Lacanian Terminology: Imago – Definition and Explanation

Lacan was not the first to introduce the Latin concept of "Imago" into psychoanalysis (the first one was Jung). The term, related to the notion of "image" expresses the emotional investment of the subject according to Lacan in the images of other people. Regardless of being a part of each and every subject's world, these images are prototypical and universal (this notion obviously draws from Jung's concept of Archetypes). The images manifest themselves in the psyche of the individual and function as stereotypes which influence the manner in which the subject relates to other around him as they are perceived through the prism of the Imago.

When intialy discussing his notion of the Mirror Stage. Lacan associated three familial complexes (complexes familiaux) with a certain Imago. While Jung saw the Imago as having both a positive and negative effect on the subject, for Lacan the tendency is towards the negative side since they act as deceiving agents which arouse an illusion of unity where there is no unity.   

see: Lacanian Terminology 

Some additional books to help you better your understanding of Lacan's theory and terminology:

Lacanian Terminology – Central Concepts in Lacan's Theory

Jacques Lacan is one of the most influential figures not only in psychoanalysis in the past century but also in the world of cultural and literary theory and cultural studies. Lacan's theory brought about a new perception and practices in psychotherapy, but also in cultural analysis and the way we understand society (one of the most remarkable applications of Lacan's theory to the social field is Louis Althusser's "On Ideology")

Lacan's writing is notorious for its illusiveness and complexity. One of the difficulties in reading and understanding Lacan is his heavy reliance on outer references but also on his own unique theoretical vocabulary.    

Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is rich with unique terminology coined by him or borrowed and adapted from other thinkers such as Freud and Jung. Understanding these concepts used in his writing and lectures is crucial for properly understanding Lacan's complicated ideas and theory regarding the human psyche. Here you will find some definitions and explanations of some of Lacan's most central concepts and theoretical terms:

lacanian Terminology

The three orders:

The imaginary order

The symbolic order (big other)

The order of the real

Other concepts:

The Name of the Father

Desire

The mirror stage (related to the imaginary order)

Imago

Displacement

Id

Primary and Secondary Identification (related to the Oedipus Complex)

Hysterical Repression

RealityPrinciple

Instinctualpressure

 Transitivism

The Dialectic of Knowledge
Jouissance 

Ideal I

Oedipus Complex

Ideal Self
signification of the Phallus 

Signifying Chain (Chain of Signifiers)
Savoir and Connaissance or Meconnaissance

additional concepts and definitions are coming up...

Lacan's concepts and terminology are often very illusive and complex. Often times than not while reading Lacan it is hard to make out the exact denotation of the various concepts employed by him. The best way to understand Lacan and his terminology is only through extensive reading of his writing with the aid of secondary and commentary literature. 

Some additional books to help you better your understanding of Lacan's theory and terminology:

Marc Prensky - "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" – part 1 – Summary and Review

Marc Prensky opens his "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants"(2001)  by stating  that the problem with education today is  that " Our students have  changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system  was designed to teach".

Pensky suggests that the arrival of digital technology in the last decade of the 20^th century can be marked as a "singularity" – a dramatic break in the flow of generational change.  Prensky therefore holds that "today’s students  think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors". He even suggests that these changes might be found in the very manner in which the new generation's brain functions. As far as thinking patterns are concerned, Prensky is confident that thinks have already drastically changed.

Prensky calls this new generation of high technology usage "Digital Natives", holding that "Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet". Consequently, all people born before the beginning of the digital era are termed by Prensky as "Digital Immigrants".

Digital immigrants learn to some extent to adapt to their new environment while retaining an "accent".  The problem that Prensky identifies regarding education is that "our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated  language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language", thus creating a cross-generational dissonance.

According to Prensky, digital natives are accustomed to receiving information really fast, parallel process and multi-task. Digital natives give precedence to graphics over text. They are networked and need fast and easy gratification.  All these is very foreign to digital immigrants.  These brings up some serious problems when we come to education.

