Prosonal Opinion

Lacan's Psychoanalysis

Lacan

Through modern psychology, our pain may be alleviated, but we lose the ability to feel pain and the virtue of enduring pain.

The beginning

Mental Automaticity

It shows that a person's identity can include elements that exist outside the boundaries of his own biology.

The differential operation of signifiers

Saussure analyzed language as a system and believed that there were no content terms in this system, but only differences. Each element in this system is constituted purely by its difference from the other elements.

Signifiers constitute a signifier chain/network through the principle of difference.

Partial object

Limit the target of libido to a certain local position of a biological body.

Imaginary

Imaginary is the relation structure between the Subject's ego and mirror, ego and other, ego and world. Such a relation is actually an illusion.

Due to imaginary relation, intersubjectivity is no longer possible.

There is no intersubjectivity at all, but only imaginary.

Love and sexual behavior are all the results of human beings being confused by imaginary.

"Being Captured in an Image"

Lacan believed that living things can be captured in external images in a form similar to imagination.

A child could identifies with an image external to itself, whether the image is a real mirror image or an image of another child. This seemingly complete image gives the Subject a new sense of mastery over his body.

If "I" identify with an image external to myself, then "I" can do anything I could't do before.

Mirror Stage

It is through identification with a specular image that an infant first begins to construct his ego.

Even when there is not a physical mirror, infant can see his own behavior reflected in imitative gestures toward an adult or another child. These imitative gestures serve as specular image to him. Human beings are completely deceived by specular images. This is the basic reason why the Imaginary affects the Subject, and it also explains why humans project this image of their bodies onto all other objects in the surrounding environment.

Infant's joyful identification with the specular image reflects the narcissistic structure of ego. This identification is called mirror identification.

At this time, infant's libido is directed towards some partial objects, mainly individual parts of the body.

Infant will soon realize that if he cannot verbalize his demands, his parents will not meet his needs as well as before. In other words, the Mirror Stage ends when infant recognizes that the parent is unresponsive to his nonverbal demands.

Narcissism and Aggressivity

Narcissism has both erotic and aggressive characteristics.

Hegel's master-slave dialectic: the existence of one consciousness requires the proof of another consciousness.

Narcissism and aggressivity are essentially the same thing, and similarly, love and hate are also the two sides of the same thing.

Narcissism is both love and hate of his ego specular image.

Hate is not 'not to love', but indifference is.

Alienation: Ego

The process by which the ego is formed in the mirror stage is also the beginning of the alienation in the Symbolic order.

The ego is the product of miscognition, and is the place where the Subject becomes alienated from itself, and represents the registration of the Subject into the symbolic order.

Ego is the result of human imaginary ability.

The "I think" of "I think,therefore I am" is also a miscognition.

Object Relation

Object relation can only be limited to the framework of imaginative narcissism, and the objectification of any "object" must be predicated on the objectification of the ego.

Symbolic

The Symbolic is the realm of culture, opposed to the imaginary order of nature. The Imaginary is characterized by a dual relation, while the Symbolic is characterized by a triadic structure, because the relation between tow Subjects is always "mediated" by a third party (i.e., the Big Other).

Once the Symbolic appears, it creates the feeling that it has always been there, so that we find it absolutely impossible to infer what exists before the Symbolic except through symbols.

After entering the language order, Subject uses speech (symbolization) behavior to anticipate the presence and absence of objects.

The essence of naming is a metaphorical replacement of the presence of objects. The presence of words comes at the expense of the absence of objects, which is a murder of objects.

The moment when Subject enters the language order is the moment when Subject registers his desires in the Symbolic.

Symbolization is embodied in the murder of objects, and the death (mortality) of objects leads to the eternity of Subject's desires.

Subject identifies with the symbolic order (father law) through symbolic identification, and at the same time Subject becomes a castrated Subject. With the completion of the Subject's symbolic identification, Subject enters the Symbolic and is captured by the network of signifiers.

The Other: Language Structure

The human spiritual world is immersed in the language environment. Our words, deeds, and thoughts are all affected and dominated by the language environment and interact with it. The structure of the human unconscious also has a language-like structure, and the reason why the unconscious has this language-like structure is precisely the result of the human spiritual world being immersed in the language environment.

The Real

Trauma is formed by Subject's retrospective construction, or by Subject imagining the gaze of the Other.

The Real is a paradoxical existence.

Subject

Subject is an unconscious subject, a splited subject.

Subject exists in the other, and exists through the other.

Lacan's rewrite of "I think, therefore I am" is: I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking.

It "thinks", is that the unconscious is "thinking" and that language is "thinking". Subject is the product of signifiers, and the unconscious has been basically completed in his early childhood. I "think" is a phenomenon that appears after the ego is formed, and the unconscious "thinking" has existed long ago.

The History of Subject

The history of Subject is constructed and examined (by himself), and the task of psychoanalysis is to find out the forbidden chapter of the unconscious.

Dual Relation

needs, demand, desire

In a language environment,Subject (unconsciously) reshapes his thoughts towards language and has to use words that cannot fully express his needs to express himself.

Symbolized castration is the sole cause of desire.

Desire cannot be satisfied as it reproduces itself.

When Subject anchors desire on a specific object (or signifiers), what Subject obtains is just the illusion that the desire is satisfied.

Nostalgia connects Subject to the lost object, and every search effort is motivated by it. It marks this rediscovery with an impossible repetition, precisely because the rediscovered object is not and cannot be the same lost object. It sets a fundamental tension at the center of the Subject-Object relation, ensuring that what is sought can never be sought in the same way as it is found.

The Object appears in the process of rediscovering the lost Object. Objects are always rediscovered objects.

The basic Object is first and foremost a missing Object, a lost Object that Subject wants to rediscover. Absence is the core of object relation.

Under language, a real Object is transformed into a present/absent Object, and love is an example of such a present/absent Object.

Object a is taken as the cause of desire, and it is the essence of desire that can never be chased. Object a happens to be what is forever lost. So desired object always serves as a substitute for object a.

Subject moves from the self-sufficient state of omnipotent fantasy into the linguistic dimension, and object a is then left behind, which is a product of castration. As a result, human becomes the subject of desire, and he will constantly try to retrieve object a, or rather, try to retrieve the "umbilical cord".

The unsatisfied needs introduce Lack into the world of Subject, and the symbolization of children then begins.

Metonymy

Desire is a metonymy.

Theory of Desire

The Subject's object of desire is always unavailable and all efforts will always fail. In desperation, Subject can only try to find a substitute to cope with the libido's betting requirements.