#objet a

What is common to both Butler and the Lacanians is their focus on society and subjectification, and not on the inner depth of a human subject for itself. The term unconscious refers to the subject’s origin in the Other, to the fact that the subject is born in relation to language and cultural norms. Psychoanalysis is founded on the idea of the unconscious. According to Lacan’s groundbreaking idea, Freud’s term unconscious was something entirely else than the notion used by thinkers that preceded Freud. Instead of understanding Freud’s unconscious as a psychological category, Lacan de-psychologises the unconscious. It does not merely relate to childhood memories and individual histories, but works between people. The unconscious refers to the discourse of the Other in oneself, to desires and fantasies that the ego is not conscious of and that are inherited from the parents, the social environment and cultural values. In Lacan’s thought the unconscious is understood as linguistic and historical. The unconscious is an organised system of letters, a formal system that enables certain relations and obstructs others. The subject is split into conscious ego and unconscious order that breaks the coherent meanings of the ego. The meaning that is given to these breaks and mistakes in language is created afterwards.

The concept of the objet petit a is central to Lacan’s theory of desire, which arguably represents his major contribution to psychoanalysis. It is an expression of the lack inherent in human beings, whose incompleteness and early helplessness produce a quest for fulfillment beyond the satisfaction of biological needs. The objet petit a is a fantasy that functions as the cause of desire; as such, it determines whether desire will be expressed within the limits of the pleasure principle or “beyond,” in pursuit of an unlimited jouissance, an impossible and even deadly enjoyment.

The language of the unconscious is traumatic. It destroys the illusions of the ego or the illusions of being in charge. At the same time, the dream is not the ultimate word of the psychoanalytic experience. The dream is a delusionary satisfaction of desire. At the same time, the dream itself invents the way in which we can wake up.

The Symbolic The Symbolic is one of the three registers that structures human existence, next to the Imaginary and the Real. It refers to the implicit laws that govern social exchange relations. Since the most basic form of exchange is speech, the Symbolic is essentially a linguistic dimension. The signifier is the elementary building block of the Symbolic.

The Imaginary The Imaginary is one of the three registers that structures human existence, next to the Symbolic and the Real. The imaginary is the field of the ego, which aims at building images of the world. It is the realm of imagination and illusions. The principal illusions of the imaginary are those of wholeness, synthesis, duality, and similarity.

Signifier and signified Lacan takes the term signifier from the work of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. It is the phonological element of the linguistic sign; not the actual sound but the mental representation of such a sound. A signifier is connected to a signified, which is the idea the linguistic sign expresses. At the level of the unconscious, signifiers play an important role: one signifier might be related to several signifieds.

Signifying chain In making up words from linguistic signs, and in articulating sentences, signifiers are combined in so-called signifying chains.

Desire People express themselves via speech, but language never finally denotes what we want. A remainder always remains unarticulated, which gives rise to desire. A key desire Lacan recognizes is that humans want to be desired by others. Unconscious desire takes shape through defences against articulating ideas and impulses. In the analytic experience, desire “must be taken literally,” as it is through the unveiling of the signifiers that support it, that desire can be made clear. Desires that have not be recognized and valued will insist through specific signifiers that recurrently pop up in speech. Desires that have been repressed—that is: actively excluded from conscious thought—typically get expressed in symptoms. This process is called the return of the repressed.

Transference In Freud’s theory transference mainly refers to the patient’s relationship to the analyst as it develops in the treatment. He subsequently used it to explain how, in psychoanalysis, the relationship between patient and analyst is affected by patients’ previous relational experiences. Lacan discerns a symbolic and an imaginary component to transference. The images the patient constructs about himself or herself, and about the analyst, make up imaginary transference. Affective reactions also belong to imaginary transference. Symbolic transference concerns the articulation of desire through signifiers. The broader the patient’s associations, and to more insisting signifiers come to the fore, the better the symbolic transference. Symbolic transference is fueled by a subject supposed to know. This means that it implies the belief that behind the insisting signifiers in the patient’s discourse an as yet hidden piece of truth about the patient can be found.

Stijn Vanheule and Gilles Arnaud, - Working With Symbolic Transference: A Lacanian Perspective. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.