Lacanian Psychoanalysis :
Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a significant contribution to the field of psychology as a human science because of its emphasis on the exceptional importance of human speech. The two attributes Lacan emphasizes the most are language and the repressed desire constituting the unconscious. According to him, the entire human life can be seen as the conglomeration of three phases : Imaginary, Symbolic and Real. A staunch supporter of Freudian viewpoint of psychoanalysis, Lacan too imposed primary importance on the childhood stage and spoke for a return to Freud in terms of thought and analysis.
Lacan constructs a model of identity formation which undergoes the consecutive process of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real phase. In the first phase, the child makes its first identification with the reflection in the mirror – the reason why it is also known as mirror stage. By looking at its own reflection the child finds a perfect similarity with its own body and thereby develops the idea that the reflection and the child are the same. Similarly the child thinks that its mother and itself are inseparable and selfsame. In its mind, the child never separates itself and its mother as two different beings,but thinks that its mother, like its mirror image, is itself only. Lacan then describes the child as the signifier and the mirror reflection as the signified, because the child associates the reflection as means of his identity,his own meaning. The child works with a misrecognition that the image is as concrete as him and he can substitute himself with the reflection. This stage is therefore metaphoric and – what Lacan calls – ‘homologue for the Mother/Child symbolic relation’.
The Symbolic stage is the most crucial stage in identity formation because in this stage the child becomes familiar with language and external society. He learns that society has different names – father, mother, child – thereby creating an elementary difference between them and persuading the child to understand that he is different from the mother. Thus language creates a gap in the child’s psyche and injects the idea that mother is the Other and the child can never have her. The Real is the final order that both the Imaginary and the Symbolic try to control. This is where the child’s Imaginary illusions of being one with his reflection or the mother is contradicted by the sense of otherness from the Symbolic. The psyche is caught between the ‘lack’- the desire for the absent mother – and the need to fulfil
this lack.
Lacan the Poststructuralist observes that, in language, signifiers lead to more and more signifiers but a fixed signified is never attained. Similarly, the child associates the idea of mother with signifier and goes on substituting one signifier after another in search for the lost signified – desire for mother’s body – but never finds it. That is why Lacan formulated that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’. Moreover, this language only gets him further and further from the pre-linguistic desire of mother and trains his unconscious to alienate itself from its surroundings : ‘The unconscious is the discourse of the Other’. What Lacan is proposing is that the unconscious is available to us only through language – whether of desire or of psychoanalysis.
