Introduction

We inhabit a world of surfaces. When in love, we present ourselves to our beloved as attractively as we can. At a job interview, we try to impress the interviewer by saying some things that we can hardly live up to – so that afterwards we have to run with this image and may achieve things we did not even know were possible. Also, in a struggle, we make ourselves bigger than we are to intimidate the other person. This role of the surface even appears to increase in a life full of media technologies. Increasingly, we meet our friends on Facebook, and our web profile may be very ‘superficial’ but nevertheless has very real effects. These examples show that a human being is divided ‘between its being and its semblance’ (Lacan 1998b: 107). Nevertheless, it ‘is through this separated form of himself that the being comes into play in his effects’ (ibid.). Apparently, semblance is involved where our being is at stake, and human consciousness is largely a matter of effects.

I hope you’ll consider consciousness to occur each time – and it occurs in the most unexpected and disparate places – there’s a surface such that it can reproduce what is called an image.

(Lacan 1988b: 49)

It is useful, then, to think of a third area of human living, one neither inside the individual nor outside in the world of shared reality.

(Winnicott 1971: 110) The intermediary space between individual ‘inner life’ and social ‘outer life’ (their interface or surface) is an important space for human existence and development. Here, I seek to describe this space by presenting fantasy in the work of Lacan as the primary medium for the subject of desire. Although at first sight fantasy seems to be nothing but an imaginary duplication, its images are always related to others, so that the ‘double’ is included from the start in the signifying order of intersubjective relations. Thus, the crucial question about the image (in mimicry) is: What effects does it have on the other, what does it mean to her?