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113-410: Lacanianism has been particularly influential in post-structuralism , literary theory , and feminist theory , as well as in various branches of critical theory , including queer theory . Equally, it has been criticised by the post-structuralists Deleuze and Guattari and by various feminist theorists. Its clinical relevance is limited and outside France it has had no influence on psychiatry . There

226-549: A hypothesis or " just so story as a not unpleasant English critic wittily called it. But I mean it honours a hypothesis if it shows capable of creating context and understanding in new areas." Freud conceived the id as the unconscious source of all innate needs, emotional impulses and desires , including the sexual drive. The id acts driven by aggression (energy), it's "the dark, inaccessible part of our personality". It seems limited to analysis of dreams and neurotic symptoms, and can only be described in terms of its contrast with

339-447: A technical elaboration of the concepts of the soul model: dividing the organism into three instances the id is regarded as the germ from which the ego and the superego develop. Driven by an energy that Freud calls libido in direct reference to Plato's Eros , the instances complement each other through their specific functions in a similar way to the organelles of a cell or parts of a technical apparatus. Further distinctions (as

452-516: A capitalist disorder" and "pilloried analysts as the most sinister priest-manipulators of a psychotic society" in Anti-Oedipus , their "demonstration was widely regarded as unanswerable" and "devastated the already shrinking Lacanian camp in Paris." The Deleuzoguattarian critique of Lacanianism attacks its conception of desire as "negative", in that it results from a lack in the subject, and its belief that

565-507: A conflict between the ego and the superego; and psychoses , to one between the ego and the external world. The three newly presented entities, however, remained closely connected to their previous conceptions, including those that went under different names – the systematic unconscious for the id, and the conscience/ego ideal for the superego. Freud never abandoned the topographical division of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, though he noted that "the three qualities of consciousness and

678-425: A consequence of the division of the subject in signification, so desire is said to result from an unsolvable lack at the heart of the subject. Lacanianism posits that all people belong to one of three "clinical structures" and are either psychotic, perverse, or, most commonly, neurotic. Neurotic subjects—that is to say, most people—are then always either hysterical or obsessional. The three clinical structures describe

791-462: A double function: on the one hand, it articulates "need", and on the other, acts as a "demand for love". Even after the "need" articulated in demand is satisfied, the "demand for love" remains unsatisfied since the Other cannot provide the unconditional love that the subject seeks. "Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of

904-437: A grand scale. One can find dozens of books of literary theory bogged down in signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refers to Chomsky ." Id, ego and super-ego In psychoanalytic theory , the id, ego and superego are three different, interacting agents in the psychic apparatus as Sigmund Freud summarized and defined it in his structural model of the psyche . He developed these three terms to describe

1017-529: A metaphorical event: the "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given text. Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings and that the author was not the prime source of the work's semantic content. The "Death of the Author," Barthes maintained, was the "Birth of the Reader," as the source of the proliferation of meanings of the text. In Elements of Semiology (1967), Barthes advances

1130-427: A past of betrayals and conflict—by faction after faction claiming their segment of Lacanian thought as the only genuine one—reunification of any kind has proven very problematic; and Roudinesco was perhaps correct to conclude that "'Lacanianism, born of subversion and a wish to transgress, is essentially doomed to fragility and dispersal". Three main divisions can be made in contemporary Lacanianism. Attempts to rejoin

1243-440: A post-structuralist period: Some observers from outside of the post-structuralist camp have questioned the rigour and legitimacy of the field. American philosopher John Searle suggested in 1990: "The spread of 'poststructuralist' literary theory is perhaps the best-known example of a silly but non-catastrophic phenomenon." Similarly, physicist Alan Sokal in 1997 criticized "the postmodernist /poststructuralist gibberish that

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1356-528: A regard for reality. But the superego is constantly watching every one of the ego's moves and punishes it with feelings of guilt , anxiety , and inferiority. To overcome this the ego employs defense mechanisms . Defense mechanisms reduce the tension and anxiety by disguising or transforming the impulses that are perceived as threatening. Denial , displacement , intellectualization , fantasy , compensation , projection , rationalization , reaction formation , regression , repression , and sublimation were

1469-409: A replacement for the topological division into ‘conscious vs. unconscious’, but rather a supplement." Freud conceptualised the structural model because it allowed for a greater degree of precision and diversification. While the need contents of the id are initially unconscious (can become unconscious again as a result of an act of repression), the contents of the ego (such as thinking, perception) and

