Lacan: The Mind of the Modernist (2015) (original) (raw)
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Having this characterization of the unconscious in mind, what we intend to do in this paper is carry out our own characterization of something that, in our opinion, represents the most meaningful direction of study in today's philosophy: the non symbolic phenomenology of Marc Richir. Even if, apparently, this last statement is a paradox (because, how can something that is non symbolic have a meaning?), it is so only to strengthen one of this phenomenology's foundations, namely the fact that meaning doesn't restrain itself to communication. Thus, what isn't said, or rather what is said between the lines, is equally significant, if not more significant, than the words themselves. As a consequence, the function of the unconscious discovered by psychoanalysis couldn't have been ignored by this new kind of phenomenology, especially after psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had reinvented it in the most surprising way. The unconscious is a " cut in action " , he said, thus offering phenomenology the opportunity to discover in its own field an unconscious that, as Merleau-Ponty predicted, is a partition, a free space in which the essences can freely manifest themselves without being subjected to any symbolical constraint. In such kind of freedom, both phenomenology and psychoanalysis have the chance to meet, and thus form a new constellation, one that doesn't need a hermeneutical art to be read, but a tact able to receive the subtleties of an ethos in which it is immersed.
Towards a Phenomenological Reading of Lacan
2010
Phenomenological psychotherapy, while critiquing psychoanalytic theories, has always sought to draw on and be inspired by these (and other) approaches. To read psychoanalysis through the lens of existential-phenomenology opens, deepens and perhaps even rehabilitates this body of work. In this paper, the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is explored through a phenomenological reading of his early work. Aspects of his developmental theory, as well as certain of his theoretical innovations, are related to psychopathology and treatment and are explored and understood in phenomenological terms. Emphasis is placed on psychotherapeutic experience and understandings. The paper argues that there is much of value in Lacan’s work and that it is more existentially rich than is often acknowledged.
Lacan's subject: the imaginary, language, the real and philosophy.
The thought of the psychoanalytical thinker, Jacques Lacan, is examined in this paper with a view to ascertaining the place and function in it of the so-called imaginary , the symbolic as well as the 'real'. The extent to which the imaginary or realm of images is construed by Lacan as being the order of identification and a (spurious) sense of unity of the ego or self, is contrasted with the symbolic (or linguistic) order as that of the subject and of desire, in fact, of the subject of desire. The place and meaning of the enigmatic third register in Lacan's thought, namely the 'real' is also addressed in relation to the question of desire. Furthermore, the question is raised, where philosophy in its traditional sense belongs-to the Lacanian register of the imaginary or to that of the symbolic.
Phenomenology and Ontology in the Later Heidegger
Heidegger’s later philosophy is marked by two conflicting claims about phenomenology. On the one hand, phenomenology and philosophy generally is tasked with “responding to the claim of what is to be thought” in a novel and unprecedented manner. On the other hand, Heidegger recognizes that there have been earlier attempts at thus doing justice to phenomena; in the ontological commitments of earlier thinkers, Heidegger finds accounts of the “things themselves,” each of which has different implications for what phenomenology should concern itself with. Phenomenology, as Heidegger conceives it, should thus both incorporate the history of philosophy and exceed it, yet it is unclear how these ideas can be reconciled. This chapter calls this problem the “dilemma of the historicity of phenomenology” and identifies different versions of it in Heidegger’s works after 1935/6.
The Imaginary and Symbolic of Jacques Lacan
A study of Jacques Lacan's theory of the Symbolic. The principal categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the structuring of the psyche are the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The imaginary (imaginaire) refers to perceived or imagined images in conscious and unconscious thought, sensible and intelligible forms; picture thinking (Vorstellung), dream images or manifest content, and conscious ego in discursive thought. The symbolic (symbolique) refers to the signifying order, signifiers, in language, which determine the subject; it refers to the unconscious, and the intellectual, the logos endiathetos and the logos prophorikos. It is the relation between the imaginary and symbolic in conscious and unconscious thought which is the core of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The real (réel) is that which is neither imaginary nor symbolic in conscious or unconscious thought, and which is inaccessible to psychoanalysis. It is only proposed as an algebraic concept, as it can not even be conceived, like the One of Plotinus, which cannot be thought or described, but which exists as an absence in the symbolic order (language) in the same way that the unconscious exists as an absence in conscious thought. The real is as the umbilical cord of the Freudian unconscious, which Lacan reframes as constituted by the symbolic. The imaginary and the symbolic, perception and language, are always interwoven, but while they are always interwoven, the experience of the mirror stage also constitutes a fundamental disjunction between the two, which can never be overcome, and which causes a disjunction or gap within the subject, as it is constituted by the image and the word. At about eighteen months of age, after the initial acquisition of language, the infant first recognizes itself in the mirror in self-consciousness, thus distinguishing itself from its surroundings. From the mirror stage, all perception is subsumed in language, as the imaginary is subsumed in the symbolic, and it is the perceived image which becomes the basis of conscious thought and ego, while language structures the unconscious, in the Lacanian scheme. The ego is formed in the imaginary image of the self in the mirror stage prior to the development of the subject in relation to the Other, which is defined by Lacan as the network of identifications which determine the subject in interpersonal relations, and which constitutes the unconscious. The image of the self formed by the mirror must be reconciled with the image of the self formed in relation to language and other people, which is an impossible reconciliation, and stages a dialectical process, related to the Hegelian dialectic between subjective and objective spirit, or reason and perception, but without resolution. Following the mirror stage, perception,