1997

Workshop on Lacan's Theory of the object a
Facilitated by Ellie Ragland, Ph.D.

Lacan’s theory of the object a gives an entirely different theory of the object than when one thinks it concerns literal things or persons. At the point where members of the Workshop generally thought of the object as a dynamic in and of itself, we encountered Lacan’s theory of the drives which gives an entirely new meaning to current notions of dynamism or process. I’ll try to telescope some of the discussion that occurred during those several hours, as well as to give a sense of the input of everyone there, working as we continually did between theory and praxis, between theory and cases concerning actual persons with real problems.

Lacan’s theory of the object evolved slowly over time, both through his clinical work and his on-going exchanges with British object-relations theorists, most particularly his long-time friend, Donald Winnicott. Where Winnicott found a transitional space between the self and other, the mother and infant, Lacan found a dynamic of desire in play that was created quite literally – and one could say, quite poetically – around eight corporal objects that seem to emanate from the organ that produces them. But the particularity of the way each of these objects is experienced builds up into an associational signifying chain of mind which Lacan ultimately depicted as an interlinking of three orders as the base unit of meaning: the real of the flesh which contains radically repressed traumata, the symbolic order of language, social conventions and laws and the imaginary order of (normal) narcissistic identifications with the others of a child’s own encounters. Theses three orders operate by different laws which Lacan compares to Freud’s three modes of identification. Incorporation, foreclosure and affirmation are particular to the way the real grounds the imaginary body, which the symbolic world of words will later name and represent. The three "laws" I mentioned above are all ways in which the surface of the body is cut (or not in foreclosure) by the loss of an object. In other words, the body is only an imaginary consistency, not an actual concrete whole. It is pierced by losses that give rise to the desire to replace the lost object which, in turn, gives rise to the scopic, invocatory, oral and anal partial drives which seek to close up the "holed " body with substitute objects in the world. In losing one of the object a which causes desire in the first place – an object which Lacan places at the center of the intertwined Borromean knot of real, imaginary and symbolic orders, something returns from the primordial experience of it which one can never regain as conscious memory or narrative.

One can later re-experience these eight basic objects that the infant comes to desire only at the moment of losing them, as a kind of lived out or acted out re-remembering. Lacan named them in "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious" (1960) as that which places the mark of the cut (Freud’s Einzeger Zug , Lacan’s unary trait) in objects (as described by analytic theory): They are "the mamilla, faeces, the phallus (imaginary object), the urinary flow. (An unthinkable list, if one adds, as I do, the phoneme, the gaze, the voice – the nothing). For it is not obvious that this feature, this partial feature, rightly emphasized in objects, is applicable not because these objects are part of a total object, the body, but because they represent only partially the function that produces them. These objects have one common feature… they have no specular image, or, in other words, alterity. It is what enables them to be the ‘stuff’, or rather the lining, though not in any sense the reverse, of the very subject that one takes to be the subject of consciousness. For this subject, who thinks he can accede to himself by designating himself in the statement, is no more than such an object" (Ecrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan, New York/Norton, 1977, p. 315).

It is traces of these objects that enter conscious language – of which the speaker is unaware – as the drive material that has been radically lost in the real, but whose marks remain in the particularity of experiences that build up an intricated mind/memory network of signifying units or knots that Lacanian analysts hear in listening to an analysand’s speech. In other words, Lacanians do not think of the unconscious as unconscious insofar as it carries precise images, words and affects (drawn from these eight constellations of material) into the specificity of any person’s language, thereby materializing language by the desire for a fulfillment of an intrinsic lack-in-being. There is no mind/body duality in Lacanian teaching, then, nor is there any empirical grid by which an analyst can hear the analysand’s speech as an object to be dissected, or consider his or her behavior as an "object" to be observed, or his or her relationships as good or bad object choices. The real of the objects that cause the desire for jouissance do not correspond to the pleasure principle for Lacan. Rather, the object a constitute the precise conditions of enjoyment that make up a person’s symptoms out of non-dialectical experiences of presence/absence and loss/and efforts of retrieval. What is the goal of a Lacanian analysis, then? It is to let fall the object that repeats at the point of Thanatos, or an unbearable suffering. A new signifier for being will gradually weave itself together in the concretely empty space where an object, with its myriad attributes, has fallen away like a dead skin that has outlived its function.

In the Workshop held on April 12, 1997, we worked principally with Lacan’s theory of the object a he named the gaze, which gives rise to the split between the eye and the gaze. The eye tries to understand by looking and seeing, reducing the world of the visible to what it can measure, while the gaze is the internalized material of ideals and judgments one has taken in in a lifetime (incorporated and affirmed in the real) which projects itself out onto the world in a one-way directionality. The analysand cannot tell the story of this in a straight-forward, linear narrative because he or she is caught up within the scopic field, is lived by it and blind to the specific images and words and affects that split the ego between an Ideal ego unconscious formation in which fantasy is anchored and the others onto whom one projects one’s view of oneself, meanwhile caught up in awaiting their validation of him or her as he or she expects to be seen (or heard, or fed, and so on). In the Workshop, we came to understand that the object, in Lacanian theory, is not itself dynamic, or even in process. Rather, the object gives precise material to fantasy (which takes the place of the more general concept of subjectivity) which filters into language, bringing the weight of the real with it within the fields of what Lacan called the partial drives. Without being postmodern, we came to see Lacan as giving us a new theory of how affects are formed in the particular, enter language via the real, and pierce holes through the well-made consistencies of symbolic order narratives and the seeming consistency of the imaginary body. I think it is fair to say that participants came away feeling that Lacan offers an alternative theory of object, drive, self, ego, cognition – and other concepts that start with the idea that the thing itself is itself.

My interest in Lacan’s teaching and practice began in 1972 when I first obtained the Ecrits in French in a two-volume version. His rethinking of the symbol as a base element which embodies its own structure, rather than a second meaning pointing to some a priori cause, made sense to me. As I continued to read him and understand the degree to which he formalizes the study of mind and body as a logical interaction of myriad pieces that are put in place by the world outside (the Other), not as things that emanate from innate knowledge (be it Kleinian fantasy or the knowing gene), psychoanalysis made ever greater sense to me as a theory of mind, behavior, literature – as a tool for understanding the world – and the idea of an analytic practice based on the theory that only the analysand knows what is in his or her own repressed unconscious, and only the analysand can tell it, seemed to me to be freeing for both analyst and analysand. How could someone else’s unconscious have the answer for yours; or correspond to your own experience of life? The Lacanian analyst takes the position, then, that he or she can "hear" the unconscious in repetitions, in the way desire has accommodated itself to the drives, and in the specificity of a transference in which one believes the analyst knows the reasons for the precise suffering that the analyst can only know in a general way (that the family is at issue, and so on). Studying Lacan’s teaching makes sense, then, for an "Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts".