition, then, to retaining and intensifying the residues of personal history, the id also incorporates the death instinct and passes it onto the ego. It appears first as aggression towards others, but, meeting prohibitions from the superego, this aggression turns back on the self in the form of self-denigration and self-punitive guilt. Furthermore, "the instinct of destruction is habitually brought into the service of Eros" (XIX, 41, italics his) when in regressive modes it transforms love into hate and joins the pre-genital sexual phases to manifest itself as sadism and masochism.
On the one side of the ego, then, a ravenously libidinous id has no patience with the tame pleasures ordinary life affords. On the other side, the superego draws on those early identifications, along with the destructive energies of the death instinct, and unites them with parental and social prohibitions. Therefore, "as the child was once under a compulsion to obey its parents, so the ego submits to the categorical imperative of its super-ego" (1923, 48). In various forms of pathology the superego chastises the ego for the drives it has repudiated. It becomes a "pure culture of the death instinct," that "often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death" (1923, 53). "Helpless in both directions, the ego defends itself vainly, alike against the instigations of the murderous id and against the reproaches of the punishing conscience." Between them is the beleaguered ego, which "strives to be moral" (1923, 54) while being besieged by the blind demands of the id's libido, the superego's morally punitive version of libido, and the demands of the external world.
However, this beleaguered ego still originates as a "body ego." Later associated with perception, it finally aligns with intelligence that can be looked to, if anything can, for rational assessment of the ways in which the external world can afford us pleasure or cause us pain. Through its extension in intelligence, the ego assesses the viability of our personal and [End Page 393] cultural pasts as guides to the present; the ego, by incorporating some of the id energies into itself and desexualizing or sublimating them into cultural activity, prevents the death drive from overwhelming us after we have served Eros' reproductive purposes (1923, 47). The ego, if anything does, carves out some space for the exercise of human freedom. Only it can negotiate between, on the one hand, our biological species drives that are concerned neither with our individual well-being nor the quality of our social lives, and, on the other hand, the past modes of adaptation that are no longer relevant to our present individual or collective well-being. It follows that psychoanalytic therapy should be conceived as "an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id" (1923, 56).
The consequence of Lacan's redefinition of the ego appears nowhere more starkly than in the spiritual meaning he attributes to the death instinct. He sees it as the Real, as the inscription in the human psyche of life's ultimate meaning. Only in confrontation with death does the subject cast off the mirror images that compose the ego. Drawing on Kojève's Hegel lectures, he argues that the master and slave take their positions by virtue of the former's courage to confront death, while the latter's fear keeps him slave to mirror images. Death is what exists in the void opened with the onset of the mirror stage; it exists in gaps, gaps that are, as we will see in the next section, analogous to the gaps in Saussurean linguistic theory; it exists in the gap between the subject and the ego to which it is, as Lacan often says, eccentric. Since the true self, one's subjecthood, does not exist in any of the known categories that constitute life, it can exist only in confrontation with death. Only as a kind of non-being can the subject know itself. The blank emptiness of complete negation is what the blank face of the analyst should elicit in the analysand, who thereby confronts his own being in relation to Death. Therapy becomes a spiritual journey and the therapist a spiritual healer who "may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the 'Thou art that,' in which is revealed to him the cipher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that point where the real journey begins" (1977, 7). This "real journey" is a version of a Platonic journey from true [End Page 394] opinion to knowledge (1988b, 20), and it is begun not in the company of Socrates as therapist, but of Diotima, Socrates' teacher. As Lacan puts it in his enigmatic way, "Castration means that jouissance must be refused, so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (l'échelle renversée) of the Law of desire."
In Lacan's formulation, death is not biological death, but is rather the primordial void that opens the mirror stage. This conception accords with his revision of the Oedipus complex, in which he posits Oedipus at Colonus rather than Oedipus Rex as his founding literary text. 12 Because Oedipal conflicts cannot be resolved in life, they merge into a confrontation with death, a confrontation that distinguishes human from animal life in that it reveals, in Heideggerian fashion, man's "being for death" (1977, 104). When Oedipus, accompanied by Theseus, seeks his grave in the grove outside of Athens, he becomes the spiritual founder of Athenian civilization. Lacan equates himself with "Truth" when he has this figure say that Sophocles did not imagine Oedipus pursued by the "bleeding hounds" that followed Orestes, "certain as he was of finding with him at the sinister meeting at Colonus the hour of truth" (E. 123). Thus having converted to a spiritual quest what for Freud is a psychological concomitant of a biological drive, Lacan redefines the therapist from a Freudian man of science to a wise man who combines Christ-like love with Hegelian knowledge:
Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, that of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the loftiest, because the undertaking of the psychoanalyst acts in our time as a mediator between the man of care and the subject of absolute knowledge. (1977, 105)
But Lacan also revises Hegel, who equates absolute knowledge with consciousness. Criticizing Hegel for, like modern scientists, neglecting mystic states, he says that "the hour of truth must strike" elsewhere than in consciousness, so that the therapeutic mystic initiation also becomes part of a mystic historical unfolding (1977, 297).
I want to conclude this section by dismantling a false dichotomy that Lacan draws between a reified ego and a true self, when he mockingly equates the ego to a speaking desk (E. 131-35). [End Page 395] This dichotomy also lies behind various postmodern accounts of the ego's social construction, which seem to render the Freudian ego naive. It rests on a simplification and falsification of the autonomy that Freud attributes to the ego. His conception of autonomy does not mean that the ego is self-originating or all of a piece. As we have seen, Freud in Mourning and Melancholia (1917, 249-250), conceived of it as being composed initially of sediments of infantile identifications, and later of identifications and introjections remaining from lost love relationships. Though it is thus formulated as a composite, it is not a collection of disjointed fragments. Freud's conception of ego autonomy emerges most clearly in analogy to the body. At conception, our bodies take form from the genetic materials of our parents, and from the womb onwards they grow from the nutrients we imbibe. As Lacan, citing common knowledge, points out, not a single cell remains in our bodies beyond seven years. That we generally remain recognizable to ourselves and others throughout these changes suggests that our bodies are formally constituted by an organizing principle, inscribed in our DNA. But even if one should become unrecognizable to a friend from the deep past, the immune system still recognizes and rejects organs that are foreign to it. That it does so suggests that one might reasonably talk about a body identity beyond the level of consciousness. 13
Whether the unique organization and inner integration of our bodies on this biological level has any bearing on the uniqueness of each person's proprioceptive awareness obviously cannot be known, for we have no way of comparing our normal internal sense of ourselves to that of other persons. We do have such a sense however, as we avoid collisions, seek pleasure, adjust the distance we place between ourselves and others. That we may lose it under pathological conditions, and that it will dissolve in time, in no way challenges its reality in an ordinary sense. Similarly, on the psychic level the ego, initially composed of the sediments of diverse experiences, acquires a mode of taking in new ones. Increasingly it acquires power to select the encounters and experiences that will later contribute to its composition. To use Holland's apt formulation, it has, in analogy to the proprioceptive sense and to the body's immune response, an identity theme. 14 [End Page 396]
That there can be variations on this theme, that it can unravel in time, does not thereby cancel its reality while it endures. That it is capable of different orchestrations, and that its different strands may come apart does not logically entail the claim that it is therefore "really" a disjointed collection of fragments. For the time it endures its reality is as secure as the reality of a symphony while it is being played. The symphony cannot exist without the score that gives evidence of a composer, the musicians, the instruments, the hall, and all the vast network of social institutions that produce and maintain them. But the music is not reducible to what generates it. Between the discord of the musicians tuning their instruments and the silence of the emptying hall, the music has its reality. This kind of autonomy, and this kind of identity, is sufficient to support a Freudian conception of the ego. Only a religious or mystic perspective equates reality with permanence, or requires an absolute divide between mind and matter to claim any degree of individual autonomy.
