Consuming Behaviour

© John Desmond

First published, January, 2026

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design © John Desmond (with thanks to Alan Gillies)

Chapter seven: Psychoanalysis

Introduction

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, originally trained as a neuroscientist, but gave this up when he discovered that the majority of the problems he was confronted with were not open to empirical observation or verification. For instance, some of his first cases involved young women who recalled vivid memories of sexual encounters with adults which they told him they had experienced when they were children. From these accounts Freud first developed his ‘seduction theory’ to argue that the stories he was told referred to actual sexual abuse of the girls by adults. Freud later abandoned the seduction theory to argue instead that these stories were mostly not based on real experiences but represented the girls’ repressed unconscious sexual fantasies. What motivated Freud to radically change his explanation was his growing belief that infants are sexual and aggressive beings, a claim that was profoundly shocking for his audience and which continues to disturb those today who, along with the Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau, believe we are born pure and that it is our immersion in the world that corrupts us. Freud argued in contrast, that the psyche represses sexual and aggressive desires that are repugnant to the interests of civilization, developing psychoanalysis as a radically new theory to explain the mental distress that can be caused by the repression of sexual and aggressive impulses. Whilst he was by no means the first to develop a theory of the unconscious, his explanation that human civilization is based on the repression of unconscious desire has since had a profound effect on Western culture.

The concepts developed by Freud such as the “dynamic unconscious”, “repression”, “id”, “ego” and “superego” are considered unscientific as they cannot be observed and measured but are rather must be inferred from observation. That said – and one can only appreciate this by reading the original – his approach was broadly scientific in that he followed a rigorous process of enquiry which begins by constructing an explanation that is then subjected to rigorous scrutiny and critique, or alternatively, by discussing two possible explanations side by side and drawing out their relative merits and weaknesses.

Freud’s followers imitated his practice by developing explanations based on their analytic experience to enrich the understanding of areas that Freud had merely sketched. For instance, while Freud devoted considerable attention to sexuality, he merely sketched a theory of ego-development which was subsequently addressed more fully by Melanie Klein, Erich Fromm and Jacques Lacan, whose accounts diverge in important respects from Freud and from each other. The subsequent proliferation of psychoanalytically inspired schools of thought, each with its own explanation and key concepts, led to the development of a diverse range of theories which have since been applied to the arts and in the development of social theory. However despite affinities in practice between these various schools, the proliferation of theories linked to difficulties in operationalizing concepts has hindered the development of psychoanalysis as a science.¹ Technological developments now enable the testing and refinement of ideas that were speculative in Freud’s day, leading to the formation of the new field of neuro-psychoanalysis, which is discussed more fully in the next chapter.

Nowadays psychoanalytic concepts pervade everyday cultural understanding, particularly to describe others in a pejorative fashion. A person who is parsimonious is described as “anal”, while someone one takes particular care for their appearance is “narcissistic”, and so on. While some rightly point out that social mores, particularly those relating to sexuality are very different to those that prevailed in Freud’s day, his theory retains its capacity to shock, “You mean I wanted to have sex with my mother – that’s disgusting!” – it is indeed! Freud argues that there is no natural law forbidding incest and so this must be brought into being by some kind of cultural process, leading to his development of the hypothesis of the Oedipus complex. He explains the greatest human achievements in the realms of art science and architecture as the products of the sublimation of sexual and aggressive desires, attributing mental illness to the refusal to come to terms with our desire.

The aim of the first section of this chapter is to convey something of Freud’s ideas on psychoanalysis and to illustrate them with examples that are relevant to the context of consumption. It is in no way intended to be comprehensive and one of the major limitations is that it fails to capture the evolution of Freud’s ideas over time. That some of them can seem irrelevant today is partly due to the changing nature of social mores particularly in relation to sexuality, where it is now well over one hundred years since his classic piece was published. That said in developing his theory Freud drew widely from the ancients as well as from the medical knowledge of his time such that his account is infused with richness and depth of understanding for those who care to look.

If anything, the contribution of Jacques Lacan, known as the “French Freud” is more difficult to discuss. Like his mentor Lacan also developed and refined his theory and concepts of the course of his life. While Freud’s exposition is generally clear and his reasoning often a delight to follow, Lacan’s can be anything but, raising the question as to why focus on him to the exclusion of dozens of other psychoanalysts, including luminaries such as Adler, Jung, Klein and Fromm? This is perhaps firstly, becuase Lacan’s cultural explanation of the Oedipus complex was more palatable to modern sensibilities as it de-literalizes Freud to argue that, regardless of our possession of a penis, we must all cede a large part of our infantile narcissistic enjoyment if we are to become functioning members of society and it is how this transition is achieved that gives rise to a personality structure that is neurotic, perverse or psychotic. Secondly, despite its opacity, Lacan was influential for Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Helen Cixious, Luce Irigary and Slavoz Zizek, Teresa Brennan and Renata Salecl who amongst others, were sufficiently stimulated or stung to develop their own explanations or conceptions of the subject. Additionally, Lacan can productively be read alongside that of contemporaries such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser and Rene Girard. The psychoanalytic focus on the darker aspects of human motivation has inspired academics and practitioners in the arts and cultural studies. Lacan, who was associated with the DADA and Surrealist movements and film noir, exemplified in the work of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, remains a favourite for psychoanalytically inspired readings of the arts.

