Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 2002. 97-99.

Jacques Lacan

The Imaginary and the Symbolic Order constitute one of the most fundamental sets of related terms in Lacanian theory and are best explained in relation to each other. The Imaginary corresponds to the pre-Oedipal period when the child believes itself to be part of the mother, and perceives no separation between itself and the world. In the Imaginary there is no difference and no absence, only identity and presence. The Oedipal crisis represents the entry into the Symbolic Order. This entry is also linked to the acquisition of language. In the Oedipal crisis the father splits up the dyadic unity between mother and child and forbids the child further access to the mother and the mother’s body. The phallus, representing the Law of the Father (or the threat of castration), thus comes to signify separation and loss to the child. The loss or lack suffered is the loss of the maternal body, and from now on the desire for the mother or the imaginary unity with her must be repressed. This first repression is what Lacan calls the primary repression and it is this primary repression that opens up the unconscious. In the Imaginary there is no unconscious since there is no lack.

The function of this primary repression becomes particularly evident in the child’s use of the newly acquired language. When the child learns to say ‘I am’ and to distinguish this from ‘you are’ or ‘he is’, this is equivalent to admitting that it has taken up its allotted place in the Symbolic Order and given up the claim to imaginary identity with all other possible positions. The speaking subject that says ‘I am’ is in fact saying ‘I am he (she) who has lost something’ – and the loss suffered is the loss of the imaginary identity with the mother and with the world. The sentence ‘I am’ could therefore best be translated as ‘I am that which I am not’, according to Lacan. This re-writing emphasizes the fact that the speaking subject only comes into existence because of the repression of the desire for the lost mother. To speak as a subject is therefore the same as to represent the existence of repressed desire: the speaking subject is lack, and this is how Lacan can say that the subject is that which it is not.

To enter into the Symbolic Order means to accept the phallus as the representation of the Law of the Father. All human culture and all life in society is dominated by the Symbolic Order, and thus by the phallus as the sign of lack. The subject may or may not like this order of things, but it has no choice: to remain in the Imaginary is equivalent to becoming psychotic and incapable of living in human society. In some ways it may be useful to see the Imaginary as linked to Freud’s pleasure principle and the Symbolic Order to his reality principle.

This exposition of the transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic Order requires some further comments. The Imaginary is, for Lacan, inaugurated by the child’s entrance into the Mirror Stage. Lacan seems to follow Melanie Klein’s views of child development in so far as he postulates that the child’s earliest experience of itself is one of fragmentation. One might have said that at first the baby feels that its body is in pieces, if this wouldn’t give the mistaken impression that the baby has a sense of ‘its’ body at this early stage. Between the ages of 6 to 8 months the baby enters the Mirror Stage. The principal function of the Mirror Stage is to endow the baby with a unitary body image. This ‘body ego’, however, is a profoundly alienated entity. The child, when looking at itself in the mirror – or at itself on its mother’s arm, or simply at another child – only perceives another human being with whom it merges and identifies. In the Imaginary there is, then, no sense of a separate self, since the ‘self’ is always alienated in the Other. The Mirror Stage thus only allows for dual relationships. It is only through the triangulation of this structure, which, as we have seen, occurs when the father intervenes to break up the dyadic unity between mother and child, that the child can take up its place in the Symbolic Order, and thus come to define itself as separate from the other.

Lacan distinguishes between the Other (Autre) with a capital ‘O’ and the other with a small ‘o’. For our purposes it is useful to look at a few of the many different significations these concepts take on in Lacan’s texts. The most important usages of the Other are those in which the Other represents language, the site of the signifier, the Symbolic Order or any third party in a triangular structure. Another, slightly different way of putting this is to say that the Other is the locus of the constitution of the subject or the structure that produces the subject. In yet another formulation, the Other is the differential structure of language and of social relations that constitute the subject in the first place and in which it (the subject) must take up its place.

If, for Lacan, it is the entry into the Symbolic Order that opens up the unconscious, this means that it is the primary repression of the desire for symbiotic unity with the mother that creates the unconscious. In other words: the unconscious emerges as the result of the repression of desire. In one sense the unconscious is desire. Lacan’s famous statement ‘The unconscious is structured like a language’ contains an important insight into the nature of desire: for Lacan, desire ‘behaves’ in precisely the same way as language: it moves ceaselessly on from object to object or from signifier to signifier, and will never find full and present satisfaction just as meaning can never be seized as full presence. Lacan calls the various objects we invest with our dsire (in the symbolic order) objet a (‘objet petit a’ – ‘a’ here standing in for the other (autre) with a small ‘a’). There can be no final satisfaction of our desire since there is no final signifier or object that can be that which has been lost forever (the imaginary harmony with the mother and the world). If we accept that the end of desire is the logical consequence of satisfaction (if we are satisfied, we are in a position where we desire no more), we can see why Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, posits death as the ultimate object of desire – as Nirvana or the recapturing of the lost unity, the final healing of the split subject.