Lacan presentation by laxman

Jacques Lacan Bundle of Freud,
Saussure, Levi-Strauss,
Foucault, and Nietzsche
Some people are born only for invention
Arrange the alphabets to make meaningful sentence
M-A-D-A-M C-U-R- I- E
LACAN Full form
L= Linguistic
A= Application of
C= psychoanalysis
A= application in art
N= n many more
cf] d'/L rGb|df ˜˜˜˜˜˜˜ t]/L
rfFbgL d]/] c+u hnfo] .
Metaphor?
Metonymy
d ltd|f] 3/ cfsf] .
Eff]6]s's'/ e'Sg] 8/n] kms]{ /
k;ndf k;]/ Ps sk lkP/
cfo]+
His Psychosexual theory of Psychanalysis

My phases and works:
➢ Phase 1 (1926-1953): work
Articles on mirror stage
➢ Phase 2 (1953-1963) : work
On structural linguistics and
unconscious
➢ Phase 3 (1963-1974) roughly
Departed further from traditional
psychoanalysis form Freud
➢ Phase 4 (194 to final years)
Mathematicization of PsychoanalysisAmazing controversial figure
1. Psychiatrist
2. Treated automatism
3.Conflictual to the mainstream of
psychoanalysis
4. Resigned form the socieite
psychanlytique de Paris
5. Started EcolPreudiennne de paris in
1963
The Function and Field of language
in 1953 It gave fame to him

The stages of psycho sexual development
0-6 months of age.
1. dominated by a chaotic mix of perceptions, feelings, and needs.
2. distinguish own self from that of parents or even the world around . Spends time taking into
itself everything that you experienced as pleasurable without any acknowledgment of
boundaries.
3. closest to the pure materiality of existence, or what Lacan terms "the Real."
4. body begins to be fragmented into specific erogenous zones (mouth, anus, penis, vagina),
6-18 months of age.
1. The "mirror stage" entails a "libidinal dynamism" caused by the young child's identification
with his own image (what Lacan terms the "Ideal-I" or "ideal ego".
2. this act marks the primordial recognition of one's self as "I," although at a point "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.
18 months to 4 years of age.
1. The acquisition of language during this next stage of development further separated you from a
connection to the Real (from the actual materiality of things).
2. Lacan builds on such semiotic critics as Ferdinand de Saussure to show how language is a
system that makes sense only within its own internal logic of differences: the word, "father,"
only makes sense in terms of those other terms it is defined with or against (mother, "me," law,
the social, etc.).

➢Symbolic order
➢Unconsciousness
➢Imaginary order
➢Order or the real
➢Mirror stage
➢Splitting
➢Desire
➢Entry in to language
➢Phallus
➢suture
???
Lacan and Freud

Three orders govern human consciousness
Real, imaginary and Symbolic
Symbolic order
Constitutes of meanings and exchange of them in linguistic terms.
Constructs desire and feeling acc. particular representations.
a universal structure encompassing the entire field of human action and existence.
It involves the function of speech and language, and more precisely that of the
signifier.
It appears as an essentially unconscious, latent apparatus.
Radical reinterpretation of Freud in light of structuralism.
= the Big other
Baby Father ,
society
I want to suck mother's breast
the Big other
I need a toy to play with.
Symbolically transformed in to
no Other of the Other
The other is Language,
society Code values norms
and cultures
Big Others = the cultures

Explanation of the Big other.
• the big Other represents the otherness of language in Lacanian term
• Newly born baby doesn't posses any language to express itself.
• Language is alien for him and because of nurturing he familiarizes the language
• Mastery over language is almost impossible in Lacan's term.
• Human speak language. Or human beings are spoken by language.
• The Big other is the term to symbolize the use of language.
• Connotation starts from there and it is related to the unconscious.
• Unconscious emerges from the successful combination language and turns into a subject.
• Unconscious itself is structures like a language. So the unconscious is a system of differences between
signifiers just like that of structuralists to language.
• The "big other" reflects the societal need for suppressing one or more aspects of truth in order to function.
• This big other, when spoken explicitly, disrupts the foundations of collective thought.
• there is no Other of the Other,” which was a way of saying that there is no metalanguage that could provide a guarantee to our
meanings)
• little others can be thought of as neighbors, fellow citizens, enemies, friends, peers, or lovers, and Big Others can be
thought of as collections of social conventions, codes, norms, laws, etc., why shouldn't we simply abandon the
lacanian parlance and call little others 'persons' and Big Others 'cultures'? What is it that makes the other "other"?

