Lacanian Ideas Research Articles

The Limits of Social Construction: Commentary on Paper by Cynthia Dyess and Tim Dean

The insufficiencies that Joan Copjec finds in the work of Judith Butler are the same kind Dyess and Dean want to alert us to in relational psychoanalysis. Two dangers of this nature are reification (that is, the relational position's becoming “the Book”) and a flirtation with superficiality (a potential outcome of believing that all experience can be understood in the terms of social relatedness). Theorizing “the impossibility of meaning” may be a first step in addressing these problems without having to limit the terms of the discussion to nature and nurture, or essence and social construction. But the idea of the Real is inextricably interrelated with, and mutually defined by, other parts of Lacan's theory. And so, if we simply import into relational psychoanalysis Lacan's conception of the Real, we are mixing apples and oranges and thereby risking conceptual confusion. We should instead use Lacan's idea as inspiration for the construction of a conception of “the impossibility of meaning” that can be used in theorizing the particular kind of problems relational psychoanalysis sets itself.

Fantasm: The triumph of form (an essay on the democratic sublime)

This essay attempts to counter the dreariness of postmodern critique and culture by locating the vital force of phantasy, rhetoric, argument, hope, and memory in contemporary public affairs. More particularly, it engages recent controversies about collective memory and the FDR memorial statue especially to generate a greater sensitivity to the fact that we are agents (and not just dupes) of history. The body, symbolic and material, is a core site for the history, theory, and practice of democracy, I argue, and is the hard kernel of collective identification and division. Methodologically, the essay fuses Aristotle and Lacan's ideas about phantasy as a perceptual device, which gages and creates public and personal desire, as an analytic frame for the study of public discourse.

Stages of Desire: The Mythological Tradition in Classical and Contemporary Spanish Theater (review)

REVIEWS Kidd, Michael. Stages ofDesire: The Mythological Tradition in Classical and Contemporary Spanish Theater. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Cloth. 266 pp. This volume is a most welcome addition to the growing body of criticism on the mythological tradition in Hispanic letters . While the most recent contributions to this field focus on one period, Kidd carefully traces the tradition from Juan del Encina's Égloga de Plácida y Victoriano (1513), the first Spanish play to rewrite classical mythology, to Luis Riaza's Medea es un buen chico (1980), a play that transforms the heterosexual Greco-Roman tale into a contemporary queer myth. Kidd traces the myth's origins and identifies the changes made by Spanish playwrights in their own plays. Kidd's solid and cogent analyses are informed by current critical trends, principally René Girard's and, to a lesser extent, Jacques Lacan's ideas on desire. The result is a refreshingly jargon-free study that combines traditional and current ideologies. In a brief introduction , Kidd offers a working definition of myth (7) and summarizes Girard's and Lacan's theories on violence and desire . In each analysis, Kidd examines the development of numerous triangles of desire among the characters, with particular attention played to the three taboos of the "nutritive, erotic , and aggressive" (15). This Girardian prototype also often involves the sacrificing of an innocent victim in order to stop violent aggression. In chapter 2, Kidd examines three pieces that span the sixteenth century and pave the way for full exploitation of the mythological tradition in subsequent centuries. Juan del Encina 's Ègloga de Placida y Victoriano is pivotal because it sets 167 168BCom, Vol. 52, No. 2 (2000) the stage for the seventeenth-century comedia that will syncretize pagan and Christian traditions, without privileging one over the other. In his second analysis, Kidd explores myth's political potential and sees Juan Timoneda's Tragicomedia llamada Filomena as a protest to a law that had banned Encina 's Plácida y Victoriano (49). This assertion, perhaps a bit forced, is nonetheless inviting, because it establishes the precedent of using the mythological play as a vehicle for political dissent. Finally, Francisco de la Cueva y Suva's Tragedia de Narciso serves as prototype for the emplotment of desire that will flourish in seventeenth-century mythological plays and comedias de honor. Three comedias from the seventeenth century are the focus of chapter 3. Kidd suggests that the mythological setting of Dido y Eneas enabled Guillen de Castro to create triangles of mimetic desire that deal ironically with conflicts between honor and honra and honor and love. This ironic distance is carried one step further in Lope de Vega's El laberinto de Creta and Calderón's Los tres mayores prodigios in which the protagonists are decidedly unheroic. In El laberinto, this cowardly behavior, coupled with several metatheatrical elements, exposes the sacrosant themes of honor and its ensuing vengeance as dramatic convention. Lope molds the tragic potential of the myth into tragicomedy, the genre best suited to comedia values. Kidd suggests that Calderón intended to draw parallels between Los tres mayores and the historical context in which it was produced, namely the tarnished image of Felipe rVs court. In the last two chapters, Kidd moves to the twentieth century . In chapter 4, he examines Electro Fedro and El señor de Pigmalión, in which Galdós, Unamuno and Grau, respectively, used myth to comment on the mediocrity of the early twentieth -century Spanish stage. In particular, Galdós and Unamuno create triangles of desire that assault complacent bourgeois values concerning the taboos of incest and fetisichism. Grau designs several extreme triangles of desire that verge on fetisichism. Kidd asserts that the use of puppets in this play underscores the "absence of authentic desire on the contemporary stage" (166). The play culminates when the puppets Reviews1 69 rebel against their creator, Pigmalión, thereby simulating a comparable liberation of contemporary theater from middleclass ideology. In a theatrical milieu dominated by the crowdpleasing Echegaray and, later, Benavente, these three dramatists argue for placing artistic over economic considerations. The two plays analyzed in chapter 5, Buero's...

