Lacan Vs Freud

Lacan versus Freud: Subverting the Enlightenment
Author(s): KAY STOCKHOLDER

Source: American Imago, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Fall 1998), pp. 361-422
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26304390
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KAY STOCKHOLDER
Lacan versus Freud:
Subverting the Enlightenment
I. Smoke and Mirrors
The mirror stage for Jacques Lacan functions as a found

ing myth, analogous to and replacing Freud's founding myth,
elaborated in Totem and Taboo, of the band of brothers whose
murder of the primal father condemns them to perpetual
guilt. The first section of this paper will examine the philo
sophical agenda involved in Lacan's conception of the mirror
stage, visible in the logical gaps of this argument; the second
will show the ways in which Lacan deploys this conception to
rearrange the Freudian landscape; and the third will discuss
how Lacan's conception of language, integral to all his thought,
is at odds not only with Freud's conception, but entirely
undermines Freud's essentially Enlightment world views.
For both Lacan and Freud the founding myth involves
circular reasoning, for the myth is posited to underwrite an
already elaborated psychological theory. This circularity, how
ever, is more crucially problematic for Lacan than it is for
Freud. Freud's myth is cast as a hypothetical historical exten
sion of an otherwise free-standing psychological theory. One
can totally reject Totem and Taboo without rejecting Freud's
arguments for the unconscious, infantile sexuality, and the
Oedipus complex. In contrast, one cannot reject Lacan's
existential myth without calling into question the psychology
that Lacan bases on its assumptions because the scientific
claims of the mirror stage assume the truth of this founda
tional myth.
In "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience," Lacan sketches a conception of
the ontology and epistemology of the human psyche which
American Imago, Vol. 55, No. 3, 361-422. © 1998 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
361
362 Lacan versus Freud
underlies his massive revision of Freudian thought. Though

Lacan presents himself as recovering what he asserts as the
"true" Freudian message from the distortions of North Ameri
can ego psychology, and though commentators speak of the
mirror stage as though it were a variation on Freud's theory of
narcissism, in fact Lacan's theory subverts the enlightenment
ideology upon which Freud's work is based. Ultimately, the
differences between Lacan's mirror stage and Freud's narcis
sism are paradigmatic of the differences between their theories
of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the ego, id, and superego,
of the Oedipus and castration complexes, the nature of
therapy, and their understanding of man's relation to lan
guage and culture. By redefining the key Freudian concepts,
Lacan severs Freudian theory from its roots in Enlightenment
rational individualism and deploys them to serve a version of
pre-Enlightenment authoritarianism.
Most commentators on Lacan not only assume the truth
of Lacan's description of what children do when first con
fronted with their mirror images, but also accept Lacan's
assertion that the behavior he imputes to them betokens an
absolute alienation of the inner being of the infant from the
conscious sense of itself it later acquires as a being in the
world.1 Others' claims for the importance of Lacan's theory of
the mirror stage are not less sweeping than his own. Lacan
rejects the Cartesian "cogito" by which Descartes asserted the
validity of human reason, and returns to Descartes' radically
skeptical assumption that all experience is an illusion, thrown
up by a deceiving God. Substituting a deceiving ego for a
deceiving God, Lacan claims that the mirror stage reveals "the
ontological structure of the human world," in a way that
"accords with my reflections on paranoiac knowledge (Lacan
1977, 2)"2 For Lacan the ratiocinative self is a grotesque mask,
behind which lurks the true subject, which is beyond thought.
Though he claims to bring scientific proof to his project, he
does not have in mind contemporary scientific endeavor, or
what he calls the debased scientism of North America. Rather
he invokes the Hegelian conception of Wissenschaft in its widest
sense of the systematic inquiry by which Hegel described the
stages by which Geist, or the evolving human consciousness,
Kay Stockholder 363
comes into being. It is from Hegel that Lacan gets his concep
tion that the subject finds herself only in confrontation with
others, or the Other, that is constituted by the external world.
For Hegel, consciousness develops by oppositions, so that the
master/slave opposition cannot be overcome until the master
and the slave recognize each other as negated aspects of
themselves. Lacan purports to validate Hegel's understanding
of Science by claiming to use it in elaborating the mirror stage.
Fuller significance of this circular argument emerges when
Lacan redefines the therapist from a Freudian man of science
to a wise man who combines Christ-like love with Hegelian
knowledge:
Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this

century, that of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the loftiest,
because the undertaking of the psychoanalyst acts in our
time as a mediator between the man of care and the
subject of absolute knowledge". (1977, 105)
However, even while Lacan invokes the authority of Hegel, he

transforms Hegel into an anti-Enlightenment thinker by ob
scuring the differences between Hegel's and his own episte
mology and ontology. Hegel believed in the ultimate capacity
of reason fully to comprehend its own situation and to over
come the self-negation, or alienation, that drove history along.
The goal for Hegelian man is, by negating the negation, to
come to full self-awareness, one akin to the awareness Freud
attributed to a fully analyzed subject. While Freud envisioned
the possibility of examining the murky depths of the uncon
scious with the light of consciousness, Lacan believes that
ordinary consciousness can legitimately be aware only of its
own incapacity. This Lacanian limit to the power of conscious
ness becomes clear later on when he criticizes Hegel for being
a precursor of modern science in so far as he neglected mystic
states. He says that "the hour of truth must strike" elsewhere
than in consciousness. For Lacan the therapeutic mystic initia
tion also becomes part of a mystic historical unfolding (1977,
297). In these often obscure references, Lacan inserts Freud
ian rationalist discourse into a vaguely mystic and spiritual
context. Because Lacan bases such far-reaching claims on his

concept of the mirror stage, one should attend closely to the
ways in which his philosophic premises intertwine with what he
purports to be a purely scientific argument.
Lacan 's argument for the mirror stage has both empirical
and theoretical components. The first question is to what
degree children's behavior conforms to Lacan's description,
and the second is whether that behavior would carry the
significance that Lacan claims. Lacan contrasts the behavior of
the human infant between six and eighteen months in front of
the mirror with that of a monkey. The monkey, Lacan asserts,
finds his image empty, whereas the helpless infant,
nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity,

the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in
a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in
his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the
image. (1977, 1-2)
Upon this empirical claim for the difference between animal

and human behavior, Lacan rests his thesis for the absolute
and qualitative uniqueness of human subjectivity. Neither
Lacan nor his commentators cite specific surveys of infant
behavior in front of mirrors, nor have I found one.3 However,
it does not require elaborate studies to observe some obvious
aspects of children's behavior, so that it seems permissible here
to resort to the same kind of anecdotal evidence upon which
Lacan relies.
People report a great variety of infant behavior in front of

mirrors. Some children become interested in their own reflec
tions; some regard their parent, or the person who holds them,
rather than their own image; some seem intensely interested in
the mirror reflections, some mildly so, and some ignore the
mirror altogether. Furthermore, it is questionable whether
even those infants who manifest interest in their mirror images
do so in a way that differs from the interest they manifest in
other circumstances. Recently I saw an infant who was just
learning to crawl approaching its image in a three-way mirror.
It was certainly interested in the various images it saw there,
Kay Stockholder 365
but it was not clear that it was more interested in its own. Some
children do express the happy interest in their own images
that Lacan describes, but as Tallies observes, such behavior can
also be observed when an infant sees a passing cat, or lies in its
crib watching a mobile (1988, 143). The significance that
Lacan attaches to the jubilance of children confronted with
their mirror images could be confirmed only if it were proven
that children manifest such jubilance in no other situation.
Therefore, because not all children behave in the ways upon
which Lacan bases his conception of the mirror stage, and
because Lacan bases his scientific claims upon the literal
behavior of children, his concept of the mirror stage along
with its far-reaching implications are seriously called into
question.
Another of Lacan's empirical claims is in principle more
difficult to prove, as it concerns the infant's subjective state.
Lacan says that the infant suffers greater "motor incapacity and
nursling dependence" due to the "prematurity" of its birth
(1977, 2) than do primates, and that its perceptual systems are
more mature. This combination renders man's relation to
nature fundamentally different from that of animals. Because

of "a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness
and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal months" the
relation of man's consciousness to his organic existence is
fundamentally altered (1977, 4). There are several problems
with this argument. On physiological grounds, Tallis disputes
both Lacan's claims that the human child is more premature
than other mammals, relative to their life span, and his claim
that a child's perceptual system is more mature than its motor
coordination:
There is no evidence for an anatomical incompleteness

of the pyramidal tract—all the neurons are present at
birth—unless 'anatomical' refers to the connectivity of
the neurons. If that is what is meant, then the argument
falls flat on its face, because the immaturity of the
perceptual systems is even greater in this respect as the
immense amount of research carried out on the visual
cortex over the last thirty years has clearly demonstrated.
(1980, 144)
However, these arguments from anatomy and neurology,

though interesting, are not centrally relevant to the question
of an infant's consciousness. Even if Lacan were right about
neurology, such facts would not confirm his assertions about
an infant's subjectivity. He asserts that the child contrasts its
"fragmented body" to the wholeness of the specular image.
Without this subjective experience there would be no gap
between the unity it perceives and its inner experience.4
There are other grounds upon which to reject Lacan 's
conception of the mirror stage. Given Lacan's account, a
person blind from birth could not achieve full humanity, and
neither could those who lived in cultures that had no mirrors.
While such people at some point might see a reflection of

themselves in water or metal implements, such reflections
would not give them stable or unified images of themselves.
Furthermore, it is unlikely that all infants prior to acquiring
speech would encounter such experiences. While most com
mentators unquestioningly accept the literal truth of Lacan's
description despite these problems, others try to rescue this
theory by arguing that it does not depend upon his literal
claims. Lemaire (1977, 79) deplores those critics who "have
seen fit to use the 'factual' insubstantiality of the phase" to
invalidate his work as a whole, but she contradicts herself in
also asserting its factuality:
Occurring as it does at the age mentioned in the above

discussion of the relationship between the child and his
fellow, self-recognition in the mirror (the true mirror
stage) is even more important when it comes to the
establishment of an alienated ego. (1977, 80)
Ragland-Sullivan also seems embarrassed by Lacan's literal

claims. She says that "even in the 1936 version of the theory
Lacan clarifies that he is not talking about a mirror per se."5
She asserts that in his theory "sight-impaired people would also
experience a mirror stage," but does not say how they would
do so. Accusing Kohut and Winnicott of stealing Lacan 's
thunder in their object relations theories, she insists that
Lacan refers "to the identificatory/perceptual mimicry of
Kay Stockholder 367
human infants" (1989, 45). However, she tries to have it both

ways when she says that "the mirror serves as a metaphor and a
structural concept at the same time that it points to a crucial
experience in psychic development"(1987, 29). Similarly,
Forrester says that "Lacan is clearly aware of the implications of
the logical, rather than developmental, argument," and slides
quickly from the literal description to discussions of the child's
relations to others in its world (1990, 122).
Arguments for the metaphorical rather than the literal
force of Lacan's concept of the mirror stage involve some
devious strategies. On the one hand, there seems little prob
lem in accepting the mirror stage as a metaphor for the
importance of a child's understanding of itself as a "moi," as a
being seen by others. Lacan's formulation captures a deeply
felt aspect of the ways in which we see ourselves seen by others,
or of the process by which our sense of ourselves emerges from
the ways in which we see ourselves regarded by others. Discus
sions of the mirror stage tend often to merge with these fairly
commonplace observations about the deeply social nature of
human reality.
Therefore, one can easily accept the concept of the mirror
stage as a metaphor for our social interdependence, but doing
so does not entail accepting the Lacanian claim for a profound
alienation as constitutive of human subjectivity. Indeed, as a
metaphor for the way in which we "prepare a face to meet the
faces that we meet," or for our awareness of being the object of
others' "gaze," it has been used powerfully by Irving Goffman
to describe the subtleties of role behavior.6 Lacanian apologists
who recognize the obvious failure of the literal argument,
nonetheless attribute the same foundational significance to its
metaphorical extension. However, as we have seen, Lacan's
argument for the ontological and epistemological significance
of the mirror stage rests upon its literal occurrence rather than
its metaphorical force. If children do not both feel and behave in
the way Lacan asserts, then the metaphorical force of his
formulation cannot rescue his argument for a primordial
psychological alienation.
There is also a self-contradiction at the heart of Lacan's
arguments for the mirror stage as radically alienating. If the
child experiences itself as uncoordinated, and sees a unified

and complete image of itself in the mirror, it is not clear on
what basis the child could understand that the mirror image
has anything to do with itself. Lacan 's accounts of the frag
mented state of the infant body and the child's behavior are
mutually exclusive, for the child's self-recognition would de
pend upon its having a sense of connection to that image. For
the child to recognize its image as its own, it would have to
intuit a connection between its inner sensations and the
movements it observes in the mirror. It would simultaneously
see its image and feel its body, in the process testing the
correspondence between the two. The mirror image then
would manifest the same amount of coordination, or lack of it,
that it feels interior to its own body. Such a connection would
involve it in a kind of reality testing in a way that calls into
question the alienating function of the image.
Children who behaved as Lacan claims would have to
make use of the proprioceptive senses, their inner feelings of
their own bodies. David-Ménard (1989, 3), who hews a path
somewhere between Lacan and Freud, uses the term "erotoge
nic body" for a person's felt sense of its own interiority as
distinct from its anatomical body. Lacan's omission of an
infantile equivalent to adult proprioceptive senses undermines
his argument that the child's location of itself in space and
time depends upon the alienation of the mirror stage. He
argues that the "spatial captation manifested in the mirror
stage" (1977, 4) is part of the drama by which the mirror stage
"situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination,
in a fictional direction" (1977, 2). At stake here is a founda
tional philosophic assumption. Lacan buttresses his argument
for a fundamental alienation as the ground for human experi
ence with a Kantian conception of space and time as necessary
categories of perception. If Lacan could prove that human
perception of space and time, that is, all external reality, rests
on the illusory wholeness generated in the mirror stage, then
he would both seem to prove the existence of the noumenal
realm that Kant posits as a logical necessity, and give it an
experiential dimension, albeit of a mystical kind. For Kant the
logical positing of this noumenal world enables an account for
Kay Stockholder 369
human freedom and moral action, but it cannot be appre

