Nobus, Dany. Jacques Lacan
Schema L
In Lacan’s purportedly Freudian alternative, patients had to be approached as subjects with an unconscious, rather than unitary objectified others. In Schema L, the subject (S) is identified with the Freudian Id (Es) and the unconscious is emanating from the Other (A) according to a symbolic vector which crosses the imaginary axis.
This means that the intervention of the Other (the unknown dimension of the other) is necessary for the revelation of the unconscious.
The idea is that if human beings can wonder about the hidden intentions of a fellow being, or if the latter answers their questions in a way which they had never expected, they will also be driven to investigate the (hitherto unconscious) mainspring of their own intentions.
Whereas on Lacan’s account an ego-psychologist attributed a patient’s symptom to a weakness of the ego, or an incomplete self-realization, and remedied this problem by increasing the patient’s self-awareness, a truly Freudian analyst defined the symptom as a compromise between unconscious knowledge (the repressed representations) and conscious ignorance.
To open up this realm of unconscious knowledge, Lacan posited that the analyst’s task is to be somewhere in the place of the Other (Seminar III The Psychoses 1955-56 [1993 trans. Russell Grigg 161])
Page 68: Lacan conceded that even at the end of analysis the subject ‘refers to this imaginary unity that is the ego … where he knows himself and misrecognizes himself, and which is what he speaks about’ (Lacan Sem III, Russell 161). This ongoing entanglement of the subject with the ego is represented within Schema L. in the vector from S to a’ (the identification with the imaginary counterparts on which the ego is based). The emergence of the patient’s ego will also reawaken the ego of the analyst, on whose presence it depends during the analytic session.