Lacan's Linguistic Hypothesis

January has been Lacan month for me!  Here are a couple links:  Lacan and the Mirror Stage and Lacan: The Four Discourses.

Today's blog is on Lacan's Linguistic Hypothesis.  Lacan made a non-controversial claim that the primary characteristic that sets human beings apart from animals is the fact that human beings can speak.  Going further, it would follow that in order to understand the human psyche, we would need to look at language.  For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language.  This sets him apart from Freud's hypothesis that the unconscious was made up of instinct and certainly theorists influenced by Freud like Jung who hypothesized that the unconscious has mystical significance.  Lacanian Lionel Bailly said, "For Lacan, the unconscious is comprised of symbolic elements, and because we are speaking beings for whom language is the main vehicle of representation, its building block are words, and its structure is grammatical... This is why discourse in the setting of an analytical session is the only way of working effectively with it" (42).

Along with Freud, Lacan argued that the unconscious is comprised of what a person represses.  As made up of words, this would mean that a person could not consciously express the 'unconscious discourse'.  This discourse makes itself intelligible through dreams, slips of the tongue, pathological symptoms, the words we don't say, repetitions, and self-defeating acts of the person.  We can start to uncover this discourse through psychoanalysis or serious self-reflection/criticism/questioning.

What would an unconscious made up of a discourse look like?  We would need to look at the work of Ferdinand de Saussure to grasp it.  Saussure argued against the view that language is essentially the matching up of a thing in the world with a name.  The common way of thinking about language up until Saussure's breakthrough was that you had a language if you had, say, a physical cat lying on the couch, and you could point to that animal and match it to a word: "cat".  Language is essentially a large number of these words, all indicating different things.  Saussure's breakthrough was that language works in a different way - it involves a sound-image (signifier) and a concept (signified).  The signifier can be thought of as "the hearer's psychological imprint of the sound" (a spoken or written word), "the impression it makes on our senses" (43).  The signified is not a thing, like a physical cat, but the idea of a cat.  The idea of a cat is far more than an object - it includes its relationship with other concepts.  In ancient Egyptian culture, the idea of a cat would have spiritual significance.  Today it would not.  The idea of a cat for someone allergic to cats will be very different than for someone who is not.  Or someone self-identified as a "dog-person" will understand "cat" very differently than someone who is a self-professed "cat-person".  The point is that "cat", as a signifier, will never point simply to a physical object, but will make sense according to a whole network of meanings.  This is Saussure's primary breakthrough, and Lacan was inspired by it when making his linguistic hypothesis.

In consciousness, human beings think according to this Saussurian model.  From the very beginning of experience - as babies - we form concepts from within networks of meanings - the simplest being dialectical reasoning: we understand pleasure only when we understand pain, or a mother's presence only when we understand a mother's absence.  Even before we can speak, we start to think in this way.  This all exists within consciousness.

Once language is actually formulated in the human subject, the unconscious becomes possible.  An unbearable thought can be expressed, and therefore repressed.  The signifier (the sound-image) can be buried because out in the open, according to its place in a vast network of meanings, it is associated with emotional pain.  We push that signifier back and bar it from this conscious network.  As such, we see that for Lacan, the unconscious is made up of repressed signifiers or particular combinations of signifiers.  As a person's network of meanings (which is conscious) can significantly change throughout their life, these repressed signifiers, or combination of signifiers, can be recovered and people can re-appropriate them.  They can re-imagine those painful phonetic elements, this being a step towards curing pathologies.  Bailly writes, "These elements recombine into new signifiers; and perhaps these new signifiers might recombine into new chains" (48).

As a personal example, upon graduating High School, college took on particularly painful meanings for me.  I associated school with boredom, distraction from my work as a musician, a road toward an uninspiring status-quo, etc.  Ultimately, I associated it with failure as I continually dropped out, taking F's for lack of even the ambition to officially drop the classes.  "School" became a repressed signifier.  When I walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain, I underwent a radical self-transformation.  I adopted an entirely different linguistic structure.  Words made sense according to 'pilgrimage', 'journey', and 'adventure'.  "School" was brought up from my unconscious and understood according to this new linguistic structure.  I was able to go back to school and eventually earn a Master's Degree in Philosophy because it made sense to me according to these more empowering meanings.  Studying philosophy in an institution became a 'pilgrimage'.

Understanding the unconscious as filled with repressed signifiers helps Lacanian psychoanalysts make sense of dreams, as they are the one of the many "discourses of the unconscious".  Lacan wrote, "the dream has the structure of a sentence... of a rebus... it has the structure of a form of writing [which] reproduces the simultaneously phonetic and symbolic use of signifying elements, which can also be found both in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and in the characters still used in China."  When a Lacanian psychoanalyst listens to an account of a dream, they will look for signifiers that are metaphoric and have a metonymic structure.  They will try and track down hidden associations through language as you describe your dream (you choose certain words or phrases to describe it).  Bailly gives an example of how this might work:

"A young woman dreams that she's looking into a big chest full of clothes and strange objects.  She finds what looks like the skin of a monkey but realizes that it is actually still alive.  She experiences a sudden outburst of violence and crushes one of the animal's feet with her bare hands.  She can feel the bones cracking.


"During the session, this patient described how she 'crushed the monkey's foot' , and tried unsuccessfully to remember a scene in her life in which a monkey or a foot were involved.  When asked to go through the description again, she says, 'I can feel his foot being broken in my grip... the crushing of his toes... his tootsies' and suddenly remembers that Tootsie was the childhood nickname of her older sister, with whom she had a relationship of intense rivalry" (56).

In contrast to Freud, trying to track down dreams with reference to unconscious mechanisms, Lacanians track them down through investigating the Subject's choice of words.  They try to use dreams to unearth repressed signifiers so that the Subject may be better able to re-imagine their meanings.

One last note on Lacan's Linguistic Hypothesis would be that the "backbone" of the human Subject are "Master Signifiers".  These are those words and phrases that are continually repeated by a person, whether or not they will make sense to anyone else.  Bailly refers to them as a linguistic tic.  They are incredibly important because they serve the role of protecting the Subject's ego by redirecting signifiers in a signifying chain such that they will become bearable.  When I associated "School" with boredom and failure, I did so with recourse to the Master Signifier "Grunge".  I thought of myself as grunge - as Eddie Vedder and Layne Staley, even as I had little in my life that could compare with their lives.  I talked as if I was part of a scene, even as my band was not going anywhere.  I clung to the idea that we were on the verge of something big - that being Grunge meant something.  It helped me redirect signifiers such as "school" - it helped me keep that painful concept at bay.  "Grunge" became a mask I could hide behind as life kept pushing against it (like the night my band played for an audience of my Uncle and the bartender on a Monday night in downtown San Diego - a complete failure, but we were "paying our dues" - another master signifying chain allowing the potentially uncomfortable signifiers to reorganize themselves into something tolerable: 'failure' meant 'paying your dues' as opposed to 'failing').  The Lacanian psychoanalyst will search for these Master Signifiers to help bring out their opposite - those repressed signifying chains with which our pathologies stem.

This is a brief account of Lacan's Linguistic Hypothesis - an interesting theory with which valuable psychoanalysis can be done.  But is it true...