Introducing Lacan

%% CLKDUNKP ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The ideal image was thus both the object of her hate and of her aspiration." (p. 6 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% ASSJCRX6 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Lacan’s analysis of the case shows many of the features which would later become central to his work: narcissism, the image, the ideal, and how the personality could extend beyond the limits of the body and be constituted within a complex social network." (p. 6 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% KPNFIVNA ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "psychoanalysis, Lacan read widely, with a special interest in the philosophic work of Karl Jaspers, G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger." (p. 7 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% U7Y6HERV ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "theme of masks, games and the relation of the human to the animal kingdom, argued that there was a sort of natural law whereby organisms become captured in their environment. They will thus take on the colouring, for example, of the space around them." (p. 8 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% EXNQL5EV ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "If I have identified with an image outside myself, I can do things I couldn’t do before." (p. 8 | 29-08-2024) Note: orgnism become captured in their environment, parent and chikd switch moods, child learns through identification with the other %%end%%

%% MEPZIJSK ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The ImaginaryMastery of one’s motor functions and an entry into the human world of space and movement is thus at the price of a fundamental alienation. Lacan calls the register in which this identification takes place “the imaginary”, emphasizing the importance of the visual field and the specular relation which underlies the child’s captivation in the image." (p. 8 | 29-08-2024) Note: the child is a captive of the images it is served %%end%%

%% LBUWJZQK ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "the ego is constituted by an alienating identification, based on an initial lack of completeness in the body and nervous system." (p. 9 | 29-08-2024) Note: childdren identify with others, ie feel as they do act as they act, this alienates them from themself %%end%%

%% 3MG4PDXL ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "If the ego is the seat of narcissism and if narcissism does not exist from the start of life, what must happen for narcissism to emerge?" (p. 9 | 29-08-2024) Note: answer: the mirror phase. Imagine a mirror which shows the Other instead of yourself, this would mae u atart idetfying as that other. %%end%%

%% 2M2HMLJA ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Crucial to Lacan’s programme of a return to Freud is the distinction between signifier and signified. According to a well-known definition, a signifier is an acoustic image (like a word), a signified is a concept. The signified has a kind of priority and we use signifiers to gain access to signifieds: or, put more simply, to say what we mean. A word gives us access to a meaning. The passage from word to meaning seems simple enough. We can ask for some object, the listener will understand our meaning and respond with the object. Language is thus all about communicating with each other. We use words to convey meanings and intentions." (p. 12 | 29-08-2024) Note: communication: signified encoded in signifier, signifier decoded to signified. in wht ways can the 2 versions of the signiied differ? %%end%%

%% C7EK6HPX ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "But Lacan saw things differently. Rather than supposing a transparency between signifier and signified, an easy access from word to meaning, he claimed there was a real barrier, a resistance." (p. 12 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% 5X3THD4M ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The group of meanings is organized by the links between the words. There is thus a priority of the signifier, of the material, verbal element in psychic life.Many contemporary board games in which the players have to keep giving the next association of a word or concept show this clearly. Words generate meanings which are beyond the understanding of those who use them. There is a difference between what you mean to say and what your words say. That’s why everyday life involves a succession of misunderstandings and apologies." (p. 12 | 29-08-2024) Note: there is a difference btwn what u want fo say and what u say BEYOND misunderstanding between 2 ppl, is what theyre trying to say. the person speaking may inend to say sth different from what they think they intend. very muc in line with my ow feelings towards how i think many thougjts are rationalizations after the fact %%end%%

%% 263KWDGO ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Signifiers form I networks to which we have little conscious access but which will affect our lives completely. They organize our world, the very texture of which is symbolic." (p. 13 | 29-08-2024) Note: ties into pirsigs value structures as the bleeding edge of reality or his analytic knife %%end%%

%% 2GD4A5ML ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The IdealThere is thus an identification which is both beyond and in a sense prior to the identification with the image: a symbolic identification with a signifying element." (p. 13 | 29-08-2024) Note: ie the child interpretes the image (signified) as a symbol (the signifier) %%end%%

%% LMDCDCHP ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "mirror phase. If Lacan had first stressed the imaginary identification, he now discussed its symbolic side. If the child is captured in an image, he or she will still assume signifiers from the speech of the parents as elements of identification." (p. 13 | 29-08-2024) Note: ie how does the child assume the signiiers in the images it identifies with(ie is captured by).And in addition, it will need to find meanings FROM those signiiers bc those arent supplied (i dont think theyre ever supplied) %%end%%

%% NN25W3UB ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "the subject has “become“ what a parent prophesied" (p. 14 | 29-08-2024) Note: idntification with the ideal %%end%%

%% XLCPDDG2 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The key to the theory of identification here is that symbolic identification with an ideal element removes the subject from being completely at the mercy of the imaginary images which captivate him or her. They come from another register, the symbolic, and thus serve to ground the subject, to give him a base, in this structure." (p. 14 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% BOY3VZWQ ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "the ideal ego is the image you assume and the ego ideal is the symbolic point which gives you a place and supplies the point from which you are looked at." (p. 14 | 29-08-2024) Note: does it make sense to ask: who am i tryna be? looking at my parents.ego ideal is the reason m assming my ideal ego (th image / ideal ego) %%end%%

%% D4XORJEA ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "A word is a word because it is different from other words: “cat” has its value because it is different from “mat”, “fat” and “cot”, for example. Or, to move outside the realm of spoken language, a railway network can perfectly well count as a linguistic system since the 10.30 train will still be the 10.30 train even if it arrives at 10.40, precisely because it is different from the 10.00 train and the 11.00 train. It takes on its value because it is an element in a system of differences." (p. 15 | 29-08-2024) Note: structuralist linguistics %%end%%

%% VUG4IQLD ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "tween elements. The 10.30, 11.00 and 10.00 trains do not all arrive at the same time and they are not all superimposed on the railway timetable.This discontinuity is set in opposition by Lacan to the imaginary register which strives to avoid the dimension of lack or absence. This endeavour is of course inauthentic, since the imaginary itself is based on a serious and troubling form of discontinuity, the gap between the child’s uncoordinated body and the envelope of the whole image which it assumes." (p. 15 | 29-08-2024) Note: is this discontinuity the struggle bwtn imaginary self / ideal ego and actual self? %%end%%

%% P26ZSLTS ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "If the ego is imaginary," (p. 15 | 29-08-2024) Note: if it is, what are we strivin for? %%end%%

%% OQIL6VP4 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "A symptom may be literally a word trapped in the body. Remember that all that children really know about their internal organs is what their parents tell them. The inside of their body is thus made up of words." (p. 16 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% 4LBFUNUY ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "a symptom is made up of words." (p. 16 | 29-08-2024) Note: ie child bangs head on bed upon waking bc mother used to say father woke up on the wrong side of the bed %%end%%

%% CR5YZNIG ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "When it is connected with the rest of the chain of words, there will be an effect on the symptom." (p. 16 | 29-08-2024) Note: it being the symptom. as merely a symptom it is isolated from the other words in the linguistic web. repressed word=symptom %%end%%

%% ID5MH2AI ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The dimension of discontinuity and rupture introduced by the variability of the length of the sessions was thus effective in generating the most hidden material." (p. 17 | 29-08-2024) Note: bc variability makes preparation moe difficult and allows ending session on importnt concepts so the patients can do most of the work themseves %%end%%

%% CRWDT2XB ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "If language is a structure, speech is an act, generating meaning as it is spoken and giving an identity to the speakers involved." (p. 18 | 29-08-2024) Note: speech gives one a place %%end%%

%% KYXZL3PA ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "And if recognition is seen as central to a theory of how speech works, it supposes the existence of an Other, a place from which you are heard, from which you are recognized." (p. 18 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% VBGROGGG ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "He calls the real, the symbolic and the imaginary the “three registers of human reality”. Thus, what we ordinarily speak of as “reality” would best be defined as an amalgam of symbolic and imaginary: imaginary to the extent that we are situated in the specular register and the ego offers us rationalizations of our actions; and symbolic to the extent that most things around us have meaning." (p. 18 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% GR2G4RGE ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The real would represent precisely what is excluded from our reality, the margin of what is without meaning and which we fail to situate or explore." (p. 18 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% JYJUDZXB ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "1950s, Lacan saw the image as the central source of resistance in psychoanalytic treatment. The ego is made up of privileged images and the task of analysis is to dissolve them. They must be integrated in speech and the symbolic network, rather than remaining stagnant and inert, blocking the dialectical progression of speech." (p. 19 | 29-08-2024) Note: these privilegwd images are idealizations of our own idetity obtained through the captivity in images that allows us to learn to function in early childhood.aside: gosh postmodernism makes so much sense. ho could there ever be ONE explntion using imperfect human language. there are only frameworks and u can pick useful ones. makes me curious abt post posg modernism %%end%%

