Split Subject: Lacanian Psychoanalysis
Mar 5, 2021
The subject can be understood as an agent of the human mind and behavior, along with its sense of self. While certain fields of philosophy and psychology find the locus of the subject in human consciousness, psychoanalysis compels us to look for it beyond the ego, the self-conscious instance, beyond the spoken words, and ultimately to question such an understanding of the term. So it is that we come to doubt the very principles of Cartesian philosophy, where “I think, therefore I am” can be turned upside down and rephrased, as Lacan would, into: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think” (Lacan, Fink, Fink, & Grigg, 2006). The very sentence that describes the split subject. To understand the meaning of this statement, we must come to it as a conclusion, therefore we must inspect, why the subject is located in the unconscious, not in the ego, and why it is split. In the end, we will also see how psychoanalytic therapy utilizes this knowledge.
Ego and Imaginary Alienation
Psychoanalysis leads us to believe there is always a conflict in our psyche. Certain ways that we think of ourselves don’t quite match the way we sometimes act or even think.
“According to both Freud and Lacan, the psychic agency of the ego has to be subordinated to the logic of a more primitive “layer” of subjectivity. This is precisely what the experience of psychoanalysis manages to show empirically: that there is an unconscious subject whose reasoning, far from simply being identifiable with sheer irrationality, does not coincide with the ego and which manifests itself in phenomena such as dreams, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and psychosomatic symptoms” (Chiesa, 2007).
Like Freud, Lacan claims that the ego is constructed by the unconscious, but that is where the similarity ends, as Lacan develops a different notion of the ego, which is not a regulating instance between the id and the super-ego, but an elaborate organization of images and identifications. While ego psychology, expanding upon Freudian theory, converges with descriptions of sensation and perception assumed to provide the bedrock of cognitive psychology, Lacan radically opposes such assumptions (Parker, 2003). For him, the ego is but a symptom, therefore we must not focus on it specifically, but rather its cause – the unconscious.
The mirror stage is one of Lacan’s most famous theories, according to which, a child, at around eighteen months of age, develops a tendency to find himself in an external object. Imaginary identification occurs in the subject through the unconscious assumption of an external image, initially of the subject’s own body as reflected in the mirror, in which he recognizes himself. The subject is captivated by his reflection, he is necessarily attracted to it - an image that seems so complete that a child has a moment of revelation, an ah-ha experience, as he is excited to realize: “This is me!”. Such an image has a (de)formative power. It constitutes a set of beliefs and images that make up his conscious sense of self – the ego. At the same time, it denies its own functioning, it doesn’t realize it is an object outside of the subject. This is the reason why being captured fascinates the subject by providing him a primal, yet alienated, form of identification (Chiesa, 2007). It is a misrecognition and at the same time – denial. A slip of the tongue, a bungled action – they are never considered intentional in everyday life. It is something that you didn’t do, as if it was something else, Other than you, when in truth it is the unconscious discourse, conflicting the conscious one. The unconscious subject assumed as an ego, diluted by imaginary identifications, doesn’t recognize its former self, it is alienated at the imaginary level.
We can conclude that the agent or the subject cannot be reduced to an ego, because it is a passive object, which makes a child misrecognize himself. “The ego is structured exactly like a symptom. At the heart of the subject, it is only a privileged symptom, the human symptom par excellence, the mental illness of man” (Lacan, 1988).
Language and Symbolic Alienation
The unconscious is structured like a language. The language and its structure are established in this world long before a child, or his parents are born. Before you are born, you are given a name and have clothes prepared according to your gender. As you grow, you have to communicate, you have to use the language as it is given to you, not as you see it fit, for any silly words and sentences you come up with, no matter how genuine, are met with confusion and laughter. A child has to unconsciously shape his thinking according to this preestablished language, which often forces him to express himself in words that don’t ever quite capture his intentions and desires, but it is a compromise he has to make, for social adaptation (Fink, 1995).
There are certain symbolic rules, people follow. These rules are defined by signifiers - the names and meanings that are given to objects and events, yet they are not determined by those very objects, or people themselves. For Lacan, Language and signifiers are seen not as simple tools of communication, but rather as something alive and alien. The relation between signifiers, named as “symbolic order” is beyond human manipulation and it determines the functioning of humanity. A child, just like his parents and everyone before him, has no other way, but to learn to perceive everything in accordance to that symbolic order, his thoughts and desires are shaped by the language and he becomes like the language. Freud’s conclusion is no coincidence, he argues that the ways unconscious reveals itself, i.e “unconscious formations” are fundamentally linguistic. The language, for a child, is something foreign that slips into his mind, and in doing so, shapes his very being. This is why the unconscious is also described as the discourse of the Other, as it is a discourse beyond the subject’s control, belonging to the symbolic order.
