CHAPTER 2
WHAT HAS LANGUAGE GOT TO DO WITH PSYCHOANALYSIS?
Psychoanalysis is carried out exclusively with words, with language. So psychoanalysis, argues Lacan, must have a theory of language and meaning. The surrealists showed that one image can be associated with more than one meaning. But Freud and Lacan claim that meaning is essentially something to do with language, with words and symbols.
Jung, Klein and Plato had theories of language that are similar: they all claim that some meanings are rigidly fixed and cannot be moved. This position is very different from Freud's and Lacan's view of language, where meaning is in flux.
Jung thought that whatever our experiences, and however different our backgrounds and cultures, we can only conceptualise and experience the world, each other and language through a fixed number of ideas that he called ‘archetypes’ such as the ‘Earth Mother’ or the ‘Trickster’.
Plato also had fixed ideas that he called ‘Forms’ such as ‘The Perfect Man’ and the ‘The Perfect Woman’; Melanie Klein’s fixed ideas are ‘objects’ such as the ‘good breast’ and the ‘bad penis’.
But there is a problem with all these theories that insist on having fixed meanings, where one word or image always has one corresponding ‘fundamental meaning’. They all run into trouble when it comes to justifying their fixed categories. For instance, one absurd consequence of believing in a theory of fixed meaning is that you could have a ‘dream dictionary’ that really worked. Such a dictionary would allow you look up ‘the definitive meaning’ of a dream symbol or image, such as a dog. But if I dream of my dog barking, my dream might have one particular meaning: but if a veterinary surgeon, or perhaps someone with a phobia of dogs, had the same dream, ‘dog’ would probably have a different meaning. There is no authority, no specialist who ‘knows the truth about meaning’ and who we can rely on to authoritatively interpret the meaning of our unconscious ideas.
So psychoanalysts are not in a position of authority regarding word meaning either, argues Lacan. The use of a word and its meaning always depends on the user’s history and on the use of the word in their life and community. So meaning depends on use, and as use varies, so meaning varies. This is an important idea for Lacan, although he was not the first to have it. Lacan realized that word meaning changes, and depends on other people and on the use they make of a particular word. Let’s look in a bit more detail at the ways in which word meaning changes.
It is not possible for one person to decide, on his own, what a word means. If I choose to use the word ‘table’ as if it meant ‘cat’, and were to say ‘please feed my table while I’m away’, and I took my table to the vet, I would soon be corrected.
Word meaning, although it changes over time, depends on all of the people who use the language. Even special scientific words, which seem to be coined by just one famous scientist, only have meaning by virtue of their currency in a whole community of scientists who, in turn, live in the larger, non-specialist language-using-community.
Before answering this question we should look at a technical term that Lacan used in trying to answer the question: ‘What is a person?’
The subject, the object, and the signifier
They opposed ‘subject’ with ‘object’. This is a bit like making a pair of ‘up’ and ‘down’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘true’ and ‘false’. These are called ‘logical equivalences’ or ‘binary opposites’. For Lacan a word’s meaning comes from its being contrasted with other words: black with white, hard with soft … This is why a word’s meaning changes over time, because it comes to be contrasted with new and different words.
‘Subject’ and ‘signifier’ are an important pair of binary opposites in Lacan’s theory of the subject. His theory of the subject is, very simply, a theory of what it means to be a person. He argued that we are represented by language, by special objects called ‘words’. Lacan’s technical term for ‘word’ is ‘signifier’.
He argued that the signifiers that a subject speaks, writes or dreams, represent that subject.
Or, in Lacan’s terms:
‘the signifier represents the subject…’
Whenever anyone speaks or writes they always represent themselves with language, with signifiers. And signifiers are the only way the subject can represent him/herself. So Lacan thought that communication between us is not direct but always mediated through signifiers. This explains why Lacan’s slogan is:
Lacan says that ‘the signifier represents the subject for another signifier’ to avoid the homunculus problem (the infinitely many little men, each one smaller than the one before it) that we met in Chapter One. The idea behind this formula is to prevent the subject somehow sidestepping the flow of language, from one subject to another. The flow of language cannot be read from outside language, and language is all with which we can represent ourselves.
Put another way, ‘the signifier represents the subject for another signifier’ is like saying:
The lawyer represents the Client for another lawyer
The signifier represents the subject for another signifier
If you have a legal case against me, your lawyer will communicate with my lawyer. The exchange between us is between lawyers, not directly between you and me.
The two clients will be separated by the legal discourse of their lawyers, which they might not even understand. It is common for lawyers to confuse their clients and to fail to get the best deal for them. So lawyers are separated from their clients by language, but it is only language, including the language of money, that keeps them together. Signifiers both constitute and divide us.
ere is another illustration:‘The prime minister represents the nation for another prime minister’. In international relations, it is what the prime minister says that represents me in the international community, whether I agree with him or not. When nations are represented by prime ministers, the views or interests of that nation are often confused, twisted or reformulated. But this, says Lacan, is the relation of the subject to language. We are all alienated by language. Language is the best we can do to communicate, but using it ensures that we will often be misunderstood, however well intentioned our audience might be.
Lacanian theory explains the entanglement of individual and collective meanings; you cannot separate subjects from language.
Lacan had a special vocabulary of technical terms and notations. His abbreviation for the subject is an ‘S’, but it is not usually written this way, because an essential part of subjectivity is our separation and constitution by language. So Lacan wrote an S with a bar through it, to show our division:
The bar also represents the fact that there is always something stopping the subject from getting what it wants and from being how it wants to be.
Theories of language are important for psychoanalysis because psychoanalysis is carried out exclusively with words: the client speaks, and the analyst speaks. For this reason Lacan said:
And that the dominant part of our minds,
What does this mean? What is the unconscious? And why did Freud and Lacan believe that the unconscious is the place where hidden desires live? The answer they both give is
Freud had a catalogue of ‘the four formations of the unconscious’. These are four mysterious mental phenomena that Freud took on as a challenge to explain:
SYMPTOMS, ERRORS OF EVERYDAY LIFE, JOKES and DREAMS.
Freud and Lacan theorised each of these phenomena as linguistic products of the unconscious; as plays of language. Here are some clinical examples:
A SYMPTOM:
The woman from Chapter One with a phobia of open and public spaces had a fantasy of falling in the street. In the course of an analysis it transpired that she suffered with guilt and shame, as a consequence of her sexual activity, and did not want ‘to be seen as a ‘fallen woman’. This woman’s unconscious desire ‘spoke’ with a symptom that took the form of an idiom, of language.
JOKES often have the same structure as slips of the tongue, as we can see in an example of Freud’s:
young woman felt tied up in her mother’s problems and complained that she was having difficulty making progress in her own life. She explained that she had never known her father, and reported a dream in which she was ‘being pulled by four bears’. She produced her own reading of this dream: ‘forebear’ means ‘forefather’, as well as ‘suffer’ and ‘sacrifice’, which appears to refer to what the young woman had given up, in order to continue her difficult relation with her mother.
So Lacan understands these four categories: dreams, slips of the tongue, symptoms and jokes as linguistic functions, as the movement of words and letters, as a kind or reading and writing. He called this idea ‘The Agency of the Letter’, because the letter seems to have a life all of its own, insisting on being rewritten, as the four formations of the unconscious, as signifiers in dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue and symptoms. The letters in books and on gravestones outlive the subject who was spoken by those words.
ow we have looked at how meanings shift about and change, we should return to look a theory which argues that meaning is somehow fixed.
Some theorists called ‘sociobiologists’ have argued, in the style of Plato, Klein and Jung, that meaning is something that is fixed for people. For these theorists meaning appears to be biologically fixed for us, just as it is for animals and plants. For example, if you wave a red stick at a stickleback it does a mating dance. Red indicates mating for sticklebacks. For them ‘red’ could never be a metaphor, a symbol symptom, dream, or a joke because it always refers to one thing and to one thing only. Sticklebacks, argues Lacan, are not divided and structured by language: people are, because the meaning of their words changes.
Lacan argues that meaning is above all a property of language, not primarily a property of biological systems. So looking at biology will not tell you much about the human condition. People are unique: they are the only organism to commit suicide. No other animal kills itself.
Our lives are radically different from those of all other animals because we are dominated by language, by meaning that is in flux, not fixed.