hended in an immediate way by any faculty whatever, neither
by Platonic intellect nor mystic intuition. Space and time for
Kant are not illusions; along with causality they constitute the
phenomenal world. This world is not for Kant, as it is for
Lacan, in any sense fictional, so that the child's introduction to
it would not point it, as Lacan claims, in a fictional direction.
Further, Kant casts no doubt on the benefits of reason used
within its proper sphere, even though he argues that reason
cannot go beyond the limits of the phenomenal.
By linking space and time to the mirror stage, Lacan tries
to underwrite his claims for a primary alienation with Kant's
philosophic authority. In doing so, however, he rejects Kant's
conception of reason as a limited but crucial instrument. In its
stead he posits a semi-mystical realm of being beyond reason
and beyond the ego, both of which merely deflect our atten
tion from the realm in which truth lies, which can be glimpsed
only by those who complete the Lacanian therapeutic journey.
However, Lacan's argument for a radical alienation between
the Real and a subject's location of itself in time and space
manifests flaws similar to those for the mirror stage itself. A
child regarding its mirror image would see itself in relation to
other reflected persons or objects. Just as it would have to feel
a correspondence, exactly the experience and conception of
truth that Lacan denies, between its bodily feeling and the
image to know the latter as related to itself, so the relations
among the mirror images could have significance only in so far
as they corresponded to its experience of the actual world in
which it moves. It may be that a child's sense of itself in the
world is profoundly changed the first time it perceives its
mirror image, but when a child reaches for that image, sees
itself doing so and feels the arm that reaches, that new image
would be coordinated with the proprioceptive awareness that
must coincide with the infant's first effort to reach for an
object.
Lacan also argues that the true subject is beyond time as
well as space. In one of his more than usually contorted
passages, he links the perception of time to the mirror stage,
saying that "the fact is that the total form of the body by which
the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power

is given to him only as a "Gestalf (1977, 2), and,
This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic

that decisively projects the formation of the individual
into history. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal
thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipa
tion—and which manufactures for the subject, caught
up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of
phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image
to a form of its totality. . . . (1977, 4)
It is hard to imagine that so young an infant experiences a sense

of futurity, or intuits itself as travelling a temporal road towards
a distant maturity. Presumably a child develops some sense of
time from the gap between its desires and their satisfaction, a
gap that opens at birth and widens as the child matures. By the
time a child anticipates the reappearance of an object that has
been temporarily obscured, an important Piagetian moment,
its intertwined sense of both time and space must be firmly
entrenched.
On all levels, then, the phenomena to which Lacan

appeals themselves preclude any radical divide for the child
between the Kantian categories and a timeless and spaceless
Real, regardless of the epistemological problem of knowing
what lies beyond our mental categories. The analogue for the
situation Lacan describes would be that of a kitten mistaking
itself for an image of a lion, in which case it would be in some
trouble.
Lacan claims further support for his argument for pri

mary alienation of the mirror stage in the phenomena of
hysterical symptoms and post-amputation phantom pains, nei
ther of which correspond to neural anatomy. While these
phenomena provide strong evidence for the psycho-somatic
basis of our experience, they do not support Lacan 's claim.
While an hysterical paralysis of an arm may express a repressed
impulse to strike out at a parent, it does so because we
correctly experience our arms as functionally specific. While
our capacity to move our arms is related to neural and
Kay Stockholder 371
muscular structures that go beyond them, skeletally they are

discreet. Therefore the cultural symbolization of body parts is
embedded in a transcultural physical reality. The same argu
ment applies to phantom pains experienced by those who have
lost a limb; such experience relates to the proprioceptive
sense, and cannot prove a fundamental divide between the
organism and the psyche.
While Lacan simultaneously assumes the mantle of and
perverts Hegelian and Kantian philosophy, his chief target is
Darwinism. Lacan's anti-Darwinism, which in turn bears upon
the role of reason in human affairs, emerges in connection
with his discussion of infantile pleasure, or the jubilance he
attributes to the infant. This relates to Lacan's claims that the
infant facing the mirror "overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant
activity, the obstructions of his support..." (1977,1), and that
there occurs at this moment a "jubilant assumption of his
specular image" by the child who is "still sunk in his motor
incapacity and nursling dependence" (1977, 2). Given Lacan's
account of the complete discordance between the child's image
and its reality, and given that he attributes no pleasure to the
child's sense of itself or of its relation to the adult who holds it,
there is no way to explain this reaction. Even if under these
conditions the infant could recognize the image as its own, its
jubilance would imply a previous state of unpleasant feeling,
and a vague desire to be like the adults around it. For it to feel
such discontent would suggest that the desire to be other than
it is in the present is built into its organism. Were that so, its
pleasure would derive from reassurance that in time it would
overcome its already felt deficiencies, and its identification
with the image would then not be a misrecognition. Once
again, Lacan's assumptions about infantile behavior would
confirm a deep continuity from the infant's biological organ
ism to its developing consciousness.
Lacan directs another shaft against Darwinism in his
conception of infantile jubilance. Lacan says that the contrast
ing size of the mirror image "fixes it in a symmetry that inverts
it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject
feels are animating him" (1977, 2). The mention of the
inverted symmetry of the mirror image emphasizes the discor
dance between the image and infant, or, as MacCannel (1986,

70) says, it is a prelude to the function of the Other in the
Symbolic as "an inverted image of the self," but the "turbulent
movements that the subject feels are animating him" refer
back to the infant's "jubilant activity." But now it appears that it
is not so much that the infant's jubilant motions express an
inner feeling, but that jubilance overtakes it from a source
beyond itself. Rather than making movements, it is moved like
an automaton, alienated from its own body, by this mysterious
power. Lacan also asserts that this mirror image
symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same

time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still
pregnant with the correspondences that unite the /with
the statue in which man projects himself, with the
phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in
which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own
making tends to find completion. (1977, 3-4)
This foreign turbulence, unrelated to the child's feelings,

conforms with his conception, developed more fully later, of
jouissance as unrelated to biology, drives, or instincts. The
"libidinal dynamism" (1977, 2) that he attributes to the move
ments he associates with the mirror stage involve an "erotic
relation, in which the human individual fixes upon himself an
image that alienates him from himself ..." (1977, 19). He
adds that "each great instinctual metamorphosis" (that is, what
Freud called the pre-genital phases) is composed of "a con
junction of the subject's history and the unthinkable innate
ness of his desire" (1977, 19-20). The word 'innateness' might
suggest a biological arena, but 'unthinkable,' removes desire
from an arena that can, in principle, be approached by
ordinary scientific understanding. The jubilance, as a prede
cessor of jouissance, thus conceived as independent of bodily
sensation or drives, becomes in principle mysterious. It is not
mysterious as it is for Freud in the sense of being unknown.
Freud readily admits that there is much to be discovered, and
perhaps much that will never be discovered, about Eros, about
the relation of sexuality to mind and body. But Lacan renders
Ray Stockholder 373
it in principle unknowable, a mystic force that moves through,

but is independent of, biological life. This force becomes the
basis for Lacan 's mystic reorientation of Freudian theory.
The wedge that Lacan drives between the instrumental
intelligence, in the development of which the child lags
behind the chimpanzee, and the human subject that the child
manifests in its jubilance, becomes particularly important in
his discussion of the ego and human aggressivity. Instead of
conceiving aggression as a manifestation of a Darwinian drive
for survival, he locates it entirely in the Hegelian struggle for
recognition deriving from the mirror stage. This element of
his thinking is clear when he says that the success of Darwin's
theory was due to the fact that Darwin
projected the prédations of Victorian society and the

economic euphoria that sanctioned for that society the
social devastation that it initiated on a planetary scale,
and to the fact that it justified its prédations by the
image of a laissez-faire of the strongest predators in
competition for their natural prey. (1977, 26)
Lacan's arguments against Darwinism are haunted by

contradictions similar to those we have already noted. The
single biological fact that Lacan repeatedly asserts is human
prematurity, that is, the relatively undeveloped state of the
human infant. His arguments for the irrelevance of biology for
the human condition rest on the supposition of a child's
"intro-organic and relational discordance during the first six
months, when be bears the signs, neurological and humoral,
of a physiological natal prematuration" (1977, 19). But he
makes a significant exception; to emphasize the primacy of the
mirror stage over biology, he resorts to animal behavior, citing
a piece of biological experimentation that finds that the
gonads of a female pigeon will not mature unless it "should see
another member of its species, of either sex." But if it doesn't,
then "the desired effect may be obtained merely by placing the
individual within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror"
(1977, 3). Wilden (1968, 160) generalizes the way in which
what Lacan calls transitivism functions as an alternative for the
literal mirror stage in animals; "without the visual presence of

others, the maturing process is delayed, although it can be
restored to a more nearly normal tempo by placing a mirror in
the animal's cage".7 Forrester (1990, 120-21) comments that
this "reliance on animal ethology may seem surprising in view
of Lacan 's critique of naturalism." After asserting that Lacan
did not treat biology phobically, he concludes that "what
animal behavior indicated to him was the universal function of
the image in sexual behavior—the universal function of decep
tion and displacement." However, Lacan discriminates be
tween animal and human reactions to images when he says
that the animal has
a limited number of pre-established correspondences

between its imaginary structure and whatever interests it
in its umvelt, namely whatever is important for the
perpetuation of individuals, themselves a function of the
perpetuation of the type of the species. . . . For man the
other has a captivating value, on account of the anticipa
tion that is represented by the unitary image as it is
perceived either in the mirror or in the entire reality of
the fellow being. (1988a, 125)
Lacan 's account, in contrast to Freud's, of animal instinctual

behavior omits entirely an animal's sense of smell as the source
of erotic excitation. By attributing animal sexual behavior only
to its sight, Lacan deepens the sense of import of the mirror
stage. But doing so threatens to link human behavior to a
biological base. He counters this danger, and deepens the
divide between the human organism and the human subject,
by asserting that eroticism belongs to the organism. However,
unlike the animal which is not born prematurely and which
therefore has its erotic instincts aroused by a corresponding
image external to it, the child, because of its chaotic inner
organism, is erotically aroused by a misrecognition. But if, as I
have been arguing, even Lacan's empirical claims in fact
suggest that the infant's inner state must at least partially
correspond to its self-image for any recognition to occur, then
his argument not only fails, but reverses itself. The importance
Kay Stockholder 375
of images confirms the link for the developing child between

its inner sense and its sense of itself as an entity in the world, at
the same time confirming the link between animal and human
experience. All of the infantile experiences that are offered in
support of the mirror stage, like those of movement, space,
and time that are supposed to occur in front of a mirror,
support the contrary thesis that the pulses of the body cooper
ate with the perceptions of the mind in creating our sense of
reality. If so, the Darwinian instinct for survival is not a socially
induced distortion, but is rather, as Freud argues, the instinc
tual ground of the ego.
Furthermore, Lacan 's use of the mirror stage to separate
desire from ego structures bears on his dismissal of love and
affection, which he represents as mere strategies to obtain the
illusory gratifications of the ego. This aspect of his thought
appears most sharply in his discussion of transitivism, whereby
a child will identify with and confuse itself with its peers, a
phenomenon from which Lacan seeks corroboration for the
empirical claims of the mirror stage. In "Aggressivity in Psycho
analysis" Lacan makes the same claim for this behavior as for
mirror behavior when he says that on these "occasions the
child anticipates on the mental plane the conquest of the
functional unity of his own body, which, at that stage, is still
incomplete on the plane of voluntary motility" (1977, 18).
During the mirror stage "one will record the emotional reac
tions and the articulated evidences of a normal transitivism.
The child who strikes another says that he has been struck; the
child who sees another fall, cries" (1977, 18). It isn't clear
whether Lacan means that the child literally mistakes the other
child for itself, or whether he means identification in the more
ordinary and looser sense. It would seem to be the former
when he says that the infant takes "as equivalent his own action
and that of the other" in saying that "François hit me whereas it
was him who hit François. There is an unstable mirror between
the child and his fellow being". (1988a, 169). Archard (1984,
66) claims that in this theory of transitivism, Lacan makes up
for cultural objections to his theory of the mirror stage. Wilden
rolls these two into one when he says that the mirror stage
derives its name from the importance of mirror relation

ships in childhood. The significance of children's at
tempts to appropriate or control their own image in a
mirror is that their actions are symptomatic of these
deeper relationships. (1968, 160)
And MacCannell (1986, 63) also argues that the lack of

personal identification in Lacan 's mirror stage accounts for
"the absolute 'transitivism' one observes in children after this
point." If these transitive relations are analogous to the mirror

stage, the same objections apply, for if a child's cry at another's
hurt did not derive from a correct recognition of shared
vulnerability, it would have no reason to cry.
Lacan uses this merger of transitivism with the mirror
stage to found all adult relations upon efforts to force those
upon whom one depends to sustain the delusion of being a
unified and coherent entity. These relations constitute what
Lacan calls the register of the Imaginary. In this pre-linguistic
stage, or pre-Symbolic register, there are only dyadic relations.
The adult relations that extend from the mirror stage are
condemned to remain forever confined within Hegel's mas
ter/slave paradigm, in which one tries to win from another
(small o) the recognition of oneself as a totality. If one
succeeds, one hates that person for sustaining the alienation
upon which that recognition is based, and if one fails one hates
the person for refusing the needed recognition. One is thus
condemned to the perpetual struggle to win from the other
the recognition that can only condemn one to an alienated
and false existence that defines all love relations. Lacan bases
his view of love on two grounds; first, that the child sees the
parent's unified image as a forever rebuking reminder of its
own inadequacy, and second, that once the child perceives
itself as perceived by others all its relationships consist in the
Hegelian struggle for recognition by the other. Insofar as one
wins the recognition, then one is the master who has the power
to force the other to recognize him, but because the recogni
tion is always false, one remains unrecognized, and remains
therefore in the slave position.
This rather nightmare vision of human relations first
Kay Stockholder 377
appears in Lacan's description of the child held by a "human

support." Lacan here reduces the person holding the child to
the level of a contraption, thereby excluding from his consid
erations the child's awareness of and reactions to that person.
A child held by a parent would simultaneously viscerally
experience and see the movements that accompany whatever
emotional ambiance is created by the parent. There then
would be no misrecognition, but rather a correct recognition
of itself as an object visible to itself, and to others, in the same
way as others are visible to it. Such a recognition, whether it
occurred in relation to a mirror image or more generally as the
child interacts with others, would be an important part of a
child's development, but would not sustain Lacan's assertion
that this stage creates an irrevocable gap between the child's
inner sense of itself, the Real, and its social existence. Insofar
as one conceives of the subject as being constituted at the
point at which it recognizes its own exteriority to others, the
subject so constituted would be at the intersection of its bodily
sense of self and a sense of self as an object in the world
perceptible to others. It would follow that the ego would be, as
Freud argues, a faculty that develops from the organism's
efforts to negotiate between its interiority and the external
world. Further, if a child looked upon the image of the person
holding it, and simultaneously felt the embrace of the person
it saw in reflection, its capacity to correlate its visual sensations
with inner and tactile ones would be increased rather than
diminished. A child's behavior in front of mirrors or with
others does not suggest a radical gap, but rather suggests a
merger of self awareness with awareness of the reflected image
and with the sensations and feelings generated by the person
in whose arms it rests. This social dimension of the child's
experience would interpenetrate the earliest recognition of its
own image, as well as its proprioceptive or visceral sense in
relation to the world. This combination of visceral sensation,
the emotional ambience created by the parent, and the
awareness of itself as a separate entity would become the
condition of and the ground for developing the capacity to
give and accept love. As we all know, love can be full of
problems, but Lacan has failed to prove that in principle all
love is reduced to a struggle for dominion that ends only in

