Narcissism
The term narcissism is derived from clinical description…
"On Narcissism: An Introduction" begins with a move that is characteristic of Freud's developing approach to theorizing about the psyche. Freud refers to a psychological state that other theorists have described as abnormal--in this case, exclusive auto-eroticism--and suggests that it might be a more pervasive condition that previously thought, then expands this suggestion even further to indicate that it might actually be a condition common to the psychological makeup of allhuman beings.
"Loving oneself," Freud argues, is the "libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation" (74). We all have impulses to nourish ourselves and to protect ourselves from danger; these impulses are bound up with our desires, and we can't neatly separate our sexual desires (directed at other humans) from our inwardly directed desire to care for ourselves.
Freud calls this basic, sexually charged desire directed at the self "primary" or "normal" narcissism. He contrasts primary narcissism with a "secondary narcissism" which arises in pathological states such as schizophrenia in which the person's libido withdraws from objects in the world and produces megalomania. The secondary narcissism of the mentally ill is, Freud suggests, a magnified, extreme manifestation of primary narcissism which exists in all individuals.
Other clues to the existence of primary narcissism come from observations of children and what Freud calls "primitive peoples," who engage in what Freud in Totem and Taboo calls "magical thinking": for example, believing that wishing for something will make it appear, or that uttering a spell will have real effects. These behaviors reflect a sense of the self as powerful, able to have an influence on external reality, and Freud believes that such an investment in the self is a part of human development. He calls it "an original libidinal cathexis of the ego"
Freud imagines a libidinal economy in which object-libido (directed outward) and ego-libido (directed inward) exist in a ratio. Being in love is at the extreme end of object-libido; being a paranoid schizophrenic is at the extreme end of ego-libido.
Scopophilia: Literally, the love of looking. The term refers to the predominantly male gaze of Holloywood cinema, which enjoys objectfying women into mere objects to be looked at (rather than subjects with their own voice and subjectivity). The term, as used in feminist film criticism, is heavily influenced by both and psychoanalysis.
Voyeurism is a practice in which an individual derives from observing other people. Such people may be engaged in , or be or in , or dressed in whatever other way the "voyeur" finds appealing. The word derives from verb voir (to see) with the -eur that translates as -er in English. A literal translation would then be “seer” or "observer", with pejorative connotations.
Unsuitable Substitutes for the Sexual Object - Fetishism, from Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
There are some cases which are quite specially remarkable - those in which the normal sexual object is replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim. From the point of view of classification, we should no doubt have done better to have mentioned this highly interesting group of aberrations of the sexual instinct among the deviations in respect of the sexual object.
What is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate for sexual purposes, or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and preferably to that person's sexuality (e.g. a piece of clothing or underlinen). Such substitutes are with some justice likened to the fetishes in which savages believe that their gods are embodied.
A transition to those cases of fetishism in which the sexual aim, whether normal or perverse, is entirely abandoned is afforded by other cases in which the sexual object is required to fulfil a fetishistic condition - such as the possession of some particular hair-colouring or clothing, or even some bodily defect - if the sexual aim is to be attained. No other variation of the sexual instinct that borders o the pathological can lay so much claim to our interest as this one, such is the peculiarity of the phenomena to which it gives rise. Some degree of diminution in the urge towards the normal sexual aim (an executive weakness of the sexual apparatus) seems to be a necessary pre-condition in every case. The point of contact with the normal is provided by the psychologically essential overvaluation of the sexual object, which inevitably extends to everything that is associated with it. A certain degree of fetishism is thus habitually present in normal love, especially in those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfillment prevented.
The situation only becomes pathological when the longing for the fetish passes beyond the point of being merely a necessary condition attached to the sexual object and actually takes the place of the normal aim, and, further, when the fetish becomes detached from a particular individual and becomes the sole sexual object. These are, indeed, the general conditions under which mere variations of the sexual instinct pass over into pathological aberrations.
LACAN
Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (, – , ) was a , , and . He considered his work to be an authentic "return to ", in opposition to . This entailed a renewed concentration upon the Freudian concepts of the , the , the conceptualised as a mosaic of , and the centrality of to any psychoanalytic work. His work has a strong interdisciplinary focus, drawing particularly on , , and , and he has become an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis, particularly within .
Lacan's work has had a profound impact on the development of psychoanalysis worldwide. Within the Lacanian community itself a number of different schools have emerged, particularly in France, but the vast majority of practitioners fall under the auspices of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP), headed by , Lacan's son-in-law. Yet, in the aspirations of worldwide expansion, historians, sociologists, and analysts have cautioned that the attempt to transmit psychoanalysis through the bloodline of the daughter – whether of Freud's daughter Anna or Lacan's daughter Judith (to whom Miller is married) – opens serious questions as to its validity, for this has historically resulted in institutionalizations of psychoanalysis in a manner that begins to resemble churches (IPA) and not secular analytic associations. Be that as it may, outside Europe, Lacanian psychoanalysis has gained particular prominence [] in the , and .
