22

BASIC PSYCHOLOGICAL IDEAS OF FREUD,

JUNG AND LACAN

Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung and Jacques Lacan have an important place in the
field of modern psychology. Sigmund Freud’s most seminal contribution to modern
psychology is the idea of the unconscious. He displayed through his clinical work that
unconscious is an active and dynamic force which is alive in all human behavior. It
influences all areas in which human desire operates. The unconscious is the sum total
of all our suppressed, repressed, and forgotten desires. Freud believed that human
beings are driven by two conflicting desires: one is the life drive which he calls Eros
which represents survival, thirst and sexual desires. The other one is Thanatos which
represents the death drive – an urge to return to a state of calm, in other words, a
death-in-life stage. The repressed desires he believed get embedded in the
unconscious mind. When the repressed emotions find an outlet there is a conflict
between the conscious and the unconscious psyche. This conflict and its fall outs have
been aptly portrayed in the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Freud eventually sets up a triadic structure of the mind – the id, the ego, the
super ego. Id is purely biological. It is a reservoir of libido, a primary source of all
psychic energy. It is the sum total of all desires and aggressions. Ego operates on
reality principal by the laws of reasoning and thinking. Superego is a regulating
agency which functions to protect the society. It locks the impulses towards pleasure
that society regards an unacceptable such as sexual passion, oedipal instincts.
The workings of the unconscious are available to us in the four major ways:
symptoms, slips in every day life, jokes and dreams. Freud revolutionized the world
of psychiatry with his seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams. Dreams, according
to Freud, are the messages sent from the unconscious for the consumption of ego.
Freud’s theory was that the conscious mind acts as a guard on the unconscious,
preventing certain repressed feelings from coming to the surface. During sleep,
however, this conscious mind is free to run wild and express its most hidden desires.
Dreams are the guardians of sleep and do not intend to disturb it. For this purpose, the
unconscious material changes form and gets distorted in dream images. Freud calls
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this process dream censorship. There are four mechanisms operating in a dream which
Freud calls dream work. These mechanism of dream work operate the same way in
any work of art also: condensation, displacement, symbolization or conditions of
representations and secondary revision or substitution.
The dream displays its message through censorship and symbols as it is a
protector of sleep. Freud holds that this dream distortion changes the narrative in such
a way that it becomes acceptable. A similar process takes place in literature also. In
simple language, art and dream have something disturbing and subversive to convey
to us. But it is conveyed in such a way through literary technique or dream work that
it does not unduly disturb the dreamer or the reader. So it is something subversive
conveyed in an affirmative form. Dreams are constituted at two levels: Dream as a
manifest content which is the surface story of dreams and dream as a latent content
which is the hidden meaning – meaning between the lines. The latent content is bigger
than the manifest content. It has to be interpreted and only thus mysteries can be
solved. For this purpose, Freud used the technique of free associations and secondary
elaborations. Reading a dream becomes an activity for him which parallels the
activity of reading the ambiguities in the works of literature. The work which
transforms the latent dream into manifest one is called dream work and the work
which endeavors to arrive at the latent dream from the manifest one is called the work
of interpretation.
The first achievement of dream work is condensation. Condensation means
that the manifest dream has a smaller content than the latent one and is thus an
abbreviated translation of it. Condensation is brought about by total omission of
certain latent elements; by only a fragment of some complexes in the latent dream
passing over into the manifest dream and by latent elements which have something in
single unity in the manifest dream. Just like a dream is condensed by many elements,
a literary text is also condensed with many elements. Freud calls it over –
determination. There are composite figures, structures, meanings which have been
condensed together. Freud says that condensation produces metaphors and
displacement produces metonymy and together they are at the core of the construction
of meanings in the dream or the literary text.
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Displacement is another powerful instrument of dream censorship. It is an

important device of creating literature also. Displacement manifests itself in two
ways: the latent element is replaced by not a component part of itself but by
something more remote one i.e by an allusion and secondly the psychical accent is
shifted from an important element to an unimportant element. Condensation and
displacement both are inextricable according to Freud.
The core idea of Freud is that unconscious dynamically influences the working
of human mind, language and culture. It leaves its imprints on all human behavior e.g.
the secondary revision does not take place only in the act of reading, it first takes
place in the unconscious of the author himself i.e. the author’s unconscious directly
interferes with the writing of the text. The mechanisms of unconscious affect all
aspects of the construction of human subject and creation of meaning. The
unconscious affects all the three main links in the literary interphase i.e. author, text
and reader. It operates all the time whether it is in our dream or literature or jokes or
even everyday life. To sum up Freud’s ideas, human beings are tragic figures and in
spite of being tragic, man is for love and love can overtake all difficulties. That is why
psychoanalysis is a cure through love.
C.G. Jung was nineteen years junior to Freud and Freud groomed Jung as an
heir to the psychoanalytical movement. But Jung’s research took him to a new
direction and there came a break up between the two. Jung departs from Freud about
the concept of the unconscious. Jung postulated the idea of collective unconscious. He
joined Freud’s preconscious and unconscious into one unit which he called personal
unconscious. Collective unconscious is universal in contrast with personal
unconscious. It is as if all the cultural history of past lies in the deeper layer of
unconscious. “The contents of collective unconscious are known as archetypes i.e. pre
– existent forms or original forms.” (Jung The Archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious 3) Jung saw unconscious like a three – layered onion. At the centre lies
the self. Within the inner of the three circles is collective unconscious, composed of
archetypes. The outer circle represents consciousness, with its focal ego orbiting the
system like a planet. Intermediate between the conscious and the collective
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unconscious is the personal unconscious made up of complexes which is linked to an