1582-411: A result, there is concrete reality on the one hand, abstract ideas about reality on the other hand, and a "third order" that mediates between the two. A post-structuralist critique, then, might suggest that in order to build meaning out of such an interpretation, one must (falsely) assume that the definitions of these signs are both valid and fixed, and that the author employing structuralist theory

1695-492: A self-contained Lacanianism, formalised and free of its Freudian roots. As the seventies Lacan spoke of the mathematicisation of psychoanalysis and coined the term ' matheme ' to describe its formulaic abstraction, so Leclaire brusquely dismissed the new formulas as “graffiti” Nevertheless, despite these and other tensions, the EDF held together under the charisma of their Master, until (despairing of his followers) Lacan himself dissolved

1808-456: A structured "ego", a concept of self that takes the principle of reality into account. Freud understands the id as "the great reservoir of libido ", the energy of desire as expressed, for example, in the behaviours of sexuality, the incorporation of food or the baby-care (maternal love). In general, the nature of libido is that of Platonic Eros , a universal desire that is inherent in all life instincts. They constantly strive to compensate for

1921-433: A whole and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the lack of co-ordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. The child experiences this contrast initially as a rivalry with their image, because the wholeness of the image threatens the child with fragmentation—thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension,

2034-506: Is a Lacanian strand in left-wing politics , including Saul Newman 's and Duane Rousselle 's post-anarchism , Louis Althusser 's structural Marxism , and the works of Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou . Influential figures in Lacanianism include Slavoj Žižek , Julia Kristeva and Serge Leclaire . Lacanians view the structure of the mind as defined by the individual's entry as an infant into

2147-409: Is always a leftover or surplus. Lacan distinguishes desire from need and from demand . Need is a biological instinct where the subject depends on the Other to satisfy its own needs: in order to get the Other's help, "need" must be articulated in "demand". But the presence of the Other not only ensures the satisfaction of the "need", it also represents the Other's love. Consequently, "demand" acquires

2260-630: Is constituted by the Symbolic, the Imaginary , the Real , and for Lacanians who follow Kristeva, the Semiotic . Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage , which he described as "formative of the function of the 'I' as revealed in psychoanalytic experience." By the early 1950s, he came to regard the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the infant; instead, it formed part of

2373-438: Is ensured...what we call our 'conscience'." For him the superego can be described as "a successful instance of identification with the parental agency", and as development proceeds it also absorbs the influence of those who have "stepped into the place of parents — educators, teachers, people chosen as ideal models". Thus a child's super-ego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of its parents' super-ego;

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2486-454: Is for the diagnostic process (llness can only be realised as a deviation from the optimal cooperation of all psycho-organic functions), Freud had to be modest and leave structural model in the unfinished state of a torso because - as he stated one last time in Moses and Monotheism - there was no well-founded primate research at the time. Without knowledge of the instinctive social behaviour with

2599-419: Is impossible, because history and culture actually condition the study of underlying structures, and these are subject to biases and misinterpretations. Gilles Deleuze and others saw this impossibility not as a failure or loss, but rather as a cause for "celebration and liberation." A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object (a text, for example), one must study both the object itself and

2712-465: Is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack ( manque ) . In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues that "man's desire is the desire of the Other." This entails the following: Last but not least for Lacan, the first person who occupies the place of the Other is the mother and at first the child is at her mercy. Only when the father articulates desire with the Law by castrating

2825-422: Is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire". Lacan also distinguishes between desire and the drives: desire is one and drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire. Lacan's concept of " objet petit a " is the object of desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire

2938-531: Is now hegemonic in some sectors of the American academy." Literature scholar Norman Holland in 1992 saw post-structuralism as flawed due to reliance on Saussure 's linguistic model, which was seriously challenged by the 1950s and was soon abandoned by linguists: Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics and the occasional philosopher. [Strict adherence to Saussure] has elicited wrong film and literary theory on

3051-450: Is regressive; orders of language rely upon a metalanguage by which it is explained, and therefore deconstruction itself is in danger of becoming a metalanguage, thus exposing all languages and discourse to scrutiny. Barthes' other works contributed deconstructive theories about texts. The occasional designation of post-structuralism as a movement can be tied to the fact that mounting criticism of Structuralism became evident at approximately

3164-418: Is required to serve "three severe masters...the external world, the superego and the id." It seeks to find a balance between the natural drives of the id, the limitations imposed by reality, and the strictures of the superego. It is concerned with self-preservation: it strives to keep the id's instinctive needs within limits, adapted to reality and submissive to the superego. Thus "driven by the id, confined by

3277-454: Is said to create play in the sense of strategic agency by laying bare the levers of historical change. Structuralism , as an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s, studied underlying structures in cultural products (such as texts ) and used analytical concepts from linguistics , psychology , anthropology , and other fields to interpret those structures. Structuralism posits

3390-632: Is somehow above and apart from these structures they are describing so as to be able to wholly appreciate them. The rigidity and tendency to categorize intimations of universal truths found in structuralist thinking is a common target of post-structuralist thought, while also building upon structuralist conceptions of reality mediated by the interrelationship between signs. Writers whose works are often characterised as post-structuralist include Roland Barthes , Jacques Derrida , Michel Foucault , Gilles Deleuze , and Jean Baudrillard , although many theorists who have been called "post-structuralist" have rejected

3503-400: Is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world. ...The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions... it is like a tug of war... with the difference that in the tug of war the teams fight against one another in equality, while the ego is against the much stronger 'id'." In fact, the ego

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3616-406: Is that the living soul with their needs, consciousness and memory resembles a psychological apparatus to which "spatial extension and composition of several pieces" can be attributed (...) and wich "locus ... is the brain (nervous system)" . Modern technology has made possible to observe the bioelectrical activity of neurones in the living brain. This led to the realisation in which area of

3729-574: Is thus paradoxically strongest in those who seem to have embraced Malcolm Bowie 's recommendation: "learn to unlearn the Lacanian idiom in the way Lacan unlearns the Freudian idiom". Élisabeth Roudinesco has suggested that, after the founding of the EFP "the history of psychoanalysis in France became subordinate to that of Lacanianism...the Lacanian movement occupied thereafter the motor position in relation to which

3842-421: The ego via the process of objectification, the ego being the result of a conflict between one's perceived visual appearance and one's emotional experience. This identification is what Lacan called "alienation". At six months, the baby still lacks physical co-ordination. The child is able to recognize themselves in a mirror prior to the attainment of control over their bodily movements. The child sees their image as

3955-433: The systems of knowledge that produced the object. The uncertain boundaries between structuralism and post-structuralism become further blurred by the fact that scholars rarely label themselves as post-structuralists. Some scholars associated with structuralism, such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault , also became noteworthy in post-structuralism. The following are often said to be post-structuralists, or to have had

4068-657: The 1970s they were an integral part of his thought. Lacan's thinking was intimately geared not only to the work of Freud but to that of the most prominent of his psychoanalytic successors— Heinz Hartmann , Melanie Klein , Michael Balint , D. W. Winnicott and more. With Lacan's break with official psychoanalysis in 1963–1964, however, a tendency developed to look for a pure, self-contained Lacanianism, without psychoanalytic trappings. Jacques-Alain Miller 's index to Ecrits had already written of "the Lacanian epistemology...the analytic experience (in its Lacanian definition...)"; and where

4181-530: The Discourse of the Human Sciences ", Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life. Derrida interpreted this event as a "decentering" of the former intellectual cosmos. Instead of progress or divergence from an identified centre, Derrida described this "event" as a kind of "play." A year later, in 1967, Roland Barthes published " The Death of the Author ", in which he announced

4294-544: The German reader, Freud's original terms are to some degree self-explanatory. The term " das Es " was originally used by Georg Groddeck , a physician whose unconventional ideas were of interest to Freud (Groddeck's translators render the term in English as "the It"). The word ego is taken directly from Latin , where it is the nominative of the first person singular personal pronoun and

4407-429: The Human Sciences ", was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to Structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist. The element of "play" in the title of Derrida's essay is often erroneously interpreted in a linguistic sense, based on a general tendency towards puns and humour, while social constructionism as developed in the later work of Michel Foucault

4520-697: The IPA over Lacan at this point, in the first of many subsequent Lacanian schisms. Lacan's 1973 Letter to the Italians , nominated Muriel Drazien , Giacomo Contri and Armando Verdiglione to carry his teaching in Italy. As a body of thought, Lacanianism began to make its way into the English-speaking world from the sixties onwards, influencing film theory , feminist thought, queer theory, and psychoanalytic criticism , as well as politics and social sciences, primarily through

4633-662: The IPA remain problematic, however, not least due to the persistence of the 'short session' and of Lacan's rejection of countertransference as a therapeutic tool. Judith Butler , Bracha L. Ettinger and Jane Gallop have used Lacanian work, though in a critical way, to develop gender theory. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari , the latter a trained Lacanian analyst, launched a major attack on Lacanian psychoanalysis from within post-structuralism in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972). Frederick Crews writes that when they "indicted Lacanian psychoanalysis as

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4746-668: The Oedipus complex internalised in the superego - anchored by Freud in the hypothetical murder of the forefather of the Darwinian horde by his sons - has been criticised for its supposed sexism. Women, who cannot develop a fear of castration due to their different genital make-up, do not identify with the father. Therefore, ‘their superego is never as implacable, as impersonal, as independent of its emotional origins as we demand of men...they are often more influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility.’ - not by fear of castration, as

4859-555: The Symbolic ; his concern with the Real and the lost object of desire, the objet petit a , during the Sixties; and a final phase highlighting jouissance and the mathematical formulation of psychoanalytic teaching. As the fifties Lacan developed a distinctive style of teaching based on a linguistic reading of Freud, so too he built up a substantial following within the Société Française de Psychanalyse [SFP], with Serge Leclaire only

4972-410: The Symbolic...and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real". Lacan's early psychoanalytic period spans the 1930s and 1940s. His contributions from this period centered on the questions of image, identification and unconscious fantasy . Developing Henri Wallon 's concept of infant mirroring, he used the idea of the mirror stage to demonstrate the imaginary nature of the ego, in opposition to

5085-520: The [ego] ideal — its dictatorial Thou shalt ". The earlier in the child's development, the greater the estimate of parental power. . . . nor must it be forgotten that a child has a different estimate of his parents at different periods of his life. At the time at which the Oedipus complex gives place to the super-ego they are something quite magnificent; but later, they lose much of this. Identifications then come about with these later parents as well, and indeed they regularly make important contributions to

5198-547: The analysand to recognize their desire and by doing so to uncover the truth about their desire. However this is possible only if desire is articulated in speech: "It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term." And again in The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis : "what is important is to teach

5311-554: The basic structure and various phenomena of mental life as they were encountered in psychoanalytic practice. Freud himself used the German terms das Es , Ich , and Über-Ich , which literally translate as "the it", "I", and "over-I". The Latin terms id, ego and superego were chosen by his original translators and have remained in use. In the essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud introduced his "structural model" of

5424-404: The big other , as if to call on the adult to ratify this image. Lacan's concept of desire is related to Hegel's Begierde , a term that implies a continuous force, and therefore somehow differs from Freud's concept of Wunsch . Lacan's desire refers always to unconscious desire because it is unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis. The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead

5537-556: The bitter schism of 1968 to found the Quatrieme Groupe. However, major divisions remained within the EDF, which underwent another split over the question of analytic qualifications. There remained within the movement a broad division between the old guard of first generation Lacanians, focused on the symbolic —on the study of Freud through the structural linguistic tools of the fifties—and the younger group of mathematicians and philosophers centred on Jacques-Alain Miller , who favoured

5650-402: The body-image". As this concept developed further, the stress fell less on its historical value and more on its structural value. In his fourth seminar, "La relation d'objet", Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship. " The mirror stage describes the formation of

5763-435: The brain the needs for food, skin desire etc. begin to show themselves neuronally; where the highest performances of consciously thinking ego take place (s. frontal lobe ); and that other parts of the brain are specialised in storing memorys: one of the main function of the superego. Decisive for this view was Freuds Project for a Scientific Psychology . Written in 1895, it develops the thesis that experiences are stored into

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5876-402: The case of the little boy, it forms during the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, through a process of identification with the father figure, following the failure to retain possession of the mother as a love-object out of fear of castration . Freud described the superego and its relationship to the father figure and Oedipus complex thus: The super-ego retains the character of the father, while

5989-442: The child identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart forms the ego. Lacan understood this moment of identification as a moment of jubilation, since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery; yet when the child compares their own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother, a depressive reaction may accompany the jubilation. Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic", since it leads

6102-446: The child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth". The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of his or her body as fragmented, induces a movement from "insufficiency to anticipation". In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self. In

6215-555: The concept of binary opposition , in which frequently-used pairs of opposite-but-related words (concepts) are often arranged in a hierarchy; for example: Enlightenment / Romantic , male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signified/signifier, symbolic/imaginary, and east/west. Post-structuralism rejects the structuralist notion that the dominant word in a pair is dependent on its subservient counterpart, and instead argues that founding knowledge on either pure experience ( phenomenology ) or on systematic structures (structuralism)

6328-445: The concept of the metalanguage , a systematized way of talking about concepts like meaning and grammar beyond the constraints of a traditional (first-order) language; in a metalanguage, symbols replace words and phrases. Insofar as one metalanguage is required for one explanation of the first-order language, another may be required, so metalanguages may actually replace first-order languages. Barthes exposes how this structuralist system

6441-466: The concepts of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. As the role of the real and of jouissance in opposing structure became more widely recognised, however, so too Lacanianism developed as a tool for the exploration of the divided subject of postmodernity . Since Lacan's death, however, much of the public attention focused on his work began to decline. Lacan had always been criticised for an obscurantist writing style; and many of his disciples simply replicated

6554-472: The contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgments of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation. The superego aims for perfection. It is the part of the personality structure, mainly but not entirely unconscious, that includes the individual's ego ideals, spiritual goals, and the psychic agency, commonly called " conscience ", that criticizes and prohibits

6667-440: The coordinates of topology , dynamics and economy ) encouraged Freud to assume that the metapsychological elaboration of the structural model would make it fully compatible with biological sciences such as evolutionary theory and enable a well-founded concept of mental health including a theory of human development, which naturally completed in three successive stages: the oral, anal and genital phase. However, as important as this

6780-468: The corresponding structure of cohabitation of our genetically closest relatives in realm of primates, Freud's thesis of Darwin's primordial horde (as presented for discussion in Totem and Taboo ) can't be tested and, if possible, replaced by a realistic model. Horde life and its violent abolition through introduction of mononogamy (as an agreement between the sons who murdered the horde's polygamous father) embody

6893-452: The defense mechanisms Freud identified. His daughter Anna Freud identified the concepts of undoing , suppression , dissociation , idealization , identification , introjection , inversion, somatization , splitting , and substitution. In a diagram of the Structural and Topographical Models of Mind, the ego is depicted as being half in the conscious, a quarter in the preconscious , and

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7006-505: The differences between consciousness and unconsciousness are. Freud's point of view was that consciousness is directly given – cannot be explained by insights into physiological details. Essentially, two things were known about the living soul: The brain with its nervous system extending over the entire organism and the acts of consciousness. According to Freud, therefore haphazard phenomena can be integrated between " both endpoints of our knowledge " (findings of modern neurology just as well as

7119-470: The ego - in its relation to the id - to a man on horseback: the rider must restrain and direct the superior energy of his animal and at times allow for a satisfaction of its urges if he wants to keep it alive and the species healthy. The ego is thus "in the habit of transforming the id's will into action, as if it were its own." In order to overcome difficulties of understanding as far as possible, Freud formulated his "metapsychology" which for Lacan represents

7232-414: The ego attempts to direct the libidinal energy and satisfy its demands in accordance with the imperatives of that reality. According to Freud the ego, in its role as mediator between the id and reality, is often "obliged to cloak the (unconscious) commands of the id with its own preconscious rationalizations , to conceal the id's conflicts with reality, to profess...to be taking notice of reality even when

7345-703: The ego, id and superego agencies (structural model) and the conscious and unconscious psychic systems (topographic model). In the iceberg metaphor the entire id and part of both the superego and the ego are submerged in the underwater portion representing the unconscious region of the psyche. The remaining portions of the ego and superego are displayed above water in the conscious region. The terms "id", "ego", and "superego" are not Freud's own; they are Latinizations by his translator James Strachey . Freud himself wrote of " das Es ", " das Ich ", and " das Über- Ich " —respectively, "the It", "the I", and "the Over-I". Thus, to

7458-399: The ego. It has no organisation and no collective will: It only demands immediate gratification of its instincts according to the pleasure principle . It is oblivious to reason and the presumptions of ordinary conscious life: "contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other. . . There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation. . . nothing which corresponds to

7571-438: The evolutionary as well as cultural-prehistorical core of psychoanalysis. It stands in contrast to the religiously enigmatic reports about the origin of monogamous couples on earth as an expression of divine will, but closer to the ancient trap to pacify political conflicts among the groups of Neolithic mankind. (See Prometheus ' uprising against Zeus, who created Pandora as a fatal wedding gift for Epimetheus to divide and rule

7684-449: The expression of drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions. Thus the superego works in contradiction to the id. It is an internalized mechanism that operates to confine the ego to socially acceptable behaviour, whereas the id merely seeks instant self-gratification. The superego and the ego are the product of two key factors: the state of helplessness of the child and the Oedipus complex . In

7797-401: The external world and other organisms" through aggression. Since libido energy encompasses all instinctive impulses, Eros and Thanatos are regarded as fundamental forces of the id, which co-operate despite their apparent incompatibility: The organism has the urge to 'synthetically' regenerate by integration of suitable molecules or energy into itself, for this purpose it must first deconstruct