III. Language and the Unconscious
Lacanians argue that Lacan's emphasis on language brings out the true significance of Freud's "talking cure," and that Lacan's theories about the nature of the psyche, the unconscious, and the human condition are proved by his linguistics. As well, they claim that Lacan's emphasis on the arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified that he takes from Saussurean linguistics overcomes Freudian determinism. However, it is precisely because Freud grounded his theory of language in a normative conception of physical reality that he was able to preserve a conceptual space for a degree of human freedom, while Lacan's theory leaves none. Through his theory of language, Lacan substitutes for Freud's stabilizing biological ground a phenomenological version of the chain of being. This section will tease out the assumptions about language that lie behind Freud's comments about the relation of the unconscious to language, and, comparing Freud's arguments to Lacan's, it will discuss the philosophical and political implications that shape Lacan's psycho-linguistic theory. [End Page 397]
Contrary to Lacan's claims, Freud's conception of the "talking cure" has no need of Lacan's version of Saussurean linguistics to make it intelligible. It depends on the same kinds of oppositions between manifest and latent content, and primary and secondary process that govern the Interpretation of Dreams. These oppositions are consistent with his relatively few, but hardly casual, comments on words and thought. Freud's understanding of language can be expressed in the vocabulary of signifiers, signifieds, and signs, but not in a way that supports Lacan's interpretation of Saussure.
In "Words and Things," an appendix to The Unconscious, Freud grounds the acquisition of language in bodily experience. Words, he says, combine innervatory images, or the sense of muscular tension used in producing them, with the sound image, and with sensations from the organs of speech after we have spoken. As a child learns to speak, these impressions are doubled; it hears the sound image, experiences its own bodily movements in making the sound, and hears the product of its own effort (1915, 210). Therefore, both the sound value and the meaningfulness of words are rooted in the visual, acoustic, and kinesthetic bodily experience. At the same time the sound image becomes linked to object-associations, what Lacan would call the signified. These object associations also have visual, tactile, and acoustic dimensions, so that objects associated with the sound image carry the multiple sense associations of the sound itself. This formulation suggests that specific sounds that have acquired a vague sense of meaningfulness transform themselves into signs, or words, gradually. First the child hears a sound, unattached to a concept. In Saussurean terms, upon repetition the sound becomes a signifier at the same time as it acquires a signified and becomes a sign. Contrary to Lacan, the relation between signified and signified, though arbitrary, is stabilized because the child repeatedly hears the sounds in contexts circumscribed by the language system.
Signs may be associated with various emotions, depending on the particular environment in which the child experienced the sound, either before or after it acquired linguistic significance. Though Freud says that the associations with the sound itself, or the signifier, are limited, he adds that the associations [End Page 398] with the object, or signifieds, are unlimited (1915, 214). Freud relies mainly on the open-endedness of the unconscious associations with signifieds for his therapeutic claim for free association. In the unconscious there exist "thing-presentations" rather than "word-presentations." Through displacement and condensation, visual images of objects, along with associated feelings that have not found a way to consciousness, are linked to words. This process constitutes primary process thought, our earliest mental process and that which produces our dreams. Verbal images constitute the preconscious, through which the primary visual images must pass to become conscious.
Freud's discussion of schizophrenia develops the relation among these various levels. The schizophrenic ceases to desire objects, but retains the "word-presentations" of them. "What we have permissibly called the conscious presentation of the object can now be split up into the presentation of the word and the presentation of the thing" (italics Freud's, 1915, 201). The schizophrenic tries to regain the lost objects by concentrating on words, but losing access to unconscious feelings, rests content with words instead of things. This abnormal phenomenon leads Freud to assert that normal functioning involves an intimate relationship between the thing, or visual image in the present, and the mnemic images from the past. Thus,
the conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the thing plus the presentation of the word belonging to it, while the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone. (1915, 201)
This kind of unconscious thinking in pictures cannot represent relationships. Only words allow for expression of relations between things; therefore the role of the talking cure is to allow for representation of relationships that can be represented in no other way, but which nonetheless exist apart from the words that represent them. Words and language are at one end of a mental structure that works in two directions: [End Page 399]
It is a general truth that our mental activity moves in two opposite directions: either it starts from the instincts and passes though the system Ucs., to conscious thought-activity; or, beginning with an instigation from outside, it passes through the system Cs. and Pcs. till it reaches the Ucs. cathexes of the ego and objects. (1915, 204)
In its journey to consciousness, an unconscious thought "is carried out on some material which remains unknown" (1923, 20), but in order to become conscious it must first be connected to word-presentations in the preconscious, which are memory traces of earlier perceptions that can become conscious only through word associations. While verbal formulations pervade all aspects of consciousness, our sense of their significance derives from elsewhere. Freud writes that the superego, like the ego, consists in word presentations, and has its origin in "things heard," "but the cathectic energy does not reach these contents of the super-ego from auditory perception (instruction or reading) but from sources in the id" (italics Freud's, 1923, 52). If we keep in mind that the superego has its roots in the id, and that the social ideals of family, class, or nation (1914, 101) it supports are infused with the narcissism that originates in bodily pleasure, then we repress those libidinous impulses that conflict with the cultural and ethical ideas that the other libidinous forces inform with something equivalent to parental force (1914, 93). As a consequence the competing drives are deprived of the words that alone can bring them to consciousness.
As we have seen, Freud's discussion of language merges with his inquiry into the nature of the unconscious and into the process by which language, in analysis and elsewhere, links what has risen to consciousness to the preconscious and the unconscious. There is something behind language then, and in the talking cure words function as the conduit through which whatever is behind them gets translated into comprehensible form. Though the child is surrounded by language as it passes through all of Freud's infantile stages, the prohibitions of its Oedipal designs are registered in body gesture and facial expression, as well as language. In Freud's formulation, the child's feelings and ideas predate and are separate from [End Page 400] the words that later express them. Even a strictly verbal prohibition, such as "don't rub yourself" must be regarded as a speech act which derives significance from the action that is being prohibited. To elicit associations from an analysand is to ask him to trace verbal elements of his dream account to the unconscious images and feelings that cathected to the word-representations of the pre-conscious. Freud, like Lacan, advises the therapist to listen with a hovering attention to the hesitations, gaps, and breaks in the flow of speech, but his point is that these gaps show the presence of feelings and images that have not reached, but are pressing towards, verbal expression.
Language is important, not because the unconscious is structured like a language, but rather because it isn't. To transmute feelings and visual images into words that articulate relations that are lacking in the primary process, makes repudiated drives and images available to the ego for rational scrutiny, and makes possible reasonable decisions about what gratifications are and are not possible. This process of subjecting primary process material to the relational articulation and subordination that only the grammatical forms of language provide, is to let ego be where id was. It is because the rational structures of language are separate from the unconscious that language can mediate between our primal drives and the cultural forms that those drives have helped to create.
This formulation by itself attributes to Freud too sanguine a view of human rationality. Merely bringing the previously non-verbal into verbal forms is no guarantee of rational assessment. The delusions that can come from the combined force of verbal forms infused with non-verbal energies are suggested when he describes the part played by word presentations:
By their interposition internal thought-processes are made into perceptions. It is like a demonstration of the theorem that all knowledge has its origin in external perception. When a hypercathexis of the process of thinking takes place, thoughts are actually perceived--as if they came from without--and are consequently held to be true. (italics Freud's, 1923, 23) [End Page 401]
The links suggested here between the verbal and the pre-verbal might seem to support Lacan's assertion that Freud shows us that all knowledge is paranoiac. However, Lacan in this assertion takes from Freud only one aspect of a contradiction that Freud refused to abandon.
While the dependence of thought on the irrational non-verbal that permeates it undermines confidence in rationality in one way, in another way it supports it. In Freud's bi-polar model, the force of the non-verbal can distort the rational, the rational can also contain and direct the non-verbal. Freud relates thought processes in general to displacements. Comparable to the way in which vengeful feelings towards one person can be transferred onto another, thought processes constitute a form of transference. "If thought processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements, then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive forces" (1923, 45). It is important to note that Freud posits an activity of thinking that is independent of its energy source, just as he maintains the dualistic model for the self-preservative and erotic drives, even though the latter may distort the former. It is this model that permits Freud to say that our mental apparatus is "first and foremost a device designed for mastering excitations which would otherwise be felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects. Working them over in the mind" (1914, 85) helps drain away otherwise disturbing excitations. To be worked over in the mind, excitations must be represented by words, which allow them also to be tamed and assuaged. This direct link between the verbal representations that are worked over and the drives and desires that permeate the words, in combination with their separate origin and nature, allows Freud to believe in the possibility that men like Copernicus, Darwin, and (modestly) he himself can make truth claims even when, or perhaps especially when, they expose the fragility of the rationality they use. It also suggests that ideas in the mind can in some way satisfy the drives they represent, and channel non-verbal energies into mind-chosen purposes. Freud's "talking cure" is based on a conception of the mind as capable of using [End Page 402] language to oscillate and arbitrate betwen the demands of id and ego, or of erotic and survival drives.
Implicit in Freud's writings is a conception of language that allows for Lacan's extended sense of it as equivalent to the Symbolic, or the realm of social structures and culture in general. In this extended sense, too, for Freud our relation to language is double. On the one hand it speaks us, insofar as the controlling cultural ideas pass into us through our parents. Our primal drives represent themselves in terms of those ideas, and in doing so shape our id and our superego. On the other hand, our ego forces, beleaguered as they are, struggle in the nets of la langue for a place from which to speak their parole. To adapt Noam Chomksy's terms, it is the ego that manipulates the language into which it is inserted, and creates a new sentence with each utterance. To extend metaphorically Chomsky's formulation, in the Symbolic the ego creates a new integration of the controlling cultural ideas that constitute aspects of itself, its id and superego. This new integration does not account fully for its constitution because its roots remain in the pre-cultural, biological drives that remain as shaping forces.
Such a conception is individualistic. That is, it does not deny that we are constituted in cultural forms that pre-exist us, but it values those aspects of the self that can win some freedom from them. So conceived, the self battles simultaneously against pressures from the external world and their inner psychic representatives. In accord with his Enlightenment views, Freud conceives the ego as able to take a stand on what it realistically conceives as its own good, conceived individually or collectively, and from that perspective assess the value of its inherited culture.
This conception does not address the meaning of life. At those self-authenticating moments of struggle or of heightened involvement in activities or relationships, the question of its meaning does not arise. Yearnings for a more embracing and enduring sense of meaning, one that will assuage the fear of the void that can open at any time beneath the quotidien, Freud explains as nostalgia. For him this nostalgia derives most immediately from the infantile, pre-individualized, oceanic [End Page 403] state, and, more remotely, from the realm of inanimate matter to which our biological beings seek a return.
It is upon these vague yearnings, ones Freud dismisses as the lingering traces of a less mature humanity, that Lacan builds his entire system, from the primordial gap of the mirror stage to his conception of language. 15 In discussing the mirror stage, Lacan says that the infant's jubilance in front of the mirror marks the moment at which "the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject" (italics mine, 1977, 42). The term 'restores' implies that in becoming a subject in the Symbolic, Lacan's version of Hegel's civic institutions that constitute the universal for those who live within them, one is restored to a state prior to the "original dereliction" of the mirror stage, a state, by implication, of primal innocence in a mysterious, self-authenticating domain that Lacan refers to as the Real.
The meaning of this illusive term can be surmised from Lacan's understanding of language. He talks about language on two levels: the first has to do with Saussurean linguistics, and the second has to do with an extension of those linguistics to "the universal," or the entire realm of social, political, and cultural institutions. Lacan adapts the Saussurean conception of language as based on an arbitrary, that is, conventional, relation of the signifier, or sound image, to the signified, or conception for which the sound image stands. Saussure writes his formula as s/S, that is signified over signifier, and Lacan reverses that, using the formula S/s to emphasize the primacy of the signifier. This changed emphasis signals Lacan's departure from Saussure's formulation in which a signifier can be such only in relation to a signified because they are related as are the two sides of a coin. 16 For Lacan, and on one level for Saussure, meaning does not reside in a specific sound image, but only in the systematic differences of a particular sound image from other sound images possible in the language. There are two points Lacan makes about the human condition on the basis of this conception. The first is that the act of conscious speaking depends on an unconscious network that [End Page 404] not only allows one to speak, but in a sense speaks one. The second is that meaning arises not from positive or free-standing ideas and concepts, but only from the systematic differences that constitute them. If meaning resides in a system of differences, and differences are kinds of nothings, empty spaces, as it were, then our sense of meaning arises out of gaps, emptiness, voids that we spend our days vainly trying to paper over. Lacan equates facing these linguistic voids or gaps with facing death.