Unconsciousness
not structured by biological realm of libidinal derives but formed
together with the formation of ego.
It is formed by the symbolic order.
the unconscious reveals the fact subjects are always more than our
social selves allow.
The unconscious reveals our “too-much-ness,” the fact that we are split
selves. [multiple persons or characters within a person?]
The ego works automatically. But it is an illusion, a symbolically
constructed selfhood whose excesses, splits, and gaps are revealed by
the eruptions of the unconscious into conscious life.
The birth of subjectivity is one’s entry into language, understood as a
synchronic system of signs and social codes that generate meaning—
that is a symbolic order. Previous scholars thought it to be biological
thing.
Unconsciousness
Tale of three
sisters and
long nose
• Not primitive.
• Grows with the
growth
• Symbols govern
more.
• Birth subjectivity.
• Not biological.
• Forms with ego.

Imaginary order
➢ The fundamental narcissism by which the human
subject creates fantasy images of both himself and
his ideal object of desire.
➢ The imaginary order is closely related to the mirror
stage.
➢ This imaginary realm continues to exert its influence
throughout the life of the adult and is not merely
superceded in the child's movement into the symbolic
order.
➢ The child confuses others with his or her own image,
as seen in a mirror or a photograph.
➢ The imaginary order is thus the basic matrix of self
and other.
➢ The imaginary is the order according to which the
child becomes aware of himself as an “I,” a subject,
among other subjects.

Order of the real …… 1 …. contd
➢ Only neo-natal children were we close to this state of
nature, a state in which there is nothing but need.
➢ No sense of separation. A baby needs to satisfy his
needs with no sense for any separation between itself
and the external world.
➢ For this reason, Lacan sometimes represents this
state of nature as a time of fullness or completeness
that is subsequently lost through the entrance into
language.
➢ The primordial animal need for copulation (for
example, when animals are in heat) similarly
corresponds to this state of nature.
➢ Gate to enter into language

Contd …Order of the real…..2
➢ There is a need followed by a search for satisfaction. As far as
humans are concerned, however, "the real is impossible," as
Lacan was fond of saying.
➢ There is a need followed by a search for satisfaction. As far as
humans are concerned, however, "the real is impossible," as
Lacan was fond of saying.
➢ The real is not synonymous with external reality. What is real for
the subject(baby) is what is present within his reach that can
satisfy him. The real is the present rather than a re-presented thig
through language or some other sign system. When the baby enter
into language, he marks an irrevocable separation from the real.
➢ The real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives
since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic
structures ultimately fail. The real for example continues to erupt
whenever we are made to acknowledge the materiality of our
existence, an acknowledgement that is usually perceived as
traumatic
Only present
Only mother
Only sucking
No represent
No language
No other - No world
No separation.
No imagine
No symbol
No sign
To sum up

Mirror image
Mirror stage
The way I must
get to them

Mirror
stage
➢ young child's identification with his own image (what
Lacan terms the "Ideal-I" or "ideal ego")
➢ A stage that occurs anywhere from 6-18 months of age.
➢ This act marks the primordial recognition of one's self as
"I"
➢ Pre-verbal impetus to the creation of narcissistic phantasies
in the fully developed subject.
➢ That fantasy image of oneself can be filled in by others who
we may want to emulate in our adult lives (role models, et
cetera), anyone that we set up as a mirror for ourselves.
➢ The mirror stage establishes what Lacan terms the
"imaginary order" and, through the imaginary, continues
to assert its influence on the subject even after the subject
enters the symbolic order.

