Boothby Death and Desire

psychoanalytic
tKeorv
in Laoan's
return
to Freud
richard boothby
routledge -new york end london

Published in 1991 by
Routledge
An imprint of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.
29 West 35 Street
New York, NY 10001
Published in Great Britain by

Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane
London EC4P 4EE
Copyright © 1991 by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Portions of Chapter 6 were previously published as "Lacanian Castration:

Body-Image and Signification in Psychoanalysis," in Crises in Continental
Philosophy, reprinted by permission of SUNY Press.
Diagram on page 118 reproduced from ECRITS, A Selection, by Jacques
Lacan, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan, by permission of
W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. Copyright © 1977 by Tavistock Publications Ltd.
Diagram on page 122 reproduced from Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in
General Linguistics (1966) by permission of McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boothby, Richard.
Death and desire : psychoanalytic theory in Lacan's return to Freud. /
Richard Boothby.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-90171-5 (cloth). — ISBN 0-415-90172-3 (pbk.)
1. Death instinct—History. 2. Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939.
3. Lacan, Jacques, 1 9 0 1 - . I. Title.
BF175.5.D4B66 1991
150.19'52—dc20 91-7736
CIP
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data also available.

For my family, Elaine and Oliver.
!
Contents
Bibliographic Abbreviations ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xii
1. The Enigma of the "Death Drive" 1

Freud's Most Daring Hypothesis 2
The Theoretical Value of the Death Drive 3
Repudiation of Freud's Idea 6
Re-posing the Question of the Death Drive 10
Interpreting Lacan 14
2. Lacanian Reflections on Narcissism 21

Life in the Mirror 22
The Imaginary Register of the Drives 27
The Imaginary Ego 31
Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis: The Human Being
against Itself 37
What Is "Alienation"? 41
3. The Energetics of the Imaginary 47

The Career of a Metaphor 47
Returning to Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology 51
The Fertile Remainder: Something Left To Be Desired 55
The Myth of the Real 60
The Return of the Real 65
4. Rereading Beyond the Pleasure Principle 71

The Plan and Pitfalls of Freud's Argument 72
Toward an Alternative Reading 78
va
Contents
Returning Freud to Himself 84

Reconsidering Freud's T u r n to Biology 97
5. The Unconscious Structured like a Language 105

"Au-dela de l'imaginaire, le symbolique" 107
From the Ego to the Subject 110
Reading "Schema L" 114
T h e Agency of the Letter 120
Acheronta Movebo 129
6. The Formations of the Unconscious 139

On the Psychoanalytic Theory of Anxiety 140
Understanding Castration: First Approach 145
Castration—Imaginary and Symbolic 151
In the Defile of the Signifier: The Objet a 158
Toward a Reevaluation of the Superego 167
T h e Vicissitudes of the Death Drive:
Violence and Sublimation 176
7. Metapsychology in the Perspective of Metaphysics 185

Death and Dialectic 188
Freud and Schopenhauer 191
From Schopenhauer to Nietzsche 196
Freud and Heidegger 203
Lacan versus Philosophy 215
8. Conclusion
Corpus Occultum: Desire Beyond the Imaginable 223
Notes 229
Bibliography 251
Index 261
via
Bibliographical Abbreviations
B Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. In Basic Writings of Nietz-

sche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Li-
brary, 1968.
BT Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
E Jacques Lacan. Ecrits. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966.
£.$ . Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:
W. W. Norton Co., 1977.
FFC . The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W.
Norton Co., 1981.
FP Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation.
Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1977.
S.I Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud's Papers
on Technique, 1953—1954. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John
Forrester. New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1988.
S.II . The Seminar ofJacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud's
Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954—1955. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W. W.
Norton Co., 1988.
SJII . Le Seminaire, Livre III, Les Psychoses. Ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981.
S.IV . "Le Seminaire, Livre IV, La Relation d'objet." Unpub-
lished transcript.
S.V. . "Le Seminaire, Livre V, Les Formations de l'incons-
cient." Unpublished transcript.
S.VII . Le Seminaire, Livre VII, L'Ethique de la Psychanalyse. Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986.
IX
Bibliographical Abbreviations
S.XX . Le Seminaire, Livre XX, Encore. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.

Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975.
SE Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. Edited and translated by J. Stra-
chey, A. Freud, et al. London: Hogarth Press & The Institute of
Psycho-analysis, 1955.
WR Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation.
Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York, Dover Press, 1969.
Preface
This is a book about the conceptual architecture of psychoanalytic

theory. It is centrally concerned with one of Freud's most radical
and far-reaching formulations: the hypothesis of a primordial self-
destructive impulse or "death drive." It is a concept that occupies a
pivotal position in Freud's mature theory but has been pivotal, too,
for the development of psychoanalysis after Freud. To clarify its mean-
ing is therefore to open a privileged window on the significance and
transmission of Freud's discovery. Yet, of all Freud's major concepts,
the hypothesis of the death drive remains the most maligned and
neglected. In an attempt to raise again the question of the meaning
and function of the death drive in psychoanalytic theory I will turn to
close readings of key Freudian texts. This effort will draw its guiding
clue from the contribution of the French analyst Jacques Lacan, in
which Freud's concept is significantly reinterpreted. Lacan re-positions
the theme of death in psychoanalysis in relation to Freud's cardinal
concern: the nature and fate of unconscious desire. In doing so, Lacan
challenges prevailing assessments of the death drive and invites us to
revise our understanding of the psychoanalytic theory as a whole.
This inquiry is subject to a number of limitations that should be
indicated at the outset. First, its general orientation is not clinical but
conceptual. I am not a clinician but a philosopher, and my effort here
is to trace the outline of a theoretical problem the clinical implications
of which I will touch upon only in passing. Second, it is selective in its
scope. Although the concept of the death drive is among the most
basic of all psychoanalytic concepts, my discussion of it remains a
restricted lens through which certain features of psychoanalytic theory
will be brought into sharp focus while others will be left out altogether.
Third, the primary aim of this inquiry is to show what light is shed on
a Freudian concept by Lacan's innovations, but, as such, it is not
XI
Preface
intended as a comprehensive exposition of Lacan's teaching. In draw-

ing on Lacan's rich legacy, I will say relatively little about the develop-
ment of his thinking over the course of his career and will take the
liberty of cutting across it along the bias of a single major concept.
Within these limitations, the following discussions attempt to achieve
several positive results. Primary among them is to sketch along Lacan-
ian lines a distinctive interpretation of the meaning of death in psycho-
analysis that restores to it the importance originally assigned to it
by Freud. This task requires establishing a detailed correspondence
between Freud's theoretical texts and Lacan's commentaries and con-
structions. The result is illuminating for both sides of the correspon-
dence. With respect to Freud, a Lacanian angle of view allows many
of Freud's major concepts—of anxiety and repetition, castration and
the superego, narcissism and sublimation—to be reorganized in a
distinctive integration. I hope to show how a Lacanian interpretation,
far from muddying the waters of psychoanalytic theory, serves to
clarify and coordinate the meaning of many of Freud's most basic
ideas. With regard to Lacan, the interpretation I propose has the
advantage of making visible an overarching coherence that may well
escape the reader in an initial encounter with his teaching. Lacan's
triad of key theoretical categories—the imaginary, the real, and the
symbolic—are applied systematically to the task of regrasping Freud's
theory, but in the process the relation between the three categories
comes to light in a new way. A precisely structured dynamic emerges
in the intersection of the three registers, the pivot point of which is
the concept of the death drive.
In general, the interpretation attempted here aims to substantiate
Lacan's claim to "return to Freud." For many students of Freud, a
passing familiarity with Lacan's text, as theoretically far-ranging as it
is stylistically challenging, can make Lacan's claim of fidelity to Freud
sound dubious indeed. I will try to show with reference to a key
concept how Lacan's innovations, however far afield they may appear
to wander, can be seen to retrieve and synthesize the essential points
of Freud's thought. I hope to demonstrate in some detail how Lacan's
work represents a remarkably nuanced and precise reading of Freud.
Indeed, Lacan's interpretation of the psychoanalytic theory amounts
to nothing less than a rediscovery of Freud's essential insights, a read-
ing so deeply penetrating and clarifying that it might justly be de-
scribed in the words of Eliot: that "the end of all our exploring will be
to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
xii
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge the contribution of a number of people from

whose guidance and support I have greatly benefited. I owe a special
debt to William J. Richardson for the inspiration of his seminars,
for the example of his intellectual integrity, and for the continuing
privilege of his counsel and friendship. Thanks as well to Erazim
Kohak, James Schmidt, Bernard Elevitch, and Jeffrey Mehlman, who
helped see to completion the doctoral dissertation on which this book
is based. I am especially grateful to Eric Olson, through whom I first
became acquainted with the work of Jacques Lacan. I am still inspired
by the memory of the many and marvelous discussions we shared in
Cambridge over a period of years. I am also deeply appreciative of
Judith Feher Gurewich for her wise and patient coUeagueship during
the many hours we struggled together through Lacan's text and for
collaboration with her in the years since. John Muller and Ed Casey
read and meticulously commented on early versions of the manuscript.
The completed version was improved by passing under the thoughtful
eye of Jean Imbeault, who generously commented upon it and more
than once bolstered my sagging confidence. I am grateful to the mem-
bers of the Lacanian Clinical Forum and to Wilfried Ver Eecke, Joseph
Smith, and others in our Washington Lacan circle for their stimulation.
I benefited from the advice and encouragement of Francois Roustang,
who read and commented upon portions of the text, and from the
patience and support of Maureen MacGrogan at Routledge, Chapman
and Hall. I would also like to thank William Desmond, Drew Leder,
and my other colleagues in philosophy at Loyola College, as well as
Dean David Roswell, for their insight, encouragement, and support.
Finally, but most profoundly, I want to express my gratitude to my
family—to my parents for their unstinting support and faith in me;
to my uncle and aunt, Frank and Barbara Wendt, who have been like
xiii
Acknowledgments
second parents in their encouragement and generosity; and to my

wife, Elaine Foster Boothby, for half a life of love, courage, honesty,
and forgiveness. To all these and many more whose names I know,
thank you.
November, 1990
Baltimore, Maryland
xiv
We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we
grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger.
Unaccountably, we remain. By slow degrees our sickness, and dizziness,
and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By
gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did
the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian
Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice s edge, there grows
into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius, or any
demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one,
and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness
of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our
sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of afall from such a height.
And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it
involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and
loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented
themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now most
vividly desire it.
—Edgar Allen Poe, "The Imp of the Perverse"
xv
1
The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

Men do not always take their great thinkers seriously, even when they
profess most to admire them.
—Sigmund Freud
Freud's theory oider Todestrieb, translated by James Strachey as the

"death instinct," is arguably the darkest and most stubborn riddle
posed by the legacy of psychoanalysis. 1 Jean Laplanche has remarked
that "Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which in 1920 . . . introduces the
death drive, remains the most fascinating and baffling text in the
entire Freudian corpus"'2:
If life . . . is regarded as materially present at the frontiers of the

psyche, death's entry on the Freudian scene is far more enigmatic.
In the beginning, like all modalities of the negative, it is radically
excluded from the field of the unconscious. Then suddenly in 1920,
it emerges at the center of the system as one of the two fundamental
forces—and perhaps even as the only primordial force—in the heart
of the psyche, of living beings, and of matter itself. [Death becomes]
the soul of conflict, an elemental force of strife, which from then on
is in the forefront of Freud's most theoretical formulations.3
As Laplanche indicates, Freud's hypothesis of the death drive was of

central importance during his last years. Unlike so many of Freud's
basic ideas, however, the death drive has not found a significant place
in the popular diffusion of the psychoanalytic perspective. Not infre-
quently, expositions of psychoanalysis omit it altogether. In compari-
son with other key psychoanalytic concepts—the unconscious, repres-
sion, the agencies of id, ego, and superego—Freud's supposition of a
self-destructive drive has suffered positive neglect. Precisely to that
extent we may be led to ask how adequately it has been understood.
What did Freud mean by positing a drive toward death? How did the
concept of the death drive function in the totality of the psychoanalytic
I
theory? What has it meant to psychoanalytic theory since Freud? What

can it mean for us today? The intention of this book is to raise these
questions on the level of a theoretical inquiry and to indicate the
direction of an answer.
Freud's Most Daring Hypothesis
Let us briefly recall the problem to which Freud's theory of the

death drive provided a solution. From the inception of psychoanalysis
in the 1890s and throughout the two and a half decades that followed,
Freud conceived the psychic apparatus as a homeostatic system in-
vested with quantities of energy and regulated by the pursuit of plea-
sure and the avoidance of pain. 4 Operating in this way according to a
"pleasure principle," the system seeks to release the tension of accumu-
lated excitations and to promote an equilibrium of psychic energies.
Evacuation or at least constancy and stability of energy were taken to
be the basic aims of psychic life. The pleasure principle was therefore
tantamount to a "constancy principle" (SE, 18:9). The reality principle,
under the operation of which tensions might be tolerated for a time
in order to be more satisfactorily discharged later on, qualified the
functioning of the pleasure principle but in no way departed from its
basic logic. By 1920, however, the assumption of the pleasure principle
and the view of psychic functioning that followed from it could no
longer satisfactorily account for a number of observations made in
clinical practice. In a number of instances, the psychic system appeared
to behave precisely contrary to expectation, deliberately reintroducing
or increasing energic tensions. The evidence fell into four main catego-
ries. First, there were cases of recurrent traumatic dreams. Observed
particularly in victims of war neuroses, the repetition of traumatic
experiences in dreams and memories failed to tally with Freud's earlier
view, itself an expression of the pleasure principle, that dreams repre-
sent the fulfillment of wishes. Why, if pleasure is the aim of psychic
life, should specifically painful, traumatizing experiences be repeated?
Second, Freud remarked upon the repetitive games of children in
which a painful loss is symbolically reexperienced. A child left alone
by his mother was seen to re-create the painful drama of the mother's
disappearance by alternately throwing a spool over the edge of his
bed, retrieving it, and casting it away again. Once more, the question
was why the experience of an unpleasurable loss was repeated rather
than repressed. Third, there was the problem of masochism, which,
for obvious reasons, challenged the notion that mental life is governed
2
simply by the pursuit of pleasure. In the case of the masochist, pleasure

and pain seemed to be intertwined in a particularly striking and puzzling
way. Lastly, Freud brought forward evidence specific to the analytic
process itself, namely, the tendency of patients to obstruct the treatment
by effectively re-creating, with the analyst, their most painful losses and
disappointments. The search for the motive of these self-defeating be-
haviors, or "negative therapeutic reactions," touched upon one of the
most fundamental challenges faced by psychoanalysis, that of ex-
plaining the apparently self-inflicted character of all neurotic suffering.
Taken together, the traumatic dreams of the war neurotic, the
presence/absence game of the child abandoned by its mother, the joy
taken by the masochist in his own mistreatment, and the so-called
negative therapeutic reaction indicated an order of satisfaction "be-
yond the pleasure principle," a paradoxical pleasure in pain. The
evidence pointed Freud to what he could only call "mysterious masoch-
istic trends of the ego" (SE, 18:14). The repetitive, even compulsively
repetitive character of these phenomena led Freud to suspect the
operation of a fundamental instinctual force. Alongside the homeo-
static principle of pleasure there must exist a second basic principle, a
destabilizing, disruptive force that tends not toward equilibrium and
harmony but toward conflict and disintegration. In addition to the life
drives, there must exist a primordial drive toward death. In his very
late essay on "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," Freud summa-
rized the main thrust of his argument:
If we take into consideration the whole picture made up by the

phenomena of masochism immanent in so many people, the negative
therapeutic reaction and the sense of guilt found in so many neurot-
ics, we shall no longer be able to adhere to the belief that mental
events are exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure. These
phenomena are unmistakable indications of the presence of a power
in mental life which we call the instinct of aggression or of destruction
according to its aims, and which we trace back to the original death
instinct of living matter. (SE, 23:243)
The Theoretical Value of the Death Drive
It is difficult to overstate the strangeness and radicality of Freud's

death-drive hypothesis. It amounts to saying that the true goal of living
is dying and that the life-course of all organisms must be regarded as
only a circuitous route to death. Shocking as this conclusion appeared,
3
even to its author, the hypothesis of the death drive served to account
for clinical observations that otherwise remained inexplicable. But in
addition, and perhaps even more significantly, the idea appealed to
Freud on purely theoretical grounds. First and foremost, the opposi-
tion between the life and death drives allowed Freud to reassert a
fundamental dualism in the aftermath of his studies on narcissism.5
The theory of narcissism, which supposed a differential investment of
libido between the ego and its objects, seemed to lend support to the
instinctual monism of Jung and his followers. The new theory of life-
and-death instincts reexpressed Freud's deeply held dualist sensibility
as it installed conflict in the heart of the psychical process, indeed, in
the very substance of organic material itself. Freud insisted that "only
by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal
instincts—Eros and the death instinct—never by one or the other
alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life"
(SE, 23:243).
Although he maintained a cautious skepticism concerning his re-
vised outlook, Freud valued the elegance and simplicity of the new
theory. "To my mind," he said, the hypotheses of the life and death
instincts "are far more serviceable from a theoretical standpoint than
any other possible ones; they provide that simplification, without either
ignoring or doing violence to the facts, for which we strive in scientific
work" (SE, 22:119). Despite the tireless fidelity to the details of observa-
tion that has made Freud an intellectual hero, even among many
who disagree with his conclusions, Freud's scientific spirit retained a
decidedly philosophical bent. Metapsychology, as he hinted in a letter
to Fliess and reiterated in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, was
Freud's answer to metaphysics.6 The theory of the death drive was the
highwater mark of Freud's speculative urge. In one of his late essays,
Freud enthusiastically compared his view of the life and death instincts
with the Empedoclean principles oiphilia and neikos. He claimed to be
"all the more pleased when not long ago I came upon this theory of
mine in the writings of one of the great thinkers of ancient Greece. I
am very ready to give up the prestige of originality for the sake of
such a confirmation" (SE, 23:244).
After 1920, Freud's commitment to his most controversial hypothe-
sis was reinforced by the fact that the death drive came to play a key
role in resolving several specific problems plaguing psychoanalytic
theory. Primary among them were the origins of human aggressive-
ness and the nature and function of the superego. With respect to the
former, although it was far from the case that Freud failed to recognize
the importance of aggression in human affairs prior to 1920, there
4
can be little doubt that, after that time and with the theory of the
destructive drive in hand, he felt more confident in approaching the
subject and in surveying it theoretically. In the New Introductory Lectures
on Psychoanalysis, he asked himself, "Why have we ourselves needed
such a long time before we decided to recognize an aggressive instinct?
Why did we hesitate to make use, on behalf of our theory, of facts
which were obvious and familiar to everyone?" (SE, 22:103). In fact,
Freud's rhetorical question bears directly on certain points in the
history of the psychoanalytic movement. Freud resisted the idea of an
aggressive instinct when it was introduced in 1908 by Alfred Adler.
In 1912, Sabina Spielrein posited a specifically self-destructive instinct
in her paper "Destruction as the Cause of Becoming," but again Freud
refused to accept it.7 Only with the working out of his own approach
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle did Freud settle on a definitive view of
the problem of aggression. Only then did he resolve the difficult
question of sadism and masochism that had always oriented his think-
ing about human aggression. It became clear that although masochism
and sadism are intimately bound up with one another, masochism is
the more primary impulse. Sadism is to be conceived as a turning
outward of a more primitive masochistic tendency. This view led Freud
to the revolutionary thesis that all aggression and destructiveness in
human beings is, according to its original nature, self-destructiveness.
This means that human aggressiveness is to be understood neither as
a reaction of self-defense nor as a result of an innately brutish disposi-
tion, but rather as an expression of an internal conflict of the individual
human being with itself. Freud consistently maintained these views
throughout the last period of his life, emphasizing them in The Ego
and the Id, the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Civilization and
Its Discontents, and An Outline of Psychoanalysis.
Just as the theory of the death drive contributed to a new under-
standing of aggressivity, it also shed new light on the activity of the
superego and the feelings of guilt produced by it. As an attempt to
understand neurotic behavior, psychoanalysis was centrally concerned
from its very beginnings with the question of the motive force behind
the experience of guilt. It was in answer to this question that Freud
offered another of his most speculative hypotheses: the supposition
of an inherited predisposition to guilt. Totem and Taboo traced the
existence of an inborn propensity to guilt back to the murder of the
primal father by the fraternal band of sons. It was an idea that exerted
an enduring hold on Freud's imagination, even after the theory of the
superego was introduced with the 1923 publication of The Ego and the
Id. As late as 1933 he remarked in Civilization and Its Discontents that
5
"the superego has no motive that we know of for ill-treating the ego,
with which it is intimately bound up; but genetic influence, which leads
to the survival of what is past and has been surmounted, makes itself
felt" (SE, 21:125). With the introduction theory of the death drive,
however, a new avenue of approach opened up. If human aggressive-
ness could be shown to derive from a fundamental aggressiveness of
the individual against itself, then the self-inflicted sufferings of the
neurotic became understandable in a new way. The motive force
behind the hostility of the superego could be assigned to its participa-
tion with the death drive. The punitiveness of the superego, most
remarkable in obsession and melancholia, could be attributed to its
containing "a pure culture of the death instinct" (SE, 19:53). '
Repudiation of Freud's Idea
However mysterious a notion in itself, there can be no doubt as to

the pivotal importance of the death drive in the theoretical construc-
tions of Freud's maturity. "In the series of Freud's metapsychological
writings," James Strachey observes, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle may
be regarded as introducing the final phase of his views."8 Despite
occasional hesitations, Freud became increasingly convinced of the
fundamental value of his most speculative construction. "When, origi-
nally, I had this idea," he confided to Robert Fliess, "I thought to
myself: this is something altogether erroneous, or something very
important. . . . Well, lately I have found myself more inclined toward
the second alternative." 9 Thirteen years after the publication of Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, Freud reaffirmed his faith in the basic correctness
of the death-drive theory, relying on the duality of life and death to
frame his most sweeping conception of the nature and progress of
human civilization. "To begin with," he admitted, "it was only tenta-
tively that I put forward the views I have developed here, but in the
course of time they have gained such a hold on me that I can no longer
think in any other way" (SE, 23:119). J.-B. Pontalis has summarily
remarked that "the theme of death is as basic to Freudian psychoanaly-
sis as is the theme of sexuality. I even believe that the latter has been
widely put forward so as to cover up the former." 10
The dialectic of life and death represented the culmination of
Freud's effort to conceptualize his experience and guided his thinking
throughout the last third of his intellectual life. The notion of the
death drive was thus the veritable keystone of Freud's most mature
and far-reaching theoretical synthesis. But to the degree that we more
6
fully appreciate its importance to Freud and its central function in the
final elaboration of his theory it can only strike us as more astonishing
that the death drive was almost unanimously repudiated by his early
followers. Ernest Jones remarked on the singular unpopularity of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
The book . . . is noteworthy in being the only one of Freud's which

has received little acceptance on the part of his followers. Thus of
the fifty or so papers that have since been directed to the topic one
observes that in the first decade only half supported Freud's theory,
in the second decade only a third, and in the last decade, none at
all.11
"I am well aware," Freud himself complained, "that the dualistic theory
according to which an instinct of death or of destruction or aggression
claims equal rights as a partner with Eros as manifested in the libido,
has found little sympathy and has not really been accepted even among
psychoanalysts" (SE, 23:244). Ernest Becker, although not himself a
psychoanalyst, has pronounced what can be taken as the majority view
both inside and outside the analytic community: "Freud's tortuous
formulations on the death instinct can now securely be relegated to
the dust bin of history." 12
The speculative tenor of the death drive that seems to have appealed
to Freud, especially in his last years, was an important factor in the
negative reception of his idea. Due in part to Freud's own influence,
psychoanalysis has always measured itself against the ideal of practical,
empirical work and evidences a certain uneasiness about theory-spin-
ning (in spite of—or precisely because of—the fact that the psychoana-
lytic field can be opened up only on the basis of the purely theoretical
construct of the unconscious). It is not surprising, then, that many of
Freud's followers judged the death drive to be a fanciful excess of
theorizing, unjustified by the facts. David Rapaport characterized it as
"a speculative excursion which does not seem to be an integral part of
the [psychoanalytic] theory." 13 Kenneth Colby concluded that "the
postulation of a death instinct we now know was based on a misapplica-
tion of physical principles to living organisms. Today it is only an
interesting part of psychoanalytic history." 14
Otto Rank similarly accused Freud of allowing speculation to outrun
the evidence, although for Rank the problem lay not so much in any
discrepancy between the idea of the death drive and the rest of the
psychoanalytic theory but rather in the way Freud seemed to distort
the issue of death to make it compatible with his general paradigm of
7
The Enigma of the "Death Drive
wish-fulfillment. In Rank's view, the death drive seemed to be an

instance of the sort of shoddy theorizing that Freud himself mocked
by evoking Heine's image of the philosopher patching up the holes in
the universe with the tatters of his nightshirt. According to Rank,
even when he stumbled upon the inescapable death problem, [Freud]

sought to give a new meaning to that also in harmony with the wish,
since he spoke of death instinct instead of death fear. The fear itself
he had meantime disposed of elsewhere. . . . [He] made the general
fear into a special sexual fear (castration fear). . . . If one had held to
the phenomena, it would have been impossible to understand how
a discussion of the death impulse could neglect the universal and
fundamental death fear to such an extent.15
Rank's criticism reflects another attitude that, although not always

directly expressed, certainly motivated profound hostility to Freud's
theory. The idea that every organism is destined to die for internal
reasons, that death and destruction are the aims of a basic principle,
perhaps the most basic principle of all life, violated the canons of
common sense and religious belief even more than it offended scien-
tific rationality.16 The death drive was the weightiest expression of
Freud's much-touted pessimism and was no doubt especially dis-
turbing to members of a profession devoted to the task of healing.
Indeed, there seems to be something not only absurd but deeply and
almost naturally repugnant about Freud's claim that "the aim of all
life is death" (SE, 18:38). Given this spontaneous resistance to such an
idea, it is not surprising to find among Freud's biographers ample
assurances that his supposition of an ineluctable drive toward death
cannot be taken as a result of scientific research but must be interpreted
as an expression of bitter personal experience. In this view, it was not
the evidence of psychoanalysis but rather the dark spectacle of the
First World War, the recent deaths of his son and daughter, and
increasing concern for his own mortality that led Freud to the death
drive. Thus Henri Ellenberger has remarked that "Freud's concept of
the death instinct can be best understood against the background of
the preoccupation with death shared by a number of his eminent
contemporaries: biologists, psychologists, and existential philoso-
phers."17 Paul Roazen reports that "an unusual number of elderly
analysts . . . thought Freud's cancer preceded his theory of the death
instinct."18 For his part, however, Freud anticipated and tried to com-
bat allegations that his reflections on the death drive were motivated
by personal losses. He wrote to Max Eitingon in July of 1920: "The
8
'Beyond' is finally finished. You will be able to certify that it was half
finished when Sophie was alive and flourishing."19
The most popular form of distortion to which Freud's position has
been submitted can be similarly interpreted as a turning away from
the most distressing aspect of his hypothesis. According to a common
view, we need not worry ourselves about a specifically self-annihilating
drive. We need only recognize the natural tendency in human beings
toward aggressivity and destructiveness. This view is invited by distin-
guishing between theoretical and clinical contexts of discussion. On
the clinical level, it is held, there is no need to invoke the complexities
of the dual instinct theory. As Edward Bibring puts it:
Instincts of life and death are not psychologically perceptible as such;

they are biological instincts whose existence is required by hypothesis
alone. That being so, it follows that, strictly speaking, the theory of
the primal instincts is a concept which ought only to be adduced in
a theoretical context and not in discussion of a clinical or empirical
nature. In them, the idea of aggressive and destructive instincts will
suffice to account for all the facts before us.20
The repudiation of the death-drive hypothesis presents a striking

and nearly unique exception to the otherwise conspicuous and endur-
ing authority of Freud. Indeed, in many circles the theory of the death
drive remains one of the great embarrassments of psychoanalysis. We
can be only more deeply intrigued that this exception concerns a point
of theory that Freud himself held to be of capital importance. But the
question of the death drive poses an enigma of more than merely
political or historical significance. It demands a basic decision. We are
led to ask whether the theory of the Todestrieb was simply a misguided
speculative excess, the error of which Freud's followers saw better than
the master himself, or whether, on the contrary, it really did constitute
the crowning discovery of psychoanalysis, as Freud himself believed,
and that its almost universal repudiation must therefore be seen to
involve a fundamental and widely shared misunderstanding of Freud's
teaching.
Perhaps the most damaging consequence of posterity's judgment
on Freud's theory of the death drive has been the near silencing
of the question itself. In fact, most treatments of the problem have
amounted to a side-stepping of it. Denounced as misconceived biology
or denigrated as a speculative flight of fancy, the meaning and function
of Freud's hypothesis in the larger framework of his theory is not
taken into account. Dismissed as fodder for biographers or trimmed
9
down to an assertion of simple brutishness, the theory of the death

drive is robbed of its power to challenge our basic assumptions. Unless
we are willing to dismiss Freud's own estimate of the critical importance
of his idea as easily as his interpreters have dismissed the idea itself,
we must recognize in the death drive a question worth raising again.
Re-Posing the Question of the Death Drive
Freud's theory of the death drive, although rejected by many, has

always found some supporters. In the early days, the theory was em-
braced by Eitingon, Ferenczi, and, for a time, Franz Alexander. More
notably, it was taken over and reworked by Melanie Klein and her
school. Over the past forty years, however, the most significant treat-
ment of Freud's most unpopular conception has been the work of a
renegade French analyst named Jacques Lacan. Lacan does more than
reemphasize Freud's notion of the death drive, he re-installs it at the
very center of psychoanalytic theory. "To ignore the death instinct
in [Freud's] doctrine," he insists, "is to misunderstand that doctrine
completely" (E:S, 301). Lacan characterizes Beyond the Pleasure Principle
as the "pivotal point" in the evolution of Freud's thought (S.II, 165).
In that work is announced "the culminating point of Freud's doctrine
. . . that death instinct whose enigma Freud propounded for us at the
height of his experience" (E:S, 101). T o give Freud's conception of
death its due, it must be seen to imply the lineaments of the entire
psychoanalytic discovery. For Lacan, life and death are the terms par
excellence of the Freudian dialectic: "When we get to the root of this
life, behind the drama of the passage into existence, we find nothing
besides life conjoined to death. That is where the Freudian dialectic
leads us" (S.II, 232).
Lacan insists that the death drive is not merely an unthinkable
conundrum. "The death instinct isn't an admission of impotence, it
isn't a coming to a halt before an irreducible, an ineffable last thing,
it is a concept" (S.II, 70). But, further, it is not merely one concept
among others. Perhaps more than any other point in the Freudian
theory, it is with respect to the death drive that Lacan's innovation is
rightly called a "return to Freud." What makes the death-drive theory
so important is its pivotal position in the structured totality of the
psychoanalytic theory. For Lacan, the death drive is the key to under-
standing the topography of id, ego, and superego upon which Freud
based the final and most complete elaboration of his theory:
10
Beyond the Pleasure Principle . . . is the work of Freud that most of

those who authorize themselves with the title of psychoanalyst don't
hesitate to reject as a superfluous, even chance, speculation. . . insofar
as the supreme antinomy which results from it, the death instinct,
becomes unthinkable for them.
It is difficult, however, to take as a mere sideshow, still less as a

mistake, of the Freudian doctrine, the work which is precisely the
prelude to the new topography represented by the terms ego, id, and
super-ego that has become as prevalent in its theoretical usage as in its
popular diffusion.21
Lacan insists that the death drive be understood in its original radi-
cally. Freud was not simply concerned to expose a general tendency
toward aggressivity and destructiveness in h u m a n beings. T h e thrust
of Freud's idea was to conceive of a force of s^/f-destructiveness, a
primordial aggressivity toward oneself, from which aggressivity toward
others is ultimately derived. T o fail to see that it is one's own death
that is at stake in the death drive is to miss the point entirely. Such
was the typical error of the ego psychologists, as Jean Laplanche has
pointed out in a passage that might well have been written by Lacan
himself:
For these authors, for a Fenichel, the situation is fundamentally

the same. In every case, there is a refusal of the essential thesis of
Freud which affirms that the death drive is in the first instance turned,
not toward the outside (as aggressivity), but toward the subject, that
it is radically not a drive to murder, but a drive to suicide or to kill
oneself22
Lacan returns to the death drive but not without reappropriating it

in a distinctive way. Lacan finds in the death drive a privileged point at
which the system of psychoanalytic concepts remains o p e n to question:
Contrary to the dogmatism that is sometimes imputed to us, we know

that this system [of psychoanalytic concepts] remains open both as a
whole and in several of its articulations.
These gaps seem to focus on the enigmatic signification that Freud
expressed in the term death instinct, which, rather like the figure of
the Sphinx, reveals the aporia that confronted this great mind in the
most profound attempt so far made to formulate an experience of
man in the register of biology (E:S, 8).
11
According to Lacan, the problem of the death drive opens psychoanal-

ysis to question and, ultimately, to reformulation. But what sort of
reformulation is announced herePThe answer is not immediately easy
to determine. T h e question of the death drive in Lacan will take us to
the heart of his theoretical innovations insofar as he links the meaning
of death in psychoanalysis to the faculty of speech and language, on
the one hand, and to the fate of desire, on the other. In this way, two
of the prime themes of Lacan's thought, language and desire, can be
seen to intersect in his treatment of the death drive. The question, one
that will occupy us throughout this book, remains: How are language,
desire, and death related?
The most recognizable feature of Lacan's rereading of psychoanaly-
sis is his insistence that the essential meaning of the psychoanalytic
discovery concerns the role of language in the functioning of the
unconscious. "What the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the
unconscious," Lacan maintains, "is the whole structure of language"
(E:S, 147). As he puts it in the well-known formula that stands like
the sign over the door of the Lacanian school, "the unconscious is
structured like a language" (E:S, 243). And indeed, it is instructive to
take up once again the early texts of Freud in which the foundations
of psychoanalysis were established—The Interpretation of Dreams, The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Uncon-
scious—and reread them in the light of Lacan's thesis. One cannot fail
to be struck by the fact that over and again the phenomena of the
unconscious—dreams, slips, jokes, symptoms—are traced back to es-
sentially verbal mechanisms, plays of words, and phonemic concatena-
tions. The remarkable thing is that Freud so masterfully discerned the
operation of essentially linguistic mechanisms, although he remained
ignorant of the new science of language pioneered by Ferdinand de
Saussure and his followers. In Lacan's view, the concepts of structural
linguistics, developed during Freud's lifetime but unavailable to him
through "an accident of history," offer an ideal framework for theoret-
ically rendering the psychoanalytic experience. 23 Lacking them, Freud
modeled much of his theory on analogies to nineteenth-century phys-
ics and biology. Nevertheless, for Lacan Freud's true discovery con-
cerned the function of the linguistic signifier in the unconscious:
If what Freud discovered and rediscovered with a perpetually in-

creasing sense of shock has a meaning, it is that the displacement of
the signifier determines the subjects in their acts, in their destiny, in
their refusals, in their blindnesses, in their end and in their fate, their
innate gifts a n d social acquisitions notwithstanding, without regard
12
for character or sex, and that, willingly or not, everything that might
be considered the stuff of psychology, kit and caboodle, will follow
the path of the signifier.24
From the vantage point of mainstream psychoanalysis, Lacan's

formulation readily appears an unlikely one. The common conception
of Freud's discovery, far from suggesting an identity between the
unconscious and language, tends to define them as mutually exclusive.
As Jean Laplanche has pointed out, "the Freudian unconscious and
the language of the linguists are in such radical opposition to each other
that a term for term transposition of their properties and laws may
properly be regarded as a paradoxical undertaking."25 But if there is
some paradox in linking language to the unconscious, how much
greater is the difficulty of associating language with a drive toward
death and destruction! Oriented by the role of the signifier, Lacan
locates the meaning of the death drive in a function of language. "I
have demonstrated," he offers, "the profound relationship uniting the
notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech" (E:S, 101):
From the approach we have indicated, the reader should recognize

in the metaphor of the return to the inanimate (which Freud attaches
to every living body) that margin beyond life that language gives to
the human being by virtue of the fact that he speaks. (E:S, 301)
For Lacan, the death drive can be understood only against the back-
ground of the matrix of linguistic signifiers that he calls the "symbolic
order":
The death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order. . . . The
symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be, that
is what Freud has in mind when he talks about the death instinct as
being what is most fundamental—a symbolic order in travail, in the
process of coming, insisting on being realized. (S.II, 326)
The challenge of interpreting Lacan is to make sense of passages

like these, passages that bristle with multiple perplexities.What is "that
margin beyond life" of which he speaks? How and why is it associated
with language? How are we to locate the thematics of language and
death along the axis of "non-being and insisting to be"?
Lacan links the death drive to the function of speech and language
but also, and equally improbably, to the nature and destiny of human
desire. For Lacan, the issue of the death drive bears upon the essential
13
concern of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics of unconscious desire.

"[Freud] questioned life as to its meaning," Lacan poses, "and not to
say that it has none . . . but to say that it has only one meaning, that in
which desire is borne by death" (E:S, 277). "The function of desire
must remain in a fundamental relation with death" (S.VII, 351). What
does "desire" mean here? The sheer ubiquity of "desire" in Lacan's
discourse signals its importance for his thinking. Even a brief encoun-
ter with Lacan's text serves to alert us to the very privileged status of
the word in Lacan's vocabulary. Yet it is not easy to determine precisely
its correspondence to Freud's terminology nor does Lacan offer a
Hmpid definition. Left deliberately unspecified in its meaning, the
word not unfrequently assumes an aura of almost mystical signifi-
cance. 26 By linking death to desire, Lacan seems merely to compound
one mystery with another.
Interpreting Lacan
T h e r e can be no doubt about the importance of Lacan's interpreta-

tion of the Freudian death instinct. Lacan faces us with the disturbing
possibility that the most readily recognizable and widely influential
part of psychoanalytic theory—the triad of psychical agencies; id, ego,
and superego—is based upon and is only fully understandable in terms
of the most maligned and misunderstood part of the theory: the
hypothesis of the death drive. Lacan thus takes the notion of the death
drive to be a key point, perhaps the key point, for grasping the essential
import of the psychoanalytic discovery. Further, he challenges us with
the task of re-conceiving the meaning of the death drive and of uncon-
scious processes in general according to a new paradigm: that of the
unconscious structured like a language. The main task of this essay is
to make sense of Lacan's treatment of this crucial point. But before
we can evaluate Lacan's contribution to the enigma of the death drive
it must be acknowledged that Lacan poses something of an enigma in
himself.
Despite the importance he attributes to it, Lacan nowhere devotes
to the death drive a sustained discussion in which his position might
be unambiguously grasped. Gathering together the many, but often
brief and cryptic, references to the topic is equally disappointing. It is
exceedingly difficult to discern in such a collection the main lines of a
coherent theory. In reading Lacan, the experience of being unable to
lay hold of a readily comprehensible "position" is not the exception,
however, but the rule. And such, it seems, is Lacan's intention. Lacan
14
clearly discourages his reader from expecting of him anything like a

traditionally structured "theory." "My Ecrits" he warns, "are unsuit-
able for a thesis, particularly for an academic thesis: they are antitheti-
cal by nature: one either takes what they formulate or one leaves
them." 27 As Anika Lemaire has put it:
Lacan claims, therefore, not to have put forward any "theories."

His "utterances" or "writings," seeds scattered among the thorns of
traditional philosophy and psychology, in no way lend themselves to
anything resembling a closure. . . .
For Lacan, then, any attempt to unify his scattered statements into
a whole runs the risk of making erroneous interpolations.28
For all its brilliance and evocative power, Lacan's text remains stub-
bornly resistant to ready comprehension. T h e style of Lacan's dis-
course, first of all a spoken discourse, heard by those attending his
famous seminar before appearing in print, is notoriously difficult.
Jeffrey Mehlman has described it well as "Mallarmean in hermetic
density, Swiftian in aggressive virulence, Freudian in analytic acu-
men." 29 Not surprisingly, Lacan has been accused of exercising a willful
obscurantism that conceals a lack of rigor behind the dense foliage of
a precious and overweighted style. Frangois Roustang has charged
that understanding Lacan becomes a viciously never-ending and all-
consuming labor:
The work becomes infinite, thanks on the one hand to the obscurity
of the discourse, for one would like to understand what has been
intentionally rendered incomprehensible, thanks on the other hand
to the very vague links [Lacan makes] to [other] disciplines, for one
can never discover the relations which exist only on a metaphorical
plane. It is necessary that the work be infinite, in order to absorb all
one's energy in an effort to understand, leaving nothing for critique.30
The difficulty of Lacan's style is not wholly unintentional. Convinced

that the curative effect of analysis does not consist in explaining the
patient's symptoms and life history, convinced, that is, that the analyst's
effort to understand the patient only impedes the emergence of the
unconscious within the transference and that what is effective in analy-
sis concerns something beyond the capacity of the analyst to explain,
Lacan's discourse is calculated to frustrate facile understanding. His
aim in part is to replicate for his readers and listeners something of
15
the essential opacity and disconnectedness of the analytic experience.

Often what is required of the reader in the encounter with Lacan's
dense and recalcitrant discourse, as with that of the discourse of the
patient in analysis, is less an effort to clarify and systematize than a
sort of unknowing mindfulness. We are called upon less to close over
the gaps and discontinuities in the discourse than to remain attentive
to its very lack of coherence, allowing its breaches and disalignments
to become the jumping-off points for new movements of thought.
Lacan says of himself:
I am not surprised that my discourse can cause a certain margin of

misunderstanding. . . . [I]t is with an express intention, absolutely
deliberate, that I pursue this discourse in a way that offers you the
occasion of not completely understanding it. This margin allows that
for you who say that you follow me, which is to say that you remain in
a problematic position, a door is always left open toward a progressive
rectification.31
In more than one way, then, Lacan's discourse resists systematic

conception. T h e attempt to present a coherent account of his teaching
is therefore a chancy undertaking, and perhaps especially so with
regard to the concept of the death drive. The death drive seems to be
the locus of theoretical obscurity par excellence. Nevertheless, I will
argue that there is far broader and deeper coherence in Lacan's
thought than may at first appear. This essay is an attempt to demon-
strate some of that coherence with special reference to the problem of
the death drive. 32 Do I remain true to Lacan? I will quote extensively
from Lacan's text and will try to acknowledge those points at which I
clearly depart from him. In the end, perhaps, I will be judged to
have departed from Lacan through the door he "left open toward
a progressive rectification." My aim, however, is not to provide a
comprehensive account of Lacan's work, but to traverse his thought
obliquely along the lines of a specific concept. 33 In doing so, I hope to
reveal in a limited way some aspects of the structure of his thinking,
but, more important, I hope to show that the value of Lacan's innova-
tions for reading the text of Freud. I will take seriously Lacan's claim
to "return to Freud." My effort must finally be considered an explica-
tion of Lacan's work less for its own sake than for the light it sheds on
a concept we find in Freud.
Reference to Freud is not only the goal of my analysis but also a
guide for interpreting Lacan. Lacan was fond of reminding would-be
"Lacanians" that he, Lacan, strove only to be a "Freudian." As his
16
discussions of Freud's texts so powerfully demonstrate, Lacan's genius

consisted not merely in bringing to psychoanalysis the concepts of
structural linguistics, gestalt psychology, or philosophy, but doing it in
a way that allows us to experience Freud's great cases as if for the first
time.34 Lacan was first and last a reader of Freud. "I must note," he
remarked with pointed irony, "that in order to handle any Freudian
concept, reading Freud cannot be considered superfluous, even for
those concepts that are homonyms of current notions" (E:S. 38). Con-
sistent with this advice, it will be helpful to keep the text of Freud very
clearly in view. It will be necessary during the course of this essay to
locate, painstakingly, the origin and function of the death drive in
Freud's theory. Only by determining its point of emergence in the
unfolding of Freud's thought, by understanding the nature of the
questions to which it provided an answer, and by discerning its linkages
with other key concepts and problematics can we clarify how Lacan
makes new sense of it.
Lacan's claim to remain faithful to Freud gives us some warrant to
use Freud in reading Lacan, but it can hardly be forgotten, for all the
talk of return, that Lacan is not Freud. To return to Freud is by no
means simply to repeat him. "We are not following Freud," Lacan
poses,
we are accompanying him. The fact that an idea occurs somewhere

in Freud's work doesn't, for all that, guarantee that it is being handled
in the spirit of the Freudian researches. As for us, we are trying to
conform to the spirit, to the watchword, to the style of this research.35
The concept of the death drive in particular must be interpreted in a

spirit that transcends the letter of Freud's text:
This notion [of the death drive] must be approached through its
resonances in what I shall call the poetics of the Freudian corpus, the
first way of access to the penetration of its meaning, and the essential
dimension from the origins of the work to the apogee marked in it
by this notion, for an understanding of its dialectical repercussions.
(E:S, 102)
It is toward the end of revivifying the spirit of Freud's teaching that

Lacan offers his most significant innovation: the three orders of the
imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. They constitute, he suggests, "a
sort of preface or introduction to a certain orientation of psychoanaly-
sis."36 But that is too modestly said. Beginning in the early 1950s,
17
Lacan's work is at every point saturated with the distinction of these

three fundamental registers. "Without these three systems to guide
ourselves by," he insists, "it would be impossible to understand any-
thing of the Freudian technique and experience" (S.I, 73):
In order to gain an idea of the function which Freud designates

by the word "ego," as indeed to read the whole of the Freudian
metapsychology, it is necessary to use this distinction of planes and
relations expressed in the terms, the symbolic, the imaginary, and
the real. (S.II, 36)
T h e imaginary was the first of the three orders to appear, intro-

duced in 1936 by Lacan's article on the "mirror stage." It was inspired
by research in ethology, which associated behavior patterns in animals
with the perception of specific visual images. Lacan proposed that a
similar "imaginary" function operates in human beings. In the "mirror
phase," the most rudimentary formations of psychic life are organized
for the six- to eighteen-month-old infant as it identifies itself with a
body image; either its own image in a mirror, or that of a caretaker or
peer. For Lacan, the "imaginary" designates that basic and enduring
dimension of experience that is oriented by images, perceived or
fantasized, the psychologically formative power of which is lastingly
established in the primordial identification of the mirror phase. La-
can's first and arguably most original and far-reaching innovation in
psychoanalytic theory was to characterize the Freudian "ego" as a
formation of the imaginary.
T h e symbolic, announced in his 1953 paper on "The Function and
Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," was conceived by
Lacan from the outset in dynamic opposition to the captures of the
imaginary. Lacan's notion of the symbolic is indebted to the linguistics
of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson, and to the structural
anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss. T h e symbolic is the register of
language and of linguistically mediated cognitions. In the "symbolic
order," Lacan envisions a complex system of signifying elements whose
meaning is determined by their relation to the other elements of the
system—a grand structure, then, in which meaning is free to circulate
among associated elements or signifiers without necessarily referring
to a particular object or signified. In opposition to the gestalt principles
and relations of perceptual resemblance that govern the semiotics of
the imaginary, the order of the symbolic functions in accordance with
rules internal to the signifying system itself. Lacanian psychoanalysis
18
came fully into its own when Lacan identified the Oedipus Complex
discovered by Freud with the formative moment in which the child,
molded and snared by the imaginary, accedes to a symbolic mode of
functioning.
It is a good deal more difficult to characterize briefly the Lacanian
sense of the "real." Especially in his later work, Lacan tries to show the
interconnectedness of the imaginary, symbolic, and real, comparing
them to the three interlocking rings of a Borromean knot. But the
notion of the real is perhaps best introduced as being precisely that
which escapes and is lacking in the other two registers. Neither figured
in the imaginary nor represented by the symbolic, the real is the always-
still-outstanding, the radically excluded, the wholly uncognized. As
Lacan puts it, "the real is the impossible." 37 In Lacan's sense, then, the
real has very little to do with common "reality." By the measure of
everyday reality, the Lacanian real is closer to being un- or sur-real.
The real is sheer, wholly undifferentiated and unsymbolized force or
impact. It is an experience of the real, therefore, that lies at the heart
of trauma. However, the real is not simply a designation of something
unknown external to the individual. It inhabits the secret interior as
well. T h e real is therefore also to be associated with the active yet
ineffable stirrings of organic need, the unconsciousness of the body.
T h e tripartite distinction of imaginary, symbolic, and real constitutes
the master key of Lacan's work. To interpret his treatment of the
death instinct will therefore ultimately require determining its relation
to these three essential registers. As I hope to demonstrate in the
following chapters, this task offers a unique opportunity for clarifying
the interrelation of Lacan's three basic categories to one another. This
is true in spite of the fact, or rather precisely because of the fact, that
each of the three registers seems to claim the death instinct for its own.
From one point of view, Lacan clearly associates the death drive with
the imaginary. "The point emphasized by Freud's thought, but [that]
isn't fully made out in Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Lacan asserts, "[is
that] the death instinct in man [signifies] that his libido is originally
constrained to pass through an imaginary stage" (S.I, 149). At another
point, however, it is the symbolic that appears as the order of death.
Thus we read that "the nature of the symbol is yet to be clarified. We
have approached the essence of it in situating it at the very point of
the genesis of the death instinct" (S.III, 244). Is the drive toward death
to be associated primarily with the imaginary? with the symbolic? Or
is it not more fittingly associated with the real? Lacan's notion of the
real—as lack or absence, as the impossible, as the unspeakable force of
19
the trauma, or as the ineffable exigence of the body—seems eminently

qualified to be linked with the activity of what Freud called a "death
drive."
As I hope to show in what follows, the problem of death is relevant
to each of the three registers, but in a different way. Clarifying these
differences yields not only a more adequate solution to Freud's prob-
lem of the death drive but also a better understanding of Lacan's own
thought as it illuminates the relations of the imaginary, symbolic, and
real to one another.
20
2
Lacanian Reflections on Narcissism

Man begins by being reflected in another man as in a mirror. Only
when Peter develops an attitude toward Paul which is similar to the
attitude he has toward himself, does Peter begin to be conscious of
himself as a man.
—Karl Marx quoted by Henri Wallon,
Les origines du caractere chez Venfant
Jacques Lacan is best known for his rethinking of psychoanalysis in

terms of linguistics. His contribution is often summed up by quoting
his formula about the unconscious "structured like a language." There
is a danger, however, in putting too much stress on the linguistic side
of Lacan. For all its importance in Lacan's thought, his notion of the
symbolic and its role in the unconscious must be understood in its
dynamic relation to his earlier and seminal conception of the imagi-
nary. Catherine Clement has proposed that "Lacan may not have had
any idea other than that of the mirror stage. This was a true discovery.
. . . In this discovery we find all his future work in embryonic form."1
Philippe Julien maintains that "the teaching of Lacan is, from start to
finish, a debate with the imaginary."2
However we evaluate the relative importance of the imaginary and
the symbolic in Lacan's work, there is good reason why a discussion of
his approach to the death drive must begin with the imaginary. This
is so because Lacan's treatment of the death instinct is closely bound
up with his concept of "alienation." Central to Lacan's conception of
both death and desire, alienation finds its first and decisive point of
reference in the imaginary structuration of the mirror phase. Lacan
asks of this alienation: "Isn't it the fundamental, original, specular
foundation of the relation to the other, in so far as it is rooted in the
imaginary? The first alienation of desire is linked to this concrete
phenomenon" (S.I, 176). Alienation not only begins in the imaginary,
the imaginary is somehow alienating in its very essence. "In the order
of the imaginary, alienation is constitutive. Alienation is the imaginary
21
Reflections on Narcissism
as such" {SHI, 166). As fundamentally alienating, the imaginary is tied

to death. Lacan therefore claims that "this life we're captive of, this
essentially alienated life, existing, this life in the other, is as such joined
to death, it always returns to death" (SJI, 233). And elsewhere: "This
image of the master, which is what [man] sees in the form of the
specular image, becomes confused in him with the image of death"
(S./, 149).
It is the alienating character of the imaginary that links it to death.
Understanding what Lacan means by "alienation" is therefore a key
requirement for clarifying his treatment of the death instinct. In this
chapter, I will give a general account of Lacan's notion of the imagi-
nary, which, before arriving at an answer, aims at posing the nature
of imaginary alienation as a question.
Life in the Mirror
Lacan's theory of the imaginary function in human beings is inspired

in part by ethological research into the role of perceptual mechanisms
in animal behavior. In Lacan's view, the work of Lorenz, Tinbergen,
and others has established beyond doubt the key part played by per-
ceptual Gestalten in triggering behaviors of parade, territoriality, at-
tack, courtship, and mating. For such behaviors, the primary stimulus
is the visual image of another member of the same species. In his
article on the mirror phase, Lacan cites the example of the female
pigeon for which the sight of another member of its species is a
necessary condition for the anatomical maturation of its reproductive
organs {E:S, 3). That this effect is produced by the perception of an
image and not by the real presence of another individual is shown by
the fact that a bird raised in isolation from its peers is able to develop
normally when it is supplied with a mirror. These observations suggest
that the functioning of the sexual instinct in animals cannot be under-
stood apart from such "imaginary" mechanisms:
What serves as support for the sexual instinct on the psychological

plane? What is the basic mainspring determining the setting into
motion of the gigantic sexual mechanism? What is its releasing mecha-
nism, as Tinbergen puts it, following Lorenz? It isn't the existence of
the sexual partner, the particularity of one individual, but something
which has an extremely intimate relation to what I have been calling
the type, namely an image. . . . The mechanical throwing into gear
of the sexual instinct is thus essentially crystallized in a relation of
22
images, in—now I come to the term you're expecting—an imaginary

relation. (5./, 121-22)
In his conception of the "mirror phase," Lacan transposes from

animal ethology to human beings the importance of the perceptual
imago of another member of the species. During the mirror phase,
the psychically formative moment that occurs in the human infant at
age six to eighteen months, the most rudimentary contours of psychical
structure are laid down in perceptual registrations. However, the func-
tion of the imago that is so decisive for animal behavior assumes an
even greater importance in human beings due to a striking feature of
human development: the phenomenon embryologists call "fetaliza-
tion." For Lacan, as for Henri Wallon whose work influenced him, the
first months of life in the human being are characterized by a state of
radical motor incoordination that evidences "a specific prematurity of
birth in man":
It must be remarked that the lateness of dentition and of walking,

a lateness correlative for the majority of bodily equipment and func-
tions, indicates in the infant a total vital impotence which lasts through
the first two years. . . . [W]e must not hesitate to recognize in the first
years a positive biological deficiency, and consider man as an animal
prematurely born.
I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror stage as
a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a
relation between the organism and its reality—or, as they say, between
the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.
In man, however, this relation to nature is altered by a certain
dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord be-
trayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor incoordination of the
neonatal months. (E:S, 4)
Because Lacan conceives the specific function and effects of the

imaginary in human beings to be so closely bound up with the fact of
prematurity, it is vital to understand more precisely what he takes
prematurity to mean. He characterizes it less in terms of a general
underdevelopment of functions than as a lack of coordination between
functions. T h e basic elements are in place; it is the connections between
them that are missing. This is particularly true for development of the
central nervous system.4 "Human beings," Lacan claims, "are born
with all sorts of extremely heterogenous dispositions" (S.II, 326). The
23
prematurely born h u m a n infant is, for all intents and purposes, a corps
morcele, a body in bits and pieces:
The study of the behavior of the newborn infant permits us to

affirm that exterio-, proprio-, and interoceptive sensations are not
yet, after the twelfth month, sufficiently coordinated in order either
to achieve the recognition of the infant's own body nor, correlatively,
the notion of what is exterior to it.5
In animals, knowledge is coaptation, an imaginary coaptation. . . .

In man, there is nothing of the kind. The anarchy of his elementary
impulses is demonstrated by analytic experience. His partial behav-
iour patterns, his relation to the object—to the libidinal object—is
subject to all sorts of risks. Synthesis miscarries. (S.I, 168)
T h e beneficial effect of the imago as Lacan thinks of it, again follow-

ing Wallon, relates to the radical incoordination of the neonatal
months. It is through the image of another person that the h u m a n
infant gains the first inkling of its bodily integrity and the first measure
o f control over its o w n movements. As Wallon put it:
Far from constituting a closed system, the infant is devoid of internal

cohesion and quite unable to exercise the least control over even the
most fortuitous influences. The newborn's behavior displays only
discrete and sporadic reactions that achieve no more than the elimina-
tion, by whatever pathways may be available at the time, of tensions
deriving either from organic sources or from external stimuli. . . .
Here is a being whose every reaction has to be completed, supple-
mented, and interpreted. As he is unable to do anything for himself,
he is manipulated by others, and it is through the movements of
others that his first attitudes will take shape.6
T h e imago of the fellow h u m a n being functions to provide coordina-

tion in the midst o f the infant's internal anarchy, to produce h o m o g e -
neity out of an original heterogeneity, to establish organization in the
field o f a primal discord. A highly significant consequence of such
imaginary mimicry—a consequence that will lend an initial orientation
to the problem o f imaginary alienation—is the way it introduces a
profound confusion o f self and other. Indeed, o n the level of such
primitive identification, the distinction between self and other remains
almost meaningless. T h e effects of this confusion continues well into
early childhood, as the p h e n o m e n o n of transitivism suggests. Docu-
24
mented by Charlotte Buhler, transitivism refers to the frequently ob-

served occurrence in which a young child mistakes the experience of
a peer for his own.7 The two-year-old, for instance, may complain of
being struck when he hits another child or cry when he sees another
child fall down.
The salutary function of the imago thus consists first of all in its
power to unify and integrate. In the imago of the other, the newborn
relates itself to an ideal unity. "The specular image . . . is linked as a
unifier to all the imaginary elements of what is called the fragmented
body" (E:S, 196). Lacan's emphasis on the unitary character of the
formative imago of the mirror phase shows the influence of yet another
intellectual tradition, that of gestalt psychology. What the infant finds
in the sight of the other is the Prdgnanz of a good form:
What I have called the mirror stage is interesting in that it manifests

the affective dynamism by which the subject originally identifies him-
self with the visual Gestalt of his own body: in relation to the still very
profound lack of co-ordination of his own motility, it represents an
ideal of unity, a salutory imago; it is invested with all the original
distress resulting from the child's intra-organic and relational dis-
cordance during the first six months, when he bears the signs, neuro-
logical and humoral, of a physiological natal prematuration. (E:S,
18-19)
The primordial imago coordinates the chaotic inner life of the neo-
nate by referring it to an ideal unity, but also establishes a basis of
stability over time. The imaginary Gestalt introduces a sort of fixed
point into the flux of the infantile psyche. Thus Lacan asserts that "the
total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the
maturation of his power is given to him only as a Gestalt . . . that
fixes it and in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast to the turbulent
movements that the subject feels are animating him" (E:S, 2, my em-
phasis). This "fixating" quality of the imago in the human being entails
a "formal stagnation" that is not present in animals. Lacan thus re-
marks the contrast between the behaviors of the human infant and
chimpanzee when confronted with their image in a mirror. For the
monkey, interest in the reflected image quickly passes; for the human
being, however, the mirror image continues to support a kind of
fascination.
The tendency toward temporal inertia or fixity of the imago is
presented by Lacan as a general and fundamental feature of the
imaginary function in human beings. Imaginary formations thus serve
25
not only to mobilize a nascent sense of identity and to introduce

directedness into the chaos of infantile impulses but also to lay down
the ground lines of unity and stability along which the capacity for
object recognition will be built. The imaginary Gestalt provides the
basis for the perception of discrete things as well as the enduring
impression by which things can be repeatedly recognized. The tempo-
ral fixity of imaginary formations appears with particular vividness
in certain pathological states. Delusional feelings of persecution, for
instance, are said to be
similar in their strangeness to the faces of actors when a film is

suddenly stopped in mid-action. . . . [T]his formal stagnation is akin
to the most general structure of human knowledge: that which consti-
tutes the ego and its objects with attributes of permanence, identity,
and substantiality, in short, with entities or "things" that are very
different from the Gestalten that experience enables us to isolate in
the shifting field, stretched in accordance with the lines of animal
desire.
In fact, this formal fixation, which introduces a certain rupture of
level, a certain discord between man's organization and his Umwelt,
is the very condition that extends indefinitely his world and his power,
by giving his objects their instrumental polyvalence and symbolic
polyphony, and also their potential as defensive armour. (E:S, 17)
As it serves to organize the internal confusion of the newborn, the

imago may be said to enable the most primitive form of human action.
Although the infant's newfound capacity for coordination is still de-
pendent upon the image of a being outside itself, the jubilation of the
mirror phase consists in the child's dawning realization of itself as
an agent. In the specular image, " t h e / is precipitated in a primordial
form" (E:S, 2). "[The infant's] joy is due to his imaginary triumph
in anticipating a degree of muscular co-ordination which he has not
yet actually achieved." 8 The imaginary thus becomes the register of
power par excellence. Fantasies of omnipotence and utter helplessness,
mastery and victimization, reflect the essential structure of the
imaginary. T h e logic of the imaginary is a bipolar one of acting and
being acted upon.
T o sum up the preceding points: although the functioning of the
imaginary in human beings is in some ways reminiscent of perceptual
trigger mechanisms in the behavior of animals, special effects are
produced in the human being as a result of its prematurity of birth.
26
In effect, the perceptual cues that operate for animals only within a
framework of instincts are for human beings cut free from their
moorings in any predetermined instinctual schema. As a result, the
imago of the body's wholeness assumes a special motive power in the
human being, with far-reaching effects for psychological develop-
ment. For Lacan, the imago becomes the uniquely privileged psycho-
logical object. T h e imago is "the proper object of psychology in exactly
the same way that the Galilean notion of the inert material point served
as the foundation for physics" (E, 188).
The Imaginary Register of the Drives
In more than one respect, Lacan's conception of the imaginary bears

important implications for the psychoanalytic theory of the instincts
or drives (Trieberi). For Freud, a key goal of psychoanalytic research
was to clarify the way in which psychological functions are related to
a substratum of somatic impulses and energies. It was toward the end
of explaining this relation of psyche to soma that Freud offered one
of his earliest and most enduring concepts: that of the "instinctual
representative" (Triebreprasentanz). Freud insisted that instinctual
forces are never present in themselves, either consciously or uncon-
sciously, but become psychically effective only in and through a sort
of proxy or delegate. 9 He thus proposed that
the antithesis of conscious and unconscious is not applicable to in-

stincts. An instinct can never become an object of consciousness—
only the idea that represents the instinct can. Even in the unconscious,
moreover, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise than by an
idea. If the instinct did not attach itself to an idea or manifest itself
as an affective state, we could know nothing about it. (SE, 14:177)
T h e matter becomes more complicated as Freud offered three

terms, "psychical," and "ideational," as well as "instinctual representa-
tive," that are difficult to distinguish. Nevertheless, the general intent
of all three terms is clear. T h e Freudian concept of instinct is poised
precariously at the juncture of the somatic and the psychical. By differ-
entiating the instinct from its representative, Freud meant to distin-
guish the upsurge of biological forces or excitations (Reizen) within the
organism from the idea or mental content in which those forces be-
come psychologically palpable. Lacan's concept of the imaginary is
extremely suggestive at this point. In the mirror phase, the most
27
primitive formations of the libido are thought to come into being in

and through the recognition of a perceptual Gestalt. The imago might
thus be taken to be the most fundamental form of instinctual represen-
tative. Recognition of the imago mobilizes vectors of impulse from out
of the chaos of excitations in the infantile body. In this way, too, the
Lacanian conception illuminates the connection between fantasy and
the genesis of the drive impulse remarked upon by Freud but never
fully worked out by him. Laplanche and Pontalis recall that "in one of
his first reflections on fantasy, Freud notes that the Impulse could
perhaps emanate from fantasy."10 They go on to conclude that "the
origins of fantasy cannot be isolated from the origins of the drive
itself."11 Lacan makes this conclusion explicit in his own terms: "The
libidinal drive," he insists, "is centered on the function of the imagi-
nary" (S.I, 122). Lacan finds in the imaginary matrix of the mirror
phase, itself a sort of proto-fantasy, the first channeling of libidinal
energy that will influence all subsequent fantasies. The image of the
body thus establishes "an essential dimension of the human, which
entirely structures his fantasy life" (S.I, 79).
One of the things that makes Freud's theory of instincts difficult to
handle is the double intention that motivates it. On the one hand,
Freud wants to assert the rootedness of the mind in the body and to
suggest the profound linkage between psychology and biology. At
one point, he makes bold to assert that "all our provisional ideas in
psychology may some day be based on an organic substratum" (SE,
14:78). Yet at the same time psychoanalysis continually rediscovers the
autonomy of the psychical domain from the biological; indeed, the
specific character of the psychical consists in that very autonomy.
Psychoanalysis thus reveals that human desire is not perverted from
its "natural" aims only in certain pathological conditions but is in a
sense intrinsically and essentially perverse. Lacan is especially sensitive
to the issues involved in this problem, and his concept of the imaginary
directly addresses it. Lacan can suggest that the imaginary is "half-
rooted in the natural."12 The recognition of the Gestalt of the human
face, for example, is a spontaneous function of human perception that
appears within the first two weeks of birth. Yet for all the seeming
"naturality" of the imaginary, for all its apparent continuity with exam-
ples from the animal kingdom, it cannot be forgotten that the mirror
phase marks the point at which the impulse-life of the human being
is decisively tipped into the register of symbols. The Gestalt of the body
image—what Lacan calls "imaginary anatomy"—has relatively little to
do with real anatomy. Imaginary anatomy orients itself in accordance
with only the most superficial aspects of the body form. The emphasis
28
in Lacan's work, partly in polemical response to over-naturalistic read-

ings of Freud, is to insist on the disjunction between human desire
and any biological reality. Although the distance of the human being
from the biological only comes fully into its own under the aegis of
the linguistic signifier, it is visible already in the order of the imaginary.
According to Lacan, the imaginary function in human beings, far from
doing full justice to the biological reality of the organism, is intrinsically
de-naturalizing. "This illusion of unity, in which a human being is
always looking forward to self-mastery . . . is the gap separating man
from nature that determines his lack of relationship to nature."13
We are led to suppose that it is the peculiar temporality of the imago
that accounts for its unnaturality. We noted above how the fixity of
the imago involves a "formal stagnation" that contrasts markedly with
"the shifting field . . . of animal desire." It is thus the formal fixity of
the imaginary Gestalt that distinguishes the drive in human beings
from animal impulse. What differentiates the drive from any organic
function is its constancy. The force of the drive remains constant over
time. Lacan asks:
What exactly does Freud mean by Trieb} Is he referring to some-

thing whose agency is exercised at the level of the organism in its
totality? Does the real qua totality irrupt here? Are we concerned
here with the living organism? No. . . . [T]he characteristic of the
drive is to be a konstante Kraft, a constant force.
The constancy of the thrust forbids any assimilation of the drive
to a biological function, which always has a rhythm. The first thing
Freud says about the drive is, if I may put it this way, that it has no
day or night, no spring or autumn, no rise and fall. It is a constant
force. (FFC, 164-65)
Although once invested in a particular representative the drive tends

toward constancy, the variable character of that investment over a
range of possible objects adds another dimension to the essentially
unnatural character of human impulses and further distances human
desire from biological need. It is the variability of the drive with respect
to its objects that leads Lacan to criticize Strachey's translation of the
Freudian Trieb as "instinct." "What [Freud] calls Trieb" Lacan tells us,
"is quite different from an instinct" (E:S, 236). That is to say, the
Freudian Trieb cannot be identified with the patterns of behavior in
animals that are effectively "pre-wired" in relation to the environmen-
tal stimuli that produce them and to the objects that satisfy them.
29
When it is a matter of innate animal responses, Freud uses the term

