I'm just getting into Lacan but I'm wondering if one can experience the mirror stage and remember it. The mirror stage is always portrayed as experienced during infancy, but could you experience it at some later age and recall the experience? Or is it simply restricted to the early developmental stages of childhood?

My background is in Hegelian philosophy. I’ve read some Zizek & Fink’s The Lacan Subject, and am now looking to read primary text. From what I’ve heard of the Éctris, I think I’d be better off with seminars. I guess my question is twofold: what do you recommend I start with? Is Lacan really as incomprehensible as people say?

Lacan puts a lot of emphasis on the influence of the particulars of language in mental development. How does he deal with languages that are very different in structure? For example, he seems to emphasise the moment when the child learns the word "I", or in french "Je". While all language have some way of referring to the first person, we can take as an example Japanese, where in the majority of cases where we would use the pronoun in english or french there is no marking of any kind whatsoever, neither a separate pronoun nor a conjugation on the verb. There are a number of different first person pronouns, which vary on the basis of such matters as formality and politeness, but in most cases one simply infers the subject of object of the sentence through context. Does this not surely have an impact on the mental development of the Japanese speaker?

Hello. I've been trying to access Lacan's analysis ok Freud's sublimation, but English is not my first language so can anyone help me understand his view in simple terms?

This is really a question about Freud and not Lacan but seems like worth a try to post it here:

In his three essays text, Freud says that libido is the same in men and women and to the extent he can consider it masculine or feminine he says the libido is of a masculine nature. (As I recall a footnote explains by this he means that libido is of an 'active' nature, regardless of the aim towards which it is directed.)

In this text Freud doesn't really provide any examples about what he has observed among his patients that lead him to this conclusion. But I was wondering if there are other texts by his Freud which might help to understand how he formed these ideas? I am particularly interested in any case studies mentioned. I can't recall anything to that effect off the top of my head from what I've read but maybe someone has suggestions? (I haven't read his analysis of the Wolfman but perhaps there is something there?)

Is anyone aware of a guide that is a structured presentation of at least some of the core principles of Lacanian Psychoanalysis? Or, even better, such a structured guide that has the major themes linked in some way in an effort to present a more coherent "image" of, at least, the major themes (the symbolic register, jouissance, etc)?

Hi, I'm going to Paris in a few months and I'm interested in attending the Ecole. From what I've been told, lessons are free and in the evening, from Monday to Thursday. Is this correct? Does anyone have more specific infos? I know that courses started I September, but as far as I know anyone can join whenever. Do you also know if lessons are structured in a way so that students have to actively participate in debates? I'm not a good French speaker, I've studied it in school 12 years ago so I remember barely nothing: I think I can manage listening, and after some time (I'll be in Paris for 5 months) lessons will be much easier, but if active speaking is required I'd have a rough time. Thanks in advance! :)

I use the German Translation from Gondek. (Schriften 1, p51)

Quote: "Gewiss hat sich keiner verdienstvoller um diese Seiten bemüht als der eine, der uns nahe steht, für den dabei letztlich nur die Hypostase anzuprangern war, die seinen Kantianismus beunruhigte. Aber die kantianische Büste selber braucht ihr Alkali."

I don't think I have the skills to translate, but I think you will find the Passage just fine. He seems to refer to an Analyst or Philosopher or stuff, who is criticizing him from an kantian Point of View?

For me, I mainly feel like I’m able to make puns and free associate better in my daily life, so I’d be curious to hear of others’ experiences.

I figured that psychoanalysts might enjoy/be able to respond to this question because of their emphasis on dreams:

I was watching an episode of Arcane, and in an episode, one of the characters finds himself in an alternate universe/history where his life is different. I was thinking that this could be compared to a dream? Irrational events happen all the time in dreams after all. However, the character in the show doesn’t have any memories of this alternate world, only those of the “real” world. It made me wonder: is the only way to distinguish between “what’s real” (or maybe the symbolic part of our psychic structure) and dreams is the fact that memories exist in the real world but dreams are something of a different kind; we can know what’s real and not a dream by the memory of our lives. After all, if we identify more with our “real” experiences and less of our dreams, is that because only “real” experiences have a connection through time in memories while dreams are just one offs that just simply arise when we go to sleep. After all, if dreams had a consistent memory, enduring experiences in an organized succession, would we even be able to tell what are “dreams” and what is “real” from one another?

--in fact, I do not even have the full Lacan quote, but only half-remembered fragments and a vague recall of the quote's general import.

Lacan says something about "accepting the refuse that you are," about "putting oneself in the position of the objet a" and the two are connected. That 'oneself' could be the analyst or the analysand, I really don't remember...probably the former, tho.

It felt like the quote was speaking about the general goal of analysis. To accept the 'nothing' that structures our desires--the phantasmatic, flickering 'nothing' of the objet a inaugurated by our entrance into the symbolic, that (no)thing forever inaccessible because it only exists as the mark/scar/index of what gets lost with our entrance into the symbolic order--and to even INSTALL ourselves in that place of nothingness. Thus: "...accept the refuse that we are."

I am thinking of this quote because I was echoing to a friend another friend's comment ('sometimes I worry Lacan is just Buddhism for assholes') and the first friend was baffled by the connection so I tried to marshal this quote as evidence of the (admittedly tenuous) connection with Buddhism (no pedants in the comment please, no interest in defending this position--just found it funny)

But maybe the context is helpful. I think he also says something about how the speech that comes out in analysis is the odds and ends of the real (more detritus imagery) and it's this refuse that we must accept as ourselves.

Agh!

In the analytic spirit--I ask that you give me anything you have, I mean your associations, however tenuous, as they may help provoke me into what I need. If you can hit the nail on the head, all the better--but I'd appreciate a general banging around, as well.

Thanks!

I have been thinking a lot about jouissance and enjoyment (I was wrapping up Todd McGowan's "Enjoyment Right and Left" while the Democratic National Convention was bleating about "joy", a synchronicity that haunts me) and found Robert Bononno's introductory Translator's Notes in Henri Lefebvre's "Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment" really fascinating:

The title Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment is taken directly from Henri Lefebvre’s French working title, "Vers une architecture de la jouissance", and, in that sense, is unproblematic. The proverbial elephant in the room makes its appearance in the form of jouissance, a word ripe (some might say rife) with connotations that has repeatedly proven problematic to translators of contemporary French prose. Its range of associations and ambiguity is legendary, and justifications of its translation, rather than its wholesale adoption, have now become commonplace. The usual fallback position, and one I obviously do not follow here, is to leave it untranslated. One would have to examine this tactic on a case-by-case basis to explicate the underlying rationale, but the primary reason can be traced to its use in psychoanalytic texts, particularly the work of Jacques Lacan, for whom it was a core concept.

The most recent and most accurate translation of Lacan’s Écrits, by Bruce Fink, “translates” it as such; it is assumed, as Fink notes in a short glossary at the end of the book, that readers of Lacan are sufficiently familiar with the term and its meanings to preclude the need for English translation. But even for Fink, in the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis, jouissance is a form of “enjoyment”: “I have assumed that the kind of enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle (including orgasm) denoted by the French jouissance is well enough known by now to the Englishreading public to require no translation.” Of course, such familiarity is open to question, particularly outside the narrow circle of Lacanian psychoanalysts and those scholars who engage regularly with his ideas. There appears to be a tacit assumption on the part of many that its appearance in French must inevitably refer back to Lacan, thereby foreclosing any further attempt at interpretation. Lacanian discourse may have poisoned the well of jouissance for generations, but translators must be open to the possibility of other readings. Unfortunately, given Lacan’s significance as a thinker and the widespread distribution of his ideas, directly or indirectly, in twentieth-century scholarly writing, the term has become accepted as a common element of academic discourse, in need of no further explanation—and no translation. As a result, its use (and abuse) is widespread. It is worth considering, however, that the word predates its use by Lacan and has been employed, even by his contemporaries, in ways that are less troubled with multiple and often confused interpretations. In French, the word has a lengthy pedigree; its earliest use has been traced to the fifteenth century, where it is intended primarily as a form of usufruct. In the sixteenth century it began its association with what we may call “pleasure,” initially the pleasure of the senses generally and then, around 1589, sexual pleasure. Littré in his majestic, though now somewhat superannuated, dictionary of the French language traces the verb from which it is derived, jouir, to Latin gaudere. Other than its nontranslation in psychoanalytic contexts, it has been variously rendered as “pleasure,” “enjoyment,” “contentment,” “satisfaction,” “bliss.” The emphasis so often found on sexual pleasure and on orgasmic relief is misplaced; while jouissance can certainly have this meaning, its semantic range is much broader, and sexual release is not its primary meaning, as a glance at any large French monolingual dictionary will reveal. In fact, it is the sense of overall “well-being” that the verb jouir designates: “to experience joy, pleasure, a state of physical or moral well-being procured by something.” The release should be seen as one that is organic rather than purely orgasmic, one that covers a panoply of sensual and psychic satisfactions. (Moreover, since when has it been decided that “sexual pleasure” must be limited to the moment of orgasm, to the exclusion of all that precedes and follows, or that sexuality must be so instrumental, resolutely directed toward the achievement of a goal?) There are pros and cons to each of these potential translations, and each would have to be examined in the context in which it was made. But the question remains: how does Henri Lefebvre employ the term here, in this book, in the context of architectural space?

