Guide Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan

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Edited by J. For the beginner like me, it was great to understand the philosophical underpinnings of Freud, gradually showing how Lacan elucidated certain controversial Freudian concepts and thus fully appreciating their impacts on subjectivity. A Treatise on the Diseases of Cattle, Etc. A castrating acceptance of its sovereignity precipitates the child out of its ambivalent attempts to be the fully satisfying Thing for the mother. Before a sentence ends, Lacan notes, the sense of each individual word or signifier is uncertain. There are further experiences like these to be explored, but this was the way in which both Lacan and Adorno attempted to use the force of the subject to break through the deception of constitutive subjectivity.

They designate values and ideals that the subject will be unwilling and unable to question without pulling the semantic carpet from beneath their own feet. Lacan's understanding of how these "master signifiers" function is a multi-layered one, as we shall see in more detail in Part 3.

It is certainly true to say, though, that the importance of these signifiers comes from how a subject's identification with them commits them to certain orderings of all the rest of the signifiers. For example, if someone identifies himself as a "communist," the meanings of a whole array of other signifiers are ordered in quite different ways than for someone who thinks of himself as a "liberal.

What Lacan argues is involved in the psychoanalytic process, then, is the elevation of new "master signifiers" which enable the subject to reorder their sense of themselves and of their relations to others. Previously, for example, a person may have identified with a conception of "decency" that has led him to repress aspects of his own libidinal makeup, which then return in neurotic symptoms. What analysis will properly lead him to do is identify himself with a different set of "master signifiers," which re-signify the signifiers he had unconsciously been addressing to the Other in his symptoms, reducing their traumatic charge by integrating them into his symbolic self- understanding.

Whereas Freud never systematically spoke on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan devoted his pivotal seventh seminar in to precisely this topic. Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis goes to some lengths to stress that the position on ethics Lacan is concerned to develop is concerned solely with the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, it remains that Lacan develops his position through explicit engagement with Aristotle 's Nichomachean Ethics , as well as Kant's practical writings, and the texts of Marquis de Sade. Moreover, Lacan's ethics accord with his metapsychological premises, examined in Section 2, and his theorization of language, examined in Section 3.

In this Section 4, accordingly, we will see Lacan's understanding of ethics as a sophisticated position that, disavowals notwithstanding, can be read as a consistent post-Kantian philosophy of ethics. Section 4 is divided into three sub-sections.

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The first two develop further Lacan's metapsychological and philosophical tenets. The first sub-section involves a further elaboration of the Lacanian conception of the "master signifiers. As I stated at the end of Part 2, Lacan assigns great importance in his theorization of the psychoanalytic process to what he calls "master signifiers.

As was stressed, Lacan's idea about these signifiers is that their primary importance is less any positive content that they add to the subject's field of symbolic sense. It is precisely this primarily structural or formal function that underlies the crucial Lacanian claim that master signifiers are actually "empty signifiers" or "signifiers without a signified.

As with all of Lacan's key formulations, the notion that the master signifiers are "signifiers without signified" is a complex one. Even the key idea is the following.

Freud as Philosopher - Metapsychology After Lacan (Electronic book text)

The concept or referent or both signified by any "master signifier" will always be something impossible for any one individual to fully comprehend. For example, "Australian-ness" would seem to be what is aimed at when someone proffers the self-identification: "I am an Australian. Is "Australian-ness" something that inheres in everyone who is born in Australia? Or is it a characteristic that is passed on through the medium of culture primarily? Does it, perhaps, name most deeply some virtues or qualities of character all Australians supposedly have?

However, even if we take it that all "Australians" share some basic virtues, which are these? Can a closed list everyone would agree upon be feasibly drawn up? Is it not easy to think of other peoples who share in valuing each individual trait we standardly call "Australian" for example: courage, disrespect for pomposity? And, since "Australian" would seem to have to aim at a singular entity, not a collection, or else some grounding quality of character that could perhaps unite all of the others, which is this?

And is this "essential" quality- again- simply biological, perhaps genetic, or is it metaphysical, or what?

What Lacan's account of "master signifiers" thus emphasizes is the gap between two things. The first is our initial certainty about the nature of such an apparently obvious thing as "Australian-ness. The second thing is the difficulty that we have of putting this certainty into words, or naming something that would correspond to the "essence" of "Australian-ness," beneath all the different appearances.

What Lacan indeed argues, in line with his emphasis on the decentred self, is that our ongoing and usually unquestioning use of these words represents another clear case of how the construction of sense depends on the transferential supposition of "Others supposed to know.

Just as we desire through the Other, for this reason Lacanian theory also maintains that belief is always belief through an Other. For example, in the Christian religion, priests would be the designated Others supposed to know the meaning of the Christian mystery vouchsafing believers' faith.