Psychoanalysis and Marketing

Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the founder of the field of public relations was somewhat influenced by his uncle’s ideas which he introduced to the USA in the 1920s. Psychoanalysis became interesting to marketers in Europe and the USA in the 1940s and 1950s. In Britain researchers from the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations adapted psychoanalytic techniques as qualitative tools to study the meaning of brands ranging from ice-cream and Guinness to petrol. For instance, ice-cream was particularly associated with oral gratification and defined as the pleasure food par excellence (Miller & Rose, 2008: 122). In the USA, Ernest Dichter, a young Austrian émigré from Nazism, played a major role in the fast-developing consumer society in the USA. A psychologist by training, influenced by psychoanalysis and in particular by Paul Lazarsfeld, Dichter enthusiastically embraced capitalism, which he staunchly defended against the critique of émigrés from the Frankfurt School and from the feminist critique of psychoanalysis presented by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique and The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard (1958).

Dichter’s ideas were initially received with some enthusiasm by marketing academics such as Wroe Alderson (1952) and Philip Kotler (1965), who listed psychoanalysis as one of the five dominant models with which marketing researchers can understand buyer behaviour. However the treatment of psychoanalysis in the first consumer behaviour texts (Engel, Kollatt et al. 1968, Britt & Lubawski, 1970) was superficial, reducing the rich diversity of psychoanalytic theory by focusing almost exclusively on Dichter. Although Dichter was influenced by psychoanalytic theory, his approach was pragmatic and eclectic, employing a range of methods, including surveys and experimental designs (Schwartzkop & Gries, 2008). The hostility shown towards Dichter by marketing scholars in the 1960s may partly be explained by their firm belief in logical empiricism and scepticism towards Dichter’s argument that knowledge is contextual and is always a function of the historical and cultural position of the researcher. Indeed, for Tadajewski (2007), the treatment of Dichter within normal marketing science is as much a function of the political economic context as it is philosophical beliefs. This was the era when Packard’s critique of motivation research hit the best-seller list, in the wake of the Korean War, with prevalent fears of brainwashing linked to the Cold War and of “reds under the beds” (Schein, 1960). Marketers became wary of propagating an image of the consumer as “dumb” and open to influences they were not aware of, in part, because they worried that this could be used as a basis to introduce consumer protection legislation in industries such as the cigarette industry (Caffee and Ringold, 1992).

Tadajewski’s (2007) reading suggests that the commitment to logical empiricism by mainstream marketers served political and economic functions. Engel et al. (1968) dismissed the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory to consumer research on three grounds:

While unconscious desires can be important, they are almost impossible to recover empirically outside of months of psychoanalysis, and when uncovered they can be ugly and not lend themselves to effective selling appeals (Engel et al. 1968: 29).

The pragmatic concern about the time and resources required to access unconscious desire is even more unappealing for researchers today who are under considerably more pressure to produce results than were their counterparts of sixty years ago. It is also true that findings will be troubling and even repugnant. However, if desire is important – and arguably it is the most important thing to understand about human consumption behaviour – then to remove it from consideration by consumer researchers is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. If the natural scientist Charles Darwin had concerned himself exclusively with what is considered beautiful, he would not have developed his theory of the origin of species. The assumption that academic research should work in the sole interest of producers is partisan and unscientific. Another reason advanced against psychoanalysis in marketing and consumer research pertains to the problem of operationalizing psychoanalytic concepts (Hudson and Ozanne, 1988). Researchers were suspicious of clinical interview techniques and were concerned about the lack of attention to disconfirmation (Tadajewski, 2010). This was summed up by Bass (1974).

At some point, however, the distinction between an explanation based on objective and reproducible evidence and an explanation based on subjective conjecture becomes a distinction between an explanation and no explanation at all (Bass, 1974: 1).

Psychoanalysis was marginalized even in interpretive consumer research, which is an area that one might think is more in harmony with the foundations of psychoanalytic theory and practice:

much relevant fantasy life and many key symbolic meanings lie just below the threshold of consciousness – that is they are subconscious or preconscious as opposed to unconscious – and they can be retrieved and reported if sufficiently indirect methods are used to overcome sensitivity barriers” (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982: 136; Tadajewski, 2010: 454).

