Introduction to Lacan• Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was born in 1901 to a bourgeois Catholic family.• He was an admirable student, and excelled especially at Latin and philosophy.• He went to medical school, and began studying psychoanalysis in the 1920s with the psychiatrist GaÎtan de Clérambault
Lack• Jacques Lacan created the idea of “lack” and that it causes desires to arise.• "Desire is a relation to being to lack. The lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It is not the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists.“• This is similar to the Freudian approach of ID acting on the hedonistic lifestyle whereas the Super ego acts on moral principles and what “lack” relates to is the Ego which is in between.• From a Freudian approach, the “lack” of hedonistic features strive us to act on moral principles and vice versa.
The Three Lacks• Lacan distinguishes between three kinds of lack. According to the nature of the object which is lacking.• The first one is Symbolic Castration and its object related is the Imaginary Phallus.• The second one is Imaginary Frustration and its object related is the Real Breast.• The third kind of lack is Real Privation and its object related is the Symbolic Phallus• The three corresponding agents are the Real Father, the Symbolic Mother, and the Imaginary Father. Of these three forms of lack, castration is the most important from the perspective of the cure.
“Lack” link to Freud• The symbolic version of the phallus, a phallic symbol is meant to represent male generative powers. According to Sigmund Freuds theory of psychoanalysis, while males possess a penis, no one can possess the symbolic phallus. Jacques Lacans Écrits: A Selection includes an essay titled The Significance of the Phallus which articulates the difference between "being" and "having" the phallus. Men are positioned as men in so far as they are seen to have the phallus. Women, not having the phallus, are seen to "be" the phallus. The symbolic phallus is the concept of being the ultimate man, and having this is compared to having the divine gift of God.
Relative to our film• This theory could be interpreted In our film as our film is a horror, and during our film their is several times where the characters are left vulnerable and the lack of anxiety consumed at the start of the film is then redeemed by being vulnerable in a scary place, so maybe it could be in interpreted that they wanted to get spooked so they could get an adrenaline rush but also contain both moral principles and hedonistic.
Mirror Stage• Initially, Lacan proposed that the mirror stage was part of an infants development from 6 to 18 months.• By the early 1950s, Lacans concept of the mirror stage had evolved: he no longer considered the mirror stage as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, or as the paradigm of "Imaginary order".
• Lacans concept of the mirror stage was strongly inspired by earlier work by psychologist Henri Wallon, who speculated based on observations of animals and humans responding to their reflections in mirrors. Wallon noted that by the age of about six months, human infants and chimpanzees both seem to recognize their reflection in a mirror. While chimpanzees rapidly lose interest in the discovery, human infants typically become very interested and devote much time and effort to exploring the connections between their bodies and their images.• This could be interpreted biblically as the bible notes that Human are dominant race and we were created in “god’s image and likeness” and we can appreciate the higher qualities whereas animals are 1 dimensional and only require the ability to survive and reproduce.
• In a 1931 paper, Wallon argued that mirrors helped children develop a sense of self-identity. However, later mirror test research indicates that while toddlers are usually fascinated by mirrors, they do not recognize themselves in mirrors until the age of 15 months at the earliest,leading psychiatrist Norman N. Holland to declare that "there is no evidence whatsoever for Lacans notion of a mirror stage.”Similarly, Tallis notes that a literal interpretation of the Lacanian mirror stage contradicts empirical observations about human identity and personality: "the [mirror stage] theory would predict that congenitally blind indiv-iduals would lack selfhood and be unable to enter language, society or the world at large. There is no evidence whatsoever that this implausible consequence of the theory is borne out in practice.• "Wallons ideas about mirrors in infant development were distinctly non-Freudian and little-known until revived in modified form a few years later by Lacan. "Lacan used this observation as a springboard to develop an account of the development of human subjectivity that was inherently, though often implicitly, comparative in nature." Lacan attempted to link Wallons ideas to Freudian psychoanalysis, but was met with indifference from the larger community of Freudian psychoanalysts.
• As Lacan further develops the mirror stage concept, the stress falls less on its historical value and ever more on its structural value. "Historical value" refers to the mental development of the child and "structural value" to the libidinal relationship with the body image.• It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship". The dual refers not only to the relation between the Ego and the body, which is always characterized by illusions of similarity and reciprocity, but also to the relation between the Imaginary and the Real.
Freudian roots• As show in “lack” and “Mirror Phrase”, Freud has excessive amount of effect on Lacan.• In most of Lacan’s theories, Freud is consumed in them. Lacans "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud, and included a radical critique of Ego psychology, whereas "Lacans quarrel with Object Relations psychoanalysis"
• Encouraged by the reception of "the return to Freud" and of his report "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," Lacan began to re-read Freuds works in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology and topology.• From 1953 to 1964 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in the collection Écrits, which was first published in 1966. In his seventh Seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959–60), Lacan defined the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and presented his "ethics for our time"—one that would, in the words of Freud, prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the "discontent of civilization." At the roots of the ethics is desire: analysis only promise is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play on words between lentrée en je and lentrée en jeu). "I must come to the place where the id was," where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails "the purification of desire.• " This text formed the foundation of Lacans work for the subsequent yearsHe defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must not have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and that the analytic field is the only place from which it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.