Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst remarked
that the unconscious is structured like
a language. He published a collection of his papers and seminars in 1964 in Paris named as “Écrits”
along with the four fundamental important concepts of psychoanalysis which
influenced both the feminists and poststructuralist theories.
These theories were actually
three lectures delivered to graduate-level students. Lacan’s work “Écrits” earned for him name and fame in
the literary sphere.
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| The Unconscious is Structured Like a Language-Jacques Lacan |
Lacan
has mingled Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis with the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Émile Benveniste, a French structural
linguist and semiotician. Jacques Lacan has changed the countenance of the
psychoanalytic theory after Sigmund
Freud.
Though Lacan’s theories are
complex, and difficult to understand, they have their own value in the arena of
literary theory. Shoshana Felman, an
American literary critic remarked, “Lacanian
psychoanalysis is praxis, a method, and a theory.”
The Unconscious is the Discourse of the Other
According
to Jacques Lacan, all human desires and wishes are linked to some sort of lack
or absence. In fact, the absence or lack is desire. For example, when a baby
is aware that it is separate from his mother, the idea of ‘other’ becomes
significant and vital. The sense of ‘other’ takes place with the awareness of a
baby that it is different and separate from his mother. This feeling of
‘otherness’ and separation gives birth to anxiety, a sense of loss.
It
is important to note that Lacan turns to linguistics {Ferdinand de Saussure} at
this point. He asserts that all signifiers hint at this sense at ‘otherness’ or
lack. When we try to comprehend the meaning of any signifiers; it points at
some another signifiers. It gives no idea of the ‘signified’ or the ‘concept’.
For
Lacan, it is only a chain of signifiers, and actually there is no presence of
any ‘signified’. Owing to this lack of signified, this stream of signifiers is
constantly changing and shifting. There is no proper anchor to form stability
in order to fathom the depth of meaning.
The
human desires, wishes, and dreams dwell in the unconscious which produce a
chain of signifiers which constantly floats in the unconscious. For example, a
baby pines for a reunion with his mother and feels lack of completeness or
wholeness. But the baby has to separate from his other in order to form his own
identity in order to enter into a social system. In this way, the baby becomes
a separate individual of the society.
The
baby’s desires for wholeness and reunion remain unfulfilled and it resides in
his unconscious. His separation with his mother imparts a child a kind of
language which is therefore always associated with the loss and feeling of
separation. The desire of a mother’s language is itself about this loss and
sense of unfulfilled desire. Only signifiers do not convey an absolute meaning;
and they come to mind as a series of some other signifiers, appearing on the
surface one after another without a final meaning {signified}.
Elizabeth
Wright remarks, “Language
imposes a chain of words along which the ego must move while the unconscious remains
in search of the object it has lost.”
With
this Jacques Lacan relates language with desire and the unconscious. In the
unconscious desire is structured like a language. Here the signifier: mother stands
in contrast with the signified: Mother that the child will never get. In brief,
the unconscious gives the child a signifier: mother to the absence and to the
child’s desire for Mother {signified}.
Actually the child seeks the Mother
{signified} but he will never get it. The unconscious thus develops a language.
Thus the language comes from the outside. The unconscious is not chaotic and
jumbled and it is full of repressed desires and wishes.
Lacan and Saussure:
According
to Ferdinand de Saussure, the
relationship between a word and a physical object is arbitrary and it not
inherent. But it is maintained by social agreement and convention. Saussure
pointed out that we recognize one signifier from the other due to differences
in them. Lacan thinks that the unconscious holds only signifier that refers to
some other signifier whereas Saussure
in his work “Course in General Linguistics”
{1916} states that a sign is a
combination of a signifier and a signified.
According
to Lacan, each signifier has meaning because there is difference in each
signifier. Each signifier differs from the other. He states that a signifier
merely refers to itself; and it does not refer to anything else outside it. The
absence of signified deprives the system of firmness and stability.
In this way, the unconscious is
filled with constantly changing and shifting signifiers without any hurdle of
signified which can stop their constant flow. The signifiers have no definite
meaning which makes them unstable and indefinite. The signified,, as Lacan
asserts, seem to be the real thing but actually they are not in our control. So
the signified is only a ‘conceptualize reality’.
Language becomes independent of
what is ‘external to it; and we cannot go beyond it. We can only stabilize and
cease this system so that meaning and ‘self’ become possible.
Lacan and Sigmund Freud:
Lacan states that analysts
study language as a means of understanding the unconscious. He further says
that Sigmund Freud employed two
terms, condensation and displacement as a part of dream in his work “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1899). They are quite similar to metaphor
and metonymy respectively.
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| Unconscious-storehouse-of-Signifiers |
The term condensation has been
used by Freud in order to study the workings of the unconscious in which an
image or a single word represents the intersections of a number of ideas of
associations in a dream. In brief, condensation is a process by which various
images and events are represented by a single image in a dream.
Sigmund Freud employed another
term, displacement which refers to the workings of the unconscious that is
similar to metonymy. It refers to the process of moving emotions that are
related to an idea or person to a less important object. In displacement, one
image and event is represented by another. It is a symbolic substitution. Our dreams
communicate indirectly and obliquely like literary works.
Conclusion:
Thus,
the unconscious is a linguistic effect that exists before the individual gets
into it, leaving it open to study and analysis. If the linguistic system is
extant before the individual enters into it, however, there can be no unique
self. Lacan formulated the fundamental
role played by language in the formation of human identity. According to Lacan,
human beings are driven mainly by desires and wishes.
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