Despite these difficulties, psychoanalysis can contribute towards a richer understanding of consumption by acknowledging that the human subject operates largely unconsciously and is complex, conflicted and sometimes irrational. Psychoanalysis questions the presumption that the consumer consciously exerts freedom of choice based on rational evaluation of alternatives. It shares much in common with current evolutionary explanations by arguing that we are generally unaware of our motives for purchasing and using products and that much of our decision-making is irrational. However, it goes further to argue for the existence of a dynamic unconscious and that much of our behaviour is motivated by repressed desire. Given that it is fashionable in evolutionary circles to describe ‘personal’ and ‘sub-personal’ processes, it is worthwhile remembering that Freud discussed the role played by descriptive and dynamic unconscious processes over one hundred years ago.

This chapter is divided into two main parts, with one part devoted to Freud and the other to Lacan. The first is devoted to Freud’s theory, which was briefly introduced in chapter one through discussion of Norbert Elias. This is discussed firstly in relation to his early theorising on Eros the life principle, which is discussed in relation to the ego and sexual drives. This is followed by a brief discussion of his changing views on the nature of the unconscious and on the death drive. The second part of the chapter focuses on central aspects of the theory of Jacques Lacan, who is known as “the French Freud”, who nevertheless submits Freud to such a radical interpretation that he might better be described as the one who turned Freud inside-out.

Freud: Eros: Rivers of Desire

Freud did not develop his theory of sexuality out of the blue but was influenced by the ancients, particularly by Plato’s account of Eros in the Symposium. Freud developed this conception of Eros as the fundamental life force which consists of two powerful currents of desire, comprising the drive for individual mastery linked to the “I” (Freud’s translator uses the Latin term “ego”) and the drive that draws us to reproduce with members of the opposite sex. Just as the returning salmon must surmount obstacles such as waterfalls if it is to successfully spawn, so the human infant must negotiate a series of developmental gates on their journey to adulthood and old age. Only a minority make it to anything like ‘normalcy’ as, depending on the outcome one’s character may end up as autistic, narcissistic, psychotic, neurotic or perverse.

The left-hand-side of the Figure summarizes key elements in the development of self, showing that the infant progresses from the state of primary narcissism to the formation of an ideal-ego where the image of perfection is shifted onto the model of the person they aspire to be. This forms the ground for the formation of the ego-ideal or conscience. Finally, the punitive superego develops following the resolution of the Oedipus complex.

Turning to the right-hand-side of the Figure, Freud presents several developmental stages relating to growing sexual maturity. In the oral phase the ego and sexual drives are conjoined. The ego seeks to master the world by incorporating objects into the mouth, which is also zone that provides sexual satisfaction. If oral needs are satisfied, the next challenge is to successfully surmount the anal stage, when the infant can obstinately refuse to obey parental demands to release his faeces. Following the Oedipal stage the child, fearful of castration by the father, either sets aside his desire for the mother as a sexual object and identifies with the same-sex parent, or alternatively resists this. The ultimate end of this long process is to reconcile love which is linked to ego libido, with sensuality, linked to the sexual impulse, so that one is sexually turned on by the one they love. Freud depressingly￼

Figure 8.1. Two Rivers of Desire

Figure 8.1. Two Rivers of Desire

found that most men sexually desire women they do not love and vice versa.

The Ego Drive: From Self-Extension to Self-Development

Freud in his early work describes the ego as driven by aggression to master the external world. During the phase of primary narcissism Freud (1914) refers sardonically to “his majesty the baby’ who is the centre of his own attention and that of others. The infant has no clear idea of the boundary that separates himself from his mother and divides the world crudely into two parts, consisting on the one hand of pleasurable objects such as the mother’s breast and on the other, of objects that cause displeasure, such as when he is alone and soiled. Freud’s use of “object” is technical, referring to a person or to part of a person, such as the breast. Hatred of objects that cause displeasure is more powerful than love. The infant loves the food he incorporates, which is first substance that causes pleasure. He does not just ingest the physical substance of milk but identifies with the milk by investing it with libido, or emotional energy. By investing milk with his limited supply of energy, he identifies with it. Identification describes how the self extends by symbolically incorporating objects that are pleasurable, or by mastering an object, or the loss of an object. Identification enables the infant to master the lack of the real breast by symbolically hallucinating it, such that it appears to be there in the mother’s absence. Games such as ‘Peekaboo’ initiated by parents or caregivers enable the infant to recognize that what is absent at one point in time can return at another. Given that learning to master absence involves developing the concept ‘here-gone”, it is only in the mother’s absence that this can be symbolized through language. This is an important point which struck Freud when he noticed his grandson playing an apparently simple game. One day Freud observed his grandson throwing a cotton reel out of his pram, exclaiming “fort!” (gone) with some venom, then retrieving it, exclaiming “da!” (back), with joy. As the infant’s mother was absent, Freud explained that the simple “fort-da” game was momentous because it provided his grandson with the means to symbolically master through language the intense anxiety caused by her absence.