%% 6PLYGHUF ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Understanding what someone is saying must come after this.When the patient says “I”, the analyst should be mistrustful! “I” must be separated from the “ego”. The “I” of speech might seem to refer to the person sitting in front of you, but this is not the same thing as the ego, the site of the imaginary identifications.When a patient says “I”, the analyst shouldn’t be fooled!It is necessary to see from where he is speaking, perhaps the place of a sibling, a friend or a parent who has been identified with at an unconscious level.Ego" (p. 19 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% IQOME65G ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "obsessional," (p. 20 | 29-08-2024) Note: i feel like the main trouble in understanding this is the fact i don't know what obsessional refers to in a psychoanalytic context. %%end%%

%% AZO4XY7G ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "indicate to the subject the place of the ego and to turn the stagnatory images which captivate him into part of the associative material." (p. 21 | 29-08-2024) Note: the subject is simply the person, the ego is a subconscious part of their mind which contain false identifications with others which may lead to conflict in their discordance with the subject's reality. %%end%%

%% IBXVTYZS ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "An initial situation – such as the details of the marriage of one’s parents – would be transformed into certain rules in one’s own life, completely unconsciously, to generate situations – such as one’s own marriage or love life – which both repeated the initial situation and transformed it in important ways." (p. 21 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% I2N2SELL ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Paternity has a symbolic side to it, and Lacan called this agency of paternity the name of the father. It is not a real person but a symbolic function." (p. 22 | 29-08-2024) Note: paternity is the signifier for the signified: the name of the father, which is paternity's symbolic meaning.it is not the actual name of the father, and paterity does not mea just the guy who gave his sperm. %%end%%

%% RUJMVXLW ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Oedipus complex" (p. 22 | 29-08-2024) Note: young boy unconsciously desires to have sex with his mother and disdain his father for having sex and being satisfied before him %%end%%

%% NOJA4YDH ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Once this triangular structure is established, the child can try, with the many games of seduction that children are so good at, to become this third term, the object of the mother’s desire. It is an attempt to be the phallus for the mother, to incarnate the phallus in whatever form is particular to the individuals in question." (p. 23 | 29-08-2024) Note: i guess in a way the child desires to be the primary desire of the mother, whose primary desire is the phallus, or the father. In 2023, we could perhaps rephrase the phallus to the partner?the chil identifies with the phallus in an attempt to become it, so as to becom the mothers primary object of desire. %%end%%

%% NLLJRIRN ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "He or she will be able to leave the universe of the mother to take on a place in the larger universe of the symbolic world. The imaginary object must take on the value of a gift, and hence the crucial time of the Oedipus complex will involve establishing this new signification. The phallus will be the object promised to the child for use in the future, it will become the object of a pact." (p. 23 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% 72B5YCBV ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Symbolic NetworkLacan argues that this imaginary object of the child’s games must be transported to the symbolic level. The images which the child uses to entice the mother must be given up, marked with the sign of prohibition. Now, this is where the anthropological stress on the role of giving in society becomes so important." (p. 23 | 29-08-2024) Note: im curious to find out if, for the child to leave the triangular mother-phallus structure, the mother must gift the child something?the gift is the promisw that the child will have "the phallus" in the future. %%end%%

%% ZSBFDKZF ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Is Lacan a Structuralist?By the late 1950s, Lacan’s work shifts its focus from the problem of speech to the problem of language. Speech is an act, involving subject and other. Language, however, is a structure: as such, it does not suppose a subject. There is nothing human about a language, if it is seen as a formal system of differences and distinguished clearly from speech." (p. 23 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% ZO3S6SUZ ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Lacan is thus hardly a structuralist. Structuralism aimed to do away with the subject and the notion of subjective agency, putting in its place the autonomy of linguistic structures. As Jacques-Alain Miller has pointed out, although Lacan shares this conception of the autonomy of the symbolic, he is deeply concerned at the same time, to find a place for the subject here.Try writing a small ad: “Nice young man who likes going to the theatre …” What you write is different from you. It may represent you, but in being so represented, you have to confront the fact that words are not there to help you. They have not been designed for you, and yet you have to find your way around in the world of language in order to survive." (p. 23 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% FIZLDYTW ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The early work referred to alienation in the register of the image, and now alienation is situated in the register of language. If speech was first seen as giving the subject some sort of identity, now language has the role of blocking identity. This is the difference between Lacan’s conception of language in 1953 and that of 1958: the subject is no longer recognized but abolished." (p. 24 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% 53VZOCKV ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Loss and LanguageFrom early childhood, you have to use speech to express your needs. But the minute you use words to express something, you are in another register. If you need water, asking for it changes things." (p. 24 | 29-08-2024) Note: the fact you asked for it creates a risk: my request for water is seen as a sign of love if honoured, but a sign of rejection if it is not honoured. %%end%%

