Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition by Anthony Elliott

Author:Anthony Elliott [Elliott, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780631183280
Goodreads: 337994
Publisher: Blackwell Publishers
Published: 1992-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Rethinking the Symbolic: Critical Observations

I have argued above that the imaginary comprises a good deal more than just specular images, illusions, traps. As a psychic mode of elaborating self and objects, the imaginary is a constitutive feature of human subjectivity. It is the creation of a certain relation of the individual subject to itself, forged through phantasy, drive and affects. Such an imaginary elaboration of the self is at the same time the origin of certain representational forms which are crucial to the entire structuration of subjectivity within society. The prime difference between this standpoint and Lacan's theory, as indicated previously, hinges on the status of the unconscious. At the origins of subjectivity, I have argued, lies the primary unconscious. In Lacan's theory, however, there is no unconscious until the instantiation of the symbolic order.

Despite these divergences, Lacan's writings on the symbolic order are of enduring interest since they deal (in excess of Freud's formulations) with the constitution of social reality for the psyche. Lacan's reformulation of the Oedipal drama in terms of the human subject's accession to language, individuation, differentiation and social signification raises important questions about the nature of this transformation. For Lacan, there is nothing at the level of the psyche which suggests such a transformation into the socio-symbolic order is pre-given. The interface between subjectivity and the social field can only come into existence in Lacan's view through the instantiation of the signifying order itself, conceived in post-structuralist terms as the differential elements of language. As we have seen, this entry into linguistic differences is the unconscious in Lacan's theory. 'There is nothing', writes Lacan, 'in the unconscious which accords with the body'.43 Rather, Lacan's notion of the unconscious/symbolic is on the 'outside', structured in and through the effects of language. There are, however, severe problems with this deterministic account of the subjection of persons to the symbolic order. In what follows I shall focus on two interrelated difficulties. The first concerns the nature of the unconscious; the second, the constitution of the symbolic.

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