The infant eats with her eyes by mimicking the smiles and gestures of loved objects. During the narcissistic phase of development all libido, or emotional energy, is directed inwards and fuels the infant’s megalomania and self-absorption. The primary narcissistic stage draws to a close as libido begins to drain away from the ego into loved objects and into the construction of an ideal-ego that is aggrandized and idealized in proportion as the infant’s megalomania is reduced. The mother or father, on whom the image of the ideal-ego is based, is taken as the model of perfection, and is not only imitated but assimilated as part of the self. The instantiation of the ideal creates a space for the construction of the ego-ideal, which is the symbolic place where the infant can step into the shoes of the ideal ego, monitoring and judging her behaviour from this third-person perspective. The ideal-ego forms the basis for identity projects that we develop over our the course of our lives. For instance fifty years ago it was common for little boys to idealize images of ‘rugged masculinity’ such as boxers, firemen and truck drivers. The ideal then widened to include pop and rock stars. Andrey Makarevich came to idolize the Beatles, particularly John Lennon, at a time when such identifications were strongly discouraged in the USSR. Unlike most young boys, Makarevich came close to achieving his childhood dream when his band Mashina Vremini (Time Machine) were joined by Beatles producer George Martin when recording at the Abbey Road studios. Parasocial, or imaginary relationships can develop at any age, although they are particularly prevalent during adolescence, the period of the “teenage crush”. These involve strong romantic feelings where sexual desire plays no role, if not actively discouraged. Wohlfeil & Whelan (2012) describe one such relationship described by a male fan of the actress Jena Malone. After one disappointment, he is tempted to fly to New York to visit her but puts this off when he meets an attractive girl in real life.

Idiopathic Relation to Objects

In Freud’s account that the self extends by possessing the object, which it absorbs. This narcissistic behaviour is idiopathic because the object loses its unique identity once it is assimilated to the self. This idiopathic relation pertains to objects we call possessions. Freud illustrates this by describing how some parents treat their children narcissistically as possessions, literally treating them as extensions of themselves and not treating their children as having their own unique identity and desires (see Cluley & Dunne, 2012). Freud later explained that mourning involves a narcissistic recovery of libido. When a loved object is lost, perhaps as the result of the death of a pet or person, the loss of a job we enjoyed, or of a treasured possession, we must recover our libido that was invested into the loved object. Mourning for the object represents our attempt to make up for this loss and takes time, because we must free up our energy that remains attached to the dead person, or lost object.

Ernest Dichter (1960) argued that the self extends through the possession of material objects. A motor car is not just a functional device but is an extension of the owner’s personality, representing his or her values and balancing their feelings and well-being such that a dent or scratch to the loved object is felt as a wound to the self (ibid.: 89). Dichter encouraged advertisers to target men interested in buying a new automobile with advertisements that associated the sedan with wife and family and the convertible as a substitute mistress. Although Russell Belk (1988) does not overtly argue from a psychoanalytic perspective, his overall argument relating to the extended self is similar. He too mentions motor cars, citing one respondent whose Peugeot does great mileage, but when driving it he comes across to women as a ‘geek with glasses’. His other car is a Porsche, and he strongly identifies with its sodium lamps, Blaupunkt sound and the sheer power that makes him feel ‘like a tomcat on the prowl’ that ‘leadeth women astray’(ibid.: 145). Belk describes how our possessions add to our self-esteem and status and how we mourn them when they are lost or stolen. From Sartre, he argues that one way to possess an object is through appropriating or controlling it for our own personal use. The mountain climber who reaches the summit asserts his control over the mountain. Giving possessions as gifts to others is also a means of extending the self, extending control by means of the obligation to reciprocate the gift. The objects one creates also become part of the extended self by being created by it. Finally, they can become part of the self by being known. Sartre uses the term “know” in its sexual context, where to know another person intimately is to possess them (Belk, 1988, 150-151).