Instinkt, not Trieb.lA What distinguishes Trieb from animal instinct is
the greater latitude and openness to variation between the drive im-
pulse and its mode and means of satisfaction. Freud went so far as to
say that, for the Trieb, the choice of object is, strictly speaking, a matter
of indifference. 15 It belongs to the essential nature of Trieb to be
errant, shifting, deviant—in a word, perverse. Lacan thus proposes to
translate Trieb by "derive," a word that suggests not only being de-
flected or turned aside but also being set adrift in ever shifting cur-
rents. 16 Human life, it seems, moves a la derive, it goes down the river. 17
T h e Lacanian conception of the imaginary is especially well-suited
to characterize the essentially perverse tendency of the drive in relation
to its object. Even in animals, those functions governed by the imagi-
nary are most liable to the slippage from one object to another that is
so characteristic of human sexuality. "In the animal world," Lacan
proposes, "the entire cycle of sexual behaviour is dominated by the
imaginary. . . . [I]t is in sexual behavior that we find the greatest
possibilities of displacement occurring, even for animals" (S.I, 138).
T h e potential for displacement is at the heart of the imaginary function
in human beings; it is, in fact, part of the very definition of "imag-
inary":
In man, it is also principally on the sexual plane that the imaginary

plays a role and that displacement occurs.
We would say, then, that behavior can be called imaginary when
its direction to an image, and its own value as an image for another
person, renders it displaceable out of the cycle within which a natural
need is satisfied.18
Lacan's conception of the imaginary thus serves to explain and

elaborate much that is present in Freud's formulations about the
drives, but it also invites us to take a further step. T h e thesis of the
mirror stage suggests that the drives are from the start directed more
toward form than toward content. Lacan's view leads us to suppose
that the contingency of the object that characterizes the drives in
human beings may stem from the fact that the imaginary function is
oriented less to the qualities of any particular object than it is to its
discrete character as an object. It is precisely the unity of the imaginary
Gestalt that is salutory for the chaotic impulse-life of the human infant.
Satisfaction is linked not simply to the proximity of the object but to
the experience of the very qualities of unity, identity, and substantiality
30
that ground recognition of its being an object. It is partly for this

reason that Lacan makes so much of Freud's rather offhand remark
about das Ding.19 For Lacan, human desire is forever haunted by the
dream of "the thing," the dream of re-finding a primordially lost
object, of recovering an original source of utter plentitude. T h e theory
of the mirror phase suggests something both about the imaginary
outline of das Ding but also about why human desire longs to "re-find"
an object that was in fact never possessed, an object that existed only
as a mirage, indeed, that may have existed only as the shadow of a
mirage.
The Imaginary Ego
Lacan uses the concept of the imaginary and of the mirror phase to
rethink the notion of the Freudian drive but also to recast the theory
of the ego. For Lacan, the ego is essentially a formation of the imagi-
nary. "The fundamental fact which analysis reveals to us, and which
I am in the process of teaching you, is that the ego is an imaginary
function" (S.I, 193). Recognition of the primitive imagos of the mirror
phase forms the basis for what Freud called "primary identification."
Lacan suggests that "we have only to understand the mirror stage as
an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely,
the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an
image" (E:S, 2). Lacan associates the ego with all of the characteristics
of the imaginary we have adduced above:
(1) T h e ego is constituted in relation to the perceptual Gestalt or

imago of the body. "The theory we have in mind," says Lacan, "is a
genetic theory of the ego. Such a theory can be considered psycho-
analytic in so far as it treats the relation of the subject to his own body
in terms of his identification with an imago."20 Akin to the effect of the
imago in animal behavior, the ego is the product of a sort of primitive,
animal fascination. We are to think here of the infant whose wide-eyed
gaze, fixed on the face of its mother, seems to deliver it momentarily, as
if by magic, from the chaos of movements that characterize most of
its waking life. "Fascination," Lacan insists, "is absolutely essential to
the phenomenon of the constitution of the ego. The uncoordinated,
incoherent diversity of the [infant's] primitive fragmentation gains its
unity in so far as it is fascinated" (S.II, 50).
(2) As the form of the ego is modeled on the body image, it always
tends toward the replication of a bounded unity. Lacan therefore
31
claims that "the only homogenous function of consciousness is in the

imaginary capture of the ego by its specular reflection" (E, 832). As
imaginary, the primitive ego exhibits the same characteristics of per-
manence and identity possessed by things in the world. "Literally,"
Lacan never tires of insisting, "the ego is an object" (S.II, 44).
(3) In its capacity of providing unity and stability of form, the

imaginary Gestalt grounds a certain parity between the cognition of
objects and the identity of the ego. "For there to be an object relation,"
Lacan claims, "there must already be a narcissistic relation of the
ego to the other. Moreover, that is the primary condition for any
objectification of the external world—of naive, spontaneous objectifi-
cation no less than that of scientific objectification" (S.II, 94). This
thesis installs at the most fundamental level of psychic life a profound
libidinal equivalence of ego, others, and objects in the world—an
equivalence that remains inchoatively present in all subsequent expe-
rience.
(4) The ego and its function in the psychic economy is closely
bound up with the primitive libidinal drives. "Everything pertaining
to the ego is inscribed in imaginary tensions, like all the other libidinal
tensions. Libido and ego are on the same side" (S.II, 326). "It is in the
erotic relation in which the human individual fixes upon himself an
image . . . that are to be found the energy and the form on which this
organization of the passions that he will call his ego is based" (E:S, 19).
(5) Finally, and perhaps related to the temporal fixity of the imago
in human beings, the form of the ego is essentially resistant to change.
The ego strives to retain its structure intact in diverse relations and
over the course of various developmental transformations. "One can-
not stress too strongly," Lacan suggests, "the irreducible character of
the narcissistic structure" (E:S, 24). Even under the influence of the
most far-reaching effects of maturation and sublimation, the psychic
organization remains at least partially oriented by the structure of
the ego and can therefore never fully escape from the orbit of the
imaginary. "The narcissistic moment in the subject is to be found in
all the genetic phases of the individual, in all the degrees of human
accomplishment in the person" (E:S, 24).
The history of the subject develops in a more or less typical series

of ideal identifications which represent the purest psychic phenomena
32
in that they essentially reveal the function of the imago. And we

conceive the ego to be nothing other than a central system of these
formations, a system which must be understood in its imaginary
structure and its libidinal value. (E, 178)
Lacan's theory of the imaginary genesis of the ego in the mirror

phase, although novel in many ways, is broadly consonant with Freud's
own formulations about the nature and origin of the ego. The very
term, "narcissism," chosen by Freud as the keynote of his theory of
the ego, connotes the same specular relation to a reflected image that
Lacan takes to be paradigmatic. This choice of terminology, Lacan
suggests, "reveals in those who invented it the most profound aware-
ness of semantic latencies" (E:S, 6).21 But there are other, less inciden-
tal, convergences. In fact, nearly every major point of Lacan's concep-
tion can be referred to a text of Freud in which a similar view is
proposed. There is, for example, Freud's statement in his essay "On
Narcissism" that "we are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to
the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to
develop" (SE, 14:76-77). This assertion agrees well with the Lacanian
view of the origin of the ego in the mirror stage. The theory of the
mirror phase shows us quite precisely how and why the ego does not
exist from the start. Lacan's account reemphasizes the Freudian thesis
that the ego is a differentiation, a bounded and specialized portion of
the psychic apparatus. It faces us with the implication that the ego is
not coextensive with the organism, nor even with the psychic individual
or subject. The ego is not necessarily the "center" of the personality.
Lacan forces us to re-ask the question of the nature of the ego and of
its relations to the psychic system and to the organism as a whole.
Lacan's emphasis on the prematurity of human birth and its signifi-
cance for psychological development also finds an echo in Freud. From
early on in his career, Freud had stressed the importance for psychic
development of the incomplete maturation of the infant's bodily func-
tions. When Freud refers in The Ego and the Id to the lengthy duration
of the human being's "childhood dependence" and to "the diphasic
onset of man's sexual life," he is sounding an old theme (SE, 19:35).
In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud returns to the subject of
prematurity in an especially significant way. There, he discusses the
source of intrapsychic conflict and seeks to isolate the key factors that
predispose human beings to neurosis. He mentions three factors: one
phylogenetic, one psychological, and one biological. The phylogenetic
factor is "based only on inference" and concerns the inherited resid-
uum of a momentous event in the prehistory of the species—the killing
33
of the primal father. The psychological factor is the existence of the

ego itself, differentiated from the id and in conflict with it. T h e third
factor is the biological fact of premature birth. Significantly, Freud
explicitly relates this prematurity to the separation of ego and id:
The biological factor is the long period of time during which the
young of the human species is in a condition of helplessness and
dependence. Its intra-uterine existence seems to be short in compari-
son with that of most animals, and it is sent into the world in a less
finished state. As a result, the influence of the real external world
upon it is intensified and an early differentiation between the ego
and the id is promoted. (SE, 20:154-55)
T h e emphasis on the image of the body that is so central to Lacan's

mirror stage is also present in Freud. In The Ego and The Id, Freud
supposes that "the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego, it is not
merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface" (SE,
19:26). So, too, Lacan's stress on identification and the object-character
of the ego repeats Freud's conclusion, especially in his later works,
that the ego is the product of identifications and is cathected by the id
as an internal love-object. Even more striking, perhaps, is the corrobo-
ration in a text of Freud of Lacan's thesis about the role of visual
"fascination" in the constitution of the ego. It occurs in Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego, a text in which Freud sets out to relate the
formation and character of the individual ego to the psychological
processes at work in groups. This comparison of individual and group
psychology is itself significant in relation to the Lacanian view, as the
theory of the mirror stage posits a profound identity of ego and other
at the very foundation of psychic life. Lacan's view of the genesis of
psychic structure blurs the distinction between self and other and
therefore tends to close the gap between individual and group psychol-
ogy from the very start. But the discussion in Group Psychology and
the Analysis of the Ego touches on themes that are more immediately
reminiscent of Lacan's notion of the imaginary; indeed, Freud's book
can be transposed almost page for page into the terms of Lacan's
concept. The psychology of groups, which Freud calls "the oldest
human psychology," is said to be essentially imagistic (SE, 18:123).
"[The group] thinks in images, . . . the feelings of a group are always
very simple and exaggerated. So that a group knows neither doubt
nor uncertainty" (SE, 18:78). Throughout Freud's book, the bond by
which the individual is connected to the group is compared to hypno-
sis. It is related to "the state of 'fascination' in which the hypnotized
34
individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer" (SE, 18:75-

76). This fascination is above all a function of looking and being
looked at. How, Freud poses, does the hypnotist exercise his power of
possession? "By telling the subject to look him in the eyes; his most
typical method of hypnotizing is by his look" (SE, 18:125). This power
of looking and being looked at—the power of the imaginary—is an
essential part of the psychic constitution of groups, "It is precisely the
sight of the chieftain that is dangerous and unbearable for primitive
people, just as later that of the Godhead is for mortals" (SE, 18:125).
Whatever its correspondences with specifics of Freud's text, the
importance of the more general issue at stake in Lacan's definition of
the ego as an imaginary construct can hardly be overestimated. It is
on this point that what is most distinctive about Lacanian psychoanaly-
sis can be located, particularly in contrast to the trend toward ego
psychology prevalent in England and in the United States. Taking its
clue from Anna Freud's account of the ego's defensive strategies in
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, ego psychology emphasizes the
executive and synthetic functions of the ego. In this view, the ego is
charged with the task of drawing up compromises between the de-
mands of instinct within and the constraints of reality without. Accord-
ingly, the ego tends increasingly to be identified with the core of
individual identity. Among many Anglo-American analysts, the terms
"ego" and "self are virtually synonymous. 22 This trend toward the
concept of an agent-ego was given impetus by the publication of Heinz
Hartmann's The Ego and the Problem ofAdaptation, in which the function
of the ego was identified with adaptation to reality. For Hartmann,
such adaptation is thought to be possible for the ego by virtue of its
possession of a "conflict-free sphere," a margin of independence from
the clamoring of the id. In turn, more successful adaptation and the
greater ego strength implied by it is credited to the enlargement of
the ego's conflict-free sphere.
It is not difficult to see why and how the ego-psychological emphasis
on adaptation leads to a distinctive understanding of the nature of
psychological health and illness as well as a revised approach to the
goals and methods of analytic practice. Psychological distress is
thought to derive from inadequacies of the ego in being either too
weak or too inflexible to perform its adaptive, integrative functions.
The array of defensive strategies available to the ego are organized
into a hierarchy of increasingly mature and reality-oriented solutions
to the ego's task of mediating between satisfaction and security. 23
Correspondingly, the curative effects of the analytic situation are at-
tributed to the presence of the more well-adjusted and successful ego
35
of the analyst with which the patient identifies, at least temporarily,

while engaged in the process of building new and more adequate ego-
structures. T h e analytic relation thus becomes a "therapeutic alliance"
of egos, in which the patient can be said to "borrow" the ego strength
of the analyst.
Lacan's conception of the ego as a product of the imaginary leads
him to emphatically reject the ego psychological program both in its
conception of health and illness and in its understanding of the prog-
ress of the cure. T h e key point concerns Lacan's insistence that the
ego cannot be taken to be identical with the human subject. In fact,
the very heart of Lacan's appropriation of psychoanalysis, the fulcrum
of his polemical "return to Freud," is his assertion that the true discov-
ery of Freud consists in the distinction between the ego and the subject.
Of course, to sustain this claim Lacan cannot always rely on the letter
of Freud's text—Freud's rather indiscriminate use of the German Ich
does not provide the index of differentiation suggested in French by
moi andje. Is Lacan's interpretation a fair one? It is a question as large
as any in Lacan's oeuvre, and we will return to it numerous times
throughout the present study. To begin to understand what is at stake
in the question we must succeed in clarifying the problem of alienation
in the imaginary. For the moment, it can at least be said that Lacan's
intention is unambiguous. He categorically denies any identity be-
tween the ego and the subject:
I think I have sufficiently emphasized that the unconscious is the

unknown subject of the ego, that it is misrecognized [meconnu] by the
ego, which is der Kern unseres Wesens [the core of our being]. . . . The
core of our being does not coincide with the ego. (S.II, 43)
The ego is an imaginary function, it is not to be confused with the
subject. (S./, 193)
As a precipitate of the imaginary, the ego must be taken to be

an internal object and, as such, an essentially fictive and alienating
formation. In his early paper on the mirror phase, Lacan suggests that
the imaginary ego, far from offering a conflict-free margin in which
the potentialities of the subject can unfold, must be linked to the source
of psychical illness:
We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations

of the [imaginary] /, and find there the most extensive definition of
neurosis—just as the captation of the subject by the situation gives us
36
the most general formula for madness, not only the madness that lies
behind the walls of asylums, but also the madness that deafens the
world with its sound and fury. (E:S, 7)
Especially in his early period, Lacan portrays the labor of analysis

in terms of freeing the subject from the alienating effects of the
imaginary. "Psychoanalysis alone," he claims, "recognizes this knot of
imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever" (E:S,
7). Analytic listening consists in locating the lines of cleavage between
the empty discourse of the ego and the emergent speech of the true
subject:
It is therefore always in the relation between the subject's ego (moi)

and the "I" (je) of his discourse that you must understand the meaning
of the discourse if you are to achieve the dealienation of the subject.
(E, 90)
From this perspective, it becomes abundantly clear why Lacan's

evaluation of the aims of analysis differ so dramatically from the ego
* psychological program. T o begin with, Lacan raises the question of
how, within the ego psychological strategy, the patient is ever to move
beyond identification with the analyst. But Lacan's real concern is
more radical. From a Lacanian point of view, ego psychology requires
that the treatment deepen the very imaginary relationships of the ego
that lie at the root of the patient's deepest conflicts. Psychoanalysis that
deserves the name must effect precisely the opposite, bringing about
a certain deconstruction of already existing imaginary encrustations.
Lacan suggests that "what is really at issue, at the end of analysis, [is]
a twilight, an imaginary decline of the world, and even an experience
at the limit of depersonalization" (S.I 232).
Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis: The Human Being against Itself
We have introduced Lacan's distinction between the ego and the

subject, and, although we have stressed its importance, we have yet to
clarify it in relation to the theme of imaginary alienation. Before
turning to that task, it is useful to note the way in which the opposition
between ego and subject underlies Lacan's treatment of aggressivity.
T h e topic of aggressivity will take us back to the problem of the death
drive and will serve to link the death drive with narcissism. In his 1949
paper on "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis," Lacan rearticulates the
37
Freudian connection between aggressivity and self-destructiveness by

pointing to the special relation between human aggressivity and the
Gestalt of bodily wholeness that models the primitive ego. T h e keynote
of the essay is that narcissism is intrinsically generative of aggressivity.
T h e first requirement for understanding Lacan's treatment of ag-
gressivity is to keep to the distinction he draws between the violence
of an animal whose attempts at satisfaction are frustrated by external
circumstances and the meaning of specifically human aggressivity dis-
covered by Freud. With respect to the latter, Lacan is unequivocal:
"The aggressivity experienced by the subject at this point has nothing
to do with the animal aggressivity of frustrated desire" {E:S, 42).
Animal aggressivity is explained by the notion, so pleasing to common
sense, that "after all, one must eat—when the pantry is empty, one
tucks into one's fellow being [semblable]. . . . [Thus] one assumes that
the behavior of subjects, their inter-aggressivity, is conditioned and
capable of explication by a desire which is fundamentally adequate to
its object" (S.H, 232). But, Lacan continues,
"the significance of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that that isn't

enough. Masochism is not inverted sadism, the phenomenon of ag-
gressivity isn't to be explained simply on the level of imaginary identi-
fication. (S.II, 232)
No doubt there exists in human beings a form of aggression akin to

the animal violence that originates in the frustration of an impulse
directed by the imaginary. But it is not with that in mind that Lacan
so closely associates aggressivity and narcissism. The phenomenon he
tries to bring into focus in "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" draws its
motive force from a dimension that is beyond the imaginary. It is a
force of aggressivity that has its origin in the internal conflict between
the subject and its own ego. Lacan asserts that it is
the ego as an imaginary function of the self, as a unity of the subject

alienated from itself, of the ego as that in which the subject can
recognize itself at first only in abolishing the alter ego of the ego,
which as such develops the very distinct dimension of aggression that
is called from now on: aggressivity.24
It is only in view of the conflict between the imaginary ego and the
claims of the subject beyond the imaginary and alienated by it that we
can make sense of Lacan's definition of aggressivity "as a correlative
tension of the narcissistic structure in the coming-to-be (devenir) of the
38
subject" (E:S, 22). Lacan maintains that aggressivity in psychoanalysis

cannot be understood apart from the conception of the ego as it
appears in Freud's mature theory. The ego must be seen in its opposi-
tion to the subject of the unconscious. Freud's final formulation of the
ego, Lacan claims,
can be understood only by grasping its coordination with the notion

of primordial masochism and that of the death instinct, laid down in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle. . . . [T]his study will give meaning to the
mounting interest claimed by aggressivity in the transference and in
resistance no less than in Civilization and Its Discontents, in showing
that it isn't a matter of the aggressivity one imagines at the root of
the vital struggle. The notion of aggressivity corresponds, on the
contrary, to the splitting of the subject against himself. (£, 344)
Some commentators on Lacan have characterized aggressivity, ex-

actly contrary to Lacan's intention, as a defense of the imaginary unity
of the ego. Thus one finds it said that "the main point of Lacan's
theory of aggressivity is that aggressivity is a defensive strategy used
when the loss of an ideal threatens the unity of the self."25 The real
upshot of Lacan's theory is more nearly the opposite. T h e aggressivity
that interests Lacan is not a defense of an ideal unity of the self but a
rebellion against it. Aggressivity is a drive toward violation of the
imaginary form of the body that models the ego. It is because aggressiv-
ity represents a will to rebellion against the imago that aggressivity is
specifically linked in fantasy to violations of bodily integrity. Lacan
thus characterizes
a Gestalt proper to aggression in man [in terms of] the images of

castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, de-
vouring, bursting open of the body, in short, the imagos that I have
grouped together under the apparently structured term of images of
the fragmented body" (E:S, 11-12)
It is because aggressivity in psychoanalysis is provoked not by a threat

to the unity of the ego but by the alienating structure of the ego itself
that a maximum aggressiveness would be produced by the individual's
confrontation with an exact replica of himself:
Let us imagine what would take place in a patient who saw in his
analyst an exact replica of himself. Everyone feels that the excess of
aggressive tension would set up such an obstacle to the manifestation
39
of the transference that its useful effect could only be brought about
extremely slowly, and this is what sometimes happens in the analysis
of prospective analysts. To take an extreme case, if experienced in
the form of strangeness proper to the apprehensions of the double,
this situation would set up an uncontrollable anxiety on the part of
the analysand. {E:S, 15-16)
T h e Lacanian theory of the imaginary origin of aggressivity helps

to explain a conspicuous and enigmatic feature of human experience:
the fascination with bodily violation and dismemberment. It is a phe-
nomenon remarked by Plato in the Republic. In passing by the place
of public execution, a certain Leontius is said to have found himself
unable to resist the urge to gaze upon the dead bodies laid out there.
"With wide, staring eyes, he rushed up to the corpses and cried, 'There,
ye wretches, take your fill of the fine spectacle.'" 26 St. Augustine, too,
observes the peculiar magnetism exerted by the sight of the violated
body. "What pleasure can there be," he asks, "in the sight of a mangled
corpse? Yet people will flock to see one lying on the ground, simply
for the sensation of sorrow and horror that it gives them." 27 T h e
captivating power of body-horrors noted in these classical texts is
equally manifest in that modern banality, the "rubbernecking" of mo-
torists passing a bad accident on the highway. What is it that they hope
to see there by the roadside—hoping to see in the very heart of fearing
it? As his "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" makes clear, the propensity
to images of bodily evisceration is rooted for Lacan in tensions internal
to the imaginary origin of the ego and represents the most primitive
expression of the coming-into-being of the subject against the con-
straints of its imaginary identity.
Properly understood, Lacan's notion of aggressivity restores the
central point of Freud's view: aggressivity is a function of a primordial
destructiveness toward oneself. T h e whole point of Lacan's "Aggressivity
in Psychoanalysis," as is evident from its first page, is to shed some
light "on the enigmatic significance that Freud expressed in terms of
the death instinct" (E:S, 8). Aggressivity for Lacan is tied to death—
"aggressivity gnaws away, undermines, disintegrates; it castrates; it
leads to death" (E:S, 10)—but not only to someone else's death. Lacan's
approach allows us to understand anew why Freud claims that violence
directed toward other persons or objects is traceable to an essentially
self-destructive impulse. Freud explained the dynamic in terms of a
"turning outward" of an original self-destructive force. Thus Freud
claims that "a portion of the [death] instinct is diverted towards the
external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and
40
destructiveness" (SE, 21:119). To be sure, there is a self-protective

moment in this "turning outward" of the death drive, a projective
mechanism that satisfies the self-destructive drive by means of a substi-
tution. "In this way . . . the organism was destroying some other thing,
whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own self (SE,
21:119). T h e advantage of a Lacanian account is that it shows us the
very workings of that mechanism in terms of an imaginary transitivism.
For the infant of the mirror stage whose identity is bound up in a
transitivistic parity, the fantasized dismemberment of another individ-
ual provides the unconscious equivalent of self-mutilation. T h e Lacan-
ian perspective thus retains Freud's basic point and simplifies it. Along
the axis of reflection in the imaginary double, murder and suicide
amount to the same thing. In the mirror of the imaginary, sadism
conceals and is ultimately motivated by a more fundamental masochis-
tic impulse:
For a sadistic fantasy to endure, the subject's interest in the person

who suffers humiliation must obviously be due to the possibility of
the subject's being submitted to the same humiliation himself. . . .
It's a wonder indeed that people could ever think of avoiding this
dimension and could treat the sadistic tendency as an instance of
primal aggression pure and simple.28
What Is "Alienation"?
We have opened up as yet only a very limited access to Lacan's

thought, but already the fundamental point in his treatment of the
death drive has emerged. What Freud called a drive toward death is
to be related to the alienating structure of the imaginary ego. The
death drive has its origin in the conflict between the subject and its
imaginary identity. Thus Lacan asserts that "the death instinct in man
[signifies] that his libido is originally constrained to pass through an
imaginary stage" (S.I, 149). Or, as he puts it elsewhere:
The libidinal tension that shackles the subject to the constant pursuit
of an illusory unity which is always luring him away from himself, is
surely related to that agony of dereliction which is Man's particular
and tragic destiny. Here we see how Freud was led to his deviant
concept of a death instinct.29
But although we may thus be able to determine a crucial element of

Lacan's view, we will be helpless to develop it much further without
41
specifying more precisely how and why Lacan conceives the imaginary
to be alienating. Lacan unequivocally lays it down as the "essential
point, [that] the first effect which appears from the imago in the human
being is an alienation of the subject." It remains for us to determine
what "alienation" means.
The locus classicus for explaining the nature of imaginary alienation
is the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave.30 T h e Hegelian paradigm
constitutes a prototypical alienation of desire. Lacan continues, in the
passage just quoted:
The first effect which appears from the imago in the human being
is an alienation of the subject. It is in the other that the subject first
identifies and makes certain of himself—a phenomenon that is less
surprising when we remember the fundamentally social conditions
of the human Umwelt—and if one evokes the intuition which domi-
nates the entire speculation of Hegel.
The desire of man is constituted, he tells us, under the sign of
mediation, it is desire for the recognition of his desire. (E, 181)
T h e reference to Hegel lends confirmation to Lacan's thesis that the

confusion of self and other in the imaginary establishes the fundamen-
tal structure of human desire as the desire of the other: "The object
of man's desire, and we are not the first to say this, is essentially an
object desired by someone else."31 A further value for Lacan of the
allusion to Hegel's master and slave is that it corroborates the link
Lacan finds between the first formations of identity in the mirror
phase and the generation of a primordial competitiveness. For Hegel,
too, a primordial aggressivity is installed at the very origin of human
subjectivity. Finally, the reference to Hegel echoes the theme of death.
Just as death expresses for Lacan the limit and breakdown of imagi-
nary identification, death signifies for Hegel the stake against which
the struggle for recognition is waged.
But can the dynamics of alienation and aggressivity in psychoanaly-
sis be fully explained in Hegelian terms? One of the key points to be
explained is precisely how aggressivity is related to the alienating
character of narcissism. It is readily understandable how imaginary
identification involves a confusion of oneself with the image of the
other, but how and why does it result in a primordial aggressivity? It
is difficult to find passages in Lacan that directly clarify this point,
perhaps because he tends to present the connection between narcissis-
tic identification and aggressivity on a more or less empirical basis.
42
Whatever makes it so, the vivid scenes of violation and dismemberment

so characteristic of dreams, fantasies, and delusions give evidence of
a positive desire for destruction linked to the imago of the bodily form.
But the task of unraveling the meaning of the death drive forces us
to conceive the relation of narcissism to aggressivity more exactly. An
adequate theory of the imaginary genesis of the ego must account for
narcissistic aggressivity as well as it explains the meaning of infantile
transitivism.
We are led to suppose that imaginary identification is somehow
profoundly unsatisfying, that it generates a primordial frustration or
privation. What could this mean? What sort of frustration is this?
Following the Hegelian clue, alienation appears as a kind of slavery
and aggressivity as the refusal of the slave to accept his oppression.
But, at this point, one may question whether the analogy to the Hege-
lian scheme is not more confusing than it is clarifying. The idealist
presuppositions that undergird the Hegelian account of the struggle
between master and slave are, after all, among the first pillars of
metaphysics swept away by the force of the Freudian discovery. For
all Lacan's allusions to Hegel, there remains an important margin of
difference between the Hegelian philosophy and psychoanalysis. As
Rosalind Coward and John Ellis have observed:
Although Lacan often refers to Hegel in a "totally didactic fashion,"

the dialectic of desire as it appears in Lacan is in no way comparable
to Hegelian idealism. It can in no way be seen as the same as the
alienation of self-consciousness of The Phenomenology of the Spirit. . . .
J-A. Miller asked: "Surely the definition of being born into, consti-
tuted in, and regulated by a field external to him, is very different
from the alienation of self-consciousness?" Lacan replied: "Yes in-
deed. . . . [I]t is much more a case of Lacan vs. Hegel."32
Elsewhere, Lacan remarks that
it may be no bad thing to see what the root of this celebrated alienation
really is. Does it mean, as I seem to be saying, that the subject is
condemned to seeing himself emerge, in initioy only in the field of the
Other? Could it be that? Well it isn't. Not at all—not at all—not at all.
{FFC, 210)
We should resist the temptation, invited by Lacan's own references

to Hegel and relied upon by many commentators of Lacan, to explain
imaginary alienation solely in terms of the relations between the subject
43
and an other or others outside itself. It is not enough to say, as Anika

Lemaire puts it, that "alienation is the fact of giving up a part of
oneself to another. T h e alienated man lives outside of himself."33 T h e
alienation Lacan points to is correlative with the constitution of psychic
identity at the most primordial level—a level that developmentally
precedes the structuration of an intersubjective dialectic. It is precisely
the point of Lacan's mirror stage to delineate a period in which self
and other are radically indistinguishable. Yet it is in this very period
that the most profound alienation occurs. T h e question therefore
arises: who or what is it that is alienated? 34 In order to conceive alien-
ation as an intersubjective conflict in which the self-possession of the
subject is compromised by its dependence on the image of the other,
it is necessary to assume the agency of an idealist or existential subject
who feels so compromised. We must tacitly assume the existence of a
sort of homunculus-subject that resents its dependence on the other.
But in the Lacanian scheme, such an assumption is illegitimate. T h e
existence of such a subject, a petit-homme-qui-est-dans-Vhomme, is pre-
cisely the sort of thing to which the whole of Lacan's work stands
opposed. 35 But further, even if we could answer the question about
who is alienated in imaginary identification, we still lack an account of
why they might react aggressively to it. To explain alienation in terms
of an intersubjective conflict presupposes not only a subject who expe-
riences itself as alienated, but also assumes something like a primordial
impetus toward self-sufficiency in the face of which dependence on
the other is objectionable. Far from qualifying as an originary motiva-
tion in human beings, such a desire for independence from the other
is more likely to appear in the light of psychoanalysis as a hard-won
and highly derivative achievement of psychic development. I offer
these considerations merely to suggest that the alienation Lacan associ-
ates with the formation of the ego is not as readily understandable as
it may at first appear. Above all, alienation is not well accounted
for by the recourse to a simple opposition between intersubjective
domination and autonomy—a recourse that Lacan's own references
to Hegel tend to encourage. Neither is it readily conceivable how such
an intersubjective conflict could be possible for an infant in the mirror
stage, nor is it clear, even if we grant the possibility of an infantile
experience of domination, how and why the infant would object or
react aggressively to it.
T h e main problem with the master-slave approach is that it locates
the meaning of alienation between two individuals. On a closer look, it
is clear that the alienation Lacan has in mind is describable (and,
indeed, must be describable) in other terms. What is at stake is an
44
alienation of oneselffrom oneself. What is alienating is not the relation

of the nascent ego to another ego, but of the inchoate subject to its
own ego. Thus Lacan claims that "the spatial captation of the mirror-
stage, even before the social dialectic, [is] the effect in man of an organic
insufficiency" (E:S, 4, my emphasis). We must interpret imaginary
alienation in a way that makes sense of the fact, as Lacan puts it, that
this form [of the imago] situates the agency of the ego, before its
social determination, in a fictional direction which will always remain
irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin
the coming-into-being (le devenir) of the subject asymptotically, what-
ever the success of the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve
as / his discordance with his own reality. (E:S, 2, my emphasis)
If the imaginary formation of the ego somehow generates a primordial

frustration, it is not owing to any obstacle or inhibition the ego experi-
ences from outside objects or persons. It is the ego itself that is frustrat-
ing. "The ego," Lacan maintains, ". . . is frustration in its essence" (E:S,
42).
Similarly, narcissistic aggressivity is first of all a response not to a
social but to an internal conflict. Lacan conceives of aggressivity, as
Freud did, in terms of an original aggressivity toward oneself. "The
aggressiveness involved in the ego's fundamental relationship to other
people . . . " Lacan insists, "is based upon the intra-psychic tension we
sense in the warning of the ascetic that 'a blow at your enemy is a blow
at yourself/ "36 "It is clear," he claims, "that the structured effect of
identification with the rival is not self-evident, except at the level of
fable, and can only be conceived of by a primary identification that
structures the subject as a rival with himself' (E:S, 22).
T h e key to the problem imaginary alienation lies in conceiving what
it means for the subject to be constituted "as a rival with himself." Only
by clarifying this point will it be possible to unfold Lacan's answer to
the problem of the death drive. But how are we to proceed? In the
following chapter, I will propose a reading of Lacan's concept of the
imaginary in terms not often met with in commentaries on his work:
a reading in terms of psychic energetics. Only after this reading has
been established will it be possible to return to the other, more familiar
characterization of alienation in terms of the desire of the other. In
the meantime, however, an energetic perspective will open up fresh
and fertile possibilities for interpretation.
45
3
The Energetics of the Imaginary

Why does the subject alienate himself the more he affirms himself as
ego?
Thus we return to the question of the preceding session—what is
it, beyond the ego, that seeks to make itself recognized?
—from the seminar of Jacques Lacan
I have suggested that the question of the death instinct in Lacan is

closely related to the notion of imaginary alienation. The nature of this
alienation, however, remains obscure. The appeal to an intersubjective
dialectic, which seeks to characterize alienation as a compromise of
personal autonomy, does not account well for an essential point of
Lacan's conception: alienation in the imaginary is first and foremost
an estrangement of oneself from oneself. The imaginary formation
of the ego is alienating not just because it is modeled on an other
outside the subject but because imaginary identification somehow splits
the subject from itself. In this chapter, we will try to move beyond this
impass by offering an alternative account of imaginary alienation from
the standpoint of psychic energetics. Why energetics? The metaphor
of psychic energy may seem an unlikely point of reference for a
discussion of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, it offers a valu-
able orientation with respect to Freud's system of concepts. T h e ener-
getic perspective will help to clarify what Lacan means by alienation
in a way that creates a bridge between the discourse of Lacan and the
energetic assumption on which Freud's thinking was based. In this
way, an energetic interpretation of the imaginary prepares the way
for outlining a distinctively Lacanian conception of the death drive.
The Career of a Metaphor
T h e metaphor of psychic energy was arguably the single most sig-

nificant idea relied upon by Freud in the theoretical elaboration of his
47
Energetics of the Imaginary
experience. Especially as it was made more precise in the concept of

libido, the energy metaphor functioned as a quantitative principle by
means of which the psychical equivalence of manifestly different men-
tal contents could be postulated. The notion of psychic energy, along
with its companion idea of energy cathexis or investment, played a
crucial role in conceptualizing such basic mechanisms as displacement,
condensation, resistance, and repression. But, further, energetics
makes a special claim on our attention in this essay as it is obviously a
primary frame of reference for any discussion of what Freud meant
by "drives." T h e notion of some raw force or energy coming to bear
on psychic life seems especially unavoidable in the case of the death
drive, thought by Freud to be the most primordial of the drives. In
addition, the task immediately before us is to make sense of the Lacan-
ian notion of imaginary alienation. We are therefore concerned to
determine more precisely the functions and effects of the narcissistic
ego. An energetic perspective is relevant as it was precisely a problem
of energetics—the problem of the investment or disinvestment of the
ego and of objects—that led Freud to propose his theory of narcissism.
T o return to the metaphor of energetics is to return to the original
staging of Freud's theory of the ego.
But even if we accept the centrality of energetics in Freud's thought,
how can reemphasizing it be anything but step backward? Isn't Freud's
concept of psychical energy the most anachronistic and outmoded part
of psychoanalysis? One could easily devote a long book to cataloguing
the successive waves of criticism to which the concept of psychic energy
has been subjected. There is wide agreement, as L. Breger puts it, that
Freud's "emphasis on the basic urges and forces that underlie human
psychology—in man's unconscious impulses, in sexuality and aggres-
sivity—have made [psychoanalysis] the most influential theory of hu-
man motivation." 1 But there is equally widespread consensus with
Breger's caveat that "the conceptual underpinning of the motivational
theory—the concepts of psychic energy, of libido, of conservation or
economy, of the life and death instincts—has long been its weakest
aspect." 2 In the first place, the link between Freud's idea of psychic
energy and the concepts of energy or force in the natural sciences that
inspired it is based, at best, on a very liberal analogy. "The psychoana-
lytic system is based on energy concepts," K. S. Lashley has charged,
"and I do not believe that the data justify them. There is no known
source of energy of such character in the nervous system."3 Arguing
along similar lines, Roy Grinker charges that "the series of words—
instinct, drive, action, force, and energy—are misconceptions. There
is no relation of 'psychic energy' to any known form of energy, and it
48
is not remotely related to the physical concept of force." 4 The validity

of the very concept of psychical energy has thus come into question,
but, in addition, as Grinker points out, energetics is becoming more
and more obsolete as psychoanalysis turns to other theoretical frame-
works that seem to do very well without it,
Slowly but inevitably, information theory is replacing libido theory

and its energic concomitant.. . . [S]ilently but definitely the dual drive
theory, never fully accepted even by its originator, Freud, is being
replaced by a monolithic theory of motivation (Eros) not too different
from the ancient ideas of life. Life is a process that is there and
necessary. Any other consideration at this time becomes speculative
science, philosophy, or religion.5
Any recourse to the idea of psychic energy runs against a general

tide of criticism of organicist and vitalist notions in psychoanalysis, but
isn't it especially unsuitable for a discussion of Lacan? Isn't the critique
of psychoenergetics one instance in which Lacan is moving in harmony
with the general trend? What else are we to conclude from Lacan's
thesis that "the unconscious is structured in the most radical way like
a language"? Isn't it Lacan who insists that the pure gold of analysis is
to be found, not in any effulgence of affect, but in the verbal articula-
tions of the patient's discourse, in the algebra of the signifier? Doesn't
this mean that it is precisely the notion of psychic energy that Lacan's
reinterpretation of Freud seeks to eradicate from psychoanalysis?
Clearly, the place of energetics in Lacanian psychoanalysis is prob-
lematic. Paul Ricoeur has faulted Lacan on precisely this point, claim-
ing that Lacan's linguistic interpretation fails to encompass the ener-
getic-hermeneutic duality of Freud's thought. 6 But, on closer
examination, it will be seen that the energetic standpoint is not so
much absent in Lacan as it is significantly reconceptualized. Lacan is
well aware of the importance of energetics in Freud. "The innovation
of Freud," he writes in his early monograph on paranoid psychosis,
"seems to us capital in that it brings to psychology an energetic notion,
which provides a common measure to very diverse phenomena." 7
In fact, the notion of libido reveals itself in Freud's doctrine as an

extremely broad theoretical entity, which far outstrips the specialized
sexual desire of the adult. It tends to identify itself rather with desire,
the eros of antiquity taken in a very extended sense, namely as the
ensemble of appetites in the human being which surpass the strict
limits of conservation. . . .
49
For all the relative imprecision of the concept of libido, it seems to

us to retain its value.8
Our immediate problem is the nature of imaginary alienation, for

which the Hegelian perspective was seen to be only partially illuminat-
ing. It is especially suggestive, therefore, that Lacan emphasizes that
the standpoint of energetics so central to Freud is precisely what is
lacking in Hegel. Thus Lacan claims that "in Freud something is talked
about, which isn't talked about in Hegel, namely energy. That is the
major preoccupation, the dominant preoccupation" (S.II, 74). It is
with respect to energetics that Lacan maintains that "Hegel is at the
limit of anthropology. Freud got out of it. His discovery is that man
isn't entirely in man" (S.II, 72).
Lacan obviously appreciates the importance to Freud of an energetic
perspective and he does not hesitate to rely upon many of the Freudian
concepts most thoroughly informed by the energetic metaphor. In his
seminar of 1963-64, for example, Lacan counts the problem of the
drive among the "four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis."It is,
of course, precisely the point of Lacan's work to demonstrate the
circuiting of unconscious desire in the system of the signifier. T h e
emphasis is shifted from force to structure. Any attempt to specify
organic forces acting upon psychic life is rejected in favor of linguistic,
even mathematical analysis. However, the point of Lacan's linguistic
approach is not to throw out the notion of energetics altogether, but
rather to re-pose it in a way that both radicalizes it and makes it less
accessible to reification. Lacan demonstrates the metonymy of desire
in language, but he never intends simply to identify the life of uncon-
scious desire discovered by Freud with the object studied by linguistics.
In Lacan's later work, energetics is apparently absent because he con-
ceives of it by means of another category: that of the "real."
There are good reasons, as I hope to show in the course of this
chapter, why Lacan shifts the problem of energetics into the domain
of the real—the domain of the unthinkable and, as he puts it, of the
impossible. But my first concern will be to demonstrate that the nature
of the imaginary function and the alienation associated with it is ap-
proachable in energetic terms. An energetics of the imaginary provides
a key for determining the relation of the imaginary to the real. When
this is done, it will become possible to see Lacan's innovation in relation
to Freud's order of concepts in a way that lends new meaning to the
notion of the death drive.
50
Returning to Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology
Lacan nowhere devotes a sustained discussion to the topic of psychic

energy. Determining the place and meaning of energetics in Lacan is
therefore unavoidably a matter of weaving together a number of
oblique references and drawing out their implications. All the more
valuable, therefore, is the commentary Lacan offers on Freud's most
sustained effort to construct a purely quantitative account of the psy-
chic apparatus: the Project for a Scientific Psychology of 1895. 9 Before
turning to Lacan's commentary, it is worthwhile to examine Freud's
argument in some detail. References to Freud's views in the Project
will help locate the place of energetics in Lacan but will also be of
indispensable value in the following chapter when we turn to a more
specific analysis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
The theory elaborated in the Project is at every point based on the
assumption of psychic energy. Nowhere else in Freud's work is his
conception of the mind as an apparatus for mastering excitation more
rigorously worked out. Freud sets out to "represent psychical processes
as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles"
(SE, 1:295). His concern is to identify the basic psychic structures that
make possible "processes such as stimulus, substitution, conversion,
and discharge" (SE, 1:295). He is guided by "the conception of neu-
ronal excitation as quantity in a state of flow" (SE, 1:296).
The basic building blocks of Freud's theory in the Project are the
neurones, thought to be capable of absorbing and discharging quanti-
ties of energy. 10 As each individual neurone exhibits the double func-
tion of investment and discharge, it mimics the operation of the psychic
apparatus as a whole. "A single neurone is thus a model of the whole
nervous system with its dichotomy of [afferent and efferent] struc-
tures, the axis-cylinder being the organ of discharge" (SE, 1:298). In
the interconnecting network of neurones, the economy of excitation
and discharge is organized by a series of differentiated thresholds or
"contact barriers" between neurons. T h e system of contact barriers
thus constitutes an architecture of Bahnungen, or pathways ("facilita-
tions" in Strachey's translation), which are more and less permeable
to the transmission of energy.
Thus conceived, the function of the psychic apparatus is to regulate
the flow of energy along variously conducive pathways. This regula-
tory function is subject to the interplay of two basic principles. T h e first
and most basic principle is that of neuronic inertia (Neuronentrdgheit),
according to which the neurones strive for complete discharge of
51
energy. The system thus aims at "neutralizing the reception of Qn

[quantity of energy] by giving it o f f (SE, 1:296). This discharge is
primarily accomplished in one of two ways. First, the quantity of
energy taken on by a neurone may be passed along by associative links
to other neurones. In a second mode of discharge, more satisfying for
the system as a whole, neuronal energy is directed into the musculature
and expended in motor activity. To these primary strategies of dis-
charge an auxiliary is added: that of flight from the stimulus. When
it is not possible to discharge energy taken on by contact with some
stimulus, it may be necessary simply to get out of range of the source
of excitation. However, not all sources of stimulation can be dealt with
in this way. In particular, excitations originating from the interior of
the organism cannot be eliminated by flight. Freud's statement on this
point is worth quoting at length:
The principle of inertia is, however, broken through from the first
owing to another circumstance. . . . [T]he nervous system receives
stimuli from the somatic element itself—endogenous stimuli—which
have equally to be discharged. These have their origin in the cells
of the body and give rise to the major needs: hunger, respiration,
sexuality. From these the organism cannot withdraw as it does from
external stimuli. . . . They only cease subject to particular conditions,
which must be realized in the external world. (Cf., for instance, the
need for nourishment.) . . . In consequence, the nervous system is
obliged to abandon its original trend to inertia (that is, to bringing
the level [of Qn] to zero). It must put up with [maintaining] a store
of Qn sufficient to meet the demand for a specific action. Neverthe-
less, the manner in which it does this shows that the same trend
persists, modified into an endeavor at least to keep the Qn as low as
possible and to guard against any increase of it—that is, to keep it
constant. All the functions of the nervous system can be comprised
either under the aspect of the primary function or of the secondary
one imposed by the exigencies of life. (SE, 1:296-297)
In relation to "endogenous stimuli" the function of the contact

barriers is in large part defensive: they protect against unmanageable
excitations originating within the organism itself by setting u p points
of resistance to the passage of energy between neurones. The barrier
network serves to filter or diminish internal excitations. In a limited
sense, the inhibitory contact barriers and the restricted pathways or
facilitations they establish can be said to be continuous with the first
principle of inertia: they function to prevent investments of energy
52
that would otherwise have to be evacuated. T h e system thus "avoids,

partly at least, being filled with Qn (cathexis), by setting u p facilitations.
It will be seen, then, that facilitations serve the primary function" (SE,
1:301). But in another, important sense, the barriers work in opposi-
tion to the primary tendency toward complete and immediate evacua-
tion of energy and thereby establish a second basic principle of func-
tioning. T h e contact barriers inhibit the flow of energy, but also make
possible the storage of limited quantities of energy in "permanently
cathected neurones." A quantity of energy arriving at such a 'facilitated
neurone' is not immediately passed off to another neurone but is at
least temporarily retained or stored. Such storage of energy, although
it violates the basic drive toward discharge, serves the advantage of
the organism as a whole by establishing a reservoir of energy for
the performance of specific actions in response to basic needs of the
organism. In accordance with this second principle, the apparatus
seeks not evacuation but constancy and stability of energy. Over and
against the principle of inertia, therefore, Freud poses the principle
of constancy.
In distinguishing the two principles of inertia and constancy, Freud
lays down the first articulation of the "primary" and "secondary" pro-
cesses. The endogenous energies screened out by the "phi system" of
the contact barriers represent what Freud will later come to call
"drives." T h e system of facilitated neurones, on the other hand, which
effects a general inhibition of excitations, but with the benefit that a
quantity of energy is maintained to "meet the demand for a specific
action," comes to be identified with the secondary organization of the
ego. 11 According to the views set forth in the Project, therefore, the
ego is an essentially defensive, regulatory structure. It establishes a
controlled economy of excitations by acting as a kind of sieve or semi-
permeable membrane. It admits some portion of energies impinging
upon the psychic apparatus from both outside and inside the organism
but screens out other energies, thereby protecting the system from
overload.
In his 1955 seminar on the ego, Lacan identifies the barrier-pathway
system outlined by Freud in the Project with a function of the imagi-
nary. Such an identification is not surprising: in each case it is the
problem of the origin and structure of the ego that is at stake. Yet
pausing to examine the comparison more carefully is helpful both for
niaking sense of the Freudian scheme and for understanding better
the nature of the imaginary as Lacan conceives it. The gist of Lacan's
claim is that the inhibitory function of the ego attributed by Freud to
the system of contact barriers is to be related to the effects of the
53
imaginary Gestalt. It is the gestalt function of perception that performs

the selective, filtering action characteristic of the ego. "Freud isn't a
Gestaltist," Lacan poses, "one cannot give him credit for everything—
but he does sense the theoretical demands which gave rise to the
Gestaltist construction":
Indeed, so that a living being doesn't perish every time it turns round,
it must possess some adequate reflection of the external world. This
tells you that this schema is in fact based on what will later be isolated
in the term "homeostasis." We find this here already in the notion of
an equilibrium which has to be conserved and of a buffer-zone, which
maintains the excitations at the same level, which therefore serves as
much for not recording as for recording badly. It records, but in a
filtered fashion. The notion of homeostasis is therefore already there,
implying something which is called an energy both at the entry and
the exit. (S.II, 107)
The gestalt idea serves to explain the filtering process, presumably

by analogy to the selective process by which a figure is separated from
a ground in the formation of a visual Gestalt.12 Relatively little of the
total content of the perceptual field is focally included in the gestalt
figure. In fact, the figure comes forward to explicit awareness only
because the background has been screened out or dimmed down in
some way- In a parallel fashion, only a fraction of the energies coming
to bear on the psychic apparatus are allowed to enter and influence
psychic processes. 13 Like the figure abstracted from its background in
the perceptual Gestalt, the ego is constructed by means of a bifurcation
within the total economy of organismic excitations. T h e ego inevitably
represents a reduction of the total quantity of excitation, a limited
charge that has been siphoned off and forced to circulate within the
confines of a closed structure. 14
The gestalt principle enables us to understand how the filtering
process is at the same time an in-forming of sensation. The perceptual
Gestalt produces a selection of stimuli, but also presents a definite,
formal structure and internal organization. The gestalt function thus
allows us to answer a question that otherwise remains unresolved in
Freud, namely: How it is that the contact barriers, which are thought
to be merely valvelike stoppage points between neurones, give rise to
a system of pathways serviceable for the guidance of behavior? Left as
it stands, Freud's account lacks an answer to this question. Thus Lacan
claims that
54
[Freud's] schema proves to be inadequate. If the nervous system in

fact operates a filtering, it is an organized, progressive filtering, which
brings with it facilitations. However, nothing here entitles one to
think that the facilitations will ever have a functional utility. The sum
total of all these facilitations, the events, the incidents which have
occurred in the development of the individual, constitutes a model
which provides the measure of the real. Is that the imaginary? The
imaginary must indeed be there. . . .
In short, memory is here conceived as a succession of engrams, as
the sum of a series of facilitations, and this conception proves to be
completely inadequate if we don't introduce the notion of image into
it. (S.II, 107-8)
The Fertile Remainder: Something Left To Be Desired
Lacan's rereading of the Project in the light of the gestalt concept

gives a clue for determining what we might call "the energetics of the
imaginary." T h e key point can be modeled on the double function
Freud attributes to the network of contact barriers. T h e phi system of
barrier-facilitations admits and stores measured quantities of energy
only insofar as it blocks or inhibits energy transfer within the psychic
apparatus as a whole. T h e link between these two functions of storage
and inhibition can be readily conceived on the level of individual
neurones. If a flow of energy from one neurone to another is inhibited
by the existence of a contact barrier between them, some or all of the
energy will remained bottled up, as it were, in the first neurone. But
what is thus envisaged on the microscopic level of neurones is also
discernible on the macroscopic level of psychic agencies, and it is on
the latter plane that the distinction between the two functions becomes
most significant. T h e scheme of the Project anticipates a fundamental
ambiguity in the function of the ego as it appears in Freud's mature
theory, according to which the activity of the ego is divided between
storage and inhibition of energy. On the one hand, the ego is thought
to absorb instinctual energy into itself. It is posed by Freud "as a great
reservoir of libido, from which libido is sent out to objects and which
is always ready to absorb libido flowing back/rom objects" (SE, 18:257).
On the other hand, the ego is poised defensively in relation to the id
and is, to that extent, essentially resistant to the demands of instinct.
Laplanche and Pontalis can therefore say summarily that "in Freud's
description of the defensive conflict. . . the ego emerges as the agency
which opposes itself to desire." 15
55
This double function of energy absorption and inhibition is clearly

present in Lacan's formulation. The imaginary is associated by Lacan
with the genesis and action of the libidinal drives. "Libido and ego,"
Lacan says, "are on the same side" (S.II, 326). "The libidinal drive is
centered on the function of the imaginary" (S.I, 122). But, in addition,
the imaginary Gestalt acts as a buffer or filter that refuses the transmis-
sion of energy. Lacan claims that "the ego, doubly emphasizing the
regulatory function of this buffer, must allow the maximum inhibition
of the passage of energy through this system" (S.II, 110).
Distinguishing between what is absorbed by the ego and what is
excluded by it echoes another way of characterizing the genesis and
function of the ego that occurs repeatedly in Freud: that of the analogy
to bodily incorporation and expulsion. It is the latter moment of
expulsion or exclusion that is decisive for determining the ego's rela-
tion to the psychic apparatus as a whole. As Lacan comments, "the
specific domain of the primitive ego, Urich or Lustich, is constituted
by a splitting, by a differentiation from the external world—what is
included inside is differentiated from what is rejected by the processes
of exclusion, Aufstossung, and projection" (S.I, 79). "The ego makes
itself manifest there as defence, as refusal" (S.I, 53). It is in a similar
register of primordial exclusion or refusal that Freud conceives the
genesis of the unconscious. "What does Freud now tell us about the
unconscious?" Lacan asks. "We declare that it is constituted essentially,
not by what the unconscious may evoke, extend, locate, bring out of
the subliminal, but by that which is, essentially, refused" (FFC, 43).
T h e primitive form of the ego is constituted by a primordial force of
exclusion—an exclusion that, as Luce Irigaray remarks, is an essential
feature of the imaginary function. In its "structuring powers," she
writes,
the specular image, visualization of the signifier, . . . well illustrates

the neurological anticipation which it permits for the still immature
infant, anticipation from which it finds itself constituted by the signi-
fier as "one." But this unification is also a disjunction. If the imaginary
unifies, it [also] separates.. . . All structure supposes an exclusion, an
empty ensemble, its negation, as the very condition of its func-
tioning.16
T h e effect of the imago introduces a primordial bifurcation in the

totality of the organism's energies. In doing so, it gives rise to a radical
discord between the ego and the organism as a whole. Thus Lacan
claims that
56
experience demonstrates on the simplest glance that nothing sepa-

rates the ego from its ideal forms . . . and that everything limits it
with respect to the being which it represents, since almost the whole
of the life of the organism escapes it, not only in so far as that life is
the most commonly misrecognized by the ego, but in that for the
most part it doesn't have to be known by the ego. (£, 179-80)
The key point that emerges from Lacan's conception of the imagi-
nary, approached here in terms of energetics, is that the unity of the
imago remains forever inadequate to the fullness of desire. There is
always a remainder, always something left out. Desire is split against
itself insofar as only a portion of the forces animating the living body
find their way into the motivating imaginary Gestalt. The imaginary
ego is characterized by "its essential resistance to the elusive process
of Becoming, to the variations of Desire." 17 What is left out, what is
excluded, constitutes an ineffable reservoir of desire:
The original notion of the totality of the body as ineffable, as lived,

the initial outburst of appetite and desire comes about in the human
subject via the mediation of a form which he at first sees projected,
external to himself, and at first, in his own reflection.. . . Man knows
that he is a body—although he never perceives it in a complete
fashion, since he is inside it, but he lives it. This image is the ring, the
bottle-neck, through which the confused bundle of desires and needs
must pass in order to be him, that is to say in order to accede to his
imaginary structure. (S.I, 176)
The energetics of the imaginary enables us to understand the note

of opposition that Lacan remarks between drive and desire. It is be-
cause the imaginary siphons off and directs only a portion of the
energies animating the organism that the drive, which is "centered on
the function of the imaginary," must always be a partial drive. "Every
drive [is] by its essence as drive, a partial drive" (FFC, 203). T h e drive
is "partial," in Freud's idiom, because the drive originates in relation
to the function of a single erotogenic zone and assumes the form of a
"component instinct." But it is precisely in the register of what Freud
called "erotogenic zones" that Lacan speaks of an "imaginary anat-
omy." T h e drive is a specification or determination of desire in terms
of selected organ functions, but, as such, no drive can exhaust the
potentialities of desire. At the same time, an energetic perspective
brings Lacan's theory of the imaginary into accord with Freud's insis-
tence that the somatic substratum of the drive remains intrinsically
57
inaccessible to consciousness. On the level of a purely somatic excita-

tion, drive energy remains an ineffable, unthinkable organic force or
pressure. Lacan's conception of the mirror phase requires us to think
of the situation of the newborn in terms of a primal chaos of wholly
unsymbolized somatic excitations. Identification with the imago is said
to be "the psychic relationship par excellence" insofar as the imago
functions to erect the most elemental forms of psychic life out of an
anarchy of unformed and inarticulate organic strivings. 18 Prior to the
recognition of the primordial imagos of the mirror stage, the force of
"instinct" remains dispersed amid a panoply of bodily energies. T h e
psychically unprocessed exigency of the body can thus be indicated
only as an unknowable "X." "If, for lack of representation, [the Trieb]
is not there," Lacan poses, "what is this Trieb? We may have to consider
it as being only Trieb to come" (FFC, 60).
We are now in a position to interpret imaginary alienation as an
alienation of oneself from oneself T h e function of the imago is alienating
as it installs the most primitive formation of psychic identity only at
the cost of refusing a portion of the organism's vital energies. T h e
dynamism and structure of the imaginary is essentially twofold. It is
divided between an anarchy of impulses that remain outside the ego
and a partial investment in an imaginary unity:
The entire dialectic which I have given you . . . under the name of
the mirror stage is based on the relation between, on the one hand, a
certain level of tendencies which are experienced—let us say, for the
moment, at a certain point in life—as disconnected, discordant, in
pieces—and there's always something of that that remains—and on
the other hand, a unity with which it is merged and paired. It is in
this unity that the subject for the first time knows himself as a unity,
but as an alienated, virtual unity. (S.II, 50)
T h e salutary effect of the imago is to inform and mobilize the

heterogeneity of infantile impulses and to enable their discharge in
the most primitive form of action. The "fictive," alienating character
of the imaginary formation is explainable in terms of the notion that
the imago can "represent" only a fraction of the organism's panoply
of vital energies. T h e imago fulfills its function of unity only by impos-
ing an intrinsic limitation—only, in effect, by leaving something out.
A quantity of energy is pressed into the service of the drive, but there
is always an excluded and un-imaged remainder. "The Urbild of this
formation [of the imaginary ego]," Lacan concludes, is "alienating . . .
58
by virtue of its capacity to render extraneous" (E:S, 21). The alienating

tension that is established in this way between the organism and its
imaginary identity effects all subsequent psychic life. "This dis-
cordance between the ego and the being," Lacan suggests, "will be the
fundamental note which will be retained in the whole harmonic scale
which, through the phases of psychic history, will function to resolve
it by developing it" (E, 187).
As we have seen, the energetics of the imaginary is conceivable by
analogy to the selective structure of the perceptual act. What is orga-
nized by inclusion and exclusion is in one case quantities of energy, in
the other case, portions of the sensory field. Energetically, the imagi-
nary articulates a directed impulse by suppressing an original energic
heterogeneity; perceptually, it gives rise to a unitary Gestalt by shunting
the greater part of incoming sensory information into a relatively
unformed and irrelevant background. But we can further speculate
on the nature of imaginary alienation by referring to its temporal
dimension. The fixity and constancy of the imago gives rise to a tempo-
ral exclusion insofar as it poses an impediment to the natural unfolding
of instinctual impulses over the course of development. Lacan thus
maintains that the imaginary formation of the ego "turns the I into
that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger,
even though it should correspond to a natural maturation" (E:S, 5—
6). He asks of the imaginary unity of the ego: "How can one not
conceive that each great instinctual metamorphosis in the life of the
individual will once again challenge its delimitation, composed as it is
of a conjunction of the subject's history and the unthinkable innateness
of his desire?" (E:S, 19-20). What is "excluded" by the imago can
therefore be viewed from either of two angles: in analogy to the
intrinsic selectivity of the perceptual Gestalt, the imago entrains certain
potential impulses and excludes others; correlatively, owing to the
temporal fixity of the imago, it excludes new forms of impulse arising
in the course of a natural development.
The perspective of energetics helps illuminate a number of key
points in Lacan's thinking about the imaginary. First, Lacan attributes
to the imaginary ego a function of distortion or meconnaissance, which,
far from being a merely incidental feature of the ego, is actually
constitutive of it. Viewed from an energetic standpoint, the notion of
imaginary meconnaissance is given its full measure of significance. What
Lacan wants to say by this word concerns something more fundamental
than its stem, connaissance, may suggest. The imaginary involves rela-
tions, not of knowledge, but of power. Meconnaissance points to a
dimension that is excluded, rejected, remaindered by the imaginary—
59
a dimension not only of ideas but of the energies that animate ideas.
"That the ego hasn't a clue about the subject's desires, "Lacan says,
". . . is called misrecognition (meconnaissance)" (S.I, 167). Second, an
energetic viewpoint allows us to understand why Lacan claims that
"the ego, whose strength our theorists now define by its capacity to
bear frustration, is frustration in its essence" (E:S, 42). T h e ego is
intrinsically frustrating as it inhibits and refuses as well as discharges
energy. Third, energetics helps explain what Lacan means by saying
that "there is something originally, inaugurally, profoundly wounded
in the human relation to the world" (5.//, 167). The imaginary function
in human beings, he repeats over and again, is distinct from its opera-
tion in animals. The imaginary in man generates a primordial lack or
gap at the very origin of human desire:
Living animal subjects are sensible to the image of their kind. This
is an absolutely essential point, thanks to which the whole of living
creation isn't an immense orgy. But the human being has a special
relation with his own image—a relation of gap, of alienating tension.
One has to assume a certain biological gap in [the human being],

which I try to define when I talk to you of the mirror stage. The total
captation of desire, of attention, already assumes the lack. The lack
is already there when I speak of the desire of the human subject in
relation to his image, of this extremely general imaginary relation
which we call narcissism. (S.II, 323).
The Myth of the Real
T h e energetics of the imaginary as I have presented it parallels

Lacan's distinction between the imaginary and the real. 19 From this
point of view, Lacan's dichotomy of the real and the imaginary
amounts to a distinction between the unsymbolized forces of the bio-
logical organism and the most primitive institution of psychic form—
a distinction that is fundamental for the psychoanalytic conception of
the human being. "Psychoanalysis," Lacan claims, "involves the real of
the body and the imaginary of its mental schema" (E:S, 302).
Lacan clearly poses the relation between the imaginary and the real
in terms of mutual exclusion and locates the genesis of their disjunction
in the structure of narcissism. In referring to the origin of the experi-
ence of inner and outer, he remarks that "the distinction is drawn
between what is included in the narcissistic relation and what isn't. It
60
is at the seam where the imaginary joins the real that the differentiation
takes place" (S.II, 98). Imaginary and real designate the primordial
partitioning of an originally undifferentiated and wholly unsymbol-
ized "reality." Lacan thus proposes that "in so far as one part of reality
is imagined, the other is real and inversely, in so far as one is reality,
the other becomes imaginary" (S.I, 82). He compares the disjunction
of imaginary and real to the noncoincidence of mathematical sets and
maintains that "the conjunction of different parts, of sets, can never
be accomplished" (S.I, 83).
It is in terms of the real that the place and function of an energetic
perspective in the discourse of Lacan can be understood. Like the
notion of the real, the concept of psychic energy designates an irreduc-
ible dimension that is required by the theory, yet is radically impossible
to specify. At the center of the problem is the relation of psychology
to biology—a relation that is in a certain way paradoxical. Lacan is
unequivocal in saying that "the Freudian biology has nothing to do with
biology." Yet it is precisely with respect to the notion of energetics—
apparently the most biologically determined point of Freud's theory—
that Lacan insists on Freud's distance from biology:
Freudian biology has nothing to do with biology. It is a matter of

manipulating symbols with the aim of resolving energy questions.. . .
Freud's whole discussion revolves around that question, what, in
terms of energy, is the psyche? This is where the originality of what
in him is called biological thought resides. He was not a biologist any
more than any of us are, but throughout his work he placed the
accent on the energy function. (S.II, 75)
In the notion of psychic energy the discourse of psychoanalysis

maintains a necessary but problematic point of contact with biology.
Lacan is far from dismissing altogether the relevance of biology to
psychological life. "I think ordinary organicism is a stupidity," he
maintains, "but there is another variety which doesn't in any way
neglect material phenomena" (S.II, 81). T h e energetic metaphor re-
minds us that the psychic apparatus is materially dependent on the
body and that mental life represents a specialized response to bodily
functions and needs. But, at the same time, Lacan is wary of energetics.
The danger is that energetic concepts are liable to simple-minded
reification. He warns against "the need we have . . . to confuse the
St°ff> ° r primitive matter, or impulse, or flux, or tendency with what
is really at stake in the exercise of the analytic reality."20 Why, then,
speak of energy at all? T h e problem, if it can be put this way, is knowing
61
how to talk about psychic reality before it comes to be symbolically

represented. "I am not at all trying to deny here that there is something
which is before," Lacan asserts, "that, for example, before I become a
self or an It, there is something which the It was. It is simply a matter
of knowing what this It is" (S.IV, 12/5/56). Strictly speaking, this prior
It is unthinkable. It is an aspect of the real.
In an analogy that explicitly links the problem of psychic energy
with the real, Lacan compares the real to the energy of a hydroelectric
dam. The important point is that it is impossible to specify the energy
of the river without referring to the structure of the dam that will
interrupt and redirect its flow. It is always possible, even necessary, to
presuppose the potential force of the unharnessed river, but that force
is incalculable without reference to the mechanism in which it becomes
operative. Like the force behind the dam, organismic energy is mean-
ingful only in conjunction with the psychical machinery through which
it moves. As Lacan puts it:
To say that the energy was in some way already there in a virtual
state in the current of the river is properly speaking to say something
that has no meaning, for the energy begins to be of interest to us in
this instance only beginning with the moment in which it is accumu-
lated, and it is accumulated only beginning with the moment when
machines are put to work in a certain way, without doubt animated
by something which is a sort of definitive propulsion which comes
from the river current, but the reference to the current of the river
as if it were the primitive order of this energy . . . [amounts] to a
notion of the order of mana . . . which is very different from the idea
of energy or even of force. (S.IV, 11/28/56)
The concept of energy in psychoanalysis is therefore a theoretical

requirement that, although it refers to an organic substratum, cannot
be meaningfully articulated without reference to the psychical matrix
within which it is invested or by which it is repressed. T h e energetic
presupposition warrants a certain mode of discourse about psychical
effects the way that, as Lacan puts it, "to draw the rabbit out of the
hat, you always have to have put it in beforehand. . . . That is the
principle of energetics, and that is why energetics is also a metaphysics"
(S.II, 61). Energetics implies a metaphysics, or, as Freud thought of it,
it grounds a metapsychology. Lacan maintains that the metapsycholog-
ical enterprise—as a theoretical strategy that proceeds on economic
assumptions—"is in truth completely impossible. . . . But one cannot
practice psychoanalysis, not even for one second, without thinking in
62
metapsychological terms" (S.I, 110). The presupposition of psychic

energy is necessary, but also necessarily indeterminate.
That becomes completely mysterious—we are absolutely ignorant

as to what it might mean, to say that there's an equivalence of energy
between the internal pressure, tied to the equilibrium of the organ-
ism, and what results from it. So what use does it serve? It's an X,
which, after having been used as a starting point, is totally abandoned.
(5.//, 106-7)
As an indeterminate "X," the psychic energy presupposed by psy-

choanalysis has the character of a theoretically useful myth. Such was
Freud's way of talking about the drives. "The theory of the instincts,"
he wrote in the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, "is so to say
our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their
indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them,
yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly" (SE, 22:95).
Lacan is even more sensitive to the mythical status of libido:
In the end, at this existential level, we can only talk about the libido
satisfactorily in a mythical way—it is the genitrix, hominum divumque
voluptas. That is what Freud is getting at. In former days what returns
here used to be expressed in terms of the gods, and one must proceed
with care before turning it into an algebraic sign. They're extremely
useful, algebraic signs, but on condition that you restore their dimen-
sions to them. That is what I am trying to do when I talk to you about
machines. (S.II, 227)
Not content simply to assert the mythic character of libido, Lacan

provides the thing itself in his myth of the lamelle.21 His answer to the
dyad of Aristophanes, Lacan's lamelle is also a creation story that aims
at accounting for the genesis of the human being—"if you want to
stress its joky side, you can call it Vhommelette"—and in particular the
genesis of human desire. Lacan's fiction of the lamelle is especially
significant as it integrates in a playful construction the main points of
our discussion in this chapter. The lamelle is at once a representation
of the libido, it is an aspect of the real, and it embodies, in a figure as
suggestive as it is outrageous, the excluded residue of desire that I
have tried to evoke by talking about an energetics of the imaginary.
T h e lamelle is the closest Lacan comes to the supposition of a pure
psychic energy. T h e lamelle, Lacan claims, "is the libido, qua pure life
instinct, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life"
63
(FFC, 198). Such an expression of pure energy, for reasons we have

noted above, must be associated with the register of the real. Lacan
therefore calls the lamelle an organ, but a "false organ." Its "character
is not to exist" {FFC, 197-98). It is real precisely by virtue of not
being figured in the imaginary. "This organ ought to be called
irreal, in the sense in which irreal is not imaginary, and precedes
the subjectivity that it conditions by being in direct contact with the
real" (E, 847). As an irreal organ, the lamelle "is defined by articulat-
ing itself on the real in a way that eludes us, and it is precisely this
that requires that its representation should be mythical, as I have
made it" {FFC, 205).
Like the severed other half of Aristophanes's lover, the lamelle is
"intended to embody the missing part" {FFC, 205). Lacan begins with
the image of an egg, whose twofold structure of white and yolk suggests
the idea of a differentiation between the individual and the organic
substratum to which it is attached before its entry into the world. T h e
price of birth is the loss of connection to that organic support. As
Lacan puts it, "let us imagine that each time the membranes [of the
egg] are ruptured, by the same issue a phantom flies off which has a
form infinitely more primary than life and which could hardly be
closer to redoubling the world in microcosm" {E, 845). Libido in its
purest form is thus pictured as a sort of by-product, an entity that
"flies o f f at the moment when the individual human being comes into
existence. Lacan compares it to the placenta born with the baby. T h e
lamelle is a by-product, but is nevertheless active and seeking. Lacan
amusingly pictures it as "a large crepe which spreads out like an
amoeba, ultra-flat in order to pass under doors, omniscient as it is
guided by the pure instinct of life, immortal as it is capable of splitting
itself {E, 845). After flying off at birth, it tends to return. But precisely
because the lamelle names something that is fundamentally excluded,
a part of oneself that has become alien, its return is experienced as
menacing. As Lacan says of it, "here's something you wouldn't want
to feel silently slipping over your face while you're sleeping" {E, 845).
Lacan's fiction of the lamelle emphasizes that energetics can only be
approached in full awareness of its status as a myth. But, in addition,
it reminds us that there is an absolutely crucial role to be played by
the energetic myth in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. By
assuming the existence of a reservoir of psychic energy at work behind
the theater of images and symptoms, Freud found a way to hold fast
to the conviction that a human being is always something more than
the sum of its representations. Energetics was a way to render palpable
his discovery, as Lacan puts it, "that man isn't entirely in man" {S.II,
64
72). T h e notion of psychic energy underlies the central Freudian

assumption that the human being is not really a "being" at all if we
understand by that a mere entity in the world. The human being
is fundamentally a manque a etre, a want-of-being. Human being is
essentially, not a being, but desire:
The Freudian experience starts from an exactly contrary notion of

the theoretical perspective. It starts by postulating a world of desire.
It postulates it prior to any kind of experience, prior to any considera-
tions concerning the world of appearances and the world of essences.
Desire is instituted within the Freudian world in which our experience
unfolds, it constitutes it, and at no point in time, not even in the most
insignificant of our manoeuvres in this experience of ours, can it be
erased.
The Freudian world isn't a world of things, it isn't a world of being,
it is a world of desire as such. (S.II, 222)
The Return of the Real
We can now see why, as Lacan puts it, "in the order of the imaginary,
alienation is constitutive." Described in energetic terms, the first for-
mation of psychic identity in the mirror phase can be said to originate
and maintain itself by submitting the libidinal economy to a radical
bifurcation. T h e imaginary mobilizes and informs the primitive drives,
but does so only by refusing and excluding some portion of the energ-
ies animating the body. In her Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva evokes
a similar conception of self-constitution by means of self-rejection and
self-exclusion. I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion
through which T claim to establish myself."22 So, too, in Kristeva's
view, what is in this way refused and remaindered in the constitution of
the ego assumes the aspects of utter opacity, of uncanny, unthinkable
otherness that Lacan associates with the real. In Kristeva's terms, I
become a subject capable of dealing with objects only by virtue of having
constituted a domain of the abject. Thus "refuse and corpses show me
what I permanently thrust aside in order to live."23 But what threatens
to emerge from the real is ultimately a part of oneself, one's own
refuse, one's own corpse.
T h e imaginary function in human beings generates a primordial
internal conflict in the subject even as it institutes the most basic
formation of psychic identity and mobilizes the most primitive forms of
intentionality. So conceived, the alienating character of the imaginary,
65
whose function in animals and in human beings is intimately bound

up with sexuality, can be proposed as an explanation of the idea, so
fundamental to Freud's thought, that sexuality is somehow intrinsically
generative of intrapsychic conflict. The energetics of the Lacanian
imaginary, which locates in the formative effects of the imago a func-
tion of defense as well as discharge, an energetic exclusion as well as
investment, helps explain what Freud might have meant by saying that
"however strange it may sound, we must reckon with the possibility
that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable
to the realization of complete satisfaction" (SE, 11:188).24
But the Lacanian view as I have developed it explains a further,
much more significant point. If we suppose that the dynamics of the
imaginary constitute the ego and its objects by a twofold process of
investment and exclusion of organismic energies, the Lacanian ac-
count becomes precisely homologous to Freud's characterization of
the ego and the id. In his final formulation of the ego and the id—a
formulation that recapitulated his separation of primary and second-
ary processes set out in the Project thirty years earlier—Freud empha-
sized that, from an economic standpoint, the ego is merely a bounded
and specialized portion of the id, split off under the influence of
perceptual mechanisms from the larger mass of drive energies. "We
were justified," he claimed, "in dividing the ego from the id, for there
are certain considerations which necessitate that step. On the other
hand, the ego is identical with the id, and is merely a specially differen-
tiated part of it. . . . The ego is, indeed, the organized portion of the
id" (SE, 20:97). In the opening pages of Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Freud summarized his view in terms that are now quite familiar to us:
Almost all the energy with which the apparatus is filled arises from
its innate instinctual impulses. But these are not all allowed to reach
the same phases of development. In the course of things it happens
again and again that individual instincts or parts of instincts turn out
to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones,
which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego. The
former are then split off from this unity by the process of repression,
held back at lower levels of psychic development and cut off, to begin
with, from the possibility of satisfaction. If they succeed subsequently
. . . in struggling through, . . . that event, which would in other cases
have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unplea-
sure. (SE, 18:10-11)
The splitting off of drives "incompatible with the inclusive unity of
the ego" attributed by Freud to a force of repression is accounted for
66
from a Lacanian perspective in terms of an essential feature of the

imaginary function in the human being. Recognition of the imago
effects a truly primordial form of repression. What is split off by it is
not a particular psychic content or representation, but a quantity of
energy that might otherwise animate such a representation.
T h e myth of psychic energetics has served to accentuate a basic
feature of Lacan's thinking and to highlight its homology with Freud:
the constitutive tension between the imaginary and the real and its
parallel to Freud's distinction between the ego and the id. As we will
see in subsequent chapters, such bold strokes will have to be qualified
in a number of ways. Nevertheless, they take us a step further in
outlining the first contours of a Lacanian interpretation of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle. From a Lacanian point of view, the source of what
Freud called a "death drive" is to be located in the tension between
the real and the imaginary, between "the real of the body and the
imaginary of its mental schema." T h e pressing toward expression of
somatic energies alienated by imaginary identification constitutes a
force of death insofar as it threatens the integrity of that identity. It is
because there exists a dimension in the human subject that extends
beyond his ego that there must be another principle "beyond the
pleasure principle":
We are beginning to see why it is necessary that beyond the pleasure

principle, which Freud introduces as what governs the measure of
the ego and installs consciousness in its relation with a world in
which it finds itself, that beyond, exists the death instinct. Beyond the
homeostases of the ego, there exists a dimension, another current,
another necessity, whose plane must be differentiated. This compul-
sion to return to something which has been excluded by the subject,
or which never entered into it, the Verdrangt, the repressed, we cannot
bring it back within the pleasure principle. If the ego as such redis-
covers itself and recognizes itself, it is because there is a beyond to
the ego, an unconscious, a subject which speaks, unknown to the
subject. We must therefore posit another principle. (S.H, 171)
In the section of hi& seventh seminar devoted expressly to "la pulsion

de mort? Lacan offers an explanation of the essential dynamic of the
death drive in terms that are characteristically indirect, cast in a myth
or fable, but which line up very precisely with the energetic interpreta-
tion we have pursued. He refers to the fable recounted in Sade's
Juliette: the System of Pope Pius VI. It is from this text of Sade that
Lacan draws inspiration for the concept of the "second death" that
67
plays a major role throughout the remainder of the seminar. "Not that
what Freud offers us in the notion of the death drive is scientifically
unjustifiable," says Lacan, "but it is of the same order as the System of
Pope Pius VI" (S.VII, 251). In response to Juliette's question about the
origin of his monstrous appetite for murder, Sade's pontiff appeals to
Nature herself and seeks to explain why "murder is one of her laws."25
Nature, he explains, is a pure creative power, a great birthing-ground
of being that gives rise to a myriad of forms; mineral, vegetable,
and animal. 26 Nature's desire for ever new and different progeny is
inexhaustible. Once particular forms have been cast, however, the
great "blind mother" takes no further interest in them. Indeed, the
very existence of created beings, reproducing themselves in mere
repetitions of the same, becomes an impediment to the proliferation
of new creations. Therefore it is only by means of destruction that the
primordial generative forces of Nature can be again set to work. Only
death can re-fertilize the great womb of the universe. An ever greater
destruction of Nature's offspring inevitably liberates an ever greater
resurgence of the creative power. Precisely when created forms are
most utterly crushed, smashed, burned, and ground into ashes is the
soil best prepared for Nature's new growths. "The more our destroy-
ing is of a broad and atrocious kind," concludes the pontiff, "the more
agreeable it is to her." 27 Lacan describes this text:
Sade puts before us the theory that crime enables man to collabo-
rate in the new creations of nature. The idea is that the pure elan of
nature is obstructed by its own forms, that the three realms, because
they comprise fixed forms, bind nature in a limited cycle, and more-
over a manifestly imperfect one, as is demonstrated by the chaos, the
conflicts, the fundamental disorder of their reciprocal relations. Thus
the most profound concern that one can attribute to this "psychical"
subject of Nature, in the sense of the term that connotes being most
profoundly hidden, is to make a clean slate so as to be able to begin
again her activity, to emerge again in a new burst. (S.VII, 248)
It is not difficult to recognize the likeness of this Sadean cosmology

to the view we have taken of the Freudian death drive as destructive
of the alienating form of the ego. From this perspective, the psychical
individuation of the imaginary ego is seen in analogy to the created
forms of nature and, as such, is opposed to the inexhaustible reservoir
of nature's untamed energies. Just as the destruction of existing forms
serves to liberate the emfettered creative energy of Nature, likewise
in the death drive the stultifying form of the ego is submitted to
68
dismantling as desire alienated by the imaginary strives toward expres-

sion. There is, of course, a difference between the two views. T h e
dynamic attributed in Sade's fable to the whole of nature is located by
the Freudian conception within the psychical economy insofar as it is
bifurcated between ego and id. Beneath this difference, however, a
deep similarity can be discerned. What is at stake in both cases is a
tension between the existing, relatively stable forms by which beings
are specified and individuated and "the pure elan of nature" that is
obstructed by such forms and that welcomes their destruction as the
means of its release from bondage.
It will be noticed, of course, that from such a perspective life and
death assume deeply paradoxical relations to one another. T h e process
of individuation that grounds the life of the specific being introduces
mortifying effects into the generative economy of natural processes.
T h e death of the individual form, by contrast, must be counted as a
movement toward renewal of a larger vitality. The death of the individ-
ual is thus called by Sade a "second life." Sade's character explains:
At the instant we call death, everything seems to dissolve. . . . But this

death is only imaginary, it exists figuratively but in no other way.
Matter, deprived of the other portion of matter which communicated
movement to it, is not destroyed for that; it merely abandons its form,
it decays—and proves that it is not inert; it enriches the soil, fertilizes
it, and serves in the regeneration of the other kingdoms as well as of
its own. There is, in the final analysis, no essential difference between
this first life we receive and this second, which is the one we call
death.28
T h e ambiguity of life and death is further accentuated by Lacan in

the fact that it seems to be from the example of this Sadean "second
life" that he takes his concept of "second death." In fact, the paradoxi-
cal relation of vitality and mortality is a frequent theme in Lacan's
discourse. He remarks, for example, on the ambiguity present in the
very term "death instinct":
As a moment's reflection shows, the notion of the death instinct

involves a basic irony, since its meaning has to be sought in the
conjunction of two contrary terms: instinct in its most comprehensive
acceptation being the law that governs in its succession the cycle of
behavior whose goal is the accomplishment of a vital function; and
death appearing first of all as the destruction of life. (E:S, 101)
69
As a psychically unrepresented force of vital energy, the death drive

is itself a potential source of life. Lacan thus suggests that "it is not
enough to decide on the basis of its effect—Death. It still remains to
be decided which death, that which is brought by life or that which
brings life" (E:S, 308). From this perspective, we can understand La-
can's paradoxical claim that "it is death that sustains existence" (E:S,
300). T h e death drive as Lacan reads it is, in effect, a mythical expres-
sion of pure desire, the effects produced in the psychical structure by
vital forces that remain active and striving beyond the bounds of
representation. It is for this reason that Lacan can state that "[Freud]
questioned life as to its meaning and not to say that it has none . . . but
to say that it has only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by
70
4
Rereading Beyond the Pleasure Principle

For all things, from the Void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed . . .
Thus, all which you as Sin have rated—
Destruction,—aught with Evil blent,—
That is my proper element.
—Goethe's Faust, Part 1, Scene 2 quoted
by Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Thou owest Nature a death.
—Shakespeare, Henry IV quoted by
Freud in a letter to Fliess,
February 6, 1899
In the preceding chapter, we arrived at a first expression of the

meaning of the death drive in Lacanian terms: the death drive has its
origin in the tension between the imaginary ego and the real of the
body that is only partly encompassed by the ego. But how are these
ground lines of a Lacanian interpretation to be squared with the
specifics of Freud's own formulation of the death drive? In what sense
can Lacan's perspective be said to constitute a "return to Freud"? The
primary question concerns the major point of difference between the
Lacanian and the Freudian conception: for Lacan, the traumatic force
of the death drive aims not at the biological organism but at the unity
of the ego. Must not this difference be counted as a radical departure
from Freud's views?
In what follows I will try to show that the Lacanian conception,
which opposes the force of the death drive to the imaginary identity
of the ego, far from contradicting Freud, satisfactorily explains and
integrates much of what Freud says about the death drive, but with
the advantage of avoiding the conundrums into which Freud was led
by posing the death drive as a biological reality. In the course of this
analysis, it will become increasingly evident that Freud's attempt to
establish the death drive on a biological basis was not in keeping
71
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
with many aspects of his own framing of the problem and actually
constitutes an awkward wrinkle in what can otherwise be construed as
a surprisingly coherent framework of concepts. A Lacanian approach,
which rejects Freud's biologism in favor of the dynamics of the imagi-
nary and the real, serves to rectify a confusion in Freud's own thinking
in a way that allows a deeper theoretical coherence to shine through.
Such a perspective restores to the death drive its privileged position
within the totality of the psychoanalytic theory, making it possible to
see for the first time the internal coherence and continuity between the
hypothesis of a death instinct and the larger conceptual architecture of
Freud's thought. It allows us to integrate consistently Freud's theory
of the life and death drives with the dynamics of binding and un-
binding, the principles of constancy and inertia, and the problematic
of pleasure and unpleasure. I hope to demonstrate that Lacan's treat-
ment of the death drive is rightly called a "return to Freud"; indeed,
in a certain sense Lacan can be said to return Freud to himself.
To begin this task, it is imperative that we expose and clarify the
conflicts interior to Freud's original posing of his idea. What is required
is a meticulous examination of Freud's detailed and subtly nuanced
argument. Only by plunging ourselves deep into the labyrinth of that
argument and arriving at a lucid recognition of its points of internal
tension will we arrive at the clues for a coherent rereading of Freud's
theory. Similarly, it is only in terms of those details and difficulties that
the advantages of such a rereading can be appreciated.
The Plan and Pitfalls of Freud's Argument
Let us return, then, to the text of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. T h e

primary phenomenon Freud sought to explain was the tendency of
patients in analysis to repeat unpleasant experiences by means of
dreams, memories, or enactments in the transference. What was espe-
cially curious was that these painful repetitions were apparently moti-
vated by a primitive compulsion:
Patients repeat all of these unwanted situations and painful emotions

in the transference and revive them with the greatest ingenuity. They
seek to bring about the interruption of the treatment while it is still
incomplete; they contrive once more to feel themselves scorned, to
oblige the physician to speak severely to them and treat them coldly;
they discover appropriate objects for their jealousy; instead of the
passionately desired baby of their childhood, they produce a plan or
72
a promise of some grand present—which turns out as a rule to be no

less unreal. None of these things can have produced pleasure in the
past. . . . In spite of that, they are repeated, under pressure of a
compulsion. (S£, 18:21)
Freud dubbed the repetitive insistence of such behaviors der Wieder-

holungszwangy the "repetition compulsion." The mystery presented by
the repetition compulsion came down to this: How and why, contrary
to the rule of pleasure that Freud took to be the fundamental law of
psychic processes, is the ego deliberately subjected to pain? Freud was
no stranger to the idea that impulses felt to be pleasurable for one
psychic agency might be painful to another. In fact, some such mecha-
nism, by which a yield of satisfaction at one level of psychic life is
experienced as unpleasure at another level, might well be offered as
the very heart of Freud's discovery of the unconscious. What psycho-
analysis reveals within the neurotic symptom is a paradoxical mixture
of unconscious pleasure and conscious pain. In the present case, how-
ever, Freud rejected this line of thought. Unlike the familiar instances
of repressed wishes, what was repeated in traumatic dreams could not
have been pleasurable at any time or at any level of the psyche. Thus
Freud claimed:
It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the

compulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings
to light activities of repressed instinctual impulses. That, however,
is unpleasure of a kind we have already considered and does not
contradict the pleasure principle: unpleasure for one system and
simultaneously satisfaction for the other. But we come now to a new
and remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls
from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure,
and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even
to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed. (SE, 18:20)
The repetition compulsion apparently presented an instance in

which pain experienced by the ego resulted not merely from the
pressure of instinctual forces repressed by the ego, but from a specific
will to mistreatment of the ego for its own sake. T h e repetition compul-
sion represented, in effect, a compulsion of the patient to torment his
own ego. It indicated the activity of a "primordial masochism." So
long as Freud viewed the ego essentially as a servant of instinctual
satisfaction, instituting repressions only in response to the constraints
of reality, the subjection of the ego to such torment appeared to be
73
wholly gratuitous. 1 T h e compulsion to repeat therefore seemed to be

motivated by a kind of "daemonic power" (SE, 18:40).
So far, Freud's argument was prompted by observed phenomena
and proceeded on an entirely psychological level. However, in the
subsequent course of his discussion Freud moved the argument onto
biological grounds, proposing that the clinical observations must ulti-
mately be explained in terms of a self-destructive instinct operative in
the very substance of organic material. Only a biological explanation
seemed capable of accounting for the primordiality of the power at
work in the repetition compulsion. T h e fact that this power was capable
of overriding the fundamental principle of pleasure suggested the
activity of an absolutely elemental force, even more primitive than the
erotic instincts. Opposite the life instincts, there must exist a second,
more basic class of instincts.
If the compulsiveness of the repetitions suggested the operation of
a basic instinct, it was the phenomenon of repetition itself that pro-
vided the clue for specifying more precisely the nature of the instinct
involved. Impressed by the fact that every instance of repetition under
consideration involved the activity of memory, Freud concluded that
the compulsion to repeat was tantamount to a desire "to restore an
earlier state of things" (SE, 18:36). This impulse toward restoration of
the past signaled the effect of an essentially conservative tendency. If
the most primitive instinct was thus found to be essentially conserva-
tive, it stood to reason that all instincts possess a conservative nature.
By this route Freud came to posit the death drive not only as the
most fundamental instinct but as paradigmatic of instinctual forces in
general. "How," Freud asked, "is the predicate of being 'instinctual'
related to the compulsion to repeat?":
At this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come

upon the track of a universal attribute of all instincts and perhaps of
organic life in general which has not hitherto been already recognized
or at least not explicitly stressed. It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge
inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things. (SE, 18:36,
Freud's emphasis)
T h e difficulties introduced into Freud's theory by the supposition

of a biologically based drive toward death are hard to overestimate.
In a number of ways the new hypothesis seemed both incoherent in
itself and contradictory in relation to Freud's long-standing views
about the nature of the instincts. First, the notion that the most primor-
dial force at work in organic matter is a drive to return to an inorganic
74
state threatened to make the growth process of organisms almost

unintelligible. Abandoned to its own innermost tendencies, organic
material would immediately self-destruct. Freud was thus forced to
suppose that the progressive, vital development of organisms is due
to the disturbing influence of external circumstances. According to
this view, the course of life appears to be only a circuitous path to
death, a detour that is sustained by factors external to the organism.
Freud was led to conclude that
for a long time perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly
created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences al-
tered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge
ever more widely from its original source of life and to make ever
more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death. (SE,
18:38-39)
This conclusion was paradoxical in the extreme, if not completely

nonsensical. It was a notion as foreign to widely accepted biological
assumptions as it was repugnant to common sense. We are accustomed
to assuming the opposite view: that external circumstances generally
pose obstacles, constraints, and limitations to the self-assertion of the
living organism. Freud was neither able to specify the "external influ-
ences" that preserve the organism from an early death nor to describe
the process by which that preservation occurs. Perhaps even more
damaging was his inability, assuming that the most basic drive in
organic material is a drive toward the inorganic, to explain why living
forms ever arose in the first place. Freud confessed that "the attributes
of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of
a force of whose nature we can form no conception" (SE, 18:37).
In various ways, then, the concept of a death instinct constituted a
sort of biological oxymoron that threatened to collapse under the
incompatibility of its own terms. But Freud's new idea was also incom-
patible with some of his own most cherished assumptions. Freud's
supposition that the conservative character of the death instinct is
somehow paradigmatic of all instinctual forces conflicted with the
characterization of instinct as a progressive, forward-seeking tendency
that otherwise guided all his thinking. "This [new] view of instincts,"
he confessed, "strikes us as strange because we have become used to
see[ing] in them a factor impelling towards change and development,
whereas we are now asked to recognize in them the precise contrary—
an expression of the conservative nature of living substance" (SE, 18:36).
Throughout the rest of his work, Freud took the force of instinct to
75
be an unspecified striving, an indeterminate pressure toward activity

that raises in the organism a pure "demand for work." In Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes he remarked that
by the pressure [Drang] of an instinct we understand its motor factor,

the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work which
it represents. The characteristic of exercising pressure is common to
all instinct; it is in fact their very essence. Every instinct is a piece of
activity; if we speak loosely of passive instincts, we can only mean
instinct whose aim is passive. (SE, 14:122)
Directly or indirectly, Freud himself acknowledged all of these diffi-

culties. Indeed, the fact that he so tenaciously defended the death
instinct despite the near-absurdities readily implied by it indicates
in itself Freud's high estimation of the importance of his new idea.
However, the argument of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is plagued by
an even more damaging internal conflict that Freud seems never to
have recognized. The problem at issue involves determining whether
the death drive increases or decreases psychical "tension." T h e concept
of tension, Spannung, constitutes the pivot on which turns the entirety
of Freud's argumentation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Inspired by
the psychophysics of Gustav Fechner, Freud associated pleasure and
unpleasure respectively with decreases and increases in the level of
psychic tension. Such changes in tension corresponded to decreases
or increases in the quantities of excitation with which the psychical
system is invested. In his opening sentence Freud unambiguously laid
out his view:
In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming

that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by
the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of
those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension,
and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with
a lowering of that tension—that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure
or a production of pleasure. (SE, 18:7)
From the outset, then, Freud clearly associated pleasure with the
diminution of psychic tension and unpleasure with its increase. In
accordance with this initial framework, the death drive would be quite
logically associated with an increase in tensions. Such, at least, would
be the conclusion to be drawn from identifying the effect of the death
drive with repetition of the trauma. For Freud, what characterized
76
traumatic experience was precisely the overwhelming influx of new

and psychically unmastered energies introduced by the trauma into
the psychic system. Thus he remarked that
we describe as "traumatic" any excitations from outside which are

powerful enough to break through the protective shield. It seems to
me that the concept of trauma necessarily implies a . . . breach in an
otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli" (SE, 18:29).
If, as Freud suggested, the death drive evidences its essential character
in repetition of the trauma, then we are led to suppose that the essential
activity of the death drive involves the infusion of fresh quantities of
energy into the psychic apparatus, resulting in an unpleasureable
increase in psychic tension. Adopting this view, we can make sense of
the title of Freud's book. The death drive is said to be "beyond the
pleasure principle" because the death drive increases rather than de-
creases psychical tensions and thereby constitutes a source of unplea-
sure internal to the psychic apparatus.
Given this initial association of the activity of the death drive with
increase of psychical tension, it comes as a complete surprise to find the
death drive characterized toward the end of Freud's book in precisely
opposite terms. As an impulse toward return to an inorganic state, the
death drive is thought to constitute a drive not toward increase but
toward reduction of tensions to an absolute minimum. It is this ten-
dency toward reduction of tensions to zero that warranted identifying
the death drive with a "Nirvana principle" (SE, 18:56). What has
happened to the original association of the death drive with traumatic
increase of tension? We seem faced with an contradiction inhabiting
the very heart of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the death drive is first
identified with a traumatic increase, then with maximal decrease of
tension. 2 What has made this inversion possible?
The pivot-point occurs when Freud translates the terms of his dis-
cussion out of its originally psychological frame of reference and into
a biological one. As his discussion unfolds, Freud's use of the concept
of tension undergoes an unacknowledged but utterly decisive shift
that parallels his movement from a psychological to a biological dis-
course. On the first page, tension (Spannung) is clearly conceived psy-
chologically. Psychical events {seelischen Vorgange) are said to be put in
motion by an unpleasant tension (eine unlustvolle Spannung). During
the course of the argument, however, the meaning of "tension"
changes from its original signification of intrapsychic conflict, relevant
to the problem of pleasure and unpleasure, to a second, biological
77
sense of the term, which Freud uses to speak of the coalescence of

material particles into a living being. Speaking of such biological or
chemical tensions, Freud claims that the life instinct, which promotes
"union with the living substance of a different individual, increases
those tensions [Spannungen], introducing what may be described as
fresh Vital differences* which must then be lived off." T h e death drive,
by contrast, is responsible for the fact that "the life process of the
individual leads for internal reasons to an abolition of chemical ten-
sions [Spannungen]y that is to say, to death."
Does the death drive increase or decrease tensions? Given the ambi-
guity in the concept of tension itself, we are unable to answer. Psycho-
logically speaking, the death drive increases tensions; biologically or
chemically speaking, it decreases them. T h e consequences of this con-
fusion are anything but insignificant, as they bear directly upon the
relationship between the death drive and the pleasure principle to
which it is ostensibly opposed. It has long been a source of perplexity
to many commentators that Freud's identification of the death drive
with the Nirvana principle makes the force of the death drive almost
indistinguishable from the workings of the pleasure principle. Both
the Nirvana and the pleasure principles seek to diminish tensions
through the reduction of excitations to zero or, failing that, through
the maintenance of a constant level of excitation. Are the death instinct
and the pleasure principle one and the same? Freud himself came
very close to saying so when he claimed in his conclusion that "the
pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instinct" (SE,
18:63). But if that is so, how are we to rescue any meaning for the
title of Freud's work, which points to a force "beyond the pleasure
principle"? More important, how are we to retrieve the insistence on
a radical dualism that is unquestionably the underlying intention of
Freud's work?
Toward an Alternative Reading
It is with respect to the concept of psychical "tension" that Freud's

shift from the psychological to the biological generates the greatest
confusion. However, as we just saw, what is at stake in this confusion
is no minor difficulty. On the contrary, the coherence, indeed, the
very meaning of Freud's entire construction hangs on resolving it. If
we suppose, as the identification of the death drive with the Nirvana
principle suggests, that the work of the death drive involves a reduction
of tensions, we are at a loss to see how the death drive is in any way
78
opposed to the pleasure principle. The central intention of Freud's

book can be fulfilled only by reaffirming the link drawn by Freud at
the outset between the force "beyond pleasure" and the repetition of
the trauma—that is, by recuperating the idea that the death drive
invariably increases tension. But how is this recuperation to be accom-
plished? It is the resolution of this problem and the assessment of its
implications that will occupy us for the remainder of this chapter.
Inasmuch as Freud's appeal to biology can be shown to be at the
root of the confusion surrounding the concept of tension, we are led
not only to question the soundness of Freud's excursion into biology
but also to wonder again what led him into it in the first place. If we
examine more closely the unfolding of Freud's argument, the precise
juncture at which the discussion is turned toward biology can be lo-
cated at what may well seem an unlikely point. It concerns the concept
of repetition. This concept functions in Freud's text like a sort of
lightning flash that blinds even as it illuminates. It is at once Freud's
initial clue to the operation of a force beyond the pleasure principle
yet it also provides the point of slippage at which his argument veers
off into questionable biology. We noted above that Freud construed
repetition as a tendency to "return to an earlier state of things." If he
was right to suspect in repetition the effects of a truly elemental force
of instinct, then it seemed necessary to interpret the tendency to
restore an earlier state of things in some very fundamental sense.
Such a tendency must ultimately point to the very "earliest state,"
understood in its most radical meaning. In this light, an instinctual
drive toward repetition appeared as a drive toward the most extreme
form of regression: a drive to return to the inorganic state that pre-
ceded the organization of the living being. It was along this line of
reasoning that the death drive came forward as a function of organic
matter itself, a drive operative within cellular material that aimed at
its dissolution. By this path, the "mysterious masochistic trends of
the ego" brought to light by repetition assumed the dimensions of
biological life and death.
It was the idea of repetition that gave Freud the opportunity to
make the jump from psychology to biology, but there are good reasons
to question his argumentation at this crucial juncture. The main
point—that the compulsion to repeat, as an urge to restore an earlier
state of things, implies a will to return to an inorganic state—may be
dubious enough on biological grounds, but it also involves an abuse
of logic. From a purely logical point of view, the idea of repetition
does not by itself imply any tendency toward a restoration of an earlier
state of things. A drive toward repetition implies only that a state of
79
affairs, once attained, will tend to recur. Without the addition of some
other factor, there is no reason to suppose that the tendency toward
repetition also involves a tendency to reach into the more and more
distant past. Repetition does not necessarily imply regression. Freud
himself struggled with this confusion between a merely repetitive or
conservative process and a genuinely retrograde one. He first offered
the conservative character of the death instinct as a universal attribute
of all instincts but then identified the greatest conservativism with the
instincts of life, as it is the erotic instincts that preserve the apparently
immortal germ cells. Freud asserted that these instincts "are conserva-
tive to a higher degree in that they are peculiarly resistant to external
influences" (SE, 18:40). This sort of conservatism, however, is clearly
a matter of maintaining a given state, not returning to an earlier
one. He finally qualified his position by proposing that while the life
instincts are conservative, only the death instinct is truly retrograde. 5
It is not difficult to show how the concept of repetition opens a
special door for Freud's recourse to biology, nor is it difficult to recog-
nize the weakness of his reasoning at this critical moment. But the
privileged role of repetition in Freud's argumentation is all the more
curious for the fact that in itself repetition is rather poorly suited to
represent what is distinctive about the death drive. In fact, it was not
repetition as such but only repetition of unpleasurable experiences that
raised the question about the operation of a force beyond the pleasure
principle. As Freud himself noted, a will to repetition is more conspicu-
ous in the case of pleasurable experiences than it is for unpleasurable
ones. Freud goes so far as to say that repetition itself, as "the re-
experiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of
pleasure" (SE, 18:36). But these facts suggest that the impulse toward
repetition must, at the very least, be admitted for both classes of
instincts and is arguably more appropriately linked with the life in-
stincts and the functions of the ego insofar as they are thought to obey
a principle of constancy.
Despite all the difficulties it generated, Freud clung fast to the
concept of repetition as a kind of indispensable key to unlocking the
mystery of the death drive. It is almost as if, once the phenomenon of
repetition had showed him the trail, he dared not let it go for fear of
losing his bearings. But perhaps the most damaging consequence of
Freud's reliance on repetition is the way it obscures the extent to which
the argument of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is organized around a
second basic idea: the twofold concept of psychical binding and un-
binding (Bindung and Entbindung). In fact, Freud's thinking in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle is rather awkwardly stretched around the two
80
basic loci of repetition and binding. When we read Freud's book in

the broader context of his work as a whole, it is hard not to conclude
that of the two themes, repetition and binding, the latter is the more
important. In any case, it makes a very great difference for the task
of interpreting Freud's text how the choice between these two alterna-
tives is weighted. We have already seen how repetition, construed as
a return to the earliest state of things, gave Freud an entree into a
biological reframing of his argument. By contrast, the concepts of
binding and unbinding retain a decidedly psychological emphasis. T o
be sure, binding is eventually drawn up into the biochemical meta-
phors that proliferate toward the end of the book. Thus binding is
linked to the process by which organic material is melded into the
unity of a living being. But the dominant connotation of binding,
established in some of Freud's earliest papers and maintained through-
out his career, is unquestionably psychological. Binding refers above
all to the origin and function of the ego. By following out the logic of
the concept of binding we are led to reconsider Freud's biologizing of
the death drive.
Although often overlooked in expositions of psychoanalytic theory,
the notion of bound and free psychic energy was nevertheless assigned
by Freud a place of capital importance. The idea may be said to be as
old as psychoanalysis itself. It appeared first in the Studies on Hysteria,
figured prominently in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, and was
drawn upon in the theoretical chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams,
In his 1915 essay on "The Unconscious," Freud remarked that "the
distinction [of bound versus freely mobile energy] represents the deep-
est insight we have gained up to the present into the nature of nervous
energy, and I do not see how we can do without it" (SE, 14:88).
Psychical binding and unbinding again came to the fore in 1920 and
continued to occupy a significant place in Freud's writings until the
end of his life. What is crucial for our purposes is that the concept of
binding is relevant first and foremost to the genesis and functions of
the ego. It was in terms of unbound versus bound energies that Freud
distinguished between the psychically unmastered instinctual forces
of the id and the more organized and differentiated processes charac-
teristic of the ego. Freud commented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
that "the impulses arising from the instincts do not belong to the type
of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press
toward discharge" (SE, 18:34). As early as the Project, Freud associated
the ego with bound energies. In fact, he offered the quality of being
in a bound state as the very definition of the ego. "The ego itself," he
claimed, "is a mass like this of neurones which hold fast to their
81
how to talk about psychic reality before it comes to be symbolically

represented. "I am not at all trying to deny here that there is something
which is before," Lacan asserts, "that, for example, before I become a
self or an It, there is something which the It was. It is simply a matter
of knowing what this It is" (S.IV, 12/5/56). Strictly speaking, this prior
It is unthinkable. It is an aspect of the real.
In an analogy that explicitly links the problem of psychic energy
with the real, Lacan compares the real to the energy of a hydroelectric
dam. The important point is that it is impossible to specify the energy
of the river without referring to the structure of the dam that will
interrupt and redirect its flow. It is always possible, even necessary, to
presuppose the potential force of the unharnessed river, but that force
is incalculable without reference to the mechanism in which it becomes
operative. Like the force behind the dam, organismic energy is mean-
ingful only in conjunction with the psychical machinery through which
it moves. As Lacan puts it:
To say that the energy was in some way already there in a virtual
state in the current of the river is properly speaking to say something
that has no meaning, for the energy begins to be of interest to us in
this instance only beginning with the moment in which it is accumu-
lated, and it is accumulated only beginning with the moment when
machines are put to work in a certain way, without doubt animated
by something which is a sort of definitive propulsion which comes
from the river current, but the reference to the current of the river
as if it were the primitive order of this energy . . . [amounts] to a
notion of the order of mana. . . which is very different from the idea
of energy or even of force. (S.IV, 11/28/56)
The concept of energy in psychoanalysis is therefore a theoretical

requirement that, although it refers to an organic substratum, cannot
be meaningfully articulated without reference to the psychical matrix
within which it is invested or by which it is repressed. The energetic
presupposition warrants a certain mode of discourse about psychical
effects the way that, as Lacan puts it, "to draw the rabbit out of the
hat, you always have to have put it in beforehand. . . . That is the
principle of energetics, and that is why energetics is also a metaphysics"
(5.//, 61). Energetics implies a metaphysics, or, as Freud thought of it,
it grounds a metapsychology. Lacan maintains that the metapsycholog-
ical enterprise—as a theoretical strategy that proceeds on economic
assumptions—"is in truth completely impossible. . . . But one cannot
practice psychoanalysis, not even for one second, without thinking in
62
metapsychological terms" (S.I, 110). The presupposition of psychic

energy is necessary, but also necessarily indeterminate.
That becomes completely mysterious—we are absolutely ignorant

as to what it might mean, to say that there's an equivalence of energy
between the internal pressure, tied to the equilibrium of the organ-
ism, and what results from it. So what use does it serve? It's an X,
which, after having been used as a starting point, is totally abandoned.
(5.//, 106-7)
As an indeterminate "X," the psychic energy presupposed by psy-

choanalysis has the character of a theoretically useful myth. Such was
Freud's way of talking about the drives. "The theory of the instincts,"
he wrote in the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, "is so to say
our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their
indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them,
yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly" (SE, 22:95).
Lacan is even more sensitive to the mythical status of libido:
In the end, at this existential level, we can only talk about the libido
satisfactorily in a mythical way—it is the genitrix, hominum divumque
voluptas. That is what Freud is getting at. In former days what returns
here used to be expressed in terms of the gods, and one must proceed
with care before turning it into an algebraic sign. They're extremely
useful, algebraic signs, but on condition that you restore their dimen-
sions to them. That is what I am trying to do when I talk to you about
machines. (S.II, 227)
Not content simply to assert the mythic character of libido, Lacan

provides the thing itself in his myth of the lamelle.21 His answer to the
dyad of Aristophanes, Lacan's lamelle is also a creation story that aims
at accounting for the genesis of the human being—"if you want to
stress its joky side, you can call it Vhommelette"—and in particular the
genesis of human desire. Lacan's fiction of the lamelle is especially
significant as it integrates in a playful construction the main points of
our discussion in this chapter. The lamelle is at once a representation
of the libido, it is an aspect of the real, and it embodies, in a figure as
suggestive as it is outrageous, the excluded residue of desire that I
have tried to evoke by talking about an energetics of the imaginary.
T h e lamelle is the closest Lacan comes to the supposition of a pure
psychic energy. T h e lamelle, Lacan claims, "is the libido, qua pure life
instinct, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life"
63
(FFC, 198). Such an expression of pure energy, for reasons we have

noted above, must be associated with the register of the real. Lacan
therefore calls the lamelle an organ, but a "false organ." Its "character
is not to exist" {FFC, 197-98). It is real precisely by virtue of not
being figured in the imaginary. "This organ ought to be called
irreal, in the sense in which irreal is not imaginary, and precedes
the subjectivity that it conditions by being in direct contact with the
real" (E, 847). As an irreal organ, the lamelle "is defined by articulat-
ing itself on the real in a way that eludes us, and it is precisely this
that requires that its representation should be mythical, as I have
made it" (FFC, 205).
Like the severed other half of Aristophanes's lover, the lamelle is
"intended to embody the missing part" (FFC, 205). Lacan begins with
the image of an egg, whose twofold structure of white and yolk suggests
the idea of a differentiation between the individual and the organic
substratum to which it is attached before its entry into the world. T h e
price of birth is the loss of connection to that organic support. As
Lacan puts it, "let us imagine that each time the membranes [of the
egg] are ruptured, by the same issue a phantom flies off which has a
form infinitely more primary than life and which could hardly be
closer to redoubling the world in microcosm" (E, 845). Libido in its
purest form is thus pictured as a sort of by-product, an entity that
"flies off" at the moment when the individual human being comes into
existence. Lacan compares it to the placenta born with the baby. T h e
lamelle is a by-product, but is nevertheless active and seeking. Lacan
amusingly pictures it as "a large crepe which spreads out like an
amoeba, ultra-flat in order to pass under doors, omniscient as it is
guided by the pure instinct of life, immortal as it is capable of splitting
itself" (E, 845). After flying off at birth, it tends to return. But precisely
because the lamelle names something that is fundamentally excluded,
a part of oneself that has become alien, its return is experienced as
menacing. As Lacan says of it, "here's something you wouldn't want
to feel silently slipping over your face while you're sleeping" (E, 845).
Lacan's fiction of the lamelle emphasizes that energetics can only be
approached in full awareness of its status as a myth. But, in addition,
it reminds us that there is an absolutely crucial role to be played by
the energetic myth in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. By
assuming the existence of a reservoir of psychic energy at work behind
the theater of images and symptoms, Freud found a way to hold fast
to the conviction that a human being is always something more than
the sum of its representations. Energetics was a way to render palpable
his discovery, as Lacan puts it, "that man isn't entirely in man" (5.//,
64
72). T h e notion of psychic energy underlies the central Freudian

assumption that the human being is not really a "being" at all if we
understand by that a mere entity in the world. The human being
is fundamentally a manque a etre, a want-of-being. Human being is
essentially, not a being, but desire:
The Freudian experience starts from an exactly contrary notion of

the theoretical perspective. It starts by postulating a world of desire.
It postulates it prior to any kind of experience, prior to any considera-
tions concerning the world of appearances and the world of essences.
Desire is instituted within the Freudian world in which our experience
unfolds, it constitutes it, and at no point in time, not even in the most
insignificant of our manoeuvres in this experience of ours, can it be
erased.
The Freudian world isn't a world of things, it isn't a world of being,
it is a world of desire as such. (S.II, 222)
The Return of the Real
We can now see why, as Lacan puts it, "in the order of the imaginary,
alienation is constitutive." Described in energetic terms, the first for-
mation of psychic identity in the mirror phase can be said to originate
and maintain itself by submitting the libidinal economy to a radical
bifurcation. T h e imaginary mobilizes and informs the primitive drives,
but does so only by refusing and excluding some portion of the energ-
ies animating the body. In her Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva evokes
a similar conception of self-constitution by means of self-rejection and
self-exclusion. I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion
through which T claim to establish myself."22 So, too, in Kristeva's
view, what is in this way refused and remaindered in the constitution of
the ego assumes the aspects of utter opacity, of uncanny, unthinkable
otherness that Lacan associates with the real. In Kristeva's terms, I
become a subject capable of dealing with objects only by virtue of having
constituted a domain of the abject. Thus "refuse and corpses show me
what I permanently thrust aside in order to live."23 But what threatens
to emerge from the real is ultimately a part of oneself, one's own
refuse, one's own corpse.
T h e imaginary function in human beings generates a primordial
internal conflict in the subject even as it institutes the most basic
formation of psychic identity and mobilizes the most primitive forms of
intentionality. So conceived, the alienating character of the imaginary,
65
whose function in animals and in human beings is intimately bound

up with sexuality, can be proposed as an explanation of the idea, so
fundamental to Freud's thought, that sexuality is somehow intrinsically
generative of intrapsychic conflict. The energetics of the Lacanian
imaginary, which locates in the formative effects of the imago a func-
tion of defense as well as discharge, an energetic exclusion as well as
investment, helps explain what Freud might have meant by saying that
"however strange it may sound, we must reckon with the possibility
that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable
to the realization of complete satisfaction" (SE, 11:188).24
But the Lacanian view as I have developed it explains a further,
much more significant point. If we suppose that the dynamics of the
imaginary constitute the ego and its objects by a twofold process of
investment and exclusion of organismic energies, the Lacanian ac-
count becomes precisely homologous to Freud's characterization of
the ego and the id. In his final formulation of the ego and the id—a
formulation that recapitulated his separation of primary and second-
ary processes set out in the Project thirty years earlier—Freud empha-
sized that, from an economic standpoint, the ego is merely a bounded
and specialized portion of the id, split off under the influence of
perceptual mechanisms from the larger mass of drive energies. "We
were justified," he claimed, "in dividing the ego from the id, for there
are certain considerations which necessitate that step. On the other
hand, the ego is identical with the id, and is merely a specially differen-
tiated part of it. . . . The ego is, indeed, the organized portion of the
id" (SE, 20:97). In the opening pages of Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Freud summarized his view in terms that are now quite familiar to us:
Almost all the energy with which the apparatus is filled arises from
its innate instinctual impulses. But these are not all allowed to reach
the same phases of development. In the course of things it happens
again and again that individual instincts or parts of instincts turn out
to be incompatible in their aims or demands with the remaining ones,
which are able to combine into the inclusive unity of the ego. The
former are then split off from this unity by the process of repression,
held back at lower levels of psychic development and cut off, to begin
with, from the possibility of satisfaction. If they succeed subsequently
. . . in struggling through, . . . that event, which would in other cases
have been an opportunity for pleasure, is felt by the ego as unplea-
sure. (SE, 18:10-11)
The splitting off of drives "incompatible with the inclusive unity of
the ego" attributed by Freud to a force of repression is accounted for
66
from a Lacanian perspective in terms of an essential feature of the

imaginary function in the human being. Recognition of the imago
effects a truly primordial form of repression. What is split off by it is
not a particular psychic content or representation, but a quantity of
energy that might otherwise animate such a representation.
T h e myth of psychic energetics has served to accentuate a basic
feature of Lacan's thinking and to highlight its homology with Freud:
the constitutive tension between the imaginary and the real and its
parallel to Freud's distinction between the ego and the id. As we will
see in subsequent chapters, such bold strokes will have to be qualified
in a number of ways. Nevertheless, they take us a step further in
outlining the first contours of a Lacanian interpretation of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle. From a Lacanian point of view, the source of what
Freud called a "death drive" is to be located in the tension between
the real and the imaginary, between "the real of the body and the
imaginary of its mental schema." The pressing toward expression of
somatic energies alienated by imaginary identification constitutes a
force of death insofar as it threatens the integrity of that identity. It is
because there exists a dimension in the human subject that extends
beyond his ego that there must be another principle "beyond the
pleasure principle":
We are beginning to see why it is necessary that beyond the pleasure

principle, which Freud introduces as what governs the measure of
the ego and installs consciousness in its relation with a world in
which it finds itself, that beyond, exists the death instinct. Beyond the
homeostases of the ego, there exists a dimension, another current,
another necessity, whose plane must be differentiated. This compul-
sion to return to something which has been excluded by the subject,
or which never entered into it, the Verdrangt, the repressed, we cannot
bring it back within the pleasure principle. If the ego as such redis-
covers itself and recognizes itself, it is because there is a beyond to
the ego, an unconscious, a subject which speaks, unknown to the
subject. We must therefore posit another principle. (S.H, 171)
In the section of his. seventh seminar devoted expressly to "Za pulsion

de mort" Lacan offers an explanation of the essential dynamic of the
death drive in terms that are characteristically indirect, cast in a myth
or fable, but which line up very precisely with the energetic interpreta-
tion we have pursued. He refers to the fable recounted in Sade's
Juliette: the System of Pope Pius VI. It is from this text of Sade that
Lacan draws inspiration for the concept of the "second death" that
67
plays a major role throughout the remainder of the seminar. "Not that
what Freud offers us in the notion of the death drive is scientifically
unjustifiable," says Lacan, "but it is of the same order as the System of
Pope Pius VI" (S.VII, 251). In response to Juliette's question about the
origin of his monstrous appetite for murder, Sade's pontiff appeals to
Nature herself and seeks to explain why "murder is one of her laws."25
Nature, he explains, is a pure creative power, a great birthing-ground
of being that gives rise to a myriad of forms; mineral, vegetable,
and animal. 26 Nature's desire for ever new and different progeny is
inexhaustible. Once particular forms have been cast, however, the
great "blind mother" takes no further interest in them. Indeed, the
very existence of created beings, reproducing themselves in mere
repetitions of the same, becomes an impediment to the proliferation
of new creations. Therefore it is only by means of destruction that the
primordial generative forces of Nature can be again set to work. Only
death can re-fertilize the great womb of the universe. An ever greater
destruction of Nature's offspring inevitably liberates an ever greater
resurgence of the creative power. Precisely when created forms are
most utterly crushed, smashed, burned, and ground into ashes is the
soil best prepared for Nature's new growths. "The more our destroy-
ing is of a broad and atrocious kind," concludes the pontiff, "the more
agreeable it is to her." 27 Lacan describes this text:
Sade puts before us the theory that crime enables man to collabo-
rate in the new creations of nature. The idea is that the pure elan of
nature is obstructed by its own forms, that the three realms, because
they comprise fixed forms, bind nature in a limited cycle, and more-
over a manifestly imperfect one, as is demonstrated by the chaos, the
conflicts, the fundamental disorder of their reciprocal relations. Thus
the most profound concern that one can attribute to this "psychical"
subject of Nature, in the sense of the term that connotes being most
profoundly hidden, is to make a clean slate so as to be able to begin
again her activity, to emerge again in a new burst. (S.VII, 248)
It is not difficult to recognize the likeness of this Sadean cosmology

to the view we have taken of the Freudian death drive as destructive
of the alienating form of the ego. From this perspective, the psychical
individuation of the imaginary ego is seen in analogy to the created
forms of nature and, as such, is opposed to the inexhaustible reservoir
of nature's untamed energies. Just as the destruction of existing forms
serves to liberate the emfettered creative energy of Nature, likewise
in the death drive the stultifying form of the ego is submitted to
68
dismantling as desire alienated by the imaginary strives toward expres-

sion. There is, of course, a difference between the two views. T h e
dynamic attributed in Sade's fable to the whole of nature is located by
the Freudian conception within the psychical economy insofar as it is
bifurcated between ego and id. Beneath this difference, however, a
deep similarity can be discerned. What is at stake in both cases is a
tension between the existing, relatively stable forms by which beings
are specified and individuated and "the pure elan of nature" that is
obstructed by such forms and that welcomes their destruction as the
means of its release from bondage.
It will be noticed, of course, that from such a perspective life and
death assume deeply paradoxical relations to one another. T h e process
of individuation that grounds the life of the specific being introduces
mortifying effects into the generative economy of natural processes.
T h e death of the individual form, by contrast, must be counted as a
movement toward renewal of a larger vitality. The death of the individ-
ual is thus called by Sade a "second life." Sade's character explains:
At the instant we call death, everything seems to dissolve. . . . But this

death is only imaginary, it exists figuratively but in no other way.
Matter, deprived of the other portion of matter which communicated
movement to it, is not destroyed for that; it merely abandons its form,
it decays—and proves that it is not inert; it enriches the soil, fertilizes
it, and serves in the regeneration of the other kingdoms as well as of
its own. There is, in the final analysis, no essential difference between
this first life we receive and this second, which is the one we call
death.28
T h e ambiguity of life and death is further accentuated by Lacan in

the fact that it seems to be from the example of this Sadean "second
life" that he takes his concept of "second death." In fact, the paradoxi-
cal relation of vitality and mortality is a frequent theme in Lacan's
discourse. He remarks, for example, on the ambiguity present in the
very term "death instinct":
As a moment's reflection shows, the notion of the death instinct

involves a basic irony, since its meaning has to be sought in the
conjunction of two contrary terms: instinct in its most comprehensive
acceptation being the law that governs in its succession the cycle of
behavior whose goal is the accomplishment of a vital function; and
death appearing first of all as the destruction of life. (E:S, 101)
69
As a psychically unrepresented force of vital energy, the death drive

is itself a potential source of life. Lacan thus suggests that "it is not
enough to decide on the basis of its effect—Death. It still remains to
be decided which death, that which is brought by life or that which
brings life" (E:S, 308). From this perspective, we can understand La-
can's paradoxical claim that "it is death that sustains existence" (E:S,
300). T h e death drive as Lacan reads it is, in effect, a mythical expres-
sion of pure desire, the effects produced in the psychical structure by
vital forces that remain active and striving beyond the bounds of
representation. It is for this reason that Lacan can state that "[Freud]
questioned life as to its meaning and not to say that it has none . . . but
to say that it has only one meaning, that in which desire is borne by
70
4
Rereading Beyond the Pleasure Principle

For all things, from the Void
Called forth, deserve to be destroyed . . .
Thus, all which you as Sin have rated—
Destruction,—aught with Evil blent,—
That is my proper element.
—Goethe's Faust, Part 1, Scene 2 quoted
by Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Thou owest Nature a death.
—Shakespeare, Henry IV quoted by
Freud in a letter to Fliess,
February 6, 1899
In the preceding chapter, we arrived at a first expression of the

meaning of the death drive in Lacanian terms: the death drive has its
origin in the tension between the imaginary ego and the real of the
body that is only partly encompassed by the ego. But how are these
ground lines of a Lacanian interpretation to be squared with the
specifics of Freud's own formulation of the death drive? In what sense
can Lacan's perspective be said to constitute a "return to Freud"? The
primary question concerns the major point of difference between the
Lacanian and the Freudian conception: for Lacan, the traumatic force
of the death drive aims not at the biological organism but at the unity
of the ego. Must not this difference be counted as a radical departure
from Freud's views?
In what follows I will try to show that the Lacanian conception,
which opposes the force of the death drive to the imaginary identity
of the ego, far from contradicting Freud, satisfactorily explains and
integrates much of what Freud says about the death drive, but with
the advantage of avoiding the conundrums into which Freud was led
by posing the death drive as a biological reality. In the course of this
analysis, it will become increasingly evident that Freud's attempt to
establish the death drive on a biological basis was not in keeping
71
with many aspects of his own framing of the problem and actually
constitutes an awkward wrinkle in what can otherwise be construed as
a surprisingly coherent framework of concepts. A Lacanian approach,
which rejects Freud's biologism in favor of the dynamics of the imagi-
nary and the real, serves to rectify a confusion in Freud's own thinking
in a way that allows a deeper theoretical coherence to shine through.
Such a perspective restores to the death drive its privileged position
within the totality of the psychoanalytic theory, making it possible to
see for the first time the internal coherence and continuity between the
hypothesis of a death instinct and the larger conceptual architecture of
Freud's thought. It allows us to integrate consistently Freud's theory
of the life and death drives with the dynamics of binding and un-
binding, the principles of constancy and inertia, and the problematic
of pleasure and unpleasure. I hope to demonstrate that Lacan's treat-
ment of the death drive is rightly called a "return to Freud"; indeed,
in a certain sense Lacan can be said to return Freud to himself.
To begin this task, it is imperative that we expose and clarify the
conflicts interior to Freud's original posing of his idea. What is required
is a meticulous examination of Freud's detailed and subtly nuanced
argument. Only by plunging ourselves deep into the labyrinth of that
argument and arriving at a lucid recognition of its points of internal
tension will we arrive at the clues for a coherent rereading of Freud's
theory. Similarly, it is only in terms of those details and difficulties that
the advantages of such a rereading can be appreciated.
The Plan and Pitfalls of Freud's Argument
Let us return, then, to the text of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. T h e

primary phenomenon Freud sought to explain was the tendency of
patients in analysis to repeat unpleasant experiences by means of
dreams, memories, or enactments in the transference. What was espe-
cially curious was that these painful repetitions were apparently moti-
vated by a primitive compulsion:
Patients repeat all of these unwanted situations and painful emotions

in the transference and revive them with the greatest ingenuity. They
seek to bring about the interruption of the treatment while it is still
incomplete; they contrive once more to feel themselves scorned, to
oblige the physician to speak severely to them and treat them coldly;
they discover appropriate objects for their jealousy; instead of the
passionately desired baby of their childhood, they produce a plan or
72
a promise of some grand present—which turns out as a rule to be no

less unreal. None of these things can have produced pleasure in the
past. . . . In spite of that, they are repeated, under pressure of a
compulsion. (S£, 18:21)
Freud dubbed the repetitive insistence of such behaviors der Wieder-

holungszwangy the "repetition compulsion." The mystery presented by
the repetition compulsion came down to this: How and why, contrary
to the rule of pleasure that Freud took to be the fundamental law of
psychic processes, is the ego deliberately subjected to pain? Freud was
no stranger to the idea that impulses felt to be pleasurable for one
psychic agency might be painful to another. In fact, some such mecha-
nism, by which a yield of satisfaction at one level of psychic life is
experienced as unpleasure at another level, might well be offered as
the very heart of Freud's discovery of the unconscious. What psycho-
analysis reveals within the neurotic symptom is a paradoxical mixture
of unconscious pleasure and conscious pain. In the present case, how-
ever, Freud rejected this line of thought. Unlike the familiar instances
of repressed wishes, what was repeated in traumatic dreams could not
have been pleasurable at any time or at any level of the psyche. Thus
Freud claimed:
It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the

compulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings
to light activities of repressed instinctual impulses. That, however,
is unpleasure of a kind we have already considered and does not
contradict the pleasure principle: unpleasure for one system and
simultaneously satisfaction for the other. But we come now to a new
and remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls
from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure,
and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even
to instinctual impulses which have since been repressed. (SE, 18:20)
The repetition compulsion apparently presented an instance in

which pain experienced by the ego resulted not merely from the
pressure of instinctual forces repressed by the ego, but from a specific
will to mistreatment of the ego for its own sake. T h e repetition compul-
sion represented, in effect, a compulsion of the patient to torment his
own ego. It indicated the activity of a "primordial masochism." So
long as Freud viewed the ego essentially as a servant of instinctual
satisfaction, instituting repressions only in response to the constraints
of reality, the subjection of the ego to such torment appeared to be
73
wholly gratuitous. 1 T h e compulsion to repeat therefore seemed to be

motivated by a kind of "daemonic power" (SE, 18:40).
So far, Freud's argument was prompted by observed phenomena
and proceeded on an entirely psychological level. However, in the
subsequent course of his discussion Freud moved the argument onto
biological grounds, proposing that the clinical observations must ulti-
mately be explained in terms of a self-destructive instinct operative in
the very substance of organic material. Only a biological explanation
seemed capable of accounting for the primordiality of the power at
work in the repetition compulsion. T h e fact that this power was capable
of overriding the fundamental principle of pleasure suggested the
activity of an absolutely elemental force, even more primitive than the
erotic instincts. Opposite the life instincts, there must exist a second,
more basic class of instincts.
If the compulsiveness of the repetitions suggested the operation of
a basic instinct, it was the phenomenon of repetition itself that pro-
vided the clue for specifying more precisely the nature of the instinct
involved. Impressed by the fact that every instance of repetition under
consideration involved the activity of memory, Freud concluded that
the compulsion to repeat was tantamount to a desire "to restore an
earlier state of things" (SE, 18:36). This impulse toward restoration of
the past signaled the effect of an essentially conservative tendency. If
the most primitive instinct was thus found to be essentially conserva-
tive, it stood to reason that all instincts possess a conservative nature.
By this route Freud came to posit the death drive not only as the
most fundamental instinct but as paradigmatic of instinctual forces in
general. "How," Freud asked, "is the predicate of being 'instinctual'
related to the compulsion to repeat?":
At this point we cannot escape a suspicion that we may have come

upon the track of a universal attribute of all instincts and perhaps of
organic life in general which has not hitherto been already recognized
or at least not explicitly stressed. It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge
inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things. (SE, 18:36,
Freud's emphasis)
T h e difficulties introduced into Freud's theory by the supposition

of a biologically based drive toward death are hard to overestimate.
In a number of ways the new hypothesis seemed both incoherent in
itself and contradictory in relation to Freud's long-standing views
about the nature of the instincts. First, the notion that the most primor-
dial force at work in organic matter is a drive to return to an inorganic
74
state threatened to make the growth process of organisms almost

unintelligible. Abandoned to its own innermost tendencies, organic
material would immediately self-destruct. Freud was thus forced to
suppose that the progressive, vital development of organisms is due
to the disturbing influence of external circumstances. According to
this view, the course of life appears to be only a circuitous path to
death, a detour that is sustained by factors external to the organism.
Freud was led to conclude that
for a long time perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly
created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences al-
tered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge
ever more widely from its original source of life and to make ever
more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death. (SE,
18:38-39)
This conclusion was paradoxical in the extreme, if not completely

nonsensical. It was a notion as foreign to widely accepted biological
assumptions as it was repugnant to common sense. We are accustomed
to assuming the opposite view: that external circumstances generally
pose obstacles, constraints, and limitations to the self-assertion of the
living organism. Freud was neither able to specify the "external influ-
ences" that preserve the organism from an early death nor to describe
the process by which that preservation occurs. Perhaps even more
damaging was his inability, assuming that the most basic drive in
organic material is a drive toward the inorganic, to explain why living
forms ever arose in the first place. Freud confessed that "the attributes
of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of
a force of whose nature we can form no conception" (SE, 18:37).
In various ways, then, the concept of a death instinct constituted a
sort of biological oxymoron that threatened to collapse under the
incompatibility of its own terms. But Freud's new idea was also incom-
patible with some of his own most cherished assumptions. Freud's
supposition that the conservative character of the death instinct is
somehow paradigmatic of all instinctual forces conflicted with the
characterization of instinct as a progressive, forward-seeking tendency
that otherwise guided all his thinking. "This [new] view of instincts,"
he confessed, "strikes us as strange because we have become used to
see[ing] in them a factor impelling towards change and development,
whereas we are now asked to recognize in them the precise contrary—
an expression of the conservative nature of living substance" (SE, 18:36).
Throughout the rest of his work, Freud took the force of instinct to
75
be an unspecified striving, an indeterminate pressure toward activity

that raises in the organism a pure "demand for work." In Instincts and
Their Vicissitudes he remarked that
by the pressure [Drang] of an instinct we understand its motor factor,

the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work which
it represents. The characteristic of exercising pressure is common to
all instinct; it is in fact their very essence. Every instinct is a piece of
activity; if we speak loosely of passive instincts, we can only mean
instinct whose aim is passive. (SE, 14:122)
Directly or indirectly, Freud himself acknowledged all of these diffi-

culties. Indeed, the fact that he so tenaciously defended the death
instinct despite the near-absurdities readily implied by it indicates
in itself Freud's high estimation of the importance of his new idea.
However, the argument of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is plagued by
an even more damaging internal conflict that Freud seems never to
have recognized. The problem at issue involves determining whether
the death drive increases or decreases psychical "tension." T h e concept
of tension, Spannung, constitutes the pivot on which turns the entirety
of Freud's argumentation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Inspired by
the psychophysics of Gustav Fechner, Freud associated pleasure and
unpleasure respectively with decreases and increases in the level of
psychic tension. Such changes in tension corresponded to decreases
or increases in the quantities of excitation with which the psychical
system is invested. In his opening sentence Freud unambiguously laid
out his view:
In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming

that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by
the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of
those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension,
and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with
a lowering of that tension—that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure
or a production of pleasure. (SE, 18:7)
From the outset, then, Freud clearly associated pleasure with the
diminution of psychic tension and unpleasure with its increase. In
accordance with this initial framework, the death drive would be quite
logically associated with an increase in tensions. Such, at least, would
be the conclusion to be drawn from identifying the effect of the death
drive with repetition of the trauma. For Freud, what characterized
76
traumatic experience was precisely the overwhelming influx of new

and psychically unmastered energies introduced by the trauma into
the psychic system. Thus he remarked that
we describe as "traumatic" any excitations from outside which are

powerful enough to break through the protective shield. It seems to
me that the concept of trauma necessarily implies a . . . breach in an
otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli" (SE, 18:29).
If, as Freud suggested, the death drive evidences its essential character
in repetition of the trauma, then we are led to suppose that the essential
activity of the death drive involves the infusion of fresh quantities of
energy into the psychic apparatus, resulting in an unpleasureable
increase in psychic tension. Adopting this view, we can make sense of
the title of Freud's book. The death drive is said to be "beyond the
pleasure principle" because the death drive increases rather than de-
creases psychical tensions and thereby constitutes a source of unplea-
sure internal to the psychic apparatus.
Given this initial association of the activity of the death drive with
increase of psychical tension, it comes as a complete surprise to find the
death drive characterized toward the end of Freud's book in precisely
opposite terms. As an impulse toward return to an inorganic state, the
death drive is thought to constitute a drive not toward increase but
toward reduction of tensions to an absolute minimum. It is this ten-
dency toward reduction of tensions to zero that warranted identifying
the death drive with a "Nirvana principle" (SE, 18:56). What has
happened to the original association of the death drive with traumatic
increase of tension? We seem faced with an contradiction inhabiting
the very heart of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the death drive is first
identified with a traumatic increase, then with maximal decrease of
tension. 2 What has made this inversion possible?
The pivot-point occurs when Freud translates the terms of his dis-
cussion out of its originally psychological frame of reference and into
a biological one. As his discussion unfolds, Freud's use of the concept
of tension undergoes an unacknowledged but utterly decisive shift
that parallels his movement from a psychological to a biological dis-
course. On the first page, tension (Spannung) is clearly conceived psy-
chologically. Psychical events {seelischen Vorgange) are said to be put in
motion by an unpleasant tension (eine unlustvolle Spannung). During
the course of the argument, however, the meaning of "tension"
changes from its original signification of intrapsychic conflict, relevant
to the problem of pleasure and unpleasure, to a second, biological
77
sense of the term, which Freud uses to speak of the coalescence of

material particles into a living being. Speaking of such biological or
chemical tensions, Freud claims that the life instinct, which promotes
"union with the living substance of a different individual, increases
those tensions [Spannungen], introducing what may be described as
fresh Vital differences* which must then be lived off." T h e death drive,
by contrast, is responsible for the fact that "the life process of the
individual leads for internal reasons to an abolition of chemical ten-
sions [Spannungen], that is to say, to death." 4
Does the death drive increase or decrease tensions? Given the ambi-
guity in the concept of tension itself, we are unable to answer. Psycho-
logically speaking, the death drive increases tensions; biologically or
chemically speaking, it decreases them. T h e consequences of this con-
fusion are anything but insignificant, as they bear directly upon the
relationship between the death drive and the pleasure principle to
which it is ostensibly opposed. It has long been a source of perplexity
to many commentators that Freud's identification of the death drive
with the Nirvana principle makes the force of the death drive almost
indistinguishable from the workings of the pleasure principle. Both
the Nirvana and the pleasure principles seek to diminish tensions
through the reduction of excitations to zero or, failing that, through
the maintenance of a constant level of excitation. Are the death instinct
and the pleasure principle one and the same? Freud himself came
very close to saying so when he claimed in his conclusion that "the
pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instinct" (SE,
18:63). But if that is so, how are we to rescue any meaning for the
title of Freud's work, which points to a force "beyond the pleasure
principle"? More important, how are we to retrieve the insistence on
a radical dualism that is unquestionably the underlying intention of
Freud's work?
Toward an Alternative Reading
It is with respect to the concept of psychical "tension" that Freud's