archetype for complexes are personification of archetypes.
In the words of Jung, the unconscious structure of the psyche is “an inborn
apriori element.” (Jung The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 5) He
explains it with the example of a new born baby. Just as a new born baby resembles
others in constitution, but at the same time has an individual entity, similarly, the
contents of the collective unconscious are universal but they are experienced
personally. He extends the scope of the unconscious and adds a new dimension to its
exclusively personal nature by including archaic and primordial affirmations into its
scope. According to Jung, there is an innate drive in all human beings to see the full
potential of their personality. This is universal and archetypal desire for psychic
growth. Jung calls this individuation process. Individuation is a psychological
growing up, the process of discovering those aspects of one’s self that makes an
individual different from other members of the species. It is a process of self
recognition and is absolutely essential if one is to become a well–balanced individual.
This individuation process has a definite pattern and proceeds through identifiable
stages.
The archetypes have an abode in the unconscious and come to the fore at
unpredictable intervals. The archetypes we confront are: persona, shadow, anima or
animus, wise old man and the self i.e. complete and wholesome personality when all
stages are achieved and the psychic journey is complete. When a child is born, he
knows nothing, he gradually starts realizing that he is different from others. Ego
works towards and exercises control over his sense of identity. Ego is a monolithic
entity which is multi-layered comprising of id, ego, superego and present at conscious
and unconscious levels. Ego is the ability to choose between good and bad. The ego is
the centre of consciousness. Persona is an archetype of social adaptability. There is
always some kind of pretence in persona. The persona begins to form early in
childhood out of a need to conform to the wishes and expectations of parents and
teachers. Persona should be flexible. As Jung says:
Society expects and indeed must expect, every
individual to play the part assigned to him as perfectly
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as possible, so that a man who is a person... must at all

times... play the role of parson in a flawless manner.
Society demands this as a kind of surety: each must
stand at this post, here a cobbler, there a poet. No man
is expected to be both... that would be ‘odd.’ In the
academic world he would be a dilettante, in politics an
‘unpredictable’ quantity, in religion a free-thinker in
short, he would always be suspected of unreliability and
incompetence, because society is persuaded that only
the cobbler who is not a poet can supply workmanlike
shoes. (Jung Two Essays on Analytical Psychology 305)
The persona, however, is a necessity; through it we relate to our world. It simplifies
our contacts by indicating what we may expect from other people and on the whole
makes them pleasanter, as good clothes improve ugly bodies.
Jung calls the other side of ourselves, which is to be found in the personal
unconscious, the shadow. Shadow is one’s anti self, the dark sister. All that one
represses to build a persona goes into the shadow. This is close to Freud’s concept of
id. But shadow is bigger than id. It may have positive connotations. Jung regards
shadow as a tight passage, a narrow door. As Jung states:
The shadow is tight passage, a narrow door, whose
painful constriction no man is spared who goes down to
the deep well... For what comes after the door is
surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of
unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside
and no outside, no above and no below, no here and
there, no mine and no thine. (Jung The Archetypes and
the Collective Unconscious 3)
The shadow is something more than the personal unconscious – it is personal in so far
as our own weaknesses and failings are concerned, but since it is common to
humanity it can also be said to be a collective phenomenon. The collective aspect of
shadow is expressed as a devil, a witch, or something similar.
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In choosing the word shadow to describe the aspects of the unconscious, Jung
has more in mind than merely to suggest something dark and vague in outline. There
is, as he points out, no shadow without the sun, and no shadow without the light of
consciousness. It is in fact in the nature of things that there should be light and dark,
sun and shade. The shadow is unavoidable and man is incomplete without it. The
danger of repressing the shadow is that in the unconscious it seems to acquire strength
and grow in vigour, so that when the moment comes and when it must appear, it is
more dangerous and more likely to overwhelm the rest of the personality, which
otherwise could have acted as a wholesome check. This is particularly true of those
collective aspects of the shadow which are displayed when a mob riots and apparently
harmless people behave in the most savage and destructive manner.
In the realm of the archetype of shadow, everything is unconditional and
events take an unsuspecting trend. The archetype of shadow also represents evil latent
in man. It comprises not first those undesirable traits which are repressed into the
personal unconscious, but the whole ugly burden of the evil world. “The shadow, says
Jung, is a moral problem which challenges the whole ego personality; it is moreover a
social problem of immense importance which should not be underestimated. No one
is able to realize the shadow without considerable moral resolution and some
reorientation of his standards and ideas. No redemption is possible without tolerance
and love-attitudes that have proved fruitful in dealing with the social renegade, but
that we do not usually think of applying in any constructive way to ourselves.”
(Fordham 52)
The basic idea of our life is to consolidate the conscious and the unconscious
in us to form a balanced personality. It is assumed that the psychology of man and
woman is identical. Jung has recognized and illustrated the distinctive features in the
masculine and feminine unconscious. In the unconscious of man, there is definitely a
feminine element, personified by a male figure. Jung calls it the anima or the soul.
Jung says:
An inherited collected image of woman exists in a
man’s unconscious. With the help of it he apprehends
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the nature of woman. (Jung Two Essays on Analytical

