Coleman,Charlene

=**JACQUES LACAN **=

=Introduction = Jacques Lacan is a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made major contributions to the world of psycho analysis and psychiatry with the thoughts of Fraud as his intial guide. Lacan's contributions to the study of psychoanalysis, a systematic structure of theories concerning the relation of conscious and unconscious psychological processes, has contributed intensely to the way people analyze literature, film, philosophy, and clinical psychoanalysis (European Graduate School). Within his career he has developed the idea of the "Mirror Stage", a philosophy on language, and the idea of symbolic identification. He has been the most influential and cetainly the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud himself (Murray 151).

=Biogragphy= Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was born April 13, 1901 in Paris, France. He was born the eldest child of the three children Emilie and Alfred Lacan. He grew up in a burgeouis Catholic Family and attended the Jesuit College Stanislas. He then went on to study medicine. Later he started his studies in psychiatry in the 1920s at the Faculte de Medecine de Paris and worked with patients suffering from "automatism", a condition in which the patient believes his actions, writing, or speech are controlled by an outside omnipotent force (Eurpean Graduate School). In 1932 he became licesned in forensic psychiatry. He went on to get his Doctorat in 1932 with his thesis, //De la Psychose paranoiaque dans les rapports avec la personnalité (Encyclopedia).// In Lacans thesis he drew a connection between psychiatric medicine and psychoanalysis, this connection would be the center of Lacan's practice and would elevate what he called a "return to Freud" (European Graduate School).

Lacan developed the idea of the "Mirror Stage", the idea that desire is the the desire of the other, symbolic identification, a philosophy of language, and a conception of fantasy. Lacan was a huge contributor to the field of psychoanalysis. He was constantly teaching seminars on the issues of psychoanalysis. He became more into his own thought of pscyhoanalysis than that of Frued. He began to be recognized as being different from Freud and as having more of a Lacanian method. He formed his own intelectual group in 1963 called the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP). Later on he dissolved that group and formed the École de la Cause Freudienne in 1974. He maintained this group until his death in 1981.

=The Ideas of Lacan=

"Lacan arguably extended the parameters of psychoanlysis, and in some ways 'modernised' and changed the face of the discipline." -Jacki Watts

__The Mirror Stage__
Jacques Lacan's first major contribution to the pscyhoanalysis theory came with the introduction of his 'Mirror Stage' idea in 1949. This theory came about from Lacan drawing from the field of developmental psychology and ethology, or the study of animal behavior, Lacan contrasted the behavior of a young primate with that of a human child aged about eighteen months. Lacan placed a primate in font of a mirror, and he observed no particular reaction from that of the primate. Howerver, when he placed the human child in front of the mirror the infant reacted by pointing to the mirror image, smiling and displaying signs of happiness and celebration. According to Lacan the child's reaction to her image in the mirror proves to be the child's first perception of the child's body as a whole. He considers this a primitive or primal image of the ego (Murray152).The child had to recognized that the reflection of him/her self was merely a reflection and not the subject. Through the child recognizing that the mirrored image was not the real self, the child became a subject and formed an ego. The Mirror Stage changes the emphasis in subject formation from a biological base to a symbolic or language base. As Lacan writes in the //Discourse of Rome//, "Man speaks…but it is because the symbol has made him man." (European Graduate School).

__Desire is the Desire of the Other__
Lacan believed that the person only desires something that is desired by others. For instance, fashion. A person only desires the certain fashion when that fashion is being accepted by the others as acceptable. Once that fashion is no longer accepted the person no longer desires it either. The person moves on to the next desireable object, that is acceptable by the whole. "Lacan articulates this //decentring// of desire when he contends that what has happened to the biological needs of the individual is that they have become inseparable from, and importantly subordinated to, the vicissitudes of its demand for the recognition and love of other people. Events as apparently “natural” as the passing or holding back of stool, he remarks in //Ecrits//, become episodes in the chronicle of the child’s relationship with its parents, expressive of its compliance or rebellion. A hungry child may even refuse to eat food if it perceives that this food is offered less as a token of love than one of its parents’ dissatisfaction or impatience" (Sharpe). The argument that Lacan presents is that people act on the desires of those around them. The people in one's life help to formulate the decision of the subject.

__Linguistic Law and Phallic Order (The Big Other)__
The 'Big Other' is an idea that is in accordance with Freud's Oedipus Complex. Lacan believes that the Father is the 'Big Other' of the child's sociolinguistic community (Sharpe). He is what makes the child and the mother seperate from eachother and causes the change to take place. The father has dominated the male role in the situation. He has taken control of the symbolic order. Lacan calls this change, or seperation, the "phallic order". Lacan differs from Freud in the mentioning of the "phallic". To Lacan the penis, which Freud constantly talks about, does not merely have to be external, but can also be internal. The penis, to Freud, is a symbolic representation of the desires of man or the role of the man. Freud mentioned the penis as being the visual sexual difference between a female and a male. Lacan argued that Freud did not mean for the penis to only be biological, but to also represent the social structure of the male and female. The symbolic representation-the phallus is the identity which language has made for the male and female (Segal 84) According to Lacan when the father seperates the child from the mother he is castrating him, he is domoniating the symbolic order of things and keeping them in order.

__The Unconscious__
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__Ecrits__
Ecrits was one of the most celebrated works of Lacan. The first section of the work is titled, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function".

This work is some what of a difficult read containing some concepts that are hard to grasp right off the top.

Lacan writes about the idea of a child being placed in front of a mirror amd the child reacting to the image that it sees and also reacting to the other things which are reflected in the mirror. Where as the monkey that they had do the same thing failed to act as the child. This brought Lacan to believe that, "human knowledge is more independent than animal knowledge from the force field of desire because of the social dialectic that structures human knowledge as a paranoiac, but what limits it is the "scant reality" surrealistic unsatisfaction denounces therein" (Lacan).

The child is able to finally see its in a different way, the child now sees the ideal image of its sself and now will strive to achieve that "Ideal-I". However this ideal "I" is in discordance with the child's own reality, it can really never be obtainable. The person may now have an identity of self, but the negative to it is that the child may also create pscyhasthenia.

This idea is hard to understand from Lacan's piece. It is necessary to read multiple times, but even then it is still a complex read, and leaves one wondering if they understood Lacan's idea correctly.

__What Others Think About Lacan's Work__
Charles Shepherdson said of Lacan's theory, "However much one may stress the notorious "law of the father" in Lacan, it is clear that the symbolic order is not the whole story, and that the relation between the symbolic and the real involves a certain failure of the law."

"Lacan's theory of the mirror phase and the formation of the ego was taken by many film theorists as a model for the relationship between the film projected on the screen and how this affected the film viewer or cinematic spectator. Lacan's complex notion of how a subject comes to identify themselves as an 'I' in social world was seen as a useful way of understanding how cinema spectators identify with images on the screen, beyond simply identifying positive and negative images." (Homer 2).