Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) who is sometimes called the “French Freud” developed a semiotic (on the basis of symbols and their meanings) model of Freud. He did this by presenting the ideas of psychoanalysis in a different way on the basis of Saussure’s ideas on language. His most important remark is the claim that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Lacan was partly reacting to the biological reading of Freud done by Freud’s American followers.

Especially important in Lacanian literary criticism is Lacan's reformulation of Freud's concepts of the early stages of psychosexual development and the formation of the Oedipus complex.  He makes a distinction between a prelinguistic stage of development that he calls the imaginary and the stage after the acquisition of language that he calls the symbolic. Intervenient between these two stages is what Lacan calls the mirror stage

Imaginary Stage

According to Lacan the child of 6-18 months enters the “imaginary” stage” which is also called the pre-oedipal period. This is a period of illusory unity and mastery of its world. In this state there is no clear distinction between the subject and object or between self and other.

Mirror Stage

It is the moment when the infant learns to identify with his or her image in a mirror, and so begins to develop a sense of a separate self that is later enhanced by what is reflected back to it from encounters with other people.

Symbolic Stage

 Later the child acquires language and enters into what Lacan calls the symbolic order. In this stage the child understands the system of linguistic differences and also its position in such oppositions as male/female, father/son, mother/daughter. The entry into language is similar to the oedipal crisis in Freud’s theory. The child now comes under what is called the “law of the father.”

The child expelled from the imaginary order, who enters the symbolic order as a result of its construction in language, experiences the loss of existence as pure organism (Because we cannot return to the state of wholeness that existed before language.). This lack creates desire in the subject. This desire (a type of symbolic castration) creates the unconscious in the subject. Thus the position and identity of the subject is constituted by language. Lacanian psychoanalysis is an example of poststructuralist analysis of language.

Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek was born in Slovenia in 1949. He became internationally famous as an author and philosopher with the publication of The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), a book which is a pioneering assessment and distillation of Lacan, Hegel, and Marx is an analysis and modern ideology. His other prominent works are They Know Not What They Do (1991), The Ticklish Subject (1999), Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), and In Defense of Lost Causes (2008). While providing original insights into psychoanalysis, philosophy and radical political theory and employing his extraordinary scholarship to the examination of popular culture he has established himself as a witty and deeply moral cultural critic of modern times.

His key contribution to psychoanalysis is his exploration of the idea of fantasy. According to him fantasy plays an important role in the formation of selfhood. It is not same as the illusion. It organizes how one perceives and understands reality. The uniqueness of an individual results from his notion of fantasy.

For Zizek reality is a fantasy construction which enables people to mask the Real of their desire. According to him fantasy space functions as an empty surface, a kind of screen for the projection of desires. He explains it with the short story ‘Black House’.

Zizek explores the relationship between desire and fantasy. According to him desire is endlessly reproduced in our fantasies; and it is never fulfilled or fully satisfied. He argues that the disappearance of desire would bring in anxiety. To him, anxiety threatens to eliminate ‘lack’ itself and end desire of the symbolic order.     

           

 


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