{"id":13110,"date":"2014-09-05T22:32:46","date_gmt":"2014-09-06T02:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=13110"},"modified":"2014-09-05T22:42:54","modified_gmt":"2014-09-06T02:42:54","slug":"sharpe-on-lacan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2014\/09\/05\/sharpe-on-lacan\/","title":{"rendered":"sharpe on lacan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Information on Jacques Lacan in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy<\/a>
\nJune 2005
\nMatthew Sharpe
\nEmail: matthew.sharpe_at_dewr.gov.au
\nUniversity of Melbourne
\nAustralia<\/code><\/p>\n

Jacques-Marie-\u00c9mile Lacan<\/strong> was born in Paris on April 13 1901 to a family of solid Catholic\u00a0 tradition, and was educated at a Jesuit school. After completing his baccalaur\u00e9at he commenced studying medicine and later psychiatry.<\/p>\n

In 1927, Lacan commenced clinical training and began to work at psychiatric institutions, meeting and working with (amongst others) the famous psychiatrist Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault<\/strong>. His doctoral thesis, on paranoid psychosis, was passed in 1932.<\/p>\n

In 1934, he became a member of La Societe Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP)<\/strong>, and commenced an analysis lasting until the outbreak of the war. During the Nazi occupation of France, Lacan ceased all official professional activity in protest against those he called \u201cthe enemies of human kind.\u201d Following the war, he rejoined the SPP, and it was in the post-war period that he rose to become a renowned and controversial figure in the international psychoanalytic community, eventually banned in 1962 from the International Psychoanalytic Association<\/strong> for his unorthodox views on the calling and practice of psychoanalysis. Lacan\u2019s career as both a theoretician and practitioner did not end with this excommunication, however.<\/p>\n

In 1963, he founded L\u2019Ecole Freudienne de Paris (EFP)<\/strong>, a school devoted to the training of analysts and the practicing of psychoanalysis according to Lacanian stipulations.<\/p>\n

In 1980, having single-handedly dissolved the EFP, he then constituted the Ecole for \u201cLa Cause Freudienne,\u201d saying: \u201cIt is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian.\u201d Lacan died in Paris on September 9, 1981.<\/p>\n

Lacan\u2019s first major theoretical publication was his piece \u201cOn the Mirror Stage as Formative of the I<\/strong>.\u201d This piece originally appeared in 1936. Its publication was followed by an extended period wherein he published little.<\/p>\n

In 1949, though, it was re-presented to wider recognition. In 1953, on the back of the success of his Rome dissertation to the SPP on \u201cThe Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis,\u201d Lacan then inaugurated the seminar series that he was to continue to convene annually (albeit in different institutional guises) until his death. It was in this forum that he developed and ceaselessly revised the ideas with which his name has become associated. Although Lacan was famously ambivalent about publication, the seminars were transcribed by various of his followers, and several have been translated into English. Lacan published a selection of his most important essays in 1966 in the collection \u00c9crits<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Theoretical Project<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Lacan\u2019s avowed theoretical intention, from at least 1953, was the attempt to reformalize what he termed \u201cthe Freudian field.\u201d His substantial corpus of writings, speeches and seminars can be read as an attempt to unify and reground what are the four interlinking aspirations of Freud\u2019s theoretical writings: a theory of psychoanalytic practice as a curative procedure; the generation of a systematic metapsychology capable of providing the basis for the formalization of a diagnostic heuristic of mental illness; and the construction of an account of the development of the \u201ccivilized\u201d human psyche.<\/p>\n

Lacan brought to this project, however, a keen knowledge of the latest developments in the human sciences, drawing especially on structuralist linguistics, the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, topology, and game theory. Moreover, as Jacques Derrida has remarked, Lacan\u2019s work is characterized by an engagement with modern philosophy (notably Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre) unmatched by other psychoanalytic theorists, especially informed by his attendance at Andre Kojeve\u2019s hugely influential Paris lectures on Hegel from 1933-1939.<\/strong><\/p>\n

2. Lacan\u2019s Philosophical Anthropology<\/p>\n

a. The Mirror Stage<\/p>\n

Lacan\u2019s article \u201cThe Mirror Stage as Formative of the I\u201d (1936, 1949)<\/strong> lays out the parameters of a doctrine that he never foreswore, and which has subsequently become something of a post-structuralist mantra: namely, that human identity is \u201cdecentred.\u201d<\/p>\n

The key observation of Lacan\u2019s essay concerns the behaviour of infants between the ages of 6 and 18 months. At this age, Lacan notes, children become capable of recognizing their
\nmirror image. This is not a dispassionate experience, either. It is a recognition that brings the child great pleasure.<\/p>\n

For Lacan, we can only explain this \u201cjubilation\u201d as a testimony to how, in the recognition of its mirror-image, the child is having its first anticipation of itself as a unified and separate individual. Before this time, Lacan contends (drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic observation), the child is little more than a \u201cbody in bits and pieces,\u201d unable to clearly separate I and Other, and wholly dependant for its survival (for a length of time unique in the animal kingdom) upon its first nurturers.<\/p>\n

The implications of this observation on the mirror stage, in Lacan\u2019s reckoning, are far-reaching. They turn around the fact that, if it holds, then the genesis of individuals\u2019 sense of individuation can in no way be held to issue from the \u201corganic\u201d or \u201cnatural\u201d development of any inner wealth supposed to be innate within them. The I is an Other from the ground up, for Lacan (echoing and developing a conception of the ego already mapped out in Freud\u2019s Ego and Id). The truth of this dictum, as Lacan comments in \u201cAggressivity and Psychoanalysis,\u201d is evident in infantile transitivity: that phenomenon wherein one infant hit by another yet proclaims: \u201cI hit him!\u201d and visa-versa. It is more simply registered in the fact that it remains a permanent possibility of adult human experience for us to speak and think of ourselves in the second or third person. What is decisive in these phenomena, according to Lacan, is that the ego is at base an object: an artificial projection of subjective unity modelled on the visual images of objects and others that the individual confronts in the world. Identification with the ego, Lacan accordingly maintains, is what underlies the unavoidable component of aggressivity in human behaviour especially evident amongst infants, and which Freud recognised in his Three Essays on Sexuality<\/em> when he stressed the primordial ambivalence of children towards their love object(s) (in the oral phase, to love is to devour; in the anal phase, it is to master or destroy\u2026).<\/p>\n

b. Desire is the Desire of the Other<\/p>\n

It is on the basis of this fundamental understanding of identity that Lacan maintained throughout his career that desire is the desire of the Other. What is meant by him in this formulation is not the triviality that humans desire others, when they sexually desire (an observation which is not universally true).<\/p>\n

Again developing Freud\u2019s theorization of sexuality, Lacan\u2019s contention is rather that what psychoanalysis reveals is that human beings need to learn how and what to desire. Lacanian theory does not deny that infants are always born into the world with basic biological needs that need constant or periodic satisfaction.<\/p>\n

Lacan\u2019s stress, however, is that, from a very early age, the child\u2019s attempts to satisfy these needs become caught up in the dialectics of its exchanges with others. Because its sense of self is only ever garnered from identifying with the images of these others (or itself in the mirror, as a kind of other), Lacan argues that it demonstrably belongs to humans to desire\u2014directly\u2014as or through another or others. We get a sense of his meaning when we consider such social phenomena as fashion. As the squabbling of children more readily testifies, it is fully possible for an object to become desirable for individuals because they perceive that others desire it, such that when these others\u2019 desire is withdrawn, the object also loses its allure.<\/p>\n

Lacan articulates this decentring of desire when he contends that what has happened to the biological needs of the individual is that they have become inseparable from, and importantly subordinated to, the vicissitudes of its demand for the recognition and love of other people.<\/p>\n

Events as apparently \u201cnatural\u201d as the passing or holding back of stool, he remarks in \u00c9crits<\/em>, become episodes in the chronicle of the child\u2019s relationship with its parents, expressive of its compliance or rebellion. A hungry child may even refuse to eat food if it perceives that this food is offered less as a token of love than one of its parents\u2019 dissatisfaction or impatience.<\/p>\n

In this light, Lacan\u2019s important recourse to game theory also becomes explicable. For game theory involves precisely the attempt to formalize the possibilities available to individuals in situations where their decisions concerning their wants can in principle both affect and be affected by the decisions of others. As Lacan\u2019s article in the \u00c9crits<\/em> on the \u201cDirection of the Treatment\u201d spells out, he takes it that the analytic situation, as theorized by Freud around the notion of transference (see Part 2), is precisely such a situation.<\/p>\n

In that essay, Lacan focuses on the dream of the butcher\u2019s wife in Freud\u2019s Interpretation of Dreams<\/em>. The said \u201cbutcher\u2019s wife\u201d thought that she had had a dream which was proof of the invalidity of Freud\u2019s theory that dreams are always encoded wish-fulfillments. As Freud comments, however, this dream becomes explicable when one considers how, after a patient has entered into analysis, her wishes are constructed (at least in part) in relation to the perceived wishes of the analyst.<\/p>\n

In this case, at least one of the wishes expressed by the dream was the woman\u2019s wish that Freud\u2019s desire (for his theory to be correct) be thwarted. In the same way, Lacan details how the deeper unconscious wish expressed in the manifest content of the dream (which featured the woman attempting to stage a dinner party with only one piece of smoked salmon) can only be comprehended as the coded fulfilment of a desire that her husband would not fulfill her every wish, and leave her with an unsatisfied desire.<\/p>\n

[to be continued]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Information on Jacques Lacan in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy June 2005 Matthew Sharpe Email: matthew.sharpe_at_dewr.gov.au University of Melbourne Australia Jacques-Marie-\u00c9mile Lacan was born in Paris on April 13 1901 to a family of solid Catholic\u00a0 tradition, and was educated at a Jesuit school. After completing his baccalaur\u00e9at he commenced studying medicine and later psychiatry. … Continue reading “sharpe on lacan”<\/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":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lacan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13110","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=13110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13112,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13110\/revisions\/13112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}