A Tour of Lacan's Graph of Desire

in this video we're going to go on a tour of lakhan's graph of desire we'll check in at each of its points explain what all this algebra means and go through the concepts behind it we throw in plenty of real-life examples so if you're not familiar with that Conell ready or if like me you're turned off by Lacanian jargon it'll still make sense I'll also be putting all the quotations from Lacan on screen as we go through so you can see what that khan himself said about the graph of desire and so that more hardcore Lacanian scan follow up the references oh and hit subscribe to see new videos as they released and check out more about jacques lacan and psychoanalysis on Lacan online.com so background in history first off almost everything from Lacan comes from his seminar the collective name for the roughly twenty seven or so year long series of courses he did from 1952 to 1980 each seminar is devoted to a different topic and what you have in the air Cree is basically a 900-page condensation of all this material at around the midway point of lakhan's work in 1966 now Lokhande felt his graph of desire throughout seminar five from 1957 to 1958 which is on what he calls the formations of the unconscious why formations what are they formations he says are forms forms have relations to each other and when we put them together they comprise a topology that's not exactly what we get in the graph desire but this is what Lacan tells his audience when he's wrapping up that seminar and he says he didn't want to scare people away by talking about it at the start when the graph of desire gets condensed for publication into the air Cree it's the paper the subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire where we find its most succinct elaboration that's what most people use when they reference a graph so it's with that text that will explore it here that said if you want a crystal-clear walkthrough by Lacan himself of the graph Hey to Seminole 5 specifically the later part of that seminar to get your head around it and then maybe come back to subversion of the subject now the first thing to say about the graph of desire itself is that that comp doesn't refer to it as a graph of desire anywhere in the air Cree or in seminar 5 when he spends months explaining it he just calls it his graph it was you column in there and popularized the idea of a graph desire with his short commentary that we find at the end of the air cream so if it's not a grant for desire what is it a graph of well in the first place Lacan says it's a graph of what psychoanalysis shows us the practical structure of the data of analytic experience but it is about desire insofar as Lacan says it shows where desire is situated in relation to a subject defined on the basis of his articulation by the signifier more on that in a moment second thing to say is that as Millea correctly notes they are graphs not just one graph for to be exact and we'll walk through each of them while the later forms of extensions of the earlier ones Lacan uses them to elaborate different ideas so we'll treat them like a ladder the comparison that Cohn uses and take them step by step so this is what Lacan calls the elementary cell of the graph desire graph one and we have four points our starting point is this little triangle here and the trajectory takes us through to the bard s Lac on symbol for the subject the subject is not the individual not the person on the ego but it is human subjectivity and we should here in this terms subject the implication subject to this is why Lacan describes the subject as a function Lacan makes it clear that we're not talking about the subject of psychology Lacan takes a pretty dim view of psychology calling psychologists Philistines referring to its lowly purpose of social exploitation and most cuttingly saying that psychologists just do a judicial astrology what's wrong with psychology is its criterion as the unity of the subject he says hence why the subject here s has a bar for it lakhan's dismal view of psychology is repeated throughout his work and on Lacan online.com you can read more in my article what does psychoanalysis have to do with psychology here in subversion of the subject alongside criticisms of psychology Lacan closing criticisms of the reduction of subjectivity to consciousness or states of consciousness even if there are higher forms of consciousness like the degrees of Samadhi and Buddhism the trips and highs of loose energetic drugs or the states of enthusiasm described by Plato lack horns point in short is that no matter how much you meditate you're still going to be a divided subject what are you / in short by the effect of the signifier denoted here by s if you want to know more about the effect of the signifier check out my videos on what's so unconscious about the unconscious and my series on repression here I'm gonna flash up some quotations from that calm for those who appreciate the references to illustrate how fundamental the effect of the signifier is in the construction of human subjectivity but in short we can say that a signifier is a linguistic unit a fragment of language a signifier could be a word or part of the word but one which is unhinged from any particular meaning any fixed representational reference and which thereby refers only to other signifiers denoted here by s-prime rather than to a particular meaning or signification this assemblage of signifiers taken together as a structure is a key component in language language as a formal structure rather than any particular language like in or French as a whole this is sometimes loosely referred to as the symbolic the symbolic register or the symbolic order Lacan is saying that from the very start of our lives indeed even before our births we are by the symbolic and once you're you can't get unfucked so notice it in the graph this elementary cell of the graph we begin with the barred subject there is no entry point into language you are already conditioned by language notice also here how the barred subject sits between two signifiers in effect suspended in the gap between these s and s prime this is why Lacan says that the Sigma 5 represents the subject for another signifier in the same way that a lawyer represents her client for another lawyer or an ambassador represents her country for another ambassador Lacan suggestion is that Freud had some intuition about this when he described how the unconscious worked before the arrival of modern linguistic theory Freud talked about a primary psychical process which was characterized by two mechanisms condensation and displacement Lacan aligns these two two linguistic mechanisms metaphor and metonymy in other words he says the effect of the substitution and combination of signifiers in the synchronic and diachronic dimensions respectively in which they appear in discourse the lesson to be drawn from the book length studies that Freud wrote on dreams slips of the tongue and jokes is that these all show how unconscious processes are at work which exhibit these same essentially linguistic mechanisms hence lakhan's most well-known maxim the unconscious is structured like a language the unconscious is therefore a totally different form of psychical reality to consciousness the unconscious is not a non consciousness not the negation of consciousness as he refers to it here