%% 5NEYDAJZ ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "If someone asks you if you love them and you say yes, that will not stop them from asking you again and again and again. The impossibility of really proving one’s love once and for all is well known." (p. 24 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% CJEMTHQ4 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "need and demand, he adds the register of desire. Desire takes up what has been eclipsed at the level of need (the dimension represented by the mythical water) and introduces an absolute condition in opposition to the absolutely unconditional nature of demand." (p. 24 | 29-08-2024) Note: demand is unconditional, and desire introduces an opposite absolute condition to it: what does that mean?also: need leads to demandapparently it means that desire introduces an absolute requirement for the desired thing, in addition to it being unconditional? %%end%%

%% NMKP7JYJ ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "…Although the example of fetishism is an extreme one, Lacan shows that it is at the horizon of all desire for the man." (p. 24 | 29-08-2024) Note: desire being absolute and unconditional %%end%%

%% RBOATE3V ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "If demand is demand for an object, desire has nothing as its object: nothing in the sense of “lack taken as an object”. Some clinical structures show the difference clearly. The anorexic, for example, in refusing to eat gives a place to desire beyond demand. To the mother’s demand for the child to eat, the latter offers a symbolic refusal, maintaining a desire centering on the “nothing” which is eaten." (p. 25 | 29-08-2024) Note: it seems the demand is made by someone else, leading to later desire the opposite thing to the demand. %%end%%

%% MRLIREV5 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Freud had shown that when an unconscious current is repressed, since it cannot enter consciousness, it displaces itself on to tiny details and it is only in following these derivatives that we will mobilize the rest of the complex in question." (p. 25 | 29-08-2024) Note: freudian slips %%end%%

%% KFCMMAE6 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "It is important to distinguish what Lacan calls desire from what we would ordinarily call a wish. A wish is something you want consciously. But desire is fundamentally barred from consciousness." (p. 25 | 29-08-2024) Note: was the colloquialism "secret desire" introduced by freud? %%end%%

%% 4WA6WWEQ ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Desire is simply equivalent to the process of distortion which has turned the wish for shelter and food into this particular image, these particular details. If you dream of passing an exam in a certain place the night before sitting a real exam, desire is more likely to be found not in the idea of passing the exam (a wish) than in the detail of the place in question (why this place rather than another?)." (p. 26 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% L7TTVB6V ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "You say one thing instead of something else and you do not know why. Desire is present because one element has been distorted and modified by another one. We can deduce the presence of desire in clinical work by paying attention to these processes as they repeat themselves and to the points of rupture, distortion and opacity in a patient’s associations." (p. 26 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% W46OHRJR ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The neurotic wants, in Lacan’s terms, to be the phallus for the mother. The child is searching for some object, but it is a lost one, as the intervention of the father in the Oedipus complex prevents the child from assimilating itself with the object of the mother’s demand. The intervention of the father distances the child from the mother, it gives the child possibilities of leaving the universe of the mother. And it situates the phallus as something lost, forever out of reach. It says “No” both to the child and to the mother." (p. 27 | 29-08-2024) Note: the mother demands the phallus, and the child wants to be it, but cannot find it bc of the fathers intervention. the remaining struggle creates the neurotic person. %%end%%

%% CKHENV5K ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The child is at the mercy of the mother at the start of life, dependent on her in all senses of the word, and unable to understand the rationale of her behaviour. However marvellous or cruel the mother may be, the same question will pose itself for the child, a question which concerns him or her to the quick: what does she want?" (p. 27 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% BZHNTVZW ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "If, however, the mother does show that her life is not completely reduced to the child, things are otherwise. The child is confronted with a series of questions about the mother’s movements and whims. Lacan argues that there is an operation which will link all these enigmas about the mother to a precise signification, that of the phallus." (p. 28 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% DA622MVK ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "There is always something beyond the child to which the mother’s desire is directed. This, Lacan argues, is the phallus, something forever out of the child’s reach and beyond its own capacities to incarnate." (p. 28 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% CRWHNSCG ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "If the Oedipal process works properly, the child will give this up, the phallus becoming less an imaginary object than a signification of what is missing.Confronted with this loss, boys and girls have certain options." (p. 28 | 29-08-2024) Note: right so, child wants to be the thing that mother desires (the phallus), but it cant, which is a loss? %%end%%

%% S67XEGT3 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The game shows how language works, how the initial element is altered, the circle of children incarnating the network of language. Lacan argues that the symbol of this process of distortion is the phallus." (p. 30 | 29-08-2024) Note: game of chinese whispers %%end%%

%% UHVUDQ73 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "There is always this disassociation between the real side of paternity and its symbolic side." (p. 30 | 29-08-2024) Note: but doesnt literally the same thing happen for maternity? ie biologically giving birth vs motherhood %%end%%