De que se trata... Uma criança?

In this paper, we try to review some "scholastic prejudices"- which includes those who participate of a specific theoretical school, in this case, the school that follows Lacan's ideas - and its implications on the clinic of babies and litlle children. We discuss some questions: is the child born as a white paper? What is development? Since when can we suppose the existence of the insconscious? Why are psychoanalysts concerned with the organic? The interdiscipline is here understood as fundamental.

Advertisements: Multileveled in Word and Image and in the Mind of the Beholder

This study compared cognitive and psychodynamic perspectives on responses to simple and complex advertisements for perfume and liquor products. In simple ads, copy/image relations are concordant and sentimentalized, while in complex ads relations are discordant and ironic. It was hypothesized that writing story outlines based on simple ads would provide a means for projecting compensatory fantasies onto the scenes, while analyzing copy/image relations in complex ads would make viewers more aware of stimulus qualities in the ads. Thirty-one male and twenty-one female undergraduates viewed four perfume and four liquor ads. Commodity (perfume, liquor) and Advertising Style (simple, complex) were factorially combined in two blocks of four trials each. In a within-subjects design, subjects either wrote story outlines first and analyzed copy-image relations, or vice-versa. They then rated each ad on thirteen 7-point scales measuring perceived stimulus properties (e.g., quality of the ad) and subjective processes (e.g., liking or experiencing fantasies). Results showed that three factors underlined the judgments: Compensation (enhanced feelings of success, confidence, power, and masculinity/femininity), Effectiveness (ad was liked, perceived as good, stimulated fantasies, and an intention to purchase the product), and Action (everyday use of perfume/after shave or liquor products). Writing stories in response to simple perfume ads had a facilitative influence on scales loading on the Compensation factor. Content analysis showed that simple perfume ads elicited romantic stories, while analyzing copy-image relations fostered seduction themes and a sensitivity to metaphor. These findings provided support for Lacan's idea that people need to compensate for self-perceived inadequacies, but also fit with cognitive/empirical ideas.

The Play in the Mirror: Lacanian Perspectives on Spanish Baroque Theater (review)