Every translation is an act of interpretation. This inevitably entails the elucidation of meaning—the evaluation of a word’s connotational and denotational elements within a microcontext of some sort (the sentence or paragraph, generally). In fiction what a word connotes may hold more weight for the translator than the various senses found in a dictionary entry. But with certain text types, nonfiction especially, we are most concerned with a word’s denotation, the class of objects that theoretically fall within its scope of reference. The characteristic that indicates that a word is a technical term (as jouissance would be for Lacanian psychoanalysis) is its restricted scope of reference. That scope can be relatively large or relatively small, but it is not unlimited, does not extend to the limits of general language as a whole. The language of the sciences, law, or finance are prime examples of such restricted scope. To leave a word untranslated is to imply that it is so uniquely bound up with a culture that it is untranslatable (croissant or baguette, for example) or to signify that it is a term of art employed as intended by specialists in a given field, usually for historical reasons (voir dire in the field of law, for example). Jouissance, of course, has escaped the cage of Lacanian psychoanalysis and been used with an equally complex range of associations, primarily psychoanalytical, by other scholars, but its appearance in an English context is intended to isolate and identify its pedigree in Lacanian psychoanalysis. To have left the word untranslated would have been to have made such an assumption, whereas it is used, as Lefebvre’s text demonstrates, “to lay out a broad field of investigation ... often ... within and against a whole family of concepts such as bonheur, plaisir, volupté, and joie” (see the Introduction).

There are a number of overriding factors in the use of “enjoyment” as a translation for jouissance: its inclusion in the title of the book and the weight that must be assigned to this, and its recurrence throughout the text in various and wide-ranging contexts. While Lefebvre was familiar with Lacan’s work, nothing in Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment indicates his employment of the word in the sense(s) used by Lacan—in other words, as a psychoanalytic “term of art.” “Pleasure” as a translation of jouissance is a possibility, but the French language has a perfectly adequate word to express that concept, le plaisir, and its translation is relatively unproblematic. More important, as Łukasz Stanek notes in his Introduction, Lefebvre changed the title from Vers une architecture du plaisir, which had been suggested by Mario Gaviria, to Vers une architecture de la jouissance. There was, therefore, no justification for its use here as a translation of Lefebvre’s jouissance. Additionally, given the nature of Lefebvre’s text and his theorization of space, a more active word was needed. “Pleasure” and “bliss,” and their synonyms, refer to states of being rather than to a mode that would involve the active engagement of the subject over time, a way of being. “Enjoyment,” in spite of its humble workaday simplicity and lack of academic standing, has the virtue of reflecting such activity, one that is commonplace, easily accessible, and liable, even likely, to be associated with the experience of architecture or an architectural site or a (lived) space generally. Both concrete and capable of duration, it accords with Lefebvre’s vision of space as something not merely conceived or perceived, something abstracted or purely representational, but something lived and, yes, enjoyed in the process of organic unfolding. Lefebvre’s notion of space and, by extension, architectural space is that of an actualized, embodied space and would strongly call into question any attempt to interpret his use of jouissance as something abstract, much less purely psychoanalytical. Lefebvre was notoriously antipathetic toward academicism and its jargon and what he referred to as the “violence of scholarly abstraction.” In his discussion of psychology and psychoanalysis and their relation to architecture, he writes, “Knowledge struggles to reduce: uncertainty to certainty, ambiguity to the determinate, silence to speech, spontaneity to deliberation, the concrete to the abstract, pleasure to thought, and pain to the absence of thought” (chapter 8). Such a view would support a more general reading of jouissance, one that affords room for the living, breathing subject to engage with the world fully and completely.

In the film the Wild Robot, Dreamwork's latest animated special, there is an interesting exchange that demonstrates the power of the father, even in his absence. The role of a father is, against the conservative suggestions of Bruce Fink, carried by a single mother, represented by the movies main character- a robot named Roz.

Let's talk about the many ways ROZZUM unit 7134, aka Roz is an excellent representative of the Paternal metaphor. In the beginning of the film she is a mere automaton, created for service and tasks, lost in wilderness. Her instrumentalization falls on deaf ears of the animals of the forest, as like one lost in the Tower of Babel she's unable to communicate them. She begins the instantiation of the father function with the most basic elementary unit of the symbolic order: acquiring Language. The film displays her intro in the beginning with her sitting in stasis, analyzing the animals and reprogramming herself to understand animal speech.

After learning to speak, she soon accidentally smashes a bird and her nest, but adopts one of their single gosling ducks that hatches, imprinting on him as its mother. He becomes not her only point of contact with the world, but rather his introduction changes her world entire view. The relationship between the mother and son is the main plot in the film, but it demonstrates the transformative aspect of the Name of the Father. As Roz herself says midway through the film, summarizing the Paternal Metaphor beautifully to another Roz-Unit:

"My responses to problems increasingly rely on improvised solutions. The processing that used to happen here (her head), is now coming more from here. (Pointing to her chest) [...] I'm just making stuff up, I don't know what I'm doing. I have to, I have to because he's relying on me."
"You over road your programming?"
"I have been overriding my code for months."

And thus she does overwrite herself, going from a programmed entity of pure rationality and data among a horde of animals driven by instinct (A beautiful duality of the psychotic aperture), to a being that must use make believe, imitation, improvised bonds and creativity to release both herself and the forest from their devastating drive instincts. She cares for Brightbull the duck until he grows up properly, going thru strides to teach him to fly and take care of himself so he may fly with a flock of other Ducks, joining the Big Other.

"Roz is a sophisticated piece of technology who washes up on an island solely inhabited by animals. Longing for a purpose, the sentient machine forges relationships with the local wildlife and becomes the adoptive mother of a newly-hatched gosling named Brightbill."

Now, if the paternal function can be replicated by motherhood and other familial roles I would ask where exactly does this leave the literal biological father. Is he useless? Is he fundamentally unnecessary, redundant or is he fundamentally a necessary part of the family? These questions are central to Lacanian thought, but often ignored. I think this is why the question is often bug-beared and poked by conservative leaning figureheads like Bruce Fink to assail their anxieties about masculinity and the role of biological fatherhood in the subject, oft given an overly-dogmatic and literal brush of paint to try to bring the Father back.

But ironically what I think the Name of the Father does is not anchor the importance of Fathers but the opposite- it brings them into question and opens the dialogue, because if even a single mother with all her robotic thing-ness can serve the lacanian Father, what should a dad do? The whole point of the paternal metaphor is that the father is always absent, and it is precisely this absence that grants him the power to set up the framework for social reality.

The Father is always a signifier, and you only ever encounter his traces in society; they are never “personified” by some actual living father figure. The “Real” father omnipresent without the lack or absences that NOTF's imaginative and social powers introduces, can only lead to a psychic deadlock and destructive gaze upon the subject. We see this in the film's climax when Roz's father- represented by the factory machines of Universal Dynamics (What's Universal about them? We could say a University Discourse in all its tyranny, as Zizek reminds us the USSR in all its utopian neurosis was) attempt to take Roz back by force and burn the forest down, and must be fought back by the animals to rescue their Oedipal Mother.

The father is thus always only a signifier of the break from demand/drive to desire. As the film shows at the very end Roz, having raised her duck son, must release Bright Bill to the skies to fly home and then leave herself to return to where she belongs, signifying a father's death (marked by the separation between the parent and child) that marks an absence which is not filled, but rather an opening that allows the subject's fluidity and free movement through the unconscious order. This loss has the effect that the child must not be a slave to the father, i.e. their own drive repetition and psychic reality, but rather find the child's own place in the world. We see this common in many whimsical child's stories: E.T., Iron Giant, arguably Toy Story. The parent must always release their child into the symbolic realm to let them find their own way. Mary Poppins must fly away at the end after imparting her magical lessons on imaginative and social cooperation.

We could say the paternal father has three attributes:

1. He creates a prohibition, drawing the line at demand/drive and having a soothing curtailing on its vices (hunger and want, envy, anxieties about the Other) via the circuit loop of desire.

Roz performs this twice- first by raising her son away from the dangers and corruption of the forest, and then again from herself and her own presence by teaching him to fly away, while she herself leaves the forest.

2. He does not intervene directly to prohibit the libidinal relation but rather opens up sexuality, i.e. he allows Difference

During the film Roz does this by uniting the forest animals together, predator and prey alike and teaching them to overcome their differences in cooperative unity.

3. He sets up the Law as the signifier, and this signifier introduces Lack

And for the third,, imagine what a handshake, a series of shared jokes, a signature or shared social code does. As signifier it recognizes certain things are off limits (Harming the Other or exploiting them, letting harm come to the other and trusting it won't act destructively towards them), letting go of the uncertainties one encounters. We see this liberally in the movie, with Roz able to imitate others via mimicry and uses them to regularly play with her son. One of the earliest things parents teach to kids, is how to play with toys and use their imagination- effectively applying the NOTF even pre-verbally.

By the NOTF introducing an absence, an uncertain but desired and intentional future is created for the involved subjects. Lack for Lack. What does this mean?

As shown in the film, the father is always a symbolic function. When you ask for him, you're never answered with anything other than silence. Rather than trying to create a reality-based relationship within him, we look to the traces of absences and Lack, i.e. the holes he creates in world that structure our reality. This is primarily what makes Lacan's Object-a and his Object-Subject relationship fundamentally different than the kantian paradigm and Das-Ding, in the Lacanian thoughtworld the Object of the subject is fundamentally a thing of nothing, given speculative psychic investment and libidinal structure. Thingness, becomes something we recognize as fundamentally human, which is why the thing in the film (a wild robot) becoming a perfect representative of motherhood and humanity veers towards pure metaphoric brilliance.

Take Brightbill the duck in the movie. As a child Roz doesn't know how to raise him properly or what he'll grow up to be, what the process is nor the end result. She, engaging with the difficult hardships of motherships works an improvised method for an uncertain and ambiguous result. We see this not only in other children's cinema but throughout culture- Gods were commonly signaled by their emphasis on weather, seasons, animals, always for the sake of controlling the future, via makeshift games and rituals. The fetiche object came about through thing-y totem dolls and african artifacts. The earliest thingness was in unitary tracts measured by lines across cave walls, and before that fruits and basic primitive tools, i.e. the father can even be found in the apple of good and evil.

Why was this apple so controversial for ancient societies before NOTF was Law or accepted? Because its power lay in lack, in disobedience and separation from the Real father and the fundamental drives which Antiquity considered the principle passions of Man.

It would seem, to throw off the Drive-laden track of future certainty and instinct, the speaking subject requires the contingency of something not understood or undefinable, something Lacking rather than absolute. Lack begets lack, Other bridges to Otherness. That's why Thingness is so important to the Oedipal Father. He needs not the authority of omnipresence but the enigmas of das ding to serve as a breaker, as we see even in Lacan's take on Freud's Mose and Monotheism, the totem representing the dead father is key here. When we have something outside the social-symbolic order of language to teach us why its so valuable, we gain an opening onto desire, to have an agency and autonomy. Desire circulates around Lack fundamentally afterall, as Lacan teaches us.

