{"id":13043,"date":"2014-08-07T14:37:10","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T18:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=13043"},"modified":"2014-08-07T14:40:52","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T18:40:52","slug":"boothby-death-desire-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2014\/08\/07\/boothby-death-desire-2\/","title":{"rendered":"boothby death desire 1a"},"content":{"rendered":"

Boothby, Richard. (1991) Death and desire: psychoanalytic theory in Lacan’s return to Freud<\/em>. London: Routledge.<\/p>\n

Over the past forty years, however, the most significant treatment of Freud’s most unpopular conception has been the work of a renegade French analyst named Jacques Lacan.<\/p>\n

Lacan does more than reemphasize Freud’s notion of the death drive, he re-installs it at the very center of psychoanalytic theory<\/strong>. To ignore the death instinct in [Freud’s] doctrine,” he insists, “is to misunderstand that doctrine completely” (E:S, 301).<\/p>\n

Lacan characterizes Beyond the Pleasure Principle<\/em> as the “pivotal point” in the evolution of Freud’s thought (S.II, 165).<\/p>\n

But, further, it is not merely one concept among others. Perhaps more than any other point in the Freudian theory, it is with respect to the death drive that Lacan’s innovation is rightly called a “return to Freud.”<\/p>\n

What makes the death-drive theory so important is its pivotal position in the structured totality of the psychoanalytic theory. For Lacan, the death drive is the key to understanding the topography of id, ego, and superego upon which Freud based the final and most complete elaboration of his theory<\/p>\n

According to Lacan, the problem of the death drive opens psychoanalysis to question and, ultimately, to reformulation. But what sort of reformulation is announced here?<\/p>\n

The answer is not immediately easy to determine. The question of the death drive in Lacan will take us to the heart of his theoretical innovations insofar as he links the meaning of death in psychoanalysis to the faculty of speech and language, on the one hand, and to the fate of desire, on the other.<\/p>\n

In this way, two of the prime themes of Lacan’s thought, language and desire, can be seen to intersect in his treatment of the death drive. The question, one that will occupy us throughout this book, remains: How are language, desire, and death related?<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The function of desire must remain in a fundamental relation with death” (S.VII, 351).<\/p>\n

The difficulty of Lacan’s style is not wholly unintentional. Convinced that the curative effect of analysis does not consist in explaining the patient’s symptoms and life history, convinced, that is, that the analyst’s effort to understand the patient only impedes the emergence of the unconscious within the transference and that what is effective in analysis concerns something beyond the capacity of the analyst to explain, Lacan’s discourse is calculated to frustrate facile understanding.<\/p>\n

His aim in part is to replicate for his readers and listeners something of the essential opacity and disconnectedness of the analytic experience. Often what is required of the reader in the encounter with Lacan’s dense and recalcitrant discourse, as with that of the discourse of the patient in analysis, is less an effort to clarify and systematize than a sort of unknowing mindfulness.<\/p>\n

We are called upon less to close over the gaps and discontinuities in the discourse than to remain attentive to its very lack of coherence, allowing its breaches and disalignments to become the jumping-off points for new movements of thought.<\/p>\n

IMAGINARY<\/p>\n

The imaginary was the first of the three orders to appear, introduced in 1936 by Lacan’s article on the “mirror stage.” It was inspired by research in ethology, which associated behavior patterns in animals with the perception of specific visual images. Lacan proposed that a similar “imaginary” function operates in human beings. In the “mirror phase,” the most rudimentary formations of psychic life are organized for the six- to eighteen-month-old infant as it identifies itself with a body image; either its own image in a mirror, or that of a caretaker or peer.<\/p>\n

For Lacan, the “imaginary” designates that basic and enduring dimension of experience that is oriented by images, perceived or fantasized, the psychologically formative power of which is lastingly established in the primordial identification of the mirror phase.<\/p>\n

Lacan’s first and arguably most original and far-reaching innovation in psychoanalytic theory was to characterize the Freudian “ego” as a formation of the imaginary.<\/p>\n

The symbolic, announced in his 1953 paper on “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” was conceived by Lacan from the outset in dynamic opposition to the captures of the imaginary. Lacan’s notion of the symbolic is indebted to the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, and to the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss.<\/p>\n

SYMBOLIC<\/p>\n

The symbolic is the register of language and of linguistically mediated cognitions. In the “symbolic order,” Lacan envisions a complex system of signifying elements whose meaning is determined by their relation to the other elements of the system \u2014 a grand structure, then, in which meaning is free to circulate among associated elements or signifiers without necessarily referring to a particular object or signified.<\/p>\n

In opposition to the gestalt principles and relations of perceptual resemblance that govern the semiotics of the imaginary, the order of the symbolic functions in accordance with rules internal to the signifying system itself. Lacanian psychoanalysis came fully into its own when Lacan identified the Oedipus Complex<\/strong> <\/span>discovered by Freud with the formative moment in which the child, molded and snared by the imaginary, accedes to a symbolic mode of functioning<\/strong>. It is a good deal more difficult to characterize briefly the Lacanian sense of the “real.”<\/p>\n

Especially in his later work, Lacan tries to show the interconnectedness of the imaginary, symbolic, and real, comparing them to the three interlocking rings of a Borromean knot<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

But the notion of the real is perhaps best introduced as being precisely that which escapes and is lacking in the other two registers. Neither figured in the imaginary nor represented by the symbolic, the real is the always still – outstanding, the radically excluded, the wholly uncognized. As Lacan puts it, “the real is the impossible.”37<\/p>\n

In Lacan’s sense, then, the real has very little to do with common “reality.” By the measure of everyday reality, the Lacanian real is closer to being un- or sur-real.<\/p>\n

REAL<\/p>\n

The real is sheer, wholly undifferentiated and unsymbolized force or impact. It is an experience of the real, therefore, that lies at the heart of trauma. However, the real is not simply a designation of something unknown external to the individual. It inhabits the secret interior as well. The real is therefore also to be associated with the active yet ineffable stirrings of organic need, the unconsciousness of the body. The tripartite distinction of imaginary, symbolic, and real constitutes the master key of Lacan’s work. To interpret his treatment of the death instinct will therefore ultimately require determining its relation to these three essential registers.<\/p>\n

As I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, this task offers a unique opportunity for clarifying the interrelation of Lacan’s three basic categories to one another. This is true in spite of the fact, or rather precisely because of the fact, that each of the three registers seems to claim the death instinct for its own.<\/span><\/p>\n

From one point of view, Lacan clearly associates the death drive with the imaginary. “The point emphasized by Freud’s thought, but [that] isn’t fully made out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Lacan asserts, “[is that] the death instinct in man [signifies] that his libido is originally constrained to pass through an imaginary stage” (S.I, 149).<\/p>\n

At another point, however, it is the symbolic that appears as the order of death. Thus we read that “the nature of the symbol is yet to be clarified. We have approached the essence of it in situating it at the very point of the genesis of the death instinct” (S.III, 244).<\/p>\n

Is the drive toward death to be associated primarily with the imaginary? with the symbolic? Or is it not more fittingly associated with the real? Lacan’s notion of the real<\/span> \u2014 as lack or absence, as the impossible, as the unspeakable force of the trauma, or as the ineffable exigence of the body\u2014seems eminently qualified to be linked with the activity of what Freud called a “death drive.”<\/p>\n

As I hope to show in what follows, the problem of death is relevant to each of the three registers, but in a different way. Clarifying these differences yields not only a more adequate solution to Freud’s problem of the death drive but also a better understanding of Lacan’s own thought as it illuminates the relations of the imaginary, symbolic, and real to one another. 20<\/span><\/p>\n

To begin with, Lacan raises the question of how, within the ego psychological strategy, the patient is ever to move beyond identification with the analyst. But Lacan’s real concern is more radical. From a Lacanian point of view, ego psychology<\/strong> requires that the treatment deepen the very imaginary elationships of the ego that lie at the root of the patient’s deepest conflicts.<\/p>\n

Psychoanalysis that deserves the name must effect precisely the opposite, bringing about a certain deconstruction of already existing imaginary encrustations. Lacan suggests that “what is really at issue, at the end of analysis, [is] a twilight, an imaginary decline of the world, and even an experience at the limit of depersonalization<\/span><\/strong>” (S.I 232). 37<\/p>\n

Lacan’s conception of the mirror phase<\/strong> requires us to think of the situation of the newborn in terms of a primal chaos of wholly unsymbolized somatic excitations. Identification with the imago is said to be “the psychic relationship par excellence” insofar as the imago<\/strong> functions to erect the most elemental forms of psychic life out of an anarchy of unformed and inarticulate organic strivings.18<\/p>\n

Prior to the recognition of the primordial imagos of the mirror stage<\/strong>, the force of “instinct” remains dispersed amid a panoply of bodily energies. 58<\/p>\n

The pressure of psychically unmastered instinct therefore constitutes, in effect, a force of psychical unbinding from inside the organism itself. … The function of the life instinct is to bind together and to establish unities.<\/p>\n

The activity of the death drive<\/span><\/strong>, by contrast, is to effect unbinding and disintegration. The crucial polarity becomes … between the organic and the properly psychological, between the force of unbound instinctual energies and the bound structure of the ego. 83<\/p>\n

The death drive<\/span><\/strong> designates the way the bound organization of the ego is traumatized by the pressure upon it of unbound instinctual energies. 84<\/p>\n

In Lacanian terms the death drive<\/span><\/strong> represents the return of the real<\/strong> excluded by the imaginary.<\/p>\n

The death drive<\/span><\/strong> designates the pressure of unbound energies against the limitations of the bound structure of the ego. What is subject to “death” is not the biological organism but the imaginary ego<\/strong>. 84<\/p>\n

The effect of the death drive<\/span><\/strong>, like the traumatic repetitions that first alerted Freud to its existence, threatens to overload the psychical organization with a wave of unmastered energies. …<\/p>\n

The\u00a0death drive<\/span><\/strong> is reinterpreted as the impingement upon the bound structure of the ego of organismic energies as yet inadequately represented int he psychic system<\/strong>. The death drive is the force of the instinctual as such. 85<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Boothby, Richard. (1991) Death and desire: psychoanalytic theory in Lacan’s return to Freud. London: Routledge. Over the past forty years, however, the most significant treatment of Freud’s most unpopular conception has been the work of a renegade French analyst named Jacques Lacan. Lacan does more than reemphasize Freud’s notion of the death drive, he re-installs … Continue reading “boothby death desire 1a”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,125,40,118,41,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-desire","category-drive","category-lack","category-symbolic","category-the-real","category-unconscious"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13043"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13045,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13043\/revisions\/13045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}