Jacques Lacan: An Introduction to his Psychoanalysis

Overview

Lacan was a reminder of something fundamental. He examined human nature and human condition against any narrowly defined parameters and claimed ignorance of the self, which does not exist as a constitution, as a sum of attitudes revolving around a core, but, instead, as a borderland: it is not a stable, recognizable entity, but an open field of outside forces, false identifications, and self-deceptions, it is a fusion of inside and outside, a collage, a collection of partial views. For Lacan, there is a fundamental inadequacy-internal and integral-a biological insufficiency, a lack of being, a lack of ontol­ogical autonomy, an ontological uncertainty on which suffering is founded and which marks the ultimate tragedy of the human condition. Because one lacks innate being and wants to eradicate this loss, one identifies with persons and images, while the ego is this internalization of otherness.