Series: The Seminar Of The NUS Psychoanalysis Society - Seminar I: Caught Lacan?
"It can also be read, since it is in capital letters, it can be read R.S.I., which perhaps suggested to those who are in the know: the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary."
This seminar is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on psychoanalysis, covering the works of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud.
The Nostomodernist project is a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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Seminar I: Caught Lacan? was delivered by Thomas J. Pellarin on Sunday, 9th October 2022 in the Philosophy Graduates Room at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
Introduction to Seminar I
After one year of struggling to read Lacan—or should we say, after four months of sincere effort—I have become confident enough to speak at length on his ideas, such that this seminar series is to be a guiding tool for both myself and to whoever wants to read Lacan as well.
The problem with many commentaries on Lacan is that, to assuage the volume of this momentous thinker, the tendency in practice is to throw a menagerie of details into an already-vast pudding, so to speak. What results is an oftentimes dense—if accurate—set of interpretations and elaborations on Lacan; however, what one hopes to discover, through reading these very technical texts, are those gorgeous and short passages of clarity and poise, such that with those sections alone, it is as if Lacan opened up to you, for the first time, in simple and unbarred language.
These seminars are hence a tribute to the illuminating passages of Lacan scholars such as Alenka Zupančič, Slavoj Žižek, Bruce Fink, Dylan Evans, Elizabeth Grosz, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and of course, the vital Jacques-Alain Miller. They are also an exciting opportunity for myself to teach Lacan in the evocative format of seminars, and to perhaps practice a bit of psychoanalysis at the same time, while still an undergraduate reading for a degree which has no official relation to psychoanalysis, which is likely the result of a transference towards a neurosis I am satisfied with leaving alone for now—and thus keeping in silence.
It should be noted that the format of these seminars are based on the list of guiding questions, which ought to wrap around the elaborations of the seminarist so as to keep the dialogue organic and pointed during the seminar itself; otherwise, who would wish to teach like Lacan himself, and drone onwards about Lacanian psychoanalysis, unless teaching a choir of the already-initiated?
The seminar notes are thus an accompanying document, or a primer, which is to be optionally read and occasionally glanced at, so as to give a minimum structure to the seminarist and to the attendees a minimum frame of reference, such that most questions can be directed towards the direction of the notes, and that additional questions supplement the notes, so that therefore, the scope of the notes can be met while preserving the function of a real and engaging teaching discussion.
It has been an unconscious ambition of mine, inundated since learning to speak and read French, which I tossed into consciousness while planning these seminars, that I be able to somehow teach Lacan while drinking coffee at the same time; with this first seminar, this ambition is fulfilled and the result is my further silence on the subject and the lack of any documentation outside these seminar notes and guiding questions.
Guiding Questions
What is Psychoanalysis?
Is Psychoanalysis a Science?
What is the Borromean Knot?
What are the Registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, or the R.S.I.?
What is the Sinthome?
How do the Registers interact with one another?
What is the Objet Petit A (a)?
What is Jouissance (J) and what is Lack?
What is the Phallus (φ) and what is Castration (-φ)?
Who is the Barred Subject ($)?
What is the Master Signifier (S1) and what is the Big Other (A)?
What is the relationship between the de Saussurean concepts of Sign, Signifier and Signified to Lacan?
What is the nature of the Mirror Stage and who is the Specular Image (i)?
What is the purpose and goal of Psychoanalysis?
Seminar Notes
Thank you for coming today for the first seminar of the NUS Psychoanalysis Society. Hopefully, we will be able to have more of these in the future—with more coffee—but today, we will consider the concepts of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, as a means of introducing psychoanalysis to you. The idea of this seminar is to produce an attitude towards psychoanalysis that allows you to better read the text later—should you wish to do so on your own—given that it is difficult to read Lacan without first having an attitude which opens up to him.
