拉康的理论

. 黄华，权利，身体与自我一福科与女性主义文学批评「M]北京:北京大学出

版社，2005必须注意的是,自我的建构是在一种时间的辩证法中实现的。对拉康来说,镜子阶段远不仅是幼儿的一个自然发展阶段,而且是主体发展中一个体现了时间辩证法的、先行和回溯相互交织的决定性的时刻。“这一发展是作为时间的辩证法而经历的,它把个体的形成决定性地投射进历史之中:镜子阶段是一出戏,其内在压力迅猛地从不足冲向先行(anticipation)——对于受空间认同诱惑的主体而言,这出戏生产了从身体的破碎形象到我所说的关于身体整体性的外科整形形式的种种幻想——直到最终穿戴起异化身份的盔甲。这副盔甲以其僵硬的结构标识出主体的精神发展。”[2](p6)

拉康认为,镜子有一个整体的功能,构建统一的自我，自我形成于镜像

阶段。

来源于作者与自我分裂6

Lacan and His Fundamental Concepts of Theory of Subject Jacques Lacan(1901-80)is undoubtedly the central figure of psychoanalysis in the second half of the 20th century.He has not only revolutionized the psychoanalytic practice but also exerted a global reinterpretation of the entire psychoanalytic theoretical edifice by employing the achievements of structural linguistics and semiotics.The reinterpretation has changed the entire field of the scientific debate.Some of his formulas such as“[T]he unconscious is structured like a language”;“[D]esire is the

desire of the Other”(Ecrites:A Selection 121,123),etc.acquire an almost iconic status

like Einstein’s E=mc2.The least one can say about Lacan is that nobody was undisturbed and unaffected by his work:even those who

passionately oppose him have to take stance from his theory. For Lacan, psychoanalysis totally changes the way we should understand the fundamental notions like “subject’,“cause”,and“reality”,which clearly indicates that the Freudian unconscious as primordial and irrational drives is ridiculous; on the contrary, the unconscious is in a specific way fully rational, discursive, “structured like

a language”(Ecrites:A Selection 121),which entails that Lacan reduces all psychic life

to a symbolic interplay. He proposes the triangle of Imaginary-Symbolic-Real as the three basic phases of forming the subject,the elementary matrix of the human experience.

The term Imaginary is obviously similar with fiction but in Lacanian sense it is not

simply synonymous with the fictional or unreal;on the contrary,imaginary identifications can have very real effects. There is of course an air of unreality to the Imaginary: it traps the subject into alienating identifications that prevent the truth from emerging. In the Mirror Stage that is a key step to the formation of the subject,when the baby at the age from six to eighteen months glimpses its own image in a mirror or some equivalent to a mirror, it greets the image in the mirror with great jubilation and thus identifies with it which is unreal by definition and shows something

yet to become: an integrated unity. It is this identification that forms its unconscious, but its initial self-identification is inevitably based on the Other; so identification with this image in the mirror means alienation of the subject. Therefore, from the beginning, the site of the subject is occupied by the other; the subject is in fact deteriorated into emptiness in essence. The unconscious which is the soul of the subject becomes accordingly the other’s unconscious, while the desire of the subject is the desire of the other. In this sense, the unconscious is not a latent being since it is not an entity; on the contrary, it is rather a negativity, a lack of being, and a hole in chains of signifiers. Lacan calls it pre-ontological. Strictly speaking, the unconscious cannot be defined in the sense of being delimited.

The Symbolic is a register that exists prior to the individual subject, into which the subject must be inserted if he/she is to be able to speak and desire. The Symbolic is often exhibited as languages, cultures, persons and surroundings around. Insertion into the Symbolic is a negative or privative process which implies recognition on the part of the child that it is not in possession of the phallus which is the object of the mother’s desire. It is also an object with which the child attempts to identify (desire always being

a desire of and for the Other).The agency that imposes the law and deprives the child of the phallus in an act of symbolic castration is