Roz brings other obvious connotations of the NOTF to mind, with memorable teaching scenes like her gathering all the animals of the forest during a harsh blizzard. Huddled inside her warm hut to survive but acting as predator and prey do, they all make the anonymous, collective decision to put aside that relationship and their hungry instincts to enter a new social contract. They all promise not to eat each other. As the mother, father and paternal metaphor rolled into one, Roz raises a child, teaching him not only to be like her but to separate from her and become like 'himself', making up his identity as she did. While not in the position of a single parent home where the father is absent, the mother can still fill his role in many cases. I would note that many of the single parent homes often do not have father but deliver the NOTF, or do have a father present with no mother and fail to do-so.

This movie demonstrates the function of the Paternal Metaphor is to provide a stability to the subjects social and psychological world, rather than an actual figure. It is in this context that the Mother can deliver the father function, whether in a nuclear family with him or absent altogether. I hope this helps explain the film a bit. It's an exciting piece of cinema I'd recommend. Even all my jargon and theorizing aside, it's actually a really excellent and heartwarming film whose appeal seems universal, as Dreamworks has been known to do.

I'd love to hear your guys opinion on this.

I'm reading and writing about Joan copjecs book imagine there's no woman and I'd really appreciate any advice or pointers anyone is willing to give. I'm trying to relate it through a greater narrative of Gender and sexuality studies and I want to know how to navigate and talk about the subject to better understand it.

Is happiness symbolic? Is it embedded in the language? Can you feel happy without language?

Is there happiness before language? What does the infant do when he laughs or giggles? Is he responding to sounds, words?

Starting from the interpretation of Freud's dreams and then to Lacan's vision of dreams, how are hallucinations (can they be interpreted as a lack in language?). It is not very clear to me what is the latent and manifested content in these. Also can the nightmare just be a derivative of an unconscious hallucination?

https://x.com/Coranalyste/status/1834927490969501730

« La psychanalyse vous permettrait d’espérer assurément de tirer au clair l’inconscient dont vous êtes sujet. Mais chacun sait que je n’y encourage personne, personne dont le désir ne soit pas décidé. »

"Psychoanalysis would allow you the hope of clarifying the unconscious to which you are subject. But everyone knows that I do not encourage anyone to do so, anyone whose desire is not decided."

Is there any Seminar or Ecrit where Lacan particularly explains his idea about Voice as an Object a? Also, I am looking for an article written by JA Miller entitled "Jacques Lacan et la voix" that was published in QUARTO No 54, is it accessible online?

Thank you

If one is buying Freud's entire collection, whats the best one to go with? Specifically for a Lacanian. Is the Revised Solms version worth it?

I’m listening to Sheldon George talk about race and trauma and he is saying “ah te” is a barrier to the real. What word or symbol is he saying so I can look that up?

When Zizek says, “You are just perverts who are secretly horny for the apocalypse,” does he refer to Lacanian Jouissance?

If yes, what do you think about the way Zizek has chosen to interpret the concept of Jouissance? Does the phrase do justice to Lacan's theory?

Also are there any quotes/passages from literature (fiction) that you think perfectly capture the essence of Jouissance?

I see that Lacan said that your desire is in fact the other desire and Girard said that you desire the desire of the other, but it fact it is not really the same thing?

What is the purpose of ideal ego in human interactions? Does it want security in relationship?

Lacan's famous aphorism, the unconscious Is structured like a language, flags the rereading of the Freudian unconscious by way of structural linguistics that was so central to his work. Through his theory of the unconscious structured like a language, does Lacan effectively obviate the Freudian distinction between unconscious and preconscious and thing presentations and word presentations, respectively?

If, as Lacan emphasises, the unconscious can only be accessed through the speech of the patient, and, for Freud himself, unconscious thing presentations are not accessible in and of themselves but only through subsequent mediation by word presentations, why might it be valuable to sustain this original Freudian distinction? Lacan's Rome Report and Seminar I seem to fairly clearly elucidate the problems & pitfalls that came with other contemporaneous schools of psychoanalysis' (Ego Psychology & Object Relations) attempts to posit access to the analysands unconscious beyond their discourse, whereby the analyst's imaginary is effectively imputed on to the patient whether it be through notions of libidinal object relations or preverbal fantasy, or countertransference.