I will include here that we are beginning with Lacan and not his predecessor Sigmund Freud, because even though Lacan says that there is no escaping Freud if we are to understand psychoanalysis, to read Freud first is likely to be somewhat frustrating because of how old-fashioned his analysis is, and how much essentialism and borderline assumptions he makes in his famous essays, so therefore, for the purposes of the first seminar, we will be observing psychoanalysis and thus Freud from the rehabilitative viewpoint of Jacques Lacan.
First, we will begin with the Borromean Knot, or Lacan’s description of how the psyche works in general. I will draw it onto the board. Psychoanalysis is the study of the relations or the intersubjectivity between yourself and the other; the relationship between yourself and the other is intersubjectivity, such as what is your relation to each other and how do you produce relations between yourself and other—the other can be the big Other, the specular image or even yourself.
I repeat that the purpose of the seminars is to create an attitude, which you can carry forth in your private studies; this is not a substitute for the texts, although it will be difficult to understand the text if you lack the proper attitude to look at them.
We begin first with the Imaginary Register: it is reminiscent of the Freudian ego, although Lacan builds further on the concept. The Imaginary encompasses everything which you consciously and unconscious create and know and experience, and it is the domain of the creative and dreaming senses of self which you mix with the symbolic to be able to tread above the water of the Real, as if you were in a trance, held together by the patchwork of the symbols you have chosen to imagine and imprint as signs with meaning and desire.
The next is the Symbolic Register: this register includes everything you are born into, such as the language which your parents speak, the name which you are given, and everything else that which is yours, but which you did not ask for. It also contains the domain of the big Other or the law or the symbolic father, to which you are always acting in relation to, as either acceding or opposing it.
The next register is that of the Real. The Real is everything that which we cannot penetrate into; it is akin to Kantian noumena, or to that inaccessible thing which occupies everything you cannot know, but you might mediate through the registers of the Imaginary or the Symbolic, or a combination of both. Therefore it is also the source of neurosis, such that coming into contact with the Real is often a traumatic or aversive event, and the production of the traumatic event causes you to flee or to create an illusion—either symbolically or neurotically—to escape or deny it—to live in denial of it, like how people procrastinate to avoid their work or how people pretend that their loved one has not passed away.
Lastly is the Register of the Sinthome, or the Symptom, which exists as a binding for all three registers. The allusion here is clear: what prevents the entire collapse of the psyche from the disjunctions of the three Registers in conflict with each other is the Symptom, or the coping mechanism, or that which allows you to live despite your situation.
For instance, consider that the Imaginary of me wished to have coffee socially; however, I understand that the socially-acceptable way is to invite friends to do so: given that I lack a group of coffee-drinking friends who would meet up for the sole purpose of drinking coffee, and given that I am too lazy to find and join an existing group of coffee-drinking friends—note that these are imaginary reasons I have created to excuse myself—I imagine this as the real of my Lack, or as all that which I am not yet and also unwilling to become and unwilling to confront and therefore which I transfer into a symbolic gesture—this seminar—which mediates between the Imaginary and the Symbolic as a skirting of the Real of my lack, which I deny and yet which I also pursue in a roundabout way, therefore as a neurotic symptom, which I summarise by the statement: the society is the symptom—what? of my neurosis!
Think about greater society as well, as the repression of our desires by the Big Other of the Law, in favour of satisfying our desires in the roundabout transference of civilisation.
Now, notice how the overlapping areas within the Knot account for special relations between the Registers, with the intersection of all three registers as the objet petite a, or the impossible desire which lies as the impossible object of all desires since the moment of the Mirror Stage, or the situation of the desire in the Symbolic because of the impossibility of knowing the Other as Self, but only as the Barred Subject ($). For Lacan, the stages for interpreting the Knot, or the acronym RSI, are its inverse order: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and then the Real; hence, we will consider the intersections in that way.
We begin with the intersection of the Imaginary and Symbolic Registers, or the interaction between the aspect of the Freudian ego and superego rehabilitated by Lacan into the sense or meaning created by self-inflicted but necessary distances between the Imaginary of ourselves and the Symbolic of everything which we are but did not ask to be.