An idiopathic relation can occasionally double back to destroy the self it has so avidly constructed. The double aim of experiential marketing is to boost the ego of the customer by maximising the thrill, enabling them to endlessly recount their adventures, and simultaneously to minimize fear associated with real danger. The conquest of a mountain provides a powerful sense of possession (Belk, 1988). Companies queue up to lure wealthy amateurs by offering them the prospect of the ultimate bragging right, the ascent of Everest. Traditionally it was customary for teams to cooperate in this quest, but the growing marketization of the Everest experience in recent years has led to companies competing to deliver high-paying customers to the summit (Tumbat & Belk, 2010). Safety is an important pre-requisite, but it is impossible for companies to guarantee safe passage. Elmes & Barry (1999) describe how a deadly mixture of customer entitlement and competition between teams led to a catastrophic situation on the mountain, contributing to the deaths of several clients.

Anaclitic or Heteropathic Relations to Objects

The narcissistic idiopathic orientation cannibalizes the other and assimilates them to the point of view of the self. Belk (1988) refers in this context to those who choose mates simply on the basis that they will make them look good, or “wearing” an attractive companion to a party (ibid.: 156). The anaclitic orientation is the opposite to this, describing a “leaning-on” relation, where the self is assimilated to the object (Freud, 1914). This offers the potential for self-development because it involves the lover seeing himself from the point of view of the loved one, risking self-dispossession by losing himself in the object. The person who is truly in love with another experiences alternate feelings of loss and then recovery of self when their love is reciprocated. This presents a danger to the integrity of the self, because our self-possession is in the gift of the other person (Han, 2017: 24).

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Chick-cent-mihai) and Eugene Rochberg-Halton (1981) develop a similar argument to Freud in relation to the investment of energy, although they define psychic energy as focused attention distinct from the emotional energy of libido (ibid.: 4). They differentiate terminal materialism from instrumental materialism. Terminal materialism forms the end-point of the idiopathic relation, where the possession of the object is taken as an end in itself. For instance, I buy an expensive guitar that I can show off in public but do not bother to learn to play it. In contrast, instrumental materialism describes the situation where the self enters a process of self-cultivation in relation to a goal. If I attend guitar lessons to improve my skill at playing the guitar, then I am engaging in a process of self-cultivation, not only by putting in long hours of practice, but in the wider sense that this activity draws me out of the bubble of myself and into a deferential relation to my teacher. The self in this instance expands outwards towards others. However, it is not always easy to define a goal in relation to an object. For instance, my belief that I am a careful and courteous driver who drives defensively may be disputed by my passengers!

Chen’s (2009) study of art collectors illustrates how idiopathic identification can play an important role in the collecting art, in that the desire for possession is aroused by a projection of the “me” in the painting” (ibid.: 932). The absorption of the object into the self through physical and psychological possession allows the collector a form of comforting accomplishment and self-closure. However, the collectors she interviewed also mentioned profound experiences with the artwork that went beyond comfortable self-closure. For instance, one collector who had struggled in his own life identified with a painting that depicts, “endless struggle, sufferings, and disappointments”. He sought to acquire paintings to construct a “quasi-religious shelter for his spiritual world…Art, a soul mate, a soul shelter, and a soul echo, asks questions in silence about life and death, about humanity and the world, about existence and eternity” (ibid.: 931). From this, Chen contends that collectors and visitors to art galleries also desire otherness, seeking adventure or to be transported to a different place, comprising the world of the imagination (ibid.: 930). By comparison with collectors, Chen describes three traits of the “only looking” attitude found in visitors, comprising; attention, non-discursiveness, and disinterestedness, to argue that their underlying rationale is quite different from the jealousy, possessiveness, and envy of the materialist (Belk 1988).

The gaze can work as a powerful means to disconcert and dispossess the self. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1956) developed a binary scheme of vision to distinguish the look from the gaze. The voyeur spies on his unwitting victim through a keyhole as she undresses, but his look turns to shame when he is discovered and confronted by someone else who is watching him. Feminists criticize the portrayal of “cover-girls” who front up Vogue and Elle, whose eyes are coyly focused downwards or sideways. Here the image is constructed as an object to be controlled by the voyeuristic look of the male. When on the other hand, the model stares sullenly straight out at the viewer, the viewer’s look is unsettled as his freedom to enjoy her body is challenged by her intense gaze (Oswald, 2010).