shift from the psychological to the biological generates the greatest
confusion. However, as we just saw, what is at stake in this confusion
is no minor difficulty. On the contrary, the coherence, indeed, the
very meaning of Freud's entire construction hangs on resolving it. If
we suppose, as the identification of the death drive with the Nirvana
principle suggests, that the work of the death drive involves a reduction
of tensions, we are at a loss to see how the death drive is in any way
78
opposed to the pleasure principle. The central intention of Freud's

book can be fulfilled only by reaffirming the link drawn by Freud at
the outset between the force "beyond pleasure" and the repetition of
the trauma—that is, by recuperating the idea that the death drive
invariably increases tension. But how is this recuperation to be accom-
plished? It is the resolution of this problem and the assessment of its
implications that will occupy us for the remainder of this chapter.
Inasmuch as Freud's appeal to biology can be shown to be at the
root of the confusion surrounding the concept of tension, we are led
not only to question the soundness of Freud's excursion into biology
but also to wonder again what led him into it in the first place. If we
examine more closely the unfolding of Freud's argument, the precise
juncture at which the discussion is turned toward biology can be lo-
cated at what may well seem an unlikely point. It concerns the concept
of repetition. This concept functions in Freud's text like a sort of
lightning flash that blinds even as it illuminates. It is at once Freud's
initial clue to the operation of a force beyond the pleasure principle
yet it also provides the point of slippage at which his argument veers
off into questionable biology. We noted above that Freud construed
repetition as a tendency to "return to an earlier state of things." If he
was right to suspect in repetition the effects of a truly elemental force
of instinct, then it seemed necessary to interpret the tendency to
restore an earlier state of things in some very fundamental sense.
Such a tendency must ultimately point to the very "earliest state,"
understood in its most radical meaning. In this light, an instinctual
drive toward repetition appeared as a drive toward the most extreme
form of regression: a drive to return to the inorganic state that pre-
ceded the organization of the living being. It was along this line of
reasoning that the death drive came forward as a function of organic
matter itself, a drive operative within cellular material that aimed at
its dissolution. By this path, the "mysterious masochistic trends of
the ego" brought to light by repetition assumed the dimensions of
biological life and death.
It was the idea of repetition that gave Freud the opportunity to
make the jump from psychology to biology, but there are good reasons
to question his argumentation at this crucial juncture. The main
point—that the compulsion to repeat, as an urge to restore an earlier
state of things, implies a will to return to an inorganic state—may be
dubious enough on biological grounds, but it also involves an abuse
of logic. From a purely logical point of view, the idea of repetition
does not by itself imply any tendency toward a restoration of an earlier
state of things. A drive toward repetition implies only that a state of
79
affairs, once attained, will tend to recur. Without the addition of some
other factor, there is no reason to suppose that the tendency toward
repetition also involves a tendency to reach into the more and more
distant past. Repetition does not necessarily imply regression. Freud
himself struggled with this confusion between a merely repetitive or
conservative process and a genuinely retrograde one. He first offered
the conservative character of the death instinct as a universal attribute
of all instincts but then identified the greatest conservativism with the
instincts of life, as it is the erotic instincts that preserve the apparently
immortal germ cells. Freud asserted that these instincts "are conserva-
tive to a higher degree in that they are peculiarly resistant to external
influences" (SE, 18:40). This sort of conservatism, however, is clearly
a matter of maintaining a given state, not returning to an earlier
one. He finally qualified his position by proposing that while the life
instincts are conservative, only the death instinct is truly retrograde. 5
It is not difficult to show how the concept of repetition opens a
special door for Freud's recourse to biology, nor is it difficult to recog-
nize the weakness of his reasoning at this critical moment. But the
privileged role of repetition in Freud's argumentation is all the more
curious for the fact that in itself repetition is rather poorly suited to
represent what is distinctive about the death drive. In fact, it was not
repetition as such but only repetition of unpleasurable experiences that
raised the question about the operation of a force beyond the pleasure
principle. As Freud himself noted, a will to repetition is more conspicu-
ous in the case of pleasurable experiences than it is for unpleasurable
ones. Freud goes so far as to say that repetition itself, as "the re-
experiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of
pleasure" (SE9 18:36). But these facts suggest that the impulse toward
repetition must, at the very least, be admitted for both classes of
instincts and is arguably more appropriately linked with the life in-
stincts and the functions of the ego insofar as they are thought to obey
a principle of constancy.
Despite all the difficulties it generated, Freud clung fast to the
concept of repetition as a kind of indispensable key to unlocking the
mystery of the death drive. It is almost as if, once the phenomenon of
repetition had showed him the trail, he dared not let it go for fear of
losing his bearings. But perhaps the most damaging consequence of
Freud's reliance on repetition is the way it obscures the extent to which
the argument of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is organized around a
second basic idea: the twofold concept of psychical binding and un-
binding (Bindung and Entbindung). In fact, Freud's thinking in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle is rather awkwardly stretched around the two
80
basic loci of repetition and binding. When we read Freud's book in

the broader context of his work as a whole, it is hard not to conclude
that of the two themes, repetition and binding, the latter is the more
important. In any case, it makes a very great difference for the task
of interpreting Freud's text how the choice between these two alterna-
tives is weighted. We have already seen how repetition, construed as
a return to the earliest state of things, gave Freud an entree into a
biological reframing of his argument. By contrast, the concepts of
binding and unbinding retain a decidedly psychological emphasis. T o
be sure, binding is eventually drawn up into the biochemical meta-
phors that proliferate toward the end of the book. Thus binding is
linked to the process by which organic material is melded into the
unity of a living being. But the dominant connotation of binding,
established in some of Freud's earliest papers and maintained through-
out his career, is unquestionably psychological. Binding refers above
all to the origin and function of the ego. By following out the logic of
the concept of binding we are led to reconsider Freud's biologizing of
the death drive.
Although often overlooked in expositions of psychoanalytic theory,
the notion of bound and free psychic energy was nevertheless assigned
by Freud a place of capital importance. The idea may be said to be as
old as psychoanalysis itself. It appeared first in the Studies on Hysteria,
figured prominently in the Project for a Scientific Psychology, and was
drawn upon in the theoretical chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams.
In his 1915 essay on "The Unconscious," Freud remarked that "the
distinction [of bound versus freely mobile energy] represents the deep-
est insight we have gained up to the present into the nature of nervous
energy, and I do not see how we can do without it" (SE, 14:88).
Psychical binding and unbinding again came to the fore in 1920 and
continued to occupy a significant place in Freud's writings until the
end of his life. What is crucial for our purposes is that the concept of
binding is relevant first and foremost to the genesis and functions of
the ego. It was in terms of unbound versus bound energies that Freud
distinguished between the psychically unmastered instinctual forces
of the id and the more organized and differentiated processes charac-
teristic of the ego. Freud commented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
that "the impulses arising from the instincts do not belong to the type
of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press
toward discharge" (SE, 18:34). As early as the Project, Freud associated
the ego with bound energies. In fact, he offered the quality of being
in a bound state as the very definition of the ego. "The ego itself," he
claimed, "is a mass like this of neurones which hold fast to their
81
the dialectic of the death and life drives is no longer to be conceived

as a conflict of two opposing biological trends, but rather as marking
the problematic interface between the biological and the psychologi-
cal.In its struggle against the ego-formations of Eros, the death drive
is appropriately referred to as the most primordial instinctual force.
The death drive presents the mute exigence of the organic as such.
Over the course of this chapter, the reader will no doubt have
noticed that despite our earlier precautions about Strachey's transla-
tion of the Freudian Trieb, we have constantly flipped back and forth
between the terms "instinct" and "drive." Although this slippage is in
part the result of frequent citations from the Strachey translation, we
can take it as the occasion to define again more precisely the meaning
of Freud's term. In the view we have taken, what distinguishes the
death drive from the functioning of the ego is precisely its lack of
determinate representation. To this extent, the Todestrieb is unlike
animal instincts, which tend to be determinate with respect to their
aims and objects, and is better called a "drive." Yet there remains
something in the concept of the Todestrieb, as the word "instinct" tends
to connote, that is bound u p with the biological forces that animate
the living body. Even having admitted with Lacan that the death drive
threatens the ego and not the biological organism, there remains a
sense in which the death drive is rooted in the inarticulate strivings of
the body. The death drive has its source in the "impossible" depths of
the real.
We are now in a position to appreciate more fully Lacan's assertion
that the doctrine of the death drive constitutes the culmination of
Freud's thought. T h e quintessential Freudian problematic is located
on the limen between the psychical and the somatic. Unlike Jung, for
whom the basic forms of psychical conflict are posed within a matrix
of images and archetypes, Freud is continually drawn toward the very
threshold of representation, that outer boundary of the thinkable at
which the structures of psychic life trail off into a reservoir of forces
that remain active but relatively devoid of form. For Freud, the funda-
mental problem is that of symbolization itself, the underlying conflict
is that between psychically represented and unrepresented somatic
forces. The dialectic of the life and death drives constitutes the master
concept by which this conflict is expressed. In this way, too, Beyond the
Pleasure Principle can be more clearly recognized in its preparatory and
grounding relation to The Ego and the Id. The notion of the death drive
can be seen to open the way for that of the id, marking the border
along which the formations of the ego are liable to disintegration
under the pressure of forces excluded by it. The death drive emerges
102
as the key moment in the movement of Freud's thought toward recog-

nition of the nonrepressed unconscious. It is the supreme expression
of the view that psychic structure arises in response to the exigence of
bodily forces yet remains forever inadequate to the task of exhaustively
representing them.
103
5
The Unconscious Structured

like a Language
Sing, Heavenly Muse, . . .
Instruct me, for thou know'st, thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like sat'st brooding over the vast abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support.
—Milton, Paradise Lost
We now arrive at a crucial juncture in the course of our inquiry. We

have framed a rereading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle on the basis
of the dynamics of the imaginary and the real—a rereading that we
have not hesitated to call Lacanian. Yet this "Lacanian" interpretation
has made almost no reference to the linguistic register that is the most
distinctive mark of Lacan's thinking. The most radical and innovative
feature of Lacan's approach is to "have demonstrated the profound
relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems
of speech" (E:S, 101). The purpose of this chapter is to make u p this
deficit by exploring the relation Lacan finds among death, desire, and
language.
For readers familiar with Lacan, postponing discussion of the sym-
bolic may already have seemed a questionable strategy, as we have
introduced on the level of the imaginary the opposition between the
ego and the subject that, strictly speaking, is articulable only within
the register of the symbolic. The Lacanian subject is above all the
subject of language, the subject who speaks. So, too, we have linked
desire with an aspect of the real alienated by the imaginary structura-
tion of the ego but have made no mention of Lacan's insistence that
desire manifests itself only as a function of a speaking subject in a
signifying chain. Indeed, to speak of the imaginary function of the
ego in isolation from the symbolic can be misleading. Over the course
of his teaching, Lacan increasingly insists that the influence of the
105
The Unconscious: A Language
symbolic is present from the beginning. The human child is born into
an order of symbolic relations that, although it cannot be said to
precondition imaginary identification in the sense that such identifica-
tion could not take place without it, nevertheless provides the environ-
ing context in which the definition of subjective identity will finally
assume its meaning. We are thus given to understand that "there is
never a simple duplicity of terms . . . there are always three terms in
the structure, even if these terms are not explicitly present" (S.I, 218).
T h e drama of the mirror stage, which we have presented as a wholly
presymbolic function unfolded in the register of perceptual relations,
must finally be recognized as an abstraction:
For the child, to start with there is the symbolic and the real, contrary
to what one might think. Everything which we see taking on consis-
tency, becoming enriched and being diversified in the register of the
imaginary begins with these two poles. If you think that the child is
more a captive of the imaginary than of the rest, you are right in a
certain sense. The imaginary is there. But it is completely inaccessible
to us. It is only accessible to us when we start from its realisation in
the adult. (5.7,219)
Admittedly, there are dangers in abstracting the imaginary from

the symbolic, but there are also advantages. Of prime importance,
focusing on the relations between the imaginary and the real apart
from the role of the symbolic served to frame more clearly the homol-
ogy of the two Lacanian categories with the Freudian ego and id. On
the basis of this homology, some key points of a Lacanian reading of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle could be sketched. The abstraction of the
imaginary from the symbolic will continue to be of value in the present
chapter as it will allow us to contrast more decisively the structure and
functions of imaginary identification from those of linguistic significa-
tion. In Chapter 6, it will help to unfold more deliberately the structure
and consequences of the Oedipal drama as Lacan conceives it.
But a further question immediately arises: If our focus on the imagi-
nary must now be rectified by accounting for the role of the symbolic,
hasn't our way of interpreting the imaginary in terms of energetics
made the task of reintroducing the symbolic even more difficult? Our
reliance on the concept of energetics has been a vital part of our
interpretive strategy. Energetics provided the scaffold along which
Lacanian categories of the imaginary and the real could be aligned
with the conceptual register in which Freud worked. As we saw earlier,
the concept of energetics is by no means wholly absent in Lacan. It is
106
clearly resonant with Lacan's treatment of the real and is strikingly

embodied in his fable of the lamelle. What is not so clear, however, is
how the energetic metaphor is to be related to the characteristically
Lacanian concern with linguistic signification. Doesn't an energetic
perspective, far from preparing us to understand the attention to the
details of the patient's verbal discourse that is the prime feature of
Lacanian psychoanalysis, tend rather to cast Lacan in the role of an
"id psychologist," an avatar of catharsis more than of interpretation?
From the viewpoint we have adopted, Lacan's conception of psycho-
analysis may seem to have more in common with Groddeck's Book of
the It than with Saussure's Course in General Linguistics.
It must be admitted that in outlining an energetics of the imaginary
we have relied on a problematic construction. There is a constant
danger of overliteralizing the energetic metaphor, thereby resurrect-
ing precisely the sort of crude instinctualism of organismic needs that
Lacan tries to combat. Nevertheless, there is something to be gained
by running these risks. In positing a quantity of energy excluded by
the imaginary, the energetic perspective will provide an initial frame
within which the function of the symbolic can be introduced. By giving
some tentative meaning to the notion of the real, the energetics of
the imaginary will allow us to locate provisionally an indeterminate
dimension beyond the imaginary out of which the desire of the subject
will fleetingly appear in the play of the signifier.
"Au-dela de l'imaginaire, le symbolique"1
What, then, is the relation of the symbolic to the imaginary and

how are they linked to the real? This question will occupy us for the
remainder of this book, and for good reason: it is the most fundamen-
tal question raised by Lacanian psychoanalysis. From the outset, Lacan
conceives the relation between the symbolic and the imaginary to
be o n e of dynamic conflict. Lacan repeatedly opposes the task of
psychoanalysis to the captures of the imaginary. He conceives the
imaginary structuration of identity as a problem to be overcome, as a
form of bondage from which the subject must escape. "Psychoanalysis
alone," he offers, "recognizes the knot of imaginary servitude that love
must always undo again, or sever" (E:S, 7). This work of love, the work
Freud identified with the dynamics of the transference, is essentially
a labor of language. The keynote of Lacan's sensibility is to be heard
in his insistence that "imaginary incidences, far from representing the
essence of our experience, reveal only what in it remains inconsistent
107
unless they a r e r e l a t e d to the symbolic chain which b i n d s a n d orients

them."2
W h a t is p r o b l e m a t i c a b o u t t h e imaginary, as we have seen, is its
alienation of desire. I n the Urbild of t h e i m a g i n a r y ego, Lacan locates
t h e "delay, t h e unsticking (decollement) of m a n in relation to his o w n
libido" (S.I, 146). I n t h e f o r m a t i o n of t h e ego s o m e t h i n g is inevitably
lost, e x c l u d e d , r e m a i n d e r e d . W h a t is this lost libido, this alienated
desire? Lacan assigns it a p u r e l y negative status. I m a g i n a r y identifica-
tion i n t r o d u c e s a "biological g a p , " a n essential b r e a c h or lack:
One has to suppose a certain biological gap in [man], which is what

I try to define when I talk to you about the mirror stage. The total
captation of desire, of attention, already assumes the lack. T h e lack
is already there when I speak of the desire of the human subject in
relation to his image, of the extremely general imaginary relation
which we call narcissism. (S.II, 323)
Desire originates from a p r i m o r d i a l lack, a hole o r g a p , a manque-a-

etre (lack, or w a n t , of being). I n t h e c a p t u r e s of t h e imaginary, "desire
is essentially a negativity" (S./, 147). T h e function of t h e symbolic is to
give this negativity a n a m e :
Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for

nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the very
origin of every variety of animation. (S.II, 223)
That the subject should come to recognise and to name his desire,
that is the efficacious action of analysis. (S.II, 228—29)
T h e symbolization of desire b e y o n d t h e i m a g i n a r y is a process

e v o k e d over a n d over again by Lacan in different contexts, a reitera-
tion a p p r o p r i a t e to t h e p h e n o m e n o n h e describes, as t h e recovery of
d e s i r e is a n u n e n d i n g a n d u n e n d a b l e task:
What is my desire? What is my position in the imaginary structura-

tion? This position is only conceivable in so far as one finds a guide
beyond the imaginary, on the level of the symbolic plane, of the
legal exchange which can only be embodied in the verbal exchange
between human beings. (S.I, 141)
The relation of the subject to his Urbild, his Idealich, through which
he enters into the imaginary function and learns to recognise himself
108
as a form, can always see-saw. Each time that the subject apprehends
himself as form and as ego, each time that he constitutes himself in
his status, his stature, his static, his desire is projected outside. From
whence arises the impossibility of all human coexistence.
But, thank God, the subject inhabits the world of the symbol, that
is to say a world of others who speak. That is why his desire is
susceptible to the mediation of recognition. Without which every
human function would simply exhaust itself in the unspecified wish
for the destruction of the other as such. (S.I, 171)
Speech is that dimension through which the desire of the subject is

authentically integrated on to the symbolic plane. (S.I, 183)
Excluded and alienated by the imaginary, desire is retrievable in

some measure through the power of language. Lacan thinks of the
function of the symbolic as a power of memory, an activity of profound
recollection. In the reality of the present, Lacan claims, "only speech
bears witness to that portion of the powers of the past that has been
thrust aside at each crossroads when the event has made its choice"
(E:S, 47). What is this "portion of the powers of the past that has been
thrust aside"? What is it that is recalled by the action of the symbolic?
Ultimately, the retrieval of desire concerns the possibility of what
Lacan calls jouissance, for which there is no adequate English equiva-
lent. As the English translator of Lacan's Ecrits notes:
"Enjoyment" conveys the sense, contained in puissance, of enjoyment

of rights, of property, etc. Unfortunately, in modern English, the
word has lost the sexual connotations it still retains in French, (fouir
is slang for "to come.") "Pleasure," on the other hand, is pre-empted
by "plaisir"—and Lacan uses the two terms quite differently. "Plea-
sure" obeys the law of homoestasis that Freud evokes in "Beyond the
Pleasure Principle," whereby, through discharge, the psyche seeks
the lowest possible level of tension. "Jouissance" trangresses this law
and, in that respect, it is beyond the pleasure principle. (E:S, x)
T h e emergence of desire in the signifying chain brings with it a

promise of jouissance. In the following passage, jouissance is placed in
the context of Freudian energetics by being associated with the aim of
the living being governed by the pleasure principle. Yet, if jouissance
is thus posed in terms of energy discharge, it is at the same time shown
to be an excluded, forbidden discharge, an energy that is put out
109
of play by t h e p l e a s u r e principle in its defensive aspect of a v o i d i n g

d i s p l e a s u r e . T h e function of l a n g u a g e a p p e a r s in t h e role of a liberat-
i n g influence, which o p e n s u p t h e possibility of testing a foreclosed
a n d f o r b i d d e n jouissance:
If the living being is something at all thinkable, it will be above all

as subject of the jouissance; but this psychological law that we call the
pleasure principle (and which is only the principle of displeasure) is
very soon to create a barrier to all jouissance. . . . [T]he organism
seems to avoid too much jouissance. Probably we would all be as quiet
as oysters if it were not for this curious organization which forces us
to disrupt the barrier of pleasure or perhaps only makes us dream
of forcing and disrupting this barrier. All that is elaborated by the
subjective construction on the scale of the signifier in its relation to
the Other and which has its root in language is only there to permit
the full spectrum of desire to allow us to approach, to test, this sort
of forbidden jouissance which is the only valuable meaning that is
offered to our life.3
T h e n a t u r e of this " f o r b i d d e n jouissance" is illuminated by t h e e n e r -

getic i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of t h e imaginary, which locates t h e source of d e s i r e
in a quantity of e n e r g y e x c l u d e d by t h e ego. T h i s i n t e r p r e t a t i o n has
m a d e us familiar with t h e p a r a d o x t h a t t h e p l e a s u r e principle, insofar
as it effects t h e r e g u l a t o r y function of constancy a n d homoestasis
characteristic of t h e ego, installs a b a r r i e r to p l e a s u r e in t h e m o r e basic
sense of e n e r g e t i c discharge. T h e erection of this b a r r i e r to c o m p l e t e
d i s c h a r g e creates a r e m a i n d e r of vital energies incapable of d i s c h a r g e
o n t h e level of t h e i m a g i n a r y alone. T h e recovery of these e x c l u d e d
e n e r g i e s , t h e very substance of jouissance, is t h e w o r k of t h e signifier.
" T h e signifier," L a c a n claims,
is situated at the level of the substance jouissante. . . . The signifier is

the cause of jouissance. Without the signifier, how can this part of
the body even be approached? How, without the signifier, can this
something that is the material cause of jouissance be brought into
focus? As blurred, as confused as it is, it is a part of the body that is
signified by this contribution. (S.XX, 27)
From the Ego to the Subject
I n s p e a k i n g of a substance jouissante t h a t is a p p r o a c h e d by t h e signi-

fier, o r of t h e m a t e r i a l cause oijouissance t h a t is b r o u g h t into focus by
110
signification, Lacan seems to underwrite the myth of energetics in a

way that links energetic metaphors to the salutory effects of language
in granting access to the subject's desire. Following that clue, we may
be tempted to characterize the symbolic as Lacan conceives it by means
of a relatively simple schema: the symbolic reveals itself as the capacity
to pass beyond the alienation of the imaginary and to represent the
real. T h e symbolic functions to give desire a name in the sense of
lending form to an inarticulate dimension beyond the ego. In this
way, the Lacanian perspective would appear to echo Freud's famous
epigram "Where id was, there ego shall be," compared by Freud to
the way the Dutch claimed dry land from the Zuider Zee. 4 One might
even imagine that the symbolic comes to the aid of the ego in its effort
"to acheive a progressive conquest of the id." Lacan seems at times to
reinforce this impression, as when he suggests that "in the unconscious,
excluded from the system of the ego, the subject speaks" (S.II, 58).
"The subject is there to rediscover where it was—I anticipate—the real.
Where it was, the Ich, the subject, not psychology—the subject must
come into existence" (FFC, 45). We are led to suppose that a formless
substance jouissante, excluded by the ego, is approached and focused by
the signifier in the same way that the wild energies of the id are
progressively annexed by the organization of the ego.
There is something correct about this scheme. Lacan does speak of
the symbolic as affording a recovery of alienated desire and as opening
a renewed access to the real. However, there is also something signifi-
cantly wrong about it. Two key points must be made against it the
implications of which will orient us in our subsequent discussions.
(1) In the first place, such a scheme ignores the positive opposition
Lacan draws between the imaginary ego and the speaking subject.
It is that opposition that prompts Lacan to reread Freud's epigram
precisely contrary to the prevailing interpretation and, it must be
admitted, at variance with the way Freud himself seems to have taken
it. T o do justice to the real import of Freud's discovery, the "Ich" in
the formula Wo Es war, soil Ich werden must be taken to mean, not the
ego, but the subject. "[Freud] wrote Das Ich und Das Es," Lacan pro-
poses, "in order to maintain this fundamental distinction between the
true subject of the unconscious and the ego as constituted in its nucleus
by a series of alienating identifications" (E:S, 128). "Not only is there
an absolute dissymmetry between the subject of the unconscious and
the organisation of the ego, but also a radical difference" (S.II, 59).
Freud's dictum does indeed concern the recovery and reintegration
of unconscious desire. "The end that Freud's discovery proposes for
111
man was defined by him at the apex of his thought in these moving
terms: Wo Es war, soil Ich werden. . . . This is one of reintegration and
harmony, I would even say of reconciliation" (E:S, 171). But for Lacan,
it is the ego itself that makes this labor of self-recovery necessary, and
it is the ego that remains the primary obstacle to its accomplishment.
This effort of self-recovery is undertaken not in the service of the ego
but at its expense. T h e work of analysis, effected along the paths of
linguistic signification, far from extending the hegemony of the ego,
tends to bring about a certain deconstruction of its domain. The agency
of the symbolic cannot be understood as an extension of the imaginary
but must rather be taken as a challenge to it. The speaking subject is
emphatically decentered in relation to the ego.
(2) The scheme proposed above is misleading in another impor-

tant respect inasmuch as it envisages a direct intervention of the sym-
bolic in the field of the real. Such a formulation generates a classical
aporia as it supposes an introduction of form into the heart of the
utterly formless. By what means, in relation to what points of support,
might the articulations of the symbolic gain a foothold in the real? It
is easy to see how we were led to represent the relation of the symbolic
and the real in this fashion. From an energetic perspective, we con-
ceived the relation of the imaginary to the real in terms of a bifurcated
economy of energies in which a limited quantity of energy invested in
the formative imago is set apart from a relatively formless remainder
constitutive of the real. When we then turned to the task of determin-
ing the role of the symbolic in the recovery of the real beyond the
bounds of the imaginary, we found ourselves predisposed to think of
it as the introduction of form into a formless substance. And, indeed,
Lacan himself occasionally puts the matter in similar terms, inviting
us to imagine a substance jouissante beyond the ego that is addressed by
the signifier. Lacan suggests that this "id" beyond the ego should be
called a pure "whatness," or, better, it should be designated in the
form of a question, a "what is it?"
Under certain conditions, this imaginary relation itself reaches its

own limit and the ego fades away, dissipates, becomes disorganised,
dissolves. The subject is precipitated into a confrontation with some-
thing which under no circumstances can be confused with the every-
day experience of perception, something we could call an id, and
which we will simply call, so as not lead to confusion, a quod, a what-
is-it? (S.II, 178)
112
It is presumably to this indeterminate id excluded by the ego that

Lacan refers in saying that the action of analysis leads the subject "to
recognise and to name his desire." Yet Lacan does more than empha-
size the indeterminateness of the id; he insists on its radically negative
character. What arises as desire in the movement of discourse cannot
be supposed to preexist in some unconscious dimension. What the
action of the signifier brings to life is something new:
That the subject should come to recognise and to name his desire,
that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn't a question of
recognising something which would be entirely given, ready to be
coapted. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new pres-
ence in the world. (S.II, 228-29)
Desire remains a perennial gap, a missing chapter, an essential
negativity. T h e emergence of desire in the signifying chain is therefore
said to be a "metonymy of the want-to-be [manque a etre]" (E:S, 259).
The lack Lacan associates with the origin of desire outruns all possibil-
ity of representation:
Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being
properly speaking. It isn't the lack of this or that, but lack of being
whereby the being exists.
This lack is beyond anything which can represent it. It is only ever
represented as a reflection on a veil. (5.//, 223)
It is at this point that we must begin to correct and limit the energetic
metaphor that has guided so much of our inquiry and to underline its
status as a mythic construction. We are led to conclude that the power
of language to provide access to desire alienated by the imaginary
derives not from any capacity to generate form out of formlessness,
but rather from the way in which the symbolic function tends to
deconstruct imaginary unities—that is, from the way in which the
symbolic challenges and transforms the structure of the ego itself. In
effect, there is no direct access to the real. Rather, the prime contribu-
tion of the symbolic consists in its power to negate the imaginary. Lacan
thinks of the relation of the symbolic to the real less as a generation of
form in the heart of the formless than as a transmutation of existing
forms. When we attempt to specify the being of the subject and the
source of its desire prior to the effects of the signifier, we are limited to
expressing ourselves in purely negative terms. We can invoke only the
fragmentation of the imaginary, the death of the ego:
113
So when we wish to attain in the subject what was before the serial
articulations of speech, and what is primordial to the birth of symbols,
we find it in death, from which his existence takes on all the meaning
it has. (E:S, 105)
T h e question of the real is situated in the opposition of the symbolic

and the imaginary. T h e real is encountered in the negation of the
imaginary. Far from being merely an ancillary precision, this point
designates what is most distinctive in Lacan's work. The Lacanian
problematic par excellence concerns the dynamic play of image and
signifier.To see it worked out in Lacan's text, we can refer to what J o h n
Muller and William Richardson have called "the most fundamental of
all Lacan's schemata": Schema L.5
Reading "Schema L"
In his seminar on the ego, Lacan introduces Schema L in the follow-

ing form:
(Es) S * N ►- - - * o' other

\ /
\ /
cC « \)
(ego) o O' Other
I will not pretend to exhaust the very rich possibilities for interpreta-
tion afforded by this schema but want only to indicate its bearing on
the problems immediately before us. The schema is formed by the
criss-crossing of two axes, graphically indicating the irremedially con-
flictual character of what it represents. An imaginary vector, o-o\
which links the ego to the objects of its imaginary identifications, is
traversed by a second, symbolic axis, O-S, which represents the com-
ing-into-being of the subject through the agency of the Other in dis-
course. Taken as a whole, the diagram maps the dynamic field in
which the human subject is constituted. It reveals a "combinatory
114
structure" (E:S, 195) in which the "being" of the subject, if we can

provisionally use that expression, is not locatable at any single corner
of the matrix, but is
stretched over the four corners of the schema, namely, S, his ineffa-
ble, stupid existence, o, his objects, o', his ego, that is, that which is
reflected of his form in his objects, and O, the locus from which the
question of his existence may be presented to him. (E:S, 194)
I qualify the expression "being of the subject" as provisional because

what is expressed by Schema L has the structure of a question. That
is to say, the schema is intended to represent not a static being but a
process, a coming-into-being. It is readable in terms of the commentary
Lacan gives on Freud's formula, Wo Es war, soil Ich werden. In fact, the
formula itself can be glimpsed in a collapsed form at the upper left-
hand corner of the diagram—"(Es) S"—standing over the schema as
a master cipher. Lacan elucidates the Freudian epigram as follows:
Wo (Where) Es (the subject—devoid of any das or other objectivating

article) war (was—it is a locus of being that is referred to here, and
that in this locus) soil (must—that is, a duty in the moral sense, as is
confirmed by the single sentence that follows and brings the chapter
to a close) Ich (I, there must I—just as one declared, "this am I,"
before saying, "it is I"), werden (become—that is to say, not occur
(survenir), or even happen (advenir), but emerge (venir aujour) from
this very locus in so far as it is a locus of being. (E:S, 128)
Lacan's Schema L articulates the structured process, tensed by the

interaction of imaginary and symbolic effects, in which the speaking
subject emerges as a question to itself. This questioning is in its essence
a questioning of the ego. Accordingly, the schema implies a certain
priority of the imaginary axis that corresponds to the developmental
ordering suggested by Lacan's conception: the imaginary relation in
which the ego takes shape is laid down first, to be later transformed
by the torsion of the Oedipal triangulation. In the schema itself, this
priority is suggested by the way in which the symbolic relation, as if to
represent its essential incompleteness and problematic character, is
indicated in its upper extension by a dotted line. The initial position
of the schema, designating the formation of the ego in imaginary
identification with an other—"the other which isn't an other at all,
since it is essentially coupled with the ego, in a relation that is always
115
reflexive, interchangeable" (SJI, 321)—might therefore be drawn

simply:
ego o o' other
On this imaginary axis we may indicate the desire of the subject

alienated by the ego by placing the Es in brackets beyond the ego and
outside it6:
(Es)ego o o' other
The contribution of the symbolic function can now be plotted by

opening this axis against itself. What is required is a differentiation of
the desire of the subject from the ego with which it is originally con-
fused. This differentiation is effected in concert with a differentiation
in the other, according to which the specular other of imaginary
identification is distinguished from the Other who speaks, the Other
with a capital "O." Envisaging this process of double differentiation,
we are able to recognize that the shape of the schema inscribes less an
"L" than a "Z." 7 As such, it suggests a possible accordion-like movement
of expansion or collapse. Lacan remarks that the "schema signifies
that the condition of the subject S (neurosis or psychosis) is dependent
on what is being unfolded (ce qui se deroule) in the Other O." (E:S, 193).
We are thus led to propose that the matrix as a whole presents a process
of deroulement, of unfolding or uncoiling—as the French suggests, like
the uncoiling of a snake—in which the imaginary axis o-o' is opened
up to a new dimensionality by the action of the symbolic.
(ego) o 0 (ego) o O' Other
116
The new dimension opened up in the negation of the imaginary

by the symbolic is that of the real. This point can be clarified with
reference to another schema, the so-called Schema R, in which the
field of the real is plotted within the quadrangular configuration of
Schema L.
SCHEMA R:
Like Schema L, this new schema, elaborated by Lacan in his

discussion of psychosis, affords a wealth of significations that extend
beyond the scope of our present purposes. Indeed, even the most
cursory attempt to plumb its meaning will force us to touch on
extremely obscure matters. For the moment, we note only the way
in which the real is depicted in a zone adjacent to the imaginary
axis but distinct from it. The trapezoid described by this zone
coincides with the portion of the symbolic axis that was indicated
in the original schema by a broken line. We may take this coincidence
to indicate, in the first place, the variable character of the real, that
it is liable to greater and lesser access. In Schema R, the field of
the real appears to be bound and stabilized by the imaginary and
the symbolic. It is as if the real, like the volatile reaction of nuclear
fusion, is held in place by the contending forces of the imaginary
and symbolic functions. In a third, related schema, Schema I,
offered by Lacan to represent the dynamics of psychosis in the
Schreber case, we see the same field distorted by the effects of a
foreclosure of the symbolic. The real undergoes a kind of leakage
toward the four corners of the schema, thus indicating the way in
which the real comes to dominate pathologically the experience of
the psychotic in hallucinations and delusional ideas:
117
SCHEMA I e'sjT
(loves his wife)
We may make a further point. The coincidence of the zone of the

real with the broken line of the symbolic vector can be taken to suggest
the episodic, evanescent character of the experience of the real—what
Lacan calls the essentially "pulsative function of the unconscious" (FFC,
43). T h e broken line indicates the way in which the real emerges an
an uncanny eruption in the gaps produced by discourse. It is in such
gaps or breaks in the signifying chain that Lacan locates the uncon-
scious effects explored by Freud in dreams, slips, and symptoms. In
this light the following passage becomes interpretable:
The Freudian unconscious is situated at that point, where, between

cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong. . . .
[W]hat the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which
neurosis recreates a harmony with a real—a real that may well not
be determined.
In this gap, something happens. . . . [W]hat does [Freud] find in
the hole, in the split, in the gap so characteristic of cause? Something
of the order of the non-realized. (FFC, 22)
Returning to Schema L, we can see how the schema expresses the

emergence of the subject in a fashion consonant with Lacan's analysis
of Freud's Wo Es war.. . . T h e analysis we have given enables us to make
better sense of Lacan's claim that "the subject is there to rediscover . . .
the real." T h e schema shows how the movement from the subject's
"ineffable and stupid existence" finds the means in the Other of dis-
118
course to pose itself as a question. This question constitutes a birth of

desire inasmuch as the relation to the Other serves not only to articu-
late the question "What am I there (Where it was)?" but also, "What
do I want?" When Lacan insists that human desire is the desire of the
Other, he means that it is only in and through the Other, to whom I
am linked in a relation of symbolic interchange, that I am able to
announce to myself my own desire:
The question of the Other, which comes back to the subject from the
place from which he expects an oracular reply in some such form as
"Che vuoi?", "What do you want?", is the one that best leads him to
the path of his own desire. (E:S, 312)
Our analysis of Schema L has foregrounded the effect of negation

exercised by the symbolic over the imaginary in a way that returns us
to our theme of the death drive. It enables us to understand in a
preliminary way how the emergence of the speaking subject and the
pursuit of its desire is tied to death. The symbolic function is an
essentially disruptive force, which exerts "a manifestly disturbing in-
fluence in human and interhuman relations" (S.III, 17). What makes
the coming-into-being of the subject a being-towards-death is that it
entails a certain disintegration of the ego. "If this speech received by
the subject didn't exist, this speech which bears on the symbolic level,
there would be no conflict with the imaginary" (S.II, 326). As a presen-
tation of the intersection of imaginary and symbolic axes, Schema L
may thus be taken to map the very structure of primordial masochism.
The schema shows how "the question of his existence bathes the sub-
ject, supports him," but also "invades him, tears him apart even" (E:S,
194):
We cannot understand [the masochistic outcome] without the dimen-

sion of the symbolic. It is located at the juncture between the imagi-
nary and the symbolic. What, in its structuring form, is generally
called primary masochism is located at this juncture. That is also
where one must locate what is usually called the death instinct, which
is constitutive of the position of the human subject (S.I, 172).
The agency of the symbolic order constitutes an agency of death as

it gives to the subject "the law of the acts that will follow him right to
the place where he is not yet" (E:S, 68). The transformative effects of
the symbolic bring about a realization of being:
119
The symbolic order is simultaneously non-being and insisting to be,

that is what Freud has in mind when he talks about the death instinct
as being what is most fundamental—a symbolic order in travail, in
the process of coming, insisting on being realised. . . . This is the
point where we open out into the symbolic order, which isn't the
libidinal order in which the ego is inscribed, along with all the drives.
It tends beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the limits of life, and
that is why Freud identifies it with the death instinct.. . . The symbolic
order is rejected by the libidinal order, which includes the whole of
the domain of the imaginary, including the structure of the ego. And
the death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order. (S.II, 326)
The Agency of the Letter
From the position we have attained, we have provisionally answered

the question posed at the outset about the relation of the symbolic
function to the death drive. It is centered on the conflict between the
symbolic and the imaginary, the way the symbolic effects a negation
of imaginary structures. Only by means of this effect of negation can
the desire of the subject be rendered accessible. It remains for us to
specify how such a negation is possible and to determine its modes of
action. To accomplish this task, it is necessary to explore Lacan's
conception of language with an eye to determining the way in which
the entry of the subject into language introduces structures and func-
tions essentially different from those of the imaginary.
Lacan's understanding of the symbolic function is based on a concep-
tion of language inspired by the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand
de Saussure. As Lacan appropriates it, this conception can be summa-
rized in five main points. The structure of language is:
1. transcendent
2. diacritical
3. comprehensive
4. conventional
5. binary
(1) By the "transcendence" of language I refer to the fact that

language constitutes an organization of codes and meanings shared by
120
the members of a human community over and beyond the individual

speaker. The acquisition of language involves entrance into an already-
established institution. "Language and its structure exist prior to the
moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental develop-
ment makes his entry into it" (E:S, 148). Language is not invented,
nor does it have the character of an instrument that the speaker is free
to manipulate or discard as he wishes. The human being's relation to
language is less like that of a workman to his tools than it is like that
between a fish and the water in which it swims and breathes.
(2) Following Saussure, Lacan conceives language as a diacritical

system. That is to say, language is a structure of internal relations in
which the meaning of each of its signifying elements is determined by
its interconnectedness with the organization of the whole. A rough
idea of the point at stake is gained simply by reflecting on the self-
containedness of a dictionary in which each word is defined in terms
of the other entries in the dictionary. According to Saussure, "language
is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except
the momentary arrangement of its terms." 8 In an analogy to chess,
Saussure proposes that "the respective value of the pieces depends on
their position on the chessboard just as each linguistic term derives its
value from its oppositions to all the other terms." 9
(3) Language is by its very nature comprehensive. This is not to

say that there exists a word in every language specific to every possible
denotation. Particular languages are more and less well-outfitted with
words for specific uses. According to the often-cited example, the
Eskimos have some two dozen terms for snow. The point is rather that
language, as a system of meanings in which each element is dependent
for its signification on other elements in the system, is always capable
of producing new meanings even when a specific word is lacking. To
propose another analogy, language is a system of interconnecting
pathways on the basis of which any point in the topography of the
signified may be reached by more than one route. As Lacan puts this
idea,
no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another

signification: in its extreme form this amounts to the proposition that
there is no language (langue) in existence for which there is any
question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified, it
being an effect of its existence as a language (langue) that it necessarily
answers all needs. {E:S, 150)
121
(4) Lacan insists on the conventional character of language, or, in

the terms of Saussure, on the arbitrariness of the relation between the
linguistic signifier and what it signifies. Saussure defined the linguistic
sign in terms of a sound image, or signifier, bound to a concept, or
signified. He expressed their relationship in the following diagram:
The relation of signifier to signified is called "arbitrary" or "unmoti-

vated" in so far as it is not based (1) on a relation of resemblance (as,
for example, the image on a dollar bill stands for George Washington;
or (2) on a relation of causality (as a footprint indicates that someone
has passed). 10 The arbitrariness of the signifier is demonstrated by the
fact that the same signified may be indicated by completely different
signifiers: "tree," "arbre," "Baum"; "I am going to school," "Je vais au
l'ecole," "Ich gehe in die Schule."
T h e arbitrariness of the link between signifier and signified, which
marks language as a conventional rather than a natural organization
of forms, is closely related to and is in fact interdependent with the
character of language as a diacritical system. Because it constitutes a
system defined in and through itself, the signifying network of lan-
guage can theoretically be posed in its independence from the entirety
of the signified. Saussure was thus led to speak of signifier and signified
as "two floating kingdoms." This analogy of floating kingdoms held
together only by convention suggests the possibility of slippage be-
tween the two realms. "We are forced, then," Lacan claims, "to accept
the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier"
(£:S, 154).
Although the relation of signifier to signified may thus be taken to
be arbitrary, the speaker is not free to use a signifier in a way that fully
ignores its conventional meanings. Precisely because each signifying
element is determined by its relation to all the other elements in
the system, the meanings of particular signifiers are stabilized for a
122
community of speakers. From this point of view, as Emile Benveniste

has remarked, the relation of signifier to signified is not arbitrary but
necessary. 11
(5) Finally, Lacan conceives the most elemental components of

language to be binary in structure. In this respect, he follows the
proposal of Roman Jakobson that all language is analyzable in terms of
twelve pairs of distinct, vocal-physiological oppositions—oppositions
such as voiced-unvoiced, dental-labial, rounded-nonrounded, etc.—
which Jakobson calls "differential features." The building blocks of
language, the phonemes, are composed of "bundles" of differential
features. 12
Along the lines described by these five aspects of language, it is
possible to specify the differential relation of the symbolic and the
imaginary.
In the first place, unlike the effects of the imaginary, the origin of
which is circumscribed within the present experience of an individual
perceiver and which remains coextensive with the ego-identity it forms
and limits, the symbolic system always extends beyond the position of
the perceiving subject both diachronically and synchronically—in the
terms used a moment ago, language is both "transcendent" and "dia-
critical." On the one hand, as a system of shared codes that exists
prior to the individual's entry into it, language offers an inexhaustible
reservoir of forms from which psychic development beyond the infan-
tile ego may draw its guiding clue. The symbolic order is adequate to
provide a rule which "pre-exists the infantile subject and in accordance
with which he will have to structure himself (E:S, 234). On the other
hand, as comprehensive in its power to signify an ever-wider domain of
meanings, language encompasses every form of motive and response.
"This language system, within which our discourse makes its way,"
Lacan remarks, "isn't it something which goes infinitely beyond every
intention that we might put into it, and which, moreover, is only
momentary?" (5./, 54). In this respect, too, language differs from the
effect of the imaginary, which tends toward a fixed and unilinear
structuring of the drives. "When language gets into the act, the drives
tend rather to proliferate, and the question (if anyone were there to
ask it) would instead be how the subject will find any place whatsoever"
(£, 662). Lacan summarizes the all-encompassing character of lan-
guage in these terms:
Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that
they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are
123
going to engender him "by flesh and blood"; so total that they bring
to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of
the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they give the words
that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will
follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and even beyond
his death; and so total that through them his end finds its meaning
in the last judgement, where the Word absolves his being or con-
demns it—unless he attain the subjective bringing to realization of
being-for-death. (E:S, 68)
The opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary may be

related to the fact that language exists before and extends beyond the
subject who speaks, but also to the way that entry into language effects
a certain release from enthrallment with the objects of imaginary
identification. In comparison with the relations of resemblance that
govern the imaginary, the arbitrariness of the linguistic signifier im-
plies a certain negation of the object. "The being of language is the
non-being of objects" (E:S, 263). Lacan links this moment of negation
with the themes of death and desire, claiming that "the symbol mani-
fests itself first of all as the murder of the thing, and this death
constitutes in the subject the eternalization of his desire" (E:S, 104).
Language effects an uncoupling from the imaginary object by virtue
of the fact that the symbolic function is not dual, but triadic. "All dual
relations," Lacan maintains,
are more or less of an imaginary style; and in order for a relation to

take its symbolic value, it is necessary that there be a mediation by a
third person which realizes, by relation to the subject, the transcen-
dent element thanks to which his relation to the object can be sus-
tained at a certain distance.13
This triadic character of the symbolic function is related by Lacan to

the triangularity of the Oedipus Complex, but it is ultimately based
on the nature of the linguistic signifier. The capacity of the linguistic
sign to evoke the signified depends on its imbrication in the whole
system of signifiers. T h e third term introduced between subject and
object is, ultimately, the entire signifying system itself. Of capital im-
portance, therefore, is the way in which the subject, in being freed
from the captures of the imaginary, is thrust into circulation within
the symbolic system.
It is tempting to put the matter thus: drawn out of the bipolar
relation to the object that characterizes the imaginary, the subject
124
enters into the system of language. Yet strictly speaking this formula
is misleading, as it tends to assume an already existing subject who
leaves the imaginary and enters the symbolic. As Lacan thinks of it,
the subject is constituted by the entry into language. The subject is
an effect of the unfolding of the signifying chain. According to his
definition, "a signifier is that which represents the subject for another
signifier" (E:S, 316). What does this mean? What are we talking about
when we refer to the "signifying chain"?
T h e property of language that Lacan refers to in terms of a chaining
of signifiers derives from the fact, simply put, that the meaning of
words is oriented less to the concrete things they may stand for than
to other words that complete and complement them. Meaning in
language is ultimately less a function of any one-to-one correspon-
dence of words to things than it is a function of the ways in which
words follow upon and interpret one another.
The trap we must not let ourselves fall into is to believe that the
signified are objects, things. The signified is something else alto-
gether—it is the signification of which I have explained, thanks to
Saint Augustine who is a linguist just as much as Mr. Benveniste,
that it always refers to the signification, that is to say, to another
signification. (5.///, 42-43)
Signification is a human discourse in so far as it always refers to

another signification. (S.III, 135)
T h e priority emphasized by Lacan of relations between signifiers

over relations to the signified can be schematized as a succession of
signifiers above and separated from the signified by a bar 14 :
Sl-»S2,S3,...Sn
s
This schema graphically represents Lacan's contention that meaning

is a function of the signifying chain itself and cannot be determined
by any one of its elements in isolation, or, as he puts it, "that it is in
the chain of the signifier that the meaning 'insists' but that none of its
elements 'consists' in the signification of which it is at the moment
capable" (E:S9 153).
Although the image of a chain suggests a linear progression (remi-
niscent of the essential linearity Saussure attributed to the linguistic
125
act: one word after another), the signifying chain is by no means one-
dimensional. As Lacan remarks, "there is in effect no signifying chain
that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its
units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended Vertically/
as it were, from that point" (E:S, 154). As polysemic as an orchestral
score is polyphonic, linguistic discourse resonates with a multitude of
meanings, some momentarily more prominent than others, arranged
along different levels of attention and relevance. This polysemy is an
essential feature of discourse and is of interest to psychoanalysis, first,
in grounding the possibility of multiple meaning that Freud called
"overdetermination." "Overdetermination is strictly speaking only
conceivable within the structure of language" (E:S, 271). But, in addi-
tion, the tendency of discourse to evoke a multitude of meanings—
what might be called the essential "extravagance" of speech—estab-
lishes the capacity of language to accommodate unconscious intention-
ality even in the most apparently mundane and innocent banter.
Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life is a veritable encyclopedia of
this phenomenon. Lacan makes this point by insisting that
what this structure of the signifying chain discloses is the possibility

I have, precisely in so far as I have this language in common with
other subjects, that is to say, in so far as it exists as a language, to use
it in order to signify something quite other than what it says. (E:S, 155)
The multiple reverberations of meaning generated within the sym-

bolic system as a whole by the signifying chain brings to light an aspect
of what Lacan calls the "decentering of the subject." The meaning
of the subject's discourse always and essentially outstrips his or her
intention in speaking. Yet the excentricity of the speaking subject to
itself in which Lacan locates the essential import of Freud's discovery
is even more strikingly exhibited by the fact that it is the symbolic
system itself that gives rise to the signifying chain. T h e diachrony of
language is possible only on the basis of the fundamental synchrony
of its internal relations. 15 The unfolding of the chain of discourse is
immanently conditioned by the structure of the symbolic order. T h e
status of the Lacanian subject is thus put at a double remove from any
conception of autonomous and sovereign intentionality. T h e subject
is "strung along" by the unfolding of the signifying chain, 16 but, in
addition, the course of that unfolding is determined in large part by
the network of grammar and syntax, of codes and meanings that
comprise the symbolic order.
Much of what has just been said can be summarized in terms of the
126
examples Lacan provides in his essay on "The Agency of the Letter in

the Unconscious." As we have seen, Saussure diagrams the complex
of the sign by placing a tree-drawing, indicating the concept of "tree,"
over the sound-image, or signifier, "arbor." Lacan reprints the same
diagram in his essay, but inverts it, placing the signifier on top of the
signified to indicate the primacy of the signifier over the signified. He
then offers an example of his own that further emphasizes his distance
from Saussure:
LADIES GENTLEMEN
This Lacanian revision of the definition of the sign not only gives
the signifier priority over the signified, thus "silencing the nominalist
debate by a low blow," but also fundamentally alters the status of the
signified and the relationship of the signifier to it (2s;S, 151). For
Saussure, the signified is a concept, the idea called up by the sound-
image. In Lacan's diagram, what is offered in the place of Saussure's
concept is an indication of the thing itself. The two doors in the
diagram do not indicate two different rooms but a single room under
the influence of two signifiers. Lacan's example thus illustrates how
different modes of signification determine the very being of the thing
signified. And what is this signified? It has assumed the status of the
real. Without the intervention of the signifier, it remains completely
undifferentiated. The signifier functions to realize an order of being
that did not exist before. 17 Further, it is because the signified for Lacan
ultimately occupies the place of the real that the line dividing signifier
and signified in the diagram—the line that indicates an absolutely
intimate connection for Saussure, a connection he compares at one
point to the two sides of a piece of paper—must be recognized as a
bar, a barrier to all signification. At the very heart of the sign there is
a failure of transmission, a lack of any ultimate connection to the
127
signified. There is something in the real that forever escapes the

attempt to signify it.
This conclusion returns us to the point made earlier: there is no
question for Lacan of the real being carved at the joints, as it were, by
the signifier. Rather, the effect of the signifier consists only in the
negation of the imaginary. This, too, is suggested by the "Ladies and
Gentlemen" inasmuch as it is the dynamics of sex difference that is at
stake in it. By means of its imbrication in a system of signification, the
signifier lifts the entire issue of sex difference out of the specular
order in which it is originally registered and renders it available to an
unending slippage of significations.
A final point: we have emphasized that the symbolic introduces a
certain negation of the imaginary, insofar as it severs the specular
relation to the object. But the symbolic negates the imaginary in an-
other and more fundamental sense related to the binary structure of
the linguistic sign. T h e imaginary form is essentially a gestalt unity. By
contrast, the linguistic signifier is structured, not by unity, but by
difference. The "units" of language are not really units at all. The
elements of language, the phonemes and the differential features that
compose them, are in no way monadic entities. Their essential nature
consists in pairings of oppositions. 18 Linguistic cognition is through
and through a recognition of differences, and is such even on the level
of its microstructure. The whole function of the linguistic phoneme
is to register increments of distinction. 19 "All phonemes," Jakobson
emphasizes, "denote nothing but mere OTHERNESS." 20 This means
that for any phonemic element to perform its function, its contrary
must be implicitly given in thought. As Jakobson makes this point,
"the opposed terms are two in number and they are interrelated in a
quite simple way: if one of them is present the mind educes the other.
In an oppositive duality, if one of the terms is given then the other,
though not present, is evoked by thought." 21
T h e significance for the problem of desire of this structural distinc-
tion between imaginary and symbolic effects is that where the imagi-
nary generates a lack, a gap, or absence for which it is unable to
compensate, the symbolic retains within itself the antipode of every
position. "Speech is able to recover the debt that it engenders" (E:S,
144). T h e symbolic bears within itself the capacity to respond to the
alienating effect of the imaginary, which produces a primordial ab-
sence. Thus Lacan suggests that "the human being has a special rela-
tion with his own image—a relation of gap, of alienating tension. That
is where the possibility of the order of presence and absence, that is
128
of the symbolic order, comes in. The tension between the symbolic
and the real is subjacent here" (SJI, 323).
The special power of the symbolic lies in its capacity "to give absence
a name," a capacity that is based on the way in which the binary
structure of language itself functions as a ceaseless alternance of pres-
ence and absence. "Through the word—already a presence made
of absence—absence gives itself a name" (E:S, 65). Every phonemic
opposition, although it becomes effective through the presence of one
feature and the absence of its binary opposite, must be implicitly given
to thought not in its disjunction but in its conjunction. The linguistic
sign operates "in so far as it connotes presence or absence, by introduc-
ing essentially the and that links them, since in connoting presence or
absence, it establishes presence against a background of absence, just
as it constitutes absence in presence" (E:S, 234). The symbolic is distin-
guished from the imaginary by the fact that for every linguistic deter-
mination of meaning an opposite and complementary determination
is always preserved, so to speak, inpotentia. Thus Lacan concludes that
it is not because of some mystery concerning the indestructibility of

certain infantile desires that these laws of the unconscious determine
the analysable symptoms. The imaginary shaping of the subject by
desires more or less fixed or regressed in their relation to the object
is too inadequate and partial to provide the key to it.
The repetitive insistence of these desires in the transference and
their permanent recollection in a signifier that has been taken posses-
sion of by repression, that is to say, in which the repressed element
returns, find their necessary and sufficient reason, if one admits that
the desire of recognition dominates in these determinations the desire
that is to be recognized, by preserving it as such until it is recognized. (E:S,
141, my emphasis)
Acheronta Movebo
Although we have supplied some key points of reference for under-

standing Lacan's concept of the symbolic, we have yet to specify con-
cretely the meaning of his claim that the unconscious is structured like
a language. It is to that task that we will turn in the following chapter.
Nevertheless, on the basis of what we have said so far, it is possible to
draw up some broad conclusions with regard to our central concern
with the death drive and to relate them to the problem of the Freudian
129
unconscious in general. Those conclusions have bearing on the prob-

lem of energetics in psychoanalyisis that has figured so prominently
in this inquiry.
At the outset of this chapter, we noted the basic tension between
Lacan's concern for language and the energetic perspective along
which we sought to establish a first avenue of approach to his work.
This tension between energetics and signification is by no means pecu-
liar to Lacan but may be said to occupy the very center of the theoretical
field opened up by Freud. Perhaps the greatest challenge of Freud's
thought consists in the way it is ambiguously poised at the interface
between the physical and the psychical. The fundamental concerns of
psychoanalysis tend to agitate the boundary between body and mind—
the boundary on which the concept of the unconscious itself is located.
On the one hand, Freud based his metapsychological speculations on
suppositions about the organic sources of desire. The most conspicu-
ous feature of Freud's legacy is its emphasis on sexuality and the
economics of libido. Freud invites us to conceive the unconscious, as
the concept of the id suggests, as a cauldron of seething forces, the
primeval Acheron of the mind, whose black waters underlie and
obscurely influence everything that occurs on the level of conscious-
ness. Psychoanalysis might thus be characterized as first and foremost
an attempt to illuminate the instinctual life of human beings. Freud
himself called the theory of the instincts "the most important but
at the same time the least complete portion of psychoanalytic theory"
(SE, 7:168, n.2). On the other hand, however, the psychoanalyst is
never confronted with the raw force of bodily energies. Although
Wilhelm Reich could jusdy claim Freud as his forebear, Reich's quest
for orgone energy had nothing to do with psychoanalysis. The practice
of analysis, in both its evidence and its agency, relies upon the verbal
exchange between an analyst and patient. Freud's discovery, so aptly
dubbed by one of his patients "the talking cure," is intimately bound
up with the process and structures of speech and language. From this
second angle of view, for which Lacan is often taken to be the major
spokesperson, the unconscious is to be identified with the precisely
articulated processes of symbolization revealed by analysis in the over-
determined structure of dreams, the signifying play of slips and bun-
gled actions, the symbolic architecture of symptoms. How are these
two conceptions of the unconscious to be reconciled? In the extreme,
we may be tempted to speak of two Freuds: on one hand, Freud the
anatomist and neurologist, the author of the Project for a Scientific
Psychology and Three Essays on Sexuality, who pursued a life-long
fascination with the problem of the instinctual drives; on the other
130
hand, Freud the semiologist or even linguist, who so brilliantly teases

apart the complexities ofjokes and verbal slips or deciphers the private
codes of dreams. And how is the problem of the death drive related to
this fundamental ambiguity in the psychoanalytic unconscious? These
questions can be seen to occupy a central place in Paul Ricoeur's
monumental and penetrating study of psychoanalysis, Freud and Phi-
losophy.
Ricoeur takes Freud's dualist sensibility as his guiding motif. For
Ricoeur, psychoanalysis rests on the double foundation of energetics
and hermeneutics. Ricoeur appreciates the necessity of the energetic-
hermeneutic distinction, observing that it is from the simultaneous
pursuit of both economic and interpretive approaches that psycho-
analysis derives much of its fertility as a theory and its power as
a therapeutic modality. "This mixed discourse is the raison d'etre of
psychoanalysis" (FP, 65). Yet Ricoeur also stresses its status as an
epistemological problem. The tension between energetic and herme-
neutic perspectives threatens to imply an incommensurability between
force and meaning. "The most difficult notion of all," he claims, "is
the idea of an 'energy that is transformed into meaning.'. . .For a
philosophical critique, the essential point concerns what I call the place
of that energy discourse. Its place, it seems to me, lies at the intersection
of desire and language" {FP, 395).
In thus defining the problem, Ricoeur indicates the direction of a
solution: there must be a reconciliation between the energetic and
hermeneutic orders, an "intersection of desire and language." This
reconciliation is required not simply to satisfy a logical requirement
imposed on psychoanalysis from outside, but to do justice to what
Ricoeur calls the "implicit teleology" of psychoanalysis. Ricoeur main-
tains that if psychoanalysis unavoidably relies upon a "mixed dis-
course," which implies a disjunction between desire and language, it
must also be recognized that "Freudianism exists only on the basis of
its refusal of that disjunction" (FP, 66). Ricoeur takes as his task "to
overcome the gap between the two orders of discourse and to reach
the point where one sees that the energetics implies a hermeneutics
and the hermeneutics discloses an energetics" (FP, 65). What makes
this project especially challenging is that its objective is not merely to
show the compatibility of desire and language, but also to show how
they are necessarily and inextricably bound up with one another. T h e
greatest significance of Freud's work consists in the discovery that
desire actually comes into being through symbols, that "the positing
or emergence of desire manifests itself in and through a process of
symbolization" (FP, 65). T h e burden then becomes explaining how
131
this emergence of desire occurs. "The difficulty in the Freudian episte-

mology is not only its problem but also its solution" (FP, 66).
Ricoeur comes closest to a solution in his discussion of sublimation.
T h e implicit teleology of psychoanalysis is already located by Freud in
the concept of sublimation. There, if anywhere, it seems we will be
able to map the meeting-place of desire and language. What, then, is
sublimation? As Ricoeur himself acknowledges, his discussion, al-
though immensely suggestive, remains tentative and programmatic.
His treatment of sublimation finally offers less an answer than a better-
articulated statement of the question.The problem of sublimation
presents particular difficulties, in part because Freud said relatively
little about it. Around certain key notions there remains an "unspoken
factor" in Freud's doctrine. "The empty concept of sublimation," Ri-
coeur suggests, "is the final symbol of this unspoken factor" (FP, 492).
But there is a deeper reason why the problem of sublimation refuses
to yield its secret, for its solution is dependent on the solution of a
prior problem: that of the genesis and function of the superego. It is
only through the activity of the superego that sublimation becomes
possible at all. "The whole economy of the superego," Ricoeur ob-
serves, "is reflected in the concept of sublimation" (FP, 489).
T h e link between sublimation and the function of the superego,
present in Freud but never fully worked out, might seem to make
things even more mysterious. Far from making possible an emergence
of desire, the superego is often taken to be the agency of repression
par excellence. But the plot thickens yet again. Associated with the
superego, the problem of sublimation is referred to the topography
of superego, ego, and id, and to the master key of Freud's entire
experience, the drama of the Oedipus Complex—topics for which
there is no shortage of Freudian texts, yet for which a coherent account
of the plan of the whole is still lacking. Why? On this point, the result
of Ricoeur's inquiry is especially intriguing for the problematic we
have been pursuing. The nature of the superego remains a mystery
so long as its relations with the death drive, the enigmatic climax of
Freud's mature theory, remain unclarified. It is not without reason,
therefore, that the first half of Ricoeur's book, his "Reading of Freud,"
culminates with a discussion of the death drive and the "destructive-
ness" of the superego. "We must indeed admit," he remarks, "that the
theory of the superego remains incomplete as long as we have not
understood its 'deathly' component" (FP, 229).
For Ricoeur, what begins as an inquiry into the unresolved dualism
of energetics and hermeneutics in Freud's theory ends up in an appeal
to sublimation, but only by way of the twin problems of conscience
132
and death. How, then, does Ricoeur understand the death drive? At
every point, his treatment of it raises the possibility of a fundamental
reinterpretation. Ricoeur recalls the child's Fort-Da game, in which
Freud discerned a first adumbration of a force "beyond the pleasure
principle," and proposes that the primitive vocalizations of the child
bereft of its mother somehow represent the very essence of the death
drive. "What is surprising is that the death instinct is represented by
such an important function which has nothing to do with destruction,
but rather with the symbolization of play, with esthetic creation, and
with reality-testing itself (FP, 317). Ricoeur proposes that "the death
instinct, which is finally regarded as anticultural destructiveness, may
conceal another possible meaning. . . . [D]o we not discover another
aspect of the death instinct, a nonpathological aspect, which would
consist in one's mastery over the negative, over absence and loss? And
is not this negativity implied in every appeal to symbols and to play?"
(FP, 314). He is then led to ask: "Are we not invited thereby to reinter-
pret the death instinct and relate it to the negativity through which
desire is educated and humanized? Is there not a profound unity
between the death instinct, the mourning of desire, and the transition
to symbols?" {FP, 482).
Certainly, this brief catalog of passages from Ricoeur yields only the
barest glimpse of the reinterpretation of the death drive that he calls
for. But it may at least be said that it leaves no doubt that Ricoeur finds
in the problem of the death drive a privileged, if perhaps unexpected,
opportunity to address his central problematic. His inquiry suggests
that the "unspoken factor" in Freud's thought, the key for explaining
sublimation and for resolving the aporia about the linkage of desire
and language, is the death drive itself. It is all the more remarkable,
then, that the question Ricoeur poses about the "profound unity be-
tween the death instinct, the mourning of desire, and the transition to
symbols" is left unanswered. This very suggestive passage is, quite
literally, his last word on the matter. In the remaining seventy pages
of his book, the death drive is mentioned only once, and in passing.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Ricoeur very masterfully
works his way toward the framing of a question about the relation of
language, desire, and death in psychoanalysis that is as important and
fascinating as it is unusual, only to let it drop once he has succeeded
in raising it.
The guiding clue for pursuing Ricoeur's question is to be found in
an "unspoken factor" of his own text. Despite the curious paucity of
references to Lacan, it is impossible to mistake the influence of Lacan
on Ricoeur's work; indeed, Ricoeur's book is in large part a veiled
133
challenge to Lacan's teaching. In particular, Ricoeur criticizes Lacan

for failing to do justice to the energetic side of Freud. "The linguistic
conception of the unconscious . . . makes sense only in conjunction
with the economic concepts of Freudian theory; instead of replacing
the Freudian topographical and economic point of view, it parallels
that point of view in every respect" (FP, 395-96).
In the course of this essay, I have tried to show that Ricoeur's
criticism of Lacan is unwarranted, or at least that his claim that "the
linguistic conception of the unconscious . . . instead of replacing the
topographical and economic view, parallels it in every respect," is
less a criticism of Lacan's perspective than a description of it. Lacan
variously supplies support for both views of the unconscious, energetic
and symbolic. At times, Lacan evokes the unconscious as an utterly
indefinite substance, linking it with the indeterminate domain of the
real, and designating it by a variety of mythical tropes. He will claim,
for example, that for the "subject of the unconscious... to be rigorous,
it, like Jehovah, should be neither represented, nor named" (5.//, 62).
Such a characterization recalls the image of the Freudian id, rooted in
the mute exigencies of an organic substratum, a substance jouissante,
the very juice, so to speak, of the body. At other times, and doubtless
more consonant with most accounts of his innovation, Lacan insists on
the linguistically structured character of the unconscious. In fact, he
will go so far as to claim, against the views of his students Laplanche
and Leclaire, that without language there is no such thing as the
unconscious. 22 We are thus faced with a basic ambiguity in Lacan's
treatment of the unconscious—an ambiguity that is unmistakable in
the following passage:
On the one hand, the unconscious is, as I have just defined it, some-
thing negative, something ideally inaccessible. On the other hand, it
is something quasi-real. Finally, it is something which will be realised
in the symbolic, or, more precisely, something which, thanks to the
symbolic progress which takes place in analysis, will have been. (5./,
158)
T h e ambiguous character of the unconscious evidenced by this

passage is to be related, as the wording of the passage indicates, to the
duality of the real and the symbolic. T h e unconscious is both some-
thing ideally inaccessible, something quasi-real, yet it is also realized
by the symbolic. In this distinction between the real and symbolic
aspects of the unconscious, Lacan expresses Ricoeur's duality of ener-
getics and hermeneutics. For Lacan, however, there is a third term in
134
relation to which the real and the symbolic are brought into dynamic
interchange. In our analysis of Schema L, we have seen how the two
sides of this ambiguity meet in relation to the imaginary. Even by itself,
the function of the imaginary is almost unintelligible apart from a
double reference to energy and representation, force and form. T h e
imaginary fixes the primitive libidinal drives in relation to perceptual
registrations. Earlier we underlined this point by associating the imagi-
nary with Freud's concept of "instinctual representative," a concept
that embodies in itself the duality of force and form. Yet the conjunc-
tion of energy and structure effected by the imaginary is essentially
problematic. T h e imaginary establishes the defensive structure of the
personality and lays down the initial contours along which objects in
the world can be stably and predictably experienced. T h e imaginary
is revealed as the foundation for the twofold system of the pleasure
and reality principles. This imaginary structuration is established only
at the price of an alienation of the subject from itself. T h e "reality
system, however far it is elaborated, leaves an essential part of what
belongs to the real a prisoner in the toils of the pleasure principle"
(FFC9 55). When the imaginary is brought under the influence of the
symbolic, the effect is both to transform existing structures and to
release hitherto inaccessible potentialities of desire. The symbolic func-
tion wins access to the real indirectly by means of the effect of negation
it exercises over the imaginary. In contrast to the homeostatic tendency
of the imaginary, the symbolic introduces difference and discontinuity.
"Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious
first appears to us as a phenomenon" (FFC, 25). Such discontinuity
produces a certain fragmentation of the imaginary, in the gaps of
which something of the real emerges as surprise:
Impediment, failure, split. In a spoken or written sentence some-

thing stumbles. Freud is attracted by these phenomena, and it is there
that he seeks the unconscious. There, something other demands to
be realized—which appears as intentional, of course, but of a strange
temporality. What occurs, what is produced in this gap, is presented
as the discovery. It is in this way that the Freudian exploration first
encounters what occurs in the unconscious.
This discovery is, at the same time, a solution—not necessarily a
complete one, but, however incomplete it may be, it has that indefin-
able something that touches us, that peculiar accent . . . namely,
surprise, by which the subject feels himself overcome, by which he
finds both more and less than he expected—but, in any case, it is, in
relation to what he expected, of exceptional value. (FFC, 25)
135
Filling out this schema of interrelation between the three registers,

it is possible to see how and why Lacan characterizes the dynamics of
the imaginary, real, and symbolic in terms of the three interlocking
rings of a Borromean knot. Only insofar as the three registers act
upon one another are the effects of the unconscious produced. So,
too, clarifying this interrelation enables us to complete the basic outline
of Lacan's account of the death drive, satisfying the anticipation set
out in the first chapter that the death drive is to be variously related
to all three of the Lacanian categories. The death drive may be said
to involve the emergence of the real in the disintegration of the imagi-
nary—a disintegration that is effected by the agency of the symbolic.
In accordance with this formula, we can complete the mapping of
the Lacanian categories in relation to the concepts of binding and
unbinding that informed Freud's theory of the life and death drives.
T h e function of the imaginary grounds the process of binding insofar
as it tends toward the establishment of unities characteristic of the
Gestalt. T h e effects of unbinding, associated by Freud with the trauma,
are to be attributed in the first place to the real. Thus Lacan remarks
that "at the origin of the analytic experience, the real . . . presented
itself in the form of that which is unassimilable it is—in the form of
the trauma." (FFC, 55). However, although it is tied to the real, the
unbinding of imaginary structures is brought about by the intervention
of the symbolic. T h e power of the symbolic to actualize the process of
unbinding stems from the fact that linguistic signification is structured
not by unity but by difference and opposition. It is for this reason,
then, that Lacan claims that "the signifier—you perhaps begin to
understand—materializes the agency of death." 23 From a Lacanian
perspective, the Freudian death drive, as a drive toward difference
over unity, fragmentation over wholeness, heterogeneity over any
principle of sameness, is identifiable with a drive to signification.24
"Life is only caught u p in the symbolic piece-meal (morcelee), decom-
posed. The human being himself is in part outside life, he partakes of
the death instinct" (S.II, 90).
With this conclusion, we are able to resolve Ricoeur's dilemma about
the energetic-hermeneutic duality in psychoanalysis. Energetics, as an
aspect of the real, is accessible in the action of psychoanalysis as a
function of the relation between imaginary and symbolic structures.
The energy of the real emerges in the very heart of psychoanalytic
hermeneutics insofar as that hermeneutics involves a realignment of
imaginary forms under the influence of the symbolic. At the same time,
we arrive at the answer to our original question about the enigmatic
conjunction of desire, language, and death in Lacan's thought. Under-
136
stood as an emergence of the real in the dynamism of the imaginary

and the symbolic, the death drive becomes the very engine by which
the intersection of desire and language is effected in the coming-to-
be of the subject. In the activity of the death drive, the unrealized
potentialities of the subject, the subject's question "What am I there
(where it was)?" emerges beyond the imaginary in the metonymy of
the signifier. We are able to see further why Lacan takes the death
drive to be "the culminating point of Freud's doctrine." As we have
interpreted it, the death drive emerges as the master concept around
which the entire Freudian metapsychology can be unified and inte-
grated. T h e action of the death drive becomes virtually consubstantial
with the effects of the unconscious. The Freudian Acheron, like the
mythical river of Hades, flows along the boundary separating life and
death.
In the following chapter, we will try to articulate these conclusions
more precisely in relation to the Freudian topography of ego, id, and
superego. On the basis of that analysis, it will be possible to venture
some remarks on the relation of the death drive to sublimation—a
problematic that is located, as Ricoeur suggests, at the furthest horizon
of the Freudian discovery.
137
6
The Formations of the Unconscious

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another.
—Shakespeare, Sonnet III
In this chapter, we set our sights on clarifying the relations of the

death drive with sublimation, thus committing ourselves to an itinerary
that will take us beyond the conclusions explicitly laid down by Freud.
It is a problem for which Freud's text provides only fragmentary,
tentative, and ambiguous clues. In view of this lack of direction by
Freud, but also in consideration of the importance and complexity of
the questions involved, we must cautiously limit our expectations from
the start. Our aim will not be to provide an exhaustive account of the
process of sublimation, either in its Freudian or Lacanian incarnations,
but only to indicate some general and suggestive correspondences in
relation to the theme of the death drive. Even to approach the question
of sublimation, however, it will be necessary to traverse a twofold
series of preliminary problematics: on the one hand, the theory of
the Oedipus and castration complexes; on the other, the nature and
function of the superego. As we will see, they are problematics very
significantly illuminated by a Lacanian perspective. Indeed, whatever
contribution we can make in these domains will provide a measure of
the fruitfulness of the Lacanian innovations we have been following.
In introducing Lacan's concept of the symbolic, we have stressed
the conflict between the symbolic and the imaginary, suggesting how
linguistic signification implies a certain deconstruction of imaginary
formations. As we move toward the question of sublimation it will be
necessary to shift this focus on the negative effects of the symbolic
function toward an understanding of its positive contribution. In the
dialectical play between these twofold effects, negative and positive,
we will trace the emergence of what Lacan calls the "formations of the
unconscious." They constitute what might otherwise be called the
"thematics" of psychoanalytic interpretation, centered on the Oedipus
139
Formations of the Unconscious
wrote in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, "is the reaction to danger"

(SE, 20:150). "But what," he went on to ask, "is a 'danger'?" If the
prototypical situation of anxiety is to be found in the experience of
birth and the helplessness of the newborn baby, it remained unclear
by what means danger becomes psychically effective. As Freud put it:
In the act of birth there is a real danger to life. We know what this
means objectively; but in a psychological sense it says nothing at all
to us. The danger of birth has as yet no psychical content. We cannot
possibly suppose that the foetus has any sort of knowledge that there
is a possibility of its life being destroyed. It can only be aware of some
vast disturbance in the economy of its narcissistic libido. Large sums
of excitation crowd in on it, giving rise to new kinds of feelings of
unpleasure. (SE, 20:135)
Linking anxiety to the perception of danger enabled Freud to draw

a parallel between the experiences of anxiety and fear. The difference
between the two is to be related to the presence or absence of a specific
object. "Anxiety has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In
precise speech, we use the word Tear' [Furcht] rather than 'anxiety'
[AwgsJ] if it has found an object" (SE, 20:105). But, in addition to its
indefiniteness with regard to an object, the danger that calls forth
anxiety is related less to a threatening external situation than to an
overflow of internal excitations. It was this economic consideration
that dominated Freud's final version of the theory. T h e significant
factor in anxiety is "the economic disturbance caused by an accumula-
tion of amounts of stimulation which require to be disposed of. It
is this factor, then, which is the real essence of the 'danger.' " (SE,
20:137).
Although James Strachey has emphasized the way in which this
new conception overturned Freud's long-held theory of anxiety as
repressed libido, in another sense it renewed an old idea present in
the Project for a Scientific Psychology.l As we saw earlier, the Project posits
the mastery of excitation as the aim of the psychic apparatus. Excessive
stimulation is the primary danger to the psychic system and especially
so when the source of the stimulus lies within the organism itself,
making physical withdrawal from the stimulus impossible. It was as a
defense against the onslaught of such unchecked "endogenous stim-
uli" that Freud first posed in a systematic way the notion of the ego. T h e
idea that anxiety expresses the danger to the ego of an unmanageable
economic disturbance was therefore a direct inheritance from a con-
ception that Freud developed very early in his experience.
142
Lacan's view of anxiety builds on the Freudian account in a way that

unifies and integrates Freud's various formulations. Like Freud, Lacan
links anxiety to the vulnerability and internal discord experienced by
the infant during the first months of life. The prototype of anxiety
appears in the suffocation of birth, the cold, linked to the nudity of

the skin, and the labyrinthine malaise which is allayed by the satisfac-
tion of rocking, organizing by their triad the painful tone of organic
life which, for the best observers, dominates the first six months of
human life. These primordial afflictions all have the same cause: an
insufficient adaptation to the rupture of the conditions of environ-
ment and of nutrition which ground the parasitic equilibrium of
intra-uterine life.2
Lacan and Freud are in agreement, too, that it is the integrity of the
ego that is threatened in anxiety. "The ego," as Freud put it, "is the
actual seat of anxiety" (SE, 20:93). Insofar as the imaginary formation
of the ego serves to deliver the infant from its original chaos and
helplessness, the structure of the ego itself becomes the primary bul-
wark against anxiety. Yet anxiety remains an ever-present possibility
to the extent that the ego is vulnerable to disintegration. The very
possibility of anxiety testifies to the fact that the formation of the ego
does not fully quell the infant's internal chaos. Lacan maintains that
the structure of the primitive ego, "this illusion of unity, in which a
human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a con-
stant danger of slipping back into the chaos from which he started; it
hangs over the abyss of a dizzy Assent in which one can perhaps see
the very essence of Anxiety." 3
Lacan's view of anxiety as a breakdown of the imaginary form of
the ego serves to clarify a number of problematic points in Freud's
account. In particular, it specifies the meaning of the danger to the
ego signaled by anxiety. Freud clearly found it difficult to determine
the nature of the danger. In The Ego and the Id he remarked that "what
it is that the ego fears from the external and from the libidinal danger
cannot be specified; we know that the fear is of being overwhelmed
or annihilated; but it cannot be grasped analytically" (SE, 19:57). For
Lacan, the danger is readily interpretable in terms of an explanation
of the unity of the ego that is lacking in Freud. 4 Inasmuch as it is
formed on the basis of a unifying perceptual Gestalt, the ego is liable
to anxiety in fantasies of the fragmented body, or corps morcele. This
idea might readily be extended to give new meaning to the opposition
143
Formations of the Unco?iscious
Complex, its conditions and derivatives. As such, the formations of

the unconscious serve to explain the appearance of certain privileged
fantasies encountered by analytic work. In addition to the family dy-
namics of the Oedipus Complex and in fact underlying those dynam-
ics, the formations of the unconscious concern the role of the body
image and parts of the body in the formation of character, sexual
identity, and various pathological conditions. Of prime importance is
the role of the phallus. For Lacan, "the phallus is the privileged signi-
fier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent
of desire" (E:S, 287). Centered on the function of the phallus, the
formations of the unconscious are thus to be related above all to the
function of castration. From a Lacanian point of view, the castration
complex remains an essential point of reference for psychoanalytic
theory and its reinterpretation constitutes one of Lacan's most impor-
tant contributions. If the drama of Oedipus is the guiding myth of
psychoanalysis, Lacan contends, "what is not a myth, and which Freud
nevertheless formulated soon after the Oedipus Complex, is the castra-
tion complex" (E:S, 318). "It is castration that governs desire, whether
in the normal or the abnormal" (E:S, 323). What, then, does Lacan
understand by castration? T o move forward toward an answer, let us
begin with the basics: castration is an expression of anxiety. Before
undertaking a discussion of castration it is helpful to review Freud's
formulations on the problem of anxiety in general and to assess Lacan's
treatment of it.
On the Psychoanalytic Theory of Anxiety
Freud's thinking on the problem of anxiety can be roughly divided

into two main periods. In the first period, beginning in the 1890s
with his research on hysteria and continuing into the 1920s, Freud
identified anxiety with the energy of repressed libido. In this view,
anxiety was taken to be an alternative mode of release for instinctual
energies denied expression by the secondary agencies of the psychic
apparatus. Refused discharge along preferred pathways, energies sub-
ject to repression undergo a transformation and are experienced in
characteristic somatic reactions: shortness of breath, weakness, sweat-
ing, shaking, dizziness, etc. Thus, in a draft from 1894, Freud associ-
ated the genesis of anxiety with sexual abstinence or coitus interruptus
and asserted that "anxiety has arisen by transformation out of the accu-
mulated sexual tension" (SE, 1:191). "What finds discharge in the
generating of anxiety," he later commented, "is precisely the surplus
140
of unutilized libido" (SE, 20:141). "One of the most important results

of psychoanalytic research," he concluded, "is the discovery that neu-
rotic anxiety arises out of libido, that it is a transformation of it, and
that it is thus related to it in the same kind of way as vinegar to wine"
(SE, 7:224).
The "wine into vinegar" theory remained a central part of Freud's
explanation of hysteria and of his view of mental functioning in gen-
eral until the 1920s, when it finally collapsed under the weight of a
number of difficulties. Primary among them was the case of phobic
anxiety, for which the onset of anxiety could not readily be traced to
a repression. In fact, the example of phobia seemed to demand pre-
cisely the inverse of Freud's earlier view: in phobia "it was anxiety
which produced repression and not, as I formally believed, repression
which produced anxiety" (SE, 20:109). In regard to phobias, "it is
always the ego's attitude of anxiety which is the primary thing and
which sets repression going. Anxiety never arises from repressed li-
bido" (SE, 20:109).
The example of phobia suggested that the phenomenon of anxiety
represents a more fundamental feature of mental life than Freud's
early theory had indicated. In his early account of anxiety as trans-
formed libido, anxiety was thought to be a consequence of repression
and, more specifically, of neurotic repression, the prime agency of
which Freud came to identify with the superego. But this approach
failed to account for the very striking occurrence of anxiety in infancy,
prior to the formation of the superego. "There is a danger," he wrote
in his 1926 monograph on Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, "of our
overestimating the part played in repression by the super-ego. . . .
[T]he earliest outbreaks of anxiety occur before the super-ego has
become differentiated" (SE, 20:94). In fact, it seemed possible to locate
the prototype of anxiety in the situation of the infant at birth. "In man
and the higher animals it would seem that the act of birth, as the
individual's first experience of anxiety, has given the affect of anxiety
certain characteristic forms of expression" (SE, 20:93). Freud further
suggested that it is not simply birth but the prematurity of birth that
predisposes the human being to anxiety. He maintained that "the long
period of time during which the young of the human species is in a
condition of helplessness and dependence . . . establishes the earliest
situation of danger" (SE, 20:154-155).
The idea that anxiety might be the cause of repression and not the
other way around, along with the fact that infantile anxiety could not
always be attributed to the activity of the superego, led Freud to
identify anxiety with a signal of "danger" to the ego. "Anxiety," he
141
between "ego syntonics" cognition versus those that are dissonant with
the ego's imaginary homogeneity.
Lacan's conception of the ego as imaginary better explains its endan-
germent in fantasmatic disintegration, but also clarifies the economic
situation of the ego in a way that reveals the unity of Freud's two
formulations about anxiety as repressed libido and as danger to the
ego. T h e ego as Lacan conceives it functions to inform the libidinal
drives only at the cost of refusing some portion of the heterogeneity
of organismic impulses—that quantity of alienated desire attributable
to the real. Lacan's account thus makes it clear how and why anxiety
is possible prior to the formation of the superego by locating the origin
of anxiety in a form of repression more primitive than that at the
disposal of the superego. The propensity to anxiety does not depend
on the existence of an agency superior to the ego, but represents
the price paid for the institution of the ego itself. From a Lacanian
perspective, the most constant and elemental form of danger faced by
the ego stems not from its relations with the superego nor with the
external world, but from the reassertion of the real refused by its
imaginary unity. Anxiety is the felt encounter with the real, the experi-
ence of a traumatizing economic overload. Jean Laplanche has charac-
terized anxiety in very similar terms: "Anxiety would be precisely what
comes closest to a kind of pure quantitative manifestation; it is, we
might say, an affect without quality; an affect in which nothing remains
but the quantitative aspect." 5 A similar view is suggested by Lacan's
mythic lamelle, the menacing reassertion of which is evoked in the
image of a suffocating, amoeboid stuff which may slip over one's
face while one is sleeping. This outlandish lamelle, said by Lacan to
represent the "libido qua pure life instinct, life that has need of no
organ," is intrinsically anxiety-producing; its very indeterminacy
threatens the stability and integrity of the ego. Stressing the conflict
between the structure of the ego and the potentially anxiety-producing
force of desire that it excludes enables Lacan to suggest that the ego
not only finds its own interests served by the formation of symptoms
that protect it from anxiety, the ego itself functions as a symptom. 6
"The ego is structured exactly like a symptom. At the heart of the
subject, it is only a privileged symptom, the human symptom par
excellence, the mental illness of man" (S.I, 16).
Finally, the Lacanian view opens the way to integrating Freud's life-
long concern for the problem of anxiety with his hypothesis of the
death drive. As a signal of danger to the ego, anxiety can be said to
constitute a response to the effects of psychical unbinding that figure
so prominently in his characterization of the death drive. As Serge
144
Leclaire has remarked, "If it is difficult to conceptually grasp the death

drive, at least we have in anxiety the experience of being grasped by
its force." 7 From this perspective, what Freud called a death instinct
may be taken to represent a fundamental predisposition to anxiety.
Freud never made this connection explicit, even in his lecture on
"Anxiety and Instinctual Life," where he puts summary discussions of
anxiety and the theory of the dual instincts back to back. Yet the link
between anxiety and the death drive should hardly be surprising. It
represents a return to the key notion of repetition of the trauma that
first put Freud on the track of the death drive.
Understanding Castration: First Approach 8
The preceding discussion of the nature of anxiety in general pro-

vides a valuable preparation for understanding Lacan's treatment of
castration. Freud and Lacan agree that the Oedipal crisis, for which
castration is the pivotal issue, is precipitated by an intensification of
the child's sexual strivings toward its parents, along with a shift in the
aims of those strivings from an oral or anal to a genital orientation.
Such a blossoming of instinctual impulses, for reasons we have just
seen, tends to generate anxiety as it brings to bear on the infantile ego
the force of psychically unmastered impulses. Freud describes the
anxiety of Little Hans, his paradigm case of castration anxiety, in
similar terms. According to Freud, "the boy felt anxiety in the face of
a demand by his libido—in this case, anxiety at being in love with his
mother; so the case was in fact one of neurotic anxiety" (SE, 22:86).
"What he is afraid of is evidently his own libido" (SE, 22:84).
The key questions remain, first, why Oedipal anxiety emerges in the
form of a fear of castration; and second, how and why this particular
manifestation of anxiety constitutes such a privileged moment in the
radical crisis of psychological transformation located by Freud in the
Oedipus Complex.
Freud's view of castration is decisively influenced by his tendency to
emphasize the paternal threat over the libidinal danger. He tends to
shift the issue from neurotic to realistic anxiety. He thus qualifies the
description of little Hans quoted above by insisting that
this being in love only appeared to him as an internal danger which

he must avoid by renouncing the object, because it conjured up an
external situation of danger . . . [an] internal instinctual danger
[turns] out to be a determinant and preparation for an external, real,
situation of danger. (SE, 22:86)
145
This external danger is the father's threat of castration. As Freud

explains in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, "an instinctual demand is,
after all, not dangerous in itself; it only becomes so inasmuch as it
entails a real external danger, the danger of castration" (SE, 20:126).
T h e theoretical advantage of emphasizing the role of the paternal
threat was presumably in explaining how and why Oedipal anxiety
emerges specifically as an anxiety about castration. Yet this approach
runs into difficulties, as Freud himself recognized, as it fails to account
for the ubiquity of castration fears, even in instances where a real
threat, pronounced by the father or by some other caretaker, is absent.
Freud attempted to resolve this difficulty by assuming an innate predis-
position to the fear of castration based upon a phylogenetic inheritance
from a primeval time in which castration was actually carried out. 9
Assuming the existence of such a predisposition, fears of castration
might arise even without any actual threat being made.
T h e upshot of Lacan's interpretation is to return to the internal
determinants of castration anxiety. He rejetts Freud's phylogenetic
construction and also his emphasis on the role of the paternal threat.
Lacan refers to castration as a "radical function for which a more
primitive stage in the development of psychoanalysis found more
accidental (educative) causes" (E:S, 320). T h e main lines of Lacan's
approach to castration parallel his treatment of anxiety in general. As
a form of anxiety, castration signals a threat to the integrity of the
imaginary ego. What sets this challenge to the ego in motion is an
upsurge of libidinal energies that are foreign to its organization. T h e
origin of Oedipal anxiety is the force of emergent sexuality, for which
the infantile ego lacks adequate means of symbolization and discharge.
It becomes possible, therefore, to speak of two moments of libido, the
first associated with investment in the formative imagoes of the mirror
phase, and a second that, although it emerges in the course of a
natural development, challenges the limits of the initial imaginary
organization:
The libido which is related to the genital object is not on the same
level as the primitive libido, whose object is the subject's own image.
That is a crucial phenomenon. . . .
If the primitive libido is relative to prematuration, the nature of

the second libido is different. It goes beyond, it responds to an initial
maturation of desire, if not of organic development. . . . Here there
is a complete change of level in the relation of the human being to
the image, to the other. It is the pivotal point of what is called
146
maturation, upon which the entire Oedipal drama turns. It is the

instinctual correlative of what, in Oedipus, takes place on the situa-
tional plane. (5./, 180)
Lacan's emphasis on the imaginary organization of the ego enables

us to move beyond the impasses of Freud's treatment of castration and
to respond to a number of key questions.
(1) It becomes possible to say why Oedipal anxiety tends to assume

the form of fantasies of dismemberment. As a specialized form of
dismemberment, castration is a representative of the corps morcele of
prematurity over and against which the imaginary unity of the ego
claimed its rights. 10 From a Lacanian perspective, therefore, the hu-
man child is predisposed to fantasies of dismemberment, even in the
absence of any parental threat and without any contribution of a
phylogenetic inheritance, inasmuch as the organization of the infantile
ego has taken shape in relation to an image of bodily wholeness.
Indeed, it is striking to observe how children three to six years-old
relish tearing off dolls' heads and limbs, how they gleefully threaten
to pluck out the eyes and bite off the fingers of caretakers and peers,
or how they squirm with giddy but delighted fascination at fairy-tale
scenes of violence. This underlying predisposition, which amounts to
a readiness, even a desire to imagine the violation of the body, is
activated for reasons that are now familiar. The imaginary form of
the ego tends to become the target of a destructive impulse to the
extent that it excludes or alienates the subject from the unfolding of
its own desire. What predisposes the subject toward the "phantasy of
decrepitude" offered by castration is the portion of libido that "re-
mains preserved from immersion" in identification with the imaginary
object. Thus Lacan suggests:
The imaginary function is that which Freud formulated to govern

the investment of the object as narcissistic object. It was to this point
that I returned myself when I showed that the specular image is the
channel taken by the transfusion of the body's libido towards the
object. But even though part of it remains preserved from this immer-
sion, concentrating within it the most intimate aspect of auto-erotism,
its position at the "tip" of the form predisposes it to the phantasy of
decrepitude in which is completed its exclusion from the specular
image and from the prototype that it constitutes for the world of
objects.11
147
(2) If the Oedipal crisis tends to produce fears of dismemberment

in general, how and why does it emerge in concern for a particular
organ? Lacan gives an answer by focusing on the function of the penis
as a sacrifice.12 T h e anxiety of castration is, in effect, a specialization
of and a defense against a more general anxiety. Like certain species
of lizard whose tail drops off in the jaws of a would-be predator,
castration in its literal meaning as a loss of the penis functions to save
the whole by giving up one of its parts. 13 Understood in this way, what
is at stake in castration is not only anxiety but a transition from anxiety
to fear—a transition, that is, in which an indeterminate restlessness
caused by the upsurge of somatic energies lacking psychic representa-
tion becomes specified by being attached to a definite content. It is a
shift remarked by Freud in the case of little Hans. "Hans' anxiety,. . ."
he pointed out, "was, like every infantile anxiety, without an object to
begin with: it was still anxiety and not yet fear" {SE, 10:25).
(3) Why the penis? We have noted the connection Lacan finds
between the upsurge of anxiety and fantasies of bodily dismember-
ment, but what privileges the idea of castration in particular? For the
little boy, the penis is at once a primary seat of pleasure and is well-
suited to express the child's emerging sense of power over his own
bodily functions and over objects in the environment by its capacity to
project the flow of urine. Of far greater importance for children of
both sexes, however, is the way that the central elements of the Oedipal
situation are brought together and embodied by the penis.The penis
is the distinguishing mark of the father and symbolizes the desire of
the mother. At this point, a crucial feature of Lacan's revised outlook
shows itself. Where Freud focused on the way the child's desire for
the mother is interdicted by the father, Lacan reconceives the nature
of desire along Hegelian lines, emphasizing that it is not the other qua
object that is desired, but rather the other as him- or herself desiring.
Human desire is essentially desire of the other's desire. For Lacan,
then, the key issue in the Oedipus Complex is not the availability of
the mother to the desire of the child but the position of the child in
relation to the desire of the mother. The narcissism of the pre-Oedipal
period is centered on the child's desire to be the privileged object of
the mother's desire—that is, to offer himself as what is lacking to the
mother. "If the desire of the mother is the phallus," Lacan contends,
"the child wishes to be the phallus in order to satisfy that desire" (E:S,
289). T h e specter of the phallus thus arises in the child's imagination
not because a part of his body is threatened by the father but because
148
the phallus is taken to signify the mother's desire. Prior to the Oedipal
stage, the child longs to be the phallus of the mother.
(4) Just as Lacan rereads the drama of desire in the Oedipus

complex in terms of the mother's desire for the phallus, so, too, he
reinterprets and radicalizes the meaning of the loss of the phallus.La-
can reveals how castration involves coming to terms with what one is
not, with what one does not have, with what one cannot be. The
relation of castration to loss, limit, and, ultimately, to the recognition
of finitude can be glimpsed in the interpersonal triangle of the Oedipus
Complex just discussed. The child loses its privileged position as the
be-all and end-all of the mother's desire with the dawning realization
that her desire gravitates toward a third object: the father. Around
the inevitability of this loss proliferate the terrors of separation anxiety.
But the link between castration and loss ultimately derives from the
nature of desire itself insofar as desire is occluded by the imaginary.
Lacan sharpens and deepens Freud's insight that the love object is
essentially a lost object, indeed, a lost object that was never possessed.
Human desire turns around a fundamental lack, a manque a etre or
"want of being." Castration means recognizing that something crucial
is always already lost, and irretrievably so. Castration is therefore
related in an essential way to the encounter with desire. In castration,
the human subject confronts the intrinsic unfulfillability of its desire.
Once again, castration is only incidentally related to a paternal threat
of violence. Castration anxiety arises in the unfolding of an essential
maturational task. It is not merely a possibility to be feared or antici-
pated, but a task to be symbolically accomplished.
Acceptance of castration means abandoning the narcissistic dream
of absolute self-adequacy and submitting to an original being-at-a-loss.
In the light of this formulation, we can point to some important
implications of Lacan's reinterpretation. Lacan enables us to under-
stand how the complex of castration, although it unfolds differently
for the little girl than for the little boy, is set in motion by a develop-
mental crisis that is the same for both sexes. The situation is not, as
Freud's account may tempt us to suppose, that where the little girl is
lacking or missing something by an accident of anatomy, the little boy
has from the start the advantage of possessing an essential wholeness
and only later comes to fear that he, too, might suffer the little girl's
loss. According to Lacan, castration anxiety is not a fear over the loss
of an original wholeness but a reemergence of the sense of chaos and
virtual dismemberment into which every human infant is born. The
149
Lacanian view thus implies that too stubborn a resistance to castration

reflects an inability to tolerate the anxiety produced by the upsurge of
impulses foreign to the organization of the ego. Far from being an
unqualified advantage, therefore, possession of the penis tends to tip
masculine psychology into the orbit of fetishism. T h e boy's own penis,
which readily offers itself as a reassuring presence, the guarantor of
a false promise of wholeness, becomes the prototype of the fetishistic
object.14
(5) Lacan deepens the significance of castration fear by radicalizing

the meaning of loss. Yet the most distinctive feature of Lacan's treat-
ment of castration and the point of his most significant advance over
Freud consists in the way he reveals in castration the stakes of the
subject's own desire. For Lacan, the castration complex is initiated by
emergence of the subject's desire against the constraints imposed by
the imaginary organization of his own ego. Castration becomes the
occasion of both anxiety and obscure desire, of fear and of longing
that does not yet know itself as longing. The relation to the mother
becomes problematic in Lacan's view because the mother constitutes
the primary pole of imaginary identifications. In this way, Lacan brings
to light the source of a primordial ambivalence toward the maternal
relation. If there arises in the child a drive, informed by an imaginary
identification, to be the phallus for the mother, there is also a will to
resist that identification. It is an ambivalence evidenced in the case of
little Hans by the fact that in spite of his exaggerated yearning to be
the object of his mother's desire, Hans initially experiences the fantasy
of the biting horse as a female horse. The biting fantasy which is
destined to represent castration is originally related to a fear of en-
gulfment by the mother. 15
T h e Lacanian view, which relates castration to the overturning of
an imaginary organization, thus serves to explain the role of castration
in the transition out of narcissism. Freud had repeatedly emphasized
the significance of the penis and of castration for the child's narcissism,
but was unable to oppose castration and narcissism in a systematic way.
So, too—and here we are brought back to the problem of the death
drive—Freud clearly understood the final theory of the life and death
drives to be the necessary amendment to his theory of narcissism, yet
failed to attribute any other significance to their relation than that of
restoring an essential dualism. For Lacan, the key problem is to answer
"the question why does man get out of narcissism. Why [in the position
of narcissism] is man dissatisfied?" (S.I, 131). The answer, as we have
seen, is to be found in the death drive itself, in the notion that forces
150
of the real that are alienated by the imaginary structure of the narcissis-
tic ego assert themselves against the strictures of that organization. In
the light of this perspective, the castration complex appears to be the
inaugural and privileged fantasmatic expression of the drive toward
death. In the crisis of castration, desire and death are intimately inter-
twined. It is with respect to castration that the most mysterious aspect
of Freud's discovery impresses itself upon us, the aspect that Lacan
emphasizes in his claim that "[Freud] questioned life as to its meaning,
and not to say that it has none . . . but to say that it has only one
meaning, that in which desire is borne by death" (E:S, 277). For Lacan,
the destiny of desire in the human being is inextricably bound up with
its most profound experiences of fear.
Castration—Imaginary and Symbolic
Up to this point, our discussion of castration has focused on the way

in which Lacan's concept of the imaginary structure of the ego serves
to clarify problems arising from Freud's account. Lacan reveals the
internal determinants of the castration complex in the alienating char-
acter of the imaginary ego. But this is only half the story. T o complete
it we must take account of Lacan's claim that the Oedipal Complex
marks the moment when the child enters language. For Lacan, castra-
tion is the pivotal moment in which the child effects the transition from
a predominantly imaginary mode of functioning to a predominantly
symbolic one. This shift can be variously described. (1) At the Oedipal
stage, the subject that previously found its identity in the Gestalt unity
of the ego comes to be represented by what linguists call "shifters,"
the personal pronouns whose meaning alters depending on whether
they are sounded by my mouth or that of another. (2) T h e dyadic
bond with the perceived other that structures the imaginary gives way
to triadic relations in which social exchange is mediated by the laws of
language. (3) T h e imaginary register of perceptual presence governed
by resemblance yields to a system of differences that operates through
a vacillating play of presence and absence. (4) The simultaneities of
the imaginary, which ground anticipations limited to repetition of the
same, now contrast with the serial unfolding of the signifying chain,
which finds its circuit in the diacritical web of the symbol system.
Reduced to its most absolutely basic terms, the Oedipal transition
constitutes a shift from unity to complexity, from identity to differ-
ence. In progressing through the Oedipus complex, the subject ceases
to be held in thrall to imaginary formations and passes into the defile
151
of the signifying system. The psychic process moves beyond the

bounds of imaginary unities and is taken up into the universe of sig-
nifies. It is a shift that readily finds a perceptual analogue in a contrast
between the integrity of the body Gestalt and its dismemberment into
fragments. To the extent, therefore, that Lacan reads the Oedipal crisis
in terms of a transition between imaginary and symbolic functions, he
understands the entry of the subject into language to be concomitant
with, even conditioned upon, a certain transformation in the way the
integrity of the body is experienced. It is this crisis of identity that makes
possible a new mode of relation to the child's own impulses and to the
surrounding world. As such, castration involves both an anxiety of frag-
mentation, as it implies the giving up of the imaginary unity of the ego,
and a corresponding anxiety of separation, insofar as it requires tolerat-
ing the absence of the object (or at least absence of resemblance to the
object) that is constitutive of linguistic signification. From a Lacanian
point of view, castration is the central moment of the child's acquisition
of language not in the sense of its becoming able to voice words or to use
them in some way (of this both the pre-Oedipal child and the psychotic
are capable) but rather in the sense of becoming able to dwell in lan-
guage, to rely on language for the guidance of thought and action, genu-
inely to appropriate language and to be appropriated by it. In and
through castration, the speaking subject comes into being by becoming
subject, by being subjected, to language.
Relevant to this aspect of castration as the hinge between imaginary
and symbolic functions, we can add a number of further remarks.
(1) We have already seen how the relation of imaginary and sym-
bolic functions are charted by Lacan in the matrix of Schema L. If
castration can be taken as the privileged moment of that relation, it
should be possible to reread the schema in terms of the castration
complex and the family dynamics that structure it. In his fifth seminar,
on the "Formations of the Unconscious," Lacan provides precisely
such a rereading by offering the following schema 16 :
Mother
Father
Child
By substituting the phallus, the child, the mother, and the father in
752
the positions occupied in the original schema by the id, the ego, the
imaginary object, and the Other of language, Lacan maps onto Schema
L the configuration of what he calls the "paternal metaphor." In the
paternal metaphor, the child passes beyond the imaginary relation to
the mother in which his desire is fixed and alienated by virtue of a
mediating third term: that of the father understood not as a literal
father but as the paternal function of the symbolic law.
(2) T h e unfolding of the paternal metaphor produces the fantasm

of the phallus in the locus of the subject. What is it doing there? We
ask again: How and why is the penis privileged in this conception?
If the Oedipus Complex concerns above all the transition from an
imaginary to a symbolic mode of functioning, the penis offers itself as
the ideal vehicle of that transition. T h e penis is especially well suited
both to represent the breakdown of an imaginary Gestalt and to antici-
pate the structure of the linguistic signifier. On the one hand, the
anatomical vulnerability of the penis readily symbolizes the possibility
of a violation of the body's imaginary wholeness. Aside from the
mother's breast, the penis is the only bodily appendage unsupported
by bone and the only appendage incapable of voluntary movement. It
is sensitive and easily hurt. By virtue of its very physiology, therefore,
the penis designates a special point of cleavage in the imaginary unity
of the body. Like the other partial objects enumerated by Lacan, "the
mamilla, the faeces, . . . the urinary flow," the penis bears "the mark
of the cut" {E:S, 315). What these objects have in common is their
potential separability from the body proper. In so far as they either
literally separate from the body (feces, urine) or project beyond the
general body surface in a way that suggests a possibility of separation,
they readily represent fears of loss and bodily fragmentation. On
the other hand, the penis displays the features of difference and of
presence and absence that distinguish the structure of the linguistic
signifier. As Freud himself was wont to emphasize, the child's concep-
tion of the penis soon comes to include a recognition of its presence
in the male and its absence in the female. T h e penis thus functions
anatomically like a differential feature in linguistics; its presence or
absence signifies male or female. It constitutes on the level of anatomy
what Jakobson calls "the marked and the unmarked." Even in the male
alone, the penis embodies a principle of difference in its alternance of
flacidness and erection.
This discussion helps resolve the ambiguity around the terms "pe-
nis" versus "phallus." T h e anatomical literality of the penis is by no
means irrelevant to Lacan's concept of the castration complex, yet it
153
is in terms of the symbolic function of the penis—as phallus—that

castration must ultimately be understood. When Lacan refers to the
phallus as a privileged signifier, it is to emphasize the way that the
male organ functions to mark the point of intersection between the
imaginary and symbolic orders. Talk of a "privileged signifier" has
prompted some commentators to take Lacan's concept of the phallus
as an assertion of a privileged point of contact between the battery of
signifiers and the truth of the signified. Jacques Derrida has argued,
for example, that Lacan's phallocentrism amounts to a logocentrism
the implication of which is to install a traditional concept of truth at
the heart of psychoanalysis. 17 Although a detailed treatment of this
debate cannot be undertaken here, it is perhaps evident from the
preceding discussions that the result of Lacan's concept of the phallus
is the opposite of what Derrida has attributed to it. Far from opening
the door on any special or guaranteed access to the signified, the
Lacanian concept of the phallus implies the impossibility of such access.
As a giving up of the phallus, castration means precisely a relinquishing
of the dream of a final signifier or of a fully adequate act of significa-
tion. 18 T h e phallus signifies the necessity of ever-ongoing signification.
Ironically, then, Lacan's concept of the phallus implies the unending
slippage of meaning that Derrida has called "dissemination." 19 T h e
phallus is the never-realized object, the object that is forever out of
reach, the object that can be approached only in a further movement
of the signifying chain.
(3) At the core of Lacan's theory of castration is the idea that the
imaginary schema of the body's wholeness plays a crucial role in the
unfolding of symbolic competence. T h e imaginary body-gestalt pro-
vides an initial organization of unitary form upon which the differenti-
ating function of linguistic signification can go to work. The body
imago functions as an originary frame or matrix over against which
difference within identity can first be registered. T h e imaginary thus
constitutes the protocontext for symbolic activity. It forms the original
myth of human identity, but, as such, it becomes something more
than a myth, a near-necessary myth. The imaginary has a peculiar
epistemological status. On the one hand, it is an autochthonous func-
tion that arises from perceptual mechanisms that are more primitive
than activities of conscious judgment and reflection. Yet, at the same
time, the imaginary is essentially Active, since it grounds a perception
of sex difference that has little to do with biology. Biologically speak-
ing, there is nothing lacking in the female.
154
We can note in passing the implications of this idea for the question
of gender difference. T h e problem faced by any theorist is to explain
how gender difference, if it is not merely a biological fact, occurs
with such regularity across different cultures and epochs. Like Freud,
Lacan is convinced that there is nothing biologically fixed or deter-
mined about gender identity, as the very existence of homosexuality
suggests. Yet neither is sex difference purely and simply a result of
learning or role socialization. From a Lacanian point of view, the
psychology of patriarchal gender difference is not fixed or necessary
(one might imagine other possible configurations of sexual identity),
but it is, we might say, favored by the imaginary construal of anatomy.
The structuring of desire in the unconscious is to be explained in
terms of the positioning of the subject with respect to the presence or
absence of the phallus as an imaginary object.
(4) Lacan's approach to castration illuminates the function of the

Oedipus Complex in promoting the movement from primary to sec-
ondary identification. As Lacan sees it, the complex of castration not
only raises the specter of a potential dismemberment, but also concerns
a much more fundamental relationship between the child and the
phallus, a relation that he says "will turn around a 'to be' and a 'to
have/ "20 In the negotiation of the Oedipus Complex, the child faces
the question of being versus having the phallus. On the level of the
imaginary identification constitutive of the mirror phase, the child is
unable to symbolize to itself its own desire except in and through
the desire of the other. But, in the Oedipal period, the child comes
increasingly to realize that the mother's desire aims at an object over
and beyond him/herself. T h e question for little Hans was therefore,
"What is it that the mother desires when she desires something other
than me, the child?" (SJV, 4/10/57). Under the pressure of that ques-
tion, the primary imaginary identification with the phallus first intensi-
fies, setting in motion a jealous rivalry with the father, then must finally
be abandoned. T h e shift from being to having or not having the
phallus implies a transition from an imaginary to a symbolic orienta-
tion, a shift, that is, from the all-or-nothing stakes of a dual relation
to a more complex, more mediated mode of functioning concerned
with the presence or absence of an element in a structured configura-
tion. In this way, identification in the aftermath of the Oedipal crisis
is no longer bound to assume the properties of the object as a whole,
as a Gestalt, but is free to adopt particular traits or aspects of the other
in a patchwork of borrowings.
155
(5) It is beyond the scope of this essay to ask whether or to what

extent this theory is empirically verified or verifiable. However, it is
interesting to note briefly its corroboration in what is perhaps the
most famous example of language acquisition: the education of Helen
Keller. Aside from the fact of her famous infirmity, Helen Keller's
passage into language was remarkable for its suddenness. Gently prod-
ded by her teacher, Anne Sullivan, Helen came to recognize the mean-
ing of the word "water" in a kind of flash of insight. All at once, she
recognized that the pattern traced by her teacher, w-a-t-e-r, referred
to "the wonderful, cool something that was flowing over her hand." 21
Once this breakthrough had occurred, Helen was immediately able to
repeat it with other objects around her. As Anne Sullivan described
this moment:
I spelled "w-a-t-e-r" in Helen's free hand. The word coming so close
upon the sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to
startle her. She dropped the mug and stood as one transfixed. A new
light came into her face. She spelled "water" several times. Then she
dropped on the ground and asked for its name and pointed to the
pump and the trellis, and suddenly turning round she asked for my
name.I spelled "Teacher." Just then the nurse brought Helen's little
sister into the pump-house, and Helen spelled "baby" and pointed to
the nurse. All the way back to the house she was highly excited, and
learned the name of every object she touched, so that in a few hours
she had added thirty words to her vocabulary.22
What made possible the breakthrough at the well-house? We may
be tempted to think of it as a sort of magical spark of association that
leapt between Helen's two hands, the one drawn upon and the other
wetted. However, bearing in mind Lacan's emphasis on the necessity
of an imaginary violation for the transition to symbols, we are
prompted to look more closely.23 In fact, the drama at the pump-house
is a story within a story. The larger story concerns a doll given to Helen
by her teacher:
One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put
my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled "d-o-1-1" and tried to make
me understand that "d-o-1-1" applied to both. Earlier in the day we
had a tussle over the words "m-u-g" and "w-a-t-e-r." Miss Sullivan
had tried to impress it upon me that "m-u-g" is mug and that "w-a-t-
e-r" is water, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she
had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first
opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seiz-
156
ing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted
when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither
sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved
the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong
sentiment of tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to
one side of the hearth and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause
of my discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I knew
I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless
sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip for
pleasure.
We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fra-

grance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was
drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As
the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the
word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention
fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty con-
sciousness of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought;
and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew
then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was
flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it
light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but
barriers that could in time be swept away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and

each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house
every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was
because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come
to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I
felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to
put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what
I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow. 24
R e a d i n g H e l e n Keller's account in t h e light of Lacan's t h e o r y of t h e

role of castration in t h e accession to symbols, we a r e p r o m p t e d to ask
a b o u t t h e relation b e t w e e n t h e b r o k e n doll a n d t h e miracle of d a w n i n g
signification t h a t o c c u r r e d a few m o m e n t s later. T h e interesting t h i n g
to n o t e is H e l e n ' s " k e e n sense of delight" at feeling t h e f r a g m e n t s of
t h e b r o k e n doll. She twice r e m a r k s o n it. Is it possible t h a t t h e e x p e r i -
e n c e of t h e s m a s h e d doll accomplished for H e l e n Keller t h e function of
i m a g i n a r y violation t h a t Lacan associates with t h e accession to symbols?
M i g h t t h e doll's f r a g m e n t s , as a n i m a g e of t h e body's wholeness b r o k e n
i n t o pieces, h a v e fulfilled t h e function of castration in its L a c a n i a n
157
meaning? These suggestive questions seem underscored by the further

details of Helen Keller's account. We might note, for instance, how
when Helen returns to the house empowered by her "strange new
sight" of a world with names, she remembers the broken doll and, for
the first time, feels sorrow and remorse over its loss. It is tempting to
take this detail as an evidence of a dawning superego, the first tremor
of a new sense that the named world is subject to law. Viewed from
this perspective, Helen Keller's experience at the well-house presents
in extreme compression some of the key elements of the Oedipal
drama as Lacan conceives it.
In the Defile of the Signifier: The Objet a
If we have succeeded in shedding some light on the Lacanian mean-

ing of castration as the threshold of the symbolic function, we have
yet to determine more specifically what contribution is made by the
linguistic signifier in the unconscious. To do so, we must begin to move
beyond the stress on the negative effect of the symbolic in overcoming
the imaginary and describe the positive contribution achieved in the
play of the signifier. Let us begin by following Lacan's analysis of the
Freudian Witz in his fifth seminar of 1957-58. T h e thrust of that
discussion is to identify the formations of the unconscious, circuited
by the linguistic signifier, with the generation of new meaning. Lacan
summarizes this point in the following terms:
That by which a phenomenon can be recognized as belonging to the

formations of the unconscious is strictly identifiable [with] . . . what
linguistic analysis permits us to refer to as being the essential modes
of the formation of meaning, insofar as this meaning is engendered
by combinations of signifiers. . . . This grasp at a fundamental, ele-
mentary level of the functions of the signifier is a recognition at this
level of an original power which is precisely that in which we can
localize a certain generation of something called meaning, and some-
thing that in itself is very rich in psychological implications. (S. V, 11/
20/57)25
What Lacan here refers to as the generation of meaning is illustrated

by an example given by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Uncon-
scious. It is the first joke presented by Freud, a joke of Heinrich Heine
that occupies an inaugural position and performs a paradigmatic func-
tion reminiscent of the dream of Irma's injection in The Interpretation
158
of Dreams. In this joke, Heine's character Hirsch-Hyancinth boasts to

a friend about his meeting with the wealthy Baron Rothschild by
saying:
And, as true as God shall grant me all good things, Doctor, I sat
beside Salomon Rothschild and he treated me quite as his equal—
quite famillionairely. (SE, 8:16)
T h e mechanism of the joke, what Freud calls its "technique/' can be

readily analyzed in terms of a collapsing of the words "familiar" and
"millionaire," to form a new word: "famillionaire." Freud schematizes
it as follows:
FAMIL AR
MILIONAR
FAMILIONAR
By means of the coalesence of the two words into one, the joke achieves
an abbreviation of the two sentences that would otherwise express the
thought contained in the joke:
R. treated me quite familiarly,

that is, so far as a Millionaire can.
But such a mapping of the joke's technique does not suffice to explain
fully its comic effect. In what can the comic aspect be said to consist?
In Lacan's analysis, which strives to present the essentials of Freud's
commentary in Lacan's own terms, it depends in the first place on the
way that the punch line—the famillionaire—effects a violation of our
expectations. T h e joke produces an effect of surprise and delightful
confusion precisely because we don't expect to be treated familiarly by
millionaires. To this extent, the joke is played on the expectations that
we bring to the story beforehand—expectations that Lacan attributes
to a function of the imaginary order. He points to the "very intense,
very close connection between the phenomenon of laughter and the
imaginary function in man, namely, the captivating character of the
image" (S.V, 12/18/57). When these imaginary anticipations are taken
by surprise and shattered, a certain effect of release is produced. T h e
comic outcome is thus said to be triggered when "something is liberated
from the constraint of the image" (S.V, 12/18/57). This analysis, both
in its emphasis on the violation of routine expectations and in its
159
evocation of an effect of liberation, echoes the view of Fischer, cited

by Freud in his introduction to Jokes'.
"It might be that from aesthetic freedom there might spring too a
sort of judging released from its usual rules and regulations, which,
on account of its origin, I will call a 'playful judgement,' and that in
this concept is contained the first determinant, if not the whole for-
mula, that will solve our problem. 'Freedom produces jokes and jokes
produce freedom.' wrote Jean Paul. 'Joking is merely playing with
ideas.'" (SE, 8:11)
In Lacan's commentary on the famillionaire joke we thus recognize

the pattern that emerged in the preceding chapter: namely, the way
in which imaginary formations are subjected to a kind of deconstruc-
tion by the action of the symbolic. T h e condensation of two signifiers
effects a release from the stereotypy of imaginary anticipations. But
if such fracturing of an imaginary form provides the point of entree
to the joke, the comic effect is completed by factors internal to the
signifying condensation in "famillionaire." It is at this point that a new
meaning is generated, something that hovers on the border between
sense and nonsense. This aspect of the joke, too, is remarked by Freud
in citing Lipp's book Komik und Humor.
A remark seems to us to be a joke, if we attribute a significance to it

that has psychological necessity and, as soon as we have done so, deny
it again. Various things can be understood by this 'significance.' We
attach sense to a remark and know that logically it cannot have any.
We discover truth in it, which nevertheless, according to the laws of
experience or our general habits of thought, we cannot find in it.
(SE, 8:12)
It is upon this sensible-nonsense that Lacan trains his lens, inviting

us to find in it the essential contribution of the signifying function in
the unconscious. What is produced in the famillionaire is an absolute
minimum, an almost-nothing of meaning, a peu-de-sens or pas-de-sens.
This "nonsense has the role of deluding us for an instant, long enough
[to register] a meaning not grasped before, and which moreover also
passes very quickly, furtively, in a flash" (S.V, 12/4/57). In the compos-
ite of familiar and millionaire, a new modicum of meaning emerges
against the background of our expectation of an antithesis between
them. What occurs is a kind of reverberation in the code in which the
meanings of each of the words, previously understood to be contraries,
160
cross-fertilize each other to produce a strange but curiously pleasing

offspring. A new and hitherto unthinkable being is generated, a famil-
iar-millionaire, in which the particular condescension of the very
wealthy toward someone of lower status is compactly expressed in a
way that foregrounds all the tensions and ironies of being on the
receiving end of such an attitude. By means of his invention, Heine's
character is able to remain in a naive position, basking in the attention
paid to him by the wealthy man, yet he is able simultaneously to remark
his awareness of the disingenuousness of the Baron's behavior and
even to mock it.
It will be fruitful to push further our analysis of the mechanism by
which the sense-nonsense of the famillionaire is produced. It is pre-
cisely in the failure of agreement between familiarity and the million-
aire, in the dissonance between the two words, that a generative spark
is struck. "The creation of meaning of famillionaire" is thus said to
derive from "those losses of meaning that are all the sparks, all the
spatters produced around the creation of the word famillionaire, and
that constitute its radiation, its weight, that which lends it for us its
literary value" (S.V, 11/13/57). This process Lacan calls metaphor:
It is in the action of the metaphor, insofar as certain original circuits

impact upon the everyday, banal, commonly recognized circuit of
metonymy, that the emergence of new meaning is produced. (S.V,
12/4/57)
In this remark, Lacan pictures a conflict between two "circuits" of

meaning, one well-worn and commonplace that is acted upon by origi-
nal and unexpected ones. What is going on here reflects Lacan's con-
ception of the nature of the linguistic signifier. Unlike the imaginary
Gestalt, which derives its special properties from the way it constitutes
a self-contained presentation, the linguistic signifier participates in a
whole network of relations to other signifiers. In the web of this
synchrony, the meaning of a linguistic signifier trails off into the
signifying system of language itself in ways that cannot be made simul-
taneously co-present. What the metaphoric concatenation of signifiers
effects is a kind of realignment of such tendrils of meaning, in which
the more accustomed pathways of sense give way to the emergence of
hitherto unnoticed potentialities of signification. T h e metaphor thus
functions to evoke something in the penumbra of connotation that
surrounds the signifiers it conjoins. Metaphor plays upon "language
insofar as it carries within itself its moments of meaningful creation
but in a non-active, latent state" (S.V, 12/11/57). A similar conception
161
of metaphor was explored by the artists of Surrealism and Dada.

For Breton, "the highest endeavour to which poetry can aspire is to
compare two objects as remote as possible from one another, or, by
any method whatsoever, to bring them into confrontation in an abrupt
and striking way."26 In his "Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,"
Lacan explicitly refers his view of metaphor to the Surrealists:
It should be said that modern poetry and especially the Surrealist

school have taken us a long way in this direction by showing that any
conjunction of two signifiers would be equally sufficient to constitute
a metaphor, except for the additional requirement of the greatest
possible disparity of the images signified, needed for the production
of the poetic spark, or in other words for metaphoric creation to take
place. (E:S9 156)
T h e paradigmatic metaphor offered by Lacan in "The Agency of

the Letter" is the line by Victor Hugo from his poem "Booz endormi":
"His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful" (E:S, 156). T h e relevance
of this metaphor for the functioning of the unconscious is often attrib-
uted by commentators to the way the figure of Booz himself disappears
in the metaphoric substitution of the sheaf. Booz is said to pass beneath
the bar of signification in a movement comparable to repression. How-
ever, in the light of the present discussion, an additional and perhaps
more important aspect of the metaphor comes into view. It concerns
less the fact that Booz has been occluded by substitution of another
signifier than the subtle transformation of meaning that occurs in this
substitution. "In the substitution of signifier for signifier . . . an effect
of signification is produced that is creative or poetic" (E:S, 164). This
new signification is essentially complex. In Hugo's metaphor, the con-
notation of fertility carried by the sheaf evokes the promise of paternity
in the figure of Booz for whom it has been substituted. But that is not
all. In addition to this primary signifying effect, we can detect a second,
less palpable but nevertheless important resonance of meaning. This
secondary effect of the metaphor runs precisely contrary to its ostensi-
ble meaning of celebrating the grace and generosity of Booz. By means
of it, the figure of Booz is obscurely claimed by the very greed and
spite that are refused to the sheaf. Lacan devotes a lengthy passage to
describing it:
It is obvious that in the line of Hugo cited above, not the slightest
spark of light springs from the proposition that the sheaf was neither
miserly not spiteful, for the reason that there is no question of the
162
sheafs having either of these attributes, since the attributes, like the
sheaf, belong to Booz, who exercises the former in disposing of the
latter and without informing the latter of his sentiments in the case.
If, however, his sheaf does refer us to Booz, and this is indeed the
case, it is because it has replaced him in the signifying chain at the
very place where he was to be exalted by the sweeping away of greed
and spite. But now Booz himself has been swept away by the sheaf,
and hurled into the outer darkness where greed and spite harbour
him in the hollow of their negation.
But once his sheaf has thus usurped his place, Booz can no longer
return there; the slender thread of the little word his that binds him
to it is only one more obstacle to his return in that it links him to the
notion of possession that retains him at the heart of greed and spite.
So his generosity, affirmed in the passage, is yet reduced to less than
nothing by the munificence of the sheaf.
In the shadows of its primary meaning, the metaphor of the sheaf

evokes a further signification that suggests a hint of possessiveness in
the heart of Booz's emerging paternity, the subtlest implication of a
service of greed in the enactment of his gift. This new meaning consti-
tutes the pas-de-sens, an almost-nothing of meaning, limited to the
faintest suggestion. In the terms given by Lipps in the quotation above,
it behaves like the truth expressed in the joke, which "according to the
laws of our experience and our general habits of thought we cannot
find in it." This subtle implication of meaning may be taken to exem-
plify an instance of the power of language "to signify something quite
other than it says" (E:S, 155). It illustrates Lacan's insistence that "the
function of language is not to inform but to evoke" (E:S, 86). Beyond
its assertion of generosity, the metaphor suggests the way Booz himself
will be the beneficiary of that generosity. T h e metaphor thus affords
expression of the paradoxical fact that the sheaf of his plenty will be
augmented by the act of sharing it. In this way, the metaphor an-
nounces a complexity and ambiguity incapable of expression in the
register of the imaginary.
However vague and evanescent, the pas-de-sens generated by the
metaphor is taken by Lacan to bear within itself a portentous power
for the re-making of the experienced world. One thinks again of the
Surrealists, for whom "poetic creations assume the tangible character
of extending, strangely, the limits of so-called reality."27 Lacan suggests
that it is ultimately out of such almost-nonsense that all human mean-
ings are generated over the course of time. Thus "we ought to consider
163
all human meanings as having been at some time metaphorically en-

gendered by signifying conjunctions" (S. V, 11/20/57). It is to the poten-
tial for the evocation of something other in the play of signifiers that
Lacan attributes the capacity of linguistic signification to open new
access to the real:
By the play of the substitution of one signifier for another, at a

certain place, there is created not only the possibility of the develop-
ment of the signifier, but also the possibility of the emergence of
ever-new meaning, serving always to ratify, to complicate, and to
deepen, to give its sense of depth to what in the real is only pure
opacity. (S.V, 11/13/57)
It is in this sense that Lacan attributes the emergence of desire

beyond the imaginary to a function of the signifying chain. In its
capacity to generate a pas-de-sens, a play of new meaning that opens
up beyond the routinized circuits of signification, the action of meta-
phor gives to the desire of the subject its points of support. Desire is
articulated in that Other beyond the imaginary other—the Other of
language itself:
Desire is expressed by and passes through the signifier, namely, it

crosses the signifying line, and at the level of this intersection of
desire and the signifying line, it encounters what? It encounters the
other. . . . It encounters the other, I did not say as a person—it
encounters the other as the treasury of the signifier, as the seat of
the code. (S.V, 1/8/58)
In this play of the signifier, the imaginary repetitions of the same,

the reiterations of the imago, give way to a new metonymic progression
constituted by the sliding of signification along the chain of discourse,
the metonymy of the want-to-be. Contrary to the insistence of imagi-
nary demand to be supplied with the object of its satisfaction once and
for all, desire mediated by the signifier is by its essence a movement.
Where demand situated in the dual relation of ego and imaginary
other remains impossible of fulfillment, symbolically mediated desire
is unable to satisfy itself with any single moment of signification, yet,
producing new reverberations of meaning in each step of its unfolding,
it is passed on indefinitely in pursuit of an ever-open possibility of
further significations. Lacan thus describes the progress of desire in
the signifying chain by means of an image of infinite, asymptotic
approach:
164
No part of the demand can be attained, once man has entered into
the symbolic world, except by a sort of infinite succession of pas-de-
sens, so that man, a new Achilles in pursuit of another tortoise, is
destined by the grip on his desire in the mechanisms of language, to
this infinite, never satisfied approach. (S.V, 12/18/57)
We have already seen that this emergence of desire in the signifier

effects a certain deconstruction of the imaginary object—in fact, it is
only possible in relation to such a deconstruction. Yet the signifying
chain remains haunted by the form of something object-like, as if the
imaginary orientation to the object survives in a kind of ghost-life in
the symbolic function. If the signifying chain introduces an essential
heterogeneity, says Lacan, " y o u should understand heterogeneity with
the accent placed on the heteros, which in Greek means inspired, and
whose proper acceptation in Latin is that of a remainder, of a residue"
(S.V, 12/11/57). What is this remainder or residue? It is present in the
famillionaire, insofar as Heine's neo-logism evokes the trace of a new
and unheard-of object, an object that never fully emerges from the
shadows of signification but nevertheless draws our attention toward
it:
What happens when famillionaire appears? It can be said that some-

thing is indicated . . . in the side-effects of the phenomenon, in what
will be propagated from there into the world by way of a consequence.
It is a type of emerging object, that itself tends rather toward the
comical, the absurd, the nonsensical. It is the famillionaire insofar as
it is a derisory millionaire, by tending to take on the form of a figure,
and it would not be difficult to indicate the direction in which it tends
to be embodied. (S.V, 11/13/57)
This quasi-object, rolled ahead of the unfolding of discourse, is the

Lacanian objet a. It forms the nucleus of the fantasm around which
desire will be lured and is closely associated by Lacan with the signi-
fying function of the phallus. As we have seen, under the influence of
castration, the phallus is shifted from its place in the child's relation
to the mother's desire and assumes the role of a key element of the
signifying chain. Castration is thus not so much the detachment of a
part of the subject from himself as it is a detachment of his desire from
the imaginary other. It is with respect to this process that we can situate
the emergence of sublimation in its Lacanian meaning. 28 T h e objet a
harkens back to the primordial object of satisfaction, that original
object in relation to which every subsequent attempt at satisfaction
165
must be deemed a re-finding of the object: the mother. Yet by virtue

of being imbricated within the system of language, the locus of the
objet a cannot be occupied by any imaginary form. It is cut free from
the maternal relation and circulates in the signifying chain, drawing
into its orbit the fragmentary resonances of significance generated by
signifying combinations. As objet a, the phallus becomes a key signifier
in the unconscious, or better, it becomes the mark of the necessity of
ever-ongoing signification.
What we have evinced in the preceding discussion can serve as a
preface for the analysis Lacan gives of the child's Fort-Da game, cited
by Freud in the course of his approach to the concept of the death
drive. For Lacan, the Fort-Da episode offers a kind of microscope
through which the essentials of the emergence of the subject's desire
in the signifier can be glimpsed. T h e alternance of Fort and Da embod-
ies on the most primitive level the way that all linguistic signification
reaches beyond the utterance of any signifier and reverberates within
the diacritical structure in which it is situated. In every Fort\ the Dal is
tacitly implicated. "The Fort is correlative with the Da. T h e Fort can
express itself only in the alternance stemming from a fundamental
synchrony" (S.VII, 80). T h e child's game thus leads him beyond the
disappearance of the mother that instigated it. T h e reel he throws
away and retrieves in repeating Fort and Da "is not the mother reduced
to a little ball . . . it is a small part of the subject that detaches itself
from him while still remaining his, still retained. . . . To this object we
will later give the name it bears in the Lacanian algebra—the petit
a"(FFC, 62). T h e child's game provides the opening for the emergence
of something that is not the mother, but rather something that will
come out of the signifying chain itself:
We can now grasp in this (Fort-Da) the fact that in this moment
the subject is not simply mastering his privation by assuming it, but
that here he is raising his desire to a second power. For his action
destroys the object which it causes to appear and disappear in the
anticipatory provocation of its absence and presence. His action thus
negatives the field of forces of desire in order to become its own
object to itself. And this object, being immediately embodied in the
symbolic dyad of two elementary exclamations, announces in the
subject the diachronic integration of the dichotomy of the phonemes,
whose synchronic structure existing language offers to his assimila-
tion. (E:S, 103)
166
Toward a Reevaluation of the Superego
All of the topics traversed in the preceding sections—anxiety, castra-

tion and the Oedipal triangle, sublimation—converge on the problem
of the superego. Moreover, the topic of the superego makes a special
claim on our attention inasmuch as Freud closely associated it with the
death drive. Yet it is an especially challenging problem and was so to
Freud himself. The concept of the superego, both in its relations to
neurotic anxiety and to sublimation, remains one of the most impor-
tant and, at the same time, least worked-out of Freud's basic ideas.
What does Lacan make of it? We seem justified in expecting that if the
Lacanian return to Freud overturns prevailing views of the role and
functions of the ego, so, too, Lacan's approach will suggest a radical
reevaluation of the superego. In what follows, the view of the death
drive we have developed along Lacanian lines will be drawn upon to
illuminate some of the key dimensions of the superego. This discussion
in no way claims to give a comprehensive account of the problem, but
may suffice to mark some suggestive points of reference.
Perhaps more than any other element of Freud's theory, the concept
of the superego has been embraced and appropriated by popular
consciousness, subsumed by a commonsensical notion of conscience.
We are well accustomed to thinking of superego as fundamentally
hostile to the satisfaction of desire. The superego is the Calvinist in all
of us, the moralizing and guilt-wielding agency of repression that
erects impediments to the discharge of impulse and punishes the
excesses of a pleasure-seeking ego. This view, attributable to no one
precisely because it is all around us, is related to the popular conception
of Freud's discovery that neatly divides things up on either side of a
barrier of repression. On one side is the pressure of the body's instinc-
tual urges, represented by the Freudian id. On the other side are the
structures of language, the "higher" faculties of reason and judgment,
and the forms of culture and convention. It is a vision of the sinful
flesh constrained by the repressive and distorting forces of rationality.
In this view, the activity of the superego becomes the prime source of
the discontents of the "civilized" human being whose natural instincts
are oppressed by social constraints. Although there is a difference
between this vulgarized version of Freud's theory and the sort of thing
one finds in the analytic literature, the difference is sometimes not as
great as one might suppose. Nor is it a perspective that is without
support in the text of Freud. To the extent that our concept of the
superego is informed by this commonsensical perspective, however, it
167
comes as a surprise to find the paternal figure and the symbolic Law
for which he stands, in short, the whole framing of the Freudian
notion of the superego, revealed by Lacan in their nonrepressive, even
liberating aspects. "The true function of the Father. . .," Lacan insists,
"is fundamentally to unite (and not to set in opposition) a desire and
the Law" (E:S, 321). Elsewhere he makes a similar point:
If God doesn't exist, the father [Karamazov] says, then everything is

permitted. Quite evidently, a naive notion, for we analysts know full
well that if God doesn't exist, then nothing at all is permitted any
longer. (S.II, 128)
At the very outset, then, we are led to expect a fundamental reorien-

tation of the nature and function of the superego as Lacan interprets
it. Like almost everything in Lacan's innovation, however, the seeds
of his revised outlook on the superego are to be found in Freud's
own text. Here, as elsewhere, Lacan's conclusions are arguably less a
departure from Freud than a clarification and revivification of Freud's
basic intentions. Looking more closely at the way Freud describes the
superego in The Ego and the Id, it becomes impossible to maintain that
the superego functions simply as an obstacle to the fulfillment of
wishes. Two considerations militate against it. First, contrary to what
we might expect from an agency charged with the task of implement-
ing moral prohibitions, Freud stresses the intimate relation between
the superego and the id, suggesting that "the cathectic energy does
not reach these contents of the superego from auditory perception
(instruction or reading) but from sources in the id" (SE, 19:52-53).
He suggests that "the superego is always close to the id and can act as
its representative vis a vis the ego. It reaches deep down into the id
and for that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego is" (SE,
19:48). Second, Freud's text makes clear that the superego directs its
hostility not toward the impulsive id but rather toward the ego.
But perhaps the proximity of the superego to the id and its opposi-
tion to the ego can be explained in a way that allows us to insist once
again on the purely repressive character of the superego. Concerning
its connection with the id, the superego might be said to have its origin
in the id not in an unqualified sense but in relation to the specifically
aggressive impulses of the id. In regard to its hostility toward the
ego, the superego might be thought to restrain the id only indirectly,
exercising its repressive function by proxy, forcing the ego to fulfill
its demands for instinctual renunciation. Warrants for both these
168
explanations may be found in Freud. Nevertheless, they are not ade-

quate to resolve our difficulties. In fact, the close relation of the super-
ego to the energies of the id and its hostility toward the ego constitute
a twofold anomaly at the very heart of the concept of the superego.
On the first point, the close relation between the superego and the
id must be said to involve more than the aggressive energies of the
id. In its role as an ego ideal, the superego is said to promote the
reintegration of the most primitive libidinal energies into the structure
of the ego. "The ego ideal," Freud remarked, "is therefore the heir to
the Oedipus Complex, and thus it is also the expression of the most
powerful impulses and the most important libidinal vicissitudes of the
id" (SE, 19:36). Joseph Sandier clarifies the point by saying that "the
id finds a pathway through the ego in two ways: directly, to the extent
to which its impulses are ego-syntonic; and indirectly, through the
superego." 29 From this point of view, we must assert that the superego
really does function "to represent the id vis a vis the ego." Indeed, if
the superego provides the structure that makes possible the satisfaction
of sublimation, the superego must be seen to serve the libidinal inter-
ests of the id.
On the second point, concerning the opposition of the superego to
the ego, Freud over and again remarked on the excessive character of
the superego's mistreatment of the ego and struggled to explain it.
Freud found the punitiveness of the superego to be frequently incom-
mensurate with the transgressions of the ego toward giving greater
license to instinctual satisfactions. In some cases it seemed exactly the
opposite: the wrath of the superego appeared to be related less to the
ego's overpermissiveness than to its repressive control over the id. In
obsession, for example, "the ego, having gained control over the libido
by means of identification, is punished for doing so by the superego
through the instrumentality of the aggressiveness which was mixed
with the libido" (SE, 19:55). Particularly with respect to aggressive
impulses, the function of the superego appeared to be precisely the
opposite of what one might expect: the greater the renunciation of
impulse, the greater the hostility of the superego toward the ego:
The ordinary view sees the situation the other way round: the stan-
dard set up by the ego ideal seems to be the motive for the suppression
of aggressiveness. The fact remains, however, as we have stated it:
the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes
his ideal's inclination to aggressiveness against his own ego. (SE,
19:54)
169
Freud noted with surprise that, contrary to the notion that the
superego punishes the ego for its criminal licentiousness, the uncon-
scious sense of guilt exacted upon the ego by the superego may itself
emerge as a motive for criminal acts. "In all these situations," Freud
suggested, "the superego displays its independence from the conscious
ego and its intimate relations with the unconscious id" (SE, 19:54).
From this perspective, therefore, the superego again appears to be a
"representative of the id vis a vis the ego" in a straightforward sense.
Far from itself demanding a renunciation of instinctual satisfactions,
the superego seems to retaliate against the ego in response to repres-
sions for which the ego alone is responsible.
If the hostility of the superego toward the ego could not be traced
simply to the hedonistic excesses of the ego, neither could it be ex-
plained as an internalizing of the child's experience of hostile treat-
ment at the hand of its parents. On the contrary, the most severely
critical superego was often to be found in children of the most loving
parents. 30 The apparently gratuitous hostility of the superego thus
faced Freud with a fundamental problem, relevant to one of the key
questions of psychoanalytic research: the nature and origin of neurotic
guilt. As we saw earlier, it was toward the solution of this problem that
Freud offered his hypothesis of an inherited predisposition to guilt,
the legacy of the murder of the primal father by the fraternal band of
sons. A decade after the writing of Totem and Taboo, however, Freud
sought a new answer by means of the theory of the death instinct.
However, the explanatory power of this final association of the super-
ego with a self-destructive drive were limited by the obscurities of the
concept of the death drive itself. New possibilities are opened up along
the lines of the Lacanian interpretation we have been pursuing. A
Lacanian perspective enables us to recast the terms of the problem
and to identify the "mysterious masochistic trends of the ego" brought
to light in Beyond the Pleasure Principle with the moral masochism exer-
cised by the superego.
T h e difficulties in Freud's concept of the superego are resolved
from a Lacanian point of view. T h e fundamental question is why a
third psychic agency arises at all. So long as the ego is regarded simply
as an executor of instinctual demands, arbitrating between the id and
the constraints of a hostile external world, the anti-ego function of the
superego is bound to seem superfluous. For Lacan, however, the stress
is laid on the fundamentally alienating character of the ego. T h e
infantile ego functions as a defensive structure that stabilizes the con-
tour of a primitive identity only by excluding the heterogeneity of
impulses animating the infantile body. In this way, Lacan provides an
170
economic motive for the genesis of an agency critical of the ego and
is able to explain why the hostility of the superego is aimed not at the
instinctual forces of the id but at the defensive structures of the ego
that exclude those forces from the psychical economy. Lacan finds the
motive for the genesis of the superego in the force of the real excluded
from the imaginary organization of identity:
My thesis is that the moral law, the moral commandment, the pres-
ence of the moral agency, is that by which, in our activity in so far as
it is structured by the symbolic, the real makes itself present—the
real as such, the weight of the real.. . . [This] must have some relation
with the movement that traverses the whole of Freud's thought, and
which begins from a first opposition between the principle of reality
and the principle of pleasure and leads, across a series of vacillations,
oscillations, barely perceptible changes in his references, to some-
thing . . . which is called the death instinct. (S.VII, 28-29)
Far from being the enemy of puissance, the superego, precisely in

its hostile opposition to the ego, is the very thing that makes puissance
possible.
What is puissance? It is reduced here to being only a negative

instance. Jouissance is what doesn't serve any purpose (c'est ce qui ne
sert a rien).
I point there to the reserve implied by the field of the right-to-

jouissance. Right is not duty. Nothing forces anyone to enjoy, except
the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance—Jouisl
(S.XX, 10)
Economically considered, the superego may be said to act as a repre-

sentative of the id, yet it remains possible to speak of the repressive
function of the superego insofar as it deconstructs the battery of
imaginary drives. The task performed by the superego is that of a
measured disintegration of the narcissistic ego, the purpose of which
is to open u p the ego's basic structure toward a more complex and
sophisticated configuration capable of sustaining a wider range of
instinctual expression. New possibilities of satisfaction are opened u p
only at the price of giving up forms of satisfaction established by
imaginary identification. This formulation of the matter should sound
familiar, and for good reason. It is precisely parallel to our earlier
discussion of the Schema L, in which the symbolic function was seen
171
to realize access to the inchoate desire of the subject by means of its

corrosive influence over the formations of the imaginary. This parallel
can be readily mapped onto Schema L31:
As its location in the place of the Other of language suggests, the

superego is identified by Lacan with the insertion of the subject into
the signifying system. "The superego is essentially located within the
symbolic plane of speech" (S.I, 102). It is on the plane of the symbolic
function that another agency of the subject is stabilized over and
beyond the imaginary:
The superego . . . is produced in the symbolic system integrated by

the subject. This symbolic world is not limited to the subject, because
it is realized in a language, the universal symbolic system, in so far as
it establishes its empire over a specific community to which the subject
belongs. (S.l, 196)
With this conclusion in hand, it is possible to summarize and inte-

grate the main points of discussion in this chapter.
(1) As an agency of self-transformation, the function of which is

to install the law of the signifier over every narcissistic formation, the
superego becomes the engine of the death drive as Lacan conceives it.
The superego effects a deconstruction of the imaginary homogeneity
of the ego, thereby introducing into the subjective economy a symbolic
revival of the corps morcele of prematurity. This means that the super-
ego has two aspects, correlative to the imaginary and symbolic father.
The birth of the superego is intrinsically tied to the emergence of the
fantasies of dismemberment and thus related to the menacing "No"
of the father. But as the pun in Lacan's "Nom-du-Pere" suggests, the
No of the father is also the Name of the father. The fantasied agent of
172
imaginary castration gives way to the rule of the symbolic law to which
the father, too, is subject.
(2) The transition out of the narcissistic position effected by the

superego implies a certain failure of integration that would have occa-
sioned a crisis on the level of imaginary identification and a consequent
outbreak of anxiety. Circuited by the symbolic system, however, this
passage beyond the imaginary is rendered tolerable by the inaugura-
tion of a new mode of psychical functioning. The incompleteness of the
subject is temporalized by the insertion into language. T h e recovery of
a basic lack or fault in the subject is passed into the unfolding of
the signifying chain. In the matrix of this new structure, anxiety is
transformed into guilt. Guilt, as Freud said, is a variant of anxiety, but
it is also a specification of anxiety and as such constitutes a form of
defense against an unmasterable anxiety. 32 As Lacan puts it, "between
imaginary and symbolic relationships there is the distance between
anxiety and guilt."33
(3) By means of the institution of the superego, a new and more

complex identity can begin to coalesce. T h e personality is delivered
from the totalizing tendency of imaginary formations and opened to
complexity and internal differentiation, by means of which ambiguity
of ideation and ambivalence of feeling can be positively registered. It
is on the basis of this shift that secondary identifications can be formed
and that the superego can be said to make possible the formation of
an ego ideal that is a composite of borrowed traits.
(4) In this passage beyond the imaginary, desire is stimulated by

the generation of new and more complex configurations and finds its
points of support in the emergence of novel dimensions of meaning.
As Lacan suggests in a punning wordplay, jouissance is effected in the
generation oijouis-sens, a new register of satisfaction is opened up in
the pursuit of "enjoy-meant." 34 This shift establishes a new relation to
the object. What was previously oriented by the imaginary in the
demand for a repetition of the same is deliteralized and temporalized
in the figure of the objet a, which provides for the possibility of an
unending circulation of objects. This new object is nonsubstantial,
nonperceptual. It is related to the form of the body's imaginary anat-
omy by virtue of a negation and a fundamental displacement. In the
resolution of the castration complex, the phallus becomes precisely
what is not the penis.
173
In these ways, the accession of the subject to the symbolic order and
the establishment of the superego in which that transition is stabilized
is virtually constitutive of sublimation. From this perspective, Lacan
concurs with the judgement of Ricoeur that "sublimation is the sym-
bolic function itself (FP, 497).
T h e upshot of Lacan's view of the superego is most striking in
relation to the popular conception evinced above. Contrary to the view
that opposes the superego to the expression of desire and that finds
in language the very wherewithal of the superego's repressive func-
tion, for Lacan it is only by means of the superego and its agency in
the symbolic system that it is possible to attain anything at all of the
subject's relation to desire. It is only by virtue of the passage through
the castration complex that the subject wins access to the unfolding of
its desire. Lacan expresses this paradoxical conclusion in a terse and
intentionally strange-sounding formula: "Castration means thatjouis-
sance must be refused, so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder
{Vechelle reversee) of the Law of desire" (E:S, 324).
Let us take this formulation as the occasion for posing a further
question. If the superego constitutes a relation to the symbolic law that
spells the demise of narcissism and grants access to desire, what is the
relation of this law to particular social codes and conventions? Can the
symbolic law simply be identified with the status quo of existing moral
and social norms? Although a complete response to this question
would take us far afield of our main concerns, it is possible to indicate
at least the general direction of an answer. What Lacan has in mind
in speaking of the law of the symbolic order might be said to undergird
the codes governing specific human communities, but is not limited to
them. In fact, the symbolic law provides the matrix by which particular
conventions are given their measure and are subject to a constant
possibility of reformation. Thus Lacan asserts that "the superego is at
one and the same time the law and its destruction. As such it is speech
itself, the commandment of law, in so far as nothing more than its root
remains" (SJ, 102).
T h e distinction between particular codes and the law of language in
general is likened by Lacan to that drawn by Kant between the specific
rules of a moral system and the utterly general and formally empty law
of pure reason upon which they are ultimately grounded. At one point,
Lacan goes so far as to suggest that the a priori categories of thought
outlined by Kant must be understood in terms of the laws of language. 35
Like Kant, Lacan stresses the way the law functions to divide the subject
from itself; for Kant duty is set against inclination, for Lacan the desire
of the subject is opposed to the ego. In both cases, the ethical act is op-
174
posed to the subject's self-definition in terms of its own good. In Freud-

ian terms, the ethical emerges in what is beyond the pleasure principle,
in service to what is wholly other to the narcissistic ego.
That Lacan follows the implications of such a view beyond its Kan-
tian expression is evidenced by the parallel Lacan draws between the
positions of Kant and Sade. 36 The law of the signifier embraces the
morality of Sade as readily as it does the categorical imperative of
Kant. The provocative reference to Sade only serves to underscore
the main point at stake in Lacan's concept of law. What is at issue is
less a defense of any particular moral code than an insistence on an
ethics of desire where "desire" is taken in opposition to the homeos-
tases of the ego. 37 The Sadean ethic is an imperative of pure transgres-
sion. As such, it exemplifies in its essential form the self-transmutation
by rule of law that is constitutive of the "sadism" of the superego. What
emerges as the ethics of psychoanalysis implied by the law of the
signifier is thus a wholly negative ethic. It is the law of the symbolic
over the imaginary, the priority of the decentered subject over the
ego. It is a law of unceasing transgression against the encrustation of
the narcissistic substructure of the personality—a transgression that is
effected in the name of desire. "Transgression in the sense of puis-
sance" Lacan concludes, "is accomplished only by supporting itself on
a contrary principle, on the forms of the Law" (S.VII, 208).
What then is the law of language? Just as the Lacanian sense of the
law is more fundamental than any particular social code, so, too, the
law of language refers to something more basic than the rules of
grammar or syntax. The symbolic law derives from the diacritical
character of the symbolic system of language insofar as it necessitates
that every entrance into the system is meaningful only in terms of
other elements of the system that remain in the moment unspoken.
T h e meaning of any signifier must be determined, indeed can only be
determined, by recourse to another signifier. Every entry into the sym-
bolic order is intrinsically unfinished, there is always another move in
the game, there is always another reply. T h e law of language thus
refers to the inevitable finitude of discourse, the impossibility of ever
having the last word:
We cannot conceive of human discourse as being unitary. Every

emission of speech is always, up to a certain point, under an inner
necessity to err. So we are led, it would appear, to a historical Pyrron-
ism which suspends the truth-value of everything which the human
voice can emit, suspends it in the expectation of a future totalization.
(5./, 264)
175
The law of language that provides for the passage beyond the stric-
tures of narcissism implies in addition the impossibility of re-finding
any image of totality in the symbolic system. T h e function of the
signifier that opens to desire the circuits of its unfolding also guaran-
tees the unending character of that unfolding:
If there is anything that the Freudian experience has contributed, it

is that we are determined by these structural laws for that which,
rightly or wrongly, can be called the condition of the most profound
image of ourselves that can be signified, or more simply, that some-
thing in ourselves, beyond the idea that we can construct of ourselves,
on which we base ourselves, more or less cling to, and of which we
sometimes made a little too prematurely the synthesis, the totality, of
the person. (S.V, 11/27/57)
The Vicissitudes of the Death Drive: Violence and Sublimation
Over the course of this chapter, we have seen how a Lacanian

interpretation repeatedly locates the activity of the death drive at the
heart of key psychoanalytic concepts: anxiety, castration, the superego.
In this way, Lacan reveals how Freud's theory of the dual instincts can
be seen to unify and integrate the main points of the psychoanalytic
metapsychology. But it also enables us to go beyond Freud's formula-
tions toward a new understanding of the function of sublimation. We
have already pointed to the way in which the insertion of the subject
into the symbolic order opens new access to desire in the generation
of new dimensions of meaning—that jouissance is effected in the pro-
duction ofjouis-sens. From this point of view, sublimation is effected
by the transition from imaginary to symbolic structures and, as such,
is attributable to the work of the death drive. 38
To these discussions, however, it is necessary to add a final series of
remarks to distinguish the action of the death drive in the register of
the symbolic (the function of sublimation) in opposition to brute vio-
lence on the level of the imaginary. In the light of what has been
said so far, the psychical processes that issue in the formation of the
superego appear virtually continuous with the aggressivity that for
Lacan is a concomitant feature of the narcissistic organization of the
ego. Both the self-punishing criticism of the superego and the raging
of imaginary aggression aim at breaking apart the unity of the ego
under the pressure of impulses alienated by its defensive organization.
There is, however, a crucial difference between the two. Narcissistic
176
aggressivity is enacted on the level of literal violation of the body's

imaginary integrity, whereas the self-mutative effects of the superego
are achieved in the register of linguistic signification. We are thus led
to propose that the death drive operates on two levels, imaginary and
symbolic. In either case, the death drive attempts to have its way with
the imaginary ego, seeking to deconstruct its false unity. But what
emerges on the level of the imaginary as literal violence is accomplished
in the function of the superego by means of a symbolically mediated
transformation of identity. The graduation of the subject from the
imaginary plane to that of the symbolic might thus be called a sublima-
tion of the death drive. It symbolically effects a certain disintegration
of the imaginary ego that is attempted on the narcissistic level by brute
aggressivity. It is for this reason that Lacan refers to the "pacifying"
function of the Oedipus Complex (E:S, 22). "The Oedipal identifica-
tion," he suggests, "is that by which the subject transcends the aggres-
sivity that is constitutive of the primary subjective individuation" (E:S,
23).
T h e installation of the symbolic function enables the transcendence
of narcissistic aggressivity but is also liable to various degrees of impair-
ment. In fact, Lacan suggests that early views of the superego, which
stressed its virulently sadistic character, were mistakenly based on the
evidence of such failures. Thus "the emphasis that was placed at first
in psychoanalytic theory on the aggressive turning around of the
Oedipal conflict upon the subject's own self was due to the fact that
the effects of the complex were first perceived in failures to resolve it"
(E:S, 25). Such failures of accession to the level of the symbolic, al-
though they are most readily precipitated during the formative crisis
of the Oedipus Complex, are everpresent possibilities for the subject
insofar as the narcissistic formation retains a function in the psychic
process if only as the pole of regressions. Thus Lacan asserts that
this narcissistic moment in the subject is to be found in all the genetic

phases of the individual, in all the degrees of human accomplishment
in the person, in an earlier stage in which it must assume a libidinal
frustration and a later stage in which it is transcended in a normative
sublimation. This conception allows us to understand the aggressivity
involved in the effects of all regression, all arrested development, all
rejection of typical development in the subject, especially on the plane
of sexual realization, and more specifically with each of the great
phases that the libidinal transformations determine in human life.
(E:S, 24)
177
The idea that a failure in the insertion of the subject into the
symbolic matrix brings about a regression of the death drive to the level
of imaginary violation illuminates Lacan's analysis of the hallucination
recounted by Freud in the case of the Wolfman. Seated beside his
nurse in the garden, the boy is struck speechless with horror at the
vision of his finger almost completely severed from his hand. T h e loss
of speech is especially significant for Lacan, as it betokens a foreclosure
of the symbolic function that is in a more general sense the central
point around which the Wolfman's pathology revolves. The foreclo-
sure of the symbolic implies a refusal of castration, the effect of which
is an emergence of something uncanny in the field of the seen, some-
thing that can be represented only in the hallucinated violation of the
imaginary:
Castration, which is precisely what didn't exist for him, manifests

itself in the form of something he imagines—to have cut his little
finger, so deeply that it hangs solely by a little piece of skin. He is
then overwhelmed by a feeling of a catastrophe that is so inexpressible
that he doesn't even dare to talk of it to the person by his side.
. . . There is a sort of immediate external world, of manifestations
perceived in what I will call a primitive real, a non-symbolized real.
(5.7, 58)
In the experience of the Wolfman, a hallucination of bodily violation

erupts as a consequence of the foreclosure of the symbolic law. Al-
though it is risky to extrapolate too much from this example, it is
tempting to draw from it the clue for a more general explanation of
certain violent behaviors. A suggestive point of reference can be drawn
from an historical example: the atrociously violent crimes committed
in Colombia between 1949 and 1958 during the period known as La
Violencia. This period is remarkable first for the sheer number of
crimes committed. A conservative estimate puts the number of persons
killed at 135,000. 39 Even more horrifying than the numbers, however,
was the almost unimaginable savagery with which these crimes were
carried out. During the height of the atrocities, roving groups of
bandoleros descended upon villages in veritable orgies of brutality. T o
give some idea of the horrors involved let us quote Carlos Leon's
account:
All of these crimes reveal an excess of aggression and cruelty and

are qualified as such by a consensus of public opinion, which is
shocked at them and identifies them as different from the "usual
178
types of crime." These aberrant criminal actions are performed either

as part of the killing of the victims or after they are dead. Foremost
among these crimes is quartering or dismembering of victims and
burning of the bodies. This may involve individual victims or groups
of them. After killing a priest in Uraba, a bandolero burned the body
and the house where the priest was staying. When the body was half
burned, he chopped it in pieces, put them in a bag and threw then
in a river, upon which he became psychotic and ran into the jungle.
In a small village in Tolima, 60 persons were locked in a house, the
walls soaked in kerosene and then set on fire. The whole house
became a huge bonfire.
A man was crucified on a log and then killed by hammering nails

through his eyes. Another victim had all his teeth broken with pliers
and then was forced to walk with his previously sliced feet on a floor
covered with salt. He died of pain. Dismembering of children is
performed in the presence of parents before they are actually killed.
Dynamite is placed in the mouth of a victim and then exploded.
Recruits are forced to try themselves out with machetes on a pris-

oner or a dead body until some sort of exhilaration or climax is
achieved after the body is cut up.
Mutilation of noses, tongues, and ears is rather frequent. The

leader of one gang instructed his people to bring him "no reports
but ears" as tangible evidence of their crimes.
Atrocious crimes of a sexual nature were both abundant in number

and utterly shocking in design. These involved the extraction of
fetuses from pregnant women, the mutilation of breasts, and emascu-
lation of live victims and corpses.
Rape was frequent and sometimes carried out in indescribable

circumstances. In one instance a paralytic girl of 18 was raped by 15
bandoleros and burned alive afterwards. Women were raped in the
presence of their husbands, parents, or children, who were previously
immobilized and afterwards killed.
Impaling was quite frequent, especially in Los Llanos. Vampirism

was practiced by some bandoleros who, after decapitating their victims,
drank their blood from the open blood vessels.40
This litany of atrocities, in which bodily dismemberment is a grisly

leitmotif, is strikingly reminiscent of the aggressive potentiality attrib-
uted by Lacan to the narcissistic organization of the ego in his "Aggres-
179
sivity in Psychoanalysis." Indeed, La Violencia seems to realize in actual

deeds the fantasies of "castration, mutilation, dismemberment, disloca-
tion, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body" that Lacan
associates with "a Gestalt proper to aggression in man" (E:S, 11-12).
T h e imaginary character of the crimes is further evidenced by the way
in which much of the killing seems to have been carried out in a
manner designed to produce a maximum effect of spectacle. These
atrocities were intended to be seen. T h e highly ritualized nature of
certain methods of killing, called "mottoes," only underscores their
scenic character. Carlos Leon:
Several ways of beheading or wounding invented by the bandoleros

were used as their trademark. A few of these are:
"£/ corte de franela" (T-shirt cut). Especially practiced in Tolima,
this consists of a deep wound along the line where the throat joins
the chest. It is not done by striking but by sliding a very sharp machete
over the throat, usually with the help of another person to hold the
head in place.
"£/ corte de corbata" (necktie cut). This consists of an incision under
the mandible, through which the tongue of the victim is pulled to
hang like a tie.
"Corte de mica' (monkey cut). The victim is beheaded and the head
placed on the chest.
"Corte jranees" (French cut). It is practiced by incision of the scalp,
which exposes the skull of the victim when he is still alive. Sometimes
a hose is used to spray the skull and make it look neater.41
In response to the question of the underlying causes of the more

atrocious crimes committed during La Violencia, Leon points first to
certain psychological preconditions, informed by a generally repres-
sive social, economic, and religious environment that is reflected in
the family by the authority of a despotic father who uses brutal punish-
ment to assert his domination. Given the context of these conditioning
factors, Leon invites us to suppose that a breakdown in the structure
of political authority effects a violent release of forces previously held
in repression. And, in fact, in the years just prior to the outbreak of
violence, the political situation in Colombia underwent a series of
convulsive and destabilizing shifts in which power vacillated between
liberal and conservative factions. Putting the emphasis on this political
upheaval, the descent into spectacular violence in Colombia appears
180
to parallel on the level of a whole society the process by which the

hallucination of bodily violation was produced in the experience of
the Wolfman by the impairment of the paternal metaphor and its
institution of the symbolic law. If this parallel can be sustained, we are
led to amend the conclusions of Leon, who tends to pose the outbreak
of atrocities as the explosion of repressed forces that occurs when the
weight of repression is lifted. From a Lacanian point of view, the
structure of authority and the violence that erupted in its collapse can
be seen ultimately to aim at the accomplishment of the same end by
different means and, of course, with very different effects. What is
aimed at is the deconstruction of the imaginary either by the institution
of a symbolic order or by a kind of self-mutilation of the imaginary
itself. In the failure of adequate symbolic mediation, the destructive
forces of the death drive are unleashed on the level of the imaginary.
To these conclusions we can add a further speculation about the
factors that predisposed Colombian society to the violent outcome of
political disturbance. The outbreak of violence may have been favored
by the way in which the law in Colombian culture was overliterally
embodied in the figure of the father. In Lacanian terms, there was an
inadequate distinction between the symbolic and imaginary father.
Such a confusion might be especially likely to occur in predominantly
Catholic countries, where the authority of the divine tends to be so
closely invested in the very person of the father. Leon goes to some
lengths in describing the role of religious factors in the psychological
predisposition to violence precipitated by a crisis of authority. In sum-
marizing the general characteristics of the bandoleros, he notes that
"almost without exception they belong to the Catholic religion." 42 The
imaginary character of the father figure may be further suggested by
the way leaders of many of the bandolero groups assumed religious
identities and became among their followers and the population at
large the objects of almost mystical veneration. UiElMosco? a ferocious
bandit of the Caldo region, was said to be a very religious m a n . . . . He
was convinced that, due to divine protection, bullets would not enter
his body." 43 Another bandolero in Tolima "had the skin of his chest
opened, then placed a crucifix inside the wound, and had it sewn up.
He wanted to carry the crucifix under his skin as a protection against
the bullets of his enemies." 44 In these instances, the symbolic power of
the father is literally invested in the very body of the leader. Not
infrequently, the prestige of bandit leaders extended beyond the ban-
dolero group to the local population. A shrine was erected on the site
where one bandit leader was killed by the army in Bogota. This shrine
inspired "men and women of all social classes [to make] a pilgrimage;
181
busloads of people, as well as hundreds of automobiles, came from

several regions of the country." 45 Leon notes that "in a certain Colom-
bian city, the courtesy musical programs of the radio stations were
loaded with requests from local girls and women to play certain records
for well-known bandoleros."*6
Needless to say, this Lacanian analysis is entirely speculative. 47 It is
a construction based on the barest summary of the facts and is offered
here less an a conclusive explanation of La Violencia than as an illustra-
tion of the implications of the Lacanian theory we have been following.
Yet, even accepting this limitation of its intention, one might still
protest that this analysis stretches the bounds of believability. Is it
legitimate to invoke an elaborate Lacanian interpretation of the events
of La Violencia when a much simpler explanation is ready to hand?
After all, the atrocities committed in Colombia call to mind the more
recent activities of so-called "death squads" throughout South and
Central America. T h e murderous handiwork of such death squads is
often just as horrifying as anything that occurred during La Violencia.
Not infrequently, we hear reports of murders committed with outra-
geous savagery, after which the mutilated bodies of victims are inten-
tionally exposed to public display. These atrocities seem to have a
twofold objective that is purely political: they serve to eliminate ene-
mies of one or another political faction at the same time that they are
intended to silence other voices of dissent by paralyzing the community
at large with fears of immanent reprisals. It may thus seem possible to
dispense with psychologically sophisticated explanation and to inter-
pret acts of atrocious violence in terms of carefully calculated strategies
of political terror.
On second thought, however, a Lacanian explanation may illumi-
nate the function of even the most deliberate program of political
terror. The effect of vigilante violence of the sort committed by goons
and death squads is precisely to reduce the spirit of a people to the
level of the imaginary. By collapsing the will of the people onto an
imaginary register, political terror induces a pervasive atmosphere of
paranoia. By means of this paranoia, the larger bonds of social relation
are undermined, reducing the possibility of broader social concern to
the level of anxiety for individual survival. T h e body politic is atomized
as each individual becomes preoccupied by the fear that every other
member of the group may turn out to be a stooge or informer. In
the same stroke, the psychological ground is well prepared for the
emergence of a charismatic leader who enlists the structure of the
imaginary to consolidate his own position of power. He promises
individual safety in return for blind allegiance and provides the public
182
imagination with a circumscribed group of public enemies on whom

the full force of paranoid aggressivity can be focused. In these ways,
the formations of the imaginary are revealed as the matrix of the
psychology of fascism.
These bold and admittedly over-simple strokes, although far from
conclusive in themselves, are perhaps sufficient to indicate the direc-
tion in which a Lacanian rereading of Freud's Civilization and Its Discon-
tents might be constructed. T h e argument of this late text is reminiscent
of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the breadth of its problematics and
the profundity of its proposed solutions, as well as in the degree
of relentless self-criticism with which it is developed. It is further
reminiscent of Freud's earlier text in the way its most far-reaching
conclusions are framed on the theory of the dual instincts. At the end
of a long and halting series of discussions in which almost nothing is
said with explicit qualification, the nature and destiny of civilization is
related to the epochal contest between the forces of the life and death
drives. Yet this conclusion, too, is anything but simple. Around the
figure of the death drive, Freud's argument is especially enigmatic.
On the one hand, the operation of the death drive in aggression and
destruction is said to pose the most potent obstacle to civilized life.
Freud thus concludes that "the fateful question for the human species
seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural develop-
ment will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life
by the instinct of aggression and self-destruction" (SE, 21:145). It is for
this reason that the establishment of the superego is of such supreme
importance for the achievement of communal harmony. By means of
the superego, aggression is said to be "introjected, internalized; it is,
in point of fact, sent back to here it came from—that is, it is directed
toward [the individual's] own ego" (SE> 21:123). Yet the hostility of
the superego, as Freud had already made clear in The Ego and The Id,
and as the passage just quoted reiterates, is itself a manifestation of
the death drive. What enables the superego to internalize aggressivity
is that human destructiveness is originally self-destructiveness. The
superego functions to return the instinct of destruction back upon its
original object: the ego itself. In view of this fact, the status of the
death drive becomes deeply equivocal. It is at once the enemy, yet in
another sense the friend of the civilizing process, depending on
whether its destructive energy is directed outward toward the world
or inward toward the ego.
It is at this point that a Lacanian perspective reorients Freud's
conclusions. For Lacan, the projection outward of the death drive in
violence and aggression is to be attributed to its functioning on the
183
level of the imaginary. The establishment of the superego and the

institution of the agency of death at the interior of the subject itself is
the achievement of the symbolic. From a Lacanian point of view,
therefore, the ominous specter of destruction attributed by Freud to
the death drive in general is to be reinterpreted in terms of its specifi-
cally imaginary realization. The true threat to civilization stems not
from the self-mutative drive itself but from the failure of its symbolic
mediation. It is a failure, Lacan hints, to which modern societies, with
their emphasis on the autonomous individual, are especially liable:
What we are faced with, to employ the jargon that corresponds to

our approaches to man's subjective needs, is the increasing absence
of all those saturations of the superego and ego ideal that are realized
in all kinds of organic forms in traditional societies, forms that extend
from the rituals of everyday intimacy to the periodic festivals in which
the community manifests itself. We no longer know them except in
their most obviously degraded aspects. (E:S, 26)
In Lacanian terms, the "fateful question" posed by Freud in the

final paragraph of Civilization and Its Discontents is to be related not to
the struggle between two opposing biological forces, but to the pecu-
liarly human drama between the imaginary and the symbolic. T h e
question is whether the mass psychology of human groups will sustain
itself by adherence to the symbolic law against the temptations of
imaginary formations. For an age in which the visual image increas-
ingly dominates popular consciousness, even to the point of threaten-
ing the extinction of literacy in whole strata of the social order, the
contest between imaginary and symbolic forms may indeed assume
fateful proportions.
184
7
Metapsychology in the Perspective of

Metaphysics
The Unlimited is the first-principle of things that are. It is that from
which the coming to be of things takes place, and it is that into which
they return when they perish, by moral necessity, giving satisfaction
to one another and making reparation for their injustice, according
to the order of time.
—Anaximander
Let us briefly summarize the results of our inquiry into the concept
of the death drive as Lacan conceives it. The death drive is of relevance
first of all to the imaginary, as it is toward the structure of the ego
formed by imaginary identifications that the death drive is directed.
The alienating character of the imaginary thus remains a key point
for understanding Lacan's interpretation of the force beyond the
pleasure principle. What sets in motion the self-deconstructive poten-
tial of the death drive is the way in which the imaginary occludes the
real. The death drive may thus be said to be the return of the real
against the defensive organization of the ego that excludes it. In its
tendency to break apart the imaginary Gestalt of the ego, the death
drive represents a return to the corps morcele of prematurity. But if the
death drive is aimed at the imaginary and energized by the force of
the real, it finds a circuit beyond the imaginary in the symbolic. By
means of its insertion in a symbolic system, the subject's relation to the
real is submitted to the regulation of the law of ongoing signification.
In this way, the agency of death is positively installed in the subjective
economy as a function of symbolic transformation.
This interpretation of the death drive serves to highlight a number
of important points in Lacan's thinking. First, it underlines the pivotal
position of the imaginary order in Lacan's conception of the human
being. The role of the imaginary is to be reckoned both temporally,
as the imaginary provides the point of departure for the course of
the individual's psychical formation over time, and structurally, as it
185
Metapsychology, Metaphysics
supplies the formal matrix and problematic staging of identity against

which the desire of the subject will be unfolded in the signifying chain.
From this point of view, we can agree with the assertion of Samuel
Weber that the structure of narcissism provides an indispensable refer-
ence point for psychoanalysis. Everything that takes place in the ana-
lytic field must finally be referred to the imaginary organization of
identity. Narcissism is the original position against which the "beyond
of the pleasure principle" must be measured. As Weber puts it:
A certain narcissism forms the insurmountable, conflictual horizon

of psychoanalytic thinking, and therefore . . . any attempt—be it that
of Lacan (the Symbolic order of desire) or that of Freud himself—to
map out a region "beyond" narcissism is ineluctably determined by
what it seeks to transcend.1
T h e interpretation of the death drive we have pursued also illumi-

nates the distinctive features of Lacan's conception of the subject.2
Because the first contours of identity are inevitably inscribed in the
alienating register of the imaginary, the human subject is determined
from the outset as other to itself. T h e subject is essentially other to the
ego. By means of the insertion in a symbolic system, this otherness of
the subject finds new pathways toward expression beyond the imagi-
nary. A new dimensionality of identity emerges through symbolic
castration that is decentered in relation to the imaginary ego. It is an
essentially temporal dimension, mediated by the unfolding of signi-
fying chains. Unlike the imaginary, in which a fictive sense of identity
is given all at once in the perceptual Gestalt, the symbolically mediated
subject cannot be represented in any instant of time but is bound u p
essentially with the three extases of time, past, present, and future. In
the defile of the signifier, the subject is determinable only in the future
anterior, not as the one who is, but as the one who will have been. 3 In
this way, we can make sense of Lacan's characterization of the subject
as suspended from the signifying chain and his claim that "a signifier
is that which represents the subject for another signifier" (E:S, 316).
Perhaps of greatest importance, our inquiry has revealed in the
concept of the death drive a kind of theoretical nodal point in relation
to which the three cardinal Lacanian categories—imaginary, symbolic,
and real—can be integrated. By charting the relation of the death
drive to the three registers, we have been able to discern a deep
coherence running through Lacan's theoretical innovations. We are
able to trace the outline of a threefold dynamic that, although it is
certainly implied by a construction like Schema L, is not at all readily
186
apparent from a cursory acquaintance with Lacan's text. Is such a

theoretical synopsis a legitimate interpretation of Lacan's thought?
Certainly there is much in Lacan's own pronouncements to give us
pause. Throughout his career, Lacan seems to have assiduously re-
sisted any theoretical closure to his discourse and to have rejected
anything like a systematic appropriation of his teaching. T h e title of
his master work, called simply "writings," seems calculated to mark an
unwillingness to offer any summary designation for the subject matter
it contains and to insist on the fragmentary and unfinished character
of the commentaries it presents. In defense of our interpretation,
however, we can appeal to Lacan's claim to "return to Freud," in whom
the relentless drive for theoretical coherence is as conspicuous as
are Lacan's apparent hesitations. The usefulness of the theoretical
interpolations we have proposed can therefore be gauged not only
against Lacan's text but also in the degree to which they serve to
integrate Freud's most basic concepts in a new synthesis. One of the
main goals of the preceding chapters has been to demonstrate such
an integration.
In this concluding chapter, we will seek to add a further, indirect
measure of the correctness of our interpretation by indicating its
resonance with key points in the philosophical tradition. Here, too, it
is Lacan himself who points the way. One of the most significant
aspects of Lacan's revitalization of psychoanalysis consists in the way
he reintegrates it with philosophical reflection. From early on in his
work, Lacan, motivated not from a sense of the philosophical poverty
of Freud's thought but from a conviction that its philosophical signifi-
cance has been largely miscalculated or overlooked, sought to bring
psychoanalysis into contact with movements in contemporary philoso-
phy. Understood rightly, the psychoanalytic perspective achieves the
philosophical radicality suggested by Freud's allusion to the parity
between metapsychology and metaphysics. For Lacan, the field opened
by Freud can be seen to encompass the entire trajectory of philosophi-
cal thought from Hegel to Heidegger. "Of all the undertakings that
have been proposed in this century," Lacan claims, "that of the psycho-
analyst is perhaps the loftiest, because the undertaking of the psycho-
analyst acts in our time as a mediator between the man of care and
that subject of absolute knowledge" (E:S, 105). Accordingly, we now
turn to a consideration of the larger significance of Lacan's innovation,
seeking to map some of the ways that Lacan reopens dialogue between
psychoanalysis and philosophy. The results of our investigation into
the death drive will provide the points along which this map can be
drawn.
187
Death and Dialectic
In enlarging our compass to address more specifically philosophical

concerns, let us begin with some very brief remarks about Hegel. We
have already had occasion in the course of this essay to remark upon
Lacan's use of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in his conception of
the imaginary relation. On the level of the imaginary, the ego's relation
to the other precipitates a struggle for recognition of the sort described
by Hegel. It is a parallel too frequently developed by other commenta-
tors to require further comment here. However, there are other as-
pects of Lacan's proximity to Hegel that appear in the light of our
focus on the problem of the death drive. We might point not only to
the way in which Lacan's trio of fundamental registers—imaginary,
real, symbolic—echoes the essential triadicity of Hegel's dialectic, but
also to the way in which the three Lacanian categories are related to
one another by a series of negations. 4
T h e Hegelian dialectic is founded upon the idea that the essential
character of every determination of being contains implicitly within
itself the shadow of its contrary. Every being-for-itself, or being fur
sich, is conditioned by an internal relation to an otherness that remains
implicit or an sich. Every positivity is thus maintained by a force of
internal negation. In the movement of the dialectic, this conditioning
relation is brought to light as the positive is itself submitted to negation.
What was merely implicit and sunken in otherness emerges into its
own positivity and explicit being. In the concept of pure Being, for
example, the idea of Nothing can be discerned as an implicit moment,
as is shown by the fact that the idea of wholly undifferentiated Being
is virtually indistinguishable from Nothing. Being is separated from
Nothing merely by an effect of negation. Being is what is not Nothing.
But when the concept of Being is dialectically interrogated in this way
to reveal its implicit interdependence on Nothing, a new determination
emerges in which Being and Nothing are seen to yield the category of
Becoming. Such is the opening gambit of Hegel's Logic. In the ensuing
course of the Logic, a comprehensive architecture of logical concepts
is derived by a succession of similar dialectical negations.
For Hegel, the crucial point is that negation is never a mere nulli-
fying but is essentially generative and productive. The dialectical
meaning of negation is reflected in the word aufheben, which means
both to annul (as when one says of a legal contract that it has been
rendered null and void) and to raise up and/or preserve (as a stock of
goods or material is stored u p for future use). "This double usage of
language," Hegel insists, "which gives to the same word a positive and
188
negative meaning, is not an accident, . . . We should rather recognize

in it the speculative spirit of our language rising above the mere 'either-
or' of understanding." 5 Of the negative that results from dialectic,
Hegel claims that it is, "because [it is] a result, at the same time positive:
it contains what it results from, absorbed into itself, and made part of
its own nature." 6 T h e capacity of negation to realize a positive result
in dialectic derives from the fact that the negative always already
inhabits the innermost structure of every determination of thought.
In its dialectical significance, negation is never simply applied exter-
nally but bears upon the negative moment internal to every positivity.
In this way, the negative emerges as the very engine of the Hegelian
dialectic; indeed, Hegel's distinctive concept of the negative can be
recognized as the master idea that guides the unfolding of his entire
metaphysics. As the source of that internal otherness by which every
positivity is divided against itself, the force of the negative underlies
HegeFs claim that the Absolute must be understood not only as Sub-
stance but also as Subject.
Although we must confine ourselves here to the hints provided by
this barest sketch of Hegel's perspective, it is possible to glimpse a
similar function of the negative in the theoretical elaboration of psy-
choanalysis. Something strikingly similar is present, for example, in
Freud's brief but profoundly evocative paper "On Negation." In that
paper, Freud remarks on the significance of negative statements in
analysis—"Now you'll think I mean to say something insulting, but
really I've no such intention," "You ask who this person in the dream
can be. It's not my mother." Freud suggests that such statements repre-
sent attempts to express an unconscious idea under the cover of a
negation. In these instances, the content of a repressed idea "can make
its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated" (SE, 19:235).
Freud draws from these examples a conclusion of general significance:
"With the help of the symbol of negation, thinking frees itself from
the restrictions of repression and enriches itself with material that is
indispensable for its proper functioning" (SE, 19:236). T h e dynamic
of negation introduced here, as Jean Hyppolite points out in an essay
included in the French edition of Lacan's Ecrits, is very reminiscent of
the Hegelian scheme. If repression enacts a kind of negation, the
negative statements enumerated by Freud may be said to effect a
"negation of the negation." By means of a verbal negation, the effects
of repression are at once breached and maintained. In accordance
with the double meaning of the word aufheben, the contents under
repression are simultaneously raised up and preserved, yet also passed
over and annulled. And, in fact, it is the word aufheben that Freud uses
189
to describe the process of negation at stake. "Negation (Verneinung) is

a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a
lifting (Aufhebung) of the repression, though not, of course, an accep-
tance of what is repressed" (SE, 19:235-36).
Lacan is especially alert to the significance of the phenomenon
described in Freud's essay "On Negation" and does not hesitate to
point to the "properly metaphysical apprehension" it implies (E, 383).
He thus plays on Freud's claim that "with the help of the symbol of
negation thinking. . . enriches itself with material that is indispensable
for its functioning" by suggesting that "the creation of the symbol. . .
deals with a relation of the subject to being." Lacan then summarizes
the matter in these enigmatic terms:
We are thus brought to a sort of intersection of the symbolic and

the real that can be called immediate, inasmuch as it operates without
an imaginary intermediary, but which mediates itself, though pre-
cisely under a form that disavows itself, through what has been
excluded at the first moment of symbolization. (E, 383)
Without pretending to disentangle all the complexities involved

in this dense and puzzling statement, we can contribute a limited
commentary based on the view of the death drive we have proposed. 7
T h e task is to see how the three Lacanian categories of imaginary,
real, and symbolic are bound together by a kind of dialectical negation.
In its defensive function, the imaginary may be said to maintain itself
by negating the real. The ego is stabilized only by establishing a re-
stricted economy that excludes the forces of the id. But the real is by
no means put wholly out of play by the narcissistic posture of the ego,
but continues to haunt the imaginary as the invisible pole around
which it turns. Indeed, we sense the force and weight of the real behind,
as it were, the intensity of imaginary identifications. If the image is
hollow, as Lacan suggests in his seventh seminar, it is because it harbors
the real within itself, contained, sealed-off, but problematically so.8
We have already characterized the negative relation between the
symbolic and the imaginary in our analysis of Schema L. If the imagi-
nary constitutes a negation of the real and the real is thus taken to be
what is "excluded in the first moment of symbolization," then the
introduction of the symbolic may be said to effect a "negation of the
negation." The dynamic of imaginary and symbolic functions thus
constitutes an Aufhebung of desire. The subject rediscovers the stakes
of its desire beyond the homeostases of the ego as an Otherness that
remained implicit in the ego but inaccessible to it. In the unfolding
190
of discourse, the subject's otherness to itself is brought to explicit

expression.
In this way, the unfolding of an Hegelian dialectic can be discerned
in the triad of imaginary, real, and symbolic and in the workings of
the death drive as Lacan conceives it. For Hegel, too, death plays a
privileged role in the life of the mind. In a passage from the Preface
o£ the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the function of death in
terms that very suggestively resonate with the Lacanian perspective
we have been exploring:
Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things

the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest
strength. . . . But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from
death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life
that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in
utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something
positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of
something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with
it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit
is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying
with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that
converts it into being.
Freud and Schopenhauer
T h e likeness of many of Freud's key ideas to the philosophy of

Schopenhauer has often been observed by scholars of psychoanalysis
and was more than once remarked by Freud. The prime point of
likeness concerns the concept of the unconscious itself. In the philo-
sophical tradition, the relegation of conscious calculation and rational
judgment to a secondary status in favor of the primacy of obscure and
irrational motivations finds especially pointed expression in Schopen-
hauer's thought. 10 T h e parallel to Freud's conception of the uncon-
scious is particularly striking when we compare the Freudian id to
Schopenhauer's concept of the universal will-to-live. Just as Freud
inaugurates a new approach to psychical functioning by positing the
energetics of libido beneath the surface of consciousness, Schopen-
hauer shifts the cognitive emphasis of Kant's philosophy toward con-
sideration of the unknown forces driving the entirety of human action.
Schopenhauer interprets the Kantian thing-in-itself not as the un-
knowable object toward which the faculties of intellect are directed
191
but rather as the dark motive power of the universal world will that
directs human striving beyond all determinate objects and aims. Like
the Freudian id, the Schopenhauerian will is a source of pure force or
drive that motivates the projects of consciousness but that ultimately
operates outside the horizon of awareness. Thus Schopenhauer asserts
that "the will, considered purely in itself, is devoid of knowledge, and
is only a blind, irresistible urge" (WR, 1:275). It might well have been
with Schopenhauer in mind that Freud declared that "what we call
our ego behaves essentially passively in life, and that, as [Groddeck]
expresses it, we are lived' by unknown and uncontrollable forces" (SE,
19:23).
Freud's views further echo those of Schopenhauer with respect to
the paramount importance of sexuality in human life. For Schopen-
hauer, the striving of the will-to-live finds privileged expression in the
sexual impulse. For this reason, "far more than any other external
member of the body, the genitals are subject merely to the will, and
not at all to knowledge" (WR, 1:330). Like Freud, Schopenhauer
stresses the way in which sexuality deploys itself in a play of masks and
lures by which the energies of the individual are harnessed to the task
of preserving the species. In sexuality we see most clearly how "nature
can attain her ends only by implanting in the individual certain delu-
sions" (WR, 2:538). In a striking anticipation of Freud's theory of aim-
inhibited libido, Schopenhauer traces the whole range of passionate
feelings back to the sexual instinct. "All amorousness," he claims, "is
rooted in the sexual impulse alone, is in fact absolutely only a more
closely determined, specified, and indeed, in the strictest sense, indi-
vidualized impulse, however ethereally it may deport itself (WR,
2:533).
As Freud himself points out, Schopenhauer's view of the causes and
character of madness bears considerable resemblance to his own. Like
Freud, Schopenhauer associates both the evidence and the etiology of
madness to a failure of the function of memory. "Real soundness of
mind," Schopenhauer claims, "consists in perfect recollection" (WR,
2:399). T h e sound functioning of recollection implies that new impres-
sions received by the mind are integrated into the system in which
previous impressions have been registered. Thus "every new adverse
event must be assimilated by the intellect, in other words, must receive
a place in the system of truths connected with our will and its interests"
(WR, 2:400). However, just as Freud finds that certain traumatic expe-
riences fail to be adequately integrated by the psychical apparatus and
give rise to symptoms in a process analogous to the way a mollusk
192
forms a protective capsule around a foreign body that it cannot expel,

Schopenhauer supposes that the incompatibility of some events with
the habituated inclinations of the will issues in a failure of assimilation
around which pathological compensations are constructed. "If certain
events or circumstances are wholly suppressed for the intellect, be-
cause the will cannot bear the sight of them; and then, if the resultant
gaps are arbitrarily filled up for the sake of the necessary connections;
we then have madness" (WR, 2:400). Referring to this text, Freud
remarks that Schopenhauer's view "coincides so completely with my
concept of repression that once again I owe the chance of making a
discovery to my not being well-read" (SE, 14:15).
Reference to Schopenhauer is of special relevance to our concern
with the problem of the death drive. With the conclusions of Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, Freud observes, "we have unwittingly steered our
course into the harbour of Schopenhauer's philosophy. For him, death
is the 'true result and to that extent the purpose of life,' while the
sexual instinct is the embodiment of the will-to-live" (SE, 18:49-50).
Although Freud does not expand upon this remark, the perspective
we have developed from a Lacanian viewpoint invites us to enlarge
upon it in ways that testify to the correctness of Freud's intuition of a
deep correspondence between the psychoanalytic death drive and
the metaphysics of Schopenhauer. Notwithstanding the differences in
scope and purpose that separate the arguments of Freud and Schopen-
hauer, a remarkable homology can be discerned between the two.
T h e first aspect of that homology appears in the way in which both
Freud and Schopenhauer conceive the identity of the individual in
terms of a partial embodiment of underlying forces. For Freud, the ego
is a specialized portion of the id, formed around specifically perceptual
registrations. In Schopenhauer's view, the universal world will is splin-
tered into a multiplicity of individual beings located in space and time.
T h e will thus objectifies itself in countless instances, in Schopenhauer's
terms, "through the principium individuationis, just as a picture is
multiplied through the facets of a glass" (WR, 1:149). As Schopen-
hauer's aim is to account for the generation of all forms of existence,
extending from the inorganic realm through the hierarchy of organic
forms, his approach precludes any specific reference to perception as
the genesis of the individual. Nevertheless, he thinks of the objectifica-
tion of the will in terms of representation. The individual is a kind of
microcosmic mirror-image of the universal will. A passage describing
the individuation of the will in the human being invites comparison
with the Lacanian theory of the mirror phase:
193
This knowing and conscious ego is related to the will, which is the basis
of its phenomenal appearance, as the image in the focus of the
concave mirror is to that mirror itself; and, like that image, it has
only a conditioned, in fact, properly speaking, a merely apparent
reality. (WR, 2:278)
However much the individual ego can be taken as a reflection of
the universal will, it remains a distorted and partial reflection. Thus
everything generated in the phenomenal world by the principium indi-
viduationis must be deemed illusory. Schopenhauer repeatedly com-
pares the objectification of the will in the particular individualities of
nature to the Hindu veil ofmaya in which the deeper truth of Brahman
is obscured by a show of false forms and colors. T h e distance between
the individual ego and the world will is further accentuated by the way
in which the egoistic struggle for self-preservation sets the individual
in opposition to the larger forces out of which it originates. Every
instance of the will's objectification strives to maintain its independent
existence. In this way, the innermost secret of the world will comes
into view as the conflict of the will with itself. In the life of human
beings, this means that each person "is ready to annihilate the world,
in order to maintain his own self, that drop in the ocean, a little longer.
This disposition is egoism, which is essential to everything in nature.
But it is precisely through egoism that the will's inner conflict with
itself attains to such fearful revelation" (WR, 1:332).
T h e conflict between the world will and the individual is the ground
of Schopenhauer's celebrated pessimism and marks the point of great-
est similarity with Freud's conclusions in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
T h e universal will objectifies itself in countless individuals, but cease-
lessly moves beyond them, sweeping the individual being aside in its
restless striving for ever new creation. It is for this reason that every
natural being is so constituted as to guarantee its own destruction,
despite its best efforts at survival. The fact that every being dies, as
Freud put it, "for internal reasons," expresses the inexorable law of
the universal will that brought the individual into existence. Thus
Schopenhauer claims that
nature is always ready to let the individual fall, and the individual is
accordingly not only exposed to destruction in a thousand ways from
the most insignificant accidents, but is even destined for this and is
led toward it by nature herself. (WR, 1:276)
T h e picture of universal creation and destruction that emerges from

Schopenhauer's philosophy is thus reminiscent of the theory Sade puts
194
into the mouth of Pope Pius VI—the theory that, as we saw earlier,
Lacan likens to the Freudian death drive. 11 The will strives only for
the fullest multiplicity of emergent beings, obliterating the old to make
way for the new. Like Sade, Schopenhauer suggests that the death of
the individual serves to provide the material upon which new and
different forms will feed and grow. Schopenhauer describes the opera-
tion of this dialectic of death and rebirth in terms that suggestively
echo the transformation of identity effected by the psychoanalytic
death drive. What is left behind in the death of the ego provides the
seed of a fresh and original identity:
That of us which is left over by death is the seed and kernel of quite
another existence, in which a new individual finds himself again so
fresh and original, that he broods over himself in astonishment. . . .
Accordingly, death is the losing of one individuality and the receiving
of another, and consequently a changing of the individuality under
the exclusive guidance of his own will. For in this alone lies the eternal
force which was able to produce his existence with his ego, yet, on
account of the nature of this ego, is unable to maintain it in existence.
(WR, 2:501)
If Schopenhauer neglects to posit explicitly a drive toward death, it

is only because such a drive is so ubiquitously implied by his analysis
of the workings of the will in nature. The ethical conclusion of his
philosophy points the wise man toward a Stoical or Buddhistic quietism
that seeks to minimize suffering by "seeing through" the principium
individuationis, thus freeing him in some small measure from the relent-
less wheel of the world will. This prescription for the conduct of
the sage is a recognition of the inescapable necessity of death, an
acknowledgment that the whole motive force of the natural universe
is as much a drive toward death as toward birth. Indeed, the passing
away of the individual is presented by Schopenhauer as the fulfillment
of a kind of profound justice, a service to the larger order of all things.
Thus he suggests that "we might say to the dying individual: 'You are
ceasing to be something which you would have done better never to
become' " (WR, 2:501). The approach of death may thus be welcomed
by the individual as a release from the pain and toil of separate exis-
tence. For the sage, who has recognized the limitations of all individual
existence and has thereby risen above all egoistic striving, death holds
out the promise of a new and sublime bliss. It is the ecstatic identifica-
tion with all beings expressed in the Vedic formula Tat TwamAsi, "This
art thou." In Schopenhauer's view, as in Freud's conception of the
195
death drive, death is tied to a certain intimation of bliss, an experience

of jouissance:
All true and pure affection, and even all free justice, result from
seeing through the principium individuationis; when this penetration
occurs in all its force, it produces . . . the highest joy and delight in
death. (WR, 1:398)
At least in some limited respects, then, the pessimism of Schopen-

hauer can be seen in parallel to Freud's most pessimistic hypothesis.
In both the metaphysics of Schopenhauer and the concept of the
psychoanalytic death drive, what is at stake is the dissolution of the
individual ego that poses an obstacle to the further unfolding of the
very forces that constituted it.
From Schopenhauer to Nietzsche
Although Freud observes parallels between the discoveries of psy-

choanalysis and the philosophy of Schopenhauer, even more striking
is the respect he pays to Nietzsche. In a letter, Freud confesses that
"in my youth, he signified a nobility which I could not attain." 12 Ernest
Jones reports that Freud "several times said of Nietzsche that he had
a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who
ever lived or was ever likely to live."13 As Freud acknowledges, the
term "Es," or id, taken into psychoanalysis through the inspiration of
Groddeck's Das Buck vom Es, ultimately derived from Nietzsche. Can
the Freudian concept of the death drive, too, be compared to similar
views of Nietzsche? T o see how it can, indeed, to see how something
very like the Freudian death drive can be discerned at the heart of
Nietzsche's philosophy, we turn briefly to a reading of Nietzsche's first
book, The Birth of Tragedy,
The Birth of Tragedy presents an inquiry into the meaning of Greek
aesthetics, for which Nietzsche takes the art of tragic drama as the key
paradigm. However, the philosophical significance of the book reaches
far beyond its ostensible topic. Nietzsche's argument turns around the
distinction between two fundamental forces or principles, embodied
in the figures of the Greek divinities Apollo and Dionysus. Along the
axis of the Apollinian-Dionysian dichotomy, Nietzsche divides the arts,
associating the plastic and visual arts with Apollo and music with
Dionysus. Painting and sculpture, which present stable and luminous
forms to the observer, are thus attributed to the Apollinian principle.
196
The wild and shifting movement of music is the essential element of the
Dionysian. It is a distinction that derives directly from Schopenhauer.
According to Schopenhauer, music is to be distinguished from the
other arts, which imitate the will's objectification in the objects of the
phenomenal world. Music, by contrast, is the sensuous likeness of the
will itself. Nietzsche thus approvingly quotes Schopenhauer's assertion
that "music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the
Ideas, but a copy of the will itself."14
Beneath Nietzsche's Apollinian-Dionysian duality, therefore, is
Schopenhauer's distinction between the objectification of the will in
individuals and the dark, surging force of the will. Apollo is the patron
of every discrete and relatively enduring form, the giver of light and
measure to the world of objects. Nietzsche thus suggests that
we might call Apollo himself the glorious divine image of the princip-
ium individuationis, through whose gestures and eyes all the joy and
wisdom of "illusion," together with its beauty, speak to us. (B, 36)
The Dionysian, by contrast, is the divine embodiment of the boundless

will, ever fertile, ever ecstatically overflowing, even in the destruction
of its own forms. If Apollo represents "the transfiguring genius of the
principium individuationis" it is by Dionysus that "the spell of individua-
tion is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the
innermost heart of things" (B, 99-100). Dionysiac music expresses
"the essence of nature," a "horrible 'witches' brew' of sensuality and
cruelty" in which "the entire symbolism of the body is called into play,
not the mere symbolism of the lips, face, and speech but the whole
pantomime of dancing, forcing every member into rhythmic move-
ment" (B, 40). In the throes of the Dionysiac dithyramb,
we are really for a brief moment primordial being itself, feeling its
raging desire for existence and joy in existence; the struggle, the
pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear necessary to us, in
view of the excess of countless forms of existence which force and
push one another into life, in view of the exuberant fertility of the
universal will. (B, 104)
In tragedy, the Apollinian and Dionysian are brought into collision.