7910-455: The first from the second." Desire is a surplus, a leftover, produced by the articulation of need in demand: "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need". Unlike need, which can be satisfied, desire can never be satisfied: it is constant in its pressure and eternal. The attainment of desire does not consist in being fulfilled but in its reproduction as such. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, "desire's raison d'être

8023-403: The first model of the soul. In this ego psychology model of the psyche, the id is a set of uncoordinated instinctual needs; the superego plays the moralizing role via internalized experiences; and the ego is the perceiving, logically organizing agent that mediates between the id's instinctual desires , the demands of external reality and those of the critical superego; Freud compared

8136-478: The first of many French "Lacanians". It was this phase of his teaching that was memorialised in Écrits , and which first found its way into the English-speaking world, where more Lacanians were thus to be found in English or Philosophy Departments than in clinical practice. However the very extent of Lacan's following raised serious criticisms: he was accused both of abusing the positive transference to tie his analysands to himself, and of magnifying their numbers by

8249-576: The formation of character; but in that case they only affect the ego, they no longer influence the super-ego, which has been determined by the earliest parental images. Thus when the child is in rivalry with the parental imago it feels the dictatorial Thou shalt —the manifest power that the imago represents—on four levels: (i) the auto-erotic, (ii) the narcissistic, (iii) the anal, and (iv) the phallic. Those different levels of mental development, and their relations to parental imagos, correspond to specific id forms of aggression and affection. The concept of

8362-431: The id has remained rigid and unyielding." Originally, Freud used the word ego to mean the sense of self, but later expanded it to include psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality testing , control, planning, defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory. The ego is the organizing principle upon which thoughts and interpretations of the world are based. According to Freud, "the ego

8475-474: The idea of time." The id "knows no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality. ...Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge—that, in our view, is all there is in the id." Developmentally, the id precedes the ego. The id consists of the basic instinctual drives that are present at birth, inherent in the somatic organization, and governed only by the pleasure principle. The psychic apparatus begins as an undifferentiated id, part of which then develops into

8588-432: The ingested food complexes: the ‘analytical’ effect of stomach acid. The ego acts according to the reality principle . It analyses complex perceptions (things, ideas, dreams), synthesises the appropriate parts into logically coherent interpretations (also models ) and rules the muscular apparatus. Since the id's drives are frequently incompatible with the moral prescriptions and religious illusions of contemporary cultures,

8701-500: The label. Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing structuralism . According to J. G. Merquior , a love–hate relationship with structuralism developed among many leading French thinkers in the 1960s. The period was marked by the rebellion of students and workers against the state in May 1968 . In a 1966 lecture titled " Structure, Sign, and Play in

8814-527: The level of the unconscious. Hence Lacanian analysis works to solve neurosis, but it fails to see that neuroses are a second-order problem that reveal nothing about the unconscious—as does Freud's classical psychoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari proposed an alternative post-structuralist extension of classical psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis , which was defined in opposition to these apparent flaws in Lacanianism. Unlike Lacanianism, schizoanalysis openly repudiates parts of Freud, particularly his neurotic conception of

8927-437: The mirror stage a "misunderstanding" ( méconnaissance ) constitutes the ego—the "me" ( moi ) becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension, due to the presence of the figure of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly assumed the image as their own, the child turns their head towards this adult, who represents

9040-464: The more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on—in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt. In The Ego and the Id , Freud presents "the general character of harshness and cruelty exhibited by

9153-459: The mother is the subject liberated from desire for the mother. Lacan considered the human psyche to be framed within the three orders of The Imaginary , The Symbolic and The Real (RSI). The three divisions in their varying emphases also correspond roughly to the development of Lacan's thought. As he himself put it in Seminar XXII, "I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of

9266-433: The mystificatory elements in his work (in a sort of transferential identification) without his freshness. Where interest in Lacanianism did revive in the 21st century, it was in large part the work of figures like Slavoj Žižek who have been able to use Lacan's thought for their own intellectual ends, without the sometimes stifling orthodoxy of many of the formal Lacanian traditions. The continued influence of Lacanianism

9379-410: The neuronal network through "a permanent change after an event" . Freud soon abandoned this attempt and left it unpublished. Insights into the neuronal processes that permanently store experiences in the brain – like engraving the proverbial tabula rasa with some code – belongs to the physiological branch of science and lead in a different direction of research than the psychological question of what

9492-453: The old guard of first-generation disciples like Serge Leclaire continued to stress the importance of the re-reading of Freud, the new recruits of the sixties and seventies favoured instead an ahistorical Lacan, systematised after the event into a rigorous if over-simplified theoretical whole. Three main phases may be identified in Lacan's mature work: his Fifties exploration of the Imaginary and

9605-493: The other movements were obliged to determine their course'". There was certainly a large expansion in the numbers of the school, if arguably at the expense of quantity over quality, as a flood of psychologists submerged the analysts who had come with him from the SFP. Protests against the new regime reached a head with the introduction of the self-certifying 'passe' to analytic status, and old comrades such as François Perrier broke away in

9718-410: The other quarter in the unconscious . The superego reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly as absorbed from parents, but also other authority figures, and the general cultural ethos. Freud developed his concept of the superego from an earlier combination of the ego ideal and the "special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal

9831-422: The permanent structure of subjectivity. In the "imaginary order", the subject's own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. Lacan explains that "the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with

9944-506: The personality, linked to trauma , dream and the drive, which resists signification. The Real was what was lacking or absent from every totalising structural theory ; and in the form of jouissance , and the persistence of the symptom or synthome, marked Lacan's shifting of psychoanalysis from modernity to postmodernity. Then Real, together with the Imaginary and the Symbolic came to form a triad of "elementary registers." Lacan believed these three concepts were inseparably intertwined, and by

10057-472: The position of our planet in the universe, for example), but this only contribute to the spatial " localisation of the acts of consciousness ", not to their understanding. In the topographic model of the soul, his first one, Freud divided mental phenomena into three regions: the Conscious, of whose contents the mind is aware at every moment, including information and stimuli from internal and external sources;

10170-405: The precise words used by the analysand (patient), which Lacan characterised as a "return to Freud". Analysis focuses largely on desire . Lacanians contend that desire cannot be satisfied, as the object and cause of desire is an unobtainable object, the objet petit a , which the subject continually associates with different things that they wrongly believe will satisfy their desire. Objet a exists as

10283-415: The preconscious, whose material is merely latent (not directly present to thinking and feeling, but capable of becoming so without great effort); and the unconscious, which consists of biological needs and impulses that are made inaccessible to the conscious mind as a result of traumatic experiences in such a way that Freud describes this process as the pathological act of repression . With the introduction of

10396-532: The process stop there. Early resignations and splits from the ECF were followed in the late 1990s by a massive exodus of analysts worldwide from Miller's organisation under allegations of misuse of authority. Attempts were made to re-unite the various factions, Leclaire arguing that Lacanianism was "becoming ossified, stiffening into a kind of war of religion, into theoretical debates that no longer contribute anything new". But with French Lacanianism (in particular) haunted by

10509-542: The processes of biological decay, rejuvenating the species of living beings by means of their metabolism and reproduction . Complementing this constructive aspect of the libido, the author later postulated an inherent death drive , the Thanatos that has a decomposing effect and seeks "to lead organic life back into the inanimate state. For Freud, "the death instinct would thus seem to express itself—though probably only in part—as an instinct of destruction directed against

10622-415: The rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media (or the world) within pre-established, socially constructed structures. Structuralism proposes that human culture can be understood by means of a structure that is modeled on language . As

10735-525: The same time that Structuralism became a topic of interest in universities in the United States. This interest led to a colloquium at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 titled "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man", to which such French philosophers as Jacques Derrida , Roland Barthes , and Jacques Lacan were invited to speak. Derrida's lecture at that conference, " Structure, Sign, and Play in

10848-525: The school in 1980 the year before his death. The start of the eighties saw the post-Lacanian movement dissolve into a plethora of new organisations, of which the Millerite Ecole de la Cause freudienne (ECF, 273 members) and the Centre de formation et de recherches psychoanalytiques (CFRP, 390 members) are perhaps the most important. By 1993 another fourteen associations had grown out of the former EDF; nor did

10961-466: The signifier/Other/Symbolic Order. Lacan's approach to psychoanalysis created a dialectic between Freud's thinking and that of both Structuralist thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as with Heidegger, Hegel and other continental philosophers. The sixties saw Lacan's attention increasingly focused on what he termed the Real—not external consensual reality, but rather that unconscious element in

11074-404: The soul. It describes the instincts of the unconscious as the primary process, which the consciousness - the secondary process - values according to its socialisation and directs in relation to the reality. This second model - further refined and formalised in subsequent essays as The Ego and the Id - represents a response to the ambiguous/contradictory use of the terms conscious and unconscious in

11187-399: The structural model, Freud intended to separate the terms unconscious and conscious from their spatially opposing meanings by formulating the three instances of id, ego and superego, which interlock with each other through their specific functions in a similar way to the organelles of a cell or parts of a machine, for example. The subdivision of the psyche outlined in the structural model is not