If the Imaginary maps to the Freudian ego, or that aspect of ourselves which we create out of ourselves, then the Symbolic maps to the Freudian superego, or to the aspects of ourselves which we inherit from the moment of our birth, such as the language of our parents, the culture of our society, and the Laws which govern our relations with others in society. It is this relationship to the Law or the Big Other of the Symbolic which we either choose to accept or deny, in such cases that the denial of the Symbolic order, or that which we know we should do, but therefore, do not do, which is the source of neurosis.
Hence, there is always a sense of right and wrongness, or correct or incorrect behaviour as per the Law, which situates our response to such situations as either a castration of our desires, against that which we actually wish to do, but stops ourselves through either repression or transference, and for whom transference is the mechanism of neurosis, such that we do not confront the Real of our desires in light of the Symbolic, but defer this desire to some other process; think of procrastination as a neurosis, upon encountering the Symbolic of homework, and more so, encountering the Real of the person we need to become; therefore, if we procrastinate, we are transferring our desire and more so our Lack onto a fetish object or action, such that so long as the fetish is maintained, we are able to ignore reality through the mediation of another sign as created meaning.
Next, we consider the intersection of the Imaginary and the Real—we first begin with jouissance of the Other (A), represented by the Lacanian algebra JA, as the nature of your interaction with Real as the Barred Subject ($), for whom jouissance, or the joy of pleasure or enjoyment which occurs at the point of pain, or for which further pleasure causes pain as well as pleasure, is forever barred due to the splitting or spaltung of yourself as subject from knowledge of yourself as a complete subject, or that which would make you complete, through the function of language, or the interplay of signifier and signified, from which something is always lost in translation. But the jouissance of the Other refers to the potential jouissance which the Other could offer you, which is an impossible effort, because the Other cannot fulfill us, even if we treated them as if they could—as if they were our objet petit a or impossible desire made possible.
The next intersection is the catch between the Real and the Symbolic, or the position of phallic jouissance, represented by the Lacanian algebra JΦ as the nature of your interaction with the Real as the Barred Subject ($), for whom the symbolic course is jouissance, or the joy of pleasure or enjoyment which occurs at the point of pain, or for which further pleasure causes pain as well as pleasure—think of eating until you are full, and yet you continue to eat more; this for Lacan is the nature of our desire, or our impossible desire to become full, which we will never be able to satisfy, and yet which we attempt to fulfill as part of our drive towards the impossible object or objet petit a—and which interacts with the empty signifier of the phallus, or the imaginary potency to be able to fulfill desire and the desires of others, in the outcome of a fleeting satisfaction and the creation of a stand-in illusionary Other, who we treat like our objet petit a, as if they could satisfy our unsatisfiable desires.
The nature of the phallus will be fully-treated in Seminar II; however, the phallus is entirely mythological, illusionary and does not exist except as an empty signifier without an actual sign; its nature is therefore defined by impotency, because no matter how much you try and prove that you have it, if you can lose it, you never have it, and therefore the possession of the phallus is entirely a game of bluff.
Returning to the objet petit a, represented by the algebra a, at the centre of the Knot, this impossible object of desire originates at the moment we look into the mirror for the first time, and recognise that the way we see ourselves without a mirror is different from the way other people see ourselves without the mirror as well; this is to say we see ourselves as others see us for the first time in the mirror, such that this complete image or specular image appears unified and complete as opposed to how we see ourselves as changing, varying and incomplete and full of Lack and desires and fears, as compounded by years of habit and relations with the Symbolic Other since this encounter at the level of the mirror stage.
