Lacan and the Symbolic Order in the Unconsciousness

The unnerving discomfort from the intermingling of generations of one family is an analogy in semiology by Jacques Lacan to explain the possible resulting feelings in the event of a deficiency in symbolic identification. Symbolic identification, or the symbolic order, is, specifically, the idea of an equal correspondence between each signifier and signified in a whole system of relations, especially in language. In the analogy of kinship, Lacan notes that the notion of belonging to one’s father’s name allows other rules to appear, such as the idea of breeding strictly within one’s own generation and the taboo of incest. Similarly for language, in which structures exist only in relation to one another, it is the base structure from which all other activity spawns. Nevertheless, Lacan observes that because these relations and structures rely entirely on each other for significance, human experience is left entirely outside of this arrangement. From this conception, Lacan argues that the signified of a signifier in speech is always an abstracted, absent thing precisely because experience is always on the outside. Moreover, despite its disassociation with the human experience, the symbolic order is in fact still rooted deep within the unconscious.

The symbolic order in the unconsciousness, argues Lacan, actually orients the way in which one thinks under the idea of self-autonomy, when in reality language is a “subjective logic” in which “freedom is not exercised in a random manner” (p. 49). These symbols are infused into a person’s sentience before they are even born by way of their parents, and their own “subjective logic.” “Symbols…envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him ‘by flesh and blood’; so total that they bring to his birth…the shape of his destiny” (p. 50). In this way the governing symbolic order finds itself perpetuated. This idea of the control of language over the unconscious continues its analogy with the idea of reproductive containment. For example, the need for an understood bloodline accounts for the reasons why one may willingly stay within the rings of their own generation and certain marriage bonds, and steer away from others.

However, there are times when the defect of speech and language (langue and parole) becomes prominent and creates a problem. Because the signified is always an absent object, conflicts appear when these “imaginary fixations,” (p. 51) otherwise known as the signified, can no longer correspond with their proper symbols and the discrepancy is clear. The absent thing, the desired object, is thus unable to secure expression, and Lacan defines these problematic times as the friction between the symbolic order and restricted desires. In these situations, a subject is unable to articulate through speech these desires and must, often unconsciously, express them in other ways.

In identifying the structuring function of the symbolic order on the unconscious mode of thinking, Lacan explains certain dissenting behaviors by way of Sigmund Freud’s method of psychoanalysis. When speech cannot support a subject’s thoughts, the thoughts and desires manifest themselves in other ways, namely in the form of neurotic conditions. Moreover, the neurotic conditions do not only indicate the incongruence of language and speech, but they are also a new appearance of the symbolic order, for they are still “speech function to the full, for it includes the discourse of the other in the secret of its cipher” (p. 52). Just as each word had its equivalent with the signified, now the signifiers are transferred from words of speech into other manifestations, namely neurosis.

Other odd behaviors aside from neurotic ones can occur during the conflict between speech and the signifier and signified in a language within a subject’s consciousness or unconsciousness, but they remain outside the essence of this essay, which is to illuminate the striking influence and power of language over one’s consciousness.

Texts of Reference
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Routledge, United Kingdom, 2001.