consciousness he says is obsolete to us in grounding the unconscious what kind of subject do we mean then by subject of a linguistic unconscious Lacan makes a distinction here between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation what do I mean when I say I I by itself makes no sense I have to follow it up with something I am happy I am tired I am a man etc and here we have the deferral of signification along a chain on which more later but what about a sentence like I am lying is the speaker line or is he telling the truth Lacan uses this example because he says we can only understand it as non paradoxical if we split the sentence into I and am line and make a distinction between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation so is the subject lying or is he telling the truth lock horns answer is that he is telling the truth via his lie at the level of the subject of this statement he is lying at the level of the subject of the enunciation he's telling the truth about that lie the subject of the enunciation can be understood as the subject of the unconscious it's a subject that emerges from within our speech through our signifiers and which differs from or contradicts the I of the statement Lacan calls the subject of the enunciation the subject not insofar as it produces discourse but insofar as it is produced cornered even by discourse what Lacan is getting at is the fact that the subject is not quite the agent of what he says as much as he speaks he spoken the words that he uses carry a meaning which exceeds the one he hoped to convey when he opened his mouth and it's through the act of enunciation that we have access to the unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense this is why knock-on says that the presence of the unconscious being situated in the locust of the other can be found in every discourse in its enunciation separating out these two subjects in speech can also help us understand how lack homes famous maxim that the signifier represents a subject for another signifier refers to exactly this split between the speaking subject that enunciates words or signifiers and the eye of the subject of the statement as Lacan says what the unconscious brings back to our attention is the law by which enunciation can never be reduced to what is enunciated in any discourse in other words an unconscious production is one in which you don't recognize yourself and what you've actually said this is an expose well known to anyone who's undertaking a psychoanalysis but let's take a more everyday example advice what's going on when people give advice to salesmen are in a bar discussing work and the deals that they're expecting to close in the coming weeks one boasts to the other that he's very confident on sealing a deal in the near future and he's planning to commit to his boss that he will get it signed before the end of the month his colleague jumps in with words of advice given in the strongest possible terms never commit never commit he says these words might be taken as nothing more than sage advice where the men not at this particular bar on this particular evening to celebrate the colleagues engagement to his fiancee with words never commit we can wonder what commitment was being warned against and therefore who the advice was aimed at what Lacan says in his seminar nine on identification can tell us what's going on here by this very fact in the enunciated Lacan says he the colleague in our example alight something which is properly speaking what he cannot know namely the name of what he is Quay enunciated subject in the act of enunciated there is this latent nomination we never find the unconscious Express with the first-person pronoun while they're unconscious thoughts desires and fantasies are often voiced through an enunciation which is ostensibly intended for someone else so when we receive advice we should always ask who is this more relevant to me or the person giving it this is what Lacan calls the inter set and 2d which in French is also a homonym of forbidden it is the very place at which the transparency of the classical subject divides he says and this is one of the reasons he calls the title of this paper in the Acree the subversion of the subject so back to graph 1 the elementary cell think of it as like a button tie Lacan says beginning on the Left we have two signifiers s and s prime which represents the signifying chain the signifier Lacan says stops the indefinite sliding of signification what does this mean take the example of the phrase the weed is how we finish this sentence with a further signifier will determine retro actively its signification the weed is getting me high produces a different meaning effect than getting too high one might refer to smoking a joint the other to gardening one refers to me the other refers to a plant how we end the sentence determines how we understand its beginning and how we position ourselves relative to it lack holds most famous illustration of this is with the bathroom doors analogy from the instance of the letter two identical bathroom doors behind which are presumably two identical bathrooms the only thing that determines their difference is the signifiers gentlemen ladies above them the point Lacan is making is that the difference lies not in the thing the signified but in the signifier ladies and gentlemen the signified is totally out of play Kahn's model we know that young children have grasped this when they start making signifying substitutions in their use of language the example Lacan gives here is when a child says that the cat goes woof woof and the dog goes meow referring to the properties of things in a way that presents them as exchangeable the one thing can stand for another and these two things are not inherently fixed to a given reference graph one presents the subject as caught in the loop of the signifiers passage as we said earlier the little triangle at the bottom right is the starting point of our journey through this graph or Ponte lease calls in his write-up of Lacan seminar 5 that by which the human subject in his essence as problematic subject is situated in a certain relationship with the signifier what does this mean let's take another example a man complains of two problems first he thinks he's too skinny and so he eats large portions of high-calorie food in an attempt he says to gain weight second he suffers from insomnia when I ask what it is that keeps him awake he says some things in my life have a lot of weight the same signifier in different contexts when we say someone is unconscious of something we should think that they've repressed it in the sense of pushed it down into the unconscious it's simply that they don't see the link between two things in different contexts in our example the connection between the man's eating habits and his insomnia remember that when we ask someone to describe some aspect of their life they could say whatever they liked that they used the same term to describe two things which then have no connection indicates to us that there may indeed be a link and that this link is worth exploring but why does this vector on backwards in a negatively oriented direction with the signifiers vector as Lacan puts it exactly because of the retroactive effect of signification that we saw earlier with we example what work here is what Freud calls the effect