1 :: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
In an infamous ‘return to Freud’, Lacan interpreted psychoanalytic concepts in the
light of structuralist and post-structuralist linguistics – especially such core
Saussurian concepts as system, difference and the arbitrary relation between
signifier and signified. One of the most important features of Lacan’s psychoanalysis
is the idea that the unconscious, just like language, is an endless process of
difference, lack and absence. For Lacan, as for Saussure, the ‘I’ is a linguistic shifter
that marks difference and division in interpersonal communication; there is always in
speech a split between the self which utters ‘I’ and the word ‘I’ which is spoken. The
individual subject, Lacan says, is structured by and denies this splitting, shifting from
one signifier to another in a potentially endless play of desires. Language and the
unconscious thus thrive on difference: signs fill-in for the absence of actual objects
at the level of the mind and in social exchange. The unconscious, Lacan argues, is
structured like a language. And the language that dominates the psyche is that of
sexuality – of fantasies, dreams, desires, pleasures and anxieties.
This interweaving of language and the unconscious is given formal expression in
Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic Order – a crucial register for grasping the constitution
of identity. The Symbolic Order, says Lacan, institutes meaning, logic and
differentiation; it is a realm in which signs fill-in for lost loves, such as one’s mother
or father. Whereas the small child fantasizes that it is at one with the maternal body
in its earliest years, the Symbolic Order permits the developing individual to
symbolize and express desires and passions in relation to the self, to others and
within the wider culture. The key term in Lacan’s theory, which accounts for this
division between imaginary unity and symbolic differentiation is the phallus, a term
used by Freud in theorizing the Oedipus complex. For Lacan, as for Freud, the phallus
is the prime marker of sexual difference. The phallus functions in the Symbolic
Order, according to Lacan, through the enforcement of the Name-of-the-Father
(nom-du-pére). This does not mean, absurdly, that each individual father actually
forbids the infant/mother union, which Freud said the small child fantasizes. Rather
it means that a ‘paternal metaphor’ intrudes into the child’s narcissistically
structured ego to refer her or him to what is outside, to what has the force of law
- namely, language. The phallus, says Lacan, is fictitious, illusory and imaginary. Yet
it has powerful effects, especially at the level of gender. The phallus functions less in
the sense of biology than as fantasy, a fantasy which merges desire with power,
omnipotence and mastery.
It is against this complex psychoanalytic backdrop that Lacan develops a global
portrait of the relation between the sexes. Males are able to gain phallic prestige, he
says, since the image of the penis comes to be symbolically equated with the phallus