Psychology 301)
But it is only woman as a general phenomenon that man apprehends in this way, for
the image is an archetype, a representation of the age-old experience of man with
woman, and though many women will conform, at least outwardly, to this image, it in
no way represents the real character of an individual woman.
The image becomes conscious and tangible through the actual contacts with
woman that a man makes during the course of his life. The first and most important
experience of a woman comes to him through his mother and is most powerful in
shaping and influencing him: there are men who never succeed in freeing themselves
from her fascinating power. But the child’s experience has a marked subjective
character; it is not how the mother behaves, but how he feels she behaves that is
significant. The image of his mother that occurs in each child is not an accurate
picture of her, but is formed and coloured by the innate capacity to produce an image
of woman – the anima.
The compelling power of the anima is due to her image being an archetype of
the collective unconscious, which is projected on to any woman who offers the
slightest hook on which her picture may be hung. Jung considers her to be the soul of
man, not soul in the Christian sense, as the essence of the personality and with the
attribute of immortality, but ‘soul’ as primitives conceive it to be – namely, a part of
the personality. To avoid confusion, therefore, Jung uses the word anima instead of
soul; psychologically it implies the ‘recognition of the existence of a semiconscious
psychic complex, having partial autonomy of function.’ (Jung Two Essays on
Analytical Psychology 302)
The anima is expressed in a man’s life not only in projection upon the woman
and in creative activity, but in fantasies, moods, presentiments and emotional
outbursts. An old Chinese text says that when a man wakens in the morning heavy or
in bad mood, that is his feminine soul, his anima. She disturbs the attempt to
concentrate by whispering absurd notions in his ears, spoils the day by creating the
vague, unpleasant sensation that there is something physically wrong with him or
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haunts his sleep with seductive visions; and a man possessed by his anima is a prey to
uncontrollable emotion. (Fordham 55)
Its counterpart in woman is the animus, personified by a man. He seems to be
(like the anima) derived from three roots: the collective image of man which a woman
inherits; her own experience of masculinity coming through the contacts she makes
with men in her life; and the latent masculine principle in herself.
The masculine principle – that is, the masculine element in women – found
very positive expression in women’s activities during the war years, when it was
made clear that they could fill adequately most positions previously reserved for men.
But only an abnormal situation brings out such manifestations; there is a
contemporary movement towards a wider range of activity for women, but generally
this activity is better expressed in a domestic milieu, or in one that bears some
relationship to it, e.g. teaching, nursing and social work:
Personal relations are as a rule more important and
interesting to her than objective facts and their
interconnections. The wide fields of commerce, politics,
technology and science, the whole realm of the applied
masculine mind, she relegates to the penumbra of
consciousness; while on the other hand, she develops a
minute consciousness of personal relationships, the
infinite nuances of which usually escape the man
entirely. (Jung Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
330)
In other words, it is usually (though not always) the case that a woman’s
thinking and a man’s feelings and emotions belong to the realm of the unconscious.
The anima produces moods, the animus produces opinions, resting on unconscious
assumptions instead of really conscious and directed thought.
As the mother is the first carrier of the anima image for the boy, so the father
embodies the animus image for the girl and this combination seems to exercise a
profound and lasting fascination over her mind, so that instead of thinking and acting
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for herself she continually quotes father and does things in father’s way, even late into
life.
The animus is a natural archetype in woman and is projected upon man. The
woman has no option in having the animus. It is a part of her natural endowment. The
father is the first man the woman meets in her and involuntarily he becomes the
standard by which she assesses other man. The girl’s experience of her father
becomes an all important image in her mind. Her later experiences in life do not
displace the image of her father. There is also the inherited image of man in woman’s
unconscious, derived from her past experiences of man. For this masculine element in
woman, Jung has employed the term animus. The masculine element in her
personality is harmoniously blended enabling her to understand and apprehend the
nature of man. Unharmonious blending of animus in her personality causes
maladjustment in the woman and also brings about the failure of her marriage.
The animus has a positive function, however; there are times when a woman
needs the courage and aggressiveness he represents and he is useful if she can prevent
him running away with her; the opinions produced by him are too generalized and
therefore inapplicable to understand them critically she may find something of value
in them. The animus can in fact stir her to search for knowledge and truth and lead her
into purposeful activity, if she can learn to know him and delineate his sphere of
activity.
Both the animus and the anima are mediators between the conscious and the
unconscious mind, and when they become personified in fantasies, dreams, or visions
they present an opportunity to understand something of what has hitherto been
unconscious. Jung takes dreams seriously. They are ‘the voice of nature,’ and not only
a voice, they also have an effect on us. The most curious and apparently meaningless
dreams can usually be understood if given the right kind of thought and
considerations, while some present such a clear picture that there is little difficulty in
grasping something of their meaning if one is prepared to try. If one studies visionary
or dream figures closely and notes any correspondence with people already known, or
with figures of myth and poetry, or characters from books or plays, one may gather
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some idea of the significance of the dream figure for oneself, and a hint of its
unconscious influence.
After anima or animus the two archetypes which become influential in a
person’s life are those of the old wise man and the great mother. Jung sometimes calls
the old wise man the archetype of meaning, but since he appears in various other
forms – for instance as a king or hero, medicine man or saviour – one must clearly
take the word ‘meaning’ in its wide sense. Jung believes that the emergence of this
figure is due to a certain kind of positive father complex and embodies a spiritual
character. In dreams, it is always the father figure from whom the wise counsel and
decisive convictions emanate. The dream of white and black magician is a glaring
example of this genre. The figure appears in the guise of a magician, priest, doctor or
any other person possessing authority. The old man appears when hero is a desperate
and hopeless situation from which only profound reflection can extricate him. The
mariner in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” turns to the Hermit with a desperate
appeal for absolution. He pleads: “O shrieve me, shrieve me , holy Man.” (574)
Like any other archetype, the mother archetype can appear in multifarious
forms. It comes to the fore due to the influence of the mother, grandmother, mother-
in-law or any other woman with whom a relationship has been formed. It can be a
governess, a nurse, an actress etc. The mother in the figurative sense can be mother of
God-the Virgin and Sophia. In “Christabel,” Christabel leads Geraldine to her
chamber, where ‘moon shines dim in the open air” (75) but “not a moon beam enters
here” (76). The moon is a dominant symbol of the mother archetype. The moon
brightens the dark woods but it is partially covered by a grey cloud that signifies the
struggle between good and evil. Christabel offers her: “drink this cordial wine: / it is a
wine is virtuous powers; / My mother made it of wild flowers” (91-93). It lays the
foundation of the so-called mother complex. Like any other archetype, it appears
under infinite variety of aspects. Excessive affection from mother is harmful and has
dangerous consequences. It leads to both the negative and positive influences. As
compared with the son, the daughter experiences the mother complex in a clear and
uncomplicated way. The reason for this is that in man, the mother complex is never
pure, for it is always mixed with the anima archetype.
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Archetypes sometimes have positive and favorable influence and sometimes