Can anyone elucidate this further for me or point me to text/s where these issues have been critically explored? To my understanding, there was some debate around these issues within the context of French psychoanalysis by contemporaries of Lacan, such as Jean Laplanche, Andre Green, etc.

Hi everybody!

I'm working on library research paper about the concept of 'lack'. I'm thinking about relying on authors such as Lacan, Adam Phillips, Julia Kristeva and maybe Fromm (not sure about him yet).

Which author comes to your mind in the field of psychoanalysis when you think of 'lack'? and also I'd be glad if you could share some thoughts on it - maybe some associations or links to other ideas. I'm thinking about discussing the concept of lack in relation to alienation, foreignness within the self and desire. Any idea would help, thanks!

Recently I’ve been reading on Post-Structuralist and Lacanian literatures before stumbling across this thought in regards to Lacan’s work on “Objet petit a”, the unattainable and forever elusive object(s) of desire, and how it may represent an unconscious psychological impetus for the onset of Anorexia and other similar EDs.

Objet petit a depicts the subjects insatiable desire for a signified attainment; how after obtaining an objective, the subject will simply redirect their desire towards the next signifier, relentlessly pursuing something only to be met without. To want, to do, to have, is to be.

Although It’s a mere conjecture, I was thinking of how Anorexia may develop as a resolution to this overwhelming dilemma of pursuit that entraps them, via endlessly pursuing a morbidly emaciated state until death ensues. To escape the perpetuation of wanting, doing, having, and being, by terminating the attainability of “having” (an asymptote of atrophication) until “being” (alive), ends. And Is it plausible that Anorexics may develop this psychotic resolution as the unconscious realm realizes and attempts to evade the perpetually dissatisfied and unappeasable reality of their exogenous environment (parents or societal norm’s persistent displeasure towards them, regardless of how many accolades they achieve; instilling the belief in the AN patient that they are worthless and will never be perfect enough) or internal dissonances (an insatiable desire to attain achievements, never satisfied with themselves and obsessively attempting to perfect themselves).

I also recognize the genetic predispositions, sociological factors, Freud’s theory on rejection of feminine aptitudes, and obviously OCD correlations & Hilde Brunch’s thesis regarding Anorexia & autonomous control, I simply want receive some insight on whether my correlation between Lacan’s work of Objet Petit A was interpreted correctly and could be used to explain a facet of the psychogenesis for anorexics. Hopefully my conjecture isn’t horribly specious.

I'm not a total beginner in his thought, having read the Introductory Lectures as well as Totem and Taboo, and Civilisation and its' Discontents, but having tried to read various works by and relating to Lacan I've realised I probably ought to read a bit more. Which works would be most important or useful to me in trying to understand Lacan? Alternatively, if anyone knows of good summaries of the prerequisite Freud that might be found online, say on youtube, I would be very much obliged.

The graph of desire is not, mathematically, a graph, in that a graph is a collection of nodes, and arcs whose sole property is the pair of nodes it connects (and possibly a direction between them). Albeit that Lacan's diagram more closely resembles a graph than many other things so called, and albeit that the name "graph of desire" I understand only to be applied to the diagram later on, I have to ask the question what is it.

Let me be a little more clear on what I mean, since I don't mean simply "give me an explanation of the diagram" nor do I mean that I need reminding that Lacan used various formalisms more as pedagogical devices than as real tools. Rather, seeing the diagram, there are various concepts belonging to Lacan's thought, which are related by various paths. What does a path (or and intersection of paths) represent? Do they represent the formation of these functions in the mind over time, or perhaps a transmission of information, or, as seems more likely, something completely different?

I am currently taking an Introduction to Lacan course. In our reading, the author says that perverts are almost always men and that female masochism is a male fantasy. They didn't go any further than merely clarifying why they will use male pronouns in the chapter. Could anyone explain this idea further or point me in the direction of further reading?