death, or that desire is intrinsically death-oriented and there
fore inevitably frustrated rather than gratified in love.
In summary then, one could only imagine the situation
that Lacan describes if one held a child to a window, told him
that it was a mirror, and persuaded him that he was looking at
himself when in fact he was looking at another. It is difficult to
imagine succeeding in this deception, but if one did, that child
would be in the situation Lacan describes as common to all
humanity; it would be entirely vulnerable to the manipulation
of images and at a loss to relate its inner senses of itself to its
experience of the world. As afloat in a world of images such a
person would be, so would we be if Lacan's arguments were
correct for what occurs in the mirror stage. However, far from
providing evidence of a fundamental alienation that consti
tutes the subject, Lacan's account of the mirror experience
rather supports the argument for a subject constituted in the
intersection of felt bodily experiences, the sense of itself as
being visible to others, and whatever emotional ambience
accompanies the experience of encountering its mirror image.
A subject so constituted from the intertwining of these early
experiences does not have an absolute or trans-historical
existence, but it does have a limited autonomy. For such a
subject adult love relations, however embattled and imperfect,
constitute the primary source of creature satisfaction. And the
faculty of reason that derives from an ego grounded in our
organism's drive for survival, however embattled by the con
tending forces of destructive inner drives and by their exten
sion into irrational superego interdictions, constitutes our
most reliable guide by which to adjust ourselves to changing
circumstances and make the compromises necessary to man
age in an imperfect world. Freud's paradigmatic play, Oedipus
Rex, challenges such a subject to negotiate the tangled webs of
human relationships. As we will see in the following sections,
Lacan, by substituting Oedipus at Colonus for Freud's paradig
matic play, dismisses life's ordinary problems as mere smoke
and mirrors that distract man from life's central challenge,
which is to confront death.
Kay Stockholder 379
II. Redesigning the Freudian Landscape
Lacan equates his mirror stage to Freud's conception of

narcissism. He refers to the ego as the "golem of narcissism"
(1977,124), and to being seduced and captured in "the veil of
the narcissistic image" (1977, 195). In fact, however, the two
derive from and lead to radically opposed world views. On the
surface Lacan's formulation of the mirror stage may sound like
an adaptation of Freud's argument in "On Narcissism," that
the individual does actually carry on a twofold existence:

one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in
a chain, which he serves against his will, or at least
involuntarily. The individual himself regards sexuality as
one of his own ends; whereas from another point of view
he is an appendage to his germ-plasm. (1914, 78)
Freud contrasts the libido instincts to the ego instincts, which

derive from the individual's drive for self-preservation, while
Lacan omits the latter entirely from his theory, as we have seen
from his scornful comments on Darwinism. His exclusion of a
Darwinian self-preservative drive from the human psyche elimi
nates the distinction Freud makes between primary and sec
ondary narcissism, a central distinction for Freud, who arrives
at the theory of narcissism as a consequence of finding that
some people whose "libidinal development has suffered some
disturbance . . . have taken as a model not their mother but
their own selves" (1914, 87). Freud relates this attachment to
the self at the expense of others to a primary narcissism that,
he claims, is common to all people. Seeing it as an aspect of
infantile auto-eroticism that will in the course of time shape
the ego, he says,
The first auto-erotic sexual satisfactions are experienced

in connection with vital functions which serve the pur
pose of self-preservation. The sexual instincts are at the
outset attached to the satisfaction of the ego-instincts;
only later do they become independent of these, and
even then we have an indication of that original attach
ment in the fact that the persons who are concerned

with a child's feeding, care, and protection become his
earliest sexual objects. . . . (1914, 87)
For Freud, then, primary narcissism consists in an infant's

visceral sense of its satisfactions, which unites nascent erotic
and self-preservative drives with its perceptions of other per
sons and developing love for them. There is no sharp division
between the stage at which it does not distinguish itself from
the world, and that at which it does; rather the two stages
shade into each other as the child's pleasure in itself extends
to its perceptions of others who are from the beginning
associated with that pleasure. Further, its developing ego is
already in place, and primary narcissism involves the child's
erotic drives taking for their object its self, including its own
self-preservative drives. The ego then is not constituted, as it is
for Lacan, in mistaking an image for reality, but rather is
founded in those aspects of our organic relation to our
environment, being fed and protected from dangers, without
which we cannot survive.
Secondary narcissism develops only later, after the child,

having passed through the Oedipal stage, has developed an
ego-ideal, or what Freud later calls a super-ego. Narcissistic
people are those who suffer from secondary narcissism. Such
people either cannot love others, or if they do, they choose
other persons who either compensate for what they feel as
their failures to live up to their ego ideal, or who replicate the
kind of person they take themselves to be. It is this condition,
one that Freud considers pathological, that Lacan posits as the
human norm.
Freud's conception of secondary narcissism most closely

approximates Lacan's mirror stage, but with another differ
ence. Even for this kind of person, secondary narcissism
develops on a continuum with and incorporates primary
narcissism. Therefore both persons whose love flows from
their narcissism, and those whose loving is less bound to their
self-images, incorporate their infantile experience into their
adult choices, and both achieve some degree of real gratifica
tion. Such gratification may not be permanent or complete; it
Kay Stockholder 381
may not fill all of the heart's desires, but it is nonetheless

deeply connected to a profound and inward sense of bodily
well-being. This view of love relationships contrasts sharply
with Lacan's. For Freud "we must begin to love in order not to
fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of
frustration, we are unable to love" (1914, 85), "a real happy
love corresponds to the primal condition in which object
libido and ego-libido cannot be distinguished" (1914, 100).
For Freud, the merger of one's self-love with love for
another is the foundation of whatever happiness is available
for human beings, but Lacan's redefinition of the Freudian
ego as constituted in an illusion renders the love experience
merely one form of the nightmarish Hegelian master/slave
struggle. In Lacan's formulation such gratifications are not
real, because in erasing the distinction between primary and
secondary narcissism, Lacan also obliterates the distinction
between the ego and the super-ego, and in the process he also
transforms the concepts of castration, the death drive, the
Oedipal drama, and of therapy so as to produce an entirely
different topography of the individual's relation to the world.
For Freud the ego, grounded in survival instincts, is most
closely bound up with rational action, whereas for Lacan it
generates all individual and collective human ills. To render
the full import of Lacan's revamping of the Freudian ego, as
well as its relationship to the related conceptions of the
superego or ego-ideal, I will first supply the necessary Freudian
conceptual context. As we have seen in the discussion of
primary narcissism, Freud locates the formation of the ego, "a
coherent organization of mental processes," in the infant's
experience of its own body (1923,17). Freud conceives psycho
logical ego functions, the sense of one's self as an entity, as an
extension of, and structured in analogy to, the organism's
perceptual systems. "The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego"
(1923, 26); it develops as the child becomes aware of itself as a
bounded entity and extends from the senses by which the child
negotiates itself in the external world. On this level the ego is
that which coordinates the child's awareness of things outside
of itself with its bodily experience of pleasure and pain. It is the
psychic equivalent of the proprioceptive senses. Initially dis
tinct, the erotic drives fuse with the ego by the agency of
primary narcissism, so that the maturing ego takes as its task to
wrest from a recalcitrant world as full a range of libidinous
satisfactions as is consistent with survival.
As the child develops more complex emotions, and its

quest for pleasure sometimes arouses parental disapproval, the
ego's task of negotiating between the external and internal
world grows more complex. Other persons are involved in the
earliest development of primary narcissism, upon whom both
pleasure and survival depend. The fusion of internal and
external stimulae is so complete that Freud describes the ego
as "a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes," one that
"contains the history of those object-choices" (1923, 29). The
ego represses those manifestations of early attachments that
threaten psychic survival, that are not "ego-syntonic," thereby
severing the ego and the id. But the divide is not absolute; the
ego "is not sharply separated from the id; its lower portion
merges into it. . . .The repressed merges into the id as well"
(1923, 24), so that the ego becomes a conduit through which
erotic and survival drives are shaped in relation to actual
people in the world. Adapting Plato's analogy between a horse
and rider for reason's relationship to passion, Freud says that
while "the rider tries to [guide the horse] with his own
strength, . . . the ego uses borrowed forces." The interconnec
tion between these sometimes contending forces appears
when he says that for a rider to stay on his horse, he
is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same

way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will
into action as if it were its own. (1923, 25)
In this formulation, a strong ego involves sufficient psychic

energy to employ one's intelligence and reason in the search
for means to satisfy one's drives and desires as fully as possible
in ways that do not jeopardize one's ordinary well-being. The
ego "transforms the object-cathexes of the id into ego-struc
tures." Therefore, "psychoanalysis is an instrument to enable
the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id" (1923, 55).
Seeing the ego as that which assesses what is possible does not
Kay Stockholder 383
entail a therapy of conformity, as Lacan claims in his diatribes

against American ego psychology. Rather it entails an ego that
decides whether to change the world when that is possible, or
conform to it when it is not.
Defining the ego as generated when the child takes itself

to be the unified and spatially located mirror image, Lacan
argues that it is necessarily aggressive because it is always
enraged at the alienation which constituted it. At the same
time, it erotically seizes upon those objects that it needs in
order to confirm itself in its false autonomy. Lacan says that,
It is in this erotic relation, in which the human indi

vidual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him
from himself, that are to be found the energy and the
form on which this organization of the passions that he
will call his ego is based. (1977, 19)
Therefore, human aggression and competitiveness do not

arise, as they do for Freud, from the frustrations civilization
imposes on man's animal instincts; on the contrary Lacan
asserts that aggressivity "has nothing to do with the animal
aggressivity of frustrated desire" (1977, 42). The mirror image
constitutes the first transference, and is the basis for all other
transference relationships, either in the therapeutic situation,
or in falling in love.
In the register of the Imaginary, the mental correlate of
the Mirror stage, all ego relations are antagonistic in two
directions. On the one hand the subject projects onto the
person who stands in for his mirror image his own rage at his
alienated state. On the other hand, the mirror image or the
person who substitutes for it challenges the subject to be in
reality the self-contained and unified entity it takes the image,
or now the other, to be. Lacking such inner unity, it tries to
master the other, and fears that its failure to do so will catapult
it back into its fragmented and disjointed reality. Lacan offers
as proof his patients' dreams of dismemberment that repro
duce the nightmare images portrayed by Hieronymus Bosch
whose works form "an atlas of all the aggressive images that
torment mankind" (1977, 11). This primordial nightmare

includes as well
the imago of the mother's body . . . [her] internal

empire, the historical atlas of the intestinal divisions in
which the images of the father and brothers (virtual or
real), in which the voracious aggression of the subject
himself, dispute their deleterious dominance over her
sacred regions. (1977, 20-21)
To lose the struggle with the other constitutes falling into the
"madness that lies behind the walls of asylums" (1977, 7). It is
to be psychotic, like Schreber, who, because he defined his ego
as victim, paranoically experienced himself attacked by God
(1977, 124), and returned to the mirror stage "at which his
body was merely a collection of colonies of foreign 'nerves,' a
sort of sump for fragments detached from the identities of his
persecutors" (1977, 209). For fear of falling into a Boschian
nightmare or psychosis, each person must force the other to
recognize her as the unified being she is not, so that ego
relations are locked in Hegel's master/slave struggle. Lacan's
vision of the master/slave struggle as defining social relations
under capitalism, rather than a stage of the development of
consciousness, derives from Alexander Kojève's lectures on
Hegel (1969), which shaped the French understanding of
Hegel. As we will see later, on this basis Lacan casts himself not
only as master psychoanalyst, but as healer of cultural ills.
On the one hand, then, the ego is the specular image of
an ever retreating lure of maturity, in relation to which the
person will forever be found wanting. On the other hand,
Lacan transfers to the ego formation the production of guilt
that Freud will assign to the super-ego. In an oblique reference
to original sin, Lacan sees modern man locked in ego-relations
that cause an "isolation of the soul ever more akin to its
original dereliction" (1977, 27). The therapist's task is to
release the analysand from the symptoms generated by his
refusal to abandon false ego images and enter the Symbolic.
Guilt arises from the primal alienation by which the ego is
constituted; it becomes a psychological analogue to original
Kay Stockholder 385
sin. It does not arise, as it does for Freud, from the failure to
meet specific parental and social norms that one has introjected;
rather it is the corollary of having an ego.
The triumph of the ego is responsible for what Lacan sees
as the distortion of psychoanalytic practice by North American
ego analysts who, in the name of an adaptive theory of cure,
establish Master/Slave relations with their analysands, whereas
for Lacan the therapist's task is to initiate the patient into
higher mysteries. On the historical level, ego manifests itself in
the Darwinian world view that is responsible for
the economic euphoria that sanctioned for that society

the social devastation that it initiated on a planetary
scale, and to the fact that it justified its prédations by the
image of a laissez-faire of the strongest predators in
competition for their natural prey. (1977, 26)
The technological control enjoyed by emancipated modern

man derives from the ego which "structures human knowledge
as paranoiac" (1977, 3). In short, the unchecked proliferation
of ego structures is responsible for "the utilitarian conception
of man that reinforces it, in an ever more advanced realization
of man as individual" (1977, 27), exactly the realization that
was Freud's therapeutic goal. Lacan argues that he brings out
Freud's true meaning by rewriting "Where the id was, there the
ego shall be" to mean that '"There where it was ... it is my duty
that I should come to being'" (1977, 129) because he replaces
the concept of the id with a mystical pre-lapsarian plenitude
that he calls the Real. But Freud's conception of the id and
ego, and of their relation to the superego, permits no such
interpretation.
Lacan advocates as compensation for the original sin of
ego formation a pre-Enlightenment, anti-individualistic, anti
rational, and authoritarian conception of human life and
society. In a seldom-quoted passage, but one which expresses
attitudes that pervade his work, Lacan deplores
the increasing absence of all those saturations of the

superego and ego-ideal that are realized in all kinds or
organic forms in traditional societies, forms that extend

from the rituals of everyday intimacy to the periodical
festivals in which the community manifests itself. We no
longer know them except in their most obviously de
graded aspects. Furthermore, in abolishing the cosmic
polarity of the male and female principles, our society
undergoes all the psychological effects proper to the
modern phenomenon known as the 'battle between the
sexes'—a vast community of such effects, at the limit
between the 'democratic' anarchy of the passions and
their desperate leveling down by the 'great winged
hornet' of narcissistic tyranny. (1977, 26-27)
In order to emerge from contemporary "barbarism" we need