of that plague lick kite translated by that Corner's at peh-chu and translated better by LARP launchers afterwards Ness it's a crucial concept in psychoanalysis that Lacan pulled out avoid and which lab launch built pretty much an entire career around unfortunately in stretchies translation at the standard edition for its German is rendered as deferred action which doesn't quite capture the subtleties of afterwards Ness in English we can also read this negatively oriented direction to refer to the way that the subject receives his message back from the other in inverted form more on that later and so on to the second version of the graph where lakorn introduces a new set of terms let's start with a and s a here a is ultra other with a capital o the so-called big other because it's not an other like another person but instead what he calls the locus of the treasure trove of signifiers one way to think of the other is like a switch point in a network in any network is not the input the matters but the passage who just such a junction in the same way that a train station is indifferent to the trains that pass through it so the other has no subjectivity or intentionality in its own right it's like the pure subject of modern game strategy Lacan says the preliminary site of the pure subject of the signifier like the traffic flowing through a junction at any one point Lacan describes the other as the inscription of a combinatorial combinations may be exhaustive Li enumerated it's the other of language or the other of language in its of earnest so it's not the place where everything gets a meaning like the key to the code even if we might appeal to the other in order to find meaning it's rather the space where speech and language are constituted because language the words we use can distant or fallen to us even as we speak them even if we speak particular language very well we can think of the other as the site where language as a purely differential structure comes together a network of signifiers that only makes sense collectively founded on binary opposition to each other like night and day Adam even or ladies and gentlemen in LAC onsen allergy now this only makes sense when we look to the left s brackets a and we see punctuation Lacan says the effect of punctuation on a signifying chain just as we saw in the elementary cell with the we'd example as Lacan says one is a locus a place rather than a space the other is a moment a punctuation rather than a narrative so let's trace this line that runs from signifier on the left to voice on the right by thinking about how the infant negotiates his entrance into this symbolic order the child is born into a signifying universe that precedes him and which divides him a world of signifiers which in their brute roar materiality are absolutely meaningless the significations that are communicated to the child by the other let's say from the caregivers incarnated for the child the other are denoted by small s brackets ad but to the mother or caregiver these significations are themselves alien because they're signifiers will always carry a signification of which they are unaware this other nurse is an aspect we see in the voice which can be thought of as this signifying chain - the effect of meaning as leader puts it there's a great example of this trajectory in action in Freud's case history our little hands real name Herbert Graf this young child four and a half years old has just taken a bath and notices that when his mother dries and powders him she takes care to avoid one special part of his body Hans finds this odd and asks his mother why she want to touch it because that'd be piggish his mother replies what's that piggish why hearts retorts because it's not proper she snaps back notice how we have two signifiers that made no sense two hands piggish and proper and they're given that signification by the mother even though she herself doesn't know where they come from or what they really mean they are in Freud's excellent term pre sexual sexual but it's great fun the hands for tests demonstrating how the register of language can be used as both the condition and prohibition of enjoyment so let's trace the line that runs from the bath subject up over the graph via the other to the significations from the upper s back it's a and let's explain this with an example from another avoids case histories that of the rap man real name Ernst Lanza Ernst shared a memory with Freud when he was very young he'd done something wrong and was beaten by his father in response the rap man put up a verbal fight but as he knew no bad language for it relates he called him all the names of common objects that he could think of and had screamed you lamp you towel you plate and so on as for he tells it so shaken was the mad man's father by the fury of this outburst that he stopped declared the child will either be a great man or a great criminal void notes the patient believed that the scene made a permanent impression upon him as well as upon the father the beating stopped and never happened again but the rap man attributed his later fear of violence at his own rage to this scene in psychosis we have something bit different going on code messages and message codes separate out into pure forms in the psychotic subject subject who makes do with this preliminary other alone back on says what's he talking about at the onset of psychosis we find some the German Swiss psychiatrist Karl Gaspar's called elementary phenomena this was picked up by Lacan as early as his doctoral thesis on paranoia in the early 1930s black-owned gives an example in seminar three of how this works the subject sees of red car passing on the street he doesn't know what this means but he knows it means something and that this meaning pertains specifically to him this is the appearance of meaning as such and it's one of the early signs that the illusion is about to crystallize thus we run from the barred subject via the image to the presence of meaning as such in psychosis we might all certified auditory hallucinations whereby the signifier is divorced from the signifying chain and thereby from any signification so we can understand the location of the voice here in this context - so what about these - this is the image over from the other notice the big other as denoted by the capital a and this is the image of a from the other notice the small a denoting the semblable the mirror image i brackets capital a is the point of the ego ideal an i brackets small a is the point of the ideal ego what's the difference if the ideal ego is the person you identify whether it's the person you would like to be the ego my deal is the point from which that image takes on a value the point that sanctions or invests that image is being worthy or lovable what Freud points out in chapters 7 & 8 of group psychology and the analysis of the ego from 1921 is that what's at work in identification is not a kind of mirroring not a specular immediate identification but the support given to that identification as Lacan puts it in his remarks on this in seminar 11 the ego ideal is the point from which the subject will see himself as others see him Lacan introduces the ego ideal with reference to what cause the unary trait a concept more crucial than that Khan scholars usually give it credit for here he says that the unary trait performs the role of filling