5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
concerns the immense conceptual shifts inaugurated by Lacan, shifts in the language
of psychoanalysis away from the world of biology and toward the study of language
and human speech, away from the deterministic forces of instincts and appetites and
toward the analysis of structures and culture. In taking psychoanalysis in this largely
anti-biological direction, Lacan was dazzlingly eclectic, in his writings borrowing one
moment from the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the next from
the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, while in his seminars putting to work the
insights of the linguist Roman Jakobson and recontextualizing Hegel’s master/slave
dialectic for the analysis of human desire. The work of Lacan and his followers will be
returned to in the context of feminist and postmodern theories discussed later in the
chapter. At this point, it is necessary to consider the main features of Lacan’s revision
of Freud.
The world of sense-perception, for Lacan as for Freud, is born from immersion in a
sublimely opaque realm of images, of very early experience of imaginings and
imagos, of primitive fantasies of the body of another. It was noted earlier that Freud
viewed the small infant, from the very start of life, in a symbiotic relation with the
maternal body. At this preindividualistic, premimetic stage of life, the infant makes
no distinction between itself and the maternal body, or between a space that is
inside and outside. Instead, the infant’s world consists of a merging of itself and
the maternal body. Lacan calls this realm, caught between wonderful delight
and terrifying anguish, the Imaginary. The Imaginary for Lacan is a prelinguistic,
pre-Oedipal register, solely visual in operation and in which desire slides around and
recircles an endless array of part-objects—breasts, lips, gaze, skin. According to
Lacan, this imaginary drafting of the world of illusion, of wholeness, is broken apart
once the infant comes to identify with, and introject, things or objects beyond itself,
thus shifting beyond the lures of the Imaginary. This primordial moment of separation
is devastating, a loss so painful that it results in a primary repression of the
pre-Oedipal connection to the maternal sphere, a repression which in one stroke
founds the repressed unconscious. Once severed from primary identification with
the pre-Oedipal mother, the infant is projected into the realm of language, the
differences internal to signification that Lacan calls the Other, or the Symbolic order.
The Symbolic in Lacan’s theory is a plane of received social meanings, logic,
differentiation. Symbolization and language permit the subject to represent desire,
both to itself and to others. Yet the representation of desire, says Lacan, is always
stained by a scar of imaginary, maternal identification. As speaking subjects, our
discourse is always marked by lack, the repressed unconscious. The unconscious’
says Lacan, ‘is the discourse of the Other.’