380BCom, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Winter 1997) examination. Occasionally, alas (though fortunately not often), a more or less traditional reading ofthe play in question is merely tricked out in a few theoretical furbelows; the analysis in such cases does not really grow out of or depend upon the theory, which could have been dispensed with, without noticeably affecting the conclusions reached. As an introduction to modern theoretical approaches to the comedia, this volume has a couple of other problems as well. Some ofthe theoretical approaches illustrated are no longer exactly on the cutting edge of modern critical theory. And several ofthe essays, in somewhat different form, have already appeared elsewhere. Nevertheless, I would recommend the collection , despite the drawbacks. The lucidity of the theoretical synopses, and the cogency ofsome ofthe individual textual analyses, would make the volume highly useful in any graduate class on the Golden Age comedia. And the essays' overall, albeit sometimes implicit, call on students of the comedia to keep abreast of developments in critical theory seems likely to remain necessary and timely. Barbara E. Kurtz Illinois State University Stroud, Matthew D. The Play in the Mirror: Lacanian Perspectives on Spanish Baroque Theater. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1996. Cloth. 242 pp. Of the many theorists whose works inform contemporary literary criticism , including that of Hispanists, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan may well have the most forbidding reputation. Relatively few Golden Age scholars have ventured into this intimidating intellectual realm. Students of the comedia can thus profit from Matthew Stroud's The Play in the Mirror and will surely welcome both Stroud's ability to articulate Lacanian ideas methodically and his insightful application ofthem to several works. The Play in the Mirror's brief opening chapter enumerates the fundamental premises of Lacan's formulation of the subject, then in chapter 2 Stroud elaborates upon and demonstrates Lacanian subjectivity through the journeys toward greater self-knowledge experienced by Calderón's characters in La vida es sueño. Through the process of signification, they all must break free of the egoistic imaginary order and submit themselves to the symbolic order represented by civilization in order to play their proper roles Reviews381 in society; in doing so, they must accept the Other's desire as their own and act accordingly, as the play's concluding reconciliations and marriages demonstrate. Chapter 3, entitled "Love and Desire," explains how both these emotions result from the inescapable lack at the core of the subject. Desire is the attempt to achieve individual completion by (again) adopting the Other's desire as one's own, while love is the attempt to become whole by being loved. Due to inevitable conflicts between the imaginary, symbolic, and real, neither goal can ever be fully realized. The characters in La dama boba and El caballero de Olmedo, in search of wholeness, do not understand why contentment eludes them. Only the security of the symbolic order offers an apparent escape from this dilemma, as can be seen in La dama boba's concluding — and possibly less than completely fulfilling — marriages . For Stroud, however, this comedy is less illustrative of desire's true trajectory than the tragic El caballero de Olmedo, in which Alonso and Inés's passion conflicts with the symbolic order as embodied by her father's intention that she marry Rodrigo; desire cannot be satisfied in either the imaginary or symbolic realms and leads inexorably to death. Chapter 4, "Honor, Ethics, and Tragedy," continues to explore the insufficiency of the symbolic order to satisfy or control desire. Masculine honor in the Golden Age comedia, Stroud points out, partakes paradoxically of both the imaginary and symbolic registers, on one hand egoistically asserting individual autonomy and on the other submitting unquestioningly to various cultural imperatives. It is this paradox which is embodied by El castigo sin venganza's Duke ofFerrara, an egoistic individual expected to represent the symbolic order ofhis realm. The play's final tragedy results from the intersection of these registers and their imperatives when the Duke confronts desire in the form of his wife and illegitimate son's treasonous adultery . A secreto agravio, secreta venganza raises for Stroud the question of prudence, a symbolic virtue which...

Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (review)

Reviews42 1 performative functions of the text as revealed mainly by verbal relationships" (p. 104). Hubert argues that in Much Ado, "themes, metaphors, and tropes . . . give unity and coherence to the comedy" (p. 25), and acknowledges that in his account of The Winter's Tale, "verbal analysis mainly of the new critical variety . . . tie[s] everything together and give[s] performative unity to the play" (p. 107). This may be a criticism "shorn of organicism," but it nonetheless evinces a yearning toward aesthetic coherence, self-referentiality, and overdetermined verbal patterning. Hope CollegeJohn D. Cox Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy, by Barbara Freedman; xii & 244 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, $35.00 cloth, $12.95 paper. Staging the Gaze applies a combination of deconstructive and psychoanalytic ideas to The Comedy ofErrors, The Taming ofthe Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night. The book begins with two wholly theoretical introductory chapters. The first, "Displacing a Spectator Consciousness: Theater, Psychoanalysis , and Renaissance Considerations of Representability," draws significantly on the work of Claudio Guillen and Ernest Gilman, and relates the relativistic possibilities of Renaissance consciousness of perspective, including anamorphic representations, to Lacanian ideas ofstages ofidentity. The second, "A Fractured Gaze: Theater Cinema, Psychoanalysis," discusses how "the theory of the gaze" can be used by "theater theory," and stresses that "psychoanalysis and postmodernism alike employ theater to deny the possibility of an objective observer, a static object, or a stable process of viewing." The author argues that "the term uncanny describes the mood of The Comedy ofErrors," and that the play "operates at the level of the uncanny for its critics as well, for as we read the play we continually sense connections that we cannot understand. This comedy insists on its own meaninglessness and yet tantalizes us with the possibility of coherent meaning." Freedman suggests in this connection that "what is peculiar about farce is not the content of its fantasies but its recognition offantasy," and she concludes that "what The Comedy ofErrors finally puts on stage are such basic principles of psychological functioning as splitting, projection, denial, and repression as they haunt our quest for meaning." Stressing the importance of the frame play of The Taming of the Shrew, and 422Philosophy and Literature suggesting that its effect is analogous to that of a picture such as M. C. Escher's The Print Gallery, Freedman argues both that Shakespeare's comedy "displaces any stable relation of the spectator to the play" and that it "not only stages theatricality but can be said to be 'about' the very problem of theater's degenerating into mere show. . . ." Freedman also argues that "The Taming ofthe Shrew not only resists but succumbs to a feminist analysis." The author's analysis of A Midsummer Night's Dream is predicated on the assumption that "the play panders to an aristocratic ideology by wreaking comic punishment on all those who defy the prince's legislation of desire." Freedman does not present any argument to justify this position, she simply takes it as a given, on the authority of new historicist work on the play, notably that of Louis Montrose. Her interest, she explains, is to see what this kind of ideological "fawning" can illuminate. "Rather than refuse to teach A Midsummer Night's Dream because of its colonialist fantasies or The Taming of the Shrew because of its overt sexism, we can learn from both. Rather than censor either work, a more productive approach would be to explore how censorship operates with them." Accordingly, she explores how A Midsummer Night's Dream "puts representation on stage, displacing content with the disfiguring process of [dream] censorship itself." Finally, drawing upon the psychoanalytic work ofWinnicott as well as Lacan, the author argues that "most of the characters of Twelfth Night are unwilling to risk the drama of reflection by another's gaze," that neither Viola nor Feste "can reconcile the truth of self-division with the need for mutuality," and that "Twelfth Night is not only a pastiche of experiences of loss but a study of the more complex problem of recording and presenting loss." Freedman assimilates and explains a great deal of literary and psychoanalytic theory clearly...

