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On Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject (1996) and Lacan's "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" (1949).
What is the self? Is that the same as the experiencing subject? Lacan says no: while the self (the ego) is an imaginative creation, cemented by language, the subject is something else, something split (at least initially) between consciousness and the unconscious. Lacan mixes this Freudian picture with semiotics--an emphasis on systems of linguistic symbols--using this to both create his picture of the psyche and explain how psychological disorders arise.
The regular PEL foursome (with Wes acting much like a guest due to his formal study of psychoanalysis) try to make sense of this complex picture as presented by American psychoanalyst Fink and complain about Lacan's language as they wade into the nearly impenetrable writing of the Frenchman himself. Featuring the alienation of language! Eruptions into consciousness! Undifferentiated needs! "The Real" opposing "reality!" A baby preening in front of a mirror! Castration! And introducing the mysterious "object a!" Read more about the topic and get the texts.
End song: "Something Else" by Madison Lint, recorded mostly in late 2002 with vocals added just now; written by Jim Low and Mark Linsenmayer.
1. Freud develops 3 theories of EGO (“Project…”, “Introduction to Narc.,….” and “The Splitting of the Ego…”)
1.1.: for Freud the Ego is the First Object, hence, First object of love, First libidinized, up to the “one can only love a neighbor as himself because there is no other way of loving, but as one-self, one-Ich, Ich as object: all other objects will be secondary, etc.
1.2. For Lacan, the I and Ego are different: I is an image, of the other. The Ego has the cartesian connotation, and he does do distictions along his teachings/writings.
2. Lacan himself, as a friend of Joyce, from the first Reading of his Ulysses in 1920 Paris; He said he liked how Joyce said “scholars are going to try to figure out what I tried to say in Finnegans Wake for the next two centuries”, and he knew that the psychoanalysts “had forgotten” the most subversive of Freud’s theoretical hypothesis. He not only accuses Klein, Anna Freud, Culturalists, etc., but his own students, Hi criticizes the movement of psychoanalysis as a whole, including his own school (the last one which he dissolved before dying). He went on to have his particular form of teaching/writing, therefore, not to end up like “Freudians”, i.e. forgotten by the “lacanians” his most subversives concepts/ideas/theory, He failed: by making the teachings more difficult he didn’t succeed, he says so himself: from the Seminar II he complains about “not being understood”.
3. Lacan said that it’s a need to the formation of the analyst to both read his writings and attend/read the transcribed Seminars.
4. Because he developed a theory of Discourses, he needed to develop a way of teaching psychoanalysis without teaching like a Maitre, Proffesor of University (Cf. Peut-etre en Vincennes); so he always posited himself before his seminarists as an analizand before analysts trying to get the “pass”.
5. Reading Freud is not enough to understand Lacan: he cites, he debates, the thrives on so many authors/theories to build up his own edifice, that one must read, at least, Frege, Hegel (Kojéve), Jakobson, both Sassure “lections”, Koyré, Plato, Euripides, Euclides, Kepler, Kant, Sade, Austin, Bentham, Aristotle, Benveniste, etc,
6. One has to be careful when reading Lacan, what are the sources: the translation, etc.: Millerian monopoly for the legitimized Lacan, is a Lacan according to Miller. There are places where one can get much more accurate texts: from the internet site of the ELP, staferla.free.net, there is even for english-speakers, an Irish site with their own translations different from the “legit” editions from Norton Press; they also took different sources than Miller’s Soeul editions.
7. I have read Fink’s book, and he is deceived, like many other lacanians, including the WORLD PSYCHOANALITIC SCHOOL from Miller.
8. the question of REAL as “before the word” is as important as the REAL “before the big bang”, it does not concern Lacan, nor the psysicists. So, there is a HUGE ammount of lacanians who think that REAL is first, and then comes symbolic cuts. Lacan subverts even the most “biological” notions from FREUD: drive is grammar, death drive is repetetion (tyche, automaton), libido is a “film”, two dimensional, “lamella”, there is no NEED- DEMAND-DESIRE before the introductions of the Subject into the Real, that is, there is no REAL need. Just like the “fragmented body/Whole body”, they are not chronological moments (Cf. Logical Time….): one can have a fragmented body ONLY after one passes through the Mirror Stage.
9. Some concepts are not even in Freud: signifier, subject, Other, Enjoyment, sinthome, topology, discourse theory.
10. Lacan works and thrives on with modern Science, unlike Freud, who could have thrived on modern sciences, but he did not, he was a possitivist, inductivist, newtonian scientist, thus, his PSychoanalysis remains a “natural science”, something Lacan teases many times.
11. In Lacan, unlike Freud, there is nothing in his theoretical conceptions that can be “impossible to say/ineffable/etc.”, even more, Lacan asserts that “Math is the science of the REAL”.
Thank you for the great podcast!
What is the song playing at the end of episode 74?
Thanks again!
Esther
Thanks, per the blog post: End song: “Something Else” by Madison Lint, recorded mostly in late 2002 with vocals added just now; written by Jim Low and Mark Linsenmayer.
Hi guys,
Great podcast as usual! Really enjoy plugging in whilst I’m lifting boxes at work! XD
A quick question I hope you could clear up- when you are discussing Lacan’s notion that all language is formed by input from others (around 20 minutes in) and that in a sense, we are never speaking our “true selves”, how might this relate to Noam Chomsky’s position on the deep universal structures of grammar in humans?
(Chomsky argues there is an impoverishment of resources; i.e, it shouldn’t be possible for human children to grasp so much information about language by merely observing, ergo there must be something pre-existing in the child to allow the formation of language)
If anyone else has any thoughts I would be interested to hear, and I hope I have posed the question adequately!!
Cheers,
Josh
Chomsky is wrong for a more scientific/empirical take than Lacan’s see: http://www.psy.herts.ac.uk/pub/sjcowley/docs/cradle.pdf
are you lifting in a unionized setting?