Jacques Lacan, taking “I” by surprise

Here are two memories of Lacan. “I came to the consultation after a serious accident. “My dear, you did the right thing by coming to me,” he greeted me. And at first he sometimes prescribed me three sessions a day. I think without it, I would certainly have committed suicide.” “Regarding my love throwing, Lacan said: “You must have a lot of women.” Feeling like I was allowed to ‘have them all’, I was able to finally calm down.”

Behind the innovative methods were Lacan’s ideas about the “I” and about the tasks of psychoanalysis. Lacan considered our “I” to be a source of delusions and errors, therefore he did not see the point in the patient’s long stories about himself and his problems: we are not aware of our true desires. But paradoxical remarks, brilliant provocations and fascinating reasoning of the analyst catch the “I” by surprise, forcing us to speak the language of the unconscious and opening our eyes to our hidden desires and thoughts. It’s annoying, discouraging, it may seem rude, but it’s effective! In any case, it was so – in the performance of Lacan.

I am the other

He represented his ideas with letters. The letter “A” (from the French autre – “other”) means the great Other: it is in turn our unconscious, body, speech, mother – everything that eludes us, defining our personality against our will. And the small “a” is our “I” as another in relation to myself. And this other, like me, is a part of me: as a child, I cry when I see another child fall. The letter “a” also means “object “a”, the object of my desire: mother’s breast, her voice, look … All our desires in adulthood are only substitutes for these first objects of desire, but from now on they are hidden from our consciousness (we desire “anonymous » object) and it is difficult for us to understand what we really want.

To love is to give what we don’t have

We will never understand the cause of the dissatisfaction we suffer from unless we start with the triad of need, request, desire. To satisfy our needs – to eat, drink, sleep – we first need to make a request (or demand) to the Other – our mother. This requirement instantly transforms the need into an insatiable desire: it becomes important not what we ask for and what we need, but the one who gives it to us, that is, the Other. So when we are given what we ask for, we take it as proof of love. Meanwhile, according to Lacan, true love is “to give to those who did not ask for what we do not have.” Such love is beyond the material. In sexual terms, there is no relationship of complementarity between a man and a woman: they do not complement each other. People of different sexes speak the same language, experience the same pleasure, and can only (really) meet through love.

The symbol system makes us human

We live and think in three dimensions: real, imaginary, symbolic. The imaginary is the relationship we maintain with those who are our “images”, in whom we can identify ourselves as soul or mind. In another sense, the imaginary is the place where our “I” lives, with its tendency to feed on illusions and fascination with deceptions. The real cannot be thought or named, it is a place of madness. In contrast, the symbolic is the area of ​​culture and, above all, language, it is what structures us: a person needs symbols as landmarks in order to be a person. So, at the age of three to five years, at the moment of the manifestation of the Oedipus complex, the father, personifying the law, “intervenes” in the life of the child and thereby helps him to break away from his mother, to complete their relationship of fusion.