in the invisible mark the subject receives from the signifier which alienates this subject in the first identification that forms the ego ideal what does this mean again it's an idea that has its heritage employed in Chapter seven on identification in group psychology for it gives the example of his patient Dora who imitated the cough of her father in this case identification for rites has appeared instead of object choice object choice has regressed to identification Dora's identification is not to a person as such but to a particular trait of that person which borrows what Freud in German calls eine ein zagazig a single trait you knew he traitors the term that Lacan uses he talks at length about this in the seminars of the mid-60s halfway through seminar 11 for instance Lacan refers to how prehistoric cavemen would signify the killing of an animal they'd hunted by marking it off with a single stroke perhaps on a cave wall or on their weapon the killing of the animal is represented by a 1 and the subject counts his first killers 1 1 each mark is a signifier and that cause idea is that human subjectivity is essentially suspended in the gap between the signifiers but this doesn't mean the human subjectivity is some kind of effervescent antimatter or insubstantial pure lack the marks or strokes just give him a place in abil him to situate himself in a signifying structure the subject is barred but not entirely swallowed by the other appoint the lac comics in seminar 11 when he tells his audience that this single stroke this eine ein is a gazook constitutes the subject at the level of which there is a relation of the subject to the other two reasons why we're dwelling on the unary trades first because the idea from Freud is that when identification occurs via this single trait or characteristic it's not a form of identification that is linked to a libidinal attachment or love interest in the person the ion zagazig simply provides what Lacan calls in seminar 8 the sign of the others assent it's the reference to the i-90 hook that gives the fantasy of the ideal ego its weight the gaze of the other is internalized fire-irons occurs zhuge as a sign there is no need as Lacan puts it for the whole organized field or for some sort of massive introjection what this means is that a particular trait an X is valued by the other in some way that's why it's a sign as something that has a meaning to someone and in that respect gives the child a fixed point you can relate to amongst all the specular identifications and mirroring relations around him so all of the ideal egos that follow will depend on the ego ideal the second reason we're dwelling on the unit rate is because it's a kind of a frontier concept between the imaginary and the symbolic it's the object raised to the status of the signifier it's not an imaginary representation of the object like a little sketch of the animal that's killed on a cave wall it's simply a knotch a stroke or a mark this is what Lacan means when in seminar 9 he says that the i9z gazook functions as a support for difference it designates the paradox of radical otherness this unary trade can give to the subject to place in the symbolic order it provides both a substantive presence and a singularity a uniqueness that is the opposite of the pathological coincidence of self and other which is a feature of the imaginary register now notice that in graph two the ego ideal comes in the place where we found the bad subject in graph one the elementary sell of the graph what's this about like I was trying to present a retro version effect by which the subject at each stage becomes what he was to be a beautiful line from earlier in the air cream may help us explain this what is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what was since it is no more nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am but the future anterior as what I will have been given what I am in the process of becoming packed into this debt civil quotation we find the idea of after witness mentioned earlier we also see notions of fate destiny repetition and transmission and even though he says he won't talk about the mirror stage here Lacan goes on to give it a more developed elaboration than the purely specular one that the theory received in his original 1936 Marienbad paper in particular here we get the idea of an anticipation of bodily mastery that is at the core of the mirror stage theory in short this is the idea that we identify with an image outside ourselves an image which presents to us a model of corporal unity in order to achieve motor coordination and mastery over our own body but that comes at the price of our fundamental alienation in the image of the other hence lakhan's line there arises the ambiguity of a miss recognizing that is essential to know myself to explain this we now have to trace the journey along the bottom quadrant of graph to the journey that goes from the barred subject to the ideal ego to the ego and to the ego ideal let's explain this vector running from the idea of ego to the ego a bit more this is the image of the other or the image as other in the imagining register the eye here is the image the a the other in order for the infant to achieve motor mastery coordination and to be able to identify its image why not the image it sees in a mirror as its own it has to model itself on the image of another this is how the ego is constructed there is no other way to get to the ego except via the image of the other this vector is at the level of the imaginary and Mac on the realm of images but as we can see from its connection to the ego ideal and the barred subject it's not possible to separate off the imaginary from the symbolic the fretful preoccupation with the image in the Instagram page shows this dynamic in action we ceaselessly her and my images images through which we see ourselves but only the expense of how others present their own image that is how they would themselves like to be seen what Lacan says about this dynamic is so relevant to our day and age that it almost feels surprising that's written 60 years ago not late last night but for a con the rivalry inherent in this imaginary dual relation has a really dark side the ego is thus a function of mastery but it's at the same time a game of constituted rivalry he says which casts a shade of hostility on to the other that can rapidly boil over into an intense violent outburst as we see in these passages from subversion of the subject and in the mirror stage paper and in his paper on aggressivity there's a rivalry inherent in the imaginary register anytime it's not mediated by a symbolic operator whether that symbolic operator is inefficient or simply not present that call warns in no uncertain terms that it can become murderously violent so much of Lacan Czerny work is about how this alienation in the image produces aggressive outbursts and so many of the clinical cases that interested him exhibit this feature his commentary on the infamous case of the Papen sisters and his doctoral thesis on self punitive paranoia in which he subject MA stabbed a well-known who is an actress of the day serves to show how seriously Lacan took this but let's take an example for more recent times on the 30th of July 2008 a man called Vincent Lee boarded a Greyhound bus travelling from Edmonton to Winnipeg in Canada he sat next to a 22 