"the wisdom of Plato" to restore us to the "rituals of everyday
intimacy" of traditional society. These views on man, society,
and authority derive from the divide Lacan cleaves between
human psychology and species and physical existence. If, as
Lacan claims, our own survival needs provide no inner struc
ture of self-restraint, then it would follow that we should be
subject to the kind of Platonic authoritarianism that Lacan
suggests in the above quotation. Given Lacan's understanding
of what the ego is, his therapeutic goal must necessarily be to
circumvent it by positing a "subject" that exists apart from it.
The best one could do with such an ego would be to get it to
submit, as Lacan suggests in the passage quoted above. Though
Lacan deplores pragmatic adaptation as a therapeutic goal,
logically he should be content with such a goal for all except
those chosen few who are worthy of the glimpse of Diana that
Lacan uses as a figure of Truth (1977, 124).8
While Lacan admits that his conception of the ego departs
from what the ego psychologists have made the topographic
model of 'The Ego and the Id," he argues that Freud's later
work distorted his earlier views which, by implication, are
closer to his own. It is true that Freud's later topographical
model emphasizes the ego, but it develops rather than super
sedes his earlier dynamic model. Freud takes pains to remind
his readers that the boundaries between the structural entities
are indistinct and permeable. The ego does become more
Kay Stockholder 387
sharply defined, as Freud attributes some of the functions that

he formerly included in the ego to the id, or the superego. But
he preserves the possibility of a merger between the ego and id
that he developed in "On Narcissism," in which he says that in
illness the ego interests, ordinarily turned towards the outer
world, and the libido, ordinarily turned toward a loved person,
become "indistinguishable from each other" (1914, 82) when
both converge on the body. In Instincts and their Vidssitudes
Freud attributes to the ego some of the properties that later
characterize the id:
The ego hates, abhors and pursues with intent to destroy

all objects which are a source of pleasurable feeling for
it, without taking into account whether they mean a
frustration of sexual satisfaction or of the satisfaction of
self-preservative needs. (1915, 138)
The later work, more firmly hooking the ego to the perceptual
system and to self-preservation, eliminates confusion about the
boundary between the ego and the id which derives from an
earlier formulation in which Freud in Two Principles of Mental
Functioning distinguishes between a "pleasure-ego [which] can
do nothing but wish... [and the] reality-ego," which has to do
with self-preservation (1911, 223 italics Freud's). This split ego
appears also in Mourning and Melancholia in which Freud says
that the "libidinal cathexes" withdraw "to the place in the ego
from which [they] had proceeded" and become subject to the
"critical agency." This agency merges with the ego when he
adds that "the ego debases itself and rages against itself" (1917,
257). Though one may prefer Freud's earlier formulation to
the later more schematic version, the point here is that no
Freudian formulation accords with Lacan's.9
Lacan's concept of the ego, in which the subject is
structured as "a rival with himself" (1977, 22), merges into it
most of what Freud attributes to the superego. In Freudian
theory the superego considerably complicates and darkens the
psychological landscape. While the ego represents one portion
of the id, another dynamic generates the superego or ego
ideal. The latter term is one he uses in his earlier writings, but
later it merges with the former. In "On Narcissism" the ego

ideal is that which the child "substitutes for the lost narcissism
of his childhood in which he was his own ideal" (1914, 88n).
This function later becomes one side of a two-sided coin. In
the topographical model, the concept retains its first meaning,
but merges with that of the superego, which emphasizes the
guilt produced by the person's failure to realize his ideal self
image. Since in this later work Freud uses the two terms
interchangeably, I will confine myself to the term superego.
The superego originates in relation to other persons,
usually parents. As it enters into the Oedipal phase, it perceives
its mother and father as separate persons, and both loves and
competes with both of them. Leaving aside the complexities
that derive from his theory of bi-sexuality and of what Freud
calls the complete or two-phased Oedipal configuration, the
most significant aspect of the superego lies in its genesis in the
Oedipal drama. In simplified terms, the boy's nascent eroti
cism intensifies his already affectionate relation to his mother,
so that he enters into an ambivalent and potentially competi
tive relation with his father, with whom he identifies and whose
place he covets. The girl's identification with her mother
acquires ambivalence and hostility when her nascent eroticism
intensifies her affection for her father. The child's ego incor
porates these parental identifications, but when the child
succumbs to the parental prohibitions, the portion of the ego
that renounces its erotic claims on one or the other parent
"confronts the other contents of the ego as an ego-ideal or super-ego"
(1923, 34,italics Freud's). Since the superego is initially part of
the ego, it carries forward the "earliest object-choices of the
id," but the residual feelings that derive from those early
choices merge with the fear and anxiety consequent upon
their prohibition. It "represents an energetic reaction-forma
tion" (1923, 34) against those same loved persons. The child's
compensation for renouncing its Oedipal claim is a reaffirmed
identification with one or the other parent that permits it to
introject, to make its own, the parental prohibition. But that
identification has a double valence; on the one hand, on its
basis the child develops its image of the kind of person it
wishes to become, but on the other hand, the child is prohib
Kay Stockholder 389
ited from being that kind of person—that is, the child may not
take the place of its same-sex parent in relation to the parent
of the opposite sex.
This conception of the superego as closing the Oedipal
stage is crucial for Freud's view of the human condition. Under
pressure of castration fears, along with "the influence of
authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading" (1923,
34), the boy child, relinquishing its Oedipal claims, bonds with
his father and internalizes the cultural standards along with
parental prohibitions. In this way the child forms a conscience
in accord with the "moral and aesthetic" trends of his world,
and establishes in himself the potential for becoming a self
regulating member of society. In a somewhat ironical move to
appease those who are distressed by his bleak assessment of the
human condition, Freud says that "here we have that higher
nature . . the representative of our relation to our parents"
(1923, 36). The source of the irony emerges when he develops
the more forbidding aspects of the superego, but, on its
positive side, it marks the stage at which the child, at least the
boy, establishes himself as a self-regulating social being.10
Having transferred to the ego the major attributes of the
Freudian superego, Lacan seldom uses the latter term. When
he does, he associates the superego with the Imaginary and
pre-linguistic, rather than the Symbolic or social and linguistic.
With a reference to Melanie Klein's theory of the child's
introjection of "bad internal objects," he relates the superego
to the méconnaissance of the mirror stage, which, he says,
"enables us to situate as perfectly original the first formation of
the superego" (1977, 21). The superego then becomes a
repository of infantile identifications, which "in the broken
link of the symbolic chain, raise from the imaginary that
obscene, ferocious figure in which we must see the true
signification of the superego" (1977, 143). Elsewhere he uses
the term somewhat differently. The superego is that which
condemns the son to reproduce the mistakes of his father
(1988b, 89), or to carry from the Imaginary images of the
father that distort the subject's apprehension of the Law of the
Symbolic. He describes it as a "disruptive, almost demonic"
extension of the interiorized images of the rejecting and
desiring mother (1988b, 251), and refers to a character in

Moliere's Amphitryon as "a man of the super-ego, who is always
wanting to elevate himself to the dignity of the ideals of the
father, of the master, and who imagines that is how he will
attain the object of his desire" (1988b, 266). Lacan associates it
with the Law (that is, the realm of language in the symbolic)
but only as a distorting carryover that has been translated into
language in the form of senseless and blind prohibitions
(1988a, 102). Though Lacan distinguishes the ego-ideal from
the superego, they end up being the pleasurable or
unpleasurable experiences of a single phenomenon. The ego
ideal is what the child first saw "appearing in the form of the
parent holding him up before the mirror" (1973, 257). There
fore, the term overlaps with the unified image of the mirror
stage with which the child identifes, attempts to emulate, and
loves in the only way possible within the Lacanian system
(1988a, 138-39).
However, the most philosophically crucial element of
Lacan's revision of the Freudian superego is his chronological
reversal of the superego and the Oedipal stage. As we have
seen, Lacan relates the superego to the pre-Oedipal, Imagi
nary register, rather than seeing it as catapulting the child
from the Oedipal stage into the adult realm of self-regulation,
a realm that Lacan replaces with his conception of the Sym
bolic register. Since the superego does not bring the Oedipal
phase to a close, nothing does. For Lacan the Oedipal phase
has no resolution. Neurotic ills do not arise, as they do for
Freud, from a failure to cast off the filial fear, guilts, and
inadequacies that prevent one from assuming the fullness of
rational individualistic self-reliance. Rather Lacan considers
psychic ills to arise from the failure to inaugurate the Oedipal
configuration. Taking the "failures of Oedipal identification" as
the source of neurotic symptoms, he thinks it is an error that
"the effects of the complex were first perceived in failures to
resolve it" (1977, 24-25, italics his). Therefore, since for Lacan
entry into the Oedipal triad is synonymous with entry into the
Symbolic, the world of Law, culture, and traditions, there can
be no question of resolution, or of qualifying the need for a
total submission to authority. The normative state for Lacan is
Kay Stockholder 391
one in which the person continues to define himself as subject,

not only to authority in a modern abstract sense, but to a pre
modern, paternally imbued image of authority. Any sense of a
personal and self-regulating conscience arises from distorting
ego images.
Connected to this revision of the Oedipus complex is
Lacan's revision of the castration complex. For Freud, castra
tion fears, originating at the time the boy realizes that the girl
lacks a penis, are mobilized when the Oedipal phase brings
him into competition with his father. A castration complex
occurs when an unsatisfactorily resolved Oedipal configura
tion leaves the person in a continuing fear that deprives him of
his powers, either of his actual sexual potency, or of the psychic
extension of potency as confidence in his powers in relation to
authority. The therapeutic goal is to diminish the fear that is
itself castrating. Lacan, however, moves castration back to the
primordial gap of the mirror stage. That is, it is the human
condition to be castrated, and the possession of a penis
misleads the male into pretending to himself that he isn't.
Therefore, in failing to enter into the Oedipal phase one holds
onto the mirage of phallic power given by ego images. The
therapeutic goal is for the subject to accept that he is castrated,
and so submit to paternal authority in the Oedipal stage as a
prelude to submitting to the Law. The Oedipal phase and the
father's prohibition constitute the Symbolic Law in which the
actual father of the pre-Oedipal Imaginary stage is trans
formed into the Name of the Father of the "field of culture,"
which is identical to the "field of the Other—which, strictly
speaking, is the Oedipus complex" (1973, 204). Therefore one
takes one's place as "subject" in the double and interdepen
dent senses in which Lacan intends the term.11
These revamped conceptions of the Oedipal configura

tion and castration cohere with Lacan's valorization of pre
modern forms of authority, which he expresses as the Name of
the Father, a formulation that equates social and cultural
authority with the paternal. This conception underlies his
vision of those traditional festivals that he equates with "a
cultural normativity bound up from the dawn of history with
the imago of the father" (1977, 22), as well as his scorn for
those émigré therapists "on the other side of the Atlantic" who,
in espousing "the autonomous ego," sold out to the abstract
positivism and objectification of that world (1977, 230, italics his).
In contrast, Freud's ideal involves a conception of a
rational legal authority, of limited jurisdiction and abstracted
away from familial emotions to which one at least presumes
one has freely consented. This is why Freud sees the superego
develop only as the concluding phase of the Oedipal constella
tion. Though he equates the superego with conscience, Freud
does not rest on it whatever hopes he has for the human
species. Being, as Freud puts it, the heir of the Oedipus
complex, the superego not only internalizes the cultural
norms of the society; it also expresses "the most powerful
impulses and most important libidinal vicissitudes of the id"
(1923, 36). The full consequences of Lacan 's absorption of
Freud's conception of the superego into the ego emerge when
he discusses the relations between the superego and the id.
These relations involve the death instinct, another Freudian
formulation that Lacan renegotiates.
In Freud's conception the infantile id combines represen
tations of life-preservative instincts that later, with the help of
the senses and intelligence that Freud calls the "system Pcpt."
become the ego, with representations of erotic drives that are
manifested in varying ways as the child passes through the
infantile sexual stages. In time the id becomes the locus as well
of desires that have been repressed under the weight of social
prohibition, where they combine with anger generated by that
repression, and the "impulses of jealous rivalry against . . .
brother and sisters" (1923, 37). The ego's task is to master the
id because,
if the ego has not succeeded in properly mastering the

