⌬ Lecture №16 | Lacan, Part I: Imaginary, Symbolic, & Semblants

In this podcast lecture, I will discuss some (but definitely not all) of the concepts that make up the much broader field of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

I've struggled to prepare for these lectures. I've struggled a lot. I've spent many years working to understand Lacan's ideas and his ideas' effects on psychoanalysis.

I encountered Lacan when I was a doctoral student. He was a massive challenge, most people found him too difficult, but I stuck with it. And I've been at it for years now. For me, Lacan is not new and novel. Thinking as a Lacanian has become natural and normal for me.

So, what I'm going to try to do in this podcast lecture is remember that for most of you, Lacan is someone you don't know anything or don't know much about. You're in that new and novel phase that I was in back when I first encountered Lacan as a graduate student.

I hope that I'll be able to talk about these concepts in a way that will (1) get you more interested in them and (2) help you get started if you decide to explore this stuff more. It's going to be hard, but I'll try my best.

Let's get started.

Iterative work...

To start with, I want to draw your attention to some of the ways Lacan's work is similar to Freud's work.

• One of the ways that Lacan and Freud are similar is that they both produced many content.
• Both Freud and Lacan's ideas change over time; their work is iterative...
• And they were both clinical theorists.
• This is a fact --the fact that they were clinicians– is important because for both Freud and Lacan, the work they were doing in the clinic, the work they did with patients, with analysands, was the thing that drove the theoretical work they produced and refined over time.

Phases & Moments

Lacan's work can be divided into phases. One of the ways that many (not all) people who study Lacan break up his work is into an early stage that focuses on the imaginary, a middle stage that focuses on the symbolic, and a late period that is focused on the real, within those phases, there are moments.

During these phases, Lacan would publish papers, give talks, and conduct a seminar (which we can think of as a class or series of lectures). A specific paper, talk, or a series of lectures in his seminar, would be a moment within one of these more extensive phases.

The First Two Phases & The Big Ideas within Those Phases

The Imaginary Period: Work from the early phase focuses on how human beings, particularly infants who don't yet talk, form an unconscious and an ego and how they start to "make sense" of what is happening inside and outside of their bodies.

One of the ways that I think about this period is that it is interested in forming a coherent identity.

The Symbolic Period: In this work's middle or symbolic phase, Lacan focuses on how language (as a symbolic system) and communication/miscommunication affect the human subject. In this phase, Lacan shows how people use language, or a system of signification, to produce what we could call thoughts or complex ways of understanding or "making sense" of their experiences. This phase would interest people who want to understand how thinking about, talking about, or writing about what we have experienced helps us to "process" those experiences. Or, to put it differently, how talking can help to do things like

• De-escalate situations
• Attempt to work through complex trauma
• Or, if you're someone who is into neuroscience stuff, how talking about what has happened to you effects the way the brain is "weird." (i.e., the impact of speech on the body)

I tend to think of this period of Lacan's thought as helping to explain how we learn, internalize, and then make use of different systems like

• Language (how to express one's self and understand how others express themselves)
• Laws/rules (written laws/rules... "No Trespassing!")
• Social/behavioral norms (i.e., unwritten rules of society, culture, or family)

This is the phase where people have a pretty well-formed identity, and now they want to make sure that identity behaves in the correct way.

Anyone really interested in getting all A's is someone with a very symbolic concern.

Both the Imaginary & Symbolic Periods: Both of these periods tend to focus on how people create meaning, or how they make sense of things that happen inside of our bodies and outside of our bodies, and how these experiences impact or effect our bodies.

Sometimes we can see people combining imaginary identity stuff with symbolic stuff to create what Lacanians often call a semblant (sometimes a semblance). Semblants are powerful creations we use to orient ourselves, to help us determine who we are and where we are going.

Some examples of semblance would be

• Being married
• Being a mother/father (by giving birth or by adoption)
• Being a member of a profession. (Some more than others... Police, Doctor, Social Worker, Priest... those would be semblants. Working at Walmart or a call center when you're in high school or undergrad, not so much a semblant.)

A lot of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis could be seen as working in or through the imaginary and symbolic, or as working with the meaningful semblants to help a patient re-orient themself and get back to a place where they are

• Stable
• Where they can think and talk about what has happened to them, about their thoughts and emotions, about their traumas, etc.
• Where they can "love and work" with less difficulty.

One of the ways I've come to think about working with or through the imaginary and the symbolic is that it is using sessions to take things that are currently not thinkable and not discussable (if you can't think something, you can't talk about it) and, usually slowly, transforming these unthinkable and unsayable things into things that can be thought and then discussed.

A very general example: A person comes in to talk about a current problem, they are a workaholic, and this is harming their family. They tell you about this, and you ask questions, get them to associate (explore what ideas and concepts come to mind when they think about their work). The person starts to talk about how their parents worked so much and left them alone, how they got scared, and how they felt with their fear by doing homework or cleaning the house, or some other form of work. And interpret what you hear them saying by pointing out that they have successfully used work to not feel scared.

The patient then says, "I never thought of it like that, but yeah."

Then you might ask, "Are you possibly using work to avoid feeling something now?"

And then you and the patient discuss this thing that has been lurking in an unrealized, unthought, (repressed?) way and turned it into something that can be thought about and talked about!

If one can do this, I think it can (and usually does) have a curative or therapeutic effect on the patient.

The Real

Will be covered in a future podcast lecture.