Education today rests on the assumption that learners are the same as they ever were. This is according to Prensky no longer a valid assumption. Traditional education cannot meet the needs and inclinations of the new digital immigrants. Presnky thinks that what's done is done, and that the Digital Natives cannot and will not go back to traditional ways of thinking and learning.

According to Prensky, this gap has to be addressed by the traditional education system that needs to adapt itself to the new Digital Natives in both content and methodology.  Prensky distinguished two types of content: "legacy" content which includes things that were considered thus far as important such as reading, writing, math and logic, and "future" content which regards digital and technological matters.  The challenge is to combine the two together in a system suited for the needs of digital natives.

This warrants some rethinking of what and how we teach our children. Teachers that are, as Prensky terms it, "Digital Immigrants" have to cope with the fact that their pupils are of a different making. Things will not go back to the way they were up until now.

You should consider reading:

Lacan's Order of the Real, pleasure, Extimacy, Symptom and the Thing– Summary

According to Lacan's subject theory, the order of the real is everything which resists symbolization and representation in the unconscious. The real according to Lacan is that which resists the dialectical process typical of the symbolic order, in which one signifier is interchangeable with another. The real according to Lacan does not exist as a signifier. Lacan calls this phenomenon, which cannot be symbolized, as the Thing (with a capital T). Lacan's concept of Thing is inspired by Freud's distinction between things which are represented in the unconscious and things that do not.

Since the real for Lacan refers to an existence which cannot be a part of the symbolic order, and therefore cannot be symbolized or conceptualized, it is associated with trauma but also with pleasure, which subverts symbolic bans and aims at achieving the Thing. The real is in a sense pure absence since it is resistant to symbolization. For the same reason the real also lacks nothing.

The real is associated for Lacan with the death drive: the relation between destructive behavior and the obtainment of pleasure. The real is the realm of pure pleasure, which is symbolically castrated by the symbolic order. Lacan essentially talks about two types of subjects, the subject of language and the subject of pleasure, which are not distinct from each other but rather infused.

The need for pleasure is formed according to Lacan at an early state, before language is acquired, and in the context of the initial engagement with the mother which produces satisfaction and frustration at the same time. Following birth, the baby's first and most intimate contact is with the mother, and this is for Lacan as intimate as he is ever going to get with anything. He calls this sensation extimacy.

Extimacy for Lacan is the source or a constant yearning the various forms of imagined unities with ideal "others" (starting from the mother onwards to ideology). The yearning is also for various forms of pleasure which include not only enjoyment but also destruction. This is why the subject cherishes his symptoms and even if he is willing to eventually give it up another one will take its place. Symptom according to Lacan is a creative way to invent excess pleasure in a place which limits pleasure. If identification with the name of the father as a signifier in language has a castrating effect, the symptom allows the subject to reunite the subject with its pleasure. This is why the symptom according to Lacan is not only a subconscious message but also an expression of the real which resists symbolic discipline.

   

Suggested reading:

Lacan's Subject Theory: The Subject and Language - summary

Lacan's concept of the name of the father and a central signifier of thesymbolic order which replaces the mother as object of desire, leaving a persisting sense of absence, is one of the keys to understanding Lacan's subject theory and why he thought it was constructed of and as language. Through the name of the father the baby enters the realm of signification which constitutes him as a subject. Repressing the Oedipal complex is done through the name of the father, that is language, and this for Lacan means that the subconscious is constructed as language.

To understand the why Lacan argues that the subject is, in a sense, language, we can use the example in which Lacan draws on the work of Roman Jakobson regarding metonyms and metaphors and how he compare them to mental processes in the unconscious like conversion and displacement.

According to Lacan both conversion (the metaphoric function) and displacement (the metonymic function) point to the fact that language itself as an inherent resistance to meaning. According to Lacan, the stable link between signifier and signified, required for the use of language and the construction of the self as a coherent category, is produced by the function of the imaginary which allows for the assignment of signifiers to signifieds and thus limit the endless shifts of signification.

