Symbolic, The (Lacan) | Encyclopedia.

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Symbolic, The (Lacan)

For Jacques Lacan, the symbolic, or the symbolic order, is a universal
structure encompassing the entire field of human action and existence. It
involves the function of speech and language, and more precisely that of
the signifier. It appears as an essentially unconscious, latent apparatus.

The idea of the symbolic is contemporaneous with the birth of

psychoanalysis since the traces linked to repressed infantile sexual
experiences are symbolically reactualized in adulthood as defensive
symptoms. The fact that Freud emphasized memory and reminiscence in
his earliest theoretical work is enough to indicate the primacy of symbolic
traces in psychopathology. The Oedipus complex, the avatars of the
primal relationship with the mother, and the function of the dead father
all take on their importance because they function on the same axis
where the signifier emerges as the mainspring of the symbolic. As Lacan
wrote in the "Function and Field" essay, "Freud's discovery was that of
the field of effects, in man's nature, of his relations to the symbolic order"
(2002, p. 63). Further, Lacan's entire body of work testifies to the fact
that he was trying to restore the symbolic to its full status in
psychoanalysis.

The impact of the symbolic is felt on several levels: first in limits placed
on social alliances and relationships by a certain number of mechanisms,
for which the traditional model is the pact. At another level, the symbolic
intervenes in the form of discrete elements, namely signifiers, that are
overdetermined as the prevalent forms of the imaginary, affective
relations, and the choice of sexual objects.

Lacan repeatedly referred to the canonical example of the "child with the
reel" from Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920g) in order to
emphasize that the mark of the absence of the beloved object is realized
by the fort-da game of phonetic opposition that represented the
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appearance and disappearance of the mother. This correlation between

the missing object and a symbolic signifying mark inscribed in language
removes the object's concrete features and grants it a level of conceptual
force.

The emergence of the signifier in the symbolic is best shown by the

infant's initiation into the dialectical field of demand and desire, for it is in
the experience of vital distress and the appeal to a caretaker that a split
occurs. Even if this caretaker satisfies a vital need, there is still a gaping
lack of being. This equivocal division is brought about by the signifier of
the first demand. It brings with it consequences beyond the frontiers of
infancy and perpetuates a radical division in subjectivity. It also grants to
the unconscious Other its symbolic place because the ultimate meaning
of this signifier is assumed by the subject to reside in this other scene.

In the demand, the inexpressible, originally repressed part of the signifier

becomes the cause of desire by the process of repetition. Later, the
Oedipus complex normalizes the structure by assigning a definitive
meaning to a lack previously put in place—namely that the mother, as
primordial Other, is assumed to possess the phallus, and the father, by
prohibiting incest, reinforces the fact that the phallus is absent by
conferring on it a symbolic function. Thus the father's prohibition makes
the phallic signifier cause desire in the very place where repression had
left a hole. From that point on, this operation links the lack (symbolic
castration) to the law of language, in order to make it reappear as
symbolic debt. The symbolic order is thus constituted as an autonomous
system of signifiers, a system that is governed from the Other and to
which the subject is subjugated. The primary character of the symbolic
led Lacan to conceive of it as one of the dimensions constituting the
Borro-mean knot, a formalized structural schema that also includes the
imaginary and the real.

Jean-Paul Hiltenbrand

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See also: Blank/nondelusional psychosis; Castration of the subject; Child

analysis; Death instinct (Thanatos); Demand; Ethics; Fantasy, formula of;
Female sexuality; Feminism and psychoanalysis; Foreclosure; Fort-Da;
Ego ideal/ideal ego; Imaginary identification/symbolic identification;
Imaginary, the; Imago; Knot; L and R schemas; Matheme; Mirror stage;
Name-of-the-Father; Neurosis; Object; Object a ; Optical schema;
Phallus; Privation; Psychoses, chronic and delusional; Real, the; Real,
Imaginary, and Symbolic father; Sexuation, formulas of; Signifier;
Structuralism and psychoanalysis; Subject; Subject's desire; Symbol;
Symbolization, process of; Symptom/sinthome; Thalassa: A Theory of
Genitality ; Topology; Unary trait; Want of being/lack of being.

Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1-64.

Lacan, Jacques. (2002). The function and field of speech and language
in psychoanalysis. In hisÉcrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York:
W. W. Norton (Original work published 1953)

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