Lacan’s description of the gaze is perplexing because it has nothing to do with sight. He uses examples such as the experience of walking in the woods alone, when one hears the rustle of leaves, or when hearing a footstep in a corridor, that raise the hackles at the back of one’s neck. He makes a threefold distinction of vision, comprising, the lustful eye (“I”) of the subject, the visual object of the one who is seen and a third place, which is not captured by the visual representation but is nonetheless present. The relation of the eye to the image is moderated by the anxiety experienced in relation to this third presence. This is the “Factor X” that provides the essential delicious risk of discovery for the pornographic voyeur who is constantly driven return to those “spread shots” that supposedly reveal all, but never quite realize their lustful fantasy of perfect satisfaction. Reyes, Dholakia & Bonoff (2012) discuss the mobile phone, every aspect of which is intimately bound up with the look of its owner, by enacting a particular style and identity. The phone is not simply a vehicle for the narcissistic construction of the self but is a pervasive source of anxiety that summons our attention from real world experience to what is peripheral to this. The authors argue that the mere sight of a silent phone can be upsetting and anxiety provoking. As I see it, the phone constantly reminds us that our being is elsewhere, akin to our reluctance to step out of the room during a film in case we will miss the exciting part of the action, moreso because what summons us to the screen is the knowledge that our own self is the central character, the action never stops, and who knows what terrible vision of the self may appear in that place.

The Sexual Drive

When developing his theory of sexuality, Freud was influenced by Plato’s Symposium, which he draws on to illustrate his argument that humans come into the world as hermaphrodites, or bisexual and later identify themselves as monosexual. Aristophanes tells the story of the original humans who were doubles of what we are now, created by the gods as rounded wholes, each with four legs, four arms and two faces, one facing to the front and one to the rear. As each individual had two sets of sexual organs, there were three human sexes, male, female and an androgynous group, which possessed both male and female genitalia. These rounded humans became so powerful that they challenged the rule of the gods and so Zeus cut them into two halves, just as one might slice an egg or a sorb apple. This strategy failed, because each half desperately sought out and then clung miserably to its other half. Zeus repeated the operation, this time moving the genitals and faces to the new “front” and stitching up the navel. Humans were henceforth doomed to wander the world in search of their lost half. Aristophanes’ story has been interpreted in different ways. Freud understood it as a metaphor to explain why some men are attracted to women; some women to women and some men to men. Lacan focuses instead on the discussion of lack in the story and how the quest for love represents the desire to re-find lost wholeness.

Freud then refers to that part of the Symposium where Socrates argues that the proper end point of sexual relations is to achieve immortality, by reproducing oneself. If genital reproduction is taken as the final aim of sexuality, then against this benchmark most sexual behaviour is perverse, being unconnected to this aim. Sexual practices are perverse if they deviate in terms of their aim (activities not related to reproduction) or object (activities other than genital relations). Deviations from the sexual object, including oral and anal sex and fetishism, where an object such as a shoe, or fur is substituted for the vagina which is the proper object. Seeking to make sense of the bewildering array of sexual practices he encountered, Freud reasoned that the sexual drive must comprise several components that develop in stages. In infantile sexual development, the object of fascination shifts from one zone of the body to another, from a focus on the eye to the mouth and the curve of the mother’s breast, to the anus, then eventually to the genitals.

Primary Narcissism

Freud mistakenly assumed that infants to be self-enclosed and thus downplayed the role of caregivers in human development. He also argued the importance of powerful emotional drives for self-preservation (the “I” or ego drive) and the sexual drive are there from the beginning. To begin with ego and sexual drives are fused together. Moreover, the infant has no means to differentiate between her internal and external experience. He argued that when lacking satisfaction of a basic need as when hungry, or thirsty the infant will hallucinate satisfaction of this need just as a sleeping adult will dream that they are consuming a delicious drink when they are thirsty. He argued that the difference is that while the adult can differentiate the hallucinatory world of the dream from reality and so can wake to slake her thirst, the infant lacks the capacity to differentiate hallucination from reality and so only gradually learns to distinguish reality from fantasy.

The Oral Stage

During the oral stage the mouth is the zone of interest and the breast of the mother (or its substitute) comprises the object of interest. The infant obtains gratification from sucking and when teeth develop, pleasure comes from biting. Tension may develop over feeding, if the mother responds by over or under gratifying the demands of the infant. In adulthood those who experienced anxiety during this phase may experience pleasure and guilt in oral activities such as smoking, drinking or in preparing and consuming food. Severe trauma such as the death of a relative may lead to a neurotic disorder where the adult regresses to the oral stage by exhibiting a range of disorders associated with food and eating.

Although the mouth is the main source of satisfaction, sexual drives develop relating to vision and to power. In relation to vision, enjoyment is obtained by voyeurism (scopophilia) as infants take an interest in peeking at the genitals of others, and of being looked at by others (exhibitionism). The expression of sadistic cruelty towards playmates and animals arises from the instinct for mastery, which Freud argues comes easily to the child because the construction of the capacity for pity develops relatively late. The sadistic impulse may reverse into its opposite to reflect a masochistic tendency where the child gains a degree of pleasure from being smacked or bitten.

To survive as an independent being the infant needs to come to some understanding of herself as person that is separate from the mother. Freud’s focused overmuch on instinctual development and thus downplayed the crucial role of caregivers in forming attachments with the growing child. Given that Freud referred to the mother’s breast and to other people that the infant subsequently takes as models for identification as objects, those calling themselves object relations theorists argued in this vein that the infant’s developing relations with objects are crucial to her later development. Winnicott (1953) was particularly influential when arguing the need for a ‘transitional’ object that acts as a crutch for the infant to emerge from narcissistic enclosure and to develop a sense of self. The sense of being a separate self is facilitated by use of substitutes for the breast, which are ‘not me’ as they are neither internal nor external objects. Using their thumb, or the corner of a sheet or blanket as a substitute for the breast enables the infant to cope with the trauma of loss of the breast. These real objects play a role in the development of reality testing. They are extremely important to the infant and must not be washed, or their continuity and power is destroyed. Later these objects are often replaced with objects such as teddy bears and dolls.

The Anal Stage

Sometime between the ages of one to three years of age, the object of sexual interest switches from the mouth to the anus. By this time the child’s sphincter control has reached the point where s/he can take pleasure in holding onto or letting go of bodily wastes. The infant may greatly enjoy the performance of defecation. Those acquainted with two to three years old toddlers will be aware of the frequency of referrals to ‘pooh’, often accompanied by shrieks of laughter. Young children openly refer to faeces, play with them, have ‘accidents’ involving them and will frequently use their new-found ability to control evacuation in a battle of will with their parents. The process of defecation is the first opportunity when the child must decide between a narcissistic identification and an anaclitic, object-loving attitude (Beloff, 1957: 122). He either accedes to his mother’s wishes, ‘doing his duty’ by offering up his faeces, or else he refuses to do so. By acceding to her wishes he identifies with her. This points to an overlap between the processes of ego and sexual development. As explained above, identification requires the ability to put oneself in the place of another person whom we take as our model, imitating them to resemble them more closely. Freud notes the many cultural associations between obstinacy with the anal region, for example the invitation to kiss the buttocks or display them to others are expressions of scorn and defiance.² The link with money is an age-old association in myth and fairy tales. In Babylon gold was known as ‘the faeces of Hell’, whereas in English one description of an extremely wealthy person is ‘filthy rich’, money is often referred to as ‘shit’.

Phallic stage

Freud argued that the drama of the phallic stage unfolds from between the ages of three and five years of age, culminating in the emotional crisis known as the ‘Oedipus complex’, so named after the famous Greek myth. Up until this decisive point boys and girls each take their mother as a sexual object. Freud believed that he had confirmed his insight following his analysis of the five-year old boy he called Little Hans. Hans had recently been displaced as the centre of his mother’s love and attention by the birth of another child and was curious to discover where this imposter had issued from. Enquiries from his parents received an evasive response, but nevertheless Hans told Freud that the baby had grown inside his mother. When Freud asked him to explain how this might have happened, Hans replied that he had thought everyone had a penis, but when he saw the imposter’s - his sister’s - genitals he said, ‘her ______’s still quite small. But when she gets bigger it’ll grow all right.’³ This influenced Freud’s understanding that on sight of the female genitals boys think that girls have been castrated. Seeking the perpetrator of this crime the boy blames his father, who up until then has been the central rival for his mother’s attention. The father is perceived as a powerful rival and the boy’s terror of his father’s retribution becomes so great that eventually he splits his affections away from his mother and turns to model himself on his father through identification. Freud argued that it is by means of this identification that the boy child achieves a male identity. A new psychic agency, the “Over-I” or superego is formed as the consequence of identifying with the father and ‘introjecting, or internalising his values. This internalised parental voice not only warns the child against incest, but chastises him constantly. The punitive presence of the superego is felt, sometimes constantly, as when one makes a mistake and finds oneself saying, as if to oneself “Stupid idiot!”

Freud argued that not all little boys develop in the above manner. The first sight of the genitals of another is very shocking and when confronted with the sight of what he believes to be the mutilated female genitals the boy may literally refuse to believe the truth of what he has seen. In a fundamental way the boy refuses to be bound by the rules of society, which can eventually lead to psychosis. He may develop a homosexual object choice, believing he is a woman and seek out men who remind him of himself or of other women.⁴ Such is the trauma for some that they fixate on some object that they had seen immediately prior to the female genitals, such as a foot, shoe, underwear, stockings or pubic-hair. For Freud the fetishistic attachment to this object is perverse in that in later life the adult cannot achieve orgasm without the fetish object.

Freud struggled to provide an adequate understanding of female sexuality and openly acknowledged the tentativeness of his reasoning. Young girls also form an attachment to their mother after they give up their narcissism. The key moment for the girl is recognizing that she has been castrated. Three courses of action now open before her; she can respond with revulsion against her sexuality; she can defiantly cling to her threatened masculinity; or she can follow the ‘very circuitous’ path to female sexuality.⁵ In this last course the girl seeks to identify with her father and to distance herself from her mother who is now taken as the rival for his affection. However, the girl's physical resemblance to the mother means that she cannot physically identify with the father or with his power. As a result Freud argues that the formation of the female super-ego is a more difficult process and that it is more unstable than that of the male. He argues that women fixated at the phallic stage cling to their now-threatened infantile masculinity by becoming obsessed with power and its symbols from powerful sports cars to expensive watches.

Latency

The period of quiescence known as ‘latency’ may last between the age of five and puberty. Reaction formations arise as dams in the mind to counter activities that were once intensely pleasurable, which now produce a reaction of shame, or disgust. The process of reaction formation is instigated through the development of the super-ego. The ultimate basis of the superego is the ideal-ego, which forms the model one wants to be and then the ego-ideal by which she measures her attainment of this ideal. Under the gaze of the judgemental and watchful superego, activities that were once pleasurable are deemed unacceptable and may be abandoned. As the child moves beyond the ideal universe comprising herself and mother to identify with the father and the values of the wider culture, so the old ideal-ego is shed in the manner that a snake might shed its skin.

Discussion

Freud’s theory of sexuality was regarded as bizarre at the time he wrote about it and is dismissed by many today as oversimplistic and mistaken in important aspects. His theory of development has been criticized because of its emphasis on the development of internal drives and relative neglect of the inter-individual context and relations with others.⁶ It has also criticized by presenting an overly physical explanation of development based on the presence or absence of a penis. Freud’s successors such as the object-relations school, the Lacanian schools and most recently neuropsychoanalysis , have subsequently sought to keep the Freudian ship afloat by attending to its deficiencies. Lacan for instance reformulated Freud’s argument to argue that the key cultural force acts “in the name of the father” to police gender.

Another difficulty is that Freud’s ideas have been interpreted differently in distinct cultural contexts. For Freud, the overall aim of psychoanalysis is, where possible, to try to alleviate human suffering and his overall assessment of the human predicament was bleak. Given this, he and his European successors such as Lacan, were disconcerted by the reception of psychoanalysis in the USA and especially by the prevailing positivist orientation of scholars in that country who narrowed his ideas to the notion that the “mal-adjusted’ individual can somehow be fitted to adjust to society.⁷ Lacan criticised the notion of a “healthy” ego that is “well-adjusted” to society. Lacan asks, in the situation where an individual is accused of not being sufficiently well adapted to reality, who is it that defines the nature of reality? The obvious answer is that too often this works in the malign interest of those in power.

The idea of the well-adjusted individual was at the heart of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (Friedan, 1963), discussed in chapter one. In the book Friedan describes the life of the typical American housewife of the 1950s as the model of envy for women all over the world because of her material wealth, yet who despite this is bored, unhappy and feels empty inside, filled with a hunger that cannot be satiated by material possessions or a home in a better neighbourhood. Friedan blamed this malaise on television and newspaper editorials, on advertising and the influence of experts who, from the 1940s onwards had promoted the argument that the normal well-adjusted woman should be a fulltime mother who sublimated her desires by adjusting to those of her husband. Experts used Freudian language to describe the woman as an ‘homme manqué’, (a man with something missing), who should abandon her envy of the privileged status of men and accept her role as a mother, homemaker and support to her husband. Newspaper editorials, television broadcasts and advertising proclaimed that women should sublimate their desires by devoting their lives to their husbands and families. Friedan asserts that this had a drastic effect on the lives of American women. Prior to this in the 1920s, young women known as “flappers” directly challenged the traditional image of women, actively flaunting themselves by driving cars, smoking and drinking in public and engaging in sexual adventures (Friedan, 2010: 80). In 1920, American women comprised 47% of college students (ibid.: 7). Moreover, Friedan claims that a major reason why the proportion of women students at U.S. colleges fell to just 35% in 1958 was largely driven by Freudian inspired cultural commentators who,“chained women to a repressive image” (ibid.: 7).

Freud’s theory of sexuality did not just supplement the forces of patriarchal conservatism but was taken up by radicals, who focused on his argument that boys and girls are born bi-sexual. The English academic Joan Riviere (1929), an early translator of Freud’s work describes femininity as a show or masquerade. She developed this idea when she attended a lecture given by a woman. During her talk the lecturer came across as a highly knowledgeable scholar, who provided an exemplary exposition of a challenging, technical topic. After the lecture she entirely changed her demeanour, becