Jacques Lacan: the poetry of the unconscious

I. Background: Language and the Unconscious in Freud

Glanz auf der Nase.

There's a quirky example in Freud's essay on "Fetishism" that will be useful to keep in mind as we read Lacan. That essay begins with Freud's discussion of a man who had a nose fetish, and more particularly still a fetish for a "shine on the nose." Freud tells us that this fetish originated in the man's childhood, when he spoke English, a language he had since forgotten; the sexual charge he associates with "shine" is thus really attached, a bit less quirkily, to looking at the nose. This is because the German word for "shine"--"Glanz"--sounds like the English word "glance."

What's useful for us in this example is that it shows the unconscious expressing itself through a purely linguistic association: the connection between "glance" and "Glanz" is purely arbitrary, and exists only in language, not in the world.

Lacan's claim that psychoanalysis discovers in the unconscious "the whole structure of language" (N 1169) is thus not quite such a leap away from Freud as it might at first appear; indeed, Lacan thought of his development of psychoanalysis as a "return to Freud," a reading of Freud's texts more faithful to their insights than other competing interpretations of psychoanalysis.

Already in the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud theorized that dreams came to be distorted along pathways that are basically figurative. Dream-images, he believed, escaped the censorship of the conscious self by expressing repressed ideas in disguised forms: an image might be substituted for one that resembled it in some way, or the emotional energy attached to one thing might be displaced onto something associated with it. Hence the strange disproportion of emotion and content in dreams: a highly charged dream about flowers or about a floor or about the Uffizi galleries might be a distorted way of expressing some wish about your mother, if her name happens to be Florence. (The idiosyncrasy of this example is again to the point. There's no master code for decoding unconscious images; they depend on associations unique to the individual, though some of these will of course be shared, and they have to be discovered and confirmed in a dialogue between analyst and patient. This is why a cigar really is, sometimes, just a cigar).

Freud's names for the two primary mechanisms of dream distortion are "condensation" and "displacement" (you can read his account of these on N 818-24). These are roughly parallel to the metaphorical and metonymical modes of association described by Jakobson (N 1152-6) and appropriated from him by his friend Lacan.

II. "The Signification of the Phallus"
Lacan understands Freud's method of interpreting the associative distortions produced by the unconscious through Ferdinand de Saussure's model of the linguistic sign. We'll see the most thorough version of Lacan's integration of these two theories in "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," which we're reading for Friday. In "The Signification of the Phallus," a couple features of Saussure's model and Lacan's radicalization of it are worth keeping in mind.

Saussure says that the relation between the signifier (e.g. the English word "tree," a sound-image) and the signified (e.g. the concept of a tree) is arbitrary. In itself, as Lacan will point out, this isn't a new but a very ancient idea. Saussure's important innovation is to understand the consequences of this arbitrariness in a new way: the meaning of the signifier "tree," he will argue, doesn't take its meaning through a referential relationship to real trees; it doesn't mean by pointing to the world. Instead, "tree" takes on meaning only through its differentiation from other signifiers. Its full meaning depends, in English, on how we distinguish it from "bush" and "log" and "wood" and "plant." Saussure generalizes this idea by saying that "in language there are only differences without positive terms" (N 862, author's italics). Think of a night sky in which the darkness had no more and no less substance than the stars.

Lacan will also insist, to an extent that Saussure doesn't, on the mobility of the signifier with respect to the signified; he'll write of the "slipping" of the signifier over the domain of the signified, as if the bar between them (in the diagram above) is made of ice or covered with grease. For everyday use, "tree" pretty much means tree; in a poem or a dream, though, it can easily enough take on other signifieds, other meanings.

This is important for Lacan because it lets him understand the phallus, a signifier, as something other than just a reference to the male anatomy. Both men and women, he will say, have "a relation ... to the phallus that is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes" (N 1182). Furthermore, that relation starts out from a fantasy of the mother and of the mother's body, one in which the child (of either sex) desires her love. Yet for her to love the child, the child must have or be something she needs, something she has lost. And if she has lost something, than the child has perhaps lost something too. That loss is both terrifying and, insofar as it creates the hope of being able to supply  what the beloved has lost, endlessly promising.

The Priapus fresco from ancient Pompeii,
to which Lacan refers on page 1187.

There's a paradox here that Lacan is aware of: the privileged signifier of sexual difference is the same, regardless of your sex. This doesn't mean that sexual difference makes no difference--on the contrary, it means that the female body and the male body are both stuck with a single gendered signifier, the phallus, for their difference. Even though the signifier "phallus," because it's a signifier, is not a positive term, and takes its meaning only as a mark of difference between men and women, it tends to disguise that difference as the presence of something in men and the absence of something in women; the male body fits it in a way that the female body doesn't. And this is true, for Lacan, of language as such, in so far as patriarchal powers--the oedipal father is their epitome--have appropriated language's structural potential to allocate power.

A couple of things to attend to in Lacan's terminology:

a) He largely stops using the term "castration" after the first page or so, but he continues to refer back to the idea using more abstract terms like "lack" and "division" and "splitting." Bear in mind that these terms are, if not quite synonymous, at least continuous with one another. It's also worth thinking about the consequences of this rhetorical strategy of abstraction; does glossing castration as lack critique or merely repeat a sexist language?

b) Lacan's ostentatiously capitalized "Other" doesn't refer just to another empirical person. In fact, it's important to Lacan that what one person desires in another isn't empirical at all; this is one source of his quarrel with the observational (rather than linguistic) bent of English and American psychoanalysts in what's called the "object relations" tradition (see N 1183 and 1172-3). Lacan gives a problematically and deliberately (I think) circular definition of the Other on page 1185: it is "the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech in any relation in which the Other intervenes"; the Other is the place evoked by the Other. Later in the same short paragraph, he glosses this "locus" or place as "the unconscious." The Other, then, would seem to be both inside the self (as the unconscious) and outside of the self (as someone else's language). For Lacan, it is indeed both. This is a troubling feature of his thought that we should seek to account for--what does it portend for my relation to you?

c) Note that demand, desire and need are importantly distinct terms for Lacan. Their meanings are a bit easier to sort out from within the text of this essay, so I'll simply flag them for your attention here and will surely ask how you understand them in class.


III. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience"

Perhaps the first thing to say about this essay is that it gives us a few moments at which Lacan's sometimes too precious language registers acute observation of human behavior. The child before the mirror, he writes, even if unable to walk and confined in a stroller, "overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his confinement so as to suspend his [or her] attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position and take in, in order to still it, an instantaneous view of the image" (1164, translation modified).

Baby likes her mirror. Why does this matter for the mental life of adults?

Lacan draws our attention to the rather poignant and funny contrast between the baby's triumphant celebration before the mirror, on the one hand, and her utter dependence on the other. Unable to walk or speak, baby finds something in the mirror that she can nonetheless control, an image of herself as whole, complete, autonomous. It's important to note in Lacan's description of the child that she's not just looking at herself in the mirror, but also controlling the movement of her image, celebrating and then pausing, taking in for a moment an image of herself undisturbed by time or change.

Bosch, detail from The Garden of
Earthly Delights, c. 1500

On some level, Lacan seems to suggest, we all want what baby wants: we want to be whole, complete, autonomous. Yet this is no less ironically impossible for an adult than it is for the baby, and to the extent that we give ourselves over to language, it is perhaps more so. For language, unlike a stilled image, exists in and depends on time for its meanings, and a person who tries to find herself in it can only get her reflection back from another person, from someone else's words, words that will never be wholly her own. (Lacan's word for the process of establishing an identity interpersonally (socially, linguistically), is "dialectic," a term he borrows from the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel).

We'd all like to be as cute as baby in the mirror, but language isn't a mirror. It gives us to ourselves in pieces, not as wholes. And so instead of looking like baby, the images we make in our dreams and all too often in our history--this essay was written shortly after World War II--look like Bosch:

Hieronymous Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights. Lacan refers to Bosch with regard to the "fragmented body" (1167).

Our true selves, on this account, are less like perfect images than like tangles of limbs, in which it's hard to tell one body from another, or like Lacanian sentences, in which the play of words teases us out of thought rather than getting down to the business of reflecting a neatly coherent proposition. Desire mixes us up.

Bosch, Garden, detail

As you read "The Mirror Stage," then, look for the two figurative undercurrents that often structure Lacan's argument. The essay is about the difference in psychic life between time and space, on the one hand, and between parts and wholes, on the other. (Consider, to take just one key term, how these tensions are at play in the word "stage" itself).

It's surprising, in a way, that Lacan wants to insist not just on the truth but on the ethical value of remembering that we're not whole, and not autonomous. That baby is so happy, and those people in the Bosch painting are so twisted! One question you might take up in your comments, then, concerns what this ethical value is. Read the essay's last couple of pages, in which Lacan compares psychoanalysis to existentialism and alludes to the Holocaust, with particular care in this regard.

Yet feel free, too, to bring up anything else in the essay that you found interesting or puzzling. We'll pick up on Friday where we left off with "The Signification of the Phallus," and move on to "The Mirror Stage" and "The Agency of the Letter" (more on the latter here soon) as time permits.

IV. "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious"
This is, in my opinion, the most difficult of the three essays we're reading this week. My own experience of reading it over the years has been and remains one of alternating moments of insight and puzzlement--this latter feeling particularly when Lacan starts expressing his semiotic theory in the form of quasi-mathematical functions [f(S) etc]. Yet the essay does, I think, articulate with some clarity (and wit) ideas that are helpful for understanding the two more approachable essays of Lacan's that we've studied this week, and for thinking about the relation of language to gender and sexuality more broadly. I'll point to three such ideas.

1) Lacan's revision of Saussure's model of the sign

Where Saussure's model of the sign places the signified (a concept) over the signifier (a sound-image, a word), Lacan revises that model to clarify what he sees as a more important aspect of the signifier than its relation to the concept. His model seeks to clarify not the relation of signifier to concept, but the relation of the signifier to the human subject:

Lacan's model of the sign.

Obviously, the signifier "ladies" has no very direct link to the concept of a door. Lacan regards all such links between signifier and concept as fundamentally unstable, though, and he regards Saussure's model of the sign misleading insofar as it suggests such stability (see number 2, below). What Lacan's model of the sign clarifies, he says, is "how the signifier enters the signified" (1173).

That's a characteristically playful phrase: for surely the signifier "ladies" doesn't, in Lacan's model, cross the bar; it doesn't go into a door. What does go through the door, of course, is a lady who needs to satisfy a bodily need, needs to use the bathroom. This raises a further question, then: how does a woman's (or a man's) entry into the proper bathroom door explain something about how the signifier enters into the signified?

2) The poetry of the slippery signifier: metaphor and metonymy

Saussure's diagram of how the sign divides up the
essentially fluid spaces of language (A, above) and
 of concepts (B, below).

Lacan describes an "incessant sliding [glissement] of the signified under the signifier" (1175) in Saussure's model of the sign, referring to the diagram at left (you can see it in context at N 856). What Saussure wishes to show with this diagram is how the sign segments and stabilizes the fluid regions of conceptual and verbal space by binding certain signifiers to certain signifieds.

The emphasis on sliding is really Lacan's more than Saussure's, and we should note that Lacan revises the meaning of Saussure's diagram by metaphorizing it. Whereas Saussure wishes the dotted lines to show divisions, Lacan insists that they are no less fluid than anything else in the diagram: its upper and lower regions resemble "the upper and lower Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis," and the dotted lines are "fine streaks of rain" (1175).

Whereas Saussure sees language as linear, Lacan wants us to understand it as a musical "polyphony...aligned along the several staves of a score" (1175). Any word in a sentence might metaphorically evoke terms associated with it through similarity, as if sounding with them in a chord, or it might metonymically evoke terms associated with it through contiguity, as if preparing an arpeggio. These associative substitutions are most pronounced and most deliberate in poetry, but they're potentially at play in language at all times. Thus Jakobson's picture of language as determined at every point by metonymic and metaphoric axes of substitution gives us a fuller picture of its workings than Saussure's idea of linearity, according to Lacan.

This leads Lacan to think differently about where meaning resides in a linguistic utterance. In Saussure's model of the sign, the signifier "tree" is rather tightly bound to its concept, and this accords with our everyday use of language up to a point. Yet if I walked into class and began speaking to you with the single word "tree," you might think me rather odd if I paused for a very long time after that single word; you'd be waiting to hear what came next. Language creates meaning in sentences, and Lacan notices that even sentence fragments that don't express complete thoughts are nonetheless not without meaning. In the cliché that he plays with, the phrase "she is poor, but...", although it doesn't express a completed thought, nonetheless creates a horizon of expectation that depends on how we think about poverty, and about women--depends on the set of associations that might allow us to complete this sentence.  The signifier, argues Lacan, "'insists'" in the signifying chain, but "none of its elements 'consist' in the signification of which it as at the moment capable.

A somewhat recent example that illustrated this 'insistence' was the unusual frequency with which Barack Obama was praised for being "articulate" during his presidential campaign four years ago. That term elicited comment and sometimes criticism because it was felt to depend on another: Obama was articulate (even though he was black). The words in parentheses were never, so far as I recall, actually spoken by those who praised him for being articulate, and of course to be troubled by what articulate seemed to imply, one would have to already be aware of it. The discomfort around the term arose not from the actual utterance of any speaker, nor from anything we could discover in a dictionary definition of "articulate," but from the relation of "black" and "articulate" in the historically inflected structure of our language.

Another example for you to ponder: "She's professionally successful, and...."

3) The Lacanian cogito: Where am "I"?

Lacan's idea of the signifying chain has profound consequences for how he understands the human subject. Just as the meaning of an utterance is never fully present within it, so too the human subject is never fully present to itself.

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1928-9).
The sentence in French says "This is not a pipe."

Lacan makes this most clear in his revision of the famous axiom of René Descartes: cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. Lacan applies to this axiom his own insight that the signified is always displaced from the signifier, always elsewhere with respect to it. If I say "I want cake," what the word "cake" conveys first of all my lack of cake; what's more, even my use of "I" is the result of a displacement of my hunger into a symbolic system that merely represents it. The poet Arthur Rimbaud famously wrote to his friend that the experience of poetry had made him feel that "I is an other" (Je est un autre). Lacan gives a version of that thought in his revision of Descartes: "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think."