LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 3
LACAN ON MEANING
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this level that he is criticized for his supposed intention to develop universal standards.
Lacan can also be seen providing such standards. Witness his écrit entitled “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1936, 1949). He continuously re-worked its logic over the years. But initially the new theory of ego-formation it conveyed had strong hermeneutical overtones. Homologous to Kant’s transcendental idealist revolution, Lacan argues that it is not man who adapts himself to reality, but rather man who adapts reality to himself. More specifically, the ego creates a new adaptation to ‘reality’ and the subject then tries to maintain cohesion with this double. Ego-formation is quite literally imaginary identification, for this double is essentially an image or ‘imago.’ Lacan further refers to the appearance of these doubles and object-projections as hallucinatory and dream-like. This is to better underscore the role the mirror plays in presenting a whole, yet fictional image for the fragmented child. We can readily understand this by considering the scene Lacan paints for us. The human child is born pre-mature and is in need of care. Up to the age of eighteen months, he has immense difficulty with motor coordination and is even outdone by the chimpanzee in intelligence. But while both are able to recognize their images in a mirror, it is only the child who remains fascinated with his specular image, as the chimpanzee quickly loses interest. Present here is the elementary imaginary dyad: the fragmented child anticipates himself when looking into the mirror,2 but is ever uncertain, so he turns to his mother who offers a confirmation. “Yes, that’s you!” she says and he is swept up in the wave of jubilation which attends this phantasmatic experience of self-mastery. In this way the child is compensated with a whole image of himself, an image that he will carry for the rest of his life. This image is what Lacan calls the Ideal-ego.3
The inherent division of subjectivity will become a great motif in Lacan. But at this early stage he tends to emphasize the subject’s primordial envelope. In “Presentation on Psychical Causality” (1946), for instance, what is seen as decisive to ego-formation is the being it represents. Accordingly, ‘any healthy phenomenology... requires us to consider lived experience prior to any objectification and even prior to any reflexive analysis that interweaves objectification and experience.’4 To put it somewhat crudely, if the gap between the subject and its ego becomes too wide so as to become symptomatic, these symptoms are to be integrated back into the patient’s life in a meaningful way. The goal of psychoanalytic treatment is thus similar to the general approach of
2 To be sure, an actual mirror need not be present. Another child or even an adult can act as that other who lends its whole image to foster a sense of wholeness for the fragmented child.
3 Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” 75–7.
4 Lacan, “Presentation on Psychical Causality,” 146.
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