Assigning a relatively fixed signifier to a signified as what enables us to have a relatively coherent sense of reality and of ourselves, and without them Lacan warms that the subject might be "lost" (in two senses) and turn psychotic. On the other hand too many fixed signs might produce fixations in our lives which will deny us the ability to grow, develop and give new meaning to our existence, leading to all sort of mental and emotional problems.

Lacan stresses that the gap between signifier and signified can never be fully bridged, and never fully described or understood. This gap points to the eternal divide between the person speaking (the "I" or "self") and the one being spoken about (the unconscious subject). In language, according to Lacan, we turn alienated from ourselves for the sake of being able to communicate with others.

Suggested reading:

Lacan's "Name of the Father" - summary

"the name of the father" is one of Lacan's central concepts. According to Lacan's Psychoanalytic theory the force which drives us is desire. Desire is always directed at what Lacan call the Big Other or the symbolic order. The big other or symbolic order forms when we exchange objects for words and lose their real presence. This process of symbolization of reality is what allows for communication between people. But language is an outside order which precedes us and therefore, according to Lacan, is always somewhat alien to us. The term "desire" refers to the essential sense of absence which emerges upon entering the symbolic order. The individual can never fully explain himself, he can never be fully understood and his needs fully fulfilled, he can never be in full harmony with the symbolic order and shake away the feeling on constant absence.

According to Lacan desire is directed at many objects during one's life, starting from the mother which is the initial Big Other, moving to the father which is the central figure in the process of entering the symbolic order. Later on in life the role of the Big Other will be assumed by various types of authority and social institutions (Althusser elaborated on this point).

Lacan accepts Freud basic scheme of the Oedipus Complex. But unlike Freud, who thought fear of castration to be driving force in repressing the complex, Lacan argues that the fantasy of the mother in the Oedipal phase is a fantasy about complete pleasure. These fantasies are symbolically castrated upon entering the symbolic order, with castration being the separation from the mother and complete pleasure through the prohibition on incest. Giving up these two fundamental fantasies is crucial for entering the realm of language. The repression of these fantasies is made in order to receive a cental signifier, termed by Lacan as "the name of the father". The name of the father signifies absence and repression, the lack which is the result of repressing the fantasy about the mother.

Lacan's "name of the father" is a symbolic father (which can also be a woman) which is identified with the prohibiting function. This is one of Lacan most important innovations in subject theory, the idea that the subject not only becomes a subject only upon acquiring language and entering the symbolic order, but that he himself is also constructed as language. Under "the name of the father" Lacan imagines the subject's psyche as functioning the same manner language does, for example through metonyms and metaphors.

Suggested reading:

Desire According to Lacan – summary

Desire is one of Lacan's central concepts and he employs it to describe the relation formed upon entering the symbolic order or language. Lacan holds that the first object in a baby's life is not just a source of satisfaction but also of alienage and dissatisfaction and it will therefore remain forever as something which cannot be symbolized (the "thing" which cannot be identified with "the real"). This alienated experience, which originates in an object, is internalized by the subject and becomes private and intimate. Thus alienation and absence become the center of the subject. Lacan explains alienation as the product of the initial necessity to be understood and interpreted by others. The baby according to Lacan "suffers" a long period of dependence in which he cannot sustain his own needs and is dependent upon others. The baby therefore has to express his needs as a claim of demand directed at the Other. By crying the baby signifies his needs and appeals to the other which satisfies his needs. The other's presence therefore takes on an importance for its own sake, and not just as something which satisfies the baby's needs. The other is now love. The baby now cries not only for food or attendance, but also to be loved which comes with the need to be cared for. But the other cannot fully care for the baby, and cannot meet the love demanded of him. And even when needs are met the demand directed towards the other, that asking for love, remains unfulfilled. This insufficiency which can never be fully satisfied is termed by Lacan as desire. Desire is primarily a desire for love.

But even though desire is a relation to something absent, Lacan hold that desire is not necessarily negative. This lack, this absence of love embodies in desire is what according to Lacan drives us for action, creation and recognition. Desire is what drives us.     

Suggested reading on Lacan: