ABSTRACT
Despite its anal-sadistic obscurantism and related defects, Lacan’s work has much to offer. His deliteralization of Freudian discourse and humanization of the unconscious as “neither primordial nor instinctual” is invaluable, as are his distinctions between human desire and organic need and between the phallus and the penis. The Sartrean néant becomes Lacan’s manqué-à-être; the lack of being that de-stabilizes identity and generates desire. Whatever empirical support Lacan's theory of the mirror stage may or may not enjoy, his vision of the (specular) ego as an Imaginary idol or false self, distinct from the barred subject of the Symbolic opened up through “acceptance of castration” (read “crucifixion”) is too important to ignore. While Lacanian theory may seem less a “return to Freud” than a baptizing of him, Lacan’s secularized Catholicism is not to be confused with attempts to exploit his concepts in the service of religion, the triumph of which for Lacan would represent the defeat of psychoanalysis. Lacan's phallocentrism and his privileging of absence over presence, the (patriarchal) Symbolic over the (matriarchal) Imaginary that Kristeva characterizes as the semiotic, are subjected to critique, while his view of human desire as the desire of the other is affirmed. In the earlier Lacan psychosis is understood as “foreclosure” of the gap opened up between subject and object, while perversion results from failure of oedipalization to establish another, the third, as the object of the mother's desire. The later Lacan offers a view of psychosis as disconnection of the Borromean rings and the sinthome as a means of reconnecting them. A dialectical psychoanalysis transcending both the “metaphysics of presence” and the “metaphysics of absence” and capable of offering “maternal” as well as “paternal” function is affirmed.