The 'Return to Freud'
Following Freud's death, psychoanalytic practice split into many differing schools of thought. Against the backdrop of these divergent currents of psychoanalytic theory, Lacan called for a "return to Freud". Lacan accused later psychoanalysts of a superficial understanding of Freud (who encountered a similar problem himself on his first trip to North America, where his interpreters appeared to have "sugar-coated" his theories to make them more popular to the masses), claiming they had so cautiously adhered to his ideas that they had served to block rather than to induce scientific investigation of the mental process. Lacan wanted to return to Freud's thought, and expand it in light of its own tensions and currents. In fact, near the end of his life he remarked to a conference, "It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian."
It should be emphasised that Lacan insisted that his work was not, in his eyes, an interpretation but a translation of Freud into structural-linguistic terms. Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue", jokes and suchlike, Lacan insisted, all emphasised the agency of language in subjective constitution, such that had Freud lived contemporaneously with , and, principally, had Freud been aware of the work of , he would have done the same as him. In his famous essay "Freud and Lacan", the structuralist makes this point particularly well:
"In his first great work The Interpretation of Dreams […], Freud studied the ‘mechanisms’ and ‘laws’ of dreams, reducing their variants to two: displacement and condensation. Lacan recognized these as two essential figures of speech, called in linguistics [respectively] metonymy and metaphor. Hence slips, failures, jokes and symptoms, like the elements of dreams themselves, become signifiers, inscribed in the chain of an unconscious discourse, doubling silently, i.e. deafeningly, in the misrecognition of ‘repression’, the chain of the human subject’s verbal discourse. […] Hence the most important acquisitions of de Saussure and of the linguistics that descends from him began to play a justified part in the understanding of the process of the unconscious as well as that of the verbal discourse of the subject and of their inter-relationship, i.e. of their identical relation and non-relation in other words, of their reduplication and dislocation (décalage)." (Althusser, ‘Freud and Lacan’ in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 191 – 192).
The "return to Freud", therefore, is primarily the realisation that the pervading agency of the unconscious is to be understood as intimately tied to the functions and dynamics of language, where the signifier is irremediably divorced from the signified in a chronic but generative tension of lack. It is here that Lacan began his work on "correcting" Freud from within. As Malcolm Bowie puts it:
"For Lacan, Freud's central insight was not [...] that the unconscious exists, but that it has structure, that this structure affects in innumerable ways what we say and do, and that in thus betraying itself it becomes accessible to analysis". (Malcolm Bowie, 'Jacques Lacan' in John Sturrock (ed.), Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 118).
Major concepts
The mirror stage (le stade du miroir)
The is described in Lacan's essay, "The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience", the first of his Écrits, which remains one of his seminal papers. Some have crudely put this as the point at which the child 'recognises' him- or herself in the mirror image, but this is unfaithful to what Lacan has in mind and also confuses his terminology. Lacan's emphasis here is on the process of identification with an outside image or entity induced through, as he puts it, "insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development" (Lacan, Écrits (rvd. edn., 2002), 'The mirror stage', p. 5).
The Other
In contrast to the dominant Anglo-American of his time, Lacan considered the self as something constituted in the "", that is, the conception of the external. This belief is rooted in Lacan's reading of and , and more specifically his belief that Freud's concept of the unconscious prefigured structuralist linguistics. Lacan picks up on Saussure's observation that a signifier is distinguished and identified through its difference from other signifiers. (For example, "love" is understandable, in part, only through its opposition to "hate," which is in turn understandable only in relationship to "love") As a result, language is never completely contained - it always contains things beyond what is intended, and these things form an endless chain of signifiers. This signifying chain, and more broadly the ordering structures of language in general constitute the (always capitalized in Lacan's work).
The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic
Lacan also formulated the concepts of , , and , which he used to describe the elements of the .
The Imaginary constitutes Lacan's version of the ego - the structured conception of identity, beginning with the mirror stage. The imaginary depends on a division between self and "other," but this division already relies on reference to the Other.
The Other, in this triad, is contained in the Symbolic - the ordering structures of language and grammar in which the Imaginary self-formulates.
All of this is coupled with the Real - the world as it exists before the mediation of language. The Real, therefore, can never truly be grasped or engaged with - it is continually mediated through the imaginary and the symbolic. Lacan's notion of the Real is a very difficult concept which he, in his later years, worked to present in a structured, set-theory fashion, as .