JAQUES LACAN

Philosophy Essay On Jacques Lacan

Philosophy Essay On Jacques Lacan

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was born in Paris on April 13 1901 to a family of solid Catholic tradition? and was educated at a Jesuit school. After completing his baccalauréat he commenced studying medicine and later psychiatry. In 1927? Lacan commenced clinical training and began to work at psychiatric institutions? meeting and working with (amongst others) the famous psychiatrist Clerambault. His doctoral thesis? on paranoid psychosis? was passed in 1932. In 1934? he became a member of La Societe Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP)? 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 “the enemies of human kind”. The Law of the father is in this way theorised by Lacan as the necessary mediator between the child and the mother. A castrating acceptance of its sovereignity precipitates the child out of its ambivalent attempts to be the fully satisfying Thing for the mother. As Lacan quips? when the child accedes to castration? it accedes to the impossibility of it directly satisfying its incestous wish. If things go well? however? it will go away with 'title deeds in its pocket' that guarantee that? when the time comes (and if it plays by the rules)? it can at least have a satisficing substitute for its first lost love-object. What has occurred? in this event? is that the individual's imaginary identifications (or 'ideal egos') that exclusively characterised its infantile years have been supplemented by an identification of an entirely different order: what Lacan calls a symbolic identification with an 'ego ideal'. This is precisely identification with and within something that cannot be seen? touched? devoured? or mastered: namely? the words? norms and directives of its given cultural collective. Symbolic identification is always idenification with a normatively circumscribed way of organising the social-intersubjective space within which the subject can take on its most lasting imaginary identifications: (For example? the hysterical-vulnerable female identifies at the symbolic level with the patriarchal way of structuring social relations between sexes? outside of which her imaginary identification would be meaningless).

So? to repeat and summarise: Lacan's philosophical anthropology (his answer to the question: what is it to be human?) involves several important reformulations of Freudian tenets. By drawing on Hegel? game theory? and contemporary observations of infant behaviour? he lays greater systematic emphasis than Freud had on the intersubjective constitution of human desire. In this feature at least? his philosophical anthropology is united with that of philosophers such as Levinas? Honneth and Habermas. Equally? since for Lacan human desire is 'the desire of the other'? what he contends is at stake in the child's socialisation is its aspiration to be the fully satisfying object for the mother? a function which is finally (or at least norm-ally) fulfilled by the Law-bearing words of the father. Human-being? for Lacan? is thus (as decentred) vitally a speaking animal (what he calls a parle-etre); one whose desire comes to ...