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At this point, it is appropriate to recall from Part 1 Lacan's thesis that castration marks the point wherein the child is made to renounce its aspiration to be the phallic Thing for the mother. A subject's castration amounts at base, for Lacan, to the acceptance that it is the injunctions of the father- and through his name the conventions of the big Other of society- that govern the desire of the mother.

The "master signifiers" are also what Lacan calls phallic signifiers. The reason is exactly that- despite the difficulty of locating any simple referent for them- they nevertheless are the words that seem to intimate to subjects what "really matters" about human existence. Lacan thus is drawing together his philosophical anthropology and his theorization of language when he defends the position that it is the consequence of "castration" that subjects are debarred from immediate knowledge of what it is that the "phallic signifiers" signify.

He is also arguing, in the psychoanalytic field, a position profoundly akin to the Kantian postulation that finite human subjects are debarred from immediate access to things in themselves. Lacan's argument is that it is this lost "signified," which would as it were be "more real" than the other things that the subject can readily signify, that is what is primordially repressed when the subject accedes to becoming a speaking subject at castration. When the subject accedes to the symbolic, he repeats, the Real of aspired-to incestuous union, and the sexualized transgressive enjoyment or jouissance it would afford, is necessarily debarred.

Richard Boothby (Loyola University Maryland) - PhilPeople

What follows from this is the position that the manifestations of the unconscious represent small unconscious rebellions of subjects against the losses that they take themselves to have endured when they acceded to socialization. They are all under-girded by the more basic fantasmatic structuration of identity as constituted by the loss endured at castration. This is why Lacan talks of a fundamental fantasy, and argues that it is above all this fundamental fantasy that is at stake in psychoanalysis. This object, designated in the matheme as "a," is called by Lacan the "object petit a," or else the object cause of desire.

Lacan's argument is that the fundamental psychological "gain" from the fundamental fantasy is the following. The fundamental fantasy represents what occurred at castration in the terms of a narrative of possession and loss.

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It is this promise, Lacan maintains, that usually structures neurotic human desire. What the fantasy serves to hide from the subject, then, is the possibility that a fully satisfying sexual relationship with the mother, or any metonymic substitute for her, is not only prohibited, but was never possible anyway.

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As I recounted in Part 1, the Lacanian view, which is informed by observation of infantile behavior, is that the mother-child relationship before castration is not Edenic, but characterized by imaginary transitivity and aggressivity. This is why Lacan quips in Seminar XX that "there is no such thing as a sexual relationship" and elsewhere that the "Woman," with a capital "W," "does not exist.

The "no! Its very prohibition, however, gives rise in the subject to the fantasmatic supposition that the Thing in question is one that is attainable but only being debarred. Lacan thus asserts that the fundamental fantasy is there to veil from the subject the terminal nature of its loss at castration.

This is not simply a speculation, however. It is supported by telling evidences that he adduces. The key point that supports Lacan's position is the stipulation the objet petit is an anamorphotic object. What this means can be seen by looking at even the most well-known exemplar of the Lacanian objet petit a : the "object gaze. For Lacan, gaze is indeed a "blind spot" in the subject's perception of visible reality, "disturbing its transparent visibility" Zizek, a: The classic example of the object-gaze from Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is the floating skull at the feet of Holbein's Ambassadors.

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What is singular about this "thing" is that it can literally only be seen from "awry," and at the cost that the rest of the picture appears at that moment out of focus. From this point on the canvas, Lacan comments, it is as if the painting regards us. What he means is that the skull reminds us that we, and with us our desires and fantasies, are implicated in how the scene appears. If a subject thus happens upon it too directly, it disappears, or elseas in psychosis and the well-known filmic motif of what happens when one encounter one's doublethe cost is that one's usual sense of how the rest of the world is must dissipate.

What this indicates is that the object petit a , or at least the fascinating effect the object which bears it has upon the subject who is under its thrall, has no "objective" reality independently of this subject. This is why Lacan argues the apparently chimerical position that the objet petit a is by definition an object that has come into being in being lost. Lacan argues that the subject is "the subject of the signifier.

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I shall return to this formulation below, though, for its full meaning only becomes evident when another crucial claim that Lacan makes concerning the subject is properly examined. This is the apparently contradictory claim that the subject as such, at the same time as being a linguistic subject, lacks a signifier. There is no subject without language, Lacan wants to say, and yet the subject constitutively lacks a place in language.

At the broadest level, in this claim Lacan is simply restating in the language of structuralist linguistics a claim already made by Sartre, and before him Kojeve and Hegel and arguably Kant. This is the claim that the subject is not an object capable of being adequately named within a natural language, like other objects can be "table," "chair," or so on. It is no-thing. When Lacan says the subject is split, he means also that, as a subject of language, it will always evince the following two levels.