T h e tragic plot presents some great and noble human being, a figure
in whom the Apollinian ideal shines forth best and clearest, as he is
drawn by fate into the maelstrom of Dionysiac becoming and spun
197
apart. In this Dionysiac annihilation of the individual consists "the

mystery doctrine of tragedy:
the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent,

the conception of individuation as the prime cause of evil, and of art
as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be broken in
augury of a restored oneness. (B, 74)
Although Greek tragedy may be said to effect an ecstatic experience

of the Dionysian in the destruction of the individual, it never wholly
relinquishes the Apollinian ideal, but retains the image of Apollinian
beauty as the indispensable figure against which the dark background
of the Dionysian assumes its validity as a dimension of transcendence.
Considered in its totality, the classical tragedy brings about a fusion of
the two principles. Held together by the dramatic form, the Apollinian
and Dionysian tendencies interpenetrate one another. Nietzsche is
thus interested in "what aesthetic effect results when the essentially
separate art-forces, the Apollinian and the Dionysian, enter into simul-
taneous activity" (B, 101). In the tragedy, "these two art drives must
unfold their powers in a strict proportion, according to the law of
eternal justice" (B, 143). The whole function of tragedy in providing
the quintessential expression of the Greek sensibility consists in this
fusion of irreconcilable opposites. Thus Nietzsche concludes that
the intricate relation of the Apollinian and the Dionysian in tragedy

may really be symbolized by a fraternal union of the two deities:
Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo, finally, the
language of Dionysus. (B, 130)
With this conclusion, we see how far Nietzsche has passed beyond
the standpoint of Schopenhauer that informs his point of departure.
Schopenhauer, too, conceives tragedy as a turning of events that allows
us to see through the principium individuationis. But having determined
the illusory character of the phenomenal world as against the deeper
reality of the will and having faced the inevitable destruction of the
individual, Schopenhauer counsels withdrawal from the world. For
Schopenhauer, the ultimate lesson of tragedy is the wisdom of resigna-
tion. Only by means of ascetic resignation that disinvests itself from
all individuality is it possible to overcome the agony of an existence
submitted to death and suffering. For Nietzsche, however, Schopen-
hauer's asceticism is ultimately a counsel of nihilism. T h e pessimistic
recoil from suffering is a slander on the existing world. 15 Although
198
Schopenhauer's distinction between the phenomenal world and the

unseen forces that animate it remains of inestimable importance, the
conclusion of his philosophy lapses into "decadence." Nietzsche finds
a positive alternative in the Greeks. The example of the Greeks is
salutary precisely because it signifies the affirmation of the tension
between the world of ApoUinian forms and the menacing force of
Dionysian excess. It is the celebration of this tension that marks the
truly Greek character. The genuinely noble spirit lives only within this
tension and even seeks to heighten it. For the Greek mind, the symbols
of the most profound vitality function, as does tragedy, to unite the
ApoUinian and the Dionysian. In the centaur and the satyr, for exam-
ple, the ApoUinian virtues of courage and wisdom are literally grafted
upon the trunk of Dionysian animality.
By emphasizing the celebration of a union between ApoUinian and
Dionysian elements in ancient tragedy, Nietzsche rewrites traditional
interpretations of the Greek spirit. For Nietzsche, a certain experience
of the incommensurable, commonly taken by scholars to be anathema
to the Greek, is revealed to be the very heartbeat of the tragic sensibil-
ity. It is for this reason that Nietzsche insists on a new view of the
Greek "cheerfulness." 16 Far from being an expression of harmonized
and rational emotion, the pacified happiness of Aristotelian contem-
plation, the cheerfulness of the prephilosophical Greek must be under-
stood as composure in the face of chaos, or better, as composure that
is on intimate terms with the chaos within itself. In tragedy, Nietzsche
suggests, the Greek spirit shows its intimate connection to the dark
and infernal forces that seethe at the bottom of existence:
The effects wrought by the Dionysian also seemed "titanic" and

"barbaric" to the ApoUinian Greek; while at the same time he could
not conceal from himself that he, too, was inwardly related to these
overthrown Titans and heroes. Indeed, he had to recognize even
more than this: despite all its beauty and moderation, his entire
existence rested on a hidden substratum of suffering and of knowl-
edge, revealed to him by the Dionysian. And behold: Apollo could
not live without Dionysus! (B, 46)
In the perspective of tragedy, the "archaic smile," that sublime expres-

sion of apparently imperturbable serenity that graces the visage of
antique statuary, becomes inseparable from its antipode: the obscene
and leering grin of the Gorgon. Only when the insidious laughter of
the Gorgon is projected at the interior of the archaic smile as its alter
ego does the Greek attitude become interpretable in its true nature as
199
serious cheerfulness and cheerful seriousness. In the archaic smile,

the Greek attitude shows itself not as Buddhistic resignation to Death,
but as an affirmation of Life in spite of its terrors and sufferings.
The Birth of Tragedy inaugurates a new vision of the Greek experi-
ence, but may also be taken to presage the culmination of Nietzsche's
philosophy in his concept of the Ubermensch. The embrace of opposites
that Nietzsche finds in Greek tragedy is echoed in Zarathustra's defini-
tion of man as "a rope over an abyss" and his affirmation that "what
is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end." 17 Indeed, it is
with reference to the ability to sustain ever more disparate tensions
and forces within itself that Nietzsche defines the highest expression
of the will to power in the overman. "It is precisely through the
presence of opposites and the feelings they occasion that the great
man, the bow with the great tension, develops." 18
How, then, does Nietzche's perspective provide a parallel to the
Freudian concept of the death drive? 19 T h e argument of The Birth of
Tragedy is not only a meditation on aesthetics but also, and perhaps
even more essentially, a psychological inquiry. Looking back at his first
book in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche remarks that the first of "the two decisive
innovations of the book" is "its understanding of the Dionysian phe-
nomenon among the Greeks: for the first time a psychological analysis
of this phenomenon is offered." 20 Yet for Nietzsche, as for Freud,
psychological analysis does not take a back seat to metaphysics. As
Nietzsche remarks in Beyond Good and Evil, "psychology shall again
be recognized as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and
preparation the other sciences exist. For psychology is now again the
path to the fundamental problems." 21 And like Freudian psychology
as we have interpreted it, which locates in a "death drive" the emer-
gence of the profoundest desires of the subject in opposition to the
self-image of the ego, the psychology put forward in The Birth of
Tragedy identifies an initial "imaginary" registration of ego that is
shattered by the realization of deeper, ultimately ineffable strivings
that are incompatible with it. The opposition between the Apollinian
and the Dionysian is correlative with that between the functions of the
image and the generative forces that at once give rise to images yet
remain active beyond all imagistic embodiment and finally challenge
the limitations of every image.
T h e central concern of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music,
as Nietzsche had originally entitled his work, is the dialectic in which
the Apollinian image is seen to arise fleetingly out of Dionysian music
then collapse back into its fluid substance. The key question is thus
"how is music related to image and concept" (B, 101). Nietzsche notes
200
that even contemporary critics of music, who have no inkling of the

real dimensions of the problem, rely upon a language of images to
describe music, as do composers themselves. Thus a symphony may
be characterized as " p a s t o r a l . . . or a passage in it as the 'scene by the
brook/ or another as the 'merry gathering of rustics' " (B, 54). Such
descriptions reflect a fundamental psychological relation of music and
image that concerns the "process of a discharge of music into images"
(B, 54). That this process functions as the very birth canal of tragedy,
Nietzsche argues, is shown by the fact that tragic drama originated
out of the chorus. The musical prelude prepares an essentially scenic
anticipation in the audience. Music is intrinsically productive of imagis-
tic consciousness as "the continuously generating melody scatters im-
age sparks all around" (B, 53). Why? What relation does the image
bear to the music out of which it is spun like a spark? In Nietzsche's
view, the pure immediacy of music, its utterly fluid movement and
emotional tumult presents to the hearer an incarnation of the will that
cannot be tolerated for long without being anchored to more stable
thought forms. The images that proliferate in the hearing of music
thus function to stabilize the experience of the hearer, to offer solid
resting places in the oceanic surging of sound. Nietzsche thus conceives
the relation of image to music as one of defence against a disorienting
sea change of feeling. "The Apollinian illusion . . . aims to deliver us
from the Dionysian flood and excess" (B, 129). Nietzsche extends
the metaphor of being delivered from drowning by again quoting
Schopenhauer:
Just as in a stormy sea that, unbounded in all directions, raises and

drops mountainous waves, howling, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts
in his frail bark: so in the midst of a world of torments the individual
human being sits quietly, supported by and trusting in the principium
individuationis. (B, 35-36)
As we follow this first stage of the process of tragedy in the eruption

of images out of music, it is difficult not to be struck by its parallels
with Lacan's theory of the mirror phase and with Freud's remarks
about the genesis of the ego. Music functions in Nietzsche's argument
to represent something very similar to what Lacan presents as the
immersion of the human infant in the chaos of prematurity. In both
instances, what is envisaged is a kind of shifting sea of emotive forces
in which a stable sense of identity can find no sure foothold. For Lacan,
too, it is fixation to an image that serves to deliver the infant from its
original chaos. Out of the wavering currents of disorganized impulses,
201
Metapsyckology, Metaphysics
perception orients itself by grasping a unitary Gestalt. Freud described

the establishment of the ego in remarkably similar terms in the first
section of Civilization and Its Discontents, where the ego is presented as
a restricted domain, separated from the "oceanic" experience of "the
general mass of sensations" (SE, 21:67).
T h e likeness of Nietzsche's analysis of tragedy to the structure of
psychoanalytic theory only deepens when we turn to the second stage
of the unfolding of the tragic action: that in which the "Apollinian
illusion, by means of which we are supposed to be savecl<from the
immediate unity with Dionysian music," is again overwhelmed and
swallowed up by a resurgence of Dionysian forces (B, 139). Just as
psychoanalysis recognizes in the death drive the necessary deconstruc-
tion of the alienating form of the ego, Nietzsche proposes that the
cathartic effect of tragedy consists in the way in which the identity of
the individual is shattered. In Lacanian terms, tragedy presents a
dramatic epiphany of the corps morcele. Nietzsche insists that "the will-
ing individual that furthers his own egoistic ends can be conceived of
only as the antagonist, not as the origin of art" (B, 52). In tearing
asunder the individual, tragedy exemplifies the essential effect of all
genuine experience of art: "The conquest of the subjective, redemp-
tion from the 'ego,' and the silencing of the individual will and desire"
(B, 48). What necessitates this overcoming of individual identity is, for
Nietzsche, as for psychoanalysis, the alienating character of the ego.
T h e sorcery of Dionysian music is thus said to effect a "liberation
from the fetters of the individual" (B, 124). "Under the charm of
the Dionysian, . . . nature, which has become alienated, hostile, or
subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son,
man" (B, 37). The Dionysian as Nietzsche conceives it thus parallels the
Freudian id. In the encounter with Dionysian powers, the individual is
torn apart by forces that are at once other to himself, yet to which
he is intimately connected. Such Dionysian dismemberment, like the
effects of the psychoanalytic death drive, may be both mortifying and
revitalizing. Just as the traumatizing effect of the death drive may
serve to renourish the subject from the sources of its inchoate desire,
the death of the individual in Dionysiac excess brings with it a possibil-
ity of rebirth. "Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be
eternally reborn and return again from destruction." 22
This comparison of Nietzsche's interpretation of tragedy to key
Freudian ideas reveals how the psychoanalytic enterprise is exempli-
fied by the figure of Oedipus more completely than Freud himself
ever made explicit. Oedipus emerges not just as the epitome of the
well-known familial triangle but as the mythical embodiment of the
202
death drive. Indeed, the emotional power of the drama of Sophocles

consists not only in our awareness that a man has killed his father and
slept with his mother but in our suspense at watching him unwittingly
seek out the knowledge of this horror with all the means at his disposal.
In Oedipus Rex we are chilled and horrified to see a man unconsciously
pursuing his own destruction. It is an aspect of the drama that does
not escape the notice of Lacan, who finds in it a parable of the Freudian
death drive. Comparing Oedipus's search for the truth to the progress
of a psychoanalysis, Lacan suggests that "the psychoanalysis of Oedi-
pus is only completed at Colonus, when he tears his face apart" (5.//,
214). T h e ultimate riddle posed by the figure of Oedipus concerns the
realization of the subject in the beyond of the ego, the realization that
his destiny is bound up with a truth that from the standpoint of the
ego is an abomination:
So Oedipus does exist, and he fully realized his destiny. He realized

it to that final point which is nothing more than something strictly
identical to a striking down, a tearing apart, a laceration of himself—
he is no longer, no longer anything, at all. And it is at that moment
that he says the phrase I evoked last time—Am I made man in the hour
when I cease to be? (S.II, 229) 23
Freud and Heidegger
Perhaps the most significant dialogue opened up by Lacan between

psychoanalysis and philosophy concerns a figure with whom Freud
remained unfamiliar: Martin Heidegger. From Heidegger's stand-
point, it is a somewhat unlikely dialogue, as a great deal of what
Heidegger had to say about Freud was sharply critical.24 Heidegger's
limited acquaintance with Jacques Lacan seems to have reinforced his
already dim view of psychoanalysis. In letters to the Swiss psychiatrist,
Medard Boss, Heidegger claims to have found Lacan's Ecrits "baroque"
in its style and even suggests, in commenting to Boss on a letter he
received from Lacan, that "the psychiatrist seems to me in need of a
psychiatrist." 25 These disparaging remarks cannot be taken too seri-
ously, however, as it is fairly clear that Heidegger never made any
careful study of Lacan's work. Lacan, on the other hand, knew Heideg-
ger's thought well and referred to it enthusiastically, at least during
the period of the 1950s when Lacan produced a French translation of
Heidegger's essay on the "Logos" of Heraclitus. 26 Lacan's seminal
1953 paper "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
203
Psychoanalysis" not only culminates with references to Heidegger, but

does so precisely in connection with the central focus of our concern,
the problem of the Freudian death drive. The death drive is thus said
to "express the limit of the historical function of the subject":
This limit is death—not as an eventual coming-to-term of the life of

the individual, nor as the empirical certainty of the subject, but, as
Heidegger's formula puts it, as that "possibility which is one's own-
most, unconditional, unsupersedable, certain and as such indeter-
minable (uniiberholbare)" for the subject—"subject" understood as
meaning the subject defined by his historicity. (E:S, 103)
As we begin the task of interpreting such a passage and attempt to

locate the bridge between Heidegger and psychoanalysis envisaged by
Lacan, we are well advised not to expect too much. Anything we can
contribute must be taken as extremely provisional, not least because
our remarks here must be brief. Moreover, whatever the correspon-
dence we may evince between Heidegger and Freud, we cannot ignore
the fact that the premises, methods, and goals of Heidegger's philoso-
phy are different in many respects from those of Freudian psychoanal-
ysis. Nevertheless, it is possible to indicate some significant points of
convergence. From a certain point of view, the project of "fundamental
ontology" undertaken by Heidegger in Being and Time can be seen to
parallel the basic orientation of Freud's metapsychology. On the basis
of this parallel, we can glimpse a broad homology between Heidegger's
thought and a Lacanian perspective—a homology that centers on the
concept of the death drive.
Heidegger's lifelong philosophical preoccupation was with the prob-
lem of Being. In Being and Time, the phenomenological character of
his approach is evidenced in the way he launches his investigation into
the nature of Being in general with an inquiry into the being that we
ourselves are as existing Dasein.27 The question of Being is posed in
terms of the being to whom Being is revealed. When the question of
Being is addressed in this way to the existence of Dasein, the problem-
atic of ontology, or the science of Being in general, is shifted onto the
field of "fundamental ontology" and becomes an inquiry into the
conditions for the revealment of Being. The program of Being and
Time thus becomes an "existential analytic of Dasein," which seeks to
identify those conditioning structures by which Dasein faces Being
and encounters beings in its world. Already at the level of this very
general statement of Heidegger's project, it is possible to discern a
certain resemblance to the Freudian perspective on the unconscious. 28
204
T h e resemblance stems from Heidegger's insistence that all re-

vealment is essentially and ineluctably bound up with a corresponding
concealment. Insofar as Dasein is by its essence turned toward Being
and open to its revealment, Dasein may be said to be "in the truth." But
because every disclosure of Being necessarily implies a corresponding
concealment and covering-over, Dasein must also be said to be inevita-
bly prey to what Heidegger calls "untruth." From a phenomenological
viewpoint, therefore, Heidegger recognizes in a very general way
something akin to the necessity of the unconscious. For Heidegger,
human existence is inescapably submitted to light and darkness, pres-
ence and absence:
In its full existential-ontological meaning, the proposition that "Da-

sein is in the truth" states equiprimordially that "Dasein is in untruth."
But only in so far as Dasein has been disclosed has it also been
closed off; and only in so far as entities within-the-world have been
uncovered along with Dasein, have such entities, as possibly encoun-
terable within-the-world, been covered up (hidden) or disguised.29
As we delve more deeply into Heidegger's analysis in Being and

Time, we find further grounds for comparison to Freudian ideas.
Perhaps the most fundamental idea guiding Heidegger's thinking is
the distinction between Being as such and particular beings in the
world, the so-called "ontological difference." Along the axis of this
distinction, Heidegger differentiates between the ontological horizon
that grounds the revealment of Being in general and the ontic field of
a particular human existence in which certain determinations of Being
are actually realized. The distinction of ontological and ontic perspec-
tives in turn informs a further pair of concepts—"existential" versus
"existentieir—by which the being of Dasein can be specified. Human
being can be interrogated according to its general availability for the
revealment of Being, thus bringing to light those existential structures
that govern its potentiality-for-Being, or it can be characterized in
terms of the facts of its actual situation, which Heidegger calls exis-
tentielL Heidegger therefore conceives human being in terms of a
fundamental turning-toward-Being that is realized at particular mo-
ments of an individual life in distinctive relations and involvements.
Existentially, Dasein is pure concern for Being, or Sorge (care). In the
context of its actual or existentiell situation, however, Dasein's concern
is directed to specific objects and ends that are revealed to it in particu-
lar ways.
These distinctions can serve to frame one of the primary goals of
205
Heidegger's project in Being and Time: the differentiation of inauthen-

tic and authentic existence. As an "existential analytic of Dase'm" Being
and Time undertakes to define the structures of Dasein's openness to
Being in such a way that the factical existence of Dasein, its existentiell
engagement with particular beings, is contrasted with its existential
potentiality-for-Being, that mode of Dasein's being that transcends
any factical situation. Because Dasein is essentially openness for Being,
it is always possible for it to see beyond the confines of its immediate
engagement in the world. In its open relation to Being, Dasein's exis-
tence always borders on a dimension of transcendence. Being as such,
Heidegger claims, "is the transcendens pure and simple" (BT, 62). T h e
opposition between inauthenticity and authenticity accords with this
distinction between Dasein's factical existence and its essential potenti-
ality-for-Being. "Proximally and for the most part," as Heidegger
repeatedly puts it in one of his favorite phrases, Dasein is sunken in
"average everydayness." As a result of this everydayness, Dasein is
caught u p with particular determinations of Being in ways that obscure
its fuller potentiality-for-Being. This "everyday" determination of Da-
sein is called "inauthentic" not because it is deemed to be somehow
morally reprehensible or in order to suggest that inauthenticity is a
state from which one might escape by a leap of sincerity, but because
what is concealed by everydayness is precisely that openness to Being
that is the essence of Dasein. As Heidegger defines it, Dasein is "that
entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue" (BT, 68). In
inauthenticity, the issue of Dasein's relation to Being appears to have
been settled once and for all. Along the familiar pathways of its every-
day existence, Dasein is lulled into a profound forgetfulness, the most
pernicious feature of which is that its very forgetfulness is itself forgot-
ten. Authenticity, by contrast, involves the rediscovery that there re-
mains something questionable in Dasein's being. Authenticity is thus
a mode of existence in which the issue of Dasein's being, its potentiality
for being other than it has been, is somehow faced u p to and acknowl-
edged.
In some important respects, Freud's metapsychological perspective
parallels the Heideggerian view sketched above. T h e difference, it
might be said, is that what Heidegger conceives existentially is posed
by Freud psycho-economically. Yet, from both perspectives, a similar
underlying scheme can be discerned. Where Heidegger thinks the
relation of Dasein to particular beings in the world in terms of their
grounding in a general concernfulness toward Being, in psychoanaly-
sis the object relation is thought to be derived from, and to be a
specification of, a reservoir of libidinal energies that animate the psy-
206
chical subject. Psychoanalysis reveals in the life of the individual a

specific economy of libido in which object choices and identifications
have laid down a definite pattern of investments. The Freudian con-
cept of libido thus functions like the Heideggerian Sorge to designate
a general predisposition or interest that is particularized for every
individual yet which remains open to enlargement and redistribution.
In this light, the effects of psychoanalysis might be compared with
Heidegger's notion of Dasein's retrieval of its potentiality-for-Being
in authenticity. Psychoanalysis opens the way for a reorientation of
the libidinal attachments of the individual, loosening fixations and
providing the pathways along which new objects of desire may be
sought. 30
Certainly, there is much in these preliminary comparisons that re-
mains questionable, and a more detailed treatment would be required
to establish them with any precision. Nevertheless, perhaps they are
sufficient to move us closer to specifying the meaning of the psychoan-
alytic death drive in Heideggerian terms. To begin, we can note the
similarities between Heidegger's conception of Dasein's inauthentic
existence and the nature and function of the Lacanian ego. In its
inauthentic absorption in everydayness, Dasein loses itself as it be-
comes entangled in a web of mundane concerns. As Heidegger puts
it, "Dasein constantly surrenders itself to the 'world' and lets the 'world'
'matter' to it in such a way that somehow Dasein evades its very self
{BT, 178), This losing of itself in factical existence is a perpetual
temptation for human being, constitutive of a kind of gravity into
which Dasein is continually sinking. In Heidegger's terms, Dasein is
forever "falling" away from itself as its open horizon for the revealment
of Being is closed off precisely by virtue of Dasein's being preoccupied
with "business as usual." Heidegger describes this tendency, in terms
that recall Lacan's conception of the imaginary order of the ego, as a
kind of alienation:
When Dasein, tranquillized, and "understanding" everything, thus

compares itself with everything, it drifts along towards an alienation
[Entfremdung] in which its own most potentiality-for-Being is hidden
from it. Falling Being-in-the-world is not only tempting and tran-
quillizing; it is at the same time alienating. (BT, 222)
T h e parallels between Heidegger's conception of inauthentic exis-

tence and the Lacanian imaginary may be further extended along a
number of points. In the first place, Heidegger associates inauthentic-
ity with an effect of "fascination" that suggestively echoes the stress
207
unsupersedable, certain and as such indeterminate" is in fact simply a

compressed summary of the contents of the opening section of Divi-
sion Two. To the extent that Heideggerian inauthenticity parallels
the Lacanian concept of imaginary alienation, being-to wards-Death
occupies a position precisely homologous to the psychoanalytic death
drive. This general parallelism can be further specified in a number
of ways:
(1) We have seen how Lacan conceives the being of the subject in
the captures of the imaginary as an excluded remainder. The death
drive that breaks apart the imaginary unity of the ego is set in motion
precisely because the ego, as an internal object, does not represent the
truth of the subject. There is something of the subject beyond the ego,
something that is liberated only in the deconstruction of the ego's
imaginary organization. Heidegger presents the relation between Da-
sein's inauthentic engagement and its full potentiality-for-Being in
similar terms. The movement toward Dasein's authenticity in the sec-
ond division of Being and Time is to be understood against the back-
ground of a certain deficiency of inauthentic existence. The question
concerns what has been left out and remains lacking in Dasein's every-
dayness. If inauthentic existence is characterized by its tendency to
minimize the sphere of concern, a question arises about the possibility
of Dasein's "being-a-whole." Within the domain of Dasein's existence
as it is lived proximally and for the most part, "there is always some-
thing still outstanding, which, as a potentiality-for-Being for Dasein
itself, has not yet become 'actual' " (BT, 279). 32 This "something still
outstanding," like the desire of the Lacanian subject alienated by the
imaginary, is retrievable only by a certain encounter with death. For
Heidegger, as for Lacan, this transformative "death" is not to be taken
as simply the end-point of life, the physical demise of the organism.
T h e death at issue concerns a structural transformation of the subject's
existence.
For both Heidegger and Lacan, this experience of death is bound u p
with anxiety. "Being-towards-Death," Heidegger claims, "is essentially
anxiety" (BT, 310). In being-towards-Death, Dasein is brought u p
short in the face of its own unrealized potentiality-for-Being, the con-
frontation with which is the very essence of anxiety. As such, the
inauthentic existence of Dasein, as a flight from anxiety, is equally a
flight from death. In its everyday interpretation, "death gets passed
off as something 'actual'; its character as a possibility gets concealed"
(BT, 297). Heidegger thus concludes that "temptation, tranquilliza-
tion, and alienation are distinguishing marks of the kind of Being
210
called Tailing/ As falling, everyday Being-towards-death is a constant

fleeing in the face of death" (BT, 298).
(2) Talk of Dasein's possible being-as-a-whole may readily conjure

u p an image of the fully realized being of the subject, as if by authentic
existence Heidegger has in mind an overcoming of inauthenticity that
retrieves and gathers into a simultaneous unity the whole of what it
leaves outstanding. Likewise, when we speak in Lacanian terms of the
rediscovery of desire from its alienation in the imaginary, we might
be tempted to think of the symbolic mediation of the subject as making
possible a realization of the "total subject" or the "whole person." We
have already had occasion to remark that for Lacan there is emphati-
cally no possibility of such a totalizing of the subject. We are not to
think of desire as ever fully recovered or even represented by the
symbolic, but rather as circuited by it. That is to say, there is only the
coming-to-be of the subject into its desire over time. To say that the
Lacanian subject is ineluctably a decentered subject may therefore be
specified according to two moments: the subject is decentered or ek-
centric to itself in its relation to the imaginary, yet, even in its symbolic
mediation, it remains decentered, or ek-static, as it is stretched out
over time in the succession of the signifying chain.
This Lacanian emphasis on the essentially temporalized character
of subjectivity is shared by Heidegger; indeed, it is the culminating
insight of Being and Time. In its authenticity, Dasein is "anticipatory
resoluteness." As such, authenticity is not so much a state of being
as it is the submission to a process of becoming. The conclusion of
Heidegger's existential analytic is that "temporality reveals itself as the
meaning of authentic care" (BT, 374). In authenticity, Dasein takes over
its ek-static being explicitly as having a past that is recovered and made
its own, not as something static and inert, but as interpretable in terms
of an open and undetermined future. Only when Dasein in its being-
towards-Death confronts its possibility of being radically other than it
has been does the full meaning of its temporal existence open up
before it.
(3) Both Heidegger and Lacan accord a central role to language,

and, although their inspirations and objective differ, they share a
remarkably similar view of its function. For Heidegger, it is in and
through language that Dasein is brought into relation with Being.
"Language," he asserts, is the house of Being." 33 "Everything depends
on this alone, that the truth of Being come to language and that
thinking attain to this language." 34 Language as Heidegger thinks of
211
laid by Lacan on the visually captivating character of the imaginary.

The German word Heidegger uses, Benommenheit, connotes being
numbed or mesmerized. "Inauthenticity," Heidegger maintains, "does
not mean anything like Being-no-longer-in-the-world, but amounts
rather to a quite distinctive kind of Being-in-the-world—the kind
which is completely fascinated by the 'world' " (BT, 220). Second, we
can point to the relation between inauthenticity and anxiety. As we
have seen, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, not only is anxiety related
to a fracturing of the imaginary structure of the ego, the very function
of the imaginary organization is to provide a bulwark against the
outbreak of anxiety. T h e inauthenticity of Dasein has an essentially
similar character. For Heidegger, one of the prime features of the
everydayness of Dasein is its tranquillizing effect. T h e immersion of
Dasein in the narrow sphere of its everyday matters constitutes a flight
from anxiety. "Dasein's absorption in the 'they' and its absorption in
the 'world' of its everyday concern, make manifest something like a
fleeing of Dasein in the face of itself—of itself as an authentic potentiali-
ty-for-Being-its-Self' (BT, 229). T o face up to such pure potentiality-
for-Being is for Heidegger the very essence of anxiety.
A number of further parallels become clear in this discussion of
anxiety. First, Heidegger's distinction between fear and anxiety corre-
sponds precisely to that drawn by Freud, for whom anxiety is distin-
guished from fear by its "quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In
precise speech, we use the word Tear' [Furcht] rather than 'anxiety'
[Angst] if it has found an object" (SE, 20:105). For Heidegger, "that in
the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite" (BT, 231).
By contrast, "that in the face of which we fear is a detrimental entity
within-the-world which comes from some definite region" (BT, 230).
The relation between anxiety and fear is thus exactly for Heidegger
what it is for Freud: anxiety is the more primordial phenomenon; it
devolves into fear when it has supplied itself with an object. Thus
Heidegger maintains that "fear is anxiety, fallen into the 'world,' inau-
thentic, and, as such, hidden from itself (BT, 234). What makes it
possible for everydayness to diminish and cover over anxiety is pre-
cisely that Dasein has in its everyday behavior so completely occupied
itself with mundane beings in the world that its horizon of revealment
has been closed down and contained.
T h e experience of anxiety offers for Heidegger, as it does for Freud,
a privileged insight into the inner truth of the human being. Just as
Freud finds in anxiety the surfacing of the repressed, Heidegger
conceives anxiety in terms of the experience of Dasein's essential char-
acter as pure possibility. In anxiety, Dasein comes face to face with
208
itself. "As Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the
'world.' Everyday familiarity collapses. Dasein has been individualized,
but individualized as Being-in-the-world" (BT, 233). Both Freud and
Heidegger describe the encounter with anxiety in which the truth of
the subject erupts against its efforts to conceal it from itself as an
experience of das Unheimlich, of "uncanniness." As Heidegger puts it,
"in anxiety one feels 'uncanny' Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that
which Dasein finds itself alongside in anxiety, comes proximally to
expression: the "nothing and nowhere. . . . Being-in enters into the
existential 'mode' of the 'not-at-home.' Nothing else is meant by our
talk about 'uncanniness' " {BT, 233). Yet the sense of "nothing and
nowhere" that overtakes Dasein in anxiety is not a threat that comes
from outside but rather "a threat which reaches Dasein itself and
which comes from Dasein itself {BT, 234). From his own perspective,
Freud is in essential agreement; the experience of the uncanny repre-
sents the eruption of something belonging to the subject's own being
that has undergone repression. "This uncanny is in reality nothing
new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in
the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the
process of repression" {SE, 17:241).
Along a number of significant points, then, it is possible to glimpse a
broad homology between Heidegger's characterization of inauthentic
existence and the imaginary order of the ego in psychoanalysis. This
discussion prepares us to place the psychoanalytic death drive in a
Heideggerian context. Just as Lacan thinks of the death drive as open-
ing up a beyond of the imaginary order in which the pursuit of the
subject's desire comes into its own, Heidegger finds in the encounter
with death the point at which Dasein is brought back to itself from its
alienating absorption in everydayness. The importance for Heidegger
of this transition is signaled by the way it forms the pivot between the
two main divisions of Being and Time. The first division, called the
"preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein," is developed along
the guiding thread of Dasein's inauthentic existence, the way Dasein
comports itself toward beings "proximally and for the most part." l In
the second division, however, the "preparatory" theme of everyday-
ness gives way to a "primordial existential interpretation" in the per-
spective of which the possibility of Dasein's authentic potentiality-for-
Being will come more fully into view. The concept with which this
second movement of Heidegger's work opens, the hinge, as it were,
between the two halves of Being and Time, is the concept of being-
towards-Death, Sein-zum-Tode. Lacan's reference to Heidegger's con-
cept of death as that "possibility which is one's ownmost, unconditional,
209
it is not a mere means of expression, the tool of our communicating

with one another. Rather, language itself speaks, so that in authentic
speech human beings are called to respond to something spoken from
out of the essence of language itself. It is not the case that "along
with other faculties, man also possesses the faculty of speech"; on the
contrary, "only speech enables man to be the living being he is as
man." 35 For Heidegger, the human being does not speak language,
language speaks human being. Lacan conceives the nature of language
in a similar way. "Man speaks . . . ," he claims, "but it is because the
symbol has made him man" (E:S, 65). T h e linkage Lacan suggests
between the emergence of repressed desire and the revealment of
"being" has an unmistakably Heideggerian ring. "The repressed desire
made manifest in the dream," he claims, "is identified with the register
to which I am trying to get you to enter—what is waiting to be revealed
is being" (S.I, 270). That desire finds its circuit in language thus posi-
tions language in Lacan's view as that by which being is realized:
It is within the dimension of being that the tripartition of the symbolic,
the imaginary, and the real is to be found. . . . At the beginning of
the analysis, just as at the beginning of every dialectic, this being, if
it does not exist implicitly, in a virtual fashion, is not realized. . . .
This revelation of speech is a realization of being. (S.I, 271)
No doubt something which isn't expressed doesn't exist. But the
repressed is always there, insisting, and demanding to be. The funda-
mental relation of man to this symbolic order is very precisely what
founds the symbolic order itself—the relation of non-being to being.
What insists on being satisfied can only be satisfied in recognition.
The end of the symbolic process is that non-being come to be, because
it has spoken. (S.II, 308)
Heidegger and Lacan are in fundamental agreement that the rela-
tion to being is mediated by language, but they also concur in the way
they distinguish a fallen or deficient usage of language in which its
potential ordinarily remains unfulfilled. For Heidegger, language in
its day-to-day usage is flattened out and routinized. It becomes mere
"idle talk." Such idle chatter drones on in phrases worn so smooth
from constant usage that there are no rough edges or jutting points
of meaning at which one might hesitate and think twice. An exchange
like "How are you? —Fine, thanks" thus constitutes a kind of unthink-
ing reflex. Neither is the question understood as a genuine question
nor does the answer claim real interest as a response. Contrary to the
ostensible purpose of the question it puts forward, the everyday "How
212
are you?" exchange functions to obviate a real encounter. T h e whole

point of the exchange is to ensure the smooth passage of two individu-
als who happen to cross paths the way grease lubricates the contacts
between machine parts. In Heidegger's view the entirety of language
in its everyday employment becomes subject to such a dimming-down
of its authentic potentiality of revealment. In mere chatter, language
idles as an engine idles, running on but never being allowed to drop
into gear. The opposition drawn by Heidegger between idle talk and
the authentic speaking of language finds its reflection in Lacan's dis-
tinction between "empty speech" {parole vide) and "full speech" {parole
plein). Empty speech is the discourse of the ego, in which the resources
of the symbolic have been drawn into the orbit of imaginary forma-
tions. 36 It is the "blah-blah" of everyday banter that gets carried with
a vengeance into the analytic situation, becoming the white noise in
which everything of real significance gets lost.
The point for both Heidegger and Lacan is that the function of
language comes into its own only when the droning-on of idle talk and
empty speech is broken open in some way, only when it undergoes a
kind of death. Yet Lacan might be said to give the better account of
the process by which this death and rebirth of discourse occurs. It is
not so much that empty speech fails to say what is required but rather
that the subject fails to hear it said. It is not as if new words must be
found or that something different must be said but rather that the pat
verbal formulas in which the imaginary order of the ego's defenses
are constantly rehearsed must be really heard for the first time, thus
enabling something other to be registered in the heart of what is
most familiar. Accordingly, the function of the analyst is not to say
something new or different but to respond to what is unacknowledged
in what has already been said. The analyst's task is one of reflecting
back the patient's own acts of signification, a task comparable to a re-
punctuating of the patient's speech. Thus Lacan insists that "true speech
already contains its own reply.. . . [W]e do no more than to confer on
the subject's speech its dialectical punctuation {E:S, 95). As a punctuat-
ing that serves to re-segment the body of discourse, the function
of analysis appears precisely parallel to the dismemberment of the
imaginary body explored earlier in our discussion of castration. T h e
infamous "short session" used by Lacan should be understood in this
way as a symbolically castrating punctuation. It serves to cut the empty
speech of the patient in a way that leaves the patient with nothing but
the reverberation of his or her own words. From a Lacanian point of
view, the key element of analytic efficacy becomes timing. Analysis
213
seeks to restore to the patient the time of his own reality by re-timing
the movement of the patient's discourse:
The analyst's abstention, his refusal to reply, is an element of reality

in analysis. More exactly, it is in this negativity in so far as it is a pure
negativity—that is, detached from any particular motive—that lies
the junction between the symbolic and the real. . . . The other mo-
ment in which the symbolic and the real come together is conse-
quently revealed . . . [in] the function of time. (E:S, 95)
(4) T o these points of congruence between Heidegger and Lacan,

we can add a last remark about Heidegger's notion of conscience. We
have already seen that much of what is most distinctive about Lacan's
concept of the superego consists of the way in which he distances
himself from the vulgar understanding of Freudian conscience as
merely an internalized voice of prohibition wholly opposed to the
desire of the subject. Lacan returns to the key point for Freud, that
the superego is unexplainable in terms of an imposition of constraints
from outside, and insists that the institution of conscience must be recog-
nized somehow to serve the subject's own desire. T h e thrust of Heideg-
ger's treatment of conscience, although developed from an existential
perspective, is remarkably the same. Heidegger offers his own defini-
tion of conscience in opposition to the ordinary interpretation that
traces conscience back to a forbidding voice that speaks from outside
the subject. T h e paradoxical situation of conscience is precisely that it
seems to speak contrary to my inclinations yet speaks in my own voice.
Conscience, Heidegger suggests, "calls against our expectations and
even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtedly does
not come from someone else who is with me in the world. T h e call
comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me" (BT, 320). The
call of conscience comes from within Dasein itself because Dasein is
essentially "wanting to have a conscience" (BT, 334). Such wanting
a conscience is rooted in Dasein's pure potentiality-for-Being. As it
inevitably becomes caught up in and determined by particular life
situations and factical engagements, Dasein falls away from the poten-
tiality-for-Being that is its ownmost possibility. In this way, existing
Dasein that is factically determined in a world is primordially guilty.
On the level of this existential guilt, conscience calls Dasein back to its
own potentiality-for-Being. Conscience is thus said to be "the call of
care" (BT, 322).
214
Lacan versus Philosophy
If we have succeeded in this chapter in demonstrating some points

of resonance between Lacanian psychoanalysis and movements in the
philosophical tradition, thus indicating something of the philosophical
dimensions of Lacan's thinking, it must hastily be added that Lacan's
perspective is not reducible to any of those philosophical positions.
With respect to each of the philosophical figures discussed, it is neces-
sary to append a note about Lacan's differences from them. Enumerat-
ing these differences may serve to emphasize what is most distinctive
in his thought and to underline once again how the concept of the
death drive can be seen as the pivot-point around which his work
revolves.
(1) In a brief discussion of Hegel, I suggested that the relation of

the Lacanian imaginary and symbolic to the real might be understand-
able in terms of a dialectic of negations not unlike that envisioned
by Hegel. In this way, Hegel's concept of the negative is given a
psychoanalytic meaning. Certainly a more exhaustive discussion would
be required to explicate this parallel of the general scheme of Lacan's
thought with Hegelian dialectic. But even if such a homology can be
maintained, Lacan remains in several crucial respects at odds with the
conclusions of Hegelian idealism. For Hegel, the culmination of the
dialectic in the absolute idea fulfills the potentialities of being with
which the Logic commences. Being is finally taken up without remain-
der (aufgehoben) into the self-consciousness of absolute spirit. For La-
can, by contrast, the real remains ultimately unassimilable, even by the
agency of the symbolic function in which it is approached beyon4 the
imaginary. "It is inadmissible," Lacan says, "that I should be thought
of as having been lured by a purely dialectic exhaustion of being" (E:S,
302). From a psychoanalytic standpoint, there is an aspect of the
relation to the primordial object of satisfaction that remains irretriev-
able. There is always a remainder, a left-over. Yet for Lacan this
unrecoverable tidbit is the absolutely crucial thing. It is represented
by the phallus in the drama of the castration complex and by the objet
a in Lacan's algebra of the signifier. This something-always-beyond
cannot be recuperated in a dialectical reconciliation with the Other.
"The objective of my teaching," Lacan asserts, "inasmuch as it aims at
that part of analytic discourse which can be formulated, or put down,
is to dissociate the a from the O, by reducing the former to what
belongs to the imaginary and the latter to what belongs to the sym-
215
bolic."3 There is no "metalanguage" in which this reconciliation might

be accomplished, no standpoint outside the defile of the signifying
chain from which its beginning and end might be gathered. In his
most provocative treatment of the implications of this point, Lacan
proposes that "there is no sexual relation." The fact that the human
subject is submitted to sexual difference, that its identity is split by
sexuation like the androgynes in Aristophanes's myth, means that the
subject's relation to the real remains forever unbridgeable. There
remains a perpetual incommensurability at the heart of the subject.
"When one is made into two, there is no going back on it. It can
never revert to making one again, not even a new one. The Aufhebung
(sublation) is one of those sweet dreams of philosophy." 38 With the
stress on this irretrievable beyond of the real, Lacan remains closer to
Kant than to Hegel. The relation of the human subject to the real,
indeed, the subject's relation to itself, is comparable to the relation of
the Kantian subject to the unknowable thing-in-itself, which Kant
called "problematic." For Lacan, the relation to the real is even more
radically problematic than that envisaged by Kant, as Lacan empha-
sizes by saying that the real is not only unknowable but impossible.
Lacan's denial of any final mediation implies a rejection of Hegel's
teleology and his view of time and history. The law of the signifier
implies that there can be no overcoming of history, no ultimate realiza-
tion of desire. The Lacanian subject is irrevocably submitted to histori-
cal finitude. The desire of the subject is passed interminably along the
chain of the signifier. The being of the subject cannot be abstracted
from its extension over time. In this respect, despite the Hegelian
overtones of so much of his thinking, Lacan shares more with Nietz-
sche than with Hegel. The Lacanian subject, submitted to the death
of the ego for the access to its desire, is only "born posthumously."
(2) We have seen a limited resemblance between Schopenhauer's

metaphysics and the Freudian death drive based on the way in which
death is related in both instances to a collapse of individuation under
the influence of a deeper and ineffable reality. However, this resem-
blance cannot blind us to the differences between Schopenhauer and
the psychoanalytic perspective. In the first place, although in each case
a certain form of individuation is submitted to dissolution, the nature
of the individuality in question is conceived differently and therefore
gives rise to very different implications. The Schopenhauerian ego is
the product of a kind of metaphysical necessity. The world will splin-
ters into myriad individual forms in space and time under the influence
of the principium individuationis. But this means that the individuation
216
of human beings arises in accordance with the same process at work

in the animal, plant, and even mineral realms. The psychoanalytic ego
as Lacan has specified its nature and origin is a different matter. T h e
imaginary as Lacan conceives it is partly rooted in natural processes
of perception and motor response that are shared by many animals.
In the human being, however, the effects of the imaginary function
are fundamentally altered by the effects of prematurity. Owing to the
prematurity of human birth, the instinctual linkages that guide the
imaginary in animals are disrupted for the human being. The psychical
function of the imago is divorced from its partnership with specific
instinctual schemata and becomes available for new and unprece-
dented investments. It is the liberation of the imago from its roots in
biological reality that underlies the autonomy of the psychical sphere
in human beings and that lays the foundation upon which will take
place the second great moment of the de-biologizing of the human
being—the accession to linguistic symbols. The imaginary unity of
the human being retains an accidental, contingent, and decidedly
unnatural character.
From this difference with regard to the "life" of the individual in
Schopenhauer and Freud, there follows a difference in the meaning
of death. In the psychoanalytic perspective, the death at stake in the
death drive concerns the disintegration not of the organism as such
but of its psychological representative in the imaginary ego. In view
of this difference, Schopenhauer and Freud each adopt differing
attitudes toward death. For Schopenhauer, the inescapability of death
can be met only with resignation. Only the stoical insight into the utter
necessity of death can console us for our impending loss. But where
Schopenhauer meets death with contemplative resignation, Freud de-
liberately engages death in the field of the transference, allowing the
imaginary coalescence of the ego to be mortified by the signifier. For
Freud, the encounter with death is not to be mediated in abstract
resignation but entered into and enacted in a symbolic process of
"working through." In psychoanalysis, reminiscent of what Socrates
says of the philosophical task in the Phaedo, death is practiced. However
serious its ultimate stakes, death is played like a game. It can be
so only because the psychoanalytic sense of death is fundamentally
different from that of Schopenhauer. In the Freudian perspective,
death remains impossible to comprehend, yet nevertheless fully articu-
late. In this death, the limits of narcissism are spelled out in the defiles
of the signifying system. Death in psychoanalysis is "materialized by
the agency of the signifier." Lacan expresses this point compactly in
an analogy to bridge playing. 39 In the game played between analyst
277
and analysand, the trick of tricks is properly to engage the dummy (le
mort), the storehouse of signifiers that remains unknown to the ego
when it makes its bid, but that holds the cards by which its destiny will
be unfolded.
(3) As we have seen, the Freudian concept of the death drive bears
a greater likeness to Nietzsche's Dionysiac ecstasy than to what we
find in Schopenhauer, since Nietzsche more specifically relates the
Dionysiac dissolution of the individual to the collapse of an image-
form. And, of course, Nietzsche is at a remove from Schopenhauer
for the fact that, under the guise of the Dionysian, the eventuality of
death is an occasion not for resignation but for affirmation. Neverthe-
less, when we turn to the psychoanalytic treatment of death, we find
ourselves equally distant from both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. As
an issue for engagement and working-through, death in psychoanaly-
sis is well expressed by what J.-B. Pontalis refers to in another context
as "death-work." 40 T o be sure, Nietzsche inverts the values of Schopen-
hauer's pessimism, but, like Schopenhauerian resignation, Nietzsche's
affirmation tends to remain a posture of the will toward the loss of
individuality. Both positions assume death to be an impending event,
in the face of which the subject must choose its attitude. Something
similar can be said for Heidegger as well, inasmuch as the "anticipatory
resoluteness" outlined in Being and Time as the authentic comportment
of Dasein to its being-towards-death retains a decidedly intentional
overtone. In psychoanalysis the situation is fundamentally altered.
T h e emphasis is shifted from intentionality to the play of signification,
from any posture or determination of the will to the willed suspension
of the will in free association. In the assumption of the fundamental
rule of analysis, as a commitment to saying anything at all, there is
already a certain making-present of the potentiality of death as an
openness to the utterly Other. T h e death-work of analysis is realized
in interpretation, by which we are to understand the way in which the
signifying effects of the patient's discourse are re-punctuated in the
field of the transference. In this view, interpretation is accomplished
not by explanation of the meaning of the patient's speech, but rather
by marking that speech—as much by a silence or by the termination
of a session as by something said or done by the analyst—so that its
own latencies and potentialities are opened. Death is no longer an
anticipated eventuality but the ongoing effect of a symbolic process of
exchange.
Why bother to use the term "death" to describe this process? There
seems to be a perverse and paradoxical aspect in referring to death in
218
this context, especially if the salutary effect of analysis is taken to be

revitalizing. And, indeed, from the Lacanian point of view we have
developed, it would not be wholly inappropriate to speak of the death
drive in some more neutral and moderate terms as a self-mutative or
self-transformative drive. Lacan's insistence on retaining the Freudian
term "death drive," aside from serving to point us back to the Freudian
texts in which it occurs and to the task of deciphering the meaning of
Freud's idea in the overall theory, also stems from a polemical inten-
tion, calculated to oppose the claims of ego psychology and its norma-
tive tendencies. The analytic program that refuses to become caught
up in the discourse of egos and that ignores the goal of a "cure" can
be expressed in terms of its openness to death. This death is enacted
in following the tendrils of the signifier beyond the homeostases of
the ego. The place of death in analysis is to be located in the orientation
to puissance, as the striving of desire that operates outside the register
of pleasure and even counter to it, the ways that the subject beyond
the ego may speak where we least expect to hear it: in pain and in
panic, in loss, lack, and fragmentation.
(4) Our discussion of Heidegger, although fragmentary and provi-

sional, pointed out some important parallels between Lacan and the
existential analytic presented in Being and Time. We linked the Heideg-
gerian notions of inauthentic existence and idle talk to Lacan's imagi-
nary meconnaissance and empty speech. On that basis, it was possible to
liken Heidegger's being-towards-death to the psychoanalytic death
drive. One implication of these comparisons is to suggest a parallel
between Heidegger's conception of Being and the Lacanian category
of the real. In both instances, there is an insistence on a relation to
something impossible to encompass, a connection to something that
bears upon the most intimate concern of the subject, yet that remains
in some sense utterly Other. Both Heideggerian Being and the Lacan-
ian real point toward a dimension of transcendence that is always-still-
outstanding. It is a dimension that is subject to a constant slipping-
away and falling-into-oblivion. It is a dimension that is rediscovered,
although only partially and problematically, in confrontation with the
"death" of the familiar images by which the subject defines itself.
Finally, it is in language that this transcendence to itself of subjectivity,
this being out of itself in the Other, is mediated over time.
If this comparison of Lacan and Heidegger is a fair one, a very great
deal could be explored along the points of contact it opens up—a task
that will have to be reserved for another time and place. For our
present purposes, it serves to indicate further something of the philo-
279
sophical scope and dimension of Lacan's thinking. Yet here, too, we

must highlight, if only briefly, what is distinctive in Lacan's position.
In attempting to bring this difference into high relief, it is important
to bear in mind that Heidegger's thought, like any sophisticated philo-
sophical position, offers points of resistance to any simple characteriza-
tion. T o contrast Heidegger's position with that of Lacan runs the risk
of presenting Heidegger in caricature. Even so, there are important
differences in emphasis, or, better, there are discernible tendencies in
Heidegger's thought that rightly distinguish it from Lacanian psycho-
analysis.
T h e primary difference between them might be likened to the dis-
tance between phenomenology and structuralism. In Being and Time,
Heidegger tends to remain captive to his phenomenological point of
departure. Dasein remains that to which, or to whom, Being is revealed.
T h e concept of Dasein thus retains a subjective center of gravity even
as it problematizes it. For Lacan, by contrast, the position of the subject
is more explicitly divided between the ego and the perception-con-
sciousness system that supports it, on the one hand, and the subject of
language strung along the chain of the signifier, on the other. In
Lacan's view, the eccentricity of the subject to itself is more insistently
maintained for being articulated across the three registers of real,
imaginary, and symbolic, or, as we have noted, for being stretched
over the crossed matrix of Schema L. The difference between Lacan
and Heidegger on this point is reflected in their attitudes toward death
and anxiety. For Heidegger, being-towards-death tends to deliver
Dasein to itself, bringing it u p before the question of its wholeness in
a way that more palpably suggests a possible regathering and reposses-
sion of itself. In anxiety, Heidegger claims, Dasein is individualized. 41
It is difficult to avoid the impression that Dasein, in facing authentically
its own death, pulls itself up by its bootstraps. Heidegger's talk of
Dasein's "anticipatory resoluteness," of Dasein's hearing the appeal of
conscience, or of the "moment of vision" in which Dasein comes to
itself authentically, tends to sound like a saga of the good soldier
rallying to the clarion call.42 The very language of "authenticity" carries
with it a subjectivist overtone, the echo of a dream of autonomy and
self-sufficiency.43 Turning to Lacan, we find a more emphatic ques-
tioning of subjective identity, a difference perhaps already audible in
the choice between the two terms: "being-towards-death" versus the
"death drive." Lacan puts the emphasis on a moment of Otherness
and fragmentation that is more radically inserted at the heart of the
human being. T h e supposition of a death drive more explicitly locates
the eruption of the unexpected and uncanny from within the interior
220
of the subject's own discourse. For Lacan, the certainties of the subject
are destabilized from out of the same system of language that it relies
upon for its own name. The psychoanalytic experience of anxiety in
no way individualizes but rather implies precisely the loss of a sense
of unity, the collapse of individuation. This difference may amount,
as I say, to a difference of emphasis. Surely there is much in Heidegger
to support the notion of a decentered subjectivity. Yet in Heidegger
such a notion must be more deliberately disentangled from other,
more traditional resonances. In Lacan, we find it difficult to forget for
a single moment that the subjectivity revealed by psychoanalysis is, by
the standard of traditional metaphysics, something scandalous, even
unthinkable. For Lacan, "the radical heteronomy that Freud's discov-
ery shows gaping within man can never again be covered over without
whatever is used to hide it being profoundly dishonest" (E:S, 172).
From a Lacanian perspective, the relation to the Other is more insis-
tently located in the heart of the being of the subject and echoes in a
ceaseless questioning: "Who, then, is this other to whom I am more
attached that to myself, since, at the heart of my assent to my own
identity it is still he who agitates me?" (E:S, 172).
221
8
Conclusion
Corpus Occultum: Desire Beyond
the Imaginable
Whatever their philosophical formulations may be, Freud had an
increasingly clear view of the body's mental function and the mind's
incarnation.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty
I have tried to show how Lacan's return to the Freudian death drive
restores it to the central place in psychoanalytic theory envisaged by
Freud himself. Lacan brings new theoretical resources to bear on
Freud's thought in a way that rearticulates and radicalizes its basic
intentions. T h e result is to establish a profound continuity between
Freud's final theory of the life and death drives and his earlier formula-
tions, reaching back as far as the Projectfor a Scientific Psychology. Lacan's
treatment of the death drive also serves to reintegrate many of the
main concepts of psychoanalysis, from the dynamics of the Oedipus
complex to the topography of id, ego, and superego. Along the lines
of a Lacanian interpretation, the death drive emerges as the crowning
discovery of psychoanalysis; it designates the ultimate mystery, the
dark engine of transformation that operates at the heart of the human
being.
In concluding, we can briefly reemphasize some of the larger impli-
cations of this study for psychoanalytic theory as a whole. In particular,
the Lacanian viewpoint we have adopted enables us to regrasp the most
fundamental issue of Freud's metapsychology: that of the problematic
interrelationship between what Freud called the psychical apparatus
and its somatic substratum. The problem was posed by Freud in terms
of representation, the expression in images and symbols of "the pure
demand for work" originating within the body. The most elemental
concern of psychoanalysis might thus be called in the broadest sense
"psychosomatic," inasmuch as the dynamics of repression, the forma-
223
Conclusion: Corpus Occultum
tion of symptoms, and the effects of the "talking cure" all point back
to the shifting interface between psychical registrations and somatic
energies and processes. As we have interpreted it, the concept of the
death drive bears directly on this issue, as the "death" at stake is not
the demise of the physical organism but rather the mutative effects
on psychical structure exerted by energies that remain foreign to its
organization. The action of the death drive effects a transmission
across the boundary between the psychical and the somatic. Our study
has thus yielded the surprising result of aligning the duality of the life
and death drives with the bifurcation of the ego and the id. In the
view we have taken, the death drive operates in the tension between
ego and id, signifying the inevitability of conflict between the two, in
which the oceanic forces of the id are destined again and again to
overtake the ego and threaten to wash away the face of its identity.
The rereading of Freud that we have outlined has taken its guiding
clue from Lacan's triad of categories: real, imaginary, and symbolic.
In the light of the Lacanian categories, we understand anew the sense
in which human existence is structured by the dialectic of the life and
death drives. The human being is stretched between conflicting claims
exerted by the persisting influence of the imaginary contours of its
ego identity, on the one hand, and by the exigencies of desire alienated
by the imaginary, on the other. But if this study has succeeded in
shedding light on Freud's thought through the lens of Lacan's innova-
tions, it has also contributed something to our understanding of Lacan
himself. As we have interpreted it, the death drive offers a privileged
opportunity for grasping the relation of the three categories to one
another. T h e concept of the death drive forms a kind of dynamic
intersection between the three registers as it is at once the return of
the real, the unbinding of the imaginary, and the agency of the sym-
bolic. We can now offer a few summary remarks in reference to each
of the three registers.
We have seen how Freud's metaphor of psychic energetics is to be
transposed in Lacanian terms as a function of the real. From this
perspective, the death drive presents the eruption of the real against
the constraints of the imaginary schema of the ego. The linkage Lacan
establishes in this way between the death drive and the real affords a
more decisive restatement of the psychic-somatic tension at the basis
of metapsychology. If the essential labor of psychic life consists in
representing the forces that animate the body, Lacan shows ever more
strikingly the impossibility of completing that task. What is at issue is
the impossibility of complete coincidence between the psychical and
the somatic. It is precisely this impossibility that is signified by the
224
submission of the psychological individual to "death." The doctrine of

the death drive implies the profound inadequacy of every self-image
of the human being. There can be no total psychical representation
of the reality of the animate subject. T h e final implication of what is
beyond the pleasure principle is that the real of the body remains
beyond our powers to imagine it.
The account of the real implied by this approach is significant for
interpreting Lacan because it locates the reality of the body in his
thought and militates against any purely "intellectualist" reading of
his work. T h e indeterminate exigence of the somatic is every bit as
central to Lacan as it is in Freud, although by relegating it to the
domain of the real Lacan insists on its irremedial mysteriousness and
emphasizes the distance between the psychoanalytic theory of the
drives and the specific subject matter of biology. T h e psychoanalytic
doctrine of the death drive points us back to the unknowable source
of all drive forces and thus roots the life of the mind in the unthinkabil-
ity of the body. The ultimate paradox of the death drive is that it is
the body's incipient vitality that motivates the effects of psychological
transformation that, from the vantage point of the ego and its struggle
to maintain its imaginary integrity, can constitute a mortal threat. The
practice of psychoanalysis in both Freud and Lacan is rightly called a
talking cure (and with Lacan we better understand how rightly it is so
called). Yet in terms of the metapsychology that supplies the guiding
myth of all Freud's work, psychoanalysis emerges as a theory and
practice that addresses the ineffability of the body. From this perspec-
tive, we are tempted again to compare the psychoanalytic outlook to
that of Nietzsche when he claims that "the body is a more astonishing
idea than the soul" 1 and that "all our so called consciousness is a more
or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable,
but felt text." 2
Our inquiry into the concept of the death drive has had important
implications, too, for our understanding of the role of the imaginary
in Lacan's thinking. Here I think it must be said that many interpreters
of Lacan, impressed by the linguistic side of his teaching, have tended
to underestimate the importance and radicality of his concept of the
imaginary. T h e crucial thing is to recognize that Lacan locates in the
function of the imaginary the operative principle of the libidinal
drives. In a certain sense, the scopic drive assumes priority in Lacan's
thinking insofar as the classic drive components, oral, anal, and phallic,
can all be said to function with reference to an image of the body's
totality, tracing and retracing the demarcation of inner and outer,
framing the dream of wholeness and fleeing from the threat of frag-
225
mentation. Yet at the same time, Lacan repeatedly emphasizes the way
in which the imaginary structuration of identity introduces a profound
alienation of desire. T h e mobilization of the ego in the imaginary is
achieved only at the price of this alienation.
With respect to both of these points—the imaginary structuring of
the primitive drives and the theme of imaginary alienation—a great
deal more could be said, in fact so much more that it is difficult to give
only a brief evocation of the possibilities. On the one hand, the relation
of the drives to imaginary formations might be extended in very
interesting ways to include a reflection on the nature of action and of
what has traditionally been called the "will." It is tempting to propose,
in amendment to Aristotle's dictum that the soul always thinks with
an image, that action is always oriented by and mobilized in relation
to images. Perhaps it would be necessary to distinguish classes of
actions that are based on image-schemas from those that are not, yet
the very project of making such a distinction might yield important
and interesting results. Lacan's conception of alienation, too, invites
exploration that extends well beyond what I have been able to say of
it in the course of this study. Such an exploration would seek to
clarify Lacan's suggestion that the imaginary registration of the drives
introduces an elemental conflict at the level of the animate body. In
his essay on the mirror phase, Lacan attributes to the function of
the image the origins of "a libidinal dynamism, which has hitherto
remained problematic, as well as an ontological structure" (E:S, 2).
Although, as I have argued here, the concept of imaginary alienation
continued to inform Lacan's perspective long after it was first an-
nounced, Lacan devoted relatively little attention to elaborating the
"libidinal dynamism" or "ontological structure" at stake in it. Indeed,
it is not easy to imagine what shape such an elaboration would take.
T o pursue it further, we might undertake an inquiry of the most
fundamental sort into the the nature of perception in the human being
and would seek to illuminate the problematic relation of perceptual
mechanisms to the totality of the body's vital functions. A primary
goal of such a study would be to understand how and why the most
elemental function of perception, particularly visual perception, oper-
ates selectively not merely with respect to the objects that it disembeds
from an environing background but also with respect to the function-
ing of the impulse-life of the body. Though this project must remain
an agenda for the future, Lacan has already put it on the map of
psychoanalytic theory by differentiating the ego from the subject and
by insisting on the distinction between the drives and desire.
However we finally conceptualize it, the concepts of the imaginary
226
form of the ego and of the alienation associated with it remain among
the indispensable points of reference around which Lacan's thought
turns. They are of cardinal importance both for his revised assessment
of the function of the ego and for his view of the death drive. Without
reference to the imaginary ego, his treatment of the death drive loses
its foundation. "Death" is to be conceived in Lacanian terms primarily
as a loss of an imaginary form and coherence.
T h e psychic-somatic duality of psychoanalytic metapsychology is
most provocatively reframed in Lacan's conception of the symbolic
function, a provocation already audible for more traditionally minded
students of Freud in Lacan's claim that the unconscious is structured
like a language. Lacan shows brilliantly how the essential domain of
the psychoanalytic exchange is to be located in the field of the signifier.
Yet what makes this insistence on the linguistic medium of the psycho-
analytic enterprise most challenging is the way in which language is
thought by Lacan to engage the real of the body. We have seen how
access to desire alienated by the imaginary is opened in the circuit of
the signifying chain, an access Lacan compares at times to a kind of
profound retrieval or recollection. In this way, the contribution of the
signifier re-engages the inchoate strivings of the body. "As blurred, as
confused as it is, it is a part of the body that is signified by this
contribution" (S.XX, 27). Here, too, it must be said, there is no possibil-
ity of an exhaustive representation of the body's impulse-life. Strictly
speaking, in the symbolic dimension as Lacan thinks of it there is no
representation at all in the sense of Vorstellung, an apprehension of
presence-in-form. If the symbolic function grants new access to the
life of desire (precisely in the death of the imaginary) it is only by way
of an insertion of the subject into time. T h e fulness of desire is engaged
only by being constantly deferred in the slippage of the signifying
chain through a history. T h e symbolic function thus effects a kind of
"death" as it submits the subject to temporal finitude, not in the sense
of reaching an end, but, as Heidegger's phrase puts it, of forever
being-towards-an-end. This process involves a "death work" in which
the formations of the imaginary, subject to the mark of castration, are
shot through by the agency of the signifier. It is by way of the function
of the signifier in opening a dimension beyond the imaginary that
"desire is borne by death."
The knotting of desire, death, and language traced by this essay is
strikingly present in Lacan's discussion of Bernini's St. Teresa and
reference to Bernini's work thus seems a fitting note on which to end.
The image of "St. Teresa in Ecstasy" provides a kind of Lacanian
emblem, as suggestive as it is characteristically provocative, of the
227
coincidence of the most deeply visceral and the most utterly sublime.
"You only have to go and look at Bernini's statue in Rome," Lacan
suggests, "to understand immediately that she's coming, there's no
doubt about it."3 The key question, however, is to ask "what is her
jouissance, her coming from?" 4 It is a question that touches on the
essence of the mystical experience, but touches, too, on the essence of
Lacan's teaching. To the writings of the mystics we are enjoined to
"add the Ecrits ofJacques Lacan, which is of the same order." 5 Lacan's
evocation of the mystical accentuates the challenge posed to traditional
dichotomies by Freud's discovery, although only by challenging at the
same time some of the received interpretations of Freud himself. It
points to a communion of desire and language, the way in which the
arrow of the signifier, what St. Teresa called "the locutions of God,"
penetrates and inflames the body's most secret entrails. T o be sure,
we find in the mystical swoon the most ecstatic moment of the way that
the human being is "played by jouissance"6 Yet we miss altogether what
is at stake in the "mystical ejaculation" when we follow "what was tried
at the end of the last century" and, as Lacan puts it, "reduce the
mystical to questions of fucking." 7 T h e jouissance of the mystic must
rather be traced back to the function of language, "since all this comes*
about thanks to the being ofsignifiance."8 T h e crucial, yet most mysteri-
ous point is that "the motive of this being ofsignificance lies in jouissance,
jouissance of the body." 9 In this passage we confront the most enigmatic
moment in Lacan's thought: the insistence on a union beyond the
imaginable of flesh and word.
228
Notes
N o t e s to Chapter 1
1. As we will see more clearly in what follows, the problem of translating

Freud's term Todestrieb is anything but a trivial one. Indeed, it confronts us
immediately with the challenge of interpreting Freud's idea. Strachey's choice
of the word "instinct" for the Freudian Trieb was in many respects an unfortu-
nate one. Freud's notion has very little in common with the patterned, sponta-
neous behavior of animals that we think of as "instinctual," but rather points
to an elemental impulse or striving that is radically unspecified with respect
to its aims and objects. In general, I prefer to render Freud's Trieb by "drive,"
to indicate that the Freudian concept designates a force or striving that cannot
unproblematically be traced back to biological sources. That said, however,
the issue cannot be settled once and for all without ambiguity. The signification
of the Freudian Trieb remains profoundly equivocal, bearing within itself a
reference to the effects of psychological structures that function indepen-
dently from any basis in biology. I return to this issue below on pages 28-31
and again on pages 102-03, yet at the same time retaining a reference to an
organic substratum of psychic life.
2. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehl-
man (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 106.
3. Ibid., pp. 5-6.
4. The general outline of the pleasure principle is very clearly visible in
Freud's early unpublished theoretical paper "Project for a Scientific Psychol-
ogy." Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London:
Hogarth Press and T h e Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1955), vol. 1, pp. 2 8 1 -
397. Hereafter this source is noted parenthetically in the text, and in the notes,
as "Sis," followed by volume and page numbers.
5. Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," SE, 14:73-102.
6. In his letter of January 1, 1896, Freud remarked to Fliess, "I see
how, via the detour of medical practice, you are reaching your first ideal of
understanding human beings as a physiologist, just as I most secretly nourish
the hope of arriving, via these same paths, at my initial goal of philosophy.
229
Notes
For that is what I wanted originally, when it was not yet at all clear to me to
what end I was in the world." Jeffrey Masson, ed., The Complete Letters of
Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1985), p.
159.
The quotation from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which constitutes
the first published appearance of "metapsychology," expressly holds out the
hope to "transform metaphysics into metapsychology" (SE, 6:259).
7. Sabina Spielrein, "Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens,"/aAr-
buchfurpsychoanalytische undpsychopathologischeForschungen 6(1912): 464—503.
8. James Strachey, Editor's Note, SE, 18:5.
9. Quoted by Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (New York:
Basic Books, 1979), p. 412.
10. J.—B. Pontalis, "On Death-Work in Freud, in the Self, in Culture," in
Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature, ed. Alan Roland (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1978), p. 86.
11. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. (London:
Hogarth Press, 1962), vol. 3, p. 287.
12. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), p.
99.
13. David Rapaport, "The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory," Psycho-
logical Issues, no. 2, Monograph 6 (1960): 50.
14. Kenneth Colby, Energy and Structure (New York: Ronald Press Co.,
1955), pp. 142-43.
15. Otto Rank, Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (New York: Knopf,
1936), pp. 121-22, 115.
Ernest Becker similarly accuses Freud of using the death drive to cover
over inadequacies of his theory. He continues in the quotation cited above:
"Freud's formulations on the death instinct . . . are of interest only as the
ingenious efforts of a dedicated prophet to maintain intellectually intact his
basic dogma." Becker, The Denial of Death, p. 99.
16. Freud remarks on the conflict between the hypothesis of a destruc-
tive instinct and religious notions about the essential goodness of the human
soul in "Anxiety and Instinctual Life" (SE, 22:95).
17. Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious (New York: Basic
Books, 1970), p. 515.
18. Paul Roazen, Freud and his Followers (New York: Meridian, 1974), p.
xxii.
19. Quoted by Max Schur, Freud, Living and Dying (New York: Interna-
tional Universities Press, 1972), p. 329.
20. Edward Bibring, "The Development and Problems of the Theory
of the Instincts," International Journal of Psycho-analysis 22 (1941): 118.
230
Notes
21. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 44-45.
Hereafter this source is noted parenthetically in the text as "E" followed by
page number.
As a general rule, I will use and acknowledge published English transla-
tions of Lacan where they are available. For quotations of French texts, Lacan
or others, where no translator is cited in my footnotes, the translations are my
own.
22. Jean Laplanche, Problematiques IV: Vinconscient et le ca (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1981), p. 230.
23. Thus Lacan remarks that "the pilot science of structuralism in the
West has its roots in Russia, where formalism first flourished. 'Geneva 1910'
and 'Petrograd 1920' suffice to explain why Freud lacked this particular tool"
(E:S, p. 298).
24. Jacques Lacan, "The Seminar on the 'Purloined Letter,' " trans.
Jeffrey Mehlman, French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis, Yale French
Studies, no. 48 (1972): 60.
25. Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire, "The Unconscious: A Psychoan-
alytic Study," trans. Patrick Coleman, in French Freud: Structural Studies in
Psychoanalysis, ed. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, no. 48 (1972): 177.
26. For a discussion of Lacan's polyvalent use ot$)$frf see David Macey,
LoMMNft Contexts (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 114-19.
27. Jacques Lacan, in the preface to Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans.
David Macey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. vii.
28. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, p. 114.
29. Jeffrey Mehlman, translator's introduction to Laplanche, Life and
Death in Psychoanalysis, p. viii.
30. Francois Roustang, "L'illusion lacanienne," Critique 41, no. 456 (May
1985): 473-74.
31. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, LivreIII. Les Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981), p. 184. Hereafter this source is noted
parenthetically in the text as "S.III," followed by page number.
32. Some recent commentators on Lacan's work have emphasized the
evolution of his ideas over the course of his career. David Macey, for example,
has criticized presentations of Lacan that remain insensitive to the shifts in
Lacan's thinking over time. According to Macey, such presentations pursue a
"final state" strategy, offering us a retrospective paste-up of Lacan's often
highly ambiguous and historically varying pronouncements as if they could
be related to a comprehensive theory that was present from the beginning. It
has been suggested that Lacan's teaching on the death drive in particular
seems to have shifted over the course of his career. Slavoj Zizek makes this
point in his excellent study The Sublime Object ofIdeology (London: Verso, 1989),
pp. 13Iff. Although I think Macey and Zizek are right to point to the way
231
Notes
Lacan's thinking undergoes significant transformations, there remains in my

view an important continuity in his treatment of the death drive, the clarifica-
tion of which is of considerable value both in understanding the structure of
Lacan's thought and for charting more precisely Lacan's relation to Freud.
33. There are many other secondary works that undertake to survey
Lacan's work more fully. Among those not mentioned elsewhere in the present
study are: Marcelle Marini, JacquesLacan (Paris: Editions Belfond, 1986); J o h n
Muller and William J. Richardson, Lacan and Language: A Reader's Guide to
Ecrits (New York: International Universities Press, 1982); J. B. Fages, Compren-
dre Jacques Lacan (Toulouse: Privat, 1971); and Bice Benvenuto and Roger
Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).
Two valuable shorter articles are Malcolm Bowie, "Jacques Lacan," in Structur-
alism and Since: From Levi-Strauss to Derrida, ed. John Sturrock (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979), pp. 115-63; and Richard Kearney, "Jacques Lacan,"
in Modern Movements in European Philosophy (Manchester: University of Man-
chester Press, 1986), pp. 268—82. More specific in its concerns but also useful
is Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in
Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
34. Many examples could be offered, but consider especially the treat-
ments of the Irma dream in Seminaire II, the Schreber case in Seminaire HI,
and the cases of Dora, the female homosexual, and little Hans in Seminaire IV.
35. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud's Papers
on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1988), p. 120. Hereafter this source is noted parenthetically in
the text as "S.I," followed by page number.
Lacan insists that, even in the effort to restore meaning to Freud's basic
concepts, it is necessary to reach beyond them. "In a discipline that owes its
scientific value solely to the theoretical concepts that Freud forged in the
progress of his experience—concepts which, by continuing to be badly criti-
cized and yet retaining the ambiguity of the vulgar tongue, benefit, with a
certain risk of misunderstanding, from these resonances—it would seem to
me to be premature to break with the tradition of their terminology.
"But it seems to me that these terms can only become clear if one estab-
lishes their equivalence to the language of contemporary anthropology, or
even to the latest problems in philosophy, fields in which psychoanalysis could
well regain its health" (E:S, 32).
36. Jacques Lacan, "Le symbolique, l'imaginaire, et le reel." My quota-
tion here is from an unpublished transcript of a conference presentation given
by Lacan on July 8, 1953 to La Societe Francaise de Psychanalyse. Although
a bibliography of works by Lacan cites a published version of this text (in
Bulletin de VAssociation freudienne, 1 (1982): 4-13), I have been unable to find
it. See Michael Clark, Jacques Lacan: An Annotated Bibliography, 2 vols., (New
York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988), v.l, p. 147.
37. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed.
232
Notes
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1981), p. 167. Hereafter, this source is noted parenthetically in the text as
"FFC," followed by page number.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. Catherine Clement, Lives and Legends ofJacques Lacan, trans. Arthur

Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 100-101.
2. Philippe Julien, Le retour a Freud de Jacques Lacan: L'application au
miroir (Toulouse: Editions Eres, 1985), p. 225.
3. Jacques Lacan, Les ComplexesFamiliaux (Dijon: Navarin Editeur, 1984),
p. 31.
4. Henri Wallon makes this point: "The newborn of our species is unusu-
ally far from maturity; witness the inadequacy of his motor, perceptual, and
intellectual capacities. Although he already possesses all the neurones he will
ever have, most of them are in no state to function, owing to the absence of
needed interconnections." Henri Wallon, The World of Henri Wallon, ed. G.
Voyat, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: Aronson, 1984), p. 20.
5. Lacan, Les Complexes Familiaux, p. 28.
6. Wallon, The World of Henri Wallon, pp. 94-95.
7. Lacan refers to Buhler's work at E:S, 5 and 17.
8. Jacques Lacan, "Some Reflections on the Ego," International Journal
of Psycho-analysis 34 (1953): 15.
9. For the notion of the instinctual representative as a "delegate" of
somatic processes, see Jean Laplanche and J.—B. Pontalis, The Language of
Psycho-analysis, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1973), pp. 364-65.
10. Jean Laplanche and J.—B. Pontalis, "Fantasy and the Origins of
Sexuality," International Journal of Psycho-analysis 49 (1968): 16n.
11. Ibid., p. 17.
12. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, Livre VII. L'ethique de la psychanalyse, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Le Seuil, 1986), p. 270. Hereafter this source is
noted parenthetically in the text as "S.V77," followed by page number.
13. Lacan, "Reflections on the Ego," pp. 15-16.
14. See Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psycho-analysis, p. 214.
15. See Lacan's discussion of this point, FFC, 168.
16. See £ . 5 , 3 0 1 .
17. See Lacan's remarks in "Of Structure as an Inmixingof an Otherness
Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever," in The Structuralist Controversy, ed.
233
Notes
Richard Macksey and Eugene Donato (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press,
1972), p. 190.
18. Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff, "Fetishism: The Symbolic,
the Imaginary, and the Real," in Perversions: Psychodynamics and Psychotherapy,
ed. S. Lorand and M. Balint (New York: Gramercy Press, 1956), p. 272.
19. The topic of das Ding is especially prominent in Lacan's seventh
seminar. See S.VII, especially pp. 55—86.
20. Lacan, "Reflections on the Ego," p. 12.
21. One might also be struck by the passage in Beyond the Pleasure Princi-
ple in which Freud remarks on the special interest a child takes in making
himself appear and disappear in a mirror. Interestingly, the passage appears
in a footnote to the section describing the child's "Fort-Da" game of presence
and absence—perhaps the most significant and emblematic reference for
Lacanian psychoanalysis in the entire oeuvre of Freud. It is surprising, as
Samuel Weber has noted, that Lacan seems never to have mentioned this
passage, which so strikingly anticipates his notion of the mirror stage. See
Samuel Weber, "The Divaricator: Remarks on Freud's Witz," Glyph, no. 1
(1977): 25.
22. See M. Guy Thompson's discussion in The Death of Desire: A Study in
Psychopathology (New York: New York University Press, 1985), p. 12.
23. See, for example, George Vaillant's longitudinal study of Harvard
men in his Adaptation to Life (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977).
24. Jacques Lacan, "Le symbolique, l'imaginaire, et le r£el," unpublished
text of conference paper presented on July 8, 1953.
25. Wilfried Ver Eecke, "Hegel as Lacan's Source for Necessity in Psy-
choanalytic Theory," in Interpreting Lacan, Psychiatry and the Humanities
Series, vol. 6, ed. J. Smith and W. Kerrigan (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1983), p. 126.
A similar view of aggressivity as a defense of narcissism is presented,
although without mention of Lacan, by Gregory Rochlin in Man's Aggression
(New York: Dell Publishing, 1973).
26. Plato, Collected Dialogues ofPlato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen Press, 1961), p. 642.
27. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Ltd., 1961), p. 242.
28. Lacan and Granoff, "Fetishism—The Imaginary, Symbolic, and
Real," p. 272.
30. It is perhaps useful to point out that Lacan's primary avenue of
access to Hegel was given, as it was for a whole generation of French intellectu-
als, by the lectures of Alexandre Kojeve, which stressed both the master-slave
dialectic and the role of desire. See Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the
234
Notes
Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond

Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James Nichols (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1980).
32. Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Develop-
ments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1977), p. 108.
33. Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan, trans. David Macey, with introduction
by Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge 8c Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 176.
34. It might be said that Hegel faces the same problem. Hegel, too, is
concerned with the confusion of self and other in the genesis of subjectivity.
But here Hegel's idealist assumption shows itself. For Hegel, the subjective
identity and essential selfhood of the master and slave are presumed from the
outset. T h e movement of the Hegelian dialectic does not produce self-identity
where there was none, but rather has the effect of making explicit (fur sich) a
selfhood that was only implicit (an sich) and sunken in the other. For Hegel,
the identity of dawning self-consciousness is ultimately an echo of the subjectiv-
ity of the Absolute itself. T h e case is wholly different for Lacan, whose point
of departure precludes appeal to an Hegelian absolute.
35. In his first seminar, Lacan illustrates some features of his conception
of the imaginary with reference to an elaborate concave mirror construction
in which a vase and bouquet of flowers are reflected. Of this construction he
says, "If I wanted to use [the concave mirror construction] to redo the-little-
man-inside-the-man, there would be no point in my criticizing it all the time"
(5./, 124).
36. Lacan, "Reflections on the Ego," p. 16. (my emphasis).
1. L. Breger, "Motivation, Energy, and Cognitive Structure in Psychoan-

alytic Theory," in Modern Psychoanalysis, ed. J u d d Marmor (New York: Basic
Books, 1968), p. 44.
2. Ibid., p. 44.
3. K. S. Lashley and K. M. Colby, "An Exchange of Views on Psychic
Energy and Psychoanalysis," Behavioral Science 2 (1957): 231.
4. Roy Grinker, "Conceptual Progress in Psychoanalysis," in Modern
Psychoanalysis, ed. J u d d Marmor (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 24.
5. Ibid., p. 39.
6. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans.
Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977). We will return
to Ricoeur's energetic-hermeneutic distinction in Chapter 5, pp. 129-37.
235
Notes
Hereafter this source will be noted parenthetically in the text as ltFP,n

followed by page number.
7. Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la per-
sonnalite' (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980), p. 256.
8. Ibid., p. 256.
9. See S.H, sessions 8-10, pp. 93-122.
10. For a sympathetic treatment of this neglected but immensely sugges-
tive text of Freud, see Karl Pribram and Merton Gill, Freud's "Project" Re-
Assessed (New York: Basic Books, 1976). The authors favorably evaluate
Freud's theory in the light of contemporary neurophysiology and control
theory.
Although Freud's "neurones" are very much like the neurons of present-
day neurophysiology and might well be written without the final "e," I will
retain the spelling of the Strachey translation.
11. SeeS£, l:322ff.
12- In what follows, I go beyond what Lacan explicitly says of the imagi-
mxy-gestalt function in an attempt to clarify the nature of the process by which
it operates.
13. "There is no more vivid commentary on this bifurcation so inherent
in human experience, this distance that manifests itself in man between the
articulation of need [souhait] and what happens when his desire starts down
the path toward realization. Freud articulates why there is always something
that is very far from being satisfied, and that does not bear the character
looked for in specific action. And he ends on this word—I believe that it is the
last of his essay—a "monotonous quality." In relation to everything that the
subject pursues, everything that is produced in the domain of motor discharge
has a reduced character" (S.VII, 52-53).
14. T h e figure/ground dynamic here attributed to the imaginary and
interpreted in energetic terms is, it seems to me, not accidently reminiscent of
Sartre's discussion of the gestalt phenomenon in Being and Nothingness (see
especially his first chapter, "The Origin of Negation") Jean-Paul Sartre, Being
and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956),
pp. 3—45. Toward the end of his essay on the mirror phase, in a passage
that explicitly relates the death instincts to the "dynamic opposition between
[narcissistic] libido and the sexual libido," Lacan suggests that the question
can be located philosophically in "that existential negativity whose reality is so
vigorously proclaimed by the contemporary philosophy of being and nothing-
ness" (E:S, 6). Lacan claims that imaginary identification establishes "a libidinal
dynamism, which has hitherto remained problematic, as well as an ontological
structure" (E:S, 2). Sartre, too, takes the relation between the gestalt figure and
ground to constitute an ontological structure. For Sartre, it is the pre-refiective,
nihilating activity of consciousness that distinguishes the gestalt figure from its
background environment, thereby establishing the most fundamental struc-
236
Notes
ture of all consciousness. To point to this parallel is not at all to deny the points
of difference between Lacan and Sartre. Indeed, Sartre is more often than
not the object of Lacan's attacks. In the text of Lacan just quoted, Lacan
goes on to accuse Sartre of overstating the autonomy of the conscious ego.
Nevertheless, it might be observed that the virulence of Lacan's criticisms of
Sartre are as much a reflection of their proximity to one another as of their
differences (David Macey makes this point in his Lacan in Contexts [London:
Verso, 1988].) Although in this case they disagree about its implications—
from Lacan's point of view, Sartre bases his whole ontology on the structures
of the imaginary—both are convinced that the gestalt phenomenon describes
a fundamental, prereflective structuration of the mental life of human beings.
15. Jean Laplanche and J.—B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis,
trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), p. 136.
16. Luce Irigaray, "Communications linguistique et speculaire," Cahiers
pour ['analyse, no. 3 (May-June, 1966): 46.
17. Lacan, "Some Reflections on the Ego," InternationalJournal ofPsycho-
analysis 34 (1933): 15.
18. Ibid., p. 12.
19. As Ellie Ragland-Sullivan has noted, "Lacan's emphasis on human
prematurity and subsequent helplessness places the real in the biological
organism, as the very mechanism which makes the imaginary and the symbolic
necessary." Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psycho-
analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 190.
20. Jacques Lacan, "Le Seminaire IV, La Relation d'objet," 1956-57,
unpublished transcript, session of 11/28/56. Hereafter this source is noted
parenthetically in the text as "S.IV," followed by date of session.
21. Literally speaking, the word "lamelle" refers to the thin folds of flesh
forming the gills of bivalve mollusks, such as clams or oysters (in the class
Lamellibranchia).
22. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon
Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 3.
23. Ibid., p. 3.
24. Freud returned to this point in Civilization and Its Discontents, re-
marking that "sometimes one seems to perceive that it is not only the pressure
of civilization but something in the nature of the [sexual] function itself which
denies us full satisfaction and urges us along other paths" (SE, 21:105).
25. Marquis de Sade, Juliette, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York:
Grove Press, 1978), p. 765.
26. T h e System of Pope Pius VI exemplifies as much as any text by Sade
Blanchot's characterization of the ultimate Sadean principle, a principle that
is ingeniously ambiguous in its capacity to connote both negation and affirma-
tion, creation and destruction. Of interest to our concern with energetics,
237
Notes
Blanchot characterizes this Sadean principle in terms of energy. In Blanchot's

view, "this principle is: Energy. Energy is, actually, a completely equivocal
notion. It is both a reserve of forces and an expenditure of forces, both
potential and kinetic, an affirmation which can only be wrought by means of
negation, and it is the power which is destruction." Maurice Blanchot, "Sade,"
in Marquis de Sade, The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other
Writings, ed. and trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York:
Grove Press, 1966), p. 65.
27. Sade, Juliette, p. 772.
28. Ibid., pp. 769-70.
29. E:S, p. 277, quoted above, p. 36. The task of interpreting Freud's
concept of the death instinct as Lacan insists in the Rome Discourse, requires
attention to the "resonances in . . . the poetic of the Freudian corpus" (E:S,
102). In that passage, he mentions two such resonances, both of which express
an essential ambiguity of vitality and mortality. On the one hand, he points us
to the Empedoclean dialectic of love and strife, cited by Freud in "Analysis
Terminable and Interminable." On the other, Lacan reminds us of Goethe's
famous "Hymn to Nature," in which Freud claimed to have found the inspira-
tion for his career in medicine. As the following verses suffice to show, the
theme of the "Hymn" again echoes the paradoxical exchange of life and death,
creation and destruction, that figures so prominently in Lacan's view of the
Freudian death drive:
Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless
to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and
unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries
on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.
She creates new forms without end: what exists now, never was
before; what was, comes not again; all is new and yet always the old.
Individuality seems to be all her aim, and she cares nought for
individuals. She is always building u p and always destroying, and her
workshop is not to be approached.
T h e drama she plays is always new, because she is always bringing
new spectators. Life is her fairest invention, and Death is her device
for having life in abundance.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, trans.
Bailey Saunders (New York: Macmillan, 1893).
1. Such was Freud's view in his 1911 article "Formulations on the Two
Principles of Mental Functioning" (SE, 12:218-26). See pages 98ff below.
2. Jean Laplanche also remarks on this conflict. As he puts it: "From an
238
Notes
economic point of view the major contradiction consists in attributing to a

single 'drive' the tendency towards the radical elimination of all tension, the
supreme form of the pleasure principle, and the masochistic search for unplea-
sure, which, in all logic, can only be interpreted as an increase in tension." Jean
Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 108.
3. The complete German text is as follows: "In der psychoanalytischen
Theorie nehmen wir unbedenklich an, daB der Ablauf der seelischen Vor-
gange automatisch durch das Lustprinzip reguliert wird, das heiBt, wir
glauben, daB er jedesmal durch eine unlustvolle Spannung angeregt wird
und dann eine solche Richtung einschlagt, daB sein Endergebnis mit einer
Herabsetzung dieser Spannung, also mit einer Vermeidung von Unlust Erzeu-
gung von Lust zusammenfallt." Sigmund ¥reud> Jenseits des Lustprinzips, Gesam-
melte Werke (London: Imago Publishing, 1940), vol. 13, p. 3.
4. SE, 18:49. The German text is: "Der LebensprozeB des Individuums
aus inneren Griinden zur Abgleichung chemischer Spannungen, das heifit
zum Tode fuhrt, wahrend die Vereinigung mit einer individuell verschiede-
nen lebenden Substanz diese Spannungen vergroBert, sozusagen neue Vital-
differenzen einfuhrt, die dann abgelebt werden miissen." Freud, Jenseits des
Lustprinzips, p. 60.
5. SE, 18:44. Freud again seemed to waver in his judgment of this
question in Civilization and its Discontents, where he points to a "striking opposi-
tion" between the erotic instincts and the general conservative nature of the
instincts. See SE, 22:18, n. 2.
6. Laplanche and Pontalis remark that "it would be an easy matter to
show how the formulations of the pleasure principle proposed by Freud
throughout his work confuse two tendencies, a tendency towards the complete
discharge of excitation and a tendency towards the maintenance of a constant
level (homoestasis)." Jean Laplanche and J.—B. Pontalis, The Language of
Psycho-analysis, trans. D. Nicholsen-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1973), p. 102.
7. As Freud puts it: "The pleasure principle follows from the principle
of constancy; actually the latter principle was inferred from the facts which
forced us to adopt the pleasure principle" (SE, 18:9).
8. In view of the crucial role played in Beyond the Pleasure Principle by the
concepts of binding and unbinding (Bindung and Entbindung), it is important to
point out that the word translated here by Strachey as "taming" is Bandigung,
literally, "boundness." It is the same word Freud uses in "The Economic
Problem of Masochism" to describe the process by which the erotic instincts
render the death drive innocuous.
9. Thus Freud remarks that "a trauma in childhood may be followed
immediately by a neurotic outbreak, an infantile neurosis, with an abundance
of efforts at defense, and accompanied by the formation of symptoms" (SE,
23:77).
239
Notes
10. In their article on the "Life Instincts," Laplanche and Pontalis re-
mark that up until Beyond the Pleasure Principle, "sexuality had played the part
of an essentially subversive force," in 1920 "sexuality—paradoxically—goes
over to the side of the binding process." Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of
Psycho-analysis, p. 242.
11. Sexuality may be traumatizing; likewise, trauma may be sexualizing.
In the fourth chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud proposes that the
disposition to neurosis is mitigated when the trauma is accompanied by physi-
cal injury because "mechanical violence of the trauma would liberate a quantity
of sexual excitation which . . . by calling for a narcissistic cathexis of the injured
organ, would bind the excess of excitation" (SE, 18:33).
12. Freud's biological orientation is documented by Frank Sulloway in
his book, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
13. As Lacan remarks in another context, "Freud isn't a Gestaltist—one
cannot give him credit for everything—but he does sense the theoretical
demands which gave rise to the Gestaltist construction" (5.//, 107). Quoted
above, p. 54.
Notes to Chapter 5
1. "Beyond the imaginary, the symbolic." This is the title of the third
main division of Lacan's seminar on the ego, 1954-55.
2. Jacques Lacan, "The Seminar on the 'Purloined Letter,' " trans. Jef-
frey Mehlman, French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis, ed. Jeffrey
Mehlman, Yale French Studies, no. 48 (1972): p. 39.
3. Jacques Lacan, "Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prereq-
uisite to Any Subject Whatever," in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard
Macksey and Eugene Donato (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1970), p p . 194-95.
4. T h e quote is from SE, 19:56. The analogy with the draining of the
Zuider Zee occurs at the end of Lecture 31 of the New Introductory Lectures (SE,
22:80).
5. J o h n Muiler and William J. Richardson, eds. The Purloined Poe: Lacan,
Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1988), p . 71.
6. Lacan suggests the identity of the Freudian Es with the subject by
pointing to "the homophony of the German es with the initial of the word
'sujet'" (E:S, 129).
7. It is as a "Z" that the schema is introduced in the section titles of
Lacan's seminar (S.II, 235).
8. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. C. Bally and
240
Notes
Albert Sechehaye with A. Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw
Hill, 1966), p. 80.
9. Ibid., p. 88.
10. T h e linguistic signifier is thus comparable with what C. S. Peirce
called a "symbol," as opposed to an "icon," based on resemblance, or an
"index," based on causality. See Charles S. Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The
Theory of Signs," in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. J. Buchler (New York:
Dover Press, 1955), pp. 98-119.
T h e point, however, is not to claim that language exhibits no iconic
or indexical features. Onomatopoeia, for example, is clearly iconic. (For a
discussion of the iconic features of language see, Roman Jakobson, "Quest for
the Essence of Language," in Selected Writings, Vol. II, The Hague: Mouton,
1962: 345—59.) Rather, Lacan is concerned to isolate that feature which distin-
guishes language from other, nonlinguistic systems of signification.
11. See Emile Benveniste, "The Nature of the Linguistic Sign," in Prob-
lems of General Linguistics, trans. M. Meek (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of
Miami, 1971), pp. 43-48.
12. Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning, trans. J.
Mepham (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), p. 82.
13. Lacan, "Le Symbolique, Timaginaire et le reel," unpublished text of
conference paper presented on July 8, 1953.
14. Compare Lacan's discussion at S.III, 135.
15. Jakobson has proposed the term "dynamic synchrony" to refer to
this feature of language. See Roman Jakobson and Krystyna Pomorska, Dia-
logues, trans. Christian Hubert (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), p. 57.
As Lacan evokes this idea: "The signifiers were able to constitute them-
selves in simultaneity only by virtue of a very defined structure of constituent
diachrony. T h e diachrony is oriented by the structure (FFC, 46).
16. Thus Lacan claims that "a signifier is that which represents the
subject for another signifier" (E:S, 316).
17. "Before speech, nothing either is or isn't [rien n'est, ni n'est pas].
Everything is already there, no doubt, but it is only with speech that there are
things which are—which are true or false, that is to say which are—and things
which are not" (S.I, 228).
18. Jakobson notes that this binary, oppositive character of the structure
of the phonemic "unit" raises a philosophical question about the mode of
existence or being of the phoneme. See Six Lectures, pp. 52ff.
19. Although I will not pursue discussion of it here, it is precisely this
point that is emphasized by Jacques Derrida in his concept of differance.
20. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The
Hague: Mouton, 1956), p. 22.
241
Notes
21. Jakobson, Six Lectures, p. 76.

22. See Lacan's introduction to Anika Lemaire,/arizes Lacan, trans. D.
Macey, with introduction by Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge 8c Kegan
Paul, 1977), p. xiii.
23. Lacan, "Seminar on the 'Purloined Letter,' " p. 53.
24. In his Vinconscient et la ca, Jean Laplanche evokes a similar view in
a passage that is worth quoting at length:
We know how to characterize the sexual drives of life. They are
the object drives, tending to maintain and to unify the object. "The
Object," evidently including the ego, the first great object of the life
instinct, which becomes what we call in the Freudian terminology the
narcissistic libido. Whereas the sexual impulse of death, how are we
to define it? If it is the paranoid aspects that best characterize it, we
see that what distinguishes it is the cleavage which reduces the object
to a single aspect, unilateral and divided. The object is split, and out
of it is detached an aspect which is the exciting aspect and, by the
same token, the dangerous, even destructive aspect. How, in relation
to "a drive toward the total object," which would be the life drives,
can we define the death drives? Can we call it the "drive to representa-
tion"? . . . Can we formulate, a propos of the death drive, something
like a "drive" of the signifier? In this way of seeing things, the whole
of Lacanianism—with the accent put on these aspects of the object
signifying, split, as one-sided, that in which it is taken from now
on as a signifier and not as a synthetic object—this accent put by
Lacanianism on the signifier would be nothing else but a new accentu-
ation of the death drive, in relation to the life instinct, which, for
Lacan, is put on the side of narcissism and the imaginary.
Jean Laplanche, Problematiques IV: Uinconscient et le ga (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), pp. 259—60.
Although in this passage Laplanche very closely approaches the view we
have been developing, his later treatment of the death drive in Life and Death
in Psychoanalysis is somewhat different from it. Laplanche's account is obviously
influenced by a Lacanian reading of Freud; he refers to the essentially Gestalt-
like organization of the ego, for example. Yet his purpose is not to give
specifically Lacanian interpretation of the death instinct. In fact, aside from a
handful of references to Lacan and the evidence of Lacan's influence on
Laplanche's account of the ego just pointed to, Lacan's work is not very much
in evidence in Laplanche's book. But the main point of difference between
my own approach and that taken by Laplanche centers on different ways of
conceptualizing the death problem itself. In my view, the crucial point is
the notion of death as disintegration and fragmentation. For Laplanche, by
contrast, death is primarily characterized in terms of evacuation of energy.
Both approaches have textual warrant in Freud: on the one hand, disintegra-
tion as the counter-tendency of the unifying power of Eros, on the other hand,
242
Notes
energy evacuation or decrease of tensions to zero as the meaning of the

"Nirvana principle." I have tried to show (supra pp. 76—78) that Freud's
association of the death drive with decrease in tension is fraught with confu-
sions that arise from his shifting the problematic of Beyond the Pleasure Principle
from a psychological to a biological frame of reference. As such, I believe it
cannot be taken as the paradigmatic feature of the death drive. More impor-
tant, conceiving death primarily in terms of the disintegration of a unity more
readily lends itself to explaining the opposition between the death drive and
the structure of the ego, which, as Laplanche agrees, is the heart of the
problem. (See Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey
Mehlman (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 125—
26. Also see his article "La Pulsion de Mori dans la theorie de la pulsion sexuelle"
in La Pulsion de Mort, Premier symposium de la Federation Europeene de
Psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), especially p. 14.)
Notes to Chapter 6
1. In Strachey's view, the transformed libido theory was positively aban-

doned by Freud in 1933 in his lecture on "Anxiety and Instinctual Life." See
Strachey's footnote at SE, 22:94, n . l .
2. Jacques Lacan,Les ComplexesFamiliaux (Dijon: Navarin Editeur, 1984),
p. 30.
3. Jacques Lacan, "Some Reflections on the Ego," International Journal
of Psycho-analysis 34 (1953): 15.
4. See pp. 63—64, above.
5. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehl-
man (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 56.
6. Freud proposes that "symptoms are created in order to remove the
ego from a situation of danger" and specifies that "symptoms are only formed
in order to avoid anxiety: they bind the psychical energy which would other-
wise be discharged as anxiety" (SE, 20:144).
7. Serge Leclaire, On tue un enfant: Un essai sur le narcissisme primaire et la
pulsion de mort (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975), p. 69.
8. Portions of this and the following section appeared in an earlier article
of mine, "Lacanian Castration: Body-Image and Signification in Psychoanaly-
sis," in Crises in Continental Philosophy, ed. Charles Scott and Arlene Dallery,
with P. Holley Roberts (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 215-34.
9. See, for instance, SE, 20:86. The notion of an inherited predisposition
to castration anxiety is closely related to that of the inherited propensity to
guilt that Freud invokes to explain the severity of the superego in its torment
of the ego. We will take up this problem in more detail below.
10. Lacan's characterization of castration as a form of dismemberment
243
Notes
and therefore as a fantasmatic representation of the corps morcele is especially

clear in his article on Les Complexes Familiaux, pp. 44ff.
11. E:S, 319. The English translation, which renders fantasme de caducite
as "phantasy of decepitude," misses the punning allusion in the French to
caducee (caduceus), the wand of Hermes.
12. See, for example, Lacan's discussion in E:S, pp. 319ff.
13. Freud mentions a similar "part for the whole" function of castration
in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety {SE, 20:139).
14. See Lacan's remark: "[The woman] finds the signifier of her own
desire in the body of him to whom she addresses her demand for love. Perhaps
it should not be forgotten that the organ that assumes this signifying function
takes on the value of a fetish." "The Signification of the Phallus," E:S, 290.
15. See Jacques Lacan, "Le Seminaire IV, La Relation d'Objet," 1956-
57; unpublished transcript, session of 6/5/57.
16. Jacques Lacan, "Le Seminaire V, Les Formations de 1'inconscient,"
1957-58, unpublished transcript, session of 1/8/58. Hereafter this source is
noted parenthetically in the text as "S.V.," followed by date of session.
17. See Jacques Derrida's essay, "Le facteur de la verite" In The Post
Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans, by Alan Bass (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 411-96.
18. By contrast, refusal to give u p the phallus in the foreclosure of
castration fixes the subject in the captures of the imaginary, leaving open the
path to psychotic delusion.
19. See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981).
20. E:S, 289. Lacan here expands upon a distinction between the func-
tions of having versus being in relation to the loss of the object that was drawn
by Freud himself. In a series of fragments entitled "Findings, Ideas, Problems,"
Freud makes the following note: " 'Having' and 'being' in children. Children
like expressing an object-relation by an identification—'I am the object/ 'Hav-
ing' is the later of the two; after loss of the object it relapses into 'being.'
Example: the breast. 'The breast is a part of me, I am the breast.' Only later:
'I have it'—that is, 'I am not it' " (SE, 23:299).
21. Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (2d ed.) (New York: Grosset &
Dunlap, 1905), p. 23.
22. Ibid., p. 316.
23. Can we take the example of Helen Keller to illustrate for us the
Lacanian point about the transition from an imaginary to a symbolic mode of
functioning? Both blind and deaf, can Helen Keller be said to have possessed
an imaginary ego of the sort Lacan proposes? In fact, Helen Keller had
normal sight and hearing up to the age of nineteen months and presumably
progressed normally through the mirror phase posited by Lacan. We have
244
Notes
every reason to believe that, if her case can in any way be taken as exemplary,
it is so for a Lacanian perspective as well.
24. Keller, The Story of My Life, pp. 22-24.
25. I would like to acknowledge having had the benefit of consulting an
excellent draft translation by Cormack Gallagher of Lacan's Seminar V on
"Les formations de Tinconscient." Translations offered here differ only
slightly from Gallagher's.
26. Quoted by Sarane Alexander, Surrealist Art, trans. G. Clough (Lon-
don: Thames and Hudson, 1985), pp. 121-22. Breton's remark is echoed by
Max Ernst, who defines his working principle as "the exploitation of the chance
meeting of two remote realities on a plane unsuitable to them." Quoted by
Alexander in the same volume, p. 62. Both Breton and Ernst here play on the
remark of Lautreamont in his comparison of the beautiful to "the fortuitous
encounter upon a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella."
Lautreamont (Isidore Ducasse) Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror), trans. Guy
Wernham (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 263.
27. Andre Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. and intro-
duced by Frank Rosemont (New York: Monad Press, 1978), p. 26.
28. For a valuable discussion of Lacan's concept of sublimation, see J o h n
Muller, "Lacan's View of Sublimation," American Journal of Psychoanalysis 47,
no. 4 (1987): 315-23.
29. Joseph Sandier, "On the Concept of the Superego," Psychoanalytic
Study of the Child 15 (1960): 133-34. Sandier here paraphrases the text of
Freud: "There are two paths by which the contents of the id can penetrate
the ego. The one is direct, the other leads by way of the ego ideal" (SE, 19:55).
30. It was this fact led Freud to propose that the superego is formed by
identification, not with the parents' ego, but with their superego.
31. This mapping of the three psychical agencies onto Schema L is
suggested by Lacan's own account: "The L of the questioning of the subject
in his existence has a combinatory structure that must not be confused with
its spatial aspect. As such, it is the signifier itself that must be articulated in
the Other. . . . As support for this structure, we find in it the three signifiers
in which the Other may be identified in the Oedipus complex. . . . This play
of the signifiers . . . structures in the subject the three agencies: ego (ideal),
reality, super-ego, the determination of which was to be the task of the second
Freudian topography" (E:S, 195-96).
32. "The sense of guilt is at bottom nothing else but a topographical
variety of anxiety" (SE, 21:135).
33. Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff, "Fetishism—The Symbolic,
the Imaginary, and the Real," in Perversions: Psychodynamics and Psychotherapy,
ed. S. Lorand and M. Balint (New York: Gramercy Press, 1956), p. 272.
34. Jacques Lacan, Television, trans. D. Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and
Annette Michelson, October, 40 (Spring 1987): 14.
245
Notes
35. In response to Kant's question "What can I know?" Lacan first objects
that "my discourse doesn't allow the question of what one is able to know,
since it begins by presupposing this as the subject of the unconscious." Lacan
then goes on to ask: "What can I know? Reply: nothing in any case that doesn't
have the structure of language." Lacan, Television, p. 40.
36. Lacan's discussion of this comparison of Kant and Sade is to be
found in "Kant avec Sade," E. pp. 765-9.
37. For a valuable discussion of Lacan's ethics of desire, see J o h n Rajch-
man, "Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity," Representations 15 (Summer 1986):
42-56.
38. On this point, see J.—B. Pontalis's paper "On Death-Work in Freud,
in the Self, in Culture," in Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature, ed. Alan
Roland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
39. Carlos Leon, "Unusual Patterns of Crime During La Violencia in
Colombia," American Journal of Psychiatry 125, no. 11 (May 1969): 1566.
40. Ibid., p. 1568.
41. Ibid., pp. 1568-69.
42. Ibid., p. 1567.
43. Ibid., p. 1570.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., pp. 1570-71.
46. Ibid., p. 1571.
47. For an equally brief but immensely suggestive treatment of spectacu-
lar violence from a Lacanian perspective, see the discussion of Marc Lepine's
mass-murder/suicide by Monique Panaccio, "Lepine et les roses: au-dela
d'Eros," In Poly technique, 6 Decembre, edited by Louise Malette and Marie
Chalouh (Montreal: Editions du remue-menage, 1990), pp. 115-20.
1. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis, Minn.: University

of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 168n.
2. Many supplemental treatments of Lacan's conception of the decent-
ered subject could be cited here. See, for example, Gerard Miller, ed., Lacan
(Paris: Bordas, 1987), especially the first two sections, pp. 13-57; Joel Dor,
Introduction a la lecture de Lacan (Paris: Editions Denoel, 1985), pt. 2, pp. 8 9 -
173; William J. Richardson, "Lacan and the Subject of Psychoanalysis," in
Interpreting Lacan, ed. Joseph Smith and William Kerrigan (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 51-74.
3. Thus, Lacan claims, "I identify myself in language, but only by losing
246
Notes
myself in it like an object. What is realized in my history is not the past definite
of what was, since it is no more, or ever the present perfect of what has been
in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am
in the process of becoming" (E:S, 86).
4. For a different discussion of Lacan's relation to Hegel around the
concept of negation, see John Muller, "Negation in 'The Purloined Letter':
Hegel, Poe, Lacan," in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic
Reading, ed. John Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 343-68.
5. G.W.F. Hegel, Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1975), p. 142.
6. Ibid., p. 117.
7. In doing so, it is not irrelevant to note that Freud himself relates the
function of negation to the death drive. Freud links negation and the death
drive in the context of a general analysis of the functions of judgment in
which affirmative judgment is compared to the primordial impulse toward
incorporation and the erotic instincts—"I should like to eat this"—and the
negative judgment, "the successor to expulsion," is associated with the death
drive—"I should like to spit it out" (SE, 19:237 and 239).
8. See S.VII, 231.
9. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 19.
10. Schopenhauer insists that "my philosophy does not allow of the
fiction which has been so cleverly devised by the professors of philosophy and
has become indispensable to them, namely the fiction of a reason that knows,
perceives, or apprehends immediately and absolutely." Arthur Schopenhauer,
The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E.FJ. Payne (New York:
Dover Press, 1969), vol. 1, p. xxvi. Hereafter this source is noted parentheti-
cally in the text as "WR," followed by volume and page numbers.
Of course, Schopenhauer is not the only philosophical precursor of the
Freudian unconscious. One thinks especially of Schelling, for example, or of
Spinoza. The likeness of Spinoza's notion of conatits to the Lacanian concept of
desir would make a topic for a substantive inquiry. For a survey of philosophical
antecedents of the Freudian concept, see Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious
Before Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960).
11. See pp. 67-70, above.
12. Quoted by Ernest Jones, The Life and Work ofSigmund Freud (London:
Hogarth Press, 1962), vol. 3, p. 460.
13. Ibid., 2:344.
14. WR, 1:257. Quoted by Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writ-
ings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968),
247
Notes
p. 102. Hereafter this source is noted parenthetically in the text as " 5 , "
followed by page number.
15. T h u s Nietzsche charges in a notebook entry that "Schopenhauer . . .
appears to be a morality-man who, in order to justify his moral valuation,
finally becomes a world-denier." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed.
Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York:
Vintage Books, 1967), p. 224.
16. See 5 , 67ff.
17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Viking Press, 1966), pp. 14-15.
18. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 507.
19. For an alternative reading of the relevance of Nietzsche's analysis of
the Apollinian and Dionysian to Freudian concepts, a reading that bears some
important affinities as well as differences to the perspective adopted here, see
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), pp. 157-76.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 727.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 32.
22. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 543.
23. Lacan returns to the connection between the death drive and tragedy
in his discussion of Antigone in his seventh seminar, L'ethique de la psychanalyse
(S.VII, 285-333).
24. Heidegger comments frequently and often critically about Freudian
psychoanalysis in his Zollikoner Seminare (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1987).
25. Ibid., pp. 348 and 350.
26. Lacan's translation is printed in La Psychanalyse, No. 1 (1956): 5 9 -
79.
The English translation of Heidegger's essay is to be found in Martin
Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A.
Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
27. Dasein, translated literally, means "there-being" (da-sein) or "being-
there." It is the word by which Heidegger designates the essence of the human
being as openness for the presencing of Being. He compares it to a lighted
clearing in the forest, in which beings come and go into illumination.
28. William J. Richardson has explored this aspect of Heidegger's
thought in his article "The Place of the Unconscious in Heidegger," Review of
Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 5, no. 3 (1965): 265-90.
29. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Ed-
248
Notes
ward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 265. Hereafter this
source is noted parenthetically in the text as "BT" followed by page number.
30. In a very general way, this parallel grounds the attempts to synthesize
Freud and Heidegger proposed by Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss.
31. Thus Heidegger remarks in beginning the second division: "In
starting with average everydayness, our Interpretation has heretofore been
confined to the analysis of such existing as is either undifferentiated or inau-
thentic" (BT, 275-76).
32. The German formulation is "im Dasein immer noch etwas aussteht." As
the translator notes, "the verb 'ausstehen' and the noun 'Ausstand' (which we
usually translate as 'something still outstanding,' etc.), are ordinarily used in
German to apply to a debt or a bank deposit which, from the point of view of
the lender or depositor, has yet to be repaid to him, liquidated, or withdrawn"
(BT, 279). Lacan often thinks of the alienation of desire in the imaginary
according to a similar metaphor of a debt that remains to be paid. He thus
claims that the goal of psychoanalysis (referring to the case of the Ratman) is
that "of bringing the subject to rediscover—in the history of his father's lack
of delicacy, his marriage with the subject's mother, the 'poor, but pretty' girl,
his marred love-life, the distasteful memory of the beneficent friend—to
rediscover in this history, together with the fateful constellation that had
presided over the subject's very birth, the gap impossible to fill, of the symbolic
debt of which his neurosis is the notice of nonpayment" (E:S, 89).
33. Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," in idem, Basic Writings,
ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 195.
34. Ibid., p. 223.
35. Heidegger, "Language," in idem, Poetry Language Thought, trans.
Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 189.
36. Alain Juranville notes the parallel between empty speech as the
discourse of the imaginary and Heidegger's idle talk in his Lacan et la philo-
sophic
37. Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet
Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton & Co., 1982), pp. 153-54.
38. Ibid., p. 156.
39. See Lacan's discussions at E:S, 196, 229ff.
40. J.—B. Pontalis, "On Death-Work in Freud, in the Self, in Culture," in
Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature, ed. Alan Roland (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1978), pp. 85-95.
41. See Heidegger's analysis of anxiety in "What is Metaphysics?" in
Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977),
pp. 95-112.
42. For Heidegger's discussion of "the moment of vision," see Being and
249
Notes
Time, p. 437. For a Lacanian ear, this phrase immediately has a suspicious
ring, as its reference to vision lends to it an overtone of the imaginary.
43. Heidegger himself became increasingly aware of this problem and
moved away from the concept of authenticity in his later work.
Conclusion
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans.

R. J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968),
pp. 347-48.
2. Quoted by Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-
christ, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 268.
3. Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, Feminine Sexuality, ed. Juliet
Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton 8c Co., 1982), p. 147.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 142.
7. Ibid., p. 147.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 142.
250
1
Bibliography
Alexander, Sarane. Surrealist Art Translated by G. Clough. London:

Thames and Hudson, 1985.
Augustine, St. Confessions. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin. Harmonds-
worth: Penguin Ltd., 1961.
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press, 1973.
Benveniste, Emile. "The Nature of the Linguistic Sign." In idem,
Problems of General Linguistics. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of
Miami, 1971.
Benvenuto, Bice, and Roger Kennedy. The Works of Jacques Lacan. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1986.
Bibring, Edward. "The Development and Problems of the Theory of
the Instincts." International Journal of Psycho-analysis 22 (1941):
102-31.
Binswanger, Ludwig. Being-in-the-World: Selected Papers of Ludwig Bins-
wanger. Translated by Jacob Needleman. London: Souvenir Press,
1975.
Blanchot, Maurice. "Sade." In Marquis de Sade, The Complete Justine,
Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, edited and translated
by Richard Seaver and Austryn Warnhouse. New York: Grove
Press, 1966.
Boothby, Richard. "Lacanian Castration: Body-Image and Significa-
tion in Psychoanalysis." In Crisis in Continental Philosophy, edited
by Charles Scott and Arlene Dallery, with P. Holley Roberts.
Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 1990.
Boss, Medard. Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology. Trans-
lated by Stephen Conway and Anne Cleaves. New York: Jason
Aronson, 1983.
. Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis. Translated by Ludwig Lefe-
bre. New York: Basic Books, 1963.
251
Bibliography
Bowie, Malcolm. "Jacques Lacan." In Structuralism and Since: From

Levi-Strauss to Derrida, edited by John Sturrock. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979.
Breger, L. "Motivation, Energy, and Cognitive Structure in Psychoana-
lytic Theory." In Modern Psychoanalysis, edited by J u d d Marmor.
New York: Basic Books, 1968.
Breton, Andre. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Edited and intro-
duced by Frank Rosemont. New York: Monad Press, 1978.
Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of
History. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959.
Clement, Catherine. Lives and Legends ofJacques Lacan. Translated by
A. Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Colby, Kenneth. Energy and Structure. New York: Ronald Press Co.,
1955.
Coward, Rosalind, and John Ellis. Language and Materialism: Develop-
ments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1977.
Derrida, Jacques. "Le facteur de la verite." In idem, The Post Card:
From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass, pp.
411-96. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
. Dissemination, Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1981.
Dor, Joel. Introduction a la lecture de Lacan. Paris: Editions Denoel, 1985.
Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic
Books, 1970.
Fages, J. B. Comprendre Jacques Lacan. Toulouse: Privat, 1971.
Felman, Shoshana. Jacques Lacan and the Adventure ofInsight: Psychoanal-
ysis in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1987.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Aetiology of Hysteria." In The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited and
translated by James Strachey et al. 24 vols., vol. 3, pp. 187-222.
London: Hogarth Press, 1958.
. "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy." In Standard
Edition, 10:5-149.
. "Analysis Terminable and Interminable." In Standard Edition,
23:209-54.
252
Bibliography
. "Anxiety and Instinctual Life." In Standard Edition, 22:81—

111.
—. An Autobiographical Study. In Standard Edition, 20:1—70.
—. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In Standard Edition, 18:1-64.
—. Civilization and Its Discontents. In Standard Edition, 21:57—146.
—. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess. Edited
and translated by Jeffrey M. Masson. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap
Press, 1985.
—. "Dissection of the Personality." In Standard Edition, 22:57-
80.
— . "The Economic Problem of Masochism." In Standard Edition,
19:159-70.
The Ego and the Id. In Standard Edition, 19:1—66.
—. "Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning."
In Standard Edition, 12:218-26.
Gesammelte Werke. London: Imago Publishing, 1940.
. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In Standard Edition,
16:65-144.
—. Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. In Standard Edition, 2 0 : 7 1 -
176.
—. "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes." In Standard Edition,
14:109-40.
. The Interpretation of Dreams. In Standard Edition, vols. 4 and 5.
— . Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. In Standard Edition,
vol. 8.
. Moses and Monotheism. In Standard Edition, 23:1-138.
. "Negation." In Standard Edition, 19:235-40.
"On Narcissism: An Introduction." In Standard Edition,
14:67-104.
—. "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere
of Love." In Standard Edition, 11:179-90.
. An Outline of Psycho-analysis. In Standard Edition, 23:139—208.
—. "Project for a Scientific Psychology." In Standard Edition,
1:281-397.
—. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In Standard Edition, vol.
6.
253
Bibliography
. "The Splitting of the Ego in Defence." In Standard Edition,

23:275-78.
. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In Standard Edition,
7:123-246.
. Totem and Taboo. In Standard Edition, 13:1—161.
. "Two Encyclopedia Articles: The Libido Theory." In Stan-
dard Edition, 18:255-62.
. "The 'Uncanny.' " In Standard Edition, 17:219-56.
. "The Unconscious." In Standard Edition, 14:159-216.
Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. Studies on Hysteria. In Standard
Edition, vol. 2.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Maxims and Reflections of Goethe. Trans-
lated by Bailey Saunders. New York: Macmillan Press, 1893.
Grinker, Roy. "Conceptual Progress in Psychoanalysis." In Modern
Psychoanalysis, edited by Judd Marmor. New York: Basic Books,
1968.
Hegel, G.W.F. Logic. Translated by William Wallace. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975.
. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie
and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
. Early Greek Thinking. Translated by David Farrell Krell and
Frank A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.
. "Letter on Humanism." In idem, Basic Writings. Edited by
David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
. "Logos." Translated by Jacques Lacan. La Psychanalyse, 1,
1956, pp. 59-79.
. Poetry Language Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter.
New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
. "What is Metaphysics?" In idem, Basic Writings. Edited by
David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
. Zollikoner Seminare. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1987.
Irigaray, Luce. "Communications Hnguistique et speculaire." Cahiers
pour Vanalyse, no. 3 (May—June 1966): 39—55.
Jakobson, Roman, "Quest for the Essence of Language." Selected Writ-
ings, Vol. II. T h e Hague: Mouton, 1962: 345-59.
254
Bibliography
. Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Translated by James

Mepham. Cambridge, Mass.: M I T Press, 1981.
Jakobson, Roman and Morris Halle. Fundamentals of Language. T h e
Hague: Mouton, 1956.
Jakobson, Roman, and Krystyna Pomorska. Dialogues. Translated by
Christian Hubert. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983.
Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols. London:
Hogarth Press, 1962.
Julien, Philippe. Le retour a Freud de Jacques Lacan. Uapplication au
miroir. Toulouse: Editions Eres, 1985.
Juranville, Alain. Lacan et la Philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1984.
Kearney, Richard. "Jacques Lacan." In idem, Modern Movements in
European Philosophy. Manchester: University of Manchester Press,
1986.
Keller, Helen. The Story ofMy Life, 2d ed. New York: Grosset & Dunlap,
1905.
Kojeve, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the
Phenomenology of Spirit. Assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited
by Allan Bloom, translated by James Nichols. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
Kris, Ernst. "Introduction." In Sigmund Freud, Origins of Psychoanaly-
sis. Edited by Marie Bonaparte, Anne Freud and Ernst Kris, trans-
lated by Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey. New York: Basic
Books, 1954.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by
Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Lacan, Jacques. Les Complexes Familiaux. Dijon: Navarin Editeur, 1984.
. De la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalite.
. Ecrits. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966.
. Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York:
Norton, 1977.
. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. Edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., 1981.
. "Of Structure as an Intermixing of Otherness Prerequisite
to Any Subject Whatever." In The Structuralist Controversy, edited
255
Bibliography
by Richard Macksey and Eugene Donato, Baltimore, Md.: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1970.
. "Le Seminaire IV, La Relation d'objet." 1956-57. Unpub-
lished transcript.
. "Le Seminaire V, Les formations de 1'inconscient." 1957—58.
Unpublished transcript.
. Le Seminaire, Livre III. Les psychoses. Edited by Jacques-Alain
Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981.
. Le Seminaire, Livre VII. VEthique de psychanalyse. Edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986.
. Le Seminaire, Livre XX, Encore. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller,
. The Seminar ofJacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Tech-
nique. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by John Forres-
ter. New York: W. W. Norton 8c Co., 1988.
. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory
and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain
Miller, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W. W. Norton
& Co., 1988.
. "The Seminar on the 'Purloined Letter,' " translated by Jef-
frey Mehlman. In French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis,
edited by Jeffrey Mehlman. Yale French Studies,, no. 48 (1972) 3 8 -
72.
. "Some Reflections on the Ego." International Journal ofPsycho-
analysis 34 (1953): 11-17.
. Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Translated, with notes
and commentary, by A. Wilden. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
. "Le symbolique, l'imaginaire, et le reel." Unpublished text of
conference paper presented on July 8, 1953.
. Television. Translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and
Annette Michelson, October 40 (Spring 1987): 5-50.
and the ecole freudienne. Feminine Sexuality. Edited by Juliet
Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, translated by Jacqueline Rose. New
York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1982.
Lacan, Jacques, and Wladimir Granoff. "Fetishism: The Symbolic,
the Imaginary, and the Real." In Perversions: Psychodynamics and
256
Bibliography
Psychotherapy, edited by S. Lorand and M. Balint. New York: Gra-

mercy Press, 1956.
Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Translated by Jeffrey
Mehlman. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
. Problematiques IV: Uinconscient et le ca. Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de France, 1981.
. "La pulsion de mort dans la theorie de la pulsion sexuelle."
In La Pulsion de Mort. Premier symposium de la Federation Euro-
peene de Psychanalyse. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1986.
Laplanche, Jean, and Serge Leclaire. "The Unconscious: A Psychoana-
lytic Study/' Translated by Patrick Coleman. In French Freud:
Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis, edited by Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale
French Studies, no. 48 (1972): 118-78.
Laplanche, Jean, and J.—B. Pontalis. "Fantasy and the Origins of
Sexuality," International Journal of Psycho-analysis 49 (1968): 1—18.
. The Language of Psycho-analysis. Translated by D. Nicholson-
Smith. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973.
Lashley, K. S., and K. M. Colby. "An Exchange of Views on Psychic
Energy and Psychoanalysis." Behavioral Science 2 (1957): 231—40.
Lautreamont (Ducasse, Isidore). Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror).
Translated by Guy Wernham. New York: New Directions, 1965.
Leclaire, Serge. On tue un enfant: Un essai sur le narcissisme primaire et la
pulsion de mort. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975.
Lemaire, Anika. Jacques Lacan. Translated by David Macey, with intro-
duction by Jacques Lacan. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1977.
Leon, Carlos. "Unusual Patterns of Crime During La Violencia in Co-
lombia." American Journal of Psychiatry 125, no. 11 (May 1969):
1564-75.
Macey, David. Lacan in Contexts. London: Verso. 1988.
Marini, Marcelle. Jacques Lacan. Paris: Editions Belfond, 1986.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of
the Seduction Theory. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1984.
Miller, Gerard. Lacan. Paris: Bordas, 1987.
Muller, John. "Lacan's View of Sublimation." American Journal of Psy-
choanalysis 47, no. 4 (1987): 315-23.
257
Bibliography
. "Negation in 'The Purloined Letter': Hegel, Poe, Lacan." In

The PurloinedPoe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, edited
by J o h n Muller and William J. Richardson, pp. 343-68. Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
Muller, John, and William J. Richardson. Lacan and Language: A Read-
ers Guide to Ecrits, New York: International Universities Press,
1982.
. The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading.
Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kauf-
mann. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.
. The Birth of Tragedy. In Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Edited and
translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library,
1968.
. Ecce Homo. In Basic Writings ofNietzsche. Edited and translated
by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library, 1968.
. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New
York: Viking Press, 1966.
. The Will to Power. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. Translated
by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage
Books, 1967.
Panaccio, Monique. "Lepine et les roses: au-dela d'Eros," In Polytech-
nique, 6 Decembre, edited by Louise Malette and Marie Chalouh
Montreal: Editions du remue-m£nage, 1990.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs." In
idem, Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Edited by Justin Buchler.
New York: Dover Press, 1955.
Plato. Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Hun-
tington Cairns. Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen Press, 1961.
Pontalis, J.—B. "On Death-Work in Freud, in the Self, in Culture." In
Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature, edited by Alan Roland.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.
Pribram, Karl, and Gill, Merton. Freud's "Project" Re-Assessed. New
York: Basic Books, 1976.
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanaly-
sis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Rajchman, John. "Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity." Representations
15 (Summer 1986): 42-56.
258
Bibliography
Rank, Otto. Will Therapy and Truth and Reality. New York: Knopf, 1936.
Rapaport, David. "The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory." Psycholog-
ical Issues, no. 2, Monograph 6 (1960).
Richardson, William J. "Lacan and the Subject of Psychoanalysis." In
Interpreting Lacan, edited by Joseph Smith and William Kerrigan.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983.
. "The Place of the Unconscious in Heidegger." Review of
Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 5, no. 3 (1965): 265—90.
Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans-
lated by Denis Savage. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1977.
Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers. New York: Meridian, 1974.
Rochlin, Gregory. Man's Aggression. New York: Dell Publishing, 1973.
Roustang, Francois. Dire Mastery. Translated by Ned Lukacher. Balti-
more, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
. "L'illusion lacanienne." Critique 41, no. 456 (May 1985): 4 7 0 -
77.
Sade, Marquis de. The Complete Justin, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and
Other Writings. Edited and translated by Richard Seaver and Aus-
tryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1966.
. Juliette. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Grove
Press, 1978.
Sandier, Joseph. "On the Concept of the Superego." Psychoanalytic
Study of the Child 15 (1960): 133-34.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Barnes.
New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles
Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Reidlinger. Translated
by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols.
Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Press, 1969.
Schur, Max. Freud: Living and Dying. New York: International Univer-
sities Press, 1972.
Spielrein, Sabina. "Die Destruktion als Ursache des Wesens." Jahrbuch
fur psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen 6 (1912):
464-503.
259
Bibliography
Sulloway, Frank. Freud: Biologist of the Mind. New York: Basic Books,
1979.
Thompson, Guy. The Death of Desire: A Study in Psychopathology. New
York: New York University Press, 1985.
Vaillant, George. Adaptation to Life. Boston: Little, Brown and Com-
pany, 1977.
Ver Eecke, Wilfried. "Hegel as Lacan's Source for Necessity in Psycho-
analytic Theory." In Interpreting Lacan, edited by Joseph Smith
and William Kerrigan. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1983.
Wallon, Henri. The World of Henri Wallon. Edited by G. Voyat, trans-
lated by D. Nicholson-Smith. New York: Aronson, 1984.
Weber, Samuel. "The Divaricator: Remarks on Freud's Witz" Glyph,
no. 1 (1977): 1-27.
. The Legend ofFreud. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1982.
Whyte, Lancelot Law. The Unconscious Before Freud. New York: Basic
Books, 1960.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso: 1989.
260
Index
Adler, Alfred, 5 Being toward-death, 124, 209, 212,

Affect, 49 218-21
Aggression (aggressivity), 4, 6, 11, Benveniste, Emile, 123, 125
3 7 - 4 1 , 169, 176-78, 183 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 227-28
Aim-inhibited libido, 192 Bibring, Edward, 9
Alexander, Franz, 10 Binding and unbinding, 83-84, 8 7 -
Alienation, 21-22, 37, 39, 41-45, 88, 92, 94, 96-97, 100, 136, 145
47-48, 50, 58, 60, 65, 68, 90, 92, Biology, relation to psychology, 27—
99, 108-9, 111, 113, 116, 128, 31,61,97-103,217,225-27
135, 144, 147, 153, 170, 176, 185, Booz (Endormi), 162-63
202, 207, 209, 211, 224, 226-27 Borromean knot, 19, 136
Anaximander, 185 Boss, Medard, 203
Anticipatory resoluteness, 211, 221 Breger, L., 48
Anxiety, 40, 9 1 , 140-41, 145-46, Breton, Andr£, 162
149-50, 167, 173, 176, 208, 2 2 0 - Bridge game, 218
21; versus fear, 142, 148, 208; Buhler, Charlotte, 25
and the real, 144; of separation,
149, 152 Castration, 8, 139-40, 145-58, 167,
Apollinian, 196-202 173-74, 176, 178, 186, 214, 227
Archaic smile, 199-200 Categorical imperative, 175
Aristophanes, 64, 216 Catharsis, 107, 202
Aristotle, 199, 226 Clement, Catherine, 21
Asceticism, 198 Colby, Kenneth, 7
Aufheben, 188-90, 215-16 Conflict-free sphere of ego, 35
Augustine, Saint, 40, 125 Corps morcelt, 24, 91, 143, 147, 172,
Authenticity, 206-12, 221 185, 202
Autoerotism, 100 Coward, Rosalind, 43
Dada, 162
Becker, Ernest, 7 Dasein, 204-12, 215, 220
Being and non-being, 13, 115, 119- Death and vitality, paradoxical rela-
20, 127, 188, 1 9 1 , 2 0 4 - 7 , 2 1 2 tion of, 69-70, 202, 225
261
Index
Death drive: and anxiety, 145, 211; 60; as object, 32; and resistances,
and castration, 151; as conflict, 1, 32; versus the subject, 36-39, 47,
3, 5, 45, 96, 224; and desire, 12- 67, 110, 174, 186,203, 226; as
13, 70; and energetics, 48; in symptom, 144, 169; unity of, 3 1 -
Hegel, 191; in Heidegger, 204, 3 3 , 3 9 , 5 9 , 6 6 , 7 1 , 100-1, 143,
209-12, 218, 220-21; and the 147
imaginary, 19, 21-22, 4 1 , 67, Ego ideal, 169, 173
136, 185, 224, 227; muteness of, Ego psychology, 11, 35, 37, 99, 219
91, 102; as myth, 70, in Nietz- Ego syntonic, 144
sche, 196, 202, 218; as para- Eitingon, Max, 8, 10
digmatic of all drives, 74-76, 85, Ellenberger, Henri, 8
225; as "pure" drive, 96, 102; and Ellis, John, 43
the real, 19, 67, 102, 136, 185, Empedocles, 4
224; rejected by Freud's follow- Empty speech, 213
ers, 6—10; in Schopenhauer, 193, Endogenous stimuli, 52, 142
195-96, 217-18; and the super- Energetics, 45, 4 7 - 5 1 , 106, 109,
ego, 6, 132, 167; and the sym- 130; central in Freud's thought,
bolic/language, 12-13, 19, 105, 49-50, 64; and hermeneutics,
119, 120, 133, 136, 185, 224, 227; 131-32, 136; Lacan's treatment
and topography of id, ego, super- of, 49-50, 55, 61-65, 106-7, 134,
ego, 11, 14,223-24 224; as myth, 63-64, 67; and the
Death squads, 182 real, 50, 62, 64, 224
Death work, 218-19,227 Erogenous zones, 57
Demand, 164-65 Eros, 4, 7, 49, 83, 91, 94-95, 102
Depersonalization, 37 Ethology, 18, 22
Derrida, Jacques, 154 Everydayness, 206
Desire: as desire of the other, 42,
45, 119, 148; as question, 119, as Falling (Heidegger), 207, 211
term in Lacan's discourse, 14 Famillionaire, 159-61, 165
Diachrony, 123, 126, 166, 242 n.15 Fantasy and the drive, 28
Dialectic, 6, 10, 188, 215, 224, 235 Fascination, 31, 34-35, 40, 147,
n.34 207-8
Differential features, 123, 128, 153 Fascism, 183
Das Ding, 31 Fechner, Gustav, 76
Dionysian, 196-202, 218 Fenichel, Otto, 11
Dismemberment, fantasies of, 39— Ferenczi, Sandor, 10
41, 43, 143-44, 147-48, 152, 157, Fetishism, 150
172, 180 Fischer, Kuno, 160
Displacement, 30, 48, 173 Fixation, 207
Dissemination, 154 Fliess, Robert, 6
Double, 40 Fliess, Wilhelm, 89
Foreclosure, 178
Ego: "danger" to, 141-43, 145-46; Formations of the unconscious, 139,
differentiation from id, 33—34, 152
66, 69, 190, 224; and the drives, Fort-da game, 2, 93, 133, 166, 234
32; as imaginary, 18, 31, 36, 5 8 - n.21
262
Index
Freud, Anna, 35 Id: and death drive, 102-3; differ-

Freud, Sigmund: dualist sensibility entiated from ego, 33-34, 66, 69,
of, 4, 78, 150; empiricism of, 4, 190, 224; and the real, 112; and
7; as a gestaltist, 54; pessimism the subject, 115, 240 n.6; and the
of, 8, 196; speculative inclination superego, 167-72
of, 4, 7, 9, 97 Idealism, 43-44, 215
Freud, Sophie, 9 Identification, 24, 32, 34, 42, 4 4 -
Full speech, 213 45,67, 111, 114, 169, 171; pri-
Fundamental ontology, 204 mary and secondary, 18, 31, 155,
Fundamental rule of analysis, 219 173
Idle talk (Heidegger), 213
Gestalt: and action, 26; in animals, Image and action, 58, 226
22, 25-26; of body image, 25, 28, Imaginary: defined, 18; disjunction
31, 38, 152, 154, 225; proper to with real, 60-61, 67; as myth, 154
aggression, 39, 180; selective Imaginary anatomy, 155
function of, 54, 56-57, 59, 226, Innenwelt, 23
236, n.14; temporal fixity of, 2 5 - Instinct: in animals, 22, 25-29, 102,
26, 29, 59, 186; of trauma, 93; 217; of aggression and destruc-
unity of, 18, 25-26, 29-30, 32, tion, 3, 5, 7,9, 11, 1 3 , 4 0 , 9 1 , 95,
100-1, 128, 136, 143, 151, 153- 133
55, 161, 185,202 Instinctual representative, 27-28,
Gestalt psychology, 17, 25, 101 82, 88, 90, 95, 135, 183
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 71, Irigaray, Luce, 56
239 n.29 Irma's Injection, dream of, 158
Gorgon, 199
Grinker, Roy, 48 Jakobson, Roman, 18, 123, 128, 153
Groddeck, Georg, 107, 192, 196 Jean Paul (Richter, J. P. F.), 160
Group psychology, 34, 184 Jones, Ernest, 6, 196
Guilt, 3 , 5 , 170, 173,215 Jouissance, 109-10, 120, 173-76,
196, 210, 228
Hallucination, 117, 178 Jouis-sens, 173, 176
Hartmann, Heinz, 35 Julien, Phillippe, 21
Having versus being, 155 Jung, Carl, 4, 102
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
42-44, 50, 148, 187-91, 215, 235 Kant, Immanuel, 174-75, 191, 216,
n.43 246 n.35
Heidegger, Martin, 187, 203-14, Keller, Helen, 156, 244 n.23
218-19, 227 Klein, Melanie, 10
Heine, Heinrich, 8, 158, 161, 165 Kristeva, Julia, 65
Heraclitus, 203
History, 216, 227 Lacan, Jacques: critique of ego psy-
Homeostasis, 2-3, 54, 67, 73, 135, chology, 11, 35-37, 99, 219; sta-
175, 190, 219 tus of theory in, 14, 187, 231
Hugo, Victor, 162 n.32; style of, 15-16
Hypnosis, 34 Lack, (manque a etre), 60, 65, 108,
Hyppolite, Jean, 189 113, 128, 149, 164, 173,219
263
Index
Lamelle, 63-64, 107, 144 Narcissism: and aggressivity, 39—43;

Laplanche, Jean, 1, 11, 13, 28, 55, and energetics, 48; place in psy-
134, 144, 241 n.24 choanalytic theory, 4, 186; the
Lashley, K. S., 48 term, 33; theory of the ego in,
Law, 151, 153, 158, 168, 170, 172- 31-37, 100-1
75, 181, 184-85 Negative therapeutic reaction, 3, 93
Leclaire, Serge, 133, 145 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 196-202, 216,
Lemaire, Anika, 15, 44 218
Leon, Carlos, 178, 180-81 Nihilism, 198
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 18 Nirvana principle, 77-78, 85-86,
Libido, 4, 7, 28, 32, 48, 49-50, 5 5 - 243 n.24
56, 63-64, 96, 108, 130, 135, 140, Nom-duPere, 172
144-46, 169, 206-7 Nominalism, 127
Lipps, Theodor, 160, 163
Little, Hans, 145, 148, 150, 155 Object, imaginary orientation to, 26,
Lorenz, Konrad, 22 30-32, 114
Low, Barbara, 86 Objeta, 165-66, 173, 216
Obsession, 6, 96
Oceanic feeling, 202
Macey, David, 231 n.32 Oedipus, 202-3
Marx, Karl, 21 Oedipus Comlex, 19, 89, 106, 115,
Masochism, 2 - 3 , 5, 38, 41, 91, 9 6 - 124, 132, 139-40, 145, 147-49,
97; primordial, 39, 73, 99, 119; 152-53, 155, 157-58, 167, 169,
moral, 170 177, 223; as myth, 140
Master-slave dialectic, 42-43, 188, Ontological difference, 205
235 n.34 Organicism, 49, 61
Maya, 194 Other, 43, 110, 115-16, 118-19,
Meconnaissance, 59, 99, 219 153, 1 6 4 , 2 1 6 , 2 1 9 - 2 1
Mehlman, Jeffrey, 15 Overdetermination, 126
Melancholia, 6
Metalanguage, 216 Paranoia, 182-83
Metaphor, 161-64, 193 Partial drive, 57
Metaphysics, 4, 43, 62, 185, 187, Partial objects, 153
189, 190, 196,217, 221, 230 n.6 Pas-de-sens, 160, 163-65
Metapsychology, 4, 6, 18, 62, 130, Paternal metaphor, 153, 181
137, 176, 185 187, 204, 206, 2 2 2 - Phallus, 140, 148-49, 152-53, 155,
24, 226, 229 n.6 165-66, 173; distinct from penis,
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 43 153-55, 173; as privileged signi-
Milton, John, 105 fier, 154
Mirror phase, 18, 21-23, 25, 27, Philia and Neikos, 4
30-32, 34, 36, 44, 58, 65, 106, Phobia, 142
146, 155, 193, 226 Plato, 40
Moment of vision, 221 Pleasure principle, 2, 3, 13, 67, 7 6 -
Muller,John, 114 80, 82-83, 85-88, 109-10, 120,
Mystics, 228 135; likeness to death drive, 78
264
Index
Polymorphous perversity, 100 Sandier, Joseph, 169

Pontalis,J.-B., 6, 28, 55,218 Sartre, Jean Paul, 236 n.14
Pragnanz, 25 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 12, 18,
Prematurity of birth, 23, 25-26, 107, 120-22, 125, 127
33-34, 141, 143, 147, 172, 185, Schema I, 117
201, 217, 2 3 7 n . l 9 Schema L, 114, 135, 152-53, 171—
Presence and absence, 3, 128-29, 72, 186, 190, 220, 245 n.31
151, 153 Schema R, 117
Primal parricide, 5, 33, 170 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 191—99,
Primary and secondary processes, 201, 217
53, 82, 84, 96 Scopic drive, 225
Principium individuationis, 193—97, Seduction theory, 89
201, 217 Self-destructiveness, 1, 5-6, 9, 11,
Principle of constancy, 2, 29, 53, 72, 38, 40, 74-75, 87, 97, 170, 183,
86,96, 110 185, 203
Principle of neuronic inertia, 51— Separation anxiety, 149, 152
52, 72, 96 Sex difference, 128, 149, 154, 217
Projection, 41 Sex and trauma, 95, 240 n . l l
Psyche and soma, relations of, 27, Shakespeare, William, 71, 139
102, 130, 223-24 Shifters, 151
Punctuation, 214, 219 Short session, 219
Signifier: relation to signified as ar-
Rank, Otto, 7
bitrary, 122, 124; relation to sig-
Rapaport, David, 7
nified as necessary, 123; sepa-
Real: defined, 19; and biology, 19,
rated from signified by a bar,
238 n.19; and id, 134; as nega-
125, 127
tion of imaginary 90, 117; of the
Signifying chain, 105, 125-26, 151,
body, 19, 67, 100-2, 227, 237
154, 156, 166, 211, 216, 220, 227
n.19
Silence in analysis, 219
Reality principle, 2, 98-99, 135
Socrates, 218
Regression, 177—78
Sophocles, 203
Reich, Wilhelm, 130
Sorge (care), 205
Repetition, 7 9 - 8 1 , 145
Spielrein, Sabina, 5
Repetition compulsion, 3, 73—74,
Strachey, James, 1, 6, 29, 51, 102,
91-94
229 n.l
Repression, 1, 48, 66-67, 99, 140-
Subject: decentered, 112, 126, 175,
41, 144, 162, 167-72, 174, 181,
186, 211, 220-21, 2 4 6 n . 2 ; o f
189, 193, 208-9, 223
speech and language, 105, 152; as
Richardson, William J., 114
question, 115, 119, 221
Ricoeur, Paul, 49, 100-1, 131-34,
Sublimation, 132-33, 137, 139, 165,
136-37, 174
167, 169, 174, 176-77
Roazen, Paul, 8
Substance jouissante, 110, 112, 134
Roustang, Francois, 15
Sullivan, Anne, 156
Sade, Marquis de, 67, 175, 194-95 Superego, 4-6, 11, 132, 139, 141,
Sadism, 5, 3 8 , 4 1 , 175, 177 144, 158, 167, 172, 176, 183-84,
265
Index
214; popular conception of, 167, Trauma, 2, 19, 77, 79, 83, 87-95,
174, 214 136, 144-45, 192, 202
Surrealism, 162-63 Traumatic dreams, 2, 73, 87-88
Symbolic: defined, 18—19; access to Trieb, 27-29, 58, 100-1; translation
real, 164; negates imaginary, 113, of, 1,29-30, 102, 229 n.l
119-20, 128, 135-36, 139, 160,
165,171-72,181,190 Ubermensch, 200
Symbolic order, 13, 18, 106, 119- Umwelt, 23
20, 123, 126, 186, 212 Uncanny, 209, 221
Synchrony, 123, 126, 166, 242 n.15 Unconscious and gap, 118, 135
Talking cure, 130, 224-25

La Violencia, 178
Tat Twam Asi, 195
Temporality, 211,216, 227
Tension (Spannung), 2, 76-79, 84, Wallon, Henri, 23-4
94 Weber, Samuel, 186
Teresa of Avila, Saint, 227-28 Weismann, A., 101
Therapeutic alliance, 36 Wish fulfillment, 2, 8, 88
Timing in analysis, 214 Wo es war soil Ich werden, 111-12,
Tinbergen, Niko, 22 115, 118, 137
Todestrieb, 1, 9, 102 Wolfman, 178-81
Topography of id, ego, superego, 1, Working-through, 218
10-11, 14, 132, 137, 223 World War I, 8
Tragedy, 176, 202
Transitivism, 24-25, 41 Zizek, Slavoj, 231 n.3
266

Boothby Death and Desire

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Boothby Death and Desire

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

psychoanalytic

routledge -new york end london

Published in Great Britain by

Copyright © 1991 by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

Portions of Chapter 6 were previously published as "Lacanian Castration:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data also available.

1. The Enigma of the "Death Drive" 1

2. Lacanian Reflections on Narcissism 21

3. The Energetics of the Imaginary 47

4. Rereading Beyond the Pleasure Principle 71

Returning Freud to Himself 84

5. The Unconscious Structured like a Language 105

6. The Formations of the Unconscious 139

7. Metapsychology in the Perspective of Metaphysics 185

Corpus Occultum: Desire Beyond the Imaginable 223

B Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. In Basic Writings of Nietz-

S.XX . Le Seminaire, Livre XX, Encore. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller.

This is a book about the conceptual architecture of psychoanalytic

intended as a comprehensive exposition of Lacan's teaching. In draw-

I wish to acknowledge the contribution of a number of people from

second parents in their encouragement and generosity; and to my

—Edgar Allen Poe, "The Imp of the Perverse"

The Enigma of the "Death Drive"

Freud's theory oider Todestrieb, translated by James Strachey as the

If life . . . is regarded as materially present at the frontiers of the

As Laplanche indicates, Freud's hypothesis of the death drive was of

theory? What has it meant to psychoanalytic theory since Freud? What

Freud's Most Daring Hypothesis

Let us briefly recall the problem to which Freud's theory of the

simply by the pursuit of pleasure. In the case of the masochist, pleasure

If we take into consideration the whole picture made up by the

The Theoretical Value of the Death Drive

It is difficult to overstate the strangeness and radicality of Freud's

Repudiation of Freud's Idea

However mysterious a notion in itself, there can be no doubt as to

The book . . . is noteworthy in being the only one of Freud's which

wish-fulfillment. In Rank's view, the death drive seemed to be an

even when he stumbled upon the inescapable death problem, [Freud]

Rank's criticism reflects another attitude that, although not always

Instincts of life and death are not psychologically perceptible as such;

The repudiation of the death-drive hypothesis presents a striking

down to an assertion of simple brutishness, the theory of the death

Re-Posing the Question of the Death Drive

Freud's theory of the death drive, although rejected by many, has

Beyond the Pleasure Principle . . . is the work of Freud that most of

It is difficult, however, to take as a mere sideshow, still less as a

For these authors, for a Fenichel, the situation is fundamentally

Lacan returns to the death drive but not without reappropriating it

Contrary to the dogmatism that is sometimes imputed to us, we know

According to Lacan, the problem of the death drive opens psychoanal-

If what Freud discovered and rediscovered with a perpetually in-

From the vantage point of mainstream psychoanalysis, Lacan's

From the approach we have indicated, the reader should recognize

The challenge of interpreting Lacan is to make sense of passages

concern of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics of unconscious desire.

T h e r e can be no doubt about the importance of Lacan's interpreta-

clearly discourages his reader from expecting of him anything like a

Lacan claims, therefore, not to have put forward any "theories."

The difficulty of Lacan's style is not wholly unintentional. Convinced

the essential opacity and disconnectedness of the analytic experience.

I am not surprised that my discourse can cause a certain margin of