%% 45VRJWXP ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "It is by her speech that the mother situates a reference to a father who is beyond her, which need not be identical with the real father, as long as it serves to separate mother and child. Lacan calls this structural, symbolic element the name of the father." (p. 30 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% JGIO7NQG ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The Oedipal operation is called by Lacan the “paternal metaphor”. It is a metaphor since it involves the substitution of one term for another, the name of the father for the desire of the mother." (p. 30 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% UZ75EWFM ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Hence, a child might try to be everything for its mother." (p. 31 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% V6IQWGJL ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The child is trying to be the object which it thinks the mother lacks. The phallus is just the name for this object: that which the mother lacks. Once this definition is accepted, it can be noted in a very wide range of clinical forms." (p. 31 | 29-08-2024) Note: its so comical in a way. like who on earth bred ths weird naming system %%end%%

%% BJCZP2US ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "This is castration, the renunciation of the sustained attempt to be the phallus for the mother. Neurotics are people who have unfortunately not committed themselves to this renunciation.The" (p. 31 | 29-08-2024) Note: B %%end%%

%% QXOVG65T ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "essay “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis”." (p. 32 | 29-08-2024) Note: E %%end%%

%% S7UZMRSD ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "PsychosisIn psychosis, Lacan showed, there is a foreclosure of the name of the father: it is not repressed, but completely obliterated. This hypothesis explained clinical data in a dazzling new way. Analysts and psychiatrists had often noted the presence of the motif of paternity and filiation in psychotic delusions, as seen in the ubiquity of Trinitarian and religious motifs, but now Lacan provided not only an explanation but a refined theory of what was going on in delusion. He showed how careful inquiry into the triggering of a psychosis indicated as its catalyst an encounter with some situation which evoked for the subject the idea of paternity. For example, becoming a father for a man, or having one’s baby handed to one after birth for a woman. Or, a promotion in one’s work or a change in one’s symbolic status in the world. All these situations make a call to the register of symbolic paternity, but since there is nothing there, the subject is confronted with a hole, a gap. Hence the common sensation of the “end of the world” noted in the early stages of a psychosis.The subject faces the lack of a signifier, that of the name of the father, and, consequently, the lack of a signification. We remember that for Lacan, the signifier produces the signified. Therefore, the absence of a signifier means absence of a signified. What a psychotic delusion does, according to Lacan, is try to supply precisely this missing signification in the place of the hole opened up by the absence of the name of the father. A delusion, after all, gives a meaning to the world." (p. 32 | 29-08-2024) Note: theres an interesting thought pattern here of psycoss filling some kin of purpose. would be interesting to link to isigs comments on psychosis %%end%%

%% O65GIFTF ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "In other words, a delusion can serve as a way of giving sense to the menacing world around one, made menacing precisely by the absence of certain fundamental significations to give an order to it.The delusional signification replaces the standard, Oedipal one." (p. 33 | 29-08-2024) Note: the name of the father gives sense to the world is whag this seems to imply. and secondly the oedipus complex is th standard delusion? %%end%%

%% HBOWJNHS ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Thus, just as Freud had argued that a delusion is an attempt at self-cure, Lacan saw it as a secondary effect, an attempt to provide a meaning to the primary problematic of foreclosure." (p. 33 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% Y6XDJ3F3 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Thus delusions use the knowledge of the time to provide meanings, a fact which is seen in the change in delusional motifs from one epoch to another." (p. 33 | 29-08-2024) Note: B. very true %%end%%

%% CIKE3XIU ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "What seems incomprehensible and irrational in psychotic behaviour may turn out to make perfect sense, once the implicit logic is brought out." (p. 34 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% X2R4WWVR ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "the set of linguistic elements and their otherness is given the symbol (A) by Lacan." (p. 34 | 29-08-2024) Note: ie potential signifiers who have not been recognized by the child yet %%end%%

%% MJDBRXFJ ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Significations are gradually set in place for the child, as he or she gradually manages to associate meanings with the signifiers emitted by the adults: whether these are “right” or “wrong” is irrelevant." (p. 34 | 29-08-2024) Note: significations = meanings %%end%%

%% CGO5VWX7 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Symbol d and $  DBut, as Lacan insists, the speech and behaviour of the adult can never be completely reduced to a signification. There will always be something, however marginal, which we do not understand." (p. 34 | 29-08-2024) Note: meaning in my own words: some linguistic elements remain unexplained, even unexplained by WRONG significations. the child simply has no clue what to make of those.i wonder: are signifiers without signifieds possible, or does that make them part of this group? %%end%%

%% HAL6Y4LG ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "S () indicates the fact that ultimately there is no solution to the question of what we do not understand at the level of language. There are no words to respond to the central questions of sex and existence. Whatever the parents tell the child about these things, the child knows that what they say is inadequate. S() designates this point of impossibility. But Lacan does not simply write (), which would refer to a gap in the Other, in the set of linguistic elements. Instead there is S plus a “barred” (), indicating, paradoxically, that there is a signifier of the very impossibility of signifying something – a marker pointing to an impossibility." (p. 35 | 29-08-2024) Note: o, i cant help but see the resemblance between signifiers and pointers in languages like C. %%end%%

%% SN6V2E7R ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Note that all of these objects are used in games or rituals with the mother. The breast can be turned towards and then turned away from (refusal to eat). Excrement can be retained or expelled. The look can be hidden or shown (peekaboo). The voice can be absent or made terribly present as in the prolonged screaming of many children. Thus all these elements become involved in games of presence and absence, a sign that they are linked into the symbolic and the system of differences." (p. 36 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% F5IOFTIV ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "objects" (p. 37 | 29-08-2024) Note: objects can be non physical ie look and voie %%end%%

%% ICOVGFKC ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Language does not provide us with a proper identity: the words we use are used by other people, on television, in books, in the media. The words do not belong to us. They are alienating. Even when we want to say something intimate, linked to our heart, like “I love you”, we might be inhibited because we have heard so many other people say this." (p. 38 | 29-08-2024) Note: oof. this is what cringe is: these words have been used by annoying people, i dont want to assume a similar identity %%end%%

%% BBYGAQIO ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Formula for PhantasyConfronted with this failure of words to designate our being, what we are, the subject invokes the one object which he thinks escapes the alienating circuits of speech, the object a, the remainder from the operation of becoming a speaking being. Hence, Lacan writes the phantasy as ($a), indicating the link of the subject and the object." (p. 38 | 29-08-2024) Note: also a reminder fr me that this whole thing is about the process from a helpless newborn to A SPEAKING BEING %%end%%

%% RXIQGAP3 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Now, once this basic phantasy is established, the child has a sort of compass or rule for his or her life. Lacan calls it an “absolute signification”." (p. 38 | 29-08-2024) Note: remember that the phantasy answers "if im not the phallus, what am i?"the next p asks: "if u have only a few childhood memories, why only those?"i immediately had to think of that ball i lost... honestly, a psychoanlyst would love that with my dad running after it. %%end%%

%% 6UQQJJST ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The phantasy is a sort of magnet which will attract those memories to itself which suit it. Likewise, it will play a large part in determining your unconscious identifications." (p. 38 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% QQ4VSCF6 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Lacan’s comparison serves to distinguish two different positions of the analyst: the one aiming at the good, at regulating problems; and the other, much more frightening, at remaining true to desire." (p. 39 | 29-08-2024) Note: i dont understand the significance of desire yet %%end%%

%% PTEUTAZV ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "In 1963, Lacan was struck off the list of training analysts of the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). His practice and theoretical elaboration were seen as too threatening and challenging for those who opposed him in the established hierarchy, the International Psychoanalytic Association. As a result, he left St-Anne Hospital, the usual venue for his seminars, to move to the École Normale Supérieur, the élite higher education establishment in Paris which has produced generation after generation of France’s intellectuals." (p. 40 | 29-08-2024) Note: this illustrates very well just how controversial he was %%end%%

%% ON27LNS3 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Transference involves, in part, the attribution of a subject to this knowledge, so that the patient realizes that there is a knowledge he or she is separated from and then assumes that this knowledge has a knowing subject, identified with the analyst." (p. 40 | 29-08-2024) Note: B %%end%%

%% Z6I2MTX7 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "But, as Lacan shows, there is another side to transference which involves something opposed to knowledge, the object a. The more the subject is alienated in language, the more his words are uttered faster than he intends, the more slips he makes: in other words, the more he is losing himself in free association" (p. 41 | 29-08-2024) Note: right, so the object a being the phantasy, which is outside of language and which can be used as an anchoring point, the easier it becomes to tap into thw unconscious thrpugh free association %%end%%

%% M4HOGSPZ ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Lacan’s work in the 1960s became increasingly concerned with trying to formulate a logic of what he called jouissance, a word which is in fact part of English literary heritage, appearing in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and other writing of the 16th century." (p. 41 | 29-08-2024) Note: thats pretty smug... %%end%%