At that revelatory moment, we realise that we are no longer whole, but only that a sense of wholeness remains, which exists except that we are forbidden from accessing it again, and that this desire or search to return to wholeness is the price we pay for becoming human. This impossible object, the objet petit a, is the object of our desires in love, in comfort and life, such that we feel that through love, for instance, we can reclaim this prior state of ignorance without ignorance, or this wholeness that was lost when we recognised the other of ourselves to Others, and thus entered into the Symbolic as the Barred Subject ($) from whom the jouissance of wholeness is barred.
But this is the impossible object of desire for a reason, because it stands as a master signifier, or a signifier without an actual sign and therefore a floating signifier, since it a mythological object and not a substantive one, or that it does not exist and yet we desire it to. We feel castrated, represented by the Lacanian algebra −Φ, and so the operation of reclaiming ourselves is through the rituals of other signs, such that these rituals are mythic and stand-in for what we Lack and what does not exist.
Furthermore, returning to the jouissance of the Other, or the algebra JA, when we, in love, attempt to make our beloved the objet petit a, or that impossible object of desire which could make us whole again, what we see of them is what we have imagined to see of them in them, and this is what Lacan means when he says in Seminar XI on The Four Fundamental Concepts Of Psychoanalysis1, “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the object petit a—I mutilate you.”
We do not love the Other but we love the aspect of ourselves which we find in the Other; it is not you that I am in love with, but the aspect of myself which I see in you, or which you allow me to see, which I adore and must keep in my life, such that we find a further understanding of the sentiment which Lacan wrote to the French journalist, Madeleine Chapsal in 1955: “What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?”. It is therefore not the universe of you which I find, but the universe which you give to me that constitutes the source of my love for you, and therefore, that part of you which I cannot let go, because without you, I will not be able to create it again.
This is offers a somewhat pessimistic outlook on love, which I will unpack in the next seminar, but as a small digression, Lacan says that this is simply the best we can do: we are impossibly barred from knowing ourselves and knowing Others, because when we attempt to understand someone, we understand them insofar as ourselves, but that this is simply the necessary trade we must attempt as human beings in search of becoming whole together. In this way, love is always an effort of mirroring, such that it is always a continuous process akin to looking in the mirror and asking yourself what do you see; and likewise, what does your beloved see into the mirror of you, such that you and I see each other like opposing mirrors in an infinite set of reflections: each one of you showing the Other what you Lack and therefore, what is valuable to yourself in the glimpse of each other.
In the next few seminars, we will elaborate on the function of the objet petit a according to the Freudian notion of the Mother subject, such that we are haunted by a longing to return to the warmth and possession of the Mother, because her protection and love and warmth represented wholeness to us before the advent of the Mirror Stage, and therefore, it is symbolically tied together as reminiscent. We will also speak of the subject of the Father, or the first instance of the Big Other which acted as an opposing force to the Mother subject, or as that which enforced the Law and guided us towards the proper way to act as a disciplining function against the Oedipus Complex by the sustainment of a minimum symbolic distance.
The failure of the Father to instil the Law is associated with improper distances, with neuroses and all sorts of disarming social behaviours and eccentricities. It is important to remember here that Lacan is rehabilitating Freud, and so the essentialism of Freud is being abstracted by Lacan, such that it is not strictly the real father who must play the Father subject, nor the real mother who plays the Mother subject, but that these are roles in the stage-play of human life, which both can adopt and play at certain times.
We will also be speaking about castration, femininity, as well as the structure of the beloved-and-lover subjects in the next seminar on the topic of love; it is my belief that at this point, you may have some semblance of an attitude towards understanding Lacan, which will prove useful when we apply Lacan to common and everyday situations, such that you will be able to understand the structure of his theory by observing how it wraps around everyday life, and it is this application or practice that derives the name of the psychoanalysis society as psychoanalysis and not the psychoanalytic, because we are not considering that which is reminiscent or related to psychoanalysis but to the study and practice of psychoanalysis itself. Once we understand how to apply Lacanian theory, we can then begin to say nothing more about it.
