What is the difference between freud and lacan

Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Institutional Login. LOG IN. Through this, a sense of identity is established by the infant who experiences its body being reflected in the environment.

As opposed to Freud, Lacan viewed the ego as being an illusion and this formed his earliest phase of re-thinking psychoanalysis. Perhaps, the self found in the mother is imaginary and can only function as an ideal. To put it roughly, what differentiates between these two egos is that the ideal ego is a memory trace of a lost narcissist self love while the ideal ego is a dynamic formation that propels an individual into the future.

This distinction was based on reality; idealization of reality and a reality of the fact that reality is lost forever. Unlike the Freudian notion of the ego, Lacanian subject is not interior to the psyche but transindividual to mean that it shifts with context just like speech and language.

Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, developed the three orders, commonly known as the tripartite. The tripartite consisted of the id, the ego and the superego. However, this unity among the tripartite does not exist in an individual from the start since the ego develops later when the individual is socialised. In other words, as the individual develops, so does the ego. The centre of this all was the libido, a sexual drive or appetite that each individual possesses and which develops through the five stages of psychosexual development as put forward by Freud: the Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latent and Genital stages.

Development is the key factor which Freud uses in making his concepts intelligible. Through these negotiations and interactions among the id, the superego and ego, an individual is able to acquire an identity. Lacan expanded upon the tripartite model of Freud and he talked about the Symbolic Order, Imaginary Order and the Real. His approach was through linguistics and literature whereby the symbolic order is a linguistic dimension, the imaginary is a field of imagery and deception and finally the Real is the unconscious that is mysterious because it remains hidden.

Because of his belief that the ego psychology and object relations theory were based upon the misreading of Freud works, Lacan had to make a distinction among his tripartite for easy understanding. To Lacan, language was the determinative dimension of human experience and not the ego or the ability to identify with objects others as regarded in psychology. Therefore, Lacan correlated the Imaginary as the sight of the ego, the Symbolic order with the paternal superego while the Real as the unconscious id.

This distinction was imperative in his re-thinking of psychoanalysis. But in this regard to the instincts, Freudian and Lacanian theories of the psyche overlap. In Freudian thinking, the undifferentiated state if fusion between the ego and the mother remains latent in adult life but according to Lacan, it only manifest itself when we identify with others.

Lacan imaginary order is the gaze, as explored by Lacan in his Mirror Stage theory of psychosexual development. To him, it is imagination, fantasy and play, the ideal ego and the ego ideal image that permanently captivates. To put it plainly then, Lacan was simply saying that we as humans are what we are because of something we experience to be missing from us, that is, our unconscious desires which can never be satisfied. When signifiers mean something then they do so in relation to each other.

If the signifier dominates the world of meaning, then this nothing or this lack , inserts itself at the very grounds of our experience as the trace of Being now lost but always retrospectively. It stands in for an absence that inserts itself as an essential component of the structure of a meaningful world. Only on the analytic level would a patient achieve the freedom to become active in realizing her own destiny in life. Lacan begins with this distinction but develops some more involved implications.

The symbolic function operates like an a priori structure the notion of the Symbolic is derived from structuralism made up of rules of behavior—language, kinship relations, relations of power, socially structured communities and groups that individuals are constrained by in their negotiations, agreements and disagreements. This a priori structure constitutes the levels of possibility and constraint that order and organize the frameworks by which we all access our world. The human imaginary begins with the mirror stage.

What this means is that a child identifies with another an image of itself in the mirror or some other similar figure like a child of the same age. The ego is made up of successive layers of such identifications but is fundamentally nothing in itself. It is not a centered structure but a series of identifications, equivalencies, oppositions. That is, the originating experience for human individuals is at once joyful and depressing: I am who I am I am somebody ; but I am not in the place that I want to be—the place of the desire of the mother.

The relation between the Symbolic Name of the Father and the Imaginary Desire of the Mother constitutes my oscillation between personal desires very idiosyncratic and the impersonal and shared universe of discourse, which I can never get outside. You cannot have imaginary relations without symbolic relations, and vice versa.

To achieve a balance between the demands of the imaginary selfish and those of the symbolic social , the analyst must temper the image-building identifications with the analytic realization of difference social, cultural etc.

There are no cozy answers for the human subject because an individual is never an integral and self-sufficient whole. Stronger ego identifications lead to problems with envy and aggression while stronger analytic awareness leads to increased sense of emptiness and lack. Mental and emotional health can therefore be measured according to the greater or lesser capacity an individual has for tolerating knowledge of the emptiness on which human experience is grounded.

Freud was struck by the similarity between the myth of Oedipus and his own discoveries of unconscious processes. The myth is most clearly dramatized in the plays of Sophocles who was a contemporary of Socrates. He discovers that he has in ignorance killed his father and that the woman he loves and has married is none other than his mother.

As a consequence of his discovery he blinds himself and exiles himself from his home. In fulfilling the oracle that begins the story he fails to escape his predestined fate. This last sentence has many resonances. Freud points out in a footnote to a later edition that it is this part of his theory that has provoked the most embittered denials, fiercest opposition and the most amusing distortions year later we are often led to suspect that this is still the case.

Thus the blinding scene is a metaphorical indication of the vicious resistance to the insights that psychoanalysis offers. Freud also, significantly, likens not the myth itself but the action of the play to the processes of psychoanalysis.