New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

132 PSYCHOANALYSIS
child is divided from the moment it forms a selfconception…. In saying
‘That’s me,’ it is saying ‘I am another’” (Lapsley and Westlake 1988:69, 68).
Another moment of overcoming absence in the life of the subject
involves the acquisition of language—and thus the ability to symbolize—
described by Freud (and expanded on by Lacan) through the example of
the child’s FORT/DA game. In 1915 Freud theorized his toddler
grandson’s game with a spool of thread as the child’s manipulation of a
meaningful “symbol” in an effort to control the experience of loss. The
game involved the child’s throwing the reel over the side of his cot and
retrieving it, accompanied by “o-o-o-o” (“fort”/gone) and “da” (there).
Hypothesizing that the child had made the spool into a symbol for his
mother, Freud noted that the child’s pleasure derived from “himself staging
the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach” (Freud 1959:
34).
Lacan places the emphasis not on mastery but on the capacity to
understand language as a system of differences in the Saussurean sense, in
which meaning comes from the relations between words rather than from
their intrinsic properties. Once the child has made the spool into a “sign”
for the mother, he can also only interpret this sign in terms of what it is
not: it is present because it is not absent, and vice versa. Lacan connects
this activity of symbolizing to the fundamental absence at the heart of all
signifying systems, relating this situation (in which the word is never
adequate to the thing) to the primary gap which engenders desire:
[T]he game of the cotton-reel is the subject’s answer to what the
mother’s absence has created on the frontier of his domain—the edge
of his cradle—namely, a ditch, around which one can only play at
jumping…. [I]t is in the object to which the opposition is applied in
act, the reel…to [which] we will later give the name it bears in the
Lacanian algebra—the petit a…. The activity as a whole symbolizes
repetition…it is the repetition of the mother’s departure as cause of a
Spaltung [splitting] in the subject—overcome by the alternating game,
fort-da…. It is aimed at what, essentially, is not there.
(Lacan 1977:62–3)
This quote is of primary importance to psychoanalytic film theory because
it contains three cornerstone concepts—splitting, fort/da, and object small
a—which, while rarely mentioned explicitly in film analyses (a
disappearing character may be described as “representing” the object small
a, for example), form the basic matrix from which all
psychoanalyticsemiotic discussions of film derive. The split subject of
psychoanalysis is the spectator of psychoanalytic film theory; the presence
and absence of the fort/da game is its central signifying mechanism; and the