The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics

This essay grows out of an experience of severe puzzlement. For several years now I have been watching with growing incomprehension as increasing numbers of feminist scholars have been trying to use or adapt the theory of Jacques Lacan for feminist purposes. I myself have felt a deep disaffinity with Lacan, a disaffinity as much intellectual as political. So while many of my fellow feminists have been using Lacanian ideas to theorize the discursive construction of subjectivity in film and literature, I have been relying on alternative models of language to develop a feminist social theory. Until now, I have avoided any explicit, metatheoretical discussion of these matters. I have explained neither to myself nor to my colleagues why it is that the footnotes in my recent papers contain some positive or quasipositive references to Foucault, Bourdieu, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Gramsci but not positive references to Lacan, Kristeva, Saussure, and Derrida.2 In this essay, I want to begin to provide such an explanation. I will try to explain why I think feminists should have no truck with Lacan and why we should have only the most minimal truck with Julia Kristeva. I will also try to identify some places where I think we can find more satisfactory alternatives.

The Signifier and the Group

This paper is concerned with the idea of the group as a signifying chain. Group elements, e.g., roles, subgroups, group episodes, and social acts, are viewed as signifiers open to particular significations each of which may be represented within the imaginary history of the group, i.e., in particular people and events. This theoretical position is arrived at via an application of Lacan's ideas to implications drawn from an examination of Freud's works on narcissism and group psychology. To Freud, the group is bound together by narcissistic identifications among the members who have each incorporated important aspects of the leader into his/her ego-ideal. The myth of the primal horde exemplifies this basic group structure. Taking this myth as a basis for further hypotheses about groups, this paper argues for differential member identifications with the leader. These differential identifications seem to be the imaginary effects of the signifying chain (group structure) that is anchored by the central signifier of the group, i.e., the symbolic father/leader. A particular group is exampled.

The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics

This essay grows out of an experience of severe puzzlement. For several years now I have been watching with growing incomprehension as increasing numbers of feminist scholars have been trying to use or adapt the theory of Jacques Lacan for feminist purposes. I myself have felt a deep disaffinity with Lacan, a disaffinity as much intellectual as political. So while many of my fellow feminists have been using Lacanian ideas to theorize the discursive construction of subjectivity in film and literature, I have been relying on alternative models of language to develop a feminist social theory. Until now, I have avoided any explicit, metatheoretical discussion of these matters. I have explained neither to myself nor to my colleagues why it is that the footnotes in my recent papers contain some positive or quasipositive references to Foucault, Bourdieu, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Gramsci but not positive references to Lacan, Kristeva, Saussure, and Derrida.2 In this essay, I want to begin to provide such an explanation. I will try to explain why I think feminists should have no truck with Lacan and why we should have only the most minimal truck with Julia Kristeva. I will also try to identify some places where I think we can find more satisfactory alternatives.

Lacan x Buber/Paz: entre o contingente e o eterno

Um confronto entre as idéias de Lacan de um lado e as de Buber e O. Paz de outro revela uma incompatibilidade absoluta de posições. Para Lacan, a unidade primordial é irresgatável e, aliás, jamais existiu, não passando de uma alucinação. O nascimento impõe ao sujeito uma condição de fragmentaridade. Toda a empresa humana se reduz à busca da unidade perdida, ao desejo, que visa a objetos que, produzirem um simulacro de gozo, preenchem uma ausência primeira com sua presença de maneira falseada. Inversamente, para Buber/Paz, o todo primordial se instala desde o princípio e jamais deixa de existir. A ação humana pode despertar este todo a cada momento, em cada ato e fato corriqueiro.