New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

130 PSYCHOANALYSIS
in the simplest terms is that desire will always exist in the register of
fantasy, of memory, and of impossibility. The Lacanian subject (of desire)
attempts, throughout its life, to recapture the fantasy of totality, wholeness
and unity that is associated with the primordial experience of the breast.
The original object of desire is thus created as fantasy in the difference
between the need for food and the demand for love, the difference between
the satisfaction of instinctual need and the elaborated memory of that
satisfaction. It is never, therefore, a relation to a real object independent of
subject, but a relation to fantasy. And this “fantasmatic” creation is
continually repeated throughout the life of the subject as various objects
“stand in” for what can never be fully achieved. Thus Lacanians describe
desire as “circulating endlessly from representation to representation.”
A related concept is that of the DRIVE, or instinctual energy, defined as
a dynamic process which directs the organism towards an aim. According
to Freud, an instinct has its source in a bodily stimulus; its aim is to
eliminate the state of tension deriving from the source; and it is in the
object, or thanks to it, that the instinct may achieve its aim. 3 In “Instincts
and their Vicissitudes,” Freud points out that “an instinct may undergo the
following vicissitudes: reversal into its opposite, turning around upon the
subject, repression, sublimation” (Freud 1963c:91). What is important to
note about Freud’s approach is that it distinguishes the drive from the
biological instinct. The theory of component drives accounts for both the
bisexual disposition of the child and the variability which will determine,
through an individual’s life, the kind of representation that will be
associated with the drive.
In the Freudian account, as the child grows, there is a gradual
organization of the libidinal drives (which had at first circulated
POLYMORPHOUSLY, unattached to a specific object and not motivated
in any single direction). This organization, while still centered on the
child’s own body, now channels sexuality toward various objects and aims.
The first phase of sexual life is associated with the drive to incorporate
objects (the oral stage); in the second, the anus becomes the erotogenic
zone (the anal stage); and in the third, the child’s libido is focussed on the
genitals (the phallic stage).
Our discussion of Freud and Lacan is necessarily provisional, simplified
for the sake of explanation. Given this qualification, a loose connection can
be made between Freud’s oral phase and Lacan’s MIRROR PHASE. The
second of the moments of loss which structure the life of the child in the
Lacanian formulation involves the first acquisition of “self,” that is, the
way that the subject begins to establish an identity within a universe of
meaning through a series of imaginary identifications, provoked by an
initial sense of separation, or difference. Lacan considers this development
of the self and the formation of the psyche in terms of