Lacan and Language

 Lacan and Language

One important idea that Lacan, the Freudian, disseminated is that the unconscious is language. The unconscious, in both Freud’s notions and other notions like Jung’s, includes the forgotten and the repressed, the distorted and the repeated, the relations between symptoms and language, between affect and language, and the role of language in self analysis, in therapeutic interaction, and in self-understanding, is perhaps the most important notion that Freud discovered and that Lacan recognized and discussed throughout his work. Lacan penetrates language by introducing new ideas, e.g. lack and the phallus, signification and clarifying the meanings of signified and signifier, and by providing new ideas about the most serious psychological problems, i.e. paranoia.

Firstly, the unconscious is affect and language is intricately entwined with affective experiences. 

Secondly, as an individual with a specific social location, the person is ascribed a status by her social milieu from immediate family to lineage to geography to wider social relations: political, economic, demographic and medical, etc., which may be realized or not but qualifies as an aim, an expectation and a role.

Our earliest sensations as an organism, the inscriptions upon and into our subjectivity from the earliest moments of our existence through to a mature language user involves a movement from a very immature and totally determined process of perception to a process of self reflection: a process of examining feelings and images including all sensory data, qualia, through language. 

Language has a doubled edge: clarifies but distorts. The forgetting and repressing mechanisms, which are both physiological and social, comprise the unconscious which contains all qualia, all affects, and the ways that experience has been coded, encoded and decoded in the cultural contexts of our social-historical locations.

The ways that language has been inscribed upon us as a learning process; the way language is ascribed to form our personality and social relations as attributes, speech acts and effects including lies of all kinds, and the way that language as a cultural institution dominates our social behavior, decisions and actions involves our consciousness which is impinged by unconscious mechanisms: forgetting, condensation, metonymy and metaphor, displacements and defenses inhibiting recall of affects and linguistic phenomena we have experienced!

One controversy that Lacan was involved in was his changing of the required 50-minute session length for a psychoanalytic session. Lacan explains the variable length: he states that he cuts off the session when the analysand makes the critical remark so that s/he cannot spend the rest of the session denying it. He calls this technique 'scansion.' The analysand has to deal with the event of the interrupted session! Why? Reflection may lead to some answers, the next session now has a topic! The real work of analysis, the part when self-understanding occurs, is between sessions. At issue is an expectation of 50 minutes, earlier or later leads to a quandary. The analyst is trying to say something!