Splitting
"Splitting" (in French, "refente") discussed how the subject is divided in
subordination to the signifier.
Lacan introduced the written symbol to refer to the effects of the signifier on the
subject.
~ differentiates the ego from the subject and
consciousness from the unconscious.
In or after this process, a person does not speak about the subject; the id speaks about
it. ( for example: we don't talk about sex everytime but the idea remains dominant in the
mind) or ( take it as the baby's separation from mother's breast)
A signifier represents the subject, but before disappearing under this signifier, the
subject is nothing.
The signifier represents the subject for the signifier that exists in the Other. [This
operation alienates the subject, and through alienation produces the subject.]
The second operation is separation. [It results in the splitting of the subject.]
There is no answer in the Other to the question of the subject's being.
Instead, the subject encounters the desire of the Other, that is, its own lack, the
juncture where the subject's fantasy will form.
References:
Lacan, Jacques. (1966). Du sujet enfin en question.Écrits, pp. 229-236. Paris: Seuil.
Consciousness from
unconscious.
Ego From subject
baby from
mother's breast

Lacan aimed to deconstruct the notion of the unitary subject and to replace it
with an account of the self wherein the subject is fundamentally decentered
from consciousness. For Lacan, the individual and the social are co- constituted
in and through signification and signifying practices. Not only is the subject split
from a world where the self/other distinction does not operate, but this very
splitting is rooted in signifying practices.
it is in identifying with signifiers and discourses that alienation occurs and an
individual’s production proceeds.
The individual’s identification with and alienation from the processes of the
social begins with his or her accession to the symbolic.
The subject "I" is addressed as "He" or "She" or other relative words and names.
This is what leads him further to the OTHER.
Splitting

Desire
There are two relatively straightforward ways in which we can understand one of
Lacan’s most well-known maxims, that
“Man’s desire is the desire of the Other”? (Seminar XI, p.235).
Firstly, that desire is essentially a desire for recognition from this ‘Other’;
Secondly that desire is for the thing that we suppose the Other desires, which is
to say, the thing that the Other lacks.
https://www.lacanonline.com/2010/05/what-does-lacan-say-about-desire/
desire repeats and insists through the transference and the signifier in psychoanalytic
work, Lacan verifies our first reading, that desire is fundamentally a desire for
recognition:
In Lacan’s developmental philosophical anthropology, the child’s entry into
language as a subject coincides with his or her separation from the mother. The
mother, therefore, is the child’s first experience of lack— absence—which
creates the condition of desire. The father intervenes in the mother–child
relationship at a moment coinciding with the child’s entry into the symbolic
order and loss of union with the mother [p.159]
Separation anxiety

Desire The Unconscious is the Discourse of the Other
"The unconscious manifests itself by the way it insists
on filling the “gap” that has been left by the very thing
the subject feels is lacking in him or her, that is the
unconscious!
(The unconscious attempts to fill in the gap caused by
the unconscious)."
References:
https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/lacan.htm
Filling the
“gap”
Activity.
Desire ????

Entry in to language
The acquisition of language during this stage of development
further separates baby from a connection to the Real (from the
actual materiality of things). Lacan builds on such semiotic
critics as Ferdinand de Saussure to show how language is a
system that makes sense only within its own internal logic of
differences: the word, "father," only makes sense in terms of
those other terms it is defined with or against (mother, "me,"
law, the social, etc.). As Kaja Silverman puts it, "the signifier
'father' has no relation whatever to the physical fact of any
individual father. Instead, that signifier finds its support in a
network of other signifiers, including 'phallus,' 'law,'
'adequacy,' and 'mother,' all of which are equally indifferent to
the category of the real" (164). Once you entered into the
differential system of language, it forever afterwards
determined your perception of the world around you, so that the
intrusion of the Real's materiality becomes a traumatic event
Lacan and Jacobson
Metaphor and Metonymy sf] s'/f lg a'em a'8f ltd|f] phallus zAb eGbf
lg w]/} s'/f Metaphor and Metonymy n] a'lemG5. Metaphor and
Metonymy sf sf/0f n] aGr Sof "Chain of signifiers and signified."
ltdLn] Phallus nfO “signifier of signifieds,” or the ultimate
difference that fixes meaning in discourse" eGrf} s]/]. Multiple
meanings, many signifieds.
https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacandevelop.html
cf] d'/L rGb|df
˜˜˜˜˜˜˜ t]/L
rfFbgL d]/] c+u
hnfo] .
afp
ef]6]s's'/
cleefjs
;/+/Ifs
=============
d ltd|f] 3/
cfsf] ef]6]s's'/
e'Sg] 8/n] kms]{
/ k;ndf k;]/
Ps sk lkP/
cfo]+
Metaphor: [substitutes]. Metonymy: [displacement]. These two axes of language—substitution and displacement—correspond
to the working of the unconscious. Metonymy, which carries language along its syntagmatic axis corresponds to
the displacement of desire that characterizes the dream work in Freud. Metaphor, on the other hand, corresponds to
the paradigmatic axis, the axis of substitution and, therefore, corresponds to that aspect of condensation whereby
different figures can be substituted or are condensed into one through an overdetermined nodal point.
rGb|df
k]|ldsf
Dffofn'
lk|otd
Metaphor Paradigmatic
Ps sk lrof
Pssk skmL
Ps sk bxL
Syntagmatic

