By Joe Hummer and Joe Martin

Lacan reconceptualized Freud using post structuralism. He focused on early development and how this affects the unconscious.

Each Reality corresponds to a phase Neonatal phase goes with the real reality Mirror phase goes with imaginary reality The Symbolic Register phase goes with the Symbolic reality While these stages are usually associated with infants, it is possible for an adult (perhaps a literary character) to go through or become trapped in one of these stages.

During the Neonatal phase the infant becomes very attached to its mother. The infant considers itself a part of its surroundings; no individual identity is defined. There is no sense of where its surroundings end and the baby begins. However the baby realizes that he/she is a physical being and senses his/her own body.

According to Lacan, this is the closest we will ever get to reality because society begins to influence you afterwards. We still don’t have a clear perception of our reality even then, our sense of identity is too mixed up to perceive things clearly.

The infant’s identity and relationship with its surroundings become more coherent. The infant does this by perceiving and distinguishing images. The imagination is used to fill in the gaps of things that have unclear identities or can’t be completely seen.

At some point in the 6-18 month period, an infant will look at a mirror and realize that the reflection is itself. This is the infant’s first identity crisis. This is when the infant starts to separate itself from its surroundings and defines its own identity. A fear develops in the infant that it will melt back into its chaotic relationship it had with the world before.

However, the infant cannot see all of itself in its reflection (feelings, thoughts, etc.). This creates an unfocused or fragmented sense of identity. A desire to become a single cohesive identity develops. *Mirror phase is a process of recognition that can only be done by separating from oneself in order to observe one’s identity, and, while this first example of the mirror is a relatively physical experience, it is usually done within oneself.

This is when a child learns to speak and associates objects with words or other objects. According to Lacan, these symbols bind our sense of the “real” world because they only work in a certain context. We don’t use these symbols unless the right context is around, therefore we don’t associate the actual thing being signified unless the right context arises. These symbols also carry connotations that affect the way that we perceive the objects being symbolized. Ex. Learning connotes work, but it may not necessarily involve work.

The mind begins to work with symbols and think with words. Society begins to influence an individual’s thoughts in this way.

Lack of people or possessions governs much of how we feel and act and promotes us to try to reach an incomplete and unachievable wholeness. We create a false sense of what our desires will be like if we ever attain them, and if we ever do, they will prove to be not at perfect as we had idealized. Therefore, through our fulfillment of the unreachable brings more loss.

The wanting for a desire will cause us to create a fantasy of what we wish to have, which can replace our sense of reality at times. This creates a dilemma, for the more we live in fantasy, the more it replaces our perception of reality and blurs the line between the two. Desire starts as early as the mirror phase, when we create an idealized identity for ourselves that we wish to achieve. Desires can be dangerous if we do not learn to control them, especially at a young age.

This is French for enjoyment and pleasure that can be too much to bear. One of the goals of life is to be able to manage jouissance so as to not be controlled by it. Society helps with this through education and cultural norms. Lacan argues that we are separated from ourselves by language and we therefore feel a sense of absence. We desire a wholeness to return to our natural state of jouissance.

Lacan disagreed with attempts to link psychoanalysis with social theory, saying that human passion is structured by the desire of others. Desire appears through language, culture, and the spaces between people. Lacan found Freud’s theory of unconscious fragmentation of the self his core discovery. He believed that through the mirror phase, the conscious ego and unconscious desire are radically divided. A strong ego is seen as defensive deceit, and expressing it during analysis is a resistance to change. The main contribution Lacan made was his emphasis of language in the creation of the self, and psychic and sexual life.

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