Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis by Dany Nobus

Author:Dany Nobus [Nobus, Dany]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Although Lacan rejected the existence of auto-erotic drives, he retained Freud’s portrayal of the ego (Ich) and the concurrent experience of narcissism as secondary formations, incorporating it into his own paradigm of the mirror stage. In Seminar I, Lacan commented upon Freud’s remarks on the development of the ego in On Narcissism, saying that they ‘indicate the imaginary origin of the ego’s function.’66 Obviously, Freud did not really consider the origin — let alone the imaginary origin — of the ego; he merely suggested that ‘a new psychical action’ must be responsible for its emergence. It was Lacan himself who first elaborated upon this action in his reading of the mirror image as a formative Gestalt.

Lacan highlighted the aspect of immobility, shared by the Gestalt and the mirror image, in order to contrast this to ‘the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him.’67 This is yet another way to explain why the mirror image is attractive for the child. When adopting it, the internally felt turbulence can be steered in the right direction. Through its identification with the static mirror image, the child can channel the ‘libidinal dynamism’ of its ‘organic insufficiency.’68 The fixity of the mirror image can also be inferred from the rigidity of the ‘me’ to which it gives rise. In The Mirror Stage, Lacan contended that the ‘me’ is represented in dreams via ‘a fortress [un camp retranché], or a stadium [un stade]’ surrounded by ‘marshes and rubbish-tips,’ and that the neurotic formations of the I (me) have a characteristic inertia.69 In Seminar I, he even proffered the thesis that the ‘me’ ‘is structured exactly like a symptom,’ even ‘the human symptom par excellence, the mental illness of man,’ which explains why Anna Freud could easily assign a plethora of defence mechanisms to it.70

Between 1949 and 1953, Lacan progressively disentangled the physiological effects of the Gestalt on animals from the psychic constitution of the ‘me’ through the mirror image in the human child. Whereas an animal is captivated and influenced by the visual presence of a congener, a child also recognizes, identifies with and distinguishes itself from its mirror image. For this mental operation to occur, the presence of an external imago is necessary, but not sufficient. The imaginary condition needs to be fulfilled, but it will only produce effects if synchronized with foetalization (the real condition) and — as Lacan stressed from the mid 1950’s — the discourse of the Other (the symbolic condition).

Moreover, animals and human beings undergo the effects of the Gestalt differently due to their differential ‘accomodation of the imaginary.’71 Apart from some exceptional cases, sexual behaviour in animals is only triggered by the presence of one specific imago in the environment, for instance the brightly coloured face of a female. However, in the human species sexual arousal can result from an infinite series of imagos; the effects of the Gestalt do not depend on its age, colour, size and shape, and not even on its morphological similarity.72 To Lacan, this proves that the imaginary is not very well accomodated in human beings.

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