Categories
Lacan y la Revolución!
My Dad sent me this…perfect transition between last week topics and this one subjects of interest…Viva la revolución!
Category: Lacan
Categories
Lacan: the mirror stage
As a new reader of Lacan’s work, I frequently felt lost trying to understand what he was saying. The vocabulary certainly has been a challenge, which is mostly due to my unfamiliarity with psychology. In all honesty, I’m not sure that I understand all the finer points of his argument enough to critique them, but what follows is my best attempt.
According to Lacan human beings experience a mirror stage in their lifetime while they are a child. From my understanding the mirror stage is identification. Indeed, when we look at ourselves in the mirror for the first time our minds begin to think about what our whole being looks like. A baby sees that they are a physical person, apart from their mother and from this stage is the formation of the “I” where the child realizes who he/she is. It seems that Lacan values these early years of development, considering his emphasis on the mirror stage, which seems to stem from a cognitive form of development. In fact, after seeing him or herself in the mirror for the first time the child learns to recognize himself in the mirror, but also learns how he is interacting with the objects around him. The child begins to unconsciously develop the Symbolic nature of the world in relation to himself. This gives the child new characteristics, which leads to a expansion of the developmental process.
What I found interesting in Lacan’s text is that the child can recognize at that young age that there are things that exist outside themselves that are connected. Moreover, I’m still struggling to make the connection between the significance of the mirror stage in the formation of the ego and the primary narcissism (the Idealistic ego that can never be attained).
While I was reading the texts of Freud and Lacan, I was thinking that Psychoanalysis and narrative are related in the process that both are created. In order to discover why a patient is experimenting some symptoms, the analyst has to begin taking elements of the conscious the get to the unconscious and recreate what is going on in it. In other words, the psychoanalyst tries to build up the story, which is behind the illness, it is, the elements that are working in the unconscious, and provoke anxiety, psychosis, hysteria, etc. in the conscious level.
The process of writing is similar: the author takes elements from the reality (a conscious world, we can say) to create his or her work. Once these elements are selected, he proceeds to make his tale or novel. Of course, the main difference between a writer and an analyst, is that the first one builds a work of fiction, and the last one –it is suppose- discovers a hidden reality. But, at the end, both create a story that is presented to someone else (the audience in the case of the writer and the patient in the case of the analyst).
In the fragment of the Interpretations of Dreams that we read, for example, Freud describes an own dream and some from his patients. What he does in his analysis is create relations between the elements of the dream that are condensed, searching for the dream-thoughts. In his analysis what he does is create a story based on a specific reality. The same happens when in a process of psychoanalytical analysis, the analyst recreates the childhood experiences of the patient. He has to explore in the past, rebuild the traumatic experiences that stayed in the unconscious and then come to the conscious in form of mental or physical illness.
It is interesting that some of the fiercest critics that are made to Psychoanalysis are that in some cases the analyst builds up a false story based on the information given by the patient. For example, trying to understand which trauma that remains in the unconscious is causing a mental illness, the therapist could determine, by mistake, that the patient suffered of some kind of abuse in his childhood that is blocked in his unconscious. Then, the patient blames to whom he or she considers that committed the abuse and a terrible conflict –now in the reality, but, paradoxically, false- arises and the patient ends suffering more.
Categories