Lacanian Advances on the Freudian Unconscious

DOMB Benjamin

Lacan talks insistently about two lacks, he topologically points at two holes and distinguishes them too, in the torus structure as well as in the borromean knot. In this work I will concern myself with delimiting these two lacks due to its incidence in our practice as well as due to its theoretical value and because it points out, to my belief, what we could call the lacanian advance on the Freudian unconscious.

One of these lacks, is due to what Lacan calls "the central defect about which the dialectics of the subject’s rising to its own being in the relation with the Other turns round, due to the fact that the subject is first in the Other’s field. This lack has a relation with the previous other real lack, which will place itself in the living being’s rising in the sexed reproduction. The real lack is what the living being loses, due to his reproduction by a sexed means. This lack is real because it refers to something real, that the living being, as it is fixed to the sex, remains subject to an individual death".

Further on and continuing with these two lacks – one Symbolic and the other Real; one having a relation with the other, he is going to talk about the superposition of these two lacks, in the subject and in the Other, Lacan puts the stress in what we are going to be interested on in this occasion "the subject finds a lack in the Other", this lack is not confused with its own castration, but this meeting with that Other’s lack, turns the act of castration necessary. Which is the Other’s lack about which the phantom turns out to be its answer?.

It was named, this lack, the Other’s castration. Lacan is compelled to point out that in the analysis it does not refer only to the subject’s castration but fundamentally to the Other’s castration. Nevertheless, to place this Other’s castration it is neither easy for the subject nor it is so in the psychoanalytical theory. Freud set forth the subject’s castration as the limit of the analysis. Lacan takes it up to the Other’s castration.

What castration are we talking about?

Lacan’s production of the logic formulas of the differences between the sexes was necessary to establish as a basis of psychoanalysis "there is no sexual relation", to start giving a new location to the Real, that does not depend on the father’s function, the Real is beyond the father. The act of castration in the son must not be mistaken with what is called the mother’s "castration". The barred Other acquires another significance.

We ask ourselves, can’t there be an Other who without being absolute, exists? This is the question that many times seems confusing, it is not an other real which in turn is R.S.I., but who refers to the Other considering it starts from the structure of the "parlêtre"*, what makes it possible at the same time that the transference is installed, it deals always with the function of supposition, that is to say the Other, the Knowledge and the Subject are supposed.

Two lacks in the subject’s constitution which must not be confused, both are part of the same structure: one lack derives from the going into action of the father, whose result is the subject’s castration, that is to say that the subject is inscribed in the phallic universe and his writing in the theory is, Æ, phallic signifier, symbolic phallus. It is necessary to distinguish it from the, S(A), signifier of the lack in the Other, which refers to the Other’s non-existence. This lack is real and it is present as impossibility of nomination.

We must add, anyway that nothing is missing to the Real and neither to the women. They are, perhaps, elemental questions, but a prohibition is not the same as an impossibility.

These two lacks are present in the Other’s discourse transmitted by the mother. The child notices them in many ways, not only in the mother’s presence-absence, she can be really present and her presence mean even more the lack. Lacan says it like this: "In the child’s experience it is something that can be detected radically. The child tells to his mother, you tell me this, but really, what do you want?. The child requires her to answer about the object of her desire", that she in turn ignores, even though, if the acts are produced correctly the son comes to occupy the place of object of that desire, there is nevertheless, something beyond in her.

"All the child’s why do not arise from a greed for the reason, they rather put the adult to a test, a why do you tell me that?. Always revived from the deepest, what is the enigma of the adult’s desire?". The desire has that double root, it is not only the lack of the signifier, that the signifier is in the Other, but that besides the Other does not dispose of the signifier that names his desire and that is the point which reveals the non-existence of the Other, which is what the subject faces with in the end of the analysis, but that he, besides, has looked for and has avoided to find during all his life.

It is thanks to this non-existence that a little of invention is possible to the "parlêtre"*, it is even what gives place to its own existence.

Lacan is going to deepen, in this questioning showing how the subject, can take to a limit his demand to the Other, a limit of risking, of answering with the antecedent lack, with his own disappearance, to place himself in the point of the lack perceived in the Other. "The first object that he proposes to that parental desire, whose object he does not know, is his own loss. The child proposes himself as object and in lack. Can he lose me? The phantom of his death, of his disappearance, is the first object that the subject has to risk in this dialectics and he really does it". This lack of object would leave said lack exposed.

The phallic answer tries to use up the desire and this shows its impossible satisfaction in the most unusual ways (the endless production of objects in our society is another example of this Real).

The desire only exists as long as there is lack, even though the contrary is not verified, that is to say there can be lack without constituting the desire. For the desire to be built up it is necessary that a Father exists, understood as a function of castration.

The child demands to be named and somehow he is so by a signifier of the Father’s Name, this signifier that acts the repression can not say the lack. The child, as the signifier, constitutes a "one in more" in relation to the real lack which lives in that mother, to whom as long as she is a woman, nothing is missing. Now as mother she has a son, one in more, in relation to that nothing which lives in her.

It is the symbolic attempt and the real too, of seaming what is read, from the father’s side, as a lack.

If the acts are produced correctly, the lack continues, and the subject finds the place where to constitute himself. That is to say, that the child, so that the lack goes on, is not able to perform the mother’s project, to be named for the function of stopping up that lack. When the mother’s voice transmits the father’s saying, the no, which names that failure of the name to cover up the real, this is enough to stop the crocodile mouth. It is something reassuring, it is a stick that is there, a strength, it is the phallus, which does not seam the mouth of the crocodile but that leaves it well open so it does not swallow up the tender creature.

This Other embodied in the father does not only say no but he besides makes his "pere-versión"^**participate, he makes of a woman object a the cause of his desire, he welcomes for himself the female "jouissance" and in this way he protects his son, he avoids that this "jouissance" turns over the child.

This Other embodied in the mother and who transmits the father’s no, can not name his desire, it is in this that she non-exists. In this point, something comes as support for that child, weakening, in "aphanisis": the object a, in this way he builds his phantom in answer to the enigma of the Other’s desire. It is this fraud what allows him to support himself in relation to that Other’s lack.

It is in this questioning about the mother’s desire and in the attempt to stop up his lack that the child builds up his fundamental phantom, that one by means of which, even though on the one hand he is able to stabilize his structure, as from there, that phantom will be the measure of his reality, phantasmagoric reality, as from there he will also establish a relation to the Other that only the end of the analysis will be able to remove.