%% JPHDI2NC ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Jouissance is felt 99 per cent of the time as unbearable suffering.It is real, in the Lacanian sense of the word, something outside symbolization and meaning, constant and always returning to the same place to bring you suffering." (p. 41 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% VYTIRELJ ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "making the same mistakes, the same ill-starred decisions throughout their lives which bring them pain and grief.There is no learning from the past for most people, precisely because it is in their very best interests to suffer. Jouissance is thus the real opponent in psychoanalytic practice, and Lacan approached it conceptually in a number of different ways. The field of psychoanalysis was thus by no means occupied only by language. The real has now become central in the form of jouissance, real to the extent that it is outside meaning and signification. A different, deadly and heterogeneous presence was at work – jouissance – showing how Lacan’s work cannot be reduced, as it often is, to emphasising the importance of language. It is the relation of language to jouissance that has now become the central research problem." (p. 42 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% RCPEZKU2 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "And, crucially for psychoanalysis, in symptoms. A symptom, something in mind or body which intrudes into your life and brings you misery, represents a portion of jouissance which has not been dislodged, which has come back to disrupt your existence." (p. 43 | 29-08-2024) Note: bc as u grow older, laws and rules of the social world drain u of ur jouissance %%end%%

%% 27QHZJQF ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "not the closure of one’s relation to psychoanalysis.In telling the story of one’s analysis to others, material could be ordered and set into place, new perspectives could emerge, even if this did not necessarily mean that one had “passed” as such.THE LONG RAMBLING PROCESS OF A PSYCHOANALYSIS CAN BE FORMALIZED, PUNCTUATED, ITS LOGIC REVEALED, A TASK THAT CAN ONLY TAKE PLACE OUTSIDE OF ONE’S OWN PERSONAL ANALYSIS. AND, CRUCIALLY, THE DESIRE OF THE ANALYST, THE FACT OF HAVING TAKEN ON THE POSITION OF ANALYST, CAN BE INVESTIGATED.The analytic experience was thus shown to extend beyond its traditional limits. The pass is still the subject of lively debate in the analytic community and constitutes one of the most interesting research areas of contemporary psychoanalysis, as people who have been analysed contribute material to the analytic community which otherwise would be shrouded in silence and obscurity. They try to explain what actually happened in their analysis, what the crucial moments of change were and where and why these occurred. Rather than relying on the erratic testimony of the books people occasionally write about their analysis, Lacan thus found a way of making the personal experience of psychoanalysis a part of the work of the analytical school itself." (p. 43 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% 75RPVMI6 ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Jacques-Alain Miller has shown how these considerations led Lacan to a new formulation of castration: the emptying out of jouissance from the body. And what is the agent of this castration? The symbolic register as such: language. The organism’s passage through and into language is castration, introducing the idea of loss and absence into the world." (p. 43 | 29-08-2024) Note: B. buried in an individuals signifier chain, lie the remnants of the castration complex %%end%%

%% 5UUFTHYU ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "there is a side to language which is itself a form of jouissance." (p. 45 | 29-08-2024) Note: jouissance is insufferable pain to which you are attracted, and which is the remnant of being born into the castration complex. some ppl dont lose it like adults usually do when they grow older %%end%%

%% GXYQHOIR ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "In his book Totem and Taboo, Freud had argued that at the mythic origin of society lay a primal horde, in which a jealous and greedy father enjoyed all the women." (p. 45 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% Q4N6P4LO ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "If Freud’s story in Totem and Taboo was a myth, Lacan tries to extract a logical structure from it and he gives notation for the sexuality." (p. 45 | 29-08-2024) Note: the law of prohibition ie the idea that none but the father can have all the women. the logical structue is the fact that onky one escapes.psychoanalysis feels like a freud circlejerk and an air castle %%end%%

%% HSVAP6YJ ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "As Lacan pointed out there is no myth in the analytic literature like that contained in Totem and Taboo about female sexuality. According to Lacan, women participate in a logic very different from that of the man." (p. 45 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% ESVQGSJS ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Men and women are both subject to the imposition of the symbolic order and the networks of signifiers." (p. 45 | 29-08-2024) Note: as in, the order of significations imposed on us 1) being born human 2) into a certain mythos 3) to specific parents? %%end%%

%% 5F2TCQVT ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Now, although these formulas seem amazingly abstract and distant from the world of clinical practice, they are not. If sexuality involves a sort of materialization of these structures in the associations brought by the patient, one can understand much of the data precisely as an attempt to introduce the formulas to which Lacan had given logical form." (p. 46 | 29-08-2024) Note: okay so a big problem i have with lcans theories is that this is the classification model you get with Lacan's sample. How different would his theories be if his patients had been different people? What would its standard error be? %%end%%

%% ACXDV7OU ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Although this child was caught in a world in which the Oedipal complex was hardly standard," (p. 46 | 29-08-2024) Note: bc these tyrants the child identifies with are not subject to the oedipus complex, they are the exceptions %%end%%