year old man named Tim MacLean who barely acknowledged him and fell asleep his head against the window of the bus shortly after Lee pulled out a hunting knife and began stabbing the claim as the terrified passengers evacuated the bus Lee began cutting off its victim's head and dismembering him with Lee locked aboard bus he brandishes in McLane's severed head to the passengers and begins to eat the eyes and part of the heart of the body when he's finally arrested police find other body parts stuffed into his pocket his court appearance Lee is bereft with remorse the only words he utters to the judges the plea please kill me he's devastated to hear that the Canadian legal system does not allow for capital punishment in this sad and shocking case we see exactly the phenomenon that that Khan is talking about justice in the papen casein just as in a maze case a paranoid delusion fixes on the image of an ideal in this case the young and trendy MacLean and there follows an abrupt and violent outbursts that leads to this destruction of that image because the ego is founded on the image of another and because as Lacan hypothecated in the MA case paranoia has this self punitive dimension in which the paranoid destroys the other he would like to be when this image is destroyed that the ego is destroyed with it hence Lee's desperate plea to be killed something we also see in the case of Christine Papa who after the crimes attempts to gouge her own eyes out and eventually dies for mound nourishment in prison now let's look at the third form of the graph we have a new upper portion framed by a question keV Oh what do you want which nakorn took from 1772 novel by the French author Jacques Cassatt diabla amaha the devil in love it's no accident that the curve the graph forms around this resembles a question mark we also have two new symbols in the third form of graph this diamond symbol or lozenge which in French is called once song and which does quite a lot of work in survives it indicates the relation between the other two symbols it can joins Lacan says that it registers the relations envelopment Development conjunction disjunction and we'll explain later the UC makes of it in this formula it's helpful to see this plan soreness the soldiering together of the mathematical symbol is for less than and more than because taken together they don't just indicate a relation but a contradictory relation how could something be both less than and more than secondly we have the appearance of a lowercase D which indicates desire but in order to explain desire we're going to have to first explain demand which that Kant writes with an uppercase D what is demand for calm it's not a demand for anything as such any particular object whether one that can satisfy need or not instead it's a demand for recognition or as Lacan says a demand for love as such it's an appeal to the other notice that there's no need in the graph Lacan criticizes those analysts of his time who was so caught up on the notion that subjectivity is formed in relation to the experience of helplessness by the newborn infant in its caregivers willingness or otherwise to satisfy its needs we talked about need only in order to distinguish it from demand and desire Nev is almost totally out of play for Lacan because we never really find a pure need it's always polluted by the order of language which means that what we experiences need is never pure even basic biological needs let's take the example of the new ball infant they wants to be fed it crimes it may or may not get the bottle or a breast but it may cry for other reasons and the caregiver may still respond with a bottle or a breast thus the experience of even the most basic needs are already conditioned through the significations given to them by the other as Lacan says needs have been diversified and geared down by and through language to such an extent that their import appears to be of a quite different order needs are always expressed as demands which are never demands for a particular object but an appeal to the other as such there is no demand that does not in some respect pass through the defiles of the signifier he says now on to desire and notice that the get to desire we have to pass through the other let us begin Lacan says explaining desire with the conception of the other as the locus of the signifier when Lacan says that there is no other of the other he means that there's nothing to which the other can refer to for legitimacy no ultimate guarantor of truth and meaning it's a locus not a person and therefore Lacan can say that anyone who claims to offer this ultimate guarantee is an impostor incidentally although Lacan gets accused of emboldened patriarchy he also says here that it's not the Father who embodies a supper it's the mother desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand rips away from need that Khan says imagining young baby who is hungry and cries out for milk the need is the hunger the cry is the demand what's left over the margin between the two is desire the thing about desire is that it is need less both in the sense of being split off from need and in the sense of being contingent totally senseless the best way to explain the difference between Mead demand and desire is in reference to the object now this term object means something different in psychoanalysis to what it means in every talk normally we use the term object in the sense of a thing like an object on a table and we also talk about an object in the sense of an aim or goal the object of your affection the object of this exercise for instance the psychoanalytic object is kind of halfway between the to take happiness for instance happiness might be a goal or an aim in your life but there's no one object or thing that if you got it you could say wouldn't make you happy this is why psychoanalysis opposes happiness and wife roid thought that there was a fundamental discontent baked into civilization thus in Bihar ganondorf culture as Jay check points out happiness is a category of what Freud calls the pleasure principle so what's wrong with happiness is that it relies on the subjects inability or unread enos to fully confront the consequences of their desire the price of happiness is that we remain stuck in the inconsistency of our desire we believe that having this or that thing will make us happy and we failed to see that it's happiness itself which is infinitely hypocritical in that the quest of happiness only leads to the infinite metonymic deferral of desire so with these two meanings of object we can make sense of the difference between desire and demand desire has an object in the sense in which we speak about the desire for something or someone but desire has no object in the sense of an aim or a goal it's infinitely metonymic which means that as a byproduct of the split between needed demand it appears only as a consequence of them demand has an object in the sense of aim or goal but it's object is not material in the sense of a thing it's object is the recognition of the other all demand is demand for love as that con says this is what Lacan refers to when in a cryptic passage he talks about the odd symmetry by which desire reverses the unconditionally the demand for love in order to raise it to the power of an absolute condition if we think about the example of sexual desire this becomes clear sexual