The Lacanian Subject

Part One: Structure: Alienation and the Other

Language and Otherness

The unconscious is the Other’s discourse because language, as a pre-existing foreign system into which every child is born, insinuates itself into the speaking being’s desires and fantasies, making both ego discourse and unconscious thought fundamentally alien to the subject. Lacan’s concept of the Other names this structure of externality that inhabits us from within, manifesting in slips of the tongue, psychosomatic symptoms, and internalized desires that are never fully our own.

• Slips of the tongue reveal that discourse operates on two simultaneous levels—a conscious ego discourse and an unintentional Other discourse—and psychoanalysis holds that the interruptions of the latter are not random but follow a precise, discoverable logic.
  • A patient saying ‘schnob’ instead of ‘job’ condenses ‘job,’ ‘snob,’ ‘schnoz,’ and ‘schmuck,’ each carrying unconscious associations to family rivalry, the father’s preference for a sibling, and childhood fears.
  • “The unconscious is the Other’s discourse” —Lacan
  • While the ego dismisses slips as random errors, Freud insisted they speak truth, and analysts seek to change the logic governing such interruptions as the only path to genuine change.
• The Other as language is not an external tool but a pre-existing symbolic order into which every child is born, such that the child’s very desires are molded by the language it is forced to learn in order to be understood, making desire itself a product of alienation in language.
  • Before a child is born, parents prepare a linguistic space for it—selecting names, speaking of it—and those words have been in use for centuries, constituting the ‘Other of language’ (l’Autre du langage) that precedes and outlasts any individual.
  • When a baby cries, meaning is imposed by the caretaker’s interpretation (e.g., ‘she must be hungry’), so that the child’s discomfort is retroactively constituted as hunger; meaning is not the child’s own but is determined by others on the basis of their language.
  • Rousseau’s glorification of primitive man before language exemplifies what Lacan calls man’s alienation in language—every human who learns to speak is thereby alienated from him or herself.
• The unconscious is structured like a language because what is repressed are not feelings but signifiers—words or parts of words—that form autonomous chains obeying grammatical-like combinatory rules, preserving connections the ego ignores, such as phonemic similarities between words like ‘job,’ ‘snob,’ and ‘schnoz.’
  • Freud’s Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen (ideational representatives) are equated by Lacan with signifiers, so that repression is the sinking of a word ‘under’ consciousness where it develops new combinatory relations independent of conscious meaning.
  • The unconscious pays attention to literal equivalences—anagrams, shared phonemes—that conscious discourse ignores; ‘conservation’ and ‘conversation’ are anagrams, and the unconscious may substitute one for the other in dreams.
  • “The unconscious is structured like a language” —Lacan
• Other people’s discourse, including their desires and goals, flows into us and takes on an independent existence within us, constituting both conscience and the Freudian superego—as illustrated by the fictional Einstein example, where a father’s overheard dismissal (‘He’ll never amount to anything’) operates unconsciously to sabotage the child’s performance even without conscious memory.
  • The unconscious does not forget: even words overheard before comprehension is possible are recorded in the signifying chain and can be reactivated later, producing effects—such as inexplicable failure in an exam—without the person knowing the source.
  • Many people sense they are working toward goals they do not endorse, or mouthing aspirations that are really their parents’ or peers’ desires; the unconscious is ‘overflowing with other people’s desires.’
• The body itself is ‘written with signifiers,’ demonstrated by psychosomatic symptoms that follow linguistic rather than anatomical logic—a patient develops appendicitis pain on the anatomically wrong side of the body because his wife told him the appendix was on the left—showing that language overrides physiology.
  • Hysterical anesthesias studied by Freud’s generation obeyed popular notions of bodily zones, not the actual paths of nerves, so that numbness appeared where culture drew the line of a body part, not where a nerve ended.
  • The child’s libido is progressively channeled into specific erogenous zones through verbally expressed demands (toilet training, socialization), demonstrating that the body is subordinated to the signifier: ’the letter kills’ the living body.

The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half ‘Thinks’

Lacan models the autonomous functioning of the unconscious using cybernetic and combinatory analogies—particularly a coin-toss matrix that generates grammatical rules and a built-in memory function—to show that unconscious thought operates as a self-running chain of signifiers that ciphers without meaning, records without a subject, and determines behavior through literal, nonsemantic connections between words.

• Lacan models the unconscious using an artificial language derived from coin-toss results, in which overlapping pairs of outcomes (+/−) are grouped into categories (1, 2, 3), producing a combinatory syntax—rules forbidding certain sequences (e.g., 1 cannot be immediately followed by 3)—that arises from the method of ciphering alone, not from any pre-existing reality.
  • The symbolic matrix generates impossibilities ex nihilo: a category 3 cannot follow a category 1 because their terminal/initial signs conflict, just as spelling rules determine which letter-strings are permissible in a natural language.
  • The chain also ‘remembers’: if position 1 is a category 1 and position 4 is also a category 1, the intervening positions are fully determined; the chain keeps count of its previous components and constrains what is yet to come.
• The symbolic chain constitutes a form of memory radically different from biological memory: it is ‘remembered for’ the subject by the chain itself, not actively recalled, explaining why unconscious contents are indestructible—they cannot be forgotten because they are not held in grey matter but in the autonomous operation of the signifying order.
  • As Lacan illustrates via Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter,’ the letter does not forget the minister even when he has forgotten it; the neurotic’s unconscious similarly does not forget what the person has.
  • The unconscious conserves in the present what has affected it in the past, ’eternally holding onto each and every element, remaining forever marked by all of them’—a property only the symbolic order, not matter, can guarantee.
• Unconscious thought has nothing to do with meaning: it operates as a ciphering or coding process—akin to machine language—in which signifiers function as nonsensical assemblages, and analytic interpretation aims not at revealing meaning but at reducing signifiers to their non-meaning so as to find the determinants of a subject’s behavior.
  • Lacan cites Leclaire’s reconstruction of the assemblage ‘Poordjeli’ as the key configuration of unconscious desire in a patient: its significance lay in its ‘irreducible and insane character as a chain of signifiers,’ not in any meaning attributable to its components.
  • In the case of the ‘Rat Man,’ verbal bridges—Ratten (rats), Raten (installments), Spielratte (gambler)—link the rat complex to the father’s gambling debt through purely literal, phonemic relations, not through meaning; it is the signifier, not meaning, that subjugates the patient.
• The autonomous functioning of the signifying chain raises the question of what kind of subject can be posited for an unconscious that operates without any need for consciousness or subjective participation—a knowledge that is ‘absolutely not subjectivized’ yet demands a concept of the subject.
  • “There is perfectly well articulated knowledge for which no subject is, strictly speaking, responsible.” —Lacan
  • The unconscious is not something one knows but something that is known—passively registered, inscribed, counted—and this ‘unknown knowledge’ is locked into the connection between signifiers, requiring no subject and yet necessitating one as a theoretical construct.

The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real

The symbolic order does not merely describe a pre-existing reality but actively creates it by canceling out the ‘real’—the undifferentiated, presymbolic fabric of experience—while simultaneously generating a ‘second-order real’ composed of structural impossibilities, residues, and logical paradoxes (the caput mortuum) that the chain cannot include and around which it is condemned to circle, constituting the Lacanian concept of cause.

• The real, in Lacan’s sense, is not a temporal ‘before’ that simply disappears once language is acquired, but that which has not yet been—or resists being—symbolized; it ’ex-sists’ outside reality as named by language, and psychoanalytic work involves helping analysands symbolize those residual, unsymbolized experiences that function as traumatic fixations.
  • Language ‘cancels out’ the real, creating ‘reality’ as that which can be named and thought; what cannot be said in a group’s language does not exist, strictly speaking, for that group—existence is a product of language.
  • Fixation always involves something unsymbolized; language allows substitution and displacement, so bringing a trauma into ever more signifiers ‘dialectizes’ it, setting it in motion and allowing cathexis to transfer to new objects (e.g., a word for ‘blue’ lets one transfer a fascination from a mother’s blue eyes to a partner’s).
• The symbolic order itself produces a ‘second-order real’—impossibilities and residues generated by the chain’s own operation rather than by any presymbolic nature—illustrated by the caput mortuum: at each step of the combinatory chain, certain symbols are excluded and can never be written in certain positions, constituting a real that the chain perpetually circles without ever touching.
  • In the 1,2,3 matrix, category 3 can never follow category 1; the excluded combination is not simply absent but shapes the chain as its constitutive outside—the chain is as determined by what it excludes as by what it includes.
  • The ‘purloined letter’ in Poe’s story exemplifies this: the letter’s matter- or object-like nature—not what it says, but that it exists—fixates one character after another in a particular position; it is a real object, signifying nothing.
• Analytic interpretation ‘hits the cause’ by introducing the very signifier or formulation around which the analysand’s discourse is circling without being able to enunciate—the analyst names what the analysand’s speech perpetually skirts, impacting the immovable center and beginning the process of subjectification.
  • An analysand’s discourse traces a contour around what it hovers about and cannot say; the analyst, from a different position, can introduce the missing term, jolting the analysand toward speech—perhaps at first garbled or mumbled—as a first step toward symbolization.
  • Garbled speech and conflated words serve as a bridge between the symbolic and the real, having a materiality and libidinal weight that well-articulated phrases may lack; Lacan includes phonemes among the causes that can be hit by interpretation.
• The Other (the set of all signifiers) is structurally incomplete and can never be totalized, because any attempt to name or complete it adds a new signifier that remains outside the set—a logical paradox analogous to Russell’s catalogue of all catalogues that do not include themselves and to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
  • As soon as one attempts to designate ’the set of all signifiers,’ one adds a new signifier (’the Other’) not yet inside the set; including it changes and renames the set, requiring yet another new name, in an infinite regress that proves the Other can never be complete.
  • Russell’s paradox—the catalogue of all catalogues that do not include themselves cannot consistently include or exclude itself—illustrates the Lacanian second-order real: a logical exception whose status is always paradoxical and undecidable.
• Structure (the automatic unfolding of the signifying chain) must be distinguished from cause (that which interrupts the chain’s smooth functioning), and Lacan parts ways with structuralism precisely by insisting that the signifying chain, despite its apparent autonomy, produces an object and subjugates a subject—neither of which structuralism can account for.
  • Science and structuralism progressively fill in the gap between cause and effect until cause disappears into lawlike structure; Lacan’s psychoanalysis, by contrast, insists on maintaining cause as an irreducible category, resisting the suturing of both subject and cause.
  • Lacan translates Freud’s Wiederholungszwang as ‘automatisme de répétition’ (repetition automaton)—emphasizing the mechanical, subjectless character of structure—while simultaneously insisting that something beyond automatism (the cause) must be accounted for.

