Écrits

1. The Mirror Stage: Formation of the Alienated Ego

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in 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.

Early self-recognition. The mirror stage describes how an infant, between 6 and 18 months, joyfully recognizes its own image in a mirror. This recognition occurs before the child has full motor control, presenting an idealized, unified image of the body that contrasts with the child's felt motor incoordination. This external image provides a sense of wholeness that the child lacks internally.

Fictional unity. This identification with the specular image forms the "Ideal-I" or ego, a primordial, fictional unity. It's an alienating process because the self is constituted by an external image, leading to a fundamental discord between the perceived unified self and the felt fragmented body. This external image becomes the source of secondary identifications and libidinal normalization.

Foundation of identity. The mirror stage is crucial for understanding the ego's aggressive and competitive nature. The ego is fundamentally rooted in this spatial identification, prefiguring its alienating destiny. This early experience lays the groundwork for how the subject will relate to others and their own reality, always mediated by an external image.

2. The Unconscious is Structured Like Language

For in the analysis of dreams, Freud intends only to give us the laws of the unconscious in their most general extension.

Linguistic structure. Lacan asserts that the unconscious operates not as a primordial soup of instincts, but with the precise, articulated structure of language. Freud's work on dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes reveals that the unconscious follows linguistic rules, specifically those of metaphor and metonymy. This means the unconscious is decipherable, like a text.

Signifier and signified. The core of this linguistic structure is the distinction between the signifier (the sound-image or written word) and the signified (the concept or meaning). In the unconscious, the signifier holds primacy, actively shaping the signified rather than merely representing it. This relationship is not a simple one-to-one correspondence, but a dynamic, often shifting, interplay.

Metaphor and metonymy. These two rhetorical figures are the fundamental mechanisms of the unconscious:

• Metaphor (condensation): One signifier replaces another, creating a new, often poetic, meaning. This is seen in dream condensation, where multiple meanings are fused into a single image.
• Metonymy (displacement): A signifier is linked to another by contiguity, allowing meaning to slide along the signifying chain. This is evident in dream displacement, where emotional intensity shifts from one idea to another.

3. Speech and Language: The Core of Psychoanalytic Experience

Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of training, or of exploration in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single medium: the patient’s speech.

Verbal communication. Psychoanalysis fundamentally operates through verbal communication. The patient's speech is the sole medium, instrument, and material of the analytic process. This highlights the importance of listening not just to what is said, but to how it is said, and what remains unsaid.

Empty vs. full speech. Lacan distinguishes between "empty speech" and "full speech":

• Empty speech: Superficial discourse that avoids the subject's true desire, often serving narcissistic defenses. It's a monologue that fails to engage the truth of the subject.
• Full speech: Discourse that genuinely engages the subject's history and unconscious desire, leading to a reordering of past contingencies and the emergence of truth.

Analyst's role in speech. The analyst's role is to facilitate the transition from empty to full speech. This involves careful punctuation of the discourse, strategic silence, and interpretations that resonate with the subject's unconscious. The analyst's non-action and "pure mirror" attitude are designed to avoid imposing their own ego and to allow the subject's truth to emerge.

4. Desire as the "Want-to-Be" of the Other

Desire is that which is manifested in the interval that demand hollows within itself, in as much as the subject, in articulating the signifying chain, brings to light the want-to-be, together with the appeal to receive the complement from the Other, if the Other, the locus of speech, is also the locus of this want, or lack.

Beyond need and demand. Desire is not a biological need (which can be satisfied) nor a demand (which is articulated in language and seeks satisfaction from the Other). Instead, desire emerges in the "gap" between need and demand. It is an unconditional, insatiable longing that persists even when needs are met.

The "want-to-be". Desire is fundamentally a "want-to-be" (manque-à-être), a lack in being that the subject seeks to fill. This lack is inherent in the human condition, stemming from the subject's entry into language and the symbolic order. It is a perpetual effect of symbolic articulation, always excentric and elusive.

Desire of the Other. Man's desire is ultimately the "desire of the Other." This means two things:

• The subject desires what the Other desires, seeking recognition from the Other.
• The subject desires as the Other, meaning their desire is shaped by the symbolic structures and expectations of the Other (society, language).

5. The Symbolic Order and the Name-of-the-Father

The primordial Law is therefore that which in regulating marriage ties superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature abandoned to the law of mating.

Foundation of culture. The symbolic order is the realm of language, law, and social structures that pre-exists and shapes the individual. It is the network of signifiers that organizes human relations, kinship, and cultural norms. This order distinguishes human society from animal societies.

The Name-of-the-Father. This concept represents the paternal function as the signifier of the Law. It is not the real father, but the symbolic father who introduces the prohibition of incest and establishes the subject's place within the cultural order. This "Name" structures desire and prevents a chaotic, undifferentiated relation with the mother.

Consequences of foreclosure. The "foreclosure" (Verwerfung) of the Name-of-the-Father – its non-inscription in the symbolic order – is the essential condition for psychosis. When this foundational signifier is missing, a "hole" opens in the symbolic, leading to a cascade of imaginary disorganization and the emergence of delusional phenomena, as seen in cases like Schreber.

6. Aggressivity and Narcissism: Inherent in Human Relations

Aggressivity is the Correlative Tendency of a Mode of Identification that we call Narcissistic, and which Determines the Formal Structure of man’s ego and of the Register of Entities Characteristic of his World.

Ego's aggressive nature. Aggressivity is not merely a reaction to frustration but is fundamentally linked to the formation of the ego through narcissistic identification. The ego, formed by identifying with an external, idealized image (mirror stage), is inherently competitive and prone to rivalry with others.

Narcissistic passion. This "narcissistic passion" fuels the ego's drive for self-affirmation and mastery. Any perceived threat to this idealized image, especially from another, can trigger aggressive responses. This explains the "you or I" dynamic in human relations and the "transitivism" observed in children, where one child's actions are attributed to another.

Social implications. Lacan extends this to societal dynamics, noting how modern culture often confuses aggressivity with strength and promotes an "autonomous ego" that is fundamentally isolated. He critiques how societal structures, like the "struggle for life" or the "Master/Slave" dialectic, reflect and perpetuate this inherent aggressivity, often leading to social "discontents."

7. Psychosis as Foreclosure of the Signifier

It is the lack of the Name-of-the-Father in that place which, by the hole that it opens up in the signified, sets 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.

Breakdown in the symbolic. Psychosis is fundamentally a disorder of the symbolic order, specifically caused by the "foreclosure" (Verwerfung) of the Name-of-the-Father. This means the foundational signifier of paternal law was never inscribed in the subject's unconscious, leaving a "hole" in the symbolic structure.

Delusional metaphor. In the absence of this anchoring signifier, the subject attempts to compensate by creating a "delusional metaphor." This is a new, often idiosyncratic, signifying chain that tries to re-establish a coherent reality. Delusions and hallucinations are not simply errors of perception but attempts by the subject to reconstruct a symbolic order.

Schreber's case. Lacan extensively analyzes Daniel Paul Schreber's memoirs to illustrate this. Schreber's elaborate delusional system, with its "nerve-annexations" and "basic language," is interpreted as a desperate, yet highly structured, attempt to fill the void left by the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father. The voices and miraculous creations are signifiers irrupting into the real, trying to make sense of a world where the symbolic foundation is missing.

8. The Analyst's Role: Navigating Transference and Truth

For it is in the avowal of this speech, of which the transference is the enigmatic actualization, that the analysis must rediscover its centre and its gravity, and let no one imagine from what I said earlier that I conceive of this speech in some mystical mode reminiscent of karma.

Direction of treatment. The analyst directs the treatment, but not the patient. The primary task is to ensure the patient applies the analytic rule of free association, allowing their speech to unfold. The analyst's interventions, including interpretations, are strategic acts aimed at facilitating the emergence of the subject's truth.

Transference as a dialectic. Transference is not merely a repetition of past relationships but an "enigmatic actualization" of the subject's unconscious desire in relation to the analyst. The analyst becomes the "Other" (capital O), the locus onto whom the subject projects their fundamental questions and desires. The analyst must "cadaverize" their own ego, acting as a "dummy" to allow the subject's unconscious to speak.

Interpretation and truth. Interpretation is a precise intervention that introduces a "cut" in the signifying chain, allowing a new meaning to emerge. It is not about giving advice or imposing the analyst's reality, but about helping the subject recognize the truth of their desire, often by revealing the linguistic structure of their symptoms. The goal is to move beyond imaginary identifications and towards the subject's unique "want-to-be."

9. The Phallus as the Privileged Signifier of Desire

For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function, in the intrasubjective economy of the analysis, lifts the veil perhaps from the function it performed in the mysteries.

Symbolic, not anatomical. The phallus in Lacanian theory is not the biological penis or clitoris, nor is it a fantasy. It is a signifier, the privileged signifier of desire and lack. It represents the "to have" and "to be" in sexual difference, but always in a veiled, symbolic way.

Function in sexual difference. The phallus functions as the universal signifier of desire, structuring how both sexes relate to desire and castration. For the child, the mother is initially perceived as having the phallus (the phallic mother), and the child desires to be the phallus for the mother. The discovery that the mother lacks the phallus is crucial for the castration complex.

Castration and desire. The castration complex is not merely the fear of losing the penis, but the symbolic threat of losing the phallus as the signifier of desire. For men, it involves the fear of not having the phallus; for women, it involves the desire to be the phallus for the Other. This dynamic explains the "unnatural split" in human sexuality and the persistent "want-to-be" that drives desire.

10. The Subject's Subversion: Decentered by Language and Desire

Is the place that I occupy as the subject of a signifier concentric or excentric, in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified? – that is the question.

Beyond the Cartesian ego. Lacan fundamentally subverts the traditional Cartesian notion of a unified, self-transparent "I" (ego). The subject is not the master of their own thoughts or actions but is "split" (Spaltung) and decentered by the unconscious and the symbolic order. The "I think, therefore I am" is reinterpreted as "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think."

Subject of the signifier. The subject is constituted by language, existing as an effect of the signifier. The "I" that speaks is merely a "shifter," a linguistic placeholder, not a stable, coherent entity. The true subject emerges in the "inter-said" (inter-dit), the gaps and discontinuities of discourse, where the unconscious speaks.

Alienation and desire. This decentering means the subject is fundamentally alienated from their own being and desire. Desire is not something the subject possesses but something that possesses them, originating in the Other. The subject's quest for identity and meaning is a perpetual struggle within the linguistic and symbolic structures that define them.

11. The Death Drive: Beyond the Pleasure Principle

This limit is death – not as an eventual coming-to-term of the life of the individual, nor as the empirical certainty of the subject, but, as Heidegger’s formula puts it, as that ‘possibility which is one’s ownmost, unconditional, unsupersedable, certain and as such indeterminable (unüberholbare)’, for the subject – ‘subject’ understood as meaning the subject defined by his historicity.

Beyond homeostasis. Freud's concept of the death drive (Trieb) is not a biological instinct for self-destruction in the common sense, but a fundamental force that operates "beyond the pleasure principle." It represents a tendency towards absolute discharge, a return to an inorganic state, and is linked to the compulsion to repeat.

Limit of the symbolic. For Lacan, the death drive expresses the "limit of the historical function of the subject." It is the point where the subject confronts their own finitude and the ultimate non-meaning of existence. This limit is present in every act of symbolization, as the symbol "murders the thing" to eternalize desire.

Birth of the symbol. The death drive is paradoxically linked to the birth of the symbol, as seen in Freud's "Fort! Da!" game. The child's act of making an object appear and disappear is a mastery of absence, a symbolic negation that creates the space for language and desire. This "pure loss" is the source of the subject's being-for-death, a freedom found in confronting the void.

Last updated: October 30, 2025