they have negative and evil influence. The qualities associated with positive side are
maternal solicitude, the magical authority, wisdom and spiritual exaltation. On the
negative side, the archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, abysmal i.e.,
anything that devours or seduces by the symbols of evil influence which are the witch,
the dragon and the serpent etc.
Another very important centre of personality is ‘the self.’ The ego, Jung says,
can be regarded as the centre of the conscious and if it tries to add unconscious
contents to itself (i.e. collective contents, not the personal unconscious or shadow
which does belong to the ego) it is in danger of destruction, like an overloaded vessel
which sinks under the strain. The self, however, can include both the conscious and
the unconscious. The term ‘self’ is not used by Jung as in everyday speech, but in the
Eastern manner, where as Atman, Purusha, Brahman, it has been a familiar
philosophical concept from time immemorial. In Hindu thought the self is the
supreme principle, the oneness of being. For the Indian “everything, highest and
lowest, is in the (transcendental) ‘Subject’ i.e. the Self. In Chinese thought, the
concept of Tao is also all-inclusive and the development of the Golden Flower or
Immortal Spirit body (the highest aim of Chinese Yoga), depends on the equal
interplay of both the light forces (Yang) and the dark forces (Yin).” (Wilhelm 11-12)
It was contact with the Eastern mind that illuminated for Jung many of the
secrets of the unconscious and led him to formulate in The Secret of the Golden
Flower the concept of the self. Jung makes it clear that his concept of the self is not
that of a kind of universal consciousness, which is really only another name for the
unconscious. It consists rather in the awareness, on the one hand, of our unique
natures, and on the other of our intimate relationship with all life, not only human, but
animal and plant, and even that of inorganic matter and the cosmos itself. It brings a
feeling of ‘oneness,’ and of reconciliation with life, which can now be accepted as it
is, not as it ought to be. Jung says:
It is as if the guidance of life had passed over to an
invisible centre... [and there is a] release from compulsion
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and impossible responsibility that are the inevitable