Part Two: The Lacanian Subject

The Lacanian Subject

The Lacanian subject is neither the conscious ego of analytic philosophy nor Freud’s unconscious as a second agency, but rather the split itself—the radical division between false ego-being and the automatic functioning of unconscious thought—a split produced by language assimilation and best approached through the contrast with Descartes’ cogito, which Lacan inverts: the subject can have either thought or being, but never both simultaneously.

• The ego, contrary to ego psychology, is not an active agent but a crystallization of ideal images—mirror images and linguistically structured self-images reflected back by parents (‘a good girl,’ ‘a model son’)—constituting an ineluctably distorted, fictional self that is the seat of narcissistic fixation, not authentic subjectivity.
  • Mirror images become libidinally charged primarily because parents make a great deal of them (‘Yes, baby, that’s you!’), meaning it is the symbolic order—parental speech—that brings about their internalization, not the visual image per se.
  • The point of analysis is not to give the analysand a ’true’ or correct self-image, because the ego is by its very nature a distortion, an error, a repository of misunderstanding—mirror images are always inverted, and all communication is prone to miscommunication.
• The grammatical subject of the statement (‘I’) is only a shifter representing the message-sender—the conscious ego—and not the Lacanian subject; the Lacanian subject appears fleetingly in the act of enunciation through markers like the French ’ne’ or the English ‘but’ in certain constructions, which introduce a ’no-saying’ that splits the utterance between conscious assertion and unconscious negation.
  • Jakobson’s analysis of shifters shows that ‘I’ designates the message-sender and thus signifies the ego; what Lacan seeks is a manifestation of the subject of enunciation—the unconscious agency—that is not simply the ego speaking.
  • Expressions like ‘I cannot but think that…’ or ‘I can but hope…’ introduce an ambiguous negation that seems to play out a conflict between conscious discourse and another agency saying ‘No!’—this is the fleeting manifestation of the speaking subject of enunciation.
• The Lacanian subject is not a permanent substance but a fleeting pulsation: the subject appears as a breach in discourse when something foreign interrupts the ego’s speech, but is immediately replaced by the signifier that represents it—’ne’ or ‘but’ stand in for the subject who then vanishes, so the subject exists only as the moment of its own disappearance.
  • A signifier marks the cancellation of what it signifies: ne and ‘but’ sign the death sentence of the subject of the unconscious, which subsists only long enough to protest, say ‘No,’ and then vanish beneath the signifier that takes its place.
  • The Freudian subject—something that ‘surges forth’ in slips, bungled actions, and parapraxes—is best understood as an interruption attributed with intentionality, but Lacan never makes an agency of the unconscious the way Freud does in his topography; it remains the Other’s discourse.
• Lacan inverts Descartes’ cogito: whereas Descartes finds a point of coincidence between thinking and being (‘I think therefore I am’), Lacan’s split subject is forced to choose one or the other—ego-thinking produces only false being (rationalization), and true unconscious thought entails a beinglessness, so the subject is always either ’not thinking’ (ego mode) or ’not being’ (unconscious mode).
  • The Cartesian subject’s ‘I am thinking’ is characterized by what Lacan calls ‘false being’: the analysand who says ‘I know where I stand’ and ‘I can tell you all about myself’ is positing a fixed self that rejects the unconscious.
  • The splitting of the I into ego (false self) and unconscious creates a surface with a locally valid front and back—like a Möbius strip—where at any point there is a conscious and an unconscious face, though the two sides are made of the same linguistic ‘stuff.’
• Beyond the split, the specifically Lacanian subject is the ethical demand encoded in Freud’s ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden’: the I must come to be where ‘it’ was—the subject must assume responsibility for the automatic unfolding of unconscious thought, taking upon itself what had previously operated as foreign and impersonal.
  • “One is always responsible for one’s position as subject.” —Lacan
  • This Lacanian I is not the reified ‘I’ of ego discourse but the I of analytic aspiration: not ‘It happened to me’ or ‘They did this to me,’ but ‘I was,’ ‘I did’—an assumption of the cause that is, paradoxically, brought about only after the fact.

The Subject and the Other’s Desire

The subject comes into being through two operations—alienation (a forced submission to language that produces the subject as a mere place-holder, beingless but existent) and separation (the subject’s encounter with the Other’s desire, which produces object a as the cause of desire and grants the subject a phantasmatic sense of being through fantasy)—with the traversing of the fundamental fantasy constituting a ‘further separation’ in which the subject subjectifies the foreign, traumatic cause of its own existence.

• Alienation is a ‘forced choice’ in which the subject must submit to language or forfeit subjectivity altogether: the vel of alienation always excludes the subject, who disappears beneath the signifier but gains in exchange a place—an empty set, a place-holder—within the symbolic order, which constitutes the first form of existence.
  • Lacan’s classic example is the mugger’s ‘Your money or your life!’: one is forced to give up the money; similarly, the child who refuses to submit to language (as in psychosis) ‘wins’ against the Other but loses itself—forecloses its own advent as a divided subject.
  • The process of alienation may be viewed as yielding the subject as empty set: a set with no elements that nevertheless transforms nothingness into something by marking it, analogous to how set theory generates its whole domain from this one symbol.
  • The subject’s proper name—often chosen before birth—inscribes the child in the symbolic as a place-holder; it is foreign at first but in time becomes inextricably tied to subjectivity, standing in for the very absence of the subject.
• Separation involves the subject’s attempt to fill the mOther’s lack—demonstrated by the manifold expressions of her desire for something else—with its own lack of being, a process thwarted by the introduction of a third term (the paternal function) that disrupts the mother-child dyad and produces the subject as a desiring being expelled from the Other.
  • The child latches onto what is indecipherable in the parent’s speech—the interval between words, the ‘why’ behind demands—and attempts to be the sole object of the mOther’s desire; children’s endless ‘whys’ are not curiosity about mechanics but about their place in the Other’s desire.
  • “In Seminar XVII, Lacan schematizes the paternal function: ‘The mother’s role is her desire… The mother is a big crocodile, and you find yourself in her mouth… There is a roller, made of stone, which is potentially there at the level of the trap and which holds and jams it open. That is what we call the phallus.’” —Lacan
  • The Name-of-the-Father need not be a biological father: in the case of ‘Little Hans,’ the signifier ‘horse’ served the paternal function, standing in for a father unable to separate son from mother.
• Object a is the remainder produced when the hypothetical mother-child unity breaks down: neither the subject nor the Other, it is the leftover of symbolization that the split subject clings to in fantasy to sustain a sense of wholeness, and it simultaneously functions as the cause of the subject’s desire—the Other’s desire as it escapes the child and elicits the child’s own desire.
  • Fantasy (formalized as $ ◇ a) is the subject’s relation to object a: the divided subject orchestrates a phantasmatic relation to the Other’s desire so as to derive jouissance—excitement that may be experienced as pleasure or pain—and to sustain him or herself in being.
  • “Man’s desire is the Other’s desire” —Lacan
  • The jouissance before the letter (an unmediated real connection between mother and child) gives way to a second-order jouissance after the letter—the jouissance of fantasy—which refounds some modicum of the lost unity through the subject’s relation to object a.
• The traversing of the fundamental fantasy is a ‘further separation’ in which the subject subjectifies the traumatic cause—assumes responsibility for the foreign desire that brought it into existence—moving from a passive position (‘It happened to me’) to active ownership (‘I was,’ ‘I did’), a temporally paradoxical operation that follows the future anterior logic of Nachträglichkeit.
  • A first event (E1) does not bear fruit until a second event (E2) occurs; retroactively, E1 is constituted as trauma—its meaning and efficacy change. Similarly, a first signifier does not create subjectification until a second signifier appears, and the subject is only constituted in this retroactive relation.
  • In the analytic setting, traversing fantasy involves the analyst embodying desirousness—not knowledge or ideals—and repeatedly confronting the analysand with the enigma of the analyst’s desire, shaking up the analysand’s fantasy configuration and inducing a shift in the subject’s position relative to object a.
  • Hamlet, according to Lacan, could not act until the duel with Laertes because the king remained rigidly identified with the phallus (the signifier of desire); only when Hamlet could dissociate them—’the king is a thing of nothing’—was action possible, illustrating how the name of the Other’s desire must be ‘signifierized’ for subjectification to occur.

Metaphor and the Precipitation of Subjectivity

The subject has two faces—as precipitate (a sedimentation of meanings produced by the retroactive effect of one signifier upon another) and as breach (the spark that forges the link between signifiers)—and psychoanalytic work aims to ‘dialectize’ isolated master signifiers by establishing a binary signifier in relation to them, thereby precipitating the subject anew and reconfiguring the symptom, which itself has a metaphorical structure.

• The three fundamental moments of the subject’s constitution—alienation, separation, and traversing of fantasy—can each be formalized as a substitutional metaphor (Other/S; object a/S; S/object a), since in each case one term cancels out another to produce a new configuration; metaphor’s creative spark is thus identical with the subject, and every metaphorical effect is an effect of subjectivity.
  • As metaphor’s creative spark, the subject has no permanence; it comes into being as a spark flashing between two signifiers—a ‘headlong movement.’ But as the result of new meaning, the subject-as-meaning remains fixated under the bar, acquiring a kind of permanence as the castrated, represented subject.
  • The symptom itself has a metaphorical structure: a nonsensical signifier stands in for or over against the subject (S1/S); analysis works by forging new metaphors that bring about a precipitation of subjectivity and alter the subject’s position relative to the symptom, not by dissolving symptoms entirely.
• The castrated subject is the subject that is always presenting itself to the Other, represented by and in the Other, subjugated by a master signifier—either through the false being of the ego or through the illusory being of fantasy—in both cases remaining stuck in neurosis, unable to assume the cause.
  • Castration in the Lacanian sense has nothing to do with biological organs; it refers to the subject’s alienation by and in the Other and incomplete separation from the Other—the subject who refuses to ‘sacrifice castration to the Other’s jouissance’ has not traversed the fundamental fantasy.
  • In psychosis, the Name-of-the-Father does not hold: the barrier between mother and child is not erected, jouissance irrupts into life, and different forms of psychosis correspond to different ways jouissance breaks in—invading the body in schizophrenia, and the locus of the Other in paranoia.
• The subject as breach is realized in the forging of a link between a master signifier (S1) and a binary signifier (S2): when an analysand’s dead-end, nonsensical master signifier is ‘dialectized’—brought into relation with another signifier—a bridge is built, a meaning is created, and the subject is momentarily precipitated in the gap between them.
  • A master signifier appears in analysis as a stopping point or dead end—the word ‘death,’ a proper name, a disease name—that grinds association to a halt; its nonsense is not the analysand’s ignorance of the dictionary definition but the opacity of its personal, subjective implication.
  • Dialectizing master signifiers, precipitating subjectivity, creating new metaphors, and subjectifying the cause are all partial descriptions of the same basic analytic aim—they all come under the process of separation and the traversing of fantasy.
• Meaning in the Lacanian scheme is imaginary—a matter of assimilating one configuration of signifiers into another, confirming the status quo—whereas ’true understanding’ involves an incursion of the symbolic into the real that brings forth something new, explaining why insight and understanding are largely irrelevant to the efficacy of psychoanalytic work.
  • Lacan’s writing is deliberately overloaded with extravagant and mixed metaphors precisely to prevent ‘understanding’—the reductionist assimilation of the new to the already-known—and to force an encounter with the unfamiliar.
  • Freud occasionally remarks that the analysand who achieves the most in analysis often remembers little of it and has no understanding of what occurred; the subjective frustration of not understanding in no way hinders the efficacy of psychoanalysis.

Part Three: The Lacanian Object: Love, Desire, Jouissance

Object (a): Cause of Desire

Object (a) is Lacan’s most significant contribution to psychoanalysis, designating not an object of desire but the cause of desire—that which elicits and sustains desire without ever being identical with any particular person or thing—and its formulation traverses the imaginary (ego as object), symbolic (Other as demand), and real (the lost object, the Freudian Thing, surplus jouissance) registers as Lacan progressively shifts its locus from the imaginary to the real.

• Imaginary relations—between egos seen as like or different from oneself—are governed by the binary of love (identification with the similar) and hatred (rivalry over minute differences), and the analyst who engages the analysand at this level falls into ‘countertransference,’ becoming a mirror-rival rather than enabling the analysand to confront the Other as such.
  • Sibling rivalry exemplifies imaginary relations: children who perceive themselves as equals cannot abide preferential treatment and hate siblings for stealing the limelight—a dynamic that generalizes to classmates, colleagues, and all relationships among perceived equals.
  • Lacanian ‘countertransference’ is always at the imaginary level—the analyst sizing up the analysand’s discourse in terms of his own, competing for the upper hand—and must be set aside so the analysand can cast the analyst in some Other role.
• The analyst’s most dangerous trap is playing the ‘subject supposed to know’—the omniscient Other who knows the meaning of the analysand’s symptoms—because this fosters demand rather than desire, keeping the analysand alienated rather than moving toward separation; the analyst must instead take the analysand’s unconscious as the ultimate authority.
  • When analysts like Winnicott attempt to be ‘good enough mothers,’ making up for inadequate early care, they make the analysand ever more dependent; the analysand’s desire comes to revolve entirely around the analyst’s demand ($ ◇ D instead of $ ◇ a), fixating rather than liberating.
  • Freud’s early practice of explaining his theories and seeking agreement from analysands was the same error: the analysand’s attempts to disprove the theory placed the analyst in an imaginary rivalry rather than in the position of Other.
• Desire has no object in itself but a cause—object (a)—that brings it into being; what appears to be an ‘object choice’ (a particular person) is in fact a response to a desire-eliciting quality (a gaze, a voice) that is unspecularizable and real, and the person is adopted merely as a substratum or prop for that cause.
  • A woman may fly in the face of public opinion and social pressure for a man whose ‘impertinent, unblinking’ gaze functions as the cause of her desire, not for his caring qualities or social suitability; should that gaze no longer be available to her, she may move on in search of it elsewhere.
  • The gaze and the voice are Lacan’s paradigmatic examples of object (a): they are unspecularizable (you cannot see a gaze or a voice in the mirror), resist symbolization, and are closely related to the subject’s most crucial experiences of pleasure and pain—what Lacan calls jouissance.
• Object (a) as the ’lost object’ is never actually a found-then-lost object but is constituted retroactively as lost: the breast is not an object during the first experience of satisfaction, and it is only its absence and the child’s failed attempts to repeat satisfaction that constitute it as an object separate from the child—after which the original ‘primal state’ can never be re-experienced.
  • Freud writes that ’the finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it’ (Three Essays); Lacan reads this as meaning the object was never found in the first place—it is always already lost, constituted as lost after the fact when the subject can no longer refind the breast as experienced originally.
  • Object (a) is the leftover of the process of constituting an object—the scrap that evades symbolization, a remainder that the real connection between mother and child leaves behind after symbolization takes its toll.
• Object (a) is equated with Marx’s surplus value: just as the worker’s labor produces surplus value that is appropriated by the capitalist and circulates outside the worker, the subject’s jouissance is ‘squeezed out’ of the body by the demand to speak (symbolic castration) and circulates in the Other as surplus jouissance (plus-de-jouir), leaving the subject alienated and working for the Other’s enjoyment.
  • Castration in the Lacanian economy is the sacrifice of jouissance to the Other, which takes the form of writing, bodies of knowledge, or any cultural product that ’takes on a life of its own’ independent of its creator—culture itself is grounded in this loss.
  • Lévi-Strauss’s kinship rules offer a parallel: the incest taboo generates a fundamental loss (women are given away rather than kept), and this circulating lack structures kinship, economics, and language according to the same fundamental formula—a lack is generated that then circulates in the Other.

There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

Lacan’s claim that there is no sexual relationship means that men and women are each defined separately with respect to a third term (the phallic function), not in terms of one another, so that their ‘partners’ are dissymmetrical and non-overlapping—men’s partner is object (a), not a woman as such, while women’s partners are the phallus and S(A), the signifier of a real loss—making any direct, complementary, or specifiable relationship between the sexes impossible to articulate or write.

• Castration in Lacan’s sense is the renunciation of jouissance required of speaking beings by the very act of speaking: a quantum of jouissance is ‘squeezed’ from the body and transferred to the Other (language, culture, knowledge), applying to both men and women insofar as they submit to the splitting brought on by language.
  • The reality principle does not simply defer the pleasure principle but exceeds its mandate, inflicting an incommensurate renunciation—as the superego oversteps its bounds—so that ’the letter kills’ the living being, leaving behind a ‘mere pittance of pleasure.’
  • Lacan illustrates the same structure in three domains: kinship (the incest taboo generates circulating lack), economics (surplus value circulates in the market), and law (the right to jouissance of one’s own body, once legally protected, paradoxically destroys that jouissance for everyone).
• The phallus is the signifier of desire in Western culture—a clinical observation, not a theoretical necessity—designating that which is worthy of desire and the loss or lack that sets desire in motion; it is distinct from object (a), which is the real, unsignifiable cause of desire, and from the penis as biological organ.
  • “Without lack, desire cannot come into being: the child who never experiences the mother’s absence has no motivation to speak, and ‘what is most anxiety-producing for the child is when there is no possibility of lack, when his mother is constantly on his back.’” —Lacan
  • The phallus is the signifier of that loss or absence of being behind the subject’s relation to the signifier, and its displacements indicate the movement of lack within structure; ‘a symbol comes to the place of the lack constituted by the missing-from-its-place that is necessary for the initiation of the dimension of displacement.’
• Masculine structure is defined as being wholly under the sway of the phallic function (Vxφx)—wholly determined by symbolic castration—with the single exception of the mythical primal father (∃x¬φx), who alone has not succumbed to castration and for whom alone a true sexual relationship with a woman would be possible; all ordinary men are thus limited to fantasy—a relationship with object (a)—not with women as such.
  • The primal father of the primal horde (from Freud’s Totem and Taboo) marks man’s limit: he ex-sists, excluded from the symbolic register by foreclosure, but his ex-sistence is what gives man’s set its boundary and allows men to be taken as a whole.
  • Man’s pleasure is limited to phallic (symbolic) jouissance—thought itself is jouissance-laden in obsession, and the bodily organ functions merely as an instrument of the signifier; Lacan occasionally calls this ‘organ pleasure’ or even ‘masturbatory’ in nature.
• Feminine structure is defined as not-wholly under the phallic function (¬Vxφx): no part of a woman is entirely outside the phallic function (¬∃x¬φx, which would imply psychosis), but she is not wholly hemmed in by it, making possible an Other jouissance—related to S(A), the signifier of a first real loss—that goes beyond the phallic and is asexual, bodily, and not localizable in the genitals.
  • Woman does not exist: there is no signifier for Woman’s essence (as there is the phallus for Man), meaning a woman must encounter and adopt a signifier—S(A)—that comes to stand in for that missing definition, a process that is facilitated or thwarted by culture.
  • The Other jouissance is related to religious ecstasy and to a Lacanian sublimation whereby an ordinary object is elevated to the status of the Thing; it provides full satisfaction of the drives (‘desexualized libido’) and constitutes the ‘beyond of neurosis’ for those with feminine structure, as distinct from the masculine path of subjectifying the cause.
• The truth of psychoanalysis is that there is no sexual relationship: men’s partner is object (a) (not a woman as such) and women’s partners are the phallus and S(A) (neither of which is a man as such), so the dissymmetry of partners is complete and no equation, proportion, or direct relation between the sexes can be written or spoken.
  • A man may need a biologically defined woman as the substratum or prop of object (a), but it is only insofar as he has invested her with that precious cause of desire that he responds to her; she will never be his partner in any strict sense.
  • Lacan’s new topology—the cross-cap, a surface that can be symbolically expressed but neither accurately visualized nor constructed—serves as a metaphor for feminine structure: an impossible surface that shows how the opposition of inside and outside is locally valid but not definitively so, breaking with the old metaphor of concentric spheres.

Part Four: The Status of Psychoanalytic Discourse

The Four Discourses

Lacan’s four discourses—master’s, university, hysteric’s, and analyst’s—formalize the structural differences between dominant forms of social and clinical speech by rotating four elements (S1, S2, $, a) through four positions (agent, other, truth, product/loss), revealing the dissimulated mainspring and aims of each; analytic discourse is distinctive in placing object (a)—the cause of desire—in the commanding position, and its practice inevitably hystericizes the analysand, forcing the divided subject to produce master signifiers that can then be dialectized.

• The master’s discourse places S1 (the nonsensical master signifier) in the dominant position: the master commands without justification, the slave’s knowledge (S2) is extracted and put to work, and the split subject ($) is the dissimulated truth behind the master’s apparent wholeness, while object (a)—surplus jouissance—is the product appropriated by the master.
  • The master shows no weakness and carefully hides that he or she, like everyone, has succumbed to symbolic castration: the split between conscious and unconscious is veiled in the position of truth, maintaining the fiction of mastery.
  • The three other discourses are generated by rotating each element counterclockwise one quarter turn, so that the dominant position is successively occupied by S2 (university), $ (hysteric’s), and (a) (analyst’s).
• The university discourse places systematized knowledge (S2) in the dominant position, rationalizing and legitimating the master’s will, but at the cost of producing the alienated, divided subject ($) as its byproduct—and Lacan suggests a historical movement from the master’s discourse to the university discourse, with philosophy having always served the master by glossing over unanswered questions with encyclopedic systems.
  • Encyclopedic endeavors—Fourier’s 810 personality types, Comte’s total sociology—exemplify university discourse: any argument will do as long as it takes on the guise of reason, working in service of the master signifier concealed in the position of truth.
  • The worst kind of science and classical philosophy both fall under the university discourse, in Lacan’s view—suturing the subject and the cause, rationalizing power rather than confronting the real.
• The hysteric’s discourse places the split subject ($) in the dominant position, addressing the master signifier (S1) and demanding that it produce knowledge—then going on to disprove it; it is the exact structural opposite of the university discourse and is identified by Lacan with genuine scientific work because both take the real (object a) as their hidden motor force and do not gloss over contradictions.
  • Hysterics historically drove Freud to develop psychoanalysis while simultaneously proving the inadequacy of his theories in the consulting room; like Heisenberg, they do not attempt to explain everything with available knowledge but insist on structural limits to what can be known.
  • Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—asserting that both a particle’s position and momentum cannot simultaneously be precisely known—posits a structural incompleteness in scientific knowledge analogous to what the hysteric finds in the master, confirming the structural identity of genuine scientific and hysteric discourses.
• The analyst’s discourse places object (a) in the commanding position—the analyst operates as pure desirousness—which sets the analysand to work associating, producing master signifiers (S1) as the discourse’s product; these isolated, nonsensical signifiers must then be dialectized, and the analysand is inevitably hystericized in the process, forced to confront the division between conscious and unconscious.
  • In the analytic setting, the analyst ignores the analysand’s academic or ego discourse and focuses instead on the slightest slip or ambiguity—the analysand’s metaphor ’near misses’ being heard as ’near Mrs.’ by an analyst who knows the analysand fled a marriage proposal—pointing to the analysand’s division.
  • S2 (knowledge) occupies the position of truth in the analyst’s discourse: unconscious knowledge has yet to be subjectified, and where that knowledge was, the subject must come to be—‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.’
• There is no metalanguage or metadiscourse that escapes the limitations of the four discourses; psychoanalysis does not provide an Archimedean point outside discourse but elucidates the structure of discourse itself, and its social-institutional existence inevitably involves adoption of multiple discourses—master’s, university’s—as soon as schools, training programs, and licensing requirements are established.
  • Every discourse requires a loss of jouissance and has its own dissimulated mainspring; Marx elucidated certain features of capitalist discourse, and Lacan’s discourse theory does the same for other forms—but each account is itself produced from within a particular discourse.
  • The schisms and infighting in psychoanalytic institutions result from the adoption of other discourses (master’s, university’s) by analysts in institutional contexts, not from analytic discourse itself—there are limits to the extent to which analytic discourse can or should be adhered to outside the analytic setting.

Psychoanalysis and Science

Psychoanalysis is not a science but an independent discourse that shares with genuine scientific work (and the hysteric’s discourse) the orientation of ‘imagining the real of the symbolic’ (IRS), while distinguishing itself by taking the split subject and the libidinal cause into account—features that existing science sutures or excludes—and its pursuit of formalization through mathemes and generic procedures (the ‘pass’) constitutes a form of scientificity proper to psychoanalysis that requires no validation from Science as such.

• Science sutures the subject: by excluding subjectivity and cause from its field, it achieves objectivity, but thereby renders itself structurally incapable of accommodating psychoanalysis, which requires both the split subject and the libidinal object as foundational concepts; until science can come to grips with the psychoanalytic object, formalization of psychoanalysis into mathemes does not suffice to make it a science.
  • Truth tables and symbolic logic reduce truth to a value (T or F) within a given system, with no claim to independent validity; psychoanalysis, by contrast, takes Truth with a capital T seriously—as that which throws into question the self-confirming nature of its own axioms, namely the impossibility of sexual relationships.
  • Science and structuralism alike progressively fill in the gap between cause and effect until ‘cause’ disappears into ’law’; Lacan’s psychoanalysis insists on maintaining cause as an irreducible category—that which disrupts smooth lawlike interaction—resisting the suturing of both subject and cause.
• Lacan’s 1970s contribution to discourse theory defines discourses by the order in which the three registers (imaginary, symbolic, real) are taken up—clockwise (right-polarized) or counterclockwise (left-polarized)—and situates both psychoanalysis and mathematics as IRS discourses: ones that ‘imagine the real of the symbolic,’ recognizing and working with the kinks, impossibilities, and paradoxes that the symbolic order generates within itself.
  • Mathematics was the first discourse to recognize structural impossibilities in the symbolic—such as those revealed by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem—and psychoanalysis ’extends the mathematical process’ by recognizing object (a) as the real of/in the symbolic.
  • Religious discourse is identified as RSI (realizing the symbolic of the imaginary), sharing with psychoanalysis a right-polarization but a different sequencing; the best physics, like mathematical logic, could also be considered an IRS discourse—confronting the real of its own symbolic rather than glossing it over.
• Lacan’s mathemes are quasi-mathematical formulas designed to maximize transmissibility of psychoanalytic concepts across generations and interpretive contexts, but what is transmitted is the matheme itself as a written trace—not ‘full communication’—and the ‘pass’ is a corresponding institutional procedure designed to gather information on the analytic process that constitutes a form of scientificity proper to psychoanalysis.
  • Like topological figures whose dimensions can be varied indefinitely without altering their fundamental properties, Lacan’s algebraic relations are qualitative, structural relations—inscribing ’literalization’ (formulations involving letters and symbols) rather than quantitative measurement.
  • The pass involves an analysand who has completed analysis recounting it to two passeurs who report to a committee (Cartel de la passe), gathering information on the analytic process independently of what the analyst reports—a generic procedure that could constitute the basis of a form of scientificity particular to psychoanalysis.
• Psychoanalysis is to be taken seriously even though it is not a science: it is an independent praxis that seeks its own forms of scientificity—formalization, rigorous clinical differentiation, generic procedures—without requiring validation from Science, which is itself ‘but a fantasy,’ one discourse among others and not the ultimate metalanguage.
  • “Psychoanalysis is to be taken seriously, even though it is not a science.” —Lacan
  • The ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis are constituted by its aim—the analysand’s greater Eros, not compliance with social, economic, or political norms—and its techniques necessarily ‘wreak havoc’ on the principle that time is money and on accepted notions of professional conduct, because jouissance is anything but practical.