11300-478: The subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence. The subject should come to recognize and to name their desire. But it isn't a question of recognizing something that could be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world." The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire; whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there

11413-431: The subject's relationship to the Other and are each associated with a different defence mechanism : psychotics use foreclosure , a rejection of the father's authority in the Oedipus complex that results in a failure to form a Symbolic unconscious; perverts use disavowal , failing to accept that lack causes desire and nominating a specific object as its cause, their fetish; and neurotics use repression . Psychical reality

11526-442: The subject. The Symbolic is defined by the Other , those parts of the outside world with which the subject cannot identify, which is the place where signifiers are given meaning. Language is hence a discourse of the Other, outside conscious control. The unconscious mind is constituted by a network of empty signifiers that resurface in language—particularly dreams and Freudian slips —and Lacanian clinical practice focuses closely on

11639-430: The superego (memory; imprinting) can be both conscious and unconscious. Freud argued that his new model included the option of scientifically describing the structure and functions of the mentally healthy living being and therefore represented an effective diagnostic tool for clarifying the causes of mental disorders: Transference neuroses correspond to a conflict between the ego and the id; narcissistic neuroses , to

11752-437: The superego, repulsed by reality" the ego struggles to bring about harmony among the competing forces. Consequently, it can easily be subject to "realistic anxiety regarding the external world, moral anxiety regarding the superego, and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions in the id." The ego may wish to serve the id, trying to gloss over the finer details of reality to minimize conflicts, while pretending to have

11865-409: The three provinces of the mental apparatus do not fall together into three peaceful couples...we had no right to expect any such smooth arrangement." The iceberg metaphor shows nothing of the physiological (real) structure of the brain, the possible organic correspondences of the three psychic instances or their functions. Instead it is a commonly used visual metaphor depicting the relationship between

11978-610: The titanic brothers; Plato's myth of spherical men cut into isolated individuals for the same reason; and the similarly resolved revolt of inferior gods in the Flood epic Atra-Hasis ). Additional important assumptions are based on it, such as the Oedipus complex , the origin of moral-totemic rules like Incest taboo and, not least, Freud's Unease in Culture . Nonetheless, due to the lack of ethological primate research, these ideas remained an unproven belief of palaeo-anthropological science – only

12091-433: The unconscious mind is "structured like a language". Deleuze and Guattari argued that the unconscious mind was schizophrenic , characterised by rhizomes of libidinal investment , and that desire was a creative force that powered the essential building blocks of psychical structures, desiring-machines. The networks of signifiers to which so much weight is given in Lacanianism are structures created by desiring-machines, above

12204-495: The unconscious, and Deleuze and Guattari insisted that it was distinct from psychoanalysis. Schizoanalysis was further elaborated on in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and Guattari's individual work in the 1980s and early 90s. Elizabeth Grosz accuses Lacan of maintaining a sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Luce Irigaray accuses Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse. Others have echoed this accusation, seeing Lacan as trapped in

12317-576: The use of shortened analytic sessions. The questionable nature of his following was one of the reasons for his failure to gain recognition for his teaching from the International Psychoanalytical Association recognition for the French form of Freudianism that was "Lacanianism"—a failure that led to his founding the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964. Many of his closest and most creative followers, such as Jean Laplanche , chose

12430-637: The very phallocentric mastery his language ostensibly sought to undermine. The result— Cornelius Castoriadis would maintain—was to make all thought depend upon himself, and thus to stifle the capacity for independent thought among all those around him. Post-structuralism Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of power . Although post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include

12543-405: The views of ego psychology . In the fifties, the focus of Lacan's interest shifted to the symbolic order of kinship, culture, social structure and roles—all mediated by the acquisition of language—into which each one of us is born and with which we all have to come to terms. The focus of therapy became that of dealing with disruptions on the part of the Imaginary of the structuring role played by

12656-420: The world of language, the Symbolic , through an Oedipal process . Like other post-structuralist approaches, Lacanianism regards the subject as an illusion created when an individual is signified (represented in language). However, this initial signification is incomplete, as there is always something about the subject which cannot be properly represented in language, which means that signification also divides

12769-437: Was the case with ‘Little Hans’ in his conflict with his father over his wife and mother. However, Freud went on to modify his position to the effect "that the majority of men are also far behind the masculine ideal and that all human individuals, as a result of their human identity, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics, otherwise known as human characteristics." Freud's basic metapsychological thesis

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