results of participation mystique. (Wilhelm 77)
The experience of self is archetypal and is portrayed in dreams and visions by
many and varied images, all of which may be called archetypes of the self. To those
unfamiliar with the language of dreams this wide variety of images may seem
confusing, but one must remember that the unconscious is never precise in the way
that consciousness needs to be.
If [it speaks] of the sun and identifies with it the lion,
the king, the hoard of gold guarded by the dragon, or
the power that makes for the life and health of man, it is
neither the one thing nor the other, but the unknown
third thing that finds more or less adequate expression
in all these similes, yet – to the perpetual vexation of the
intellect remains unknown and not be fitted into a
formula. (Jung Psychology and Alchemy 267)
Thus according to Jung all these archetypes – anima, animus, shadow and wise
old man originate from the collective unconscious. The main role of archetype in our
life is to make us realize our own self and rise high in life. A capital S is used to
distinguish between the “self” of everyday usage and Jung’s “self” which transcends
ego. The self seeks fulfillment in the spiritual achievement of religion and inner life of
soul. Hence we can experience it as God within us.
In the history of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan stands out like a Moby Dick in
a duck pond. (Lacan 25) His contribution to current literary theory is prolific and
multifarious. His theory is elemented on Sigmund Freud’s ideas, but he revitalizes
Freudian theory, making radical changes in it. To follow his mission, Lacan tried to
dig up Freud’s ideas from the litter of banalising glosses and explanations that later
writers have heaped upon them.” (Bowie 101)
Most later psychoanalysts misinterpreted Freud. His ideas lost all sense and
innovative power and became a barrier for the scientific research of mental processes.
Lacan re-examined those ideas and revitalizes the complexity and power that they
possess as they were first formulated by Freud. In this mission he goes far and revises
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many of Freud’s ideas. But he is still a Freudian and can be understood with the help
of the basic ideas of Freud. “Where Freud eventually set up a triadic structure of the
mind – the id, the ego, the superego – Lacan creates the trilogy of the imaginary, the
symbolic and sometimes the real.”(Osborne 161) Lacan talks about the unconscious –
the idea that is placed at the centre of Freud’s thinking. Unconscious is defined as:
“The realm of insatiable instinctual energy and knows
no stability, or containment or closure.” (Bowie 103)
Lacan modernized Freud through language. He postulates that the unconscious
is structured like language. Language gives birth to unconscious. Before language,
there is no unconscious. Freud was interested in biology as he analyzed the inter-
relationship between biology and mind. But Lacan is interested in language and he
looks at the relationship between culture, language and the mental structures.
He writes “So psychoanalysis is carried out exclusively with words, with
language. So psychoanalysis, argues Lacan, must have a theory of language and
meaning. (Hill 25) Lacan reorganized Freud’s account of the unconscious and its
relations with the preconscious system around linguistic concepts and made it more
convincing. His debt to linguistics is clear from his pronouncement, “unconscious is
structured like language.” (Bowie 108)
We can look at the relationship between language and the unconscious in two
ways. First, unconscious’s contribution to the formation of human language and
secondly, language’s contribution to the formation of unconscious. To support the
first way:
It is clearly possible that the intra-psychical tensions
and conflicts could have played their part in
determining the structure of human language in the
first place: the idea that language was created in the
partial image of an already existing unconscious
offers at the very least an appealing poetic
explanation for that sense of a ‘natural’ interlocking
between the two systems. (Bowie 108)
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We all represent ourselves through language. We communicate with each