desire has an absolute condition the presence of a cern object that is necessary to get off but it doesn't necessarily have an object in the sense of a thing the gaze and the voice are two examples that back on uses often a certain look that someone gives is enough to excite sexual desire same goes for the tone or towner of someone's voice Lacan calls them objects a that is little object with the a denoting ultra-small other a part of the other as opposed to the big other there are objects that exist at the margins or edges of the body but lack a specifiable substance to them they do not have a specular dimension in the same way as we can't point to the gaze we can't point to the look because when we do we just end up pointing at the eye in a beautifully poetic way Lacan describes objects a as a substance caught in the net of shadow which robbed of its shadow swelling volume holds out once again the tiler of the shadow as if it were substance Lacan cause object a the object cause of desire it's paradoxical status as both the object and cause of desire is something he picks up on later and subversion of the subject where he describes it as like an AG Alma a precious treasure hidden in a worthless box this is part of the extended reference he gives to the strange attraction of alcibiades to socrates in plato's the symposium building off the long commentary in seminar 8 on that text in relation to transference this is the formula for fantasy the subject in relation to the object a what Lacan calls the structure of fantasy is built from the three elements in the bad subjects we have the moment of a fading or eclipse of the subject which is closely tied to the splitting in on the due to his subordination to the signifier in a we have the condition of an object the object cause of desire the link between the two is what constitutes fantasy to see this in action we can turn to Floyd's work on fantasy where we see these three elements that lack on shows here as comprising the structure of fantasy where Lacan has bad subject relation object a for it has subject-verb-object fantasy in tells the infinite combination of these elements which is why Lacan says that his formula is designed to allow 401 different readings for its idea was the fantasies we're thinking a particular of sexual fantasies here could be formulated as a sentence FOID picked one that he found cropping up with unusual regularity in his patience a child is being beaten and he showed how the fantasy is rephrased in a series of grammatical inversions likewise Boyd says that every sadist is also a masochist he or she can enjoy from both sides of this formula as Lacan son-in-law Jacques I Miller puts it when commenting on the difference between the drive and the fantasy fantasy is a miss recognition of the drive fantasy is that by which desire sustains itself in order to miss recognize the direction pointed out to it by the drive the same goes for fantasy in a wider sense take the case of Schreiber for instance Daniel Paul Schreiber wrote what is probably the most famous account of psychosis from the inside in his memoirs of my nervous illness in 1903 and it has fascinated people for over a century before II thought that the appearance of his paranoia directed towards his psychiatrist fleshing was a result of repressed homosexuality which morphed into paranoia the grammatical inversions in this case were I love the man this idea is rejected I hate the man also problematic the man hates me in which we have the paranoid crystallization reading the plant song or lozenges a combination of less than and more than we see that as we did above this to presents a situation of impossibility now regardless of what we think of voids our reading of the Schreber case we can see that it's these lexical configurations which propelled and sustained all the transformations the fantasy scenario that Freud and noted in the production of sexual fantasies thus Miller defines fantasy as meaning related to satisfaction and fantasy is their conjoining as for Lacan he describes his formula for fantasy is an absolute signification this denotes the more general sense of the term fantasy what leader describes as a compass or a rule that governs our lives fantasy is the pattern we repeat the groove we fall into our modus operandi this is why in psychoanalysis it's always important to locate the fantasy to understand what particular relation that person has constructed between meaning and satisfaction it may be the pattern of always putting oneself in the position of a victim or always striving for dominance for Freud according to a brilliant analysis made by LeClair in a paper called unconscious desire with forehead reading Freud this formula was to reveal a secret seriously go read this paper the fantasy would draw towards it all of the little contingencies of life of fit them into a single frame this is why in his third iteration of the graph Lacan talks about how desire adjusts to fantasy like the ego does emulation to the body image now on to the final complete version of the graph because we explained demand earlier we can now explain the drive which is denoted with this formula the subject in relation to demand what does the man have to do with the drive an ink between these two is already made by four whose brilliantly enigmatic definition of the drivers as the demands made upon the mind for work in consequence of its relation to the body our definition gives twice in the three essays on the theory of sexuality and then the meta psychological paper from 1915 drives and their vicissitudes free and cheap shak's alla lakorn attempts to locate the drive on his graph here by saying that the drive is what becomes a demand when the subject vanishes from it okay so we're talking about a kind of pure demand but then he continues it goes without saying that demand also disappears oh except that the cut remains for the latter remains present in what distinguishes that drive from the organic function it inhabits namely it's grammatical artifice so manifests in the reversals of its articulation with respect to both source and object how do we make sense of this take the example of alcohol addiction we have a split from the organic function drinking to quench thirst but for the alcoholic drink in habits that function in the way that the Trojan horse inhabits our Citadel source an object to reversed as Lacan says here in that the source of the drive from where the organic need of thirst arises the all zone in this case with this locus at the mouth is given over to the object the organic need is cheapened in favor of the object alcohol becomes more important water and thirst for water becomes thirst for alcohol vampire movies play on this trope very well there's no better illustration of the all drive at work than the undead vampire driven by a lust for blood which neither quenches its thirst nor keeps it alive that Khan's own example here of Pavlov's dog is also not bad either now turning to this formula the signifier of a lack in the other which Lacan describes as a lack inherent in the others very function as the treasure trove of signifiers this means that there's no other of the other as we saw earlier but note that here there is a signifier that itself denotes this lack a signifier that signifies a fundamentally lack of any possible signification to make sense of this think of