Символическое в психоанализе Лакана

Term in Lacanian Psychoanalysis

The Symbolic (or Symbolic Order of the Borromean knot) is the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity and bridges intersubjectivity between two subjects; an example is Jacques Lacan's idea of desire as the desire of the Other, maintained by the Symbolic's subjectification of the Other into speech. In the later psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, it is linked by the sinthome to the Imaginary and the Real.

Lacan's early work was centred on an exploration of the Imaginary, of those "specific images, which we refer to by the ancient term of imago. it set out from their formative function in the subject." Lacan's concept of the symbolic "owes much to a key event in the rise of structuralism the publication of Claude Lévi Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949. In many ways, the symbolic is for Lacan an equivalent to Lévi Strauss's order of culture:" a language mediated order of culture. Therefore, "Man speaks but it is because the symbol has made him man" which "superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature." Lacan found in Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic division of the verbal sign between signifier and signified a new key to the Freudian understanding that "his therapeutic method was 'a talking cure.'"

For a decade or so after the Rome Report, Lacan found in the concept of the Symbolic an answer to the neurotic problematic of the Imaginary: "It is the task of symbolism to forbid imaginary capture [ ] supremacy of the symbolic over the imaginary [ ] supremacy of the symbolic over the real." Accepting through Lévi Strauss the anthropological premise that "man is indeed an 'animal symbolicum'", and that "the self illumination of society through symbols is an essential part of social reality," Lacan made the leap to seeing "the Oedipus complex—in so far as we continue to recognise it as covering the whole field of our experience with its signification"—to be broken up and opened to the wider symbolic order. Lacan's shorthand for that wider world was the Other—"the big other, that is, the other of language, the Names of the Father, signifiers or words [which] [ ] are public, communal property." But though it is an essentially linguistic dimension, Lacan does not simply equate the symbolic with language, since the latter is involved also in the Imaginary and the Real. The symbolic dimension of language is that of the signifier, in which elements have no positive existence but are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.

With the increasing use of Lacanian theory in psychoanalysis in the Sixties, the Symbolic was seen more as an inseparable quality of the human condition, rather than as a register for a therapeutic cure all. Lacan's critical attention began to shift instead to the concept of the Real, seen as "that over which the symbolic stumbles [ ] that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation [ ] the umbilical cord of the symbolic." despite his own earlier warning of the dangers if "one wishes to ignore the symbolic articulation that Freud discovered at the same time as the unconscious his methodical reference to the Oedipus complex." will in time prove as fruitful as that of the symbolic order perhaps remains to be seen. Part of Lacan's enduring legacy will surely however remain bound up with the triumphal exploration of the symbolic order that was the Rome Report: "Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together [ ] the shape of his destiny."