other with the help of language. So according to the second way:
Language is the sole medium of psychoanalysis: for
the patient as he speaks his dreams and phantasies,
and for the analysts as he punctuates the patient’s
discourse and places constructions upon it, the
unconscious is available only in a linguistically
mediated form. (Bowie 109)
Lacan emphasizes the idea that language creates the unconscious. To support his idea,
he describes the elementary structural components of both language and unconscious.
Human beings represent themselves with language, with signifiers. Lacan says that
the signifier represents the subject for another signifier. Subject is the person and
signifier is the word which represents the subject.
According to Lacan a word’s meaning comes when it is contrasted with other
words, e.g., ‘true’ with ‘false,’ ‘good’ with ‘bad.’ These pairs of words are called
‘binary opposites.’ Subject and signifier also make an important pair of ‘binary
opposites’ or ‘logical equivalence.’ He used special term for the subject. The
abbreviation he used for the subject is an S with a bar through it, i.e., this bar is put to
show the alienated subject. It clears the fact that there is always some kind of slippage
or something missing that it desires. The subject is split or divided by language. The
bar is:
The pictorial enactment of a necessary and irremovable
cleavage between signifier and subject. (Bowie 110)
The subject is overpowered by language which is not fixed but always remains
in flux. It is culturally constructed and liable to change. In Lacan’s view:
“The use of a word and its meaning always depends on
the user’s history and on the use of the word in their life
and community. So meaning depends on use, and as use
varies, so meaning varies.” (Hill 28)
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Lacan draws upon Roman Jakobson’s two poles of verbal organization: ‘the
metaphor’ and ‘the metonymy’ which correspond to Freud’s terms ‘condensation’ and
‘displacement.’ Jakobson’s terms create an additional pair of crosswise relationship:
The psychical mechanism by which neurotic symptoms
are produced involves the pairing of two signifiers-
unconscious sexual trauma and changes within, or
actions by, the body and is thus metaphorical; where as
unconscious desire, indestructible and insatiable as it is,
involves a constant displacement of energy from object
to object and is thus metonymic. (Bowie 113)
Metaphor is the substitution of one word for another. One signifier takes the
place of the other in the signifying chain. Metonymy is based on the word to word
connection. The place of signifier is confused with the place of the subject. Lacan
believes that a subject can not be whole or complete. There is always something
missing in that subjectivity. This something is the object, i.e.:
The subject is made up of absent objects, of things
missing and lost, and often imagined by the subject to
reside in others, in other people. (Hill 78)
To give an example, a man’s object resides in a woman and a woman’s object
resides in a man. It is because every subject is separated by language. Our separation
or identifications are signified through images or signifiers. A subject is represented
by the signifier for another signifier that is for the subject. As the object is missing
thing, it becomes the cause of desire for the subject.
Lacan’s theory revolves around the paradox of desire and lack. He
distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is physiological in nature, for
example, a child’s need for food. It can be completely satisfied. State of infancy is a
state of need. The mother fulfills infant’s needs. In this state infant is totally
dependent on mother. When the infant gets older, mother does not spend much time
with it and increases the gap between its feeds. At this stage the child starts learning
language because the mother feeds it words or signifiers. For the infant, it is a
complicated stage. It gets confronted with symbolic father whom the mother desires.
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The problem of the real and of the impossible comes to the forefront. It is a kind of
progression from need to demand.
Demand is for an object that can not be given because it does not exist. Need
and demand can be contrasted: The object of need can be supplied but the object of
demand can not be supplied. The child keeps on demanding but does not get proper
response from the mother because the mother can not fulfill its impossible demands. It
becomes frustrated for it does not get pleasure from the words with which mother
feeds it. It is a state of progress from demand to desire. The child’s frustrated demand
gives birth to desire. Demand and desire are contrasted as:
Demand is always presented as impossibility for some
one else, as something that the other is not doing for the
subject. Desire is a possibility for the subject, something
that the subject might achieve. (Hill 67)
One desires what one lacks. Desire per se is always for ‘the other’. Meaning of an
individual’s desire can be found in other’s desire because it is a game of signifiers.
Signifiers are the property of language. Language is not an individual’s property but it
belongs to all who use it. That’s why an individual’s desire is related with what others
desire. Desire expresses itself through signifiers. Hidden desires speak in slips of
tongue, in a dream, jokes or as a symptom. Lacan says:
Desire is an effect in the subject of that condition which
is imposed upon him by the existence of the discourse
to cause his need to pass through the defiles of the
signifier. (Jafferson 153)
One can know one’s desire, after having the experience of one’s unfulfilled demands.
Otherwise one can not recognize ones desire and can not follow it. For Lacan:
Desire is that which is manifested in the interval that
demand hollows within itself, in as much the subject, in
articulating the signifying chain, brings to light the
want-to-be together with the appeal to receive the
complement from the other, if the other, the locus of
 38

speech, is also the locus of this want, or lack. (Lacan

263)
If a child is to use language he/she has to be separated from its mother. What
separates the child from the mother is the symbolic father. Symbolic father can be the
biological father, step father, sibling or mother’s work that creates separation.
The separation is regarded by the child as the mother’s
desire for someone else, for someone other than the
child. (Hill 60)
Some aspects of the symbolic father remain in flux and some aspects get fixed in
child’s mind as proper names. These proper names help the child to speak and
understand language. Proper names are fixed and other bits of language are always in
flux. Both are interdependent. The aspects which are fixed, Lacan terms those as
‘Names-of-the-Father.’
Lacan has taken the linguistic terms from Saussure’s theory of language.
Signifier is the technical term for word in Lacan’s theory of subject. Subject
represents itself through signifiers or language. What we speak or write are the
signifiers which help us in defining ourselves. Language separates the subject from
the object and becomes a signifying system to represent the subject. Subject is a
person who is made up by language which defines a subject in terms of words or
signifiers.
Signifiers are the special objects and the only way through which we can
represent ourselves for another signifier. For example, every member of a family
represents his/her family for another family. In a community one member represents
the whole family. Otherwise all members differ from each other in their views or
interests. That is why Lacan says:
We are separated and joined by language. It alienates each
one of us and yet makes a community of us: a community
of alienated and alienating subjects. (Hill 32)
Another important concept is ‘the phallus’ which represents power. The phallus and
castration are a pair of binary opposites. Castration represents loss of power. Lacan
describes the phallus as:
 39

