Jacques Lacan

An introduction......




"The symbolic: a term used by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and by the literary theorist Julia Kristeva to designate the objective order (sometimes called the Symbolic Order) of language, law, morality, religion, and all social existence, which is held to constitute the identity of any human subject who enters it. Drawing on Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex and on the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi‐Strauss, Lacan developed an opposition between the ‘Imaginary’ state enjoyed by the infant who has no distinct sense of a self opposed to the world, and the Symbolic Order in which the child then becomes a separate subject within human culture. The Symbolic is the realm of distinctions and differences—between self and others, subject and object—and of absence or ‘lack’, since in it we are exiled from the completeness of the Imaginary, and can return to it only in fantasized identifications. The infant's entry into the Symbolic is associated with the ‘splitting’ of the subject by language, which allots distinct ‘subject‐positions’ (‘I’ and ‘you’) for us to occupy in turn. In Kristeva's literary theory, the Symbolic is opposed to the disruptive energies of the semiotic, which have their source in the Imaginary state."

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/the-symbolic#ixzz1Gf5X4Sxz


























I did a lot of reading on this website: http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/#SH2d
it is well worth a look and has very detailed information on Lacan's different theories.


"what Lacan calls a symbolic identification with an “ego ideal.” This is precisely identification with and within something that cannot be seen, touched, devoured, or mastered: namely, the words, norms and directives of its given cultural collective. Symbolic identification is always idenification with a normatively circumscribed way of organising the social-intersubjective space within which the subject can take on its most lasting imaginary identifications: (For example, the hysterical-vulnerable female identifies at the symbolic level with the patriarchal way of structuring social relations between sexes, outside of which her imaginary identification would be meaningless)."


This quote, especially the bottom part, directly relates to the subject I was investigating within my essay of women's perceived roles within society. In other words, Lacan is describing the process that we go through psychologically when fitting into roles within society. He makes the point that this is completely of our doing and by using the word 'imaginary'. His views seem to suggest that it is our imaginations which forms these roles within society and this act in turn leads to the forming of society and the way it acts. It is almost like a circle and involves the hyper-real as it is difficult to determine whether it is societies roles that we fit into, or us making up the roles ourself, or possibly both. Almost a which came first, chicken or egg scenario...