5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
Lacan theorizes the imaginary tribulations of self-constitution largely through a novel
consideration of Freud’s theory of narcissism. In The mirror stage as formative of the
function of the I’ (1949), Lacan contends that the infant apprehends a sense of bodily
unity through the recognition of its image in a mirror. The ‘mirror’ provides the infant
with consoling image of itself as unified and self- sufficient. As Lacan (1977:1) puts this:
unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by
some support, human or artificial...he nevertheless overcomes in a
flutter of jubilant activity, the obstruction of his support and, fixing his
attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his
gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image.This reflecting mirror image is not at all, however, what it seems. Lacan says that
what the mirror produces is a ‘mirage of coherence’, an alienating misrecognition.
In short, the mirror lies. Mirroring leads the infant to imagine itself as stable and
unified, when in fact psychical space is fragmented, and the infant’s physical
movements uncoordinated. The reflecting mirror leads the infant into an unfettered
realm of narcissism, underpinned by hate and aggression, given the unbridgeable
gap between ideal and actuality. This imaginary drafting of the self, says Lacan,
‘situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction’
(1977:2).
The imaginary can thus be described as a kind of archaic realm of distorted mirror
images, a spatial world of indistinction between self and other, from which primary
narcissism and aggressivity are drawn as key building blocks in the formation of
identity. But if the Imaginary order is already an alienation of desire, then the same is
certainly true of the Symbolic order of language. The Symbolic, says Lacan, smashes
the mirror unity of the Imaginary. For Lacan, as for Freud, this happens with the entry
of the father into the psychic world of the child. In disturbing the mother-child link,
the Oedipal father breaks up the self—other unity of the Imaginary order. For Lacan,
language is the fundamental medium which structures the Oedipal process. The
child enters the symbolic via language, which ushers in temporal, spatial and logical
differences, which are foundational to self and other, subject and object. Language
for Lacan is an intersubjective order of symbolization which carries the force of
cultural sanctions, of what he terms ‘the Law of the Father’ —for it is in and through
language that the subject attempts a reconstruction of lost, imagined unities.
Rewriting the unconscious and Oedipus in terms of the symbolic dimensions of
language, Lacan’s theoretical point of reference is the structural linguistics of