The phallus is something that has the power to move or

change, apparently by itself. Examples of the phallus
are motorbikes, a business that expands and contracts,
women making babies, workman building a house, a
plough cutting a furrow. (Hill 103)
Lacan further postulates his idea that the unconscious of the subject is constructed by
language. According to him before language there is no unconscious. When an infant
enters into the realm of language, it becomes a human subject, its unconscious takes
birth and its identity is constructed in language. He describes the transition from
infancy to childhood in different stages – imaginary, the symbolic and the real. The
pre oedipal infant lives in imaginary state. In this state, the child has no access to
language. It can not speak and is not aware of its limitations and boundaries. There is
no split between self and other. It has no sense of difference between itself and the m
(other). For the child its body is the world. It sees itself reflected in its surroundings.
Its reality is imaginary. Through mirror phase the child enters the symbolic stage.
The imaginary grows from the infant’s experience of his
‘specular ego’ but extends far into the adult individual’s
experience of others and of the external world where
false identification is to be found within the subject, or
between subject and thing-there the imaginary holds
away. (Bowie 115)
In mirror phase, the child is confronted with an image that the world gives back to it.
It discovers itself as an identity, as whole, coherent being. But this image is like the
image that is seen in an actual mirror which is a distortion of the real.
The child experiences in play the relation between the
movements assumed in the image and the reflected
environment, and between this virtual complex and the
reality it reduplicates the child’s own body, and the
persons and things, around him. (Lacan 1)
It is false recognition or identity. The world is the mirror which gives us this
imaginary sense of ourselves. Our identity is constructed in interaction with others,
 40

i.e. what is outside of us. This identity is subject to change. It can never be fixed or
stable or coherent. Because the world (social or personal) which constructs our
identity is a process in which changes are inevitable and it never leads to completion,
so is our identity. Our identity is constructed under the ‘gaze’ of the ‘other.’ We
realize that we are different from others, though we resemble them also. Thus our
identity is relational which allows for difference.
When the child enters the world of language, its identity is constructed in
language. The mirror image is signified and the child is signifier. Identity can be said
to be a linguistic and cultural construct. Pre-verbal fantasies and drives are left
behind, hence unconscious is constructed which becomes the realm of these fantasies
and drives. Unconscious is structured like language as it works through signs and
metaphors. But it is beyond language. The world of language is “in which the Real-
the real world which we can never know is symbolized and represented by the way of
language and other representational systems that operate like language.” (Bertens
160) Real is not accessible to the subject. It is ‘the impossible’ or ‘the ineffable’
which can not be named. It always returns to the same place:
It then becomes that before which the imaginary
faltered, that over which the symbolic, that which is
refractory resistant. (Lacan 10)
It is ‘outside’ of language. The child accepts the language and the social and
cultural systems which operate in the child’s environment. It acquires its identity
through language within the symbolic order, it can be either male or female. Its
identity is relational.
The child is reduced to a subject within a relation
system (male/female, father/mother, son/daughter).
(Krishnaswamy 52)
The relational system allows for difference. Biological difference of male and female
gives birth to desire for the other. The male desires the female and female desires the
male. According to Lacan:
The massive configuration of authority that works
through language is the nom du pere, the name of the
 41

father, in recognition of the patriarchal character of our

social arrangements and the phallus is the signifier that
patriarchal character. (Bertens 161)
When the subject enters the symbolic stage, it has to accept language and the feeling
of wholeness and coherent or undifferentiated being is lost. Feeling of oneness with
the world is lost because there is no access to the preverbal self. Human subject lives
ever after with the feeling of lacking something. This loss of preverbal self results in
desire. The desire that can not be completely fulfilled but can only be substituted
temporarily with symbolic means. The child feels alienated from his ‘Real’ self.
‘Real’ returns again and again but it can not be grasped or conceptualized. It is:
That which is lacking in the symbolic order, the in
eliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed
element, which may be approached, but never grasped:
the umbilical cord of the symbolic. (Lacan 10)
‘Real’ is the impossible to say. Language is unable to represent it as words are unable
to grasp it. Thus language isolates the child from its own reality. Language is a world
of sign, and signifiers which have no stability. To further explain it:
The ‘Real’ turns up in man’s relation to desired
objects. It makes its appearance because the
signifying system is revealed as inadequate: the
desired object is never what one thinks one desires.
What one imagines is always the primordial lost
object, the union with the mother. (Jafferson 153)
We try to conceptualize it but it always fails. Language or words create a void
which can not be filled completely as Lacan’s subject is divided by language. He
describes four ways of being with language. These four ways are termed as four
discourses which are: The Slave – master Discourse; The Hysteric’s Discourse; The
University or Academic Discourse; The discourse of the Analyst. The slave – master
discourse is the basic and universal discourse. The other three are its extended forms.
The slaves think that their masters possess knowledge, power, all the fun and pleasure
and have the solution to their problems. The distinction between slave and master is
 42

not possible because every slave is a master to his own slavery and every master is a
slave to his own mastery.
Social system has complete hold over masters and slaves. It allows and forbids
the expression of their desires and their symptoms. What it forbids, takes refuge in the
unconscious. Thus, repression gives birth to the unconscious. For Lacan, repression is
“the direct effect of entry into the symbolic order.” (Jafferson 153) Masters and slaves
both follow the social order or their slave-master culture, being loyal to it. Hence
revolutions are always partial as the slaves cherish their inertia. Every relationship is
based on the slave-master culture. For example, parent-child, husband-wife,
employer-employee, warden-prisoner, lover-beloved, teacher-student relationship etc.
Hysteric’s discourse is the overestimation of the other and underestimation of the self.
When a lover says, “Without you, I am nothing,” he over evaluates his beloved and
de-evaluates himself. He is taking himself for a slave and his beloved for a master. In
Hysteric’s discourse, in the University or academic discourse, slave – master
discourse is at the root. Teacher-student relationship comes in this category. One is
the knowing subject and the other is the unknowing subject. Hence the knowing
subject, the teacher, is the master and the unknowing subject, the student, is the slave.
In a court, a lawyer is the knowing subject and a client is the unknowing subject. In
this relationship of lawyer and client, lawyer is the master and the client is the slave
though they are interdependent.
In the discourse of the analyst, analyst just listens to his patient and with
logical questioning helps him to find some truth or solution to his problems. The
patient supposes that the analyst possesses knowledge and solution of his problems. In
this way, the patient places the analyst at master’s position and himself at the slave’s
position. Being a linguist, Lacan has described four types of discourses or four ways
of being with the language. But as a structuralist, he also takes interest in structures.
He tries to establish a relation between language and mental structures. He has given
four psychic structures which are: Hysteria, Obsessional neurosis, Perversion,
Psychosis. Every human being’s psyche is dominated by one of these psychic
structures. Conflict is the basic state of life as it is full of desires. We have to live with
our conflicts or desires. These conflicts or desires determine our psychic structure. We
 43

can be hysteric, neurotic, pervert or psychosis. In every case there is some kind of
conflict or desire.
In case of hysteria, one does not recognize the desire which is hidden as his or
her own. A hysteric person gives importance to other’s desires and undermines its
own desire. It can not speak its desires but its desire can speak through the symptoms
and demands to be interpreted or addressed by the other. Its symptoms can be
headache or blindness or some other bodily pain. So hysteric feels discomfort and
pain and makes its suffering obvious.
For an obsessional, there are two desires which are mutually exclusive or
incompatible for him. He believes that if he will act on the one, the other desire will
be ruled out. He is unable to decide what he should do. He is in a state of dilemma. He
wants to fulfill both the desires but it seems to him impossible. His mind moves from
one desire to the other:
Children usually go through obsessional games, rituals
and phases... Adult obsessionals exhaust themselves
with similar activities as well as compiling endless lists,
having a lot of trouble finishing anything and amassing
huge collections, which are also usually unfinished,
with one or two stamps or match boxes that remain
missing. (Hill 99)
Impossibility is the key word in the case of obsessional. He struggles with his
impossibility, i.e. the real.
Third psychic structure is perversion. Lacan used the word ‘pere-version.’
‘Pere’ means ‘father’ in French. He links it with symbolic father who separates the
child from the mother and symbolizes rules and taboos regarding sexual enjoyment.
For example, the rules against incest which disallow incestuous relations. Perverts
enjoy their symptoms. They take ‘jouissance’ from their symptoms. ‘Jouissance’ is a
kind of sexual satisfaction which differs from pleasure. “Jouissance is always
transgressive, somehow against as a rule, as an illicit variation.” (Hill 107) Narcissists
and homosexuals come in the category of perverts.
 44

Psychosis is more complex than other psychic structures. Psychotics have a

different relation with language. Their relation with language differs from neurotics
and perverts as they are not properly separated from their mother. For them meaning
and rules of language are not that much fixed as they are for neurotics and perverts.
The rules of language can not be always proved, there exists some kind of
inconsistency and incompleteness. Neurotics and perverts believe that rules are
incomplete but for psychotics, they are inconsistent. There are some contradictions or
conflicts in these fixed rules. Psychotics are not properly separated from the mother
by the fixed aspects of language, i.e., proper names or the Names-of-the-Father. So
language functions in a different way for them and their psychic structure differs
radically from others. They can not repress the Names-of-the-Father in their
unconscious like neurotics. They lack repression, which further gives birth to new
repressions, which can work for them like the Names-of-the-Father and allow them to
use language.
Psychotics do not find anyone else whom the mother desires i.e., the symbolic
father. This problem introduces their terrible symptoms like paranoia, grandiosity and
ideas of being persecuted. They talk about changing gender and their nationality.
They have hallucinations of being controlled by aliens or having sex with them. Hill
explains Lacanian psychotics as follows:
Psychotics caricature the popular idea of ‘the mad
person’ and are often unable to follow a career or
initiate long term relationships for some or for all of
their lives. (Hill 109)
Their symptoms serve as a solution to their problem. Their fantasies of third
persons separate them from the mother and prevent ruining breakdown. Psychotics are
often rebels, geniuses or creative persons. They do not take things for granted. They
question in a radical manner. Some psychotics lead their lives as neurotics. Actually
they have a neurotic layer over their psychotic structure. Psychotic symptoms may
appear for a period in their lives or it is also possible that these symptoms may not
appear at all.
 45

Thus Lacan has modernized Freudian concept of unconscious connecting it

with language and establishing a relationship between culture, language and mental
structures. His work, like Freud’s becomes a source of instruction not only for
psychologists but also for literary scholars to examine a literary text. Thus with the
help of Freud, Jung and Lacan’s psychological ideas, the recurrent motifs in the
poetry of Coleridge can be explored under the changing vision of the poet.
 46

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