Oedipus complex, the energetic cathexis of the latter,
springing from the id will come into operation once
more in the reaction-formation of the ego-ideal. (1923,
39)
However, from the time of Beyond the Pleasure Principle the

erotic drives include a death instinct that complicates the
Kay Stockholder 393
picture. By this Freud means that life itself has a tendency to

rid itself of the tension that constitutes it and return to primal
inertness, a conception that relates to his view that sexual
pleasure consists in release of tension.
In addition, then, to retaining and intensifying the resi
dues of personal history, the id also incorporates the death
instinct and passes it onto the ego. It appears first as aggression
towards others, but, meeting prohibitions from the superego,
this aggression turns back on the self in the form of self
denigration and self-punitive guilt. Furthermore, "the instinct
of destruction is habitually brought into the service of Eros"
(XIX, 41, italics his) when in regressive modes it transforms
love into hate and joins the pre-genital sexual phases to
manifest itself as sadism and masochism.
On the one side of the ego, then, a ravenously libidinous

id has no patience with the tame pleasures ordinary life
affords. On the other side, the superego draws on those early
identifications, along with the destructive energies of the
death instinct, and unites them with parental and social
prohibitions. Therefore, "as the child was once under a
compulsion to obey its parents, so the ego submits to the
categorical imperative of its super-ego" (1923, 48). In various
forms of pathology the superego chastises the ego for the
drives it has repudiated. It becomes a "pure culture of the
death instinct," that "often enough succeeds in driving the ego
into death" (1923, 53). "Helpless in both directions, the ego
defends itself vainly, alike against the instigations of the
murderous id and against the reproaches of the punishing
conscience." Between them is the beleaguered ego, which
"strives to be moral" (1923, 54) while being besieged by the
blind demands of the id's libido, the superego's morally
punitive version of libido, and the demands of the external
world.
However, this beleaguered ego still originates as a "body

ego." Later associated with perception, it finally aligns with
intelligence that can be looked to, if anything can, for rational
assessment of the ways in which the external world can afford
us pleasure or cause us pain. Through its extension in intelli
gence, the ego assesses the viability of our personal and
cultural pasts as guides to the present; the ego, by incorporat

ing some of the id energies into itself and desexualizing or
sublimating them into cultural activity, prevents the death
drive from overwhelming us after we have served Eros' repro
ductive purposes (1923, 47). The ego, if anything does, carves
out some space for the exercise of human freedom. Only it can
negotiate between, on the one hand, our biological species
drives that are concerned neither with our individual well
being nor the quality of our social lives, and, on the other
hand, the past modes of adaptation that are no longer relevant
to our present individual or collective well-being. It follows
that psychoanalytic therapy should be conceived as "an instru
ment to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of
the id" (1923, 56).
The consequence of Lacan 's redefinition of the ego
appears nowhere more starkly than in the spiritual meaning he
attributes to the death instinct. He sees it as the Real, as the
inscription in the human psyche of life's ultimate meaning.
Only in confrontation with death does the subject cast off the
mirror images that compose the ego. Drawing on Kojève's
Hegel lectures, he argues that the master and slave take their
positions by virtue of the former's courage to confront death,
while the latter's fear keeps him slave to mirror images. Death
is what exists in the void opened with the onset of the mirror
stage; it exists in gaps, gaps that are, as we will see in the next
section, analogous to the gaps in Saussurean linguistic theory;
it exists in the gap between the subject and the ego to which it
is, as Lacan often says, eccentric. Since the true self, one's
subjecthood, does not exist in any of the known categories that
constitute life, it can exist only in confrontation with death.
Only as a kind of non-being can the subject know itself. The
blank emptiness of complete negation is what the blank face of
the analyst should elicit in the analysand, who thereby con
fronts his own being in relation to Death. Therapy becomes a
spiritual journey and the therapist a spiritual healer who "may
accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the 'Thou art
that, ' in which is revealed to him the cipher of his mortal
destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring
him to that point where the real journey begins" (1977, 7).
This "real journey" is a version of a Platonic journey from true
Kay Stockholder 395
opinion to knowledge (1988b, 20), and it is begun not in the

company of Socrates as therapist, but of Diotima, Socrates'
teacher. As Lacan puts it in his enigmatic way, "Castration
means that jouissance must be refused, so that it can be reached
on the inverted ladder (l'échelle renversée) of the Law of desire."
In Lacan's formulation, death is not biological death, but
is rather the primordial void that opens the mirror stage. This
conception accords with his revision of the Oedipus complex,
in which he posits Oedipus at Colonus rather than Oedipus Rex as
his founding literary text.12 Because Oedipal conflicts cannot
be resolved in life, they merge into a confrontation with death,
a confrontation that distinguishes human from animal life in
that it reveals, in Heideggerian fashion, man's "being for
death" (1977, 104). When Oedipus, accompanied by Theseus,
seeks his grave in the grove outside of Athens, he becomes the
spiritual founder of Athenian civilization. Lacan equates him
self with 'Truth" when he has this figure say that Sophocles did
not imagine Oedipus pursued by the "bleeding hounds" that
followed Orestes, "certain as he was of finding with him at the
sinister meeting at Colonus the hour of truth" (E. 123). Thus
having converted to a spiritual quest what for Freud is a
psychological concomitant of a biological drive, Lacan rede
fines the therapist from a Freudian man of science to a wise
man who combines Christ-like love with Hegelian knowledge:
Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this

century, that of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the loftiest,
because the undertaking of the psychoanalyst acts in our
time as a mediator between the man of care and the
subject of absolute knowledge. (1977, 105)
But Lacan also revises Hegel, who equates absolute knowledge

with consciousness. Criticizing Hegel for, like modern scien
tists, neglecting mystic states, he says that "the hour of truth
must strike" elsewhere than in consciousness, so that the
therapeutic mystic initiation also becomes part of a mystic
historical unfolding (1977, 297).
I want to conclude this section by dismantling a false
dichotomy that Lacan draws between a reified ego and a true
self, when he mockingly equates the ego to a speaking desk (E.
131-35). This dichotomy also lies behind various postmodern

accounts of the ego's social construction, which seem to
render the Freudian ego naive. It rests on a simplification and
falsification of the autonomy that Freud attributes to the ego.
His conception of autonomy does not mean that the ego is self
originating or all of a piece. As we have seen, Freud in
Mourning and Melancholia (1917, 249-250), conceived of it as
being composed initially of sediments of infantile identifica
tions, and later of identifications and introjections remaining
from lost love relationships. Though it is thus formulated as a
composite, it is not a collection of disjointed fragments.
Freud's conception of ego autonomy emerges most clearly in
analogy to the body. At conception, our bodies take form from
the genetic materials of our parents, and from the womb
onwards they grow from the nutrients we imbibe. As Lacan,
citing common knowledge, points out, not a single cell re
mains in our bodies beyond seven years. That we generally
remain recognizable to ourselves and others throughout these
changes suggests that our bodies are formally constituted by an
organizing principle, inscribed in our DNA. But even if one
should become unrecognizable to a friend from the deep past,
the immune system still recognizes and rejects organs that are
foreign to it. That it does so suggests that one might reasonably
talk about a body identity beyond the level of consciousness.13
Whether the unique organization and inner integration
of our bodies on this biological level has any bearing on the
uniqueness of each person's proprioceptive awareness obvi
ously cannot be known, for we have no way of comparing our
normal internal sense of ourselves to that of other persons. We
do have such a sense however, as we avoid collisions, seek
pleasure, adjust the distance we place between ourselves and
others. That we may lose it under pathological conditions, and
that it will dissolve in time, in no way challenges its reality in an
ordinary sense. Similarly, on the psychic level the ego, initially
composed of the sediments of diverse experiences, acquires a
mode of taking in new ones. Increasingly it acquires power to
select the encounters and experiences that will later contrib
ute to its composition. To use Holland's apt formulation, it
has, in analogy to the proprioceptive sense and to the body's
immune response, an identity theme.14
Kay Stockholder 397
That there can be variations on this theme, that it can

unravel in time, does not thereby cancel its reality while it
endures. That it is capable of different orchestrations, and that
its different strands may come apart does not logically entail
the claim that it is therefore "really" a disjointed collection of
fragments. For the time it endures its reality is as secure as the
reality of a symphony while it is being played. The symphony
cannot exist without the score that gives evidence of a com
poser, the musicians, the instruments, the hall, and all the vast
network of social institutions that produce and maintain them.
But the music is not reducible to what generates it. Between
the discord of the musicians tuning their instruments and the
silence of the emptying hall, the music has its reality. This kind
of autonomy, and this kind of identity, is sufficient to support a
Freudian conception of the ego. Only a religious or mystic
perspective equates reality with permanence, or requires an
absolute divide between mind and matter to claim any degree
of individual autonomy.
III. Language and the Unconscious
Lacanians argue that Lacan's emphasis on language brings

out the true significance of Freud's "talking cure," and that
Lacan's theories about the nature of the psyche, the uncon
scious, and the human condition are proved by his linguistics.
As well, they claim that Lacan's emphasis on the arbitrary
relation between the signifier and the signified that he takes
from Saussurean linguistics overcomes Freudian determinism.
However, it is precisely because Freud grounded his theory of
language in a normative conception of physical reality that he
was able to preserve a conceptual space for a degree of human
freedom, while Lacan's theory leaves none. Through his
theory of language, Lacan substitutes for Freud's stabilizing
biological ground a phenomenological version of the chain of
being. This section will tease out the assumptions about
language that lie behind Freud's comments about the relation
of the unconscious to language, and, comparing Freud's
arguments to Lacan's, it will discuss the philosophical and
political implications that shape Lacan's psycho-linguistic theory.
Contrary to Lacan's claims, Freud's conception of the

"talking cure" has no need of Lacan 's version of Saussurean
linguistics to make it intelligible. It depends on the same kinds
of oppositions between manifest and latent content, and
primary and secondary process that govern the Interpretation of
Dreams. These oppositions are consistent with his relatively few,
but hardly casual, comments on words and thought. Freud's
understanding of language can be expressed in the vocabulary
of signifiers, signifieds, and signs, but not in a way that
supports Lacan 's interpretation of Saussure.
In "Words and Things," an appendix to The Unconscious,
Freud grounds the acquisition of language in bodily experi
ence. Words, he says, combine innervatory images, or the sense
of muscular tension used in producing them, with the sound
image, and with sensations from the organs of speech after we
have spoken. As a child learns to speak, these impressions are
doubled; it hears the sound image, experiences its own bodily
movements in making the sound, and hears the product of its
own effort (1915, 210). Therefore, both the sound value and
the meaningfulness of words are rooted in the visual, acoustic,
and kinesthetic bodily experience. At the same time the sound
image becomes linked to object-associations, what Lacan would
call the signified. These object associations also have visual,
tactile, and acoustic dimensions, so that objects associated with
the sound image carry the multiple sense associations of the
sound itself. This formulation suggests that specific sounds
that have acquired a vague sense of meaningfulness transform
themselves into signs, or words, gradually. First the child hears
a sound, unattached to a concept. In Saussurean terms, upon
repetition the sound becomes a signifier at the same time as it
acquires a signified and becomes a sign. Contrary to Lacan, the
relation between signified and signified, though arbitrary, is
stabilized because the child repeatedly hears the sounds in
contexts circumscribed by the language system.
Signs may be associated with various emotions, depending
on the particular environment in which the child experienced
the sound, either before or after it acquired linguistic signifi
cance. Though Freud says that the associations with the sound
itself, or the signifier, are limited, he adds that the associations
Kay Stockholder 399
with the object, or signifieds, are unlimited (1915, 214). Freud

relies mainly on the open-endedness of the unconscious
associations with signifieds for his therapeutic claim for free
association. In the unconscious there exist "thing-presenta
tions" rather than "word-presentations." Through displace
ment and condensation, visual images of objects, along with
associated feelings that have not found a way to consciousness,
are linked to words. This process constitutes primary process
thought, our earliest mental process and that which produces
our dreams. Verbal images constitute the preconscious, through
which the primary visual images must pass to become con
scious.
Freud's discussion of schizophrenia develops the relation

among these various levels. The schizophrenic ceases to desire
objects, but retains the "wor^presentations" of them. "What we
have permissibly called the conscious presentation of the
object can now be split up into the presentation of the word
and the presentation of the thing" (italics Freud's, 1915, 201).
The schizophrenic tries to regain the lost objects by concen
trating on words, but losing access to unconscious feelings,
rests content with words instead of things. This abnormal
phenomenon leads Freud to assert that normal functioning
involves an intimate relationship between the thing, or visual
image in the present, and the mnemic images from the past.
Thus,
the conscious presentation comprises the presentation

of the thing plus the presentation of the word belonging
to it, while the unconscious presentation is the presenta
tion of the thing alone. (1915, 201)
This kind of unconscious thinking in pictures cannot repre

sent relationships. Only words allow for expression of relations
between things; therefore the role of the talking cure is to
allow for representation of relationships that can be repre
sented in no other way, but which nonetheless exist apart from
the words that represent them. Words and language are at one
end of a mental structure that works in two directions:
It is a general truth that our mental activity moves in two

opposite directions: either it starts from the instincts and
passes though the system Ucs., to conscious thought
activity; or, beginning with an instigation from outside, it
passes through the system Cs. and Pes. till it reaches the
Ucs. cathexes of the ego and objects. (1915, 204)
In its journey to consciousness, an unconscious thought "is

carried out on some material which remains unknown" (1923,
20), but in order to become conscious it must first be con
nected to word-presentations in the preconscious, which are
memory traces of earlier perceptions that can become con
scious only through word associations. While verbal formula
tions pervade all aspects of consciousness, our sense of their
significance derives from elsewhere. Freud writes that the
superego, like the ego, consists in word presentations, and has
its origin in "things heard," "but the cathectic energy does not
reach these contents of the super-ego from auditory percep
tion (instruction or reading) but from sources in the id"
(italics Freud's, 1923, 52). If we keep in mind that the
superego has its roots in the id, and that the social ideals of
family, class, or nation (1914, 101) it supports are infused with
the narcissism that originates in bodily pleasure, then we
repress those libidinous impulses that conflict with the cultural
and ethical ideas that the other libidinous forces inform with
something equivalent to parental force (1914, 93). As a conse

quence the competing drives are deprived of the words that
alone can bring them to consciousness.
As we have seen, Freud's discussion of language merges
with his inquiry into the nature of the unconscious and into
the process by which language, in analysis and elsewhere, links
what has risen to consciousness to the preconscious and the
unconscious. There is something behind language then, and
in the talking cure words function as the conduit through
which whatever is behind them gets translated into compre
hensible form. Though the child is surrounded by language as
it passes through all of Freud's infantile stages, the prohibi
tions of its Oedipal designs are registered in body gesture and
facial expression, as well as language. In Freud's formulation,
the child's feelings and ideas predate and are separate from
Kay Stockholder 401
the words that later express them. Even a strictly verbal

prohibition, such as "don't rub yourself' must be regarded as a
speech act which derives significance from the action that is
being prohibited. To elicit associations from an analysand is to
ask him to trace verbal elements of his dream account to the
unconscious images and feelings that cathected to the word

representations of the pre-conscious. Freud, like Lacan, ad
vises the therapist to listen with a hovering attention to the
hesitations, gaps, and breaks in the flow of speech, but his
point is that these gaps show the presence of feelings and
images that have not reached, but are pressing towards, verbal
expression.
Language is important, not because the unconscious is
structured like a language, but rather because it isn't. To
transmute feelings and visual images into words that articulate
relations that are lacking in the primary process, makes
repudiated drives and images available to the ego for rational
scrutiny, and makes possible reasonable decisions about what
gratifications are and are not possible. This process of subject
ing primary process material to the relational articulation and
subordination that only the grammatical forms of language
provide, is to let ego be where id was. It is because the rational
structures of language are separate from the unconscious that
language can mediate between our primal drives and the
cultural forms that those drives have helped to create.
This formulation by itself attributes to Freud too sanguine
a view of human rationality. Merely bringing the previously
non-verbal into verbal forms is no guarantee of rational
assessment. The delusions that can come from the combined
force of verbal forms infused with non-verbal energies are
suggested when he describes the part played by word presenta
tions:
By their interposition internal thought-processes are