the pure signifier zero what is zero ontological e it's nothing but as a signifier it still needs to denote the fact of nothing the paper for which jacala me there made his name suture elements of the logic of the signifier is a meditation on this paradox and Alain Badiou calls it the first great Lacanian text not to have been written by lack on himself this is not some abstract theoretical point is about personal question for each of us to deal with because it signifies that there is nothing which can ultimately guarantee the others consistency that there is ultimately no answer to what the other wants from us okay boy now in Lacanian jargon one way to think of this signifier of the lack of the other is with lakhan's concept of the phallus the phallus for Lacan acts as a signifier or memorial of Lac it's a kind of positive ization of an absence it occupies a very privileged place because the phallus is also the signifier of desire and the signifier of sexual difference too which means that the signification of the phallus is the point around which all articulations of sexuality are referenced to illustrate this with an example the center of my city London is Charing Cross it's the junction where six roads meet and when people measure the distance of any other place relative to London Charing Cross is taken as the ground zero the official centre of central London is the point from which distances from London are calculated the site takes its name from a memorial erected by King Edward the first to his wife Eleanor of Castile grief-stricken he placed monuments at each station marking the procession of her funeral cortege thus Charing Cross his bow an orientation point and a signifier of black but the signifier of the lack in the other is also a very necessary structural element because it allows of the flexibility or mobility of the signifying chain without one special signified and noting the lack in the other there will be no chain of signifiers no sliding of the signified under the signifier an each signification will be fixed into a closed code imagine something like a jigsaw puzzle if all the pieces were locked into place nothing would move and would be stuck with one images defining the whole of reality but with one piece missing the others can shift new significations can become possible and thus all the practices that depend on being able to play with the signifier and signified to create new significations the world of art literature culture all become possible when at this point Lacan gives his definition of the signifier a signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier we can see that logically there has to be a chain of signifiers because as he puts it this latter signifier is therefore the signifier to which all the other signifiers represent the subject which means that if this signifier is missing all the other signifiers represent nothing for something is only represented - just to the left of the signifier the lack in the other we have Sri Psalms a difficult term in itself and there's a full article explaining lakhan's idea of Sri thoughts on that con online.com but here we can approach Sri starts by asking what does that com mean when he says that jouissance is prohibited to whoever speaks as such or put differently it can only be said between the lines well notice the pun that lakor makes in French between D and DEET between saying and forbidden elsewhere Lacan talks about Sri science as being a caustic enjoyment a backhanded enjoyment which begins as a tickle and turns into an inferno complete enjoyment is impossible because it must run through the signifier the child's entrance into language with its inherent structural lack as we saw means that enjoyment or excitation is sort of progressively drained from the body so that it's only refuges are at the margins of the body what we know as the errata genic zones the place where the objects they are found in places of exquisite and complete as results and with the critical function of protecting us from it we get a kind of paltry Charice on Stu news Bruce Fink's term desire is a compensation for Sri sauce and the defense against it Lacan says it's a kind of a cack-handed roundabout way of enjoying roundabouts because it passes food to the files of the signifier and because of this desire manifests itself in odd places appearing in the half set in the slips or para practices in the stifling or bungling of some other articulation desire is the very consequence of this impossibility let's take an example from Boyd's practice of what this looks like he sees a man who is attracted to women who have what he refers to as a certain shine on their nose for its understanding of this is based on the fact that the patient had been brought up in an English nursery but had later come to Germany where he'd forgotten his mother tongue almost completely the fetish for it calls it a fetishistic precondition which originated from this earliest childhood has to be understood in English not German the shine on the nose in German glance after Nasser was in reality a glance at the nose where the ability to look or gaze was restricted and the enjoyment curtailed it's mangled and metabolized via the signifier resulting in glance after Naza shine on the nose being what excites man notice Lacan says that there's no agency for bidding Zeus Anse no one's telling us that we're not allowed to enjoy whatever kinky perversion we please it's not the law itself the Baths of subjects access to Shri Psalms he says it simply makes a bad subject out of an almost natural barrier the symbol of this effect is the phallus defined as the signifier of Shri sorts insofar as it finds incarnation in the erectile organ but even this imaginary incarnation still retains symbolic effects because the phallus phallic on is the male organ plus the idea of Lac and so Lacan gives it a symbolic formulation the square root of minus one what does this mean lakhan's English translator Bruce Finke helps us out the phallus represents what is missing in the desired image incarnated as the male organ the phallus is negative eyes Duero it's situated in the specular image it is a part that's missing in the desired image thus we have minus Phi not included here in the graph but which is the algebraic form Lacan uses for castration at the end of this vector in symbolizing this loss the phallus is transformed think of this as the post castration phallus and you get some sense of why reading the phallus as the penis makes no sense castration here refers to the evacuation of enjoyment to the margins of the body a draining of excitation to the body extremities at localized points that Lacan aligns with the source of the drive or will anal scopic mbaku tree hence why the phallus is the signifier of shri songs so fink tells us think of the phi this symbolic phallus as a minus one we go from a minus value to a plus that neutralizes the imagined loss and think says that this is exactly what the signifier does it makes the absent thing present just as a young child that Freud observes uses the signifies fought and died to make absence into present when it flows the cotton wheel with a side of its bed and pulls it back again in an attempt to master the presence and absence of its mother we make of pure loss and absence only when the thing in question is granted a representation now think refers us