Phallus
1. The phallus is used in psychoanalysis either as
a symbol of ultimate male power or the female lack.
1. In the male sense, it symbolizes creation, ultimate power, omnipotence and even
godhood. However, this ultimate quality is also unattainable and hence also indicates lack.
2. In the female sense, it connotes general lack, loss and an aching sense of incompleteness.
Women desire the phallus and hence are attracted to men.
3. Lacan saw the phallus as the symbolic function, the bearer of the 'Law of the father'. In
the symbolic register, it 'covers over' the division of the subject, from the mother. It is a
position of unreachable 'fixity' from which the subject could speak as if it were the author
of its own meaning. It represents exchange, communication and representation.
4. Taking up a position relative to the phallus enables the child to position itself sexually,
either 'having the phallus' or 'lacking it' (often framed as 'being the phallus').
5. This becomes particularly significant during gender discovery and the Oedipus Complex,
where the boy may re-present himself to his mother as 'having the phallus' and the girl as
'being the phallus', both on the assumption that the mother desire, the phallus.
http://changingminds.org/explanations/identity/s
ubject.htm
A boy child is attracted to his mother because he has a phallus
A girl child is attracted to her father because he has a phallus.
The signifier of signified
The Lack
Cause of desire

suture
Yoking the signifiers -a process based on desire, emotional investment, and identity—Lacan says, a complex,
process-oriented account of subjectivity as multiple, contradictory, and resistant.

Suture
1. When particular subject positions are unavailable to us a 'wound' is created.
Language enables us to 'suture' (ie. stitch) these wounds by replacing the
unavailable positions with other subject positions that are more readily available.
This generally reinforces the status quo.
2. Suture, according to Miller, is 'that moment when the subject inserts itself into
the symbolic register in the guise of a signifier and in doing so gains meaning at the
expense of being.'
3. Suture refers to the means by which the subject, who does not exist outside
language and cultural codes, is 'articulated' with available positions. The subject is
thus made to appear at the point of origin of language, although they are actually
absent.
4. Suturing binds the subject to the signifier. When people are sutured into a position,
they enter Lacan's symbolic register, where meaning is created through language
and culture. In doing so, they move away from the raw 'real' world outside of their
interpretation.
5. A significant effect of suture is that it makes us forget that the camera is there as
we are drawn into the scene.
http://changingminds.org/explanations/identity/suture.htm

hg
Psychoanalysis for Freud
▪ Psychoanalytic psychologists see psychological
problems as rooted in the unconscious mind.
▪ Manifest symptoms are caused by latent
(hidden) disturbances.
▪ Typical causes include unresolved issues during
development or repressed trauma.
▪ Treatment focuses on bringing the repressed
conflict to consciousness, where the client can
deal with it.
Freud used it
For treating the neurotic disorders
▪ For developing the personality
▪ For cleaning of the repressions, restrictions and
depressions , suppressions, dream analysis, slips
etc.
clinically
▪ Depression
▪ Anxiety disorder
https://www.simplypsychology.org/psychoanalysis.html
Psychoanalysis for Lacan
Linguistics
Art
History
Myth
Maths
Philosophy
Anthropology

• What about
educational
implications
• Curriculum designing
• Selection of content.
• Language teaching
• Teaching methods
• Understanding the
nature of human
psychosexual
development
1. Helped educational sociologists understand the ways in which
schools function.
2. Helped educators and educational researchers realize the
fundamental role of relationships between selves and others in
effective teaching-learning interactions, as well as the
importance of dialogue in collectively constructing knowledge
that is comprehensive and “effective”
3. Lacan’s work reveals that teaching and learning are largely a
matter of fulfilling our psychological needs
4. Understand the importance of psychological and emotional
dimensions in teaching and learning and to work against the
traditional assumption.
5. The primary purpose of teaching and learning is to help all
people involved lead personally fulfilling and socially
productive lives.
6. Development of subjectivity.
7. Development of different critical theories.

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