made into perceptions. It is like a demonstration of the
theorem that all knowledge has its origin in external
perception. When a hypercathexis of the process of
thinking takes place, thoughts are actually perceived—as
if they came from without—and are consequently held
to be true, (italics Freud's, 1923, 23)
The links suggested here between the verbal and the pre
verbal might seem to support Lacan's assertion that Freud
shows us that all knowledge is paranoiac. However, Lacan in
this assertion takes from Freud only one aspect of a contradic
tion that Freud refused to abandon.
While the dependence of thought on the irrational non

verbal that permeates it undermines confidence in rationality
in one way, in another way it supports it. In Freud's bi-polar
model, the force of the non-verbal can distort the rational, the
rational can also contain and direct the non-verbal. Freud
relates thought processes in general to displacements. Compa

rable to the way in which vengeful feelings towards one person
can be transferred onto another, thought processes constitute
a form of transference. "If thought processes in the wider sense
are to be included among these displacements, then the
activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of
erotic motive forces" (1923, 45). It is important to note that
Freud posits an activity of thinking that is independent of its
energy source, just as he maintains the dualistic model for the
self-preservative and erotic drives, even though the latter may
distort the former. It is this model that permits Freud to say
that our mental apparatus is "first and foremost a device
designed for mastering excitations which would otherwise be
felt as distressing or would have pathogenic effects. Working
them over in the mind" (1914, 85) helps drain away otherwise
disturbing excitations. To be worked over in the mind, excita
tions must be represented by words, which allow them also to
be tamed and assuaged. This direct link between the verbal
representations that are worked over and the drives and
desires that permeate the words, in combination with their
separate origin and nature, allows Freud to believe in the
possibility that men like Copernicus, Darwin, and (modesdy)
he himself can make truth claims even when, or perhaps
especially when, they expose the fragility of the rationality they
use. It also suggests that ideas in the mind can in some way
satisfy the drives they represent, and channel non-verbal
energies into mind-chosen purposes. Freud's "talking cure" is
based on a conception of the mind as capable of using
Kay Stockholder 403
language to oscillate and arbitrate betwen the demands of id

and ego, or of erotic and survival drives.
Implicit in Freud's writings is a conception of language
that allows for Lacan's extended sense of it as equivalent to the
Symbolic, or the realm of social structures and culture in
general. In this extended sense, too, for Freud our relation to
language is double. On the one hand it speaks us, insofar as
the controlling cultural ideas pass into us through our parents.
Our primal drives represent themselves in terms of those ideas,
and in doing so shape our id and our superego. On the other
hand, our ego forces, beleaguered as they are, struggle in the
nets of la langue for a place from which to speak their parole. To
adapt Noam Chomksy's terms, it is the ego that manipulates
the language into which it is inserted, and creates a new
sentence with each utterance. To extend metaphorically
Chomsky's formulation, in the Symbolic the ego creates a new
integration of the controlling cultural ideas that constitute
aspects of itself, its id and superego. This new integration does
not account fully for its constitution because its roots remain
in the pre-cultural, biological drives that remain as shaping
forces.
Such a conception is individualistic. That is, it does not

deny that we are constituted in cultural forms that pre-exist us,
but it values those aspects of the self that can win some
freedom from them. So conceived, the self battles simulta
neously against pressures from the external world and their
inner psychic representatives. In accord with his Enlighten
ment views, Freud conceives the ego as able to take a stand on
what it realistically conceives as its own good, conceived
individually or collectively, and from that perspective assess the
value of its inherited culture.
This conception does not address the meaning of life. At
those self-authenticating moments of struggle or of height
ened involvement in activities or relationships, the question of
its meaning does not arise. Yearnings for a more embracing
and enduring sense of meaning, one that will assuage the fear
of the void that can open at any time beneath the quotidien,
Freud explains as nostalgia. For him this nostalgia derives most
immediately from the infantile, pre-individualized, oceanic
state, and, more remotely, from the realm of inanimate matter

to which our biological beings seek a return.
It is upon these vague yearnings, ones Freud dismisses as
the lingering traces of a less mature humanity, that Lacan
builds his entire system, from the primordial gap of the mirror
stage to his conception of language.15 In discussing the mirror
stage, Lacan says that the infant's jubilance in front of the
mirror marks the moment at which "the I is precipitated in a
primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of
identification with the other, and before language restores to it,
in the universal, its function as subject" (italics mine, 1977,
42). The term 'restores' implies that in becoming a subject in
the Symbolic, Lacan 's version of Hegel's civic institutions that
constitute the universal for those who live within them, one is
restored to a state prior to the "original dereliction" of the
mirror stage, a state, by implication, of primal innocence in a
mysterious, self-authenticating domain that Lacan refers to as
the Real.
The meaning of this illusive term can be surmised from

Lacan's understanding of language. He talks about language
on two levels: the first has to do with Saussurean linguistics,
and the second has to do with an extension of those linguistics
to "the universal," or the entire realm of social, political, and
cultural institutions. Lacan adapts the Saussurean conception
of language as based on an arbitrary, that is, conventional,
relation of the signifier, or sound image, to the signified, or
conception for which the sound image stands. Saussure writes
his formula as s/S, that is signified over signifier, and Lacan
reverses that, using the formula S/s to emphasize the primacy
of the signifier. This changed emphasis signals Lacan's depar
ture from Saussure 's formulation in which a signifier can be
such only in relation to a signified because they are related as
are the two sides of a coin.16 For Lacan, and on one level for
Saussure, meaning does not reside in a specific sound image,
but only in the systematic differences of a particular sound
image from other sound images possible in the language.
There are two points Lacan makes about the human condition
on the basis of this conception. The first is that the act of
conscious speaking depends on an unconscious network that
Kay Stockholder 405
not only allows one to speak, but in a sense speaks one. The
second is that meaning arises not from positive or free
standing ideas and concepts, but only from the systematic
differences that constitute them. If meaning resides in a system
of differences, and differences are kinds of nothings, empty
spaces, as it were, then our sense of meaning arises out of gaps,
emptiness, voids that we spend our days vainly trying to paper
over. Lacan equates facing these linguistic voids or gaps with
facing death.
Having defined language as a system of differences, Lacan
calls all systems of differences language. He defines the Symbol
as a system of differences and therefore as a language. As with
language in the narrower sense, one is born into and irrevoca
bly shaped and defined by the world of law and culture into
which one is born. The two implications of the narrower
conception of language carry over to this wider one. In feeling
oneself to be an autonomous ego in charge of one's action and
capable of self-creation, one is deceived. 'The unconscious is
structured like a language," or "the unconscious is the dis
course of the Other," or "language is the condition for the
unconscious," or "the unconscious is language" (Lacan, 1989,
15), because the unconscious is comprised only by the cultural
network which alone confers meaning on any single compo
nent of it. There are in the unconscious no drives, no pre
linguistic, pre-Oedipal, non-verbal traces, that are carried
through language into consciousness and that thereby give us
our own ground or perspectival point from which to organize
the welter of experience and information that constitutes our
world (in Chomskian terms, to create our unique sentences).
The culture speaks the person entirely; all thought, knowl
edge, and action that we think of as autonomous and purpo
sive, presumably including Lacan's own, arise from the uncon
scious cultural inscriptions of which we are constituted. We
resist this knowledge because it undermines both the ego
images deriving from the mirror stage by which we protect
ourselves against submersion in the cultural matrix, and our
sense of reality, which derives from the system of role differen
tiation by which roles, most importantly and fundamentally
gender roles, are constituted.
This conception of language relies almost entirely upon

Saussure's la langue, that is, on the systematic grid from which
speech acts arise, rather than la parole. For Saussure,speaking is
"an individual act. It is willful and intellectual," and "the
speaker uses the language code for expressing his own thought"
(1966, 14). In speaking, one uses signs which differ from the
signifieds and signifiers of which they are composed. As a
system of signifiers "language has neither ideas nor sounds
that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual
and phonic differences that have issued from the system"
(1966, 120). But Saussure continues, "the statement that
everything in language is negative is true only if the signified
and the signifier are considered separately; when we consider
the sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in its
own class" (1966, 120). Though the relation of sign to referent
is, like that of signified to signifier, arbitrary, in speaking one
draws on the positive present context in which one deploys
signs. Though Lacan claims that Freud would have concurred
with his psycholinguistic understanding had he known about
Saussure, in fact Saussure's formulations better accommodate
Freudian than Lacanian theory. If one translates Freud's
comments on language into Saussurean terms, it is the level of
parole, of speech and signs, that would have concerned him.
That is, the word representations that compose the uncon
scious would derive from the particular experiences of the
person. These representations would be "signs" rather than
signifiers, since they represent drives and desires. The ego's
enterprise would be to carve out of the language grid a system
of signs by which it could harness the system of language to its
own conscious purposes. Its "I" would remain its own, despite
also being the means by which other egos designate them
selves. Its task would be to stabilize the shifting contexts and
control the polysemy of language sufficiently for ts own present
purposes.
In contrast, Lacan rarely speaks of the level of parole, and
regularly calls a signifier what Saussure would call a sign.17 An
example of this is Lacan's argument that the signifiers 'gentle
men' and 'ladies' written on otherwise identical doors proves
the entirely conventional nature of gender distinction. How
ever, in Saussurean terms the words are signs, "Ladies" as a
Kay Stockholder 407
sound image being the signifier, and the concept female being
the signified. While the sound image and the concept take
their meaning negatively from systematic differentials, the sign
has the positive force of a deictic, taking its meaning from the
immediate context. Similarly, Lacan undermines the stabiliz
ing role of the "shifters," such as pronouns, seeing them as
illusory as the ego images that alienated one in the mirror
stage. To locate oneself in space and time by means of an "I" in
language is to substitute a signifier for the "Real" and to be
forever at the mercy of its slidings. Therefore Lacan defines
the signifier as that which represents the subject for another
signifier. That is, each person plays the assigned cultural roles
for each other while remaining unaware that there is no "I" to
play them.
While Freud's conception of the superego accommodates
the importance of the roles made available by society to the
formation of the ego, within his framework the choices of roles
from the range presented by a given culture, and the manner
of their enactment, are expressive of the ego's strategy for
negotiating between external and internal demands.18
For Freud, our roles in life are stabilized by our uncon
scious and libidinal investments in them. Once again, Lacan's
argument that language alone constitutes the unconscious
means that there can be only "nothing," in its mystic sense, on
the other side of the wall beyond language. Both Freud and
Lacan would have therapists listen to language for clues to the
concealments that reveal unacknowledged desire, but where
Freud would be listening for the fragments of desire that had
been driven out of consciousness by the archaic fears of
reprisal that constitute the castration complex at the Oedipal
stage, Lacan would be listening for the fragmented images
from the mirror stage that the person retained in fear of
yielding himself, not to desires, but to Desire.
For Lacan, Desire is always desire for death, rather than
for the object one thinks one desires, and death represents the
nothingness that lies beyond the ego. Beyond language there
is the Real, the undifferentiated desire that constitutes the
incomprehensible ecstasy of St. Teresa. For Lacan all Desire is
desire for death, which he equates with something beyond the
frozen images that constitute the ego, and which we glimpse
only in the shifting interstices of language. Thus language

restores one to one's function as a subject, which is to know
one's mortality and consequently to acknowledge subordina
tion to the structures of authority that constitute a culture. The
culture is master, and the alternative to enslavement to it is
death. To accept death is to accept castration, which means
accepting the primordial gap that divides human from animal
life, and that is the basis of language.
For Lacan, then, the void out of which linguistic meaning
arises is the void out of which creation arises, the void from
which man flees, but which signifies the spiritual fulfillment
that is the meaning within the apparent arbitrariness of life.
Because this conception of the human psyche and language
leaves the individual no foundation for self-regulation, Lacan,
as we have seen, substitutes for the self-preservative instincts
that grounds the Freudian ego a transcendent Platonic author
ity.
This principle of authority, which he calls the Name of the

Father or the Phallus, alone stabilizes a culture. Without this
authority cultural roles lose their signification and merely
drift. On the level of language, narrowly conceived, it is this
authority presumably that lies behind a dictionary, or the
French Academy, without which language becomes destabi
lized and gives way to glissant, the tendency for signifieds to
slide beneath signifiers, or for meaning to slide from one
signifier to another according to the vagaries of condensation
and displacement, or metaphor and metonomy in dream or
symptom formation. Without it there is nothing to call the
subject back to itself from immersion in an endless play of
mirror images. By implication, without it language itself disap
pears, because there is then nothing to hold in place the
systematic differences that constitute it. On the level of the
family, the sexual differentiation that constitutes it, and that
carries significance only in relation to the Symbolic, also
disappears.
Because Lacan in this way locates all signification in the
Symbolic, that is, in the conventional rather than the natural,
many Marxist and Feminist commentators claim him as their
ally, assuming that the conventional equates with the change
Kay Stockholder 409
able and the natural with the unchangeable. But these terms
do not carry such implications for Lacan. For Freud, it is quite
the reverse, for though we may be in the grip of our biology, or
the natural, there is nothing sacrosanct about it. While in
Civilization and its Discontents Freud makes it clear that, indi
vidually and collectively, we pay a big price for imposing too
heavy restraints upon our animal desires, he nonetheless
asserts that some restraints on and rechannelings of animal
energies are the sine qua non of civilization. And though he
implied that biology constituted women's destiny in so far as
they conformed to the cultural norm, his theory of bi-sexuality
also makes it clear that no individual does conform to that
norm. Though he was more prepared for men than for women
to challenge the limits of nature, his theory in no way pre
cluded their doing so, and threatened no punishment for their
doing so beyond that which fell to civilized humanity, or was
imposed by men. Therefore it is theoretically easy to be a
Freudian feminist; one need only accept Freud's description of
the psychic process entailed in violating the norm of genital
passivity and its metaphorical extension into conventional role
behavior, and reject his implied criticism of such women who
remain in the phallic, or clitoral, stage. The result of such a
thought strategy is a vision of active and enterprising women
who suffer instinctual deprivation no more, and no less, than
do men in a state of civilized life.19 In contrast, it is theoretically
inconsistent to be a Lacanian feminist or Marxist despite the
many feminists and Marxists who invoke Lacan.20 They argue
that his Saussurean linguistics, extended to embrace culture as
a whole, exposes the conventional basis of current social
practices and of the ideologies that support them. As well, they
argue that his view of the ego as a collection of fragments
exposes the deep ways in which conventional social practices
and supporting ideologies constitute what we mistakenly as
sume to be our autonomous selves. These views also equate
exposing the mechanism by which human subjectivity is cre
ated with opening the way to change both what passes for
human nature, as well as the social and cultural practices that
sustain the late capitalist version of patriarchal society.21 These
commentators omit from Lacan's account of the psyche his
assertion that all knowledge is paranoiac. This view follows

from his premise that knowledge is what the ego seeks in its
efforts to achieve mastery over others and, by extension, the
world. Knowledge is what the ego uses to avoid knowing
castration and death. Therefore it follows that any effort to
recast social forms by knowing their operation must manifest
the culture it seeks to know and that such efforts themselves
are symptomatic of the ego-ridden monstrosity of modern

times.
The invocation of Lacan in support of these radicalisms

rests on a misunderstanding of Lacan's view of language and
its relation to his Symbolic register, his conception of the
unconscious, and of the Oedipal configuration. These misun
derstandings, in turn, stem from a central misapprehension of
Lacan's notion of convention and tradition.
The way in which Lacan converts the arbitrary and con

ventional into the Necessary and Fateful can be seen in
another aspect of his renegotiation of Saussurean concepts.
For Saussure it does not follow from the arbitrary relation of
signifier to signified that language lacks stability. He says that
though the "linguistic sign is arbitrary," language cannot be
"organized at will" because of the time factor. Because lan
guage exists only in relation to a community of speakers, and
these communities exist in time, "language is no longer free,
for time will allow the social forces at work on it to carry out
their effects" (1966, 78). Saussure anticipates no danger that
the conventional nature of language threatens hermeneutic
chaos because language is stabilized in social forms. However,
Lacan, by emphasizing the signifier rather than the concept
signified, and by ignoring parole along with the sign, creates a
specter of a linguistic or hermeneutic chaos about to over
whelm humanity. Since he also broadens language to include
all social forms, and eliminates human biology as a stabilizing
center for the swirl of cultural signification, this linguistic
chaos represents total chaos. It also represents the psychologi
cal chaos of psychosis, for Lacan argues that it is Schreber's
failure to symbolize his real father as the Name of the Father
that occasions the "hole that... opens up in the signified" and
that
Kay Stockholder 411
set off the cascade of reshapings of the signifier from

which the increasing disaster of the imaginary proceeds,
to the point at which the level is reached at which
signifier and signified are stabilized in the delusional
metaphor. (1977, 217).
For Lacan the conventional nature of tradition does not free
us; quite the contrary. The conventional acquires a desperate

importance because it is all that remains between us and
chaos. For Freud this danger does not exist because, on the
one hand, cultural convention, being rooted in our biological
drives, will not slide away. On the other hand, it is subject to
modification by human intelligence in so far as it becomes
more repressive than civilization requires. We can, if we like,
try to alter even our biology.22 We may make a mess, but we will
be disturbing no universal principle. Lacan on the other hand,
having denaturalized human affairs, sacrelizes them instead.
In a version of anti-Enlightenment argument, he sees the
conventional and arbitrary nature of language and culture as
the vehicle by which the divine manifests itself in human
affairs,23 replacing the Freudian biological ground with a tran
scendental sky hook from which dangles human society.24
This move takes its most definitive form in the concatena
tion of Lacan 's discussion of language with biblical references
to the Word, or Logos, Levi-Strauss' discussion of the elemen
tary structure of kinship, and Mauss' study of the gift in
primitive societies. In a discussion about whether "Logos" in
the Gospel of Saint John most approximates "word" in the
sense of speech or language, Lacan asserts that when language
is correctly understood, it is clear that the creating Logos of
the gospel refers to language:
What's at issue is a succession of absences and presences,

or rather of presence on a background of absence, of
absence constituted by the fact that a presence can exist.
There is no absence in the real. There is only absence if
you suggest that there may be a presence there when
there isn't one. In the in principio, I am proposing to
locate the word in so far as it creates the opposition, the
contrast. It is the original contradiction of 0 and 1.

(1988b, 313)
Here Lacan relates the Saussurean conception of language as a

system of differences to the Christian conception of creation
out of a void. The implication is that the nature of language
replicates, and thereby makes pervasively present in human
life, the very principle of creation. In this way Lacan brings
Saussure's conception of the conventional nature of
the relation of signifier to signified, along with his own

broadened use of Saussurean linguistics, into alignment
with a new version of the pre-Enlightenment Adamic
conception of language, prevalent through the seven
teenth century, against which Saussure argued. In that
conception, the relation between signifier and signified
is not arbitrary; the linguistic sign is not double but
unitary. Still retaining the divine nature of their com
mon origin, languages were in fundamental accord with
nature, indeed they were themselves part of creation
and nature. They were divine and natural, not human
and conventional. (Aarsleff 1982, 25)
In the eighteenth century Condillac and others, following

Locke, challenged the older conception with a human and
conventional view of language, a view that Saussure helped to
revive after it lost ground to German nineteenth Century
Romantic neo-Adamic conceptions (Arsleff 1982, 19).
In the name of rescuing Freud from the contaminants
introduced by his North American followers, Lacan both
subverts Saussure's Enlightenment views and then renders
them an instrument by which to subvert Freud's. By reversing
Saussure's notation, emphasizing the signifier over the signi
fied and more or less ignoring the sign, Lacan twists Saussure's
Enlightenment conception of language into a new version of
the Adamic conception.25 For Lacan, while words as such do
not carry an intrinsic and divinely insured connection to their
referents, the differential system, whereby meaning emerges
from the gaps or absences rather than being carried by sounds
in themselves, becomes an image or expression of a cosmic
Kay Stockholder 413
ontological truth. The significance of this move appears in

Lacan 's interpretation of Freud's anecdote of his grandson's
spool game. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud gives as an
example of the repetition compulsion the game in which his
grandson threw away and retrieved a spool on a string, while
saying "o/a." As Freud interpreted it, "o" and "a" were the
child's efforts to say "fort/da," in reference to his mother's
presence and absence (Freud 1921, 14-17). Ignoring the role
of the thing, the spool, altogether, Lacan redescribes this
moment as the child's fateful entry into the Symbolic. The
child acquires the word, but loses the thing because the word,
or the symbol "manifests itself first of all as the murder of the
thing" (1977,104), just as taking one's place in the Symbolic by
means of the shifter "I" obliterates one's primordial being.26 As
in the paradox of language in which presence is a manifesta
tion of absence, so the presence of life manifests the absence
of death, "from which [the subject's] existence takes on all the
meaning it has" (1977, 105).
The presence or absence of the spool becomes an ana
logue for the primal absence, then presence, of the Logos.
That is why Lacan uses St. Teresa's mystic ecstasy, beyond words
or even the soul's understanding, as an exemplar of the
jouissance that forever eludes us in our quest for pleasure, for
sexual gratification, or for love.27
The truth of St. Teresa's ecstasy that goes beyond lan
guage, and the means of an approach to it, is inscribed in
language itself. This religious understanding of language lies
behind the "human mystery" (1977, 68) into which Lacan
translates the Oedipus Complex, thereby purporting to ex
plain the operation of spirit in human affairs. In Lacan 's
conception, language preexists man, rather than arising from
the genetic endowment by which human creatures adapt to
their environment. "Man speaks . . . but it is because the
symbol has made him man." Language, then, is the gift, for
which man has incurred a "Great Debt whose economy Rabelais,
in a famous metaphor, extended to the stars themselves"
(1977, 67). Man's indebtedness for the gift of language, that is,
for the gift of his humanity, is inscribed in the "elementary
structures of kinship" as conceived by Levi-Strauss. Just as
language depends on a structure of absences and presences, so
kinship depends on the primary difference of male and

female, represented by the absence or presence of the phallus.
Kinship structures then become a language, or rather they are
the language in the broader conception that makes us human.
Whereas nature is "abandoned to the laws of mating," our
indebtedness to the Word that makes us human is reinscribed
in the prohibition of incest and the consequent exchange of

women:
the inviolable Debt is the guarantee that the

which wives and goods are embarked will br
their point of departure in a never-failing c
women and other goods, all carrying an iden
(1977,68).
All individuals, with or without a penis, are castr

meaning, both on the literal level of language and
general, resides not in the thing itself, but in t
between having and not having it. On this diffe
the inscription of all social roles which alone co
our identity. On the Symbolic level, the Phallus s
initial difference upon which all other cultural d
therefore meaning, depends. The Phallus equates
of the Father, or the principle of authority, beca
roles not only sustain good social order but huma
François Roustang puts it,
In abandoning the social, without which th

has no support, Lacan is thus forced to s
speech, to give it a certain power. He is also
substantify language, and claim that "the co
serving the duration of the fleeting . . . eng
thing" and that it is "the world of words w
the world of things"; in short he is forced to
the theology of Creation through the Word
Levi-Strauss, like Saussure, has no such intention

criticizes him for not subscribing to his own de
Levi-Straussian formulas. He says that Levi-Strau
Kay Stockholder 415
is afraid that the autonomy of the symbolic register will

give rise to a masked transcendentalism once again, for
which, as regards his affinities, his personal sensibility,
he feels only fear and aversion. In other words, he is
afraid that after we have shown God out of one door, he
will bring him back in by the other. He doesn't want the
symbol, even in the extraordinarily purified form in
which he offers us it, to be only a re-apparition, under a
mask, of God. (1988b, 35)
Lacan's mystic conception of language and of culture

stands behind his conception of therapeutic cure. Whereas for
Freud cure consists in getting people to settle for ordinary
human unhappiness, and to go on about their business of
seeking their pleasures as best they can both individually and
collectively, for Lacan cure consists in readying oneself to
receive mystic wisdom. The job of the therapist is to open the
ears of the analysand to what the Vedic text says: "the divine
voice cause [d] to be heard in the thunder: Submission, gift,
grace. Da da da. For Prajapâti replies to all: 'You have heard
me.'" (1977, 107).28 His task is to unravel the "hieroglyphics of
hysteria . . . enigmas of inhibition, oracles of anxiety—talking
arms of character, seals of self-punishment, disguises of perver
sion" so as to deliver "the imprisoned meaning, from the
revelation of the palimpsest to the given word of the mystery
and to the pardon of speech" (1977, 69-70). Quoting a
thirteenth century mystic, Angelus Silesius, Lacan says what is
really at issue at the end of analysis is
twilight, an imaginary decline of the world, and even an

experience at the limit of depersonalization. That is when
the contingent falls away—the accidental, the trauma, the
hitches of history—And it is being which then comes to be
constituted." (1988b, 232, italics Lacan's)
Whatever view one takes of Lacan's mystic psychotherapy,

its truth is not assured by Lacan's fallacious claims for the
mirror stage. Furthermore, it is not in the Freudian Field. One
may or may not appreciate the ambience of Lacan's blend of
Christian and Buddhist mystic themes, but they do not under

write Lacan's interpretation of Freud, nor, conversely, does
disbelief in them prove Freud right and Lacan wrong. It is
ironical, though, that Lacan's thought is presented as though
it befriended political or gender liberation when it valorizes
the political quietism he associates with traditional cultures. It
is also ironical that Freud's dualism and biological determin
ism, for which Lacanians blame him, align him with individual
ism, rationalism, and free choice even though his work called
into question some of their conceptual underpinnings. How
ever that may be, Freud's conception of the psyche rests on a
fundamentally Enlightenment formulation of human reason
and knowledge, while Lacan's revision of Freud depends on
what those partial to him would call Wisdom, and what those
outside of his ball field would call anti-Enlightenment obscu
rantism.
Notes
1. For example, Wilden writes, "The fascination of the subject with an image, and
the alienation revealed by the stade du miroir, are clearly demonstrable both in
the study of the child and in psychopathology, as well as in literature" (1968,
164). He gives no citations in support of this claim, and even if the behavior
Lacan describes were clearly demonstrable, the alienation in principle could
not be, and only circular reasoning can render the literary examples Wilden
cites (Oedipus with Teresias, Montaigne's "I", the hero of Rousseau's Confes
sions, etc.) as evidence for Lacan's claim. An example of many Lacanian
approaches to literary criticism is Charney, who writes,
This kind of narcissistic structure, for Lacan, is a key element of the mirror
stage as a metaphor for the idealization that occurs throughout human lives:
We perceive ourselves as whole, potent, effective human beings, but this view
of totality is a vain illusion. All human beings are fragmented. (1985, 243)
And Clément claims that, "the mirror state . . . comes before the child utters its
first words, which but for this stage it never would pronounce" (1983, 87).
2. One should note, as does Macey (1988, 93), the universalist claims here, for
Marxist and Feminist critics often mistakenly invoke Lacan's thought as though
the effects of the mirror stage could be overcome historically.
3. Ragland-Sullivan (1987, 22-24) cites various studies which stresses the activity of
infants younger than six-months that indicates their capacity to make percep
tual discriminations. She regards these studies as confirming Lacan's position,
but they in no way support either his description of the child's behavior
confronted with its specular image, or his assertion that this image precipitates
primordial alienation from its pre-mirror stage reality.
4. The importance of the subjective correlate to the claims about a child's
behavior and its cause in the prematurity of its birth is emphasized by Roussel,
who says that "we should understand that the subject is only constituted for the
first time in this primary identification, which should therefore be regarded not as
Kay Stockholder 417
an identification m the proper sense but as what first makes identific
(1968, 68; italics his).
5. As well, Macey (1988, 13) says that no 1936 version of the mirro
and that the inaccuracies of dating in part derive from a deliberate
a sense of timelessness in the process of Lacan's translation and int
English.
6. Goffman (1959) gives vivid portrayals of this kind of social interaction, but
theoretically they accord with Freud's theory of the superego and projection.
That is, in his terms, one projects onto others one's own superego demands,
and sees oneself judged in their eyes. The same applies to Lacan's notion of the
gaze. Here Goffman describes social interaction as a set of covert mutual
agreements to accept the other's self-evaluation, as communicated by subde
gestures. The element that Lacan introduces here that is not within Goffman's
purview is the eroticization of the gaze. That is, Lacan includes the gaze in the
pregenital stages, so that what he describes in Hegelian terms as the later
struggle for recognition by the Other incorporates the libidinous carryover of
the oral stage. Lacan's phenomenological terminology renders the drama and
emotion of this kind of relationship, but Freud's account of the participation of
the superego in the libidinous forces of the id can more easily account for it
than Lacan's, for the mirror stage posits a cutoff between the pregenital stages
and adult forms. The point here is not to deprive Lacan of the credit he
deserves for his poetic formulations, but to demonstrate that their rhetorical
power does not prove the theory that he intends them to.
7. Neither Lacan or Wilden give citations for this information.
8. I am not arguing that Lacan secretly espoused religious belief despite his
declared atheism, but his theory drifts towards an amorphous eastern mysticism.
Roudinesco (1990, 224) notes the way this contradiction appears on the
institutional level. She argues that Lacan's conception of the ego entails "a cult
of the master," which amounts to replacing the illusory freedom of individual
speech with a religious adherence to the imaginary person of a leader of a
cause. She also discusses the attraction Lacan had for previously Freudian
priests (205).
9. Roudinesco (1990,124) errs in claiming that Freud's Talmudic tradition plays a
parallel role in Freud's work as the Christianity from which Lacan derives. In
whatever ways his style can be related to the Jewish tradition, his theory opposes
the religious conceptual framework in a way that Lacan's does not. Of course
one can argue in Lacanian and Derridean style that Freud really believed what
he was arguing against. But this strategy can be used to argue anything, and
demeans the intellectual life. One may find contradictions in Freud, as one does
in Lacan, but it does not follow that a person "really" believes in the buried
assumption one has ferreted out, rather in what the person declares as his or
her beliefs.
10. See below for a discussion of the significance of the differences in Freud's and
Lacan's views on gender difference. For the moment, however, it should be
noted that Freud did describe the girl as developing a less powerful superego,
and therefore as being less under the sway of conscience. Though he did not
intend this as a compliment, one could read it as one, considering what he says
later about the irrational superego. Despite that, in his discussion of the
complete Oedipus complex in which sex undergoes the experience of the
other, he makes it clear that many women, especially those who are not
conventionally beautiful, do not conform to the norm. While he may regard this
failure as an illness, his formulation is such as to allow present day women to
accept his formulation while disregarding his valuation of those who depart
from what he regards as the norm.
11. Scott, in "Pathology of the Father's Rule," touches on the religious implications
of this terminology. He writes that in discussing the Name of the Father,
"Lacan's myth, so thoroughly a part of the Freudian discourse, has a controlling
image of, as it were, Deity" (1989,87). Like other comm

