ABSTRACT
Responding to developments in post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Lacan explores the mother-child relationship in his fourth public seminar. He draws attention to the central role of lack in that relationship and reasons that—in addition to the more familiar psychoanalytic notions of castration and frustration—a distinct notion of lack he names “privation” is essential for making sense of the psychoanalytic subject’s development. Lacan situates all three kinds of lack with regard to his registers of experience (the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real) in order to correct the course of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, away from an emphasis on “pre-castration” frustration, back towards a Freudian assessment of castration, namely symbolic castration. This castration is both about the castration of the subject and the castration of the mother, an insight which resituates frustration and lays the foundation for the equally pivotal notion of demand in Lacan’s more well-known metapsychology of need, demand and desire.
