Madness in English-Canadian Fiction - ub-dok - Universität Trier

Extending Freud's theories now by integrating his former mentioned insight on the
signifier, Lacan suggests some rather provocative ratios in which "the unconscious is
the whole structure of language"89 and its "dream-work follows the laws of the
signifier"90. So where Freud sees the general dynamic of psychic "distortion", Lacan
sights the floating signifier. Examples for Freud of such distortions formed in the
unconscious include dream substitutions, reversals, inversions, associations, and
identifications.91 According to Freud, these distortions ultimately disguise the
signified beyond recognition. In other words, the formative processes of the
dreamwork in the unconscious distort and thereby create floating signifiers. Just here
Lacan revises Freud, observing that all signifiers float since they are always already
productions of the human psyche. To the extent that signifiers have psychological
values and associations, they have undergone some degree of distortion. All signifiers
are distorted from the start. While Freud implies an originally undistorted signifier
that unfortunately undergoes later distortion, Lacan posits distortion at the source, so
that no uncontaminated signifier exists to start with.
One of Lacan's major aims in his analysis throughout has been to persuade us to
abandon whatever belief we cling to in the autonomy of the ego, not as an agent in
society, but as an agent controlling our own words and actions. Lacan, after Freud,
dwells on the function of the Id, those disruptive impulses of the subconscious which
refuse all authority and stability to the Ego. The Ego, in Lacan's scheme is a false
construct which we are induced to make after our earliest experiences as an infant on
seeing ourselves in the mirror and so assuming that we possess a permanent and
unchanging identity. This fictional Ego soon engages the Other, society and language,
whereupon the pure subject encounters the whole human world of knowledge and
experience: the world of signifiers quickly comes into play. It is here that Lacan's
favourite objections to psychoanalysis as traditionally practised is located, for even
though this imaginary "I" created in infancy remains important life-long psychic
material for psychoanalysis, it is still no more than an imaginary precipate and it thus
seems rather absurd for proponents of "ego psychology" to appoint themselves to the
task of stabilizing that ghostly entity.
It is largely due to Lacan's influence that the traditional sense of subject as an
abbreviation of the conscious or thinking subject, meaning the self or ego, or
individual cogito, has become a target of attack for the belief that the individual
89 Ibid., p. 147
90 Ibid., p. 161
91 cf Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretations of Dreams.- In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud:
Vol. IV / ed. by James Strachey.- London: Hogarth Press, 1966-74.- Chapter 4 and 6
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