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The Divided Subject
The Divided Subject
The Divided Subject
Humans come into the world already made, and yet for each individual the social
must be made anew each time or rather each must be inaugurated into the social”
(p. 53)
We internalize these desires as we internalize language, and yet like language they
never become completely ours, they remain foreign to us and thus our unconscious
is constituted in and through the discourse of the other (p.54)
Desire ensures that the relationship between the subject and the social is always
unstable, a matter of continuous circulation, rather than of a straightforward
determination. (p.58)
the ego is part of the imaginary order, the subject is part of the
symbolic. Thus the subject is not simply equivalent to a conscious
sense of agency, which is a mere illusion produced by the ego, but
to the unconscious; Lacan’s ‘subject’ is the subject of the
unconscious. Lacan argues that this distinction can be traced back
to Freud: ‘[Freud] wrote Das Ich und das Es 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, 128). Although psychoanalytic treatment has
powerful effects on the ego, it is the subject, and not the ego, on
which psychoanalysis primarily operates.
Estar atento al modo en el que el sujeto se representa y percibe dicho contexto (Gallo, 2017 p. 19)
“La forma mas contundente de verificarse el desajuste de lo psiquico y el medio en el cual vivimos es la
repeticion de lo que produce decepcion” (p. 29)
“Reality involves a soldering together of signifier and signified, so that we don’t perpetually ask what
things mean. But in psychosis, at certain moments, these dimensions come apart” (p. 44)
“Our capture in images would thus both help and hinder us. It would allow us to gain mastery of our
bodies, trough the identification with the virtual image provided by our reflection of the image of the
other, yet at the same time it would alienate us and give an aggressive form to our relations with our
counterparts. Identifying with the image promises to unify us, yet it never delivers, as the very thing that
gives us unity takes it away. We grasp unity through something that is not us, that is outside us” (p. 47)
The symbolic, as language plus law (p. 49) – the system of reciprocal renunciations that organizes each
society
“The work of language in organizing reality, and also how language introduced a certain negativity,
building our worlds at the same time as creating a distance from them – reality was broken down into
units and sets of units that could be conceived as distinct (p. 51)”
“A defining feature of the symbolic order is this negativity it introduces, this distance from the supposed
immediacy of experience. Entering the symbolic means accepting the rules and conventions of society,
together with the prohibitions and limits necessary for it to function, which will have effects on the body
itself” (p. 51)
“The most important part of this process is the establishment of lack. We have given up the mother, to
create a zone of emptiness that later objects can eventually occupy” 9p. 65)
Humans come into the world already made, and yet for each individual
the social must be made anew each time or rather each must be
inaugurated into the social” (p. 53)
Psychoanalysis, in the order of man, has, in fact, all the subversive and scandalous features
that the Copernican de-centering had in the cosmic order: the earth, that place inhabited by
man, is no longer the center of the universe! Well! Psychoanalysis announces that you are
no longer the center of yourself, since there is another subject within you, the
Unconscious. (Lacan, 1957)
The subject who has repressed truth is not the master anymore, he is not at the center of
his discourse; things continue to function alone and discourse continues to articulate
itself, but “outside the subject.” And this place, this “outside the subject,” is exactly
what we call the unconscious.
There has been written that psychoanalysis has as its objective the adaptation of the subject,
not precisely to his external environment, his life or his real needs; this means the ratification of
an analysis would be to become the perfect father, the model husband, the ideal citizen, in sum,
someone who has nothing left to Discuss. All this is completely false. Just as false as the first
prejudice that conceives psychoanalysis as a means to total liberation.
The ill person suffers but he realizes that the path to take in order to go beyond, to
ameliorate his suffering, is of the order of the truth: to know more and to know better.
(Lacan, 1957)
The form situates the agency known as the ego prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever
remain irreducible for any single individual
This development is experiences as a temporal dialect that decisively projects the individual’s formation into history:
the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes PRECIPITOUSLY from insufficiency to anticipation
turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what i call AN ORTHOPEDIC FORM OF ITS
TOTALITY”
“When one is disappointed, one is always wrong. You should never be disappointed with the answers
you receive. Because if you are, that’s wonderful, it proves it was a real answer, that is to say exactly
what you weren’t expecting” (Lacan- Seminar II p. 237)
“If we receive the answer we were expecting, is it really an answer?” (Lacan, 1988 p. 37)
“It is the subject, not in its totality, but in its opening up. As usual, he doesn’t know what he is saying.
If he knew what he was saying, he wouldn’t be there” (p. 241)
“In other words, language is as much there to found us in the Other as to drastically prevent us from
understanding him” (Lacan, p. 244)