in note below), he assumes that Lacan is correct in a
reveals what Freud really intended.
12. Felman (1987) in her last chapter concentrates on t
to the body of Lacan's thought.
13. The fact that the immune system can be suppressed
the argument. The fact that an identity can be alte
change in time, does not mean that it does not exist a
14. See Holland (1975, 1985).
15. Barzilai (1991, 298) recapitulates Kristeva's argume
based on the separation of meaning from sound in
patients, that language reaches back to a pre-Symbolic
the unconscious cannot be structured like a languag
Lacan simplified and misrepresented Freud's concep
oped in his discussion of aphasia. But both Barzilai and
assuming that the pre-linguistic is feminine, and the
masculine. Freud makes no such hard line between the
them.
16. There seems to be some force to Lacan's claim for
signifier, in so far as he talks of dream images and sym
signifieds have been repressed. But the relationship
repressed meaning is analogous to that between a w
book, the meaning of which one doesn't know or has f
to be a word, a signifier, from its context; from th
meaningfulness that distinguishes it from a sound
letters that one takes to be nonsense. Therefore there does seem to be room for
a concept of a potential signifier, a term that would apply to a child's sense of a
sound as significant before it quite knows what a word is or to dream images that
carry an undetermined aura of signification. This indeterminacy, however, does
not support Lacan's vision of dangerously sliding signifiers.
17. This point is made by Wilden (1968, 144n). Though Lacan makes much of the
difference between full and empty speech in "The Function and Field of Speech
and Language in Psychoanalysis," he does not relate that distinction to Saussurean
linguistics.
18. This kind of description of our relation to our roles is most powerfully rendered
by Goffman (1959). It is true that Freud does not attend to, or give vivid
portrayals of this kind of social interaction, but theoretically it accords with his
theory of the superego and projection. In his terms, one projects onto others
the demands on the self made by one's own superego, and sees oneself judged
in their eyes. The same applies to Lacan's notion of the gaze. Here too Goffman
describes social interaction as sometimes a struggle, but more often as a secret
agreement, to accept the other in his or her own terms, as communicated by
subtle gestures. One does so with the expectation that the same courtesy will be
returned. The new element that Lacan introduces here is the eroticized gaze.
That is, Lacan includes the gaze in the pregenital stages, so that what he
describes in Hegelian terms as the later struggle for recognition by the other
incorporates the libidinous carryover of the oral stage. Lacan's phenomenologi
cal stance allows him to render the drama and emotion of this kind of
relationship, but the concept derives from Freud, who includes in the oral stage
a fixation on looking and being seen, and who describes the relation of the
superego to the id in a way that accounts for the eroticization of this kind of
relationship. The point here is not to deprive Lacan of the credit he deserves for
some of these quite powerful and poetic formulations, but only to point out that
logically speaking their rhetorical power does not constitute the proof that he
intends.
19. I do not mean that Freud is correct either in his argument that clitorally focused
sexuality is less ideal for women, or that a woman cannot experience proper
Kay Stockholder 419
genital sexuality without succumbing to other aspects of conve
nine behavior. The point is that even were he right about both, it
be incumbent upon any particular woman to judge herself by
implies.
20. Macey (1988, 193) has an extended discussion of the genital determinism that
shapes both his discussion of Dora, and his use of St. Teresa as an icon of mystic
orgasm (205). Arguing that Lacanian psychoanalysis, even more than Freudian,
"posits femininity as being in excess of its rationalist discourse, and then
complains and exclaims that it cannot explain it" (179), Macey challenges
Lacanian feminists to refute his genital determinism (195) and explain such
denigrating language as dame for femme and Melanie, for Klein.
21. Jameson (1988,92) says that in the Symbolic the subject suffers the second stage
of self-alienation in substituting a name for his reality. However, this misrepre
sents Lacan's theory, for the point is that by substituting verbal for visual images
the subject prepares for the confrontation with death that lies behind alien
ation. Anchor (1989, 90) makes a similar error in supposing that Lacan's
"theorization of the Symbolic order" even if it did "offer a powerful framework
for thinking about the transactions between the individual and society" (90)
would tend towards a radical politics. Rather, for Lacan, the conventional and
therefore unstable nature of the Symbolic reinforces the need for traditional
authority. As far as I know, the earliest underestimation of the profoundly
conservative bent of Lacan's thought was made by Althusser. Asserting Lacan's
fidelity to Freud's thought, he claims for psychoanalysis the capacity to lead to
"a better understanding of this structure of misrecognition, which is of particular
concern for all investigations of ideology " (1969, 65). Like Jameson and
Anchor, Althusser celebrates the decentered ego of Lacanian thought, but
doesn't take into account that the epistemological corollary to that which gives
people no way to grapple with the Law of culture that replaces Freudian
instincts in the unconscious. As well, Macey notes that he mistakes the mirror
stage as phenomenon of late capitalism, rather than as a universal condition, as
Lacan posits it (19). Though Freud had little hope that social change would
release man from the neurotic suffering imposed by civilization, he thought
greater equality among men and economic improvement a good thing. Moder
ate as such a position is, it is more congenial to the Marxist left than is Lacan's.
22. Crews (1986, 1970) aptly comments that just as Althusser transformed Marxism
from a strategy for an adaptive materialism into an allegory of scientific
determinism, so did Lacan transform psychoanalysis.
23. His views end up by being very close to those that Berlin (1990, 54-55) ascribes
to Joseph de Maistre, who rejected the Enlightenment view of reason as God's
gift to man and manifested in the triumphs of Galileo and Newton, and who
conceived "divine reason as an activity that is transcendent, and therefore
hidden from the human eye." Berlin adds that according to de Maistre "each
province [has] its own mode of belief, its own methods of proof. A universal
logic, like a universal language, empties the symbols used of all that accumu
lated wealth of meaning created by the continuous process of slow precipitation
by which the mere passage of time enriches an old language, endowing it with
all the fine, mysterious properties of an ancient, enduring institution." And
again, "Rationalism leads to atheism, individualism, anarchy. The social fabric
holds together only because men recognize their natural superiors; they obey
because they feel a sense of natural, divinely instituted, authority which no
rationalist philosophy can reason away." These clearly are not exactly Lacan's
views, but they are in much the same spirit.
24. Althusser touches on this aspect of Lacan's work, though without appreciating
its significance, when he paraphrases Freud in saying that since Copernicus and
Marx (whom he substitutes for Darwin) we have known that for the "human
subject, the economic, political or philosophical ego is not the 'centre' of
history—and even, in supposition to the Philosophers of the Enlightenment
and to Hegel, that history has a structure, but no

ideological misrecognition" (1969, 65).
25. The deep relation between Lacan's theory of la
view is clear in many of the essays in Lacan and The
1989). Wyschogrod says that to treat the dialog
psychoanalytic dialogue "is conceivable on the surp
that Lacan's recognition of the linguistic and tex
scious establishes a homology, a commensurabilit
and manifestations of the unconscious" (1989, 11
that of the other contributors to this volume, is m
Lacan's recognition of the linguistic structure of t
26. Following Lacan, most commentators ignore the
the spool. Muller (1983, 21-31) emphasizes that
"born into language." However, like Lacan's argume
argument here for the radical divide imposed by
dropping and retrieving the spool, the child exper
the situation in association with the words. Therefore there is not radical
separation of the child's body experience from its substitution of language.
Indeed, language is not substituted; it is rather added to the felt experience as
a further dimension. Furthermore, the example does not bear out the radical
claim that the word is "the murder of the thing." This would imply that once the
word is spoken the mother can never reenter the child's life—that the desire for
physical proximity to and comfort from the mother is instantly and absolutely
repressed. But the mother does come back, and while it may be right to speak of
desire replacing need as the child slowly becomes aware of its own boundaries
and capacities, this desire is still for the mother and is not instantly and
absolutely repressed. But in Freud's model access to feelings of comfort in the
loss of boundaries is forever lost only when the child has experienced trauma in
connection with it, and the child's substitution of language keeps a channel
open back to those archaic satisfactions. Think of what the child at Lady
Macbeth's breast feels if you want to know what oral vulnerability feels like, he
says. He relates situations in which a traumatic experience has made any
approach to the feelings of oral dependency impossible to religious experiences
of merger, and sees them as substituting for a normal development in which
access to those feelings remains possible as a component of adult love relation
ships. Furthermore, in so far as the Fort/Da is a model of repression, it isn't
language that causes it; it is the inevitability of the child's separation from the
mother. It isn't at all certain that monkeys, cats, or dogs do not experience
something akin to human experience as they are slowly cast out of the mother's
protective realm. If so, we are better off than they are in that we can use
language as a source of substitute gratification. In making Freud's Fort/Da story
a paradigm for primal repression, Lacan eliminates trauma as a significant
factor in development, and transforms contingent events into universal neces
sity. He makes the human being entirely and radically subject to language, and
since he equates language with all institutional and social authority (the
Symbolic), he leaves no conceptual space in which one can step back, in an act
of self-reflection, from those structures.
27. It is not true as Casey and Woody claim (1983, 109) that access to primordial
jouissance for Lacan is barred by entry into the Symbolic, and that therefore it is
deferred on an endless slide of signifiers. It is barred by the Imaginary, but it
plays through the kind of nothing or absence, the systematic differences upon
which the Symbolic is constructed.
28. Fisher (1989, 2) notes the ways in which Buddhism and the Christian via
negativa can be claimed as a "venerable religious heritage" by postmodernism in
general (19). The religious dimension of Lacan's work has important ramifica
tions for therapy, for any therapy, for any therapy functions on an explicit or
implicit norm. Just as it matters to a woman whether her therapist considers it
Kay Stockholder 421
abnormal for her to desire professional achievement, so it mat
whether his or her therapist considers it abnormal for one to
tion to authority.
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Lacan Vs Freud

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Lacan Vs Freud

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Lacan versus Freud: Subverting the Enlightenment

Author(s): KAY STOCKHOLDER

Lacan versus Freud:

Subverting the Enlightenment

I. Smoke and Mirrors

The mirror stage for Jacques Lacan functions as a found

underlies his massive revision of Freudian thought. Though

Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this

subject of absolute knowledge". (1977, 105)

However, even while Lacan invokes the authority of Hegel, he

context. Because Lacan bases such far-reaching claims on his

nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity,

Upon this empirical claim for the difference between animal

People report a great variety of infant behavior in front of

nature fundamentally different from that of animals. Because

There is no evidence for an anatomical incompleteness

However, these arguments from anatomy and neurology,

While such people at some point might see a reflection of

Occurring as it does at the age mentioned in the above

Ragland-Sullivan also seems embarrassed by Lacan's literal

human infants" (1989, 45). However, she tries to have it both

child experiences itself as uncoordinated, and sees a unified

human freedom and moral action, but it cannot be appre

the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic

It is hard to imagine that so young an infant experiences a sense

On all levels, then, the phenomena to which Lacan

Lacan claims further support for his argument for pri

muscular structures that go beyond them, skeletally they are

dance between the image and infant, or, as MacCannel (1986,

symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same

This foreign turbulence, unrelated to the child's feelings,

it in principle unknowable, a mystic force that moves through,

projected the prédations of Victorian society and the

Lacan's arguments against Darwinism are haunted by

literal mirror stage in animals; "without the visual presence of

a limited number of pre-established correspondences

Lacan 's account, in contrast to Freud's, of animal instinctual

of images confirms the link for the developing child between

derives its name from the importance of mirror relation

And MacCannell (1986, 63) also argues that the lack of

point." If these transitive relations are analogous to the mirror

appears in Lacan's description of the child held by a "human

love is reduced to a struggle for dominion that ends only in

II. Redesigning the Freudian Landscape

Lacan equates his mirror stage to Freud's conception of

the individual does actually carry on a twofold existence:

Freud contrasts the libido instincts to the ego instincts, which

The first auto-erotic sexual satisfactions are experienced

ment in the fact that the persons who are concerned

For Freud, then, primary narcissism consists in an infant's

Secondary narcissism develops only later, after the child,

Freud's conception of secondary narcissism most closely

may not fill all of the heart's desires, but it is nonetheless

As the child develops more complex emotions, and its

is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same

In this formulation, a strong ego involves sufficient psychic

entail a therapy of conformity, as Lacan claims in his diatribes

Defining the ego as generated when the child takes itself

It is in this erotic relation, in which the human indi

Therefore, human aggression and competitiveness do not

torment mankind" (1977, 11). This primordial nightmare

the imago of the mother's body . . . [her] internal