Lacan's theories

Lacan's lack

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, who has been named as the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud. He was born in 1901 to a bourgeois Catholic family.

Lacan created the idea of 'lack' and that it causes desires to arise. Desire is a relation to being to lack. The lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It is not the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists. Lacan contrasts the lack of being, which related to desire, with the lack of having, which relates to demand.

Lacan distinguishes between three kinds of lack, according to the nature of the object which is lacking.

• The first type of lack is symbolic castration - and its object related is the imaginary phallus.
• The second is the imaginary frustration - and its object related is the real breast.
• The third is the real privation - and its object related is the symbolic phallus.

The three corresponding agents are the real father, the symbolic mother, and the imaginary father. Of these three forms of lack, castration is the most important from the perspective of the cure.

Lacan's mirror stage
Initially, Lacan proposed that the mirror stage was part of an infants development from 6-18 months. By the early 1950's, Lacan's concept of the mirror stage had evolved. He no longer considered the mirror stage as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, or as the paradigm of 'imaginary order'.
The concept of the mirror stage was strongly inspired by the earlier work of psychologist, Henri Wallon, who speculated based on observations of animals and humans responding to their reflections in mirrors. Wallon noted that by the age of 6 months, human infants and chimpanzees both appeared to recognise their reflection in a mirror. Whilst chimpanzees quickly lost interest, human infants typically became very interested and devoted much more time and effort in exploring the connections between their bodies and their images. This could be interpreted biblically, as the bible recognises that humans are the dominant race, and can appreciate higher qualities, whereas animals only require the ability to survive and reproduce.