However, before we end this seminar, I would like to introduce some terms and concepts which, although I will not go into detail in this seminar, I believe will prove useful in understanding the forthcoming seminars. We will clarify first what Lacan means by jouissance, specifically in the analogy of eating a meal to the point of fullness and yet eating more to the point of pain. At such a point, further eating produces no greater satisfaction of your hunger and yet you continue to eat, driven by some purpose of excess desire, which is tied by Lacan to the Freudian death drive or to that notion of self-destruction which is inherent in all life, and points it towards a return to biological zero, insofar as jouissance is the passing of the pleasure principle or the limits of pleasure to an uncomfortable conclusion.
It is intriguing to consider how many things are limited before the arrival of jouissance, because if we were purely hedonistic creatures, we would quickly die out from the chasing of sheer pleasure but instead we are inherently limited as it were by the biological limits of jouissance; however, how we negotiate this limit as speaking beings is mediated through the Symbolic Register as additional limits and conditions which we adopt and follow into pursuit of pleasure, or that which we lack, or that which encompasses our pursuit of the objet petit a.
An everyday example is that we might be driven to seek validation about ourselves from others because the attention of others unifies us in that moment as it were, giving us a definitive identity against the multifariousness of our inner world, and thus solidifying our image in the image we desire to be seen as, but this image is fragile, because it can be broken and thus removed from us—we are always at the risk of being castrated of the phallus, or the potency or wholeness or power which appears in the eyes of Others, like how in Westerns there are false tough guys and the real tough guys, usually the Hero, who pretend to have the phallus or really have it, which is representative here because, like in movies, it is a practice in mythology.
I wish to speak briefly on castration: it is important to note that the old-fashioned psychoanalytic structures of Freud, such as the feminine and masculine, phallus and castration, could be exchanged with more neutral terms and yet retain a similar function; however, in choosing to keep with these terms, Lacan is employing a dimension of myth or an aspect of the ancient self which gives power to this insight into the relations of the psyche—in other words, Lacan is still Freudian.
For instance, castration is linked to the aspect of symbolic femininity insofar as femininity for Lacanian psychoanalysis is associated with acceptance, with receiving, with submission, and thus vulnerability to the Other in love; however, in practice, we see men and women engaging with such castration, because in love, we castrate ourselves to the desires of the Other, such that I say to you, I love you so much that I am willing to show you what I lack, and therefore, I give you everything to potentially destroy me. Hence, we understand what Lacan is saying in Seminar XII, “Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.” In other words, I give to you what I lack—the feeling that I miss you, I want you, I cannot live without you—which you do not want, because you do not want my Lack, you want to try and fulfill it, or at least, I hope you can.
To close, I will clarify that the reasons why we engage with psychoanalysis is not for wisdom but for poetry and thus the dismantling of wisdom; in other words, what we engage to find in psychoanalysis is not clarity but the absence of a need for clarity; it is important to note that Lacan differs from Freud in his belief that psychoanalysis cannot be a science, and therefore, psychoanalysis is able to say what science cannot, which is to say, it can speak of that inscrutable aspect of the human psyche which we cannot approach directly, nor can we measure, and therefore, we must take the circuitous this route around, as if to go through a mountain, we must walk all over and open and down it so as to be able to pass straight through.
In this way, psychoanalysis is similar to the Buddhist concept of upaya, or to the gesturing of the carts and not to the fire, as described in the Lotus Sutra between the Lord Gautama Buddha and his disciple Shariputra, in which they share an exchange about a story of a father and his two children.
In the story, the two children are playing in the house; however, the father standing outside sees that the house is on fire and that the flames are reaching into their room; given the joy of his children and their ignorance in their act of play, the father understands that if he calls to them and gestures to the flames directly, they will not understand him. Likewise, if they were to recognise the danger directly, they might become paralysed to act, and hence, the father gestures to the ox-carts outside the house and calls to his children and says, if you come out, I will let you play with the carts all day; and therefore without another word, his children rushed out and to safety.