to lakhan's the signification of the phallus paper at this point and to a gorgeous German term that Lacan uses to illustrate this alpha bull this curious term has a rich history of philosophy as it connotes several seemingly contradictory meanings including to lift up to abolish to cancel or suspend to preserve and to transcend in English is often translated while the me clears to supper late which means nothing to anyone to quote Fink's explanation the phallus is the symbol of this positive ization of the loss that language performs it represents a lack despite it being present and what is the best way to represent in an image something that is lacking but at the same time present avail it this is why in the signification of the phallus Lacan says that the fast can only perform its function when veiled a weird example that he offers at the end of subversion of the subjects illustrates this such is women concealed behind her veil it is the absence of the penis that makes her the phallus the object of desire evoke this absence in a more precise way by having her wear a cute fake one under a fancy dress and you or while the she or laugh plenty to tell us about the effect is a hundred percent guaranteed for men who don't beat around the bush that is the effect here I take to mean sexual attraction on the part of men who don't beat around the bush I take to mean men who are straight towards the end of subversion of the subject Lacan brings these different formulas together to describe the situation of the neurotic whose defining problem is a conflation of the others lack with the others demand consequently the neurotic is or she who takes seriously the others demand so seriously as to make of it their object now the mistake that many analysts made lack on things is to see this as evidence of frustration whereas it's actually covering over the anxiety induced in him by the others desire phobia is the perfect example of this but the other neuroses can be defined in terms of their configuration of this fantasy the obsession with strategy is to deny the luck in the other to believe that nothing is lacking he has a fundamental need to be the others guarantor Lacan says and hysteria rather than being a 19th century pathologies ation of unruly women in that countenance is defined as a position in which the faithlessness of hysterical intrigue is the result of desire for desire itself in other words desire for a lack of satisfaction for a margin to be retained in which something is lacking the hysteric aims it infinitely perpetuating the others desire and thereby will always strive to create situations in which the other is shown to be lacking what the neurotic aims at says the con is to have the perfect master of his desire the name of this agent for that con is the father like the other the father is less a person than a place or more precisely a function which is to measure desire not in the sense of restricting it but in the sense of ensuring its proximal distance from an overwhelming enjoyment that Lacan calls elsewhere the thing borrowing for its German term dusting now although it's not depicted on the graph lakhan's masterly me reading of the universe complex by way of what he calls the paternal metaphor the substitution of the desire of the mother for the name of the father looms large this function of the father is thus an important operator not in some vague fashion but for the analyst using clinical practice Lacan thinks that how we work with the position or function of the father is one of the reading useful levers we can pull in order to have a psychotherapeutic effect an effect which is produced by shifting the subjects perspective relative to his or her fantasy if the neurotic wants to find the perfect master of his desire as Lacan says the analyst should take care not to incarnated this figure in the transference but to bring it into play in order to destabilize or undermine it practically speaking this means it's not always going to be the best strategy for the analyst to remain neutral passive or silent because this would position them in the very masterly position they should attempt to question let's take an example from the rat man's case history at one point voids notes simply record December 28th he was hungry and was fed while it may seem unorthodox for a psychoanalyst to be preparing his patient a meal during a session an intervention like this is justified if it produces more associative material more grist for the mill of the analysis this example isn't the one that lock on users and Lacan says he's not making any recommendations on technique but what he does say is super instructive how the analyst must safeguard the imaginary dimension of his non mastery and necessary imperfection for the other is as important amount of deal with as the deliberate reinforcement of an ever renewed ignorance so that no one is considered a typical case so that no one is considered a typical case at the end of subversion of the subject now Kahn talked a bit more about the position of the neurotic which is to say most of us relativity of castration castration slips under the barred subject in the fantasy life of the neurotic he says what covers over this castration is his ego yes is behind this ego that the new what ik hides the castration he denies back on says so if you approach to psychotherapy aims at strengthening the ego it's missing the point because it misses the point of castration as a defense against response on the one hand and as a yardstick of desire on the other and as such amiss is what lies beneath mainly that contrary to appearances he Cleaves to this castration the point is not the divorce to deny it but rather he doesn't want to sacrifice it to the other Sri sauce that is to allow the other to exploit his lack for its own gain the neurotic gets that things must come at a price but to pay that price by allowing the other to enjoy is intolerable for him so if we look at the arc that runs from fantasy and Sri songs on the left to castration and desire on the right we can see the central dilemma of the neurotic that is of most of us to get over this curve towards castration we have to reject Sri songs full enjoyment and accept the fact that the best satisfaction we're going to get is the one that desire offers despite its infinite autonomy its twists and turns it's perpetual dissatisfaction with an object this is what Lacan means when he ends the paper with one of the most beautiful lines in the whole Acree and which we can take as something of a mantra for a life resigned to the reality of constant striving pass tration means that she response has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the law of desire hit subscribe to see more videos from Lacan online as they released and check out much more stuff exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan on Lacan online.com

Channel: LacanOnline

Views: 43,370

Rating: 4.9367394 out of 5

Keywords: Lacan, psychoanalysis, lacanian

Id: 67d0aGc9K_I

Length: 70min 35sec (4235 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

These videos are unbelievably good.

[u/hermesincomming]

This was super helpful. On p.114 of S.V and I started to feel lost, or like I was missing something.

[u/CamillaAbernathy]

I took a few classes in college which heavily featured Lacan and this was very helpful.

[u/AntonioMachado]

excellent