%% S7XHM3DD ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Their elaboration shows Lacan’s constant preoccupation with finding ways of formalising psychic processes." (p. 46 | 29-08-2024) Note: G %%end%%

%% KXTNH6KU ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "If the unconscious is made up of relations between signifiers, there must be an order or structure imposed on them, which holds them together and organizes their relations. A signifier is a discrete element, different from other signifiers, and so may be taken as a component of a set. Now, a space is a set, a set of points, and hence a network of signifiers would constitute a space. Since mathematics offers many ways of investigating the properties of spaces, it was in this direction that Lacan moved." (p. 46 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% BEPODD7I ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "what keeps things in place, more or less, is the name of the father. This binds things together and guarantees, in some sense, the Oedipus complex. But now Lacan argues that it is less the name of the father as such that really matters than any element or device that can bind together the three orders of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. There is thus a sort of functionalism at work in Lacan’s argument." (p. 47 | 29-08-2024) Note: the first part is important in understanding this %%end%%

%% GUZ4TSWB ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Knots" (p. 47 | 29-08-2024) Note: take img on prev page %%end%%

%% C7WK4AMH ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Objects may be used or invented to bind together elements of the body image (the imaginary), linguistic or computer circuitry (the symbolic), and extreme excitation or pain (the real)." (p. 47 | 29-08-2024) Note: useful definitions %%end%%

%% C62XOZEN ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "This formulation is of great interest clinically since it allows one to understand the delusional constructions and inventions, in all senses of the word, of a psychosis. These may serve to bind together the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. Thus the well-known presence of machines, computers and products of science in certain psychotic systems may be explained in a new way. Objects may be used or invented to bind together elements of the body image (the imaginary), linguistic or computer circuitry (the symbolic), and extreme excitation or pain (the real). A successful psychotic system may thus be considered as a knot or, indeed, as a proper name, which ties together the three orders. We can see how Lacan is thus dealing with clinical considerations, especially given the fact that an understanding of this use of knots can give invaluable help in guiding work with psychotic patients." (p. 47 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% PFJTIZEX ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Lacan gives a new name to the element which can serve to bind the three orders of real, symbolic and imaginary. He calls it the “sinthome”, a word play in French which includes references to “symptom”’, “saint” and “Saint Thomas”" (p. 47 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% X7K77TRP ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "The theory of “sinthome” suggests that such subjects have found a way of knotting the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. Lacan investigated such knottings in the year-long seminar he gave on James Joyce in 1975–6. Joyce, he argued, would be an example of such a structure. His writing bound together the registers and he became the sinthome himself in the promotion of his own name.THROUGH MY WRITING, I BECAME “JOYCE”, THE NAME I WANTED ACADEMICS TO CONTINUE STUDYING FOR CENTURIES.If Joyce’s father had failed in some sense to name him, through his art he literally named himself.The form of such knots is still being studied by the Lacanian psychoanalytic community. We can thus plot a passage in Lacan’s work, from an emphasis on the father in the 1950s to the sinthome in the 1970s, a movement which perhaps responds precisely to the changing clinical picture we are presented with today and evokes the Lacanian reference in the 1938 Encyclopédie article to the decline of the paternal imago in modern civilization." (p. 48 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% OOYQOWVK ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "In Britain, the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research provides seminars on Lacanian psychoanalysis with many speakers from Europe and beyond, and offers a training in Lacanian psychoanalysis (www.cfar.org.uk)." (p. 48 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% DFRX2UGX ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Lacan published his famous collection of articles, Écrits in 1966 (Norton, New York, 1977). There is an English version of part of the text Écrits: A Selection, (Norton, New York, 1977), but the translation is poor and this makes it a difficult place to start. Much more accessible are the translations of Lacan’s seminars. These have been edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, and at present five have appeared in translation under the general title The Seminars of Jacques Lacan:Seminar 1: “Freud’s Papers on Technique”, translated by John Forrester (Norton, New York, 1988).Seminar 2: “The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli (Norton, New York, 1988).Seminar 3: “The Psychoses”, translated by Russell Grigg (Norton, New York, 1993).Seminar 7: “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis”, translated by Dennis Porter (Norton, New York, 1992).Seminar 11: “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”, translated by Alan Sheridan (Norton, New York, 1977)" (p. 50 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%

%% 7TOGIDSW ts: 2024-08-29T11:12:48Z %% "Slavoj ek’s books The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, London, 1989) and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan through Popular Culture (MIT Press, 1991) are also interesting and illuminating books in the field." (p. 52 | 29-08-2024) %%end%%