Hence, to conduct psychoanalysis, abandon your methods of clarity or the tradition of transparency, which has dogged the Western intellectual tradition since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, or the need to understand without ambiguity, in favour of obscurity and symbol, and of everything else but that which you cannot touch—the Real or the thing-in-of-itself.
Hence, we are not in the search for knowledge; we are in the search for poetry, and for everything which makes us silent in the Lack of knowledge. This is represented in what Lacan describes as the definition of psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis is the speaking cure, by which the end of psychoanalysis is the end of the need for psychoanalysis, or the process which ends without a need to say anything more, such the only expression of the cure is to either remain silent or to become nauseous at the utterance of anything more, because words have thus reached critical point of jouissance.
This is why I have left the definition of psychoanalysis to the end of the seminar, because to understand or appreciate this elucidation by Lacan, it requires that you be inundated with the Lacanian frame-of-mind and that your attitude to psychoanalysis disappears upon the appearance of an understanding, or that to resolve everything, it thus leaves you with no more questions.
Therefore, the title of the seminar will hopefully make more sense to you; there are three ways to read it now. There is first the catching of Lack, such that we are now aware that we lack and are always in such a state of searching to fulfil that original source of desire, or the objet petit a, which arrives as the sin of being human; there is secondly the catching of Lacan, such that we have only caught a symbolic aspect of Lacan or a symbolic stand-in for the real thing, such that this cannot be the Real Lacan, but only the Imagined Lacan replicated at a minimum symbolic distance through language; and thirdly, there is the interpretation that we are caught in the aspect of connecting our possession of phallus to the sudden realisation that we no longer have it, and that castration is brought to the forefront as a question of whether it is either you or me who will be castrated next.
The fact that we have arrived at three possible interpretations of this title, and that some of us may have interpreted them more differently, reflects on what Lacan means when he says that the unconscious is structured like a language, such that it is not what you want to say but what do you need to say that you actually say, and therefore raise into the conscious, such that you see what you want to see and thus what you need to say.
The speaking cure operates by bringing the unconscious or the urge to desire to say something to the point of silence or nausea, into the conscious, because it is not telling you anything you do not already know, but what you already know and have forgotten or transferred, and must simply be reminded again and expressed in your own words to therefore split itself into the Symbolic of language. That is why Lacan comments that the only medium of psychoanalysis is the analysand, for which the Other of the analyst acts as a mirror to during the psychoanalytic session, such that the unconscious can speak itself into dormancy for the moment or unravel to reach that dormancy as a pulling of a thread out the loop and thus barring it from the unconscious.
But this concludes the first seminar of the NUS Psychoanalysis Society; this is a reminder that for Seminar II, we will be discussing in detail what Lacan talks about when he talks about love and the dynamic structure of the beloved and the lover and the interplay of castration as well as ownership of the phallus and its mythological nature. As an additional point, we will be plucking examples from cultural media such as films and books and weaving them into the seminars to bridge the gap between theory and application.
If you wish to prepare yourself for the next seminar—although this is not necessary because of the difficulty in approaching the Ecrits or the Seminars head-on at this point, you may wish to read Lacan To The Letter (2004) by one of Lacan’s translators, Bruce Fink, as well as How To Read Lacan (2006) by Slavoj Žižek. I hope that you will simply allow yourself to be okay with being confused, so as to first inculcate the necessary attitude to grapple with psychoanalysis and thus the messiness of human psychology, by denying the initial impulse to call Lacan nonsense and to instead work with him to see what he can teach you.
Thank you. Feel free to ask any questions at this point, either from the guiding questions or on your own.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.
For those curious about the four fundamental concepts, Lacan describes them in Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts Of Psychoanalysis as follows: “In any case, such a mode of questioning the field of experience will be guided, in our next meeting, by the following reference—what conceptual status must we give to four of the terms introduced by Freud as fundamental concepts, namely, the unconscious, repetition, the transference and the drive?”