Since the Language subordinates a significant part of the child’s unconscious, this part, the one subjected to the language, becomes alien to him. Any desire he tries to convey is lost through the “wall of language”, by which the majority of his unconscious operates. This part of his is the Other, the foreign body which the child both fears and loves, a concept that is somewhat similar to Freud’s super-ego, but not as the images of parental figures, but rather their voices, words – their entire discourse assimilated by the child, or to better put it in Lacanian view, the discourse that has assimilated the child’s unconscious - The Other, an ultimate symbolic figure, to which a child “chooses” to subordinate, and in relation to which any thought of a human being occurs.
The Split Subject
We have just mentioned, that the unconscious is subjected to language, but this isn’t the only determining factor of the split subject. The subject is split, on the one hand, because it is alienated on the imaginary level, and on the other hand because it is alienated on the symbolic level. In other words, the subject is split because it has formed an ego, and his unconscious has been assimilated by the language.
Here we encounter a certain problem. It becomes hard to see, where exactly is the substratum of the agent. From where does the human being, at its basis, operate? In truth, as Lacan puts it, the subject may as well not exist at all. “The split is not something that can be explained strictly in linguistic or combinatory terms. It is thus in excess of structure” (Fink, 1995). The subject is nothing but a split between two forms of otherness – the ego as other and unconscious as Other’s discourse – the split stands in excess of the Other.
Lacan distinguishes a subject of the statement from a subject of enunciation. Simply put, the “I” which serves as a grammatical subject of a certain statement is not the same “I” which speaks it (Chiesa, 2007). The imaginary alienation overlaps with the symbolic alienation, i.e the “wall of language”, the ego is in this case, constructed into words. “The personal pronoun “I” designates the person who identifies his or herself with a specific ideal image. Thus, the ego is what is represented by the subject of the statement” (Fink, 1995). This kind of statement represents an “empty speech” – the one we use in everyday life.
Chiesa (2007) describes the subject of enunciation as follows:
“The subject undergoes a split “by virtue of being a subject only insofar as he speaks.” In speech and because of speech, the subject is never fully present to himself. That which is not present in the statement but is presupposed and evoked by it (the enunciation) indicates the locus of “another scene” in the subject: the subject of the unconscious which, depends on specific linguistic laws, and sustains a particular “thought.”
“I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think”. The unconscious subject thinks where the ego and subject of the statement are not. At the same time, the linguistic ego resides, where the unconscious subject doesn’t think - in consciousness. The moment they overlap, a necessity arises for the subject to come into being, even if its being is hypothetical.
Here Freud’s famous quote comes into play: “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” - I must become I where “it” was or reigned. I must assume the place, where “it” was. “I” here is the very subject the analysis tries to reach or evoke, in other words – to enunciate.
“An I that assumes the responsibility of the unconscious, that arises there in the unconscious linking up of thoughts which seems to take place all by itself, without the intervention of anything like a subject” (Fink, 1995).
This kind of I is ordinarily excluded in the unconscious thought, but it arises momentarily, not like interruptions in Freudian slips, but as the assumption (“assomption” in French), taking the responsibility for that, which interrupts. The Lacanian subject, despite that, is not temporal in the sense that the interaction of opposing discourses – conscious and unconscious – is a condition of possibility of subject’s existence, while the overlap is its realization.
Psychoanalytic therapy utilizes the subject’s realization through “full speech”. Full speech allows the unconscious subject to be fully expressed, by bypassing the wall of language. As Lacan states, the unconscious subject has a desire to be recognized by the Other, that is to say, to communicate its desire to the Other subject, without the obfuscation of the “wall of language” and ego, so that the analysand himself hears, what his unconscious desire is. How does the analysand assume full speech? The analyst takes the place of the Other subject and lets the unconscious subject be fully present in speech, by enunciating or evoking it. The analyst returns the message of analysand in a positively inverted form.
“The analyst sends back to the analysand the latter’s own (initially empty) message in an inverted, full form - that is, he makes the analysand assume his full speech. One could thus suggest that, for Lacan, successful analysis manages to invert imaginary inversion: the analysand’s own message as empty, imaginary, inverted speech is itself inverted by the analyst who places himself in the position of the Other. It is important, however, to underline how the (analyzed) subject will still receive his own message with his ego. This is the only way in which the subject, as an individuated subject, can receive any message whatsoever. Despite this, analysis achieves the temporary suspension of the alienating mediation provided by the imaginary counterpart. The subject qua ego receives his message directly from the Other, to be understood as the subject’s own unconscious embodied and refracted back by the analyst due to the suspension of the latter’s own ego during analytic treatment” (Chiesa, 2007).
Simply put, the analyst lets analysand, as the subject, to realize the meaning and cause of his unconscious thought and, at the same time, to take responsibility for it.
References
Chiesa, L. (2007). Subjectivity and otherness: A philosophical reading of Lacan. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7454.001.0001
Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press.
Lacan, J. (1988). Seminar I, Freud's Papers on Technique. New York: Nortion; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lacan, J., Fink, B., Fink, H., & Grigg, R. (2006). Écrits (First complete edition in English). W. W. Norton & Company.
Parker, I. (2003). Jacques Lacan, Barred Psychologist. Theory & Psychology, 13(1), 95-115. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354303013001764
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