Abstract
“Lacan.” We will be a long time assimilating the far-ranging theoretical innovations in psychoanalysis that are associated with his name. Exploiting the richness of Freud’s text in ways little anticipated even by Freud’s closest adherents, Lacan reconceives the most basic psychoanalytic concepts, including those of the unconscious itself and the process of repression. The effect of these innovations is to recalibrate the analytic microscope along the lines of Lacan’s three cardinal categories of imaginary, symbolic, and real. On the one hand, Lacan defines the Freudian ego as a precipitate of the imaginary. During the “mirror phase,” the psychically formative period between the ages of six months and two years, the contours of the infantile ego are laid down in identification with the perceptual unity of the body image. In this way, Lacan rediscovers the profound appropriateness of the term “narcissism” and opens up a whole series of new problematics around the function of perception and the meaning of the object relation in psychoanalysis. On the other hand, Lacan draws upon the structuralist conception of language as a diacritical system to provide a new understanding of the nature and destiny of unconscious desire, that of “the unconscious structured like a language.” Lacan thus stakes out a provocative claim, yet one that becomes increasingly plausible when we reread Freud with an eye to the way in which the workings of the unconscious are revealed over and again to turn around plays on words and phonemic linkages. As a grand system of differences, the structure of language comprises an immense and precisely articulated web, intractable to perceptual representation, in which the desire of the subject unknown to the ego finds its circuit toward expression. The first two registers of imaginary and symbolic are triangulated by a third, that of the real, by which Lacan points enigmatically toward an unencompassable horizon that remains unthinkable and unknowable. The real forever outstrips everything figured by the imaginary or signified by the symbolic. As much an expression of the ineffable ground of the subject’s own being as that of the world beyond it, the real escapes all representation, even as its indeterminate force may be encountered in the experience of the uncanny or evidenced in the effects of the trauma.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
I have elsewhere tried to make this point with respect to the concept of the Freudian death drive. See my Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud, (New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1991 ).
Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection,trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton 0000 Co., 1977), p. 105. This source is hereafter noted parenthetically in the text as “E:S,” followed by page number.
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977 ), p. 395.
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy,pp. 395–396.
The phrase is from the inaugural paragraphs of Freud’s 1895 manuscript, Project for a Scientific Psychology,Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,trans. and ed. James Strachey ,(London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1955), Vol. 1. p. 295. The Standard Edition is hereafter noted parenthetically in the text as “SE” followed by volume and page number.
The words are Freud’s. They are quoted at Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1, Freud’s Papers on Technique,ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton 0000 Co., 1988), p. 40. This source is hereafter noted parenthetically in the text as “S.I” followed by page number.
Lacan underlines the remarkable character of such moments of presence. There is something not only extraordinary and uncanny but also distinctly uncomfortable about the feeling they produce. “It isn’t a feeling that we have all the time. To be sure, we are influenced by all sorts of presences, and our world only possesses its consistency, its density, its lived stability, because, in some way, we take account of these presences, but we do not realise them as such. You really can sense that it is a feeling which I’d say we are always trying to efface from life. It wouldn’t be easy to live if, at every moment, we had the feeling of presence, with all the mystery that that implies. It is a mystery from which we distance ourselves, and to which we are, in a word, inured” S. I, p. 42.
I here leave to one side Sartre’s critique of the Freudian unconscious. For a more extended discussion of that critique and its limitations, see my article “Heideggerian Psychiatry?: The Freudian Unconscious in Medard Boss and Jacques Lacan,” The Journal of Phenomenological Psychology,Vol. 24, No. 2.
See Lacan’s discussion at S.I, pp. 39–40.
Paul Ricoeur provides a useful discussion of phenomenological approaches to the Freudian unconscious and the problems they face. Cf. Freud and Philosophy,pp. 375–418.
The Schema L may be found in Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955,ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W.W. Norton 0000 Co., 1988), p. 243. This source is noted hereafter in the text as “S.II” followed by page number.
Compare, in the light of this discussion, Freud’s remark that “repression does not hinder the instinctual representative from continuing to exist in the unconscious, from organizing itself further, putting out derivatives and establishing connections. Repression in fact interferes only with the relation of the instinctual representative to one psychical system, namely, to that of the conscious” SE, 14: 149.
Compare, in this connection, Freud’s remark that “the word-presentation is not part of the act of repression, but represents the first of the attempts at recovery or cure” SE, 14: 203.
Laplanche and Pontalis remark that “The notion of cathexis — like most of the economic notions — plays a part in Freud’s conceptual apparatus without his ever having given a rigorous theoretical definition of it.” Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis,trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton 0000 Co., 1973), p. 63.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin ( New York: McGraw Hill, 1966 ), p. 111.
The notion of value envelops the notions of unit, entity, and reality.“ Saussure, Coursechrww(133)’p. 110.
Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning,trans. James Mepham (Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press, 1981), p. 85. Hereafter this source is noted parenthetically in the text as “SM” followed by page number.
Compare Lacan’s claim that the signifier “connotes presence or absence, by introducing essentially the and that links them, since in connoting presence or absence, it establishes presence against a background of absence, just as it constitutes absence in presence” E: S, 234.
For an illuminating discussion of Lacan’s concept of the signifier, especially in relation to its roots in Saussure’s concept, see Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter, trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992 ).
Jacques Lacan, Écrits, ( Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966 ), p. 662.
I am indebted for this term to my good friend Eric Olson, whose unpublished work on Lacan is among the subtlest and most deeply insightful that I know.
A.J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln 0000 London: University of Nebraska Press: 1983 ), p. 39.
See especially Lacan’s discussion at E:S, pp. 95–99.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton 0000 Co., 1981), p. 45.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Boothby, R. (1995). “Now You See It …”: The Dynamics of Presence and Absence in Psychoanalysis. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire. Phaenomenologica, vol 133. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1624-6_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1624-6_26
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4576-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-1624-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive