accept the object ‘bear’ as inanimate. Good Night Moon is, for a certain age, a
transitional object containing many transitional objects that assuage bedtime anxieties
as the child connects with all of them, thus assuring itself of the ‘me’ before the lights go
out at bedtime.
Jacques Lacan: The Return to Freud Through LanguageFor Freud the subconscious is the irreducible radical of the psyche, its universal, whose
paradox it is that nothing raised from it remains unconscious: we can only be conscious
of something. Thus the unconscious is replaced by the comprehensible mental acts of
the ego, be they dreams, symbolisation’s or linguistic utterances. As Wright points out,
for Jacques Lacan ‘the dictum “the unconscious is structured like a language”’ is borne
out in that ‘every word indicates the absence of what it stands for, a fact that intensifies
the frustration of this child of language, the unconscious, since the absence of
satisfaction has not to be accepted. Language imposes a chain of words along which the
ego must move while the unconscious remains in search of the object it has lost’ (Wright
1984:111). The unconscious as a language allows Lacan to revise Freud’s self-
sufficiency of the unconscious with social interaction. How this comes about through
the development of the infant and how this relates to the perception of the text as psyche
—a major shift away from the author’s or reader’s psyche—has special relevance to
interpreters of children’s literature.
Lacan distinguishes three stages in the infant’s development: the imaginary, the
symbolic and the real. In the imaginary or mirror stage, which can happen at the age of
six months, the infant receives the imago of its own body (Ecrits, 1977:3). Having seen
itself only as fragmentary, the infant perceives in the mirror a symbolic ‘mental
permanence of the I’, but this perception prefigures alienation, for the mirror stage is a
spatial illusion of totality (4), an imaginary identification with reflection. The mirror
stage, which is pre-verbal, conveys the illusion that the image will respond to the child’s
wishes, as did the mother-breast-infant identification. The symbolic stage is the stage of
language, a stage that will form the subject henceforth only in and as dialogue. The
implied assumption that language may have definitive authority is undermined or
deconstructed by Lacan’s argument that every utterance is permeated by the
unconscious in the sense that wholeness, meaning, and gratification of wishes are
perpetually deferred. The real, not to be confused with ‘external reality’, describes what
is lacking in the symbolic —’it is the residue of articulation or the umbilical cord of the
symbolic’ (ix-x) (translator’s note).
The literary text, then, is an image of the unconscious structured like a language. ‘The
lure of all texts’, comments Wright, ‘lies in a revelation, of things veiled coming to be
unveiled, of characters who face shock at this unveiling’ (1984: 121). When this
phenomenon is given utterance in the reader-interpreter’s language, meaning is
inevitably deferred. In contrast to Freudian interpretation, we have here no unearthing of
authorial neuroses. The Lacanian consequences for reader and text is the realisation
that
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