Jacques Lacan

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 to September 9, 1981) was a major figure in Parisian intellectual life for much of the twentieth century. Sometimes referred to as “the French Freud,” he is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis. His teachings and writings explore the significance of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious both within the theory and practice of analysis itself as well as in connection with a wide range of other disciplines. Particularly for those interested in the philosophical dimensions of Freudian thought, Lacan’s oeuvre is invaluable. Over the course of the past fifty-plus years, Lacanian ideas have become central to the various receptions of things psychoanalytic in Continental philosophical circles especially.

Lacan's article "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I" (1936, 1949) lays out the parameters of a doctrine that he never foreswore, and which has subsequently become something of a post-structuralist mantra: namely, that human identity is "decentred." The key observation of Lacan's essay concerns the behaviour of infants between the ages of 6 and 18 months. At this age, Lacan notes, children become capable of recognising their mirror image. This is not a dispassionate experience, either. It is a recognition that brings the child great pleasure. For Lacan, we can only explain this "jubilation" as a testimony to how, in the recognition of its mirror-image, the child is having its first anticipation of itself as a unified and separate individual. Before this time, Lacan contends (drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic observation), the child is little more than a "body in bits and pieces," unable to clearly separate I and Other, and wholly dependant for its survival (for a length of time unique in the animal kingdom) upon its first nurturers.

The implications of this observation on the mirror stage, in Lacan's reckoning, are far-reaching. They turn around the fact that, if it holds, then the genesis of individuals' sense of individuation can in no way be held to issue from the "organic" or "natural" development of any inner wealth supposed to be innate within them. The I is an Other from the ground up, for Lacan (echoing and developing a conception of the ego already mapped out in Freud's Ego and Id). The truth of this dictum, as Lacan comments in "Aggressivity and Psychoanalysis," is evident in infantile transitivity: that phenomenon wherein one infant hit by another yet proclaims: "I hit him!" and visa-versa. It is more simply registered in the fact that it remains a permanent possibility of adult human experience for us to speak and think of ourselves in the second or third person. What is decisive in these phenomena, according to Lacan, is that the ego is at base an object: an artificial projection of subjective unity modelled on the visual images of objects and others that the individual confronts in the world. Identification with the ego, Lacan accordingly maintains, is what underlies the unavoidable component of aggressivity in human behaviour especially evident amongst infants, and which Freud recognised in his Three Essays on Sexuality when he stressed the primordial ambivalence of children towards their love object(s) (in the oral phase, to love is to devour; in the anal phase, it is to master or destroy…).

It is on the basis of this fundamental understanding of identity that Lacan maintained throughout his career that desire is the desire of the Other. What is meant by him in this formulation is not the triviality that humans desire others, when they sexually desire (an observation which is not universally true). Again developing Freud's theorisation

 of sexuality, Lacan's contention is rather that what psychoanalysis reveals is that human-beings need to learn how and what to desire. Lacanian theory does not deny that infants are always born into the world with basic biological needs that need constant or periodic satisfaction. Lacan's stress, however, is that, from a very early age, the child's attempts to satisfy these needs become caught up in the dialectics of its exchanges with others. Because its sense of self is only ever garnered from identifying with the images of these others (or itself in the mirror, as a kind of other), Lacan argues that it demonstrably belongs to humans to desire---directly---as or through another or others. We get a sense of his meaning when we consider such social phenomena as fashion. As the squabbling of children more readily testifies, it is fully possible for an object to become desirable for individuals because they perceive that others desire it, such that when these others' desire is withdrawn, the object also loses its allure.

I have chosen the film "Whiplash" (2014) to analysis using Lacan's theory of "lack and desire" as it is about a young mans (Andrew) desire to become a world famous jazz musician drummer. This scene is a montage of his practice to impress his teacher (Terence Fletcher) and to get the part as the drummer for the song "Whiplash".  This montage first starts off him grabbing his drum sticks and walking past a CD of "Buddy Rich" using a pull focus to bring this CD into light and lingering on said CD for a short while. Buddy Rich is the drummer Andrew desires to be as good as, if not, better than. The scene follow Andrew printing sheet music with a non diegetic sound of Buddy Rich drumming, to show that drumming is always on his mind. It's an obsession at this point rather than a hobby. Even when we can hear the diegetic sound of Andrew drumming, the non diegetic drumming still continuously plays throughout this montage.  We see he's calm and collected throughout the first drumming scene of this montage which then cuts back to him in his apartment moving all of his essentials into his drumming room. This demonstrates the level of his obsession (desire) to become the next world famous jazz drummer as his now living in the same room as his drums so he can get the most amount of practise time he possibly can. He also sleeps under a poster of Buddy Rich - the drummer he now literally looks up to as he lays on his mattress for motivation for his desire.        




Sources:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/
https://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/
https://www.iep.utm.edu/2005/page/3/
http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/symbolicrealimaginary.htm
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9780230390140_5
https://www.a-n.co.uk/media/52445075/
http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/