Having defined language as a system of differences, Lacan calls all systems of differences language. He defines the Symbol as a system of differences and therefore as a language. As with language in the narrower sense, one is born into and irrevocably shaped and defined by the world of law and culture into which one is born. The two implications of the narrower conception of language carry over to this wider one. In feeling oneself to be an autonomous ego in charge of one's action and capable of self-creation, one is deceived. "The unconscious is structured like a language," or "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other," or "language is the condition for the unconscious," or "the unconscious is language" (Lacan, 1989, 15), because the unconscious is comprised only by the cultural network which alone confers meaning on any single component of it. There are in the unconscious no drives, no pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal, non-verbal traces, that are carried through language into consciousness and that thereby give us our own ground or perspectival point from which to organize the welter of experience and information that constitutes our world (in Chomskian terms, to create our unique sentences). The culture speaks the person entirely; all thought, knowledge, and action that we think of as autonomous and purposive, presumably including Lacan's own, arise from the unconscious cultural inscriptions of which we are constituted. We resist this knowledge because it undermines both the ego images deriving from the mirror stage by which we protect ourselves against submersion in the cultural matrix, and our sense of reality, which derives from the system of role differentiation by which roles, most importantly and fundamentally gender roles, are constituted. [End Page 405]
This conception of language relies almost entirely upon Saussure's la langue, that is, on the systematic grid from which speech acts arise, rather than la parole. For Saussure,speaking is "an individual act. It is willful and intellectual," and "the speaker uses the language code for expressing his own thought" (1966, 14). In speaking, one uses signs which differ from the signifieds and signifiers of which they are composed. As a system of signifiers "language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system" (1966, 120). But Saussure continues, "the statement that everything in language is negative is true only if the signified and the signifier are considered separately; when we consider the sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in its own class" (1966, 120). Though the relation of sign to referent is, like that of signified to signifier, arbitrary, in speaking one draws on the positive present context in which one deploys signs. Though Lacan claims that Freud would have concurred with his psycholinguistic understanding had he known about Saussure, in fact Saussure's formulations better accommodate Freudian than Lacanian theory. If one translates Freud's comments on language into Saussurean terms, it is the level of parole, of speech and signs, that would have concerned him. That is, the word representations that compose the unconscious would derive from the particular experiences of the person. These representations would be "signs" rather than signifiers, since they represent drives and desires. The ego's enterprise would be to carve out of the language grid a system of signs by which it could harness the system of language to its own conscious purposes. Its "I" would remain its own, despite also being the means by which other egos designate themselves. Its task would be to stabilize the shifting contexts and control the polysemy of language sufficiently for ts own present purposes.
In contrast, Lacan rarely speaks of the level of parole, and regularly calls a signifier what Saussure would call a sign. 17 An example of this is Lacan's argument that the signifiers 'gentlemen' and 'ladies' written on otherwise identical doors proves the entirely conventional nature of gender distinction. However, in Saussurean terms the words are signs, "Ladies" as a [End Page 406] sound image being the signifier, and the concept female being the signified. While the sound image and the concept take their meaning negatively from systematic differentials, the sign has the positive force of a deictic, taking its meaning from the immediate context. Similarly, Lacan undermines the stabilizing role of the "shifters," such as pronouns, seeing them as illusory as the ego images that alienated one in the mirror stage. To locate oneself in space and time by means of an "I" in language is to substitute a signifier for the "Real" and to be forever at the mercy of its slidings. Therefore Lacan defines the signifier as that which represents the subject for another signifier. That is, each person plays the assigned cultural roles for each other while remaining unaware that there is no "I" to play them.
While Freud's conception of the superego accommodates the importance of the roles made available by society to the formation of the ego, within his framework the choices of roles from the range presented by a given culture, and the manner of their enactment, are expressive of the ego's strategy for negotiating between external and internal demands. 18
For Freud, our roles in life are stabilized by our unconscious and libidinal investments in them. Once again, Lacan's argument that language alone constitutes the unconscious means that there can be only "nothing," in its mystic sense, on the other side of the wall beyond language. Both Freud and Lacan would have therapists listen to language for clues to the concealments that reveal unacknowledged desire, but where Freud would be listening for the fragments of desire that had been driven out of consciousness by the archaic fears of reprisal that constitute the castration complex at the Oedipal stage, Lacan would be listening for the fragmented images from the mirror stage that the person retained in fear of yielding himself, not to desires, but to Desire.
For Lacan, Desire is always desire for death, rather than for the object one thinks one desires, and death represents the nothingness that lies beyond the ego. Beyond language there is the Real, the undifferentiated desire that constitutes the incomprehensible ecstasy of St. Teresa. For Lacan all Desire is desire for death, which he equates with something beyond the frozen images that constitute the ego, and which we glimpse [End Page 407] only in the shifting interstices of language. Thus language restores one to one's function as a subject, which is to know one's mortality and consequently to acknowledge subordination to the structures of authority that constitute a culture. The culture is master, and the alternative to enslavement to it is death. To accept death is to accept castration, which means accepting the primordial gap that divides human from animal life, and that is the basis of language.
For Lacan, then, the void out of which linguistic meaning arises is the void out of which creation arises, the void from which man flees, but which signifies the spiritual fulfillment that is the meaning within the apparent arbitrariness of life. Because this conception of the human psyche and language leaves the individual no foundation for self-regulation, Lacan, as we have seen, substitutes for the self-preservative instincts that grounds the Freudian ego a transcendent Platonic authority.
This principle of authority, which he calls the Name of the Father or the Phallus, alone stabilizes a culture. Without this authority cultural roles lose their signification and merely drift. On the level of language, narrowly conceived, it is this authority presumably that lies behind a dictionary, or the French Academy, without which language becomes destabilized and gives way to glissant, the tendency for signifieds to slide beneath signifiers, or for meaning to slide from one signifier to another according to the vagaries of condensation and displacement, or metaphor and metonomy in dream or symptom formation. Without it there is nothing to call the subject back to itself from immersion in an endless play of mirror images. By implication, without it language itself disappears, because there is then nothing to hold in place the systematic differences that constitute it. On the level of the family, the sexual differentiation that constitutes it, and that carries significance only in relation to the Symbolic, also disappears.
Because Lacan in this way locates all signification in the Symbolic, that is, in the conventional rather than the natural, many Marxist and Feminist commentators claim him as their ally, assuming that the conventional equates with the changeable [End Page 408] and the natural with the unchangeable. But these terms do not carry such implications for Lacan. For Freud, it is quite the reverse, for though we may be in the grip of our biology, or the natural, there is nothing sacrosanct about it. While in Civilization and its Discontents Freud makes it clear that, individually and collectively, we pay a big price for imposing too heavy restraints upon our animal desires, he nonetheless asserts that some restraints on and rechannelings of animal energies are the sine qua non of civilization. And though he implied that biology constituted women's destiny in so far as they conformed to the cultural norm, his theory of bi-sexuality also makes it clear that no individual does conform to that norm. Though he was more prepared for men than for women to challenge the limits of nature, his theory in no way precluded their doing so, and threatened no punishment for their doing so beyond that which fell to civilized humanity, or was imposed by men. Therefore it is theoretically easy to be a Freudian feminist; one need only accept Freud's description of the psychic process entailed in violating the norm of genital passivity and its metaphorical extension into conventional role behavior, and reject his implied criticism of such women who remain in the phallic, or clitoral, stage. The result of such a thought strategy is a vision of active and enterprising women who suffer instinctual deprivation no more, and no less, than do men in a state of civilized life. 19 In contrast, it is theoretically inconsistent to be a Lacanian feminist or Marxist despite the many feminists and Marxists who invoke Lacan. 20 They argue that his Saussurean linguistics, extended to embrace culture as a whole, exposes the conventional basis of current social practices and of the ideologies that support them. As well, they argue that his view of the ego as a collection of fragments exposes the deep ways in which conventional social practices and supporting ideologies constitute what we mistakenly assume to be our autonomous selves. These views also equate exposing the mechanism by which human subjectivity is created with opening the way to change both what passes for human nature, as well as the social and cultural practices that sustain the late capitalist version of patriarchal society. 21 These commentators omit from Lacan's account of the psyche his [End Page 409] assertion that all knowledge is paranoiac. This view follows from his premise that knowledge is what the ego seeks in its efforts to achieve mastery over others and, by extension, the world. Knowledge is what the ego uses to avoid knowing castration and death. Therefore it follows that any effort to recast social forms by knowing their operation must manifest the culture it seeks to know and that such efforts themselves are symptomatic of the ego-ridden monstrosity of modern times.
The invocation of Lacan in support of these radicalisms rests on a misunderstanding of Lacan's view of language and its relation to his Symbolic register, his conception of the unconscious, and of the Oedipal configuration. These misunderstandings, in turn, stem from a central misapprehension of Lacan's notion of convention and tradition.
The way in which Lacan converts the arbitrary and conventional into the Necessary and Fateful can be seen in another aspect of his renegotiation of Saussurean concepts. For Saussure it does not follow from the arbitrary relation of signifier to signified that language lacks stability. He says that though the "linguistic sign is arbitrary," language cannot be "organized at will" because of the time factor. Because language exists only in relation to a community of speakers, and these communities exist in time, "language is no longer free, for time will allow the social forces at work on it to carry out their effects" (1966, 78). Saussure anticipates no danger that the conventional nature of language threatens hermeneutic chaos because language is stabilized in social forms. However, Lacan, by emphasizing the signifier rather than the concept signified, and by ignoring parole along with the sign, creates a specter of a linguistic or hermeneutic chaos about to overwhelm humanity. Since he also broadens language to include all social forms, and eliminates human biology as a stabilizing center for the swirl of cultural signification, this linguistic chaos represents total chaos. It also represents the psychological chaos of psychosis, for Lacan argues that it is Schreber's failure to symbolize his real father as the Name of the Father that occasions the "hole that . . . opens up in the signified" and that [End Page 410]
set off the cascade of reshapings of the signifier from which the increasing disaster of the imaginary proceeds, to the point at which the level is reached at which signifier and signified are stabilized in the delusional metaphor. (1977, 217).
For Lacan the conventional nature of tradition does not free us; quite the contrary. The conventional acquires a desperate importance because it is all that remains between us and chaos. For Freud this danger does not exist because, on the one hand, cultural convention, being rooted in our biological drives, will not slide away. On the other hand, it is subject to modification by human intelligence in so far as it becomes more repressive than civilization requires. We can, if we like, try to alter even our biology. 22 We may make a mess, but we will be disturbing no universal principle. Lacan on the other hand, having denaturalized human affairs, sacrelizes them instead. In a version of anti-Enlightenment argument, he sees the conventional and arbitrary nature of language and culture as the vehicle by which the divine manifests itself in human affairs, 23 replacing the Freudian biological ground with a transcendental sky hook from which dangles human society. 24
This move takes its most definitive form in the concatenation of Lacan's discussion of language with biblical references to the Word, or Logos, Levi-Strauss' discussion of the elementary structure of kinship, and Mauss' study of the gift in primitive societies. In a discussion about whether "Logos" in the Gospel of Saint John most approximates "word" in the sense of speech or language, Lacan asserts that when language is correctly understood, it is clear that the creating Logos of the gospel refers to language:
What's at issue is a succession of absences and presences, or rather of presence on a background of absence, of absence constituted by the fact that a presence can exist. There is no absence in the real. There is only absence if you suggest that there may be a presence there when there isn't one. In the in principio, I am proposing to locate the word in so far as it creates the opposition, the [End Page 411] contrast. It is the original contradiction of 0 and 1. (1988b, 313)
Here Lacan relates the Saussurean conception of language as a system of differences to the Christian conception of creation out of a void. The implication is that the nature of language replicates, and thereby makes pervasively present in human life, the very principle of creation. In this way Lacan brings Saussure's conception of the conventional nature of
the relation of signifier to signified, along with his own broadened use of Saussurean linguistics, into alignment with a new version of the pre-Enlightenment Adamic conception of language, prevalent through the seventeenth century, against which Saussure argued. In that conception, the relation between signifier and signified is not arbitrary; the linguistic sign is not double but unitary. Still retaining the divine nature of their common origin, languages were in fundamental accord with nature, indeed they were themselves part of creation and nature. They were divine and natural, not human and conventional. (Aarsleff 1982, 25)
In the eighteenth century Condillac and others, following Locke, challenged the older conception with a human and conventional view of language, a view that Saussure helped to revive after it lost ground to German nineteenth Century Romantic neo-Adamic conceptions (Arsleff 1982, 19).
In the name of rescuing Freud from the contaminants introduced by his North American followers, Lacan both subverts Saussure's Enlightenment views and then renders them an instrument by which to subvert Freud's. By reversing Saussure's notation, emphasizing the signifier over the signified and more or less ignoring the sign, Lacan twists Saussure's Enlightenment conception of language into a new version of the Adamic conception. 25 For Lacan, while words as such do not carry an intrinsic and divinely insured connection to their referents, the differential system, whereby meaning emerges from the gaps or absences rather than being carried by sounds in themselves, becomes an image or expression of a cosmic [End Page 412] ontological truth. The significance of this move appears in Lacan's interpretation of Freud's anecdote of his grandson's spool game. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud gives as an example of the repetition compulsion the game in which his grandson threw away and retrieved a spool on a string, while saying "o/a." As Freud interpreted it, "o" and "a" were the child's efforts to say "fort/da," in reference to his mother's presence and absence (Freud 1921, 14-17). Ignoring the role of the thing, the spool, altogether, Lacan redescribes this moment as the child's fateful entry into the Symbolic. The child acquires the word, but loses the thing because the word, or the symbol "manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing" (1977, 104), just as taking one's place in the Symbolic by means of the shifter "I" obliterates one's primordial being. 26 As in the paradox of language in which presence is a manifestation of absence, so the presence of life manifests the absence of death, "from which [the subject's] existence takes on all the meaning it has" (1977, 105).
The presence or absence of the spool becomes an analogue for the primal absence, then presence, of the Logos. That is why Lacan uses St. Teresa's mystic ecstasy, beyond words or even the soul's understanding, as an exemplar of the jouissance that forever eludes us in our quest for pleasure, for sexual gratification, or for love. 27
The truth of St. Teresa's ecstasy that goes beyond language, and the means of an approach to it, is inscribed in language itself. This religious understanding of language lies behind the "human mystery" (1977, 68) into which Lacan translates the Oedipus Complex, thereby purporting to explain the operation of spirit in human affairs. In Lacan's conception, language preexists man, rather than arising from the genetic endowment by which human creatures adapt to their environment. "Man speaks . . . but it is because the symbol has made him man." Language, then, is the gift, for which man has incurred a "Great Debt whose economy Rabelais, in a famous metaphor, extended to the stars themselves" (1977, 67). Man's indebtedness for the gift of language, that is, for the gift of his humanity, is inscribed in the "elementary structures of kinship" as conceived by Levi-Strauss. Just as language depends on a structure of absences and presences, so [End Page 413] kinship depends on the primary difference of male and female, represented by the absence or presence of the phallus. Kinship structures then become a language, or rather they are the language in the broader conception that makes us human. Whereas nature is "abandoned to the laws of mating," our indebtedness to the Word that makes us human is reinscribed in the prohibition of incest and the consequent exchange of women:
the inviolable Debt is the guarantee that the voyage on which wives and goods are embarked will bring back to their point of departure in a never-failing cycle other women and other goods, all carrying an identical entity (1977, 68).
All individuals, with or without a penis, are castrated, because meaning, both on the literal level of language and of culture in general, resides not in the thing itself, but in the difference between having and not having it. On this difference depends the inscription of all social roles which alone confer upon us our identity. On the Symbolic level, the Phallus stands for that initial difference upon which all other cultural difference, and therefore meaning, depends. The Phallus equates to the Name of the Father, or the principle of authority, because traditional roles not only sustain good social order but humanity itself. As François Roustang puts it,
In abandoning the social, without which the symbolic has no support, Lacan is thus forced to substantify speech, to give it a certain power. He is also forced to substantify language, and claim that "the concept, preserving the duration of the fleeting . . . engenders the thing" and that it is "the world of words which creates the world of things"; in short he is forced to reestablish the theology of Creation through the Word. (1990, 32)
Levi-Strauss, like Saussure, has no such intention, but Lacan criticizes him for not subscribing to his own deployment of Levi-Straussian formulas. He says that Levi-Strauss [End Page 414]
is afraid that the autonomy of the symbolic register will give rise to a masked transcendentalism once again, for which, as regards his affinities, his personal sensibility, he feels only fear and aversion. In other words, he is afraid that after we have shown God out of one door, he will bring him back in by the other. He doesn't want the symbol, even in the extraordinarily purified form in which he offers us it, to be only a re-apparition, under a mask, of God. (1988b, 35)
Lacan's mystic conception of language and of culture stands behind his conception of therapeutic cure. Whereas for Freud cure consists in getting people to settle for ordinary human unhappiness, and to go on about their business of seeking their pleasures as best they can both individually and collectively, for Lacan cure consists in readying oneself to receive mystic wisdom. The job of the therapist is to open the ears of the analysand to what the Vedic text says: "the divine voice cause[d] to be heard in the thunder: Submission, gift, grace. Da da da. For Prajapâti replies to all: 'You have heard me.'" (1977, 107). 28 His task is to unravel the "hieroglyphics of hysteria . . . enigmas of inhibition, oracles of anxiety--talking arms of character, seals of self-punishment, disguises of perversion" so as to deliver "the imprisoned meaning, from the revelation of the palimpsest to the given word of the mystery and to the pardon of speech" (1977, 69-70). Quoting a thirteenth century mystic, Angelus Silesius, Lacan says what is really at issue at the end of analysis is
twilight, an imaginary decline of the world, and even an experience at the limit of depersonalization. That is when the contingent falls away--the accidental, the trauma, the hitches of history--And it is being which then comes to be constituted." (1988b, 232, italics Lacan's)
Whatever view one takes of Lacan's mystic psychotherapy, its truth is not assured by Lacan's fallacious claims for the mirror stage. Furthermore, it is not in the Freudian Field. One may or may not appreciate the ambience of Lacan's blend of [End Page 415] Christian and Buddhist mystic themes, but they do not underwrite Lacan's interpretation of Freud, nor, conversely, does disbelief in them prove Freud right and Lacan wrong. It is ironical, though, that Lacan's thought is presented as though it befriended political or gender liberation when it valorizes the political quietism he associates with traditional cultures. It is also ironical that Freud's dualism and biological determinism, for which Lacanians blame him, align him with individualism, rationalism, and free choice even though his work called into question some of their conceptual underpinnings. However that may be, Freud's conception of the psyche rests on a fundamentally Enlightenment formulation of human reason and knowledge, while Lacan's revision of Freud depends on what those partial to him would call Wisdom, and what those outside of his ball field would call anti-Enlightenment obscurantism.
Notes
1. For example, Wilden writes, "The fascination of the subject with an image, and the alienation revealed by the stade du miroir, are clearly demonstrable both in the study of the child and in psychopathology, as well as in literature" (1968, 164). He gives no citations in support of this claim, and even if the behavior Lacan describes were clearly demonstrable, the alienation in principle could not be, and only circular reasoning can render the literary examples Wilden cites (Oedipus with Teresias, Montaigne's "I", the hero of Rousseau's Confessions, etc.) as evidence for Lacan's claim. An example of many Lacanian approaches to literary criticism is Charney, who writes,
This kind of narcissistic structure, for Lacan, is a key element of the mirror stage as a metaphor for the idealization that occurs throughout human lives: We perceive ourselves as whole, potent, effective human beings, but this view of totality is a vain illusion. All human beings are fragmented. (1985, 243)
And Clément claims that, "the mirror state . . . comes before the child utters its first words, which but for this stage it never would pronounce" (1983, 87).
2. One should note, as does Macey (1988, 93), the universalist claims here, for Marxist and Feminist critics often mistakenly invoke Lacan's thought as though the effects of the mirror stage could be overcome historically.
3. Ragland-Sullivan (1987, 22-24) cites various studies which stresses the activity of infants younger than six-months that indicates their capacity to make perceptual discriminations. She regards these studies as confirming Lacan's position, but they in no way support either his description of the child's behavior confronted with its specular image, or his assertion that this image precipitates primordial alienation from its pre-mirror stage reality.
