Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

138 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
and its effect on the construction of identity. Key here is the intersection of recognition and
naming. When the child recognizes herself or himself as the object in the mirror and identifies
as “I,” the child has named itself in relation to the other objects in the mirror. With this initial
naming, she or he enters the world of language, a world that Lacan believes defines the child.
LANGUAGE, SUBJECTIVITY, AND SELF-DEFINITION
Lacan begins his theory of language in what may seem like a strange place—the id or pleasureseeking
part of the unconscious. Like Freud, Lacan connected our unconscious desires to the
sexual. The desires of the subject are tied to her or his sexual relationships (or perhaps a better
way to phrase this is “relations between the sexes”). Lacan differs from Freud in that he does
not think the unconscious is a container for repressed memories. Rather than say we discover or
uncover memories, Lacan believes that we reconstruct them. The unconscious speaks and forces
the “self” to interpret through language. So, the desires that we can identify are identified through
words. There is no way to distinguish the desire as separate from language; it is defined within
and by language.
So, how does the child come into language? In his explanation, Lacan returns to and builds upon
Freud’s explanation of the Oedipal complex that, in its most basic sense, is about our unconscious
need to satisfy sexual desires. Lacan argues that all infants’ early desires are structured in
relationship to the primary parental figure (which, according to him, is usually the mother). From
birth on, the child attempts to decipher what it is the mother wants. According to Lacan, the
mother wants the father, and the symbol for the father is the phallus. The phallus is, ultimately,
the object that the mother believes can satisfy her desires. When the child attempts to determine
the mother’s desires and fulfill them for her, she or he is engaged in the Oedipal complex. In a
“normal” Oedipal cycle, the father permanently forestalls the child’s sexual desire for the mother.
Once the child accepts that she or he cannot serve as the phallus (sexually satisfying object) for
the mother, the Oedipal cycle is resolved—Lacan terms this castration. Before the resolution of
the Oedipal complex, the child (whether male or female) perceives the father figure as a threat
and engages in a battle with the father that she or he will eventually lose.
How then is the Oedipal complex important to Lacan’s theory of language? At the moment of
resolution, the child understands herself or himself as bound by social law. For Lacan, the father
is symbolic of a larger social order. As such, he represents the rules that the child must learn
and obey in order to become a functioning and “normal” member of society. Thus, the child first
recognizes that the father is the only fully satisfying object of desire for the mother. Because the
father represents social law, the mother’s desire for the father indicates her acceptance of social
law/order. So, ultimately, the child equates the mother’s desire for the father with her desire for
social law/order. Equally important, the resolution of the Oedipal complex brings the child into
language as a fully competent and participatory subject. She or he can thus begin to participate
in the social order.
Once the Oedipal complex is resolved, the child (which has up until this point identified
with the mother) has to find something else with which to identify. Lacan terms this symbolic
identification—identification with a prescribed and intangible way of organizing the world. In
simpler terms, the child learns to identify with cultural norms, practices that define the child’s
existence but that cannot be seen or eliminated by the child. When the child identifies with the
symbolic (i.e., cultural norms), she or he enters the world of language. Once in this world, the
child becomes a subject, one who speaks its existence in words that others can understand. Prior
to this moment, the child has been in the process of becoming a subject. Thus from the mirror
stage, when the child begins to see itself as an Other in relation to objects, to just before the
resolution of the Oedipal complex, the child is not a speaking subject. Without having mastered