4. The importance of the subjective correlate to the claims about a child's behavior and its cause in the prematurity of its birth is emphasized by Roussel, who says that "we should understand that the subject is only constituted for the first time in this primary identification, which should therefore be regarded not as an identification in the proper sense but as what first makes identification possible" (1968, 68; italics his).
5. As well, Macey (1988, 13) says that no 1936 version of the mirror stage exists, and that the inaccuracies of dating in part derive from a deliberate creation of a sense of timelessness in the process of Lacan's translation and introduction to English.
6. Goffman (1959) gives vivid portrayals of this kind of social interaction, but theoretically they accord with Freud's theory of the superego and projection. That is, in his terms, one projects onto others one's own superego demands, and sees oneself judged in their eyes. The same applies to Lacan's notion of the gaze. Here Goffman describes social interaction as a set of covert mutual agreements to accept the other's self-evaluation, as communicated by subtle gestures. The element that Lacan introduces here that is not within Goffman's purview is the eroticization of the gaze. That is, Lacan includes the gaze in the pregenital stages, so that what he describes in Hegelian terms as the later struggle for recognition by the Other incorporates the libidinous carryover of the oral stage. Lacan's phenomenological terminology renders the drama and emotion of this kind of relationship, but Freud's account of the participation of the superego in the libidinous forces of the id can more easily account for it than Lacan's, for the mirror stage posits a cutoff between the pregenital stages and adult forms. The point here is not to deprive Lacan of the credit he deserves for his poetic formulations, but to demonstrate that their rhetorical power does not prove the theory that he intends them to.
7. Neither Lacan or Wilden give citations for this information.
8. I am not arguing that Lacan secretly espoused religious belief despite his declared atheism, but his theory drifts towards an amorphous eastern mysticism. Roudinesco (1990, 224) notes the way this contradiction appears on the institutional level. She argues that Lacan's conception of the ego entails "a cult of the master," which amounts to replacing the illusory freedom of individual speech with a religious adherence to the imaginary person of a leader of a cause. She also discusses the attraction Lacan had for previously Freudian priests (205).
9. Roudinesco (1990, 124) errs in claiming that Freud's Talmudic tradition plays a parallel role in Freud's work as the Christianity from which Lacan derives. In whatever ways his style can be related to the Jewish tradition, his theory opposes the religious conceptual framework in a way that Lacan's does not. Of course one can argue in Lacanian and Derridean style that Freud really believed what he was arguing against. But this strategy can be used to argue anything, and demeans the intellectual life. One may find contradictions in Freud, as one does in Lacan, but it does not follow that a person "really" believes in the buried assumption one has ferreted out, rather in what the person declares as his or her beliefs.
10. See below for a discussion of the significance of the differences in Freud's and Lacan's views on gender difference. For the moment, however, it should be noted that Freud did describe the girl as developing a less powerful superego, and therefore as being less under the sway of conscience. Though he did not intend this as a compliment, one could read it as one, considering what he says later about the irrational superego. Despite that, in his discussion of the complete Oedipus complex in which sex undergoes the experience of the other, he makes it clear that many women, especially those who are not conventionally beautiful, do not conform to the norm. While he may regard this failure as an illness, his formulation is such as to allow present day women to accept his formulation while disregarding his valuation of those who depart from what he regards as the norm.
11. Scott, in "Pathology of the Father's Rule," touches on the religious implications of this terminology. He writes that in discussing the Name of the Father, "Lacan's myth, so thoroughly a part of the Freudian discourse, has a controlling image of, as it were, Deity" (1989, 87). Like other commentators (see Roudinesco in note below), he assumes that Lacan is correct in asserting that his theory reveals what Freud really intended.
12. Felman (1987) in her last chapter concentrates on the importance of this play to the body of Lacan's thought.
13. The fact that the immune system can be suppressed does not alter the force of the argument. The fact that an identity can be altered, or even that it may change in time, does not mean that it does not exist at a given time.
14. See Holland (1975, 1985).
15. Barzilai (1991, 298) recapitulates Kristeva's arguments in "the Talking Cure," based on the separation of meaning from sound indulged in by borderline patients, that language reaches back to a pre-Symbolic level, and that therefore the unconscious cannot be structured like a language. She also argues that Lacan simplified and misrepresented Freud's conception of the sign as developed in his discussion of aphasia. But both Barzilai and Kristeva follow Lacan in assuming that the pre-linguistic is feminine, and the linguistic or symbolic is masculine. Freud makes no such hard line between the two, nor does he gender them.
16. There seems to be some force to Lacan's claim for the independence of the signifier, in so far as he talks of dream images and symptoms as signifiers whose signifieds have been repressed. But the relationship between a dream and its repressed meaning is analogous to that between a word one encounters in a book, the meaning of which one doesn't know or has forgotten. One believes it to be a word, a signifier, from its context; from that it acquires an aura of meaningfulness that distinguishes it from a sound or random collection of letters that one takes to be nonsense. Therefore there does seem to be room for a concept of a potential signifier, a term that would apply to a child's sense of a sound as significant before it quite knows what a word is or to dream images that carry an undetermined aura of signification. This indeterminacy, however, does not support Lacan's vision of dangerously sliding signifiers.
17. This point is made by Wilden (1968, 144n). Though Lacan makes much of the difference between full and empty speech in "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," he does not relate that distinction to Saussurean linguistics.
18. This kind of description of our relation to our roles is most powerfully rendered by Goffman (1959). It is true that Freud does not attend to, or give vivid portrayals of this kind of social interaction, but theoretically it accords with his theory of the superego and projection. In his terms, one projects onto others the demands on the self made by one's own superego, and sees oneself judged in their eyes. The same applies to Lacan's notion of the gaze. Here too Goffman describes social interaction as sometimes a struggle, but more often as a secret agreement, to accept the other in his or her own terms, as communicated by subtle gestures. One does so with the expectation that the same courtesy will be returned. The new element that Lacan introduces here is the eroticized gaze. That is, Lacan includes the gaze in the pregenital stages, so that what he describes in Hegelian terms as the later struggle for recognition by the other incorporates the libidinous carryover of the oral stage. Lacan's phenomenological stance allows him to render the drama and emotion of this kind of relationship, but the concept derives from Freud, who includes in the oral stage a fixation on looking and being seen, and who describes the relation of the superego to the id in a way that accounts for the eroticization of this kind of relationship. The point here is not to deprive Lacan of the credit he deserves for some of these quite powerful and poetic formulations, but only to point out that logically speaking their rhetorical power does not constitute the proof that he intends.
19. I do not mean that Freud is correct either in his argument that clitorally focused sexuality is less ideal for women, or that a woman cannot experience proper genital sexuality without succumbing to other aspects of conventionally feminine behavior. The point is that even were he right about both, it still would not be incumbent upon any particular woman to judge herself by the standards he implies.
20. Macey (1988, 193) has an extended discussion of the genital determinism that shapes both his discussion of Dora, and his use of St. Teresa as an icon of mystic orgasm (205). Arguing that Lacanian psychoanalysis, even more than Freudian, "posits femininity as being in excess of its rationalist discourse, and then complains and exclaims that it cannot explain it" (179), Macey challenges Lacanian feminists to refute his genital determinism (195) and explain such denigrating language as dame for femme and Melanie, for Klein.
21. Jameson (1988, 92) says that in the Symbolic the subject suffers the second stage of self-alienation in substituting a name for his reality. However, this misrepresents Lacan's theory, for the point is that by substituting verbal for visual images the subject prepares for the confrontation with death that lies behind alienation. Anchor (1989, 90) makes a similar error in supposing that Lacan's "theorization of the Symbolic order" even if it did "offer a powerful framework for thinking about the transactions between the individual and society" (90) would tend towards a radical politics. Rather, for Lacan, the conventional and therefore unstable nature of the Symbolic reinforces the need for traditional authority. As far as I know, the earliest underestimation of the profoundly conservative bent of Lacan's thought was made by Althusser. Asserting Lacan's fidelity to Freud's thought, he claims for psychoanalysis the capacity to lead to "a better understanding of this structure of misrecognition, which is of particular concern for all investigations of ideology " (1969, 65). Like Jameson and Anchor, Althusser celebrates the decentered ego of Lacanian thought, but doesn't take into account that the epistemological corollary to that which gives people no way to grapple with the Law of culture that replaces Freudian instincts in the unconscious. As well, Macey notes that he mistakes the mirror stage as phenomenon of late capitalism, rather than as a universal condition, as Lacan posits it (19). Though Freud had little hope that social change would release man from the neurotic suffering imposed by civilization, he thought greater equality among men and economic improvement a good thing. Moderate as such a position is, it is more congenial to the Marxist left than is Lacan's.
22. Crews (1986, 1970) aptly comments that just as Althusser transformed Marxism from a strategy for an adaptive materialism into an allegory of scientific determinism, so did Lacan transform psychoanalysis.
23. His views end up by being very close to those that Berlin (1990, 54-55) ascribes to Joseph de Maistre, who rejected the Enlightenment view of reason as God's gift to man and manifested in the triumphs of Galileo and Newton, and who conceived "divine reason as an activity that is transcendent, and therefore hidden from the human eye." Berlin adds that according to de Maistre "each province [has] its own mode of belief, its own methods of proof. A universal logic, like a universal language, empties the symbols used of all that accumulated wealth of meaning created by the continuous process of slow precipitation by which the mere passage of time enriches an old language, endowing it with all the fine, mysterious properties of an ancient, enduring institution." And again, "Rationalism leads to atheism, individualism, anarchy. The social fabric holds together only because men recognize their natural superiors; they obey because they feel a sense of natural, divinely instituted, authority which no rationalist philosophy can reason away." These clearly are not exactly Lacan's views, but they are in much the same spirit.
24. Althusser touches on this aspect of Lacan's work, though without appreciating its significance, when he paraphrases Freud in saying that since Copernicus and Marx (whom he substitutes for Darwin) we have known that for the "human subject, the economic, political or philosophical ego is not the 'centre' of history--and even, in supposition to the Philosophers of the Enlightenment and to Hegel, that history has a structure, but no necessary 'centre' except in ideological misrecognition" (1969, 65).
25. The deep relation between Lacan's theory of language and a religious world view is clear in many of the essays in Lacan and Theological Discourse (Crownfeld 1989). Wyschogrod says that to treat the dialogue of Anselm and Boso as a psychoanalytic dialogue "is conceivable on the surprising but legitimate ground that Lacan's recognition of the linguistic and textual structure of the unconscious establishes a homology, a commensurability between theological texts and manifestations of the unconscious" (1989, 115). Crownfield's stance, and that of the other contributors to this volume, is made clear when he speaks of Lacan's recognition of the linguistic structure of the unconscious.
26. Following Lacan, most commentators ignore the "things" in the story, that is, the spool. Muller (1983, 21-31) emphasizes that the child at this moment is "born into language." However, like Lacan's argument for the mirror stage, the argument here for the radical divide imposed by language does not hold. In dropping and retrieving the spool, the child experiences its physical mastery of the situation in association with the words. Therefore there is not radical separation of the child's body experience from its substitution of language. Indeed, language is not substituted; it is rather added to the felt experience as a further dimension. Furthermore, the example does not bear out the radical claim that the word is "the murder of the thing." This would imply that once the word is spoken the mother can never reenter the child's life--that the desire for physical proximity to and comfort from the mother is instantly and absolutely repressed. But the mother does come back, and while it may be right to speak of desire replacing need as the child slowly becomes aware of its own boundaries and capacities, this desire is still for the mother and is not instantly and absolutely repressed. But in Freud's model access to feelings of comfort in the loss of boundaries is forever lost only when the child has experienced trauma in connection with it, and the child's substitution of language keeps a channel open back to those archaic satisfactions. Think of what the child at Lady Macbeth's breast feels if you want to know what oral vulnerability feels like, he says. He relates situations in which a traumatic experience has made any approach to the feelings of oral dependency impossible to religious experiences of merger, and sees them as substituting for a normal development in which access to those feelings remains possible as a component of adult love relationships. Furthermore, in so far as the Fort/Da is a model of repression, it isn't language that causes it; it is the inevitability of the child's separation from the mother. It isn't at all certain that monkeys, cats, or dogs do not experience something akin to human experience as they are slowly cast out of the mother's protective realm. If so, we are better off than they are in that we can use language as a source of substitute gratification. In making Freud's Fort/Da story a paradigm for primal repression, Lacan eliminates trauma as a significant factor in development, and transforms contingent events into universal necessity. He makes the human being entirely and radically subject to language, and since he equates language with all institutional and social authority (the Symbolic), he leaves no conceptual space in which one can step back, in an act of self-reflection, from those structures.
27. It is not true as Casey and Woody claim (1983, 109) that access to primordial jouissance for Lacan is barred by entry into the Symbolic, and that therefore it is deferred on an endless slide of signifiers. It is barred by the Imaginary, but it plays through the kind of nothing or absence, the systematic differences upon which the Symbolic is constructed.
28. Fisher (1989, 2) notes the ways in which Buddhism and the Christian via negativa can be claimed as a "venerable religious heritage" by postmodernism in general (19). The religious dimension of Lacan's work has important ramifications for therapy, for any therapy, for any therapy functions on an explicit or implicit norm. Just as it matters to a woman whether her therapist considers it abnormal for her to desire professional achievement, so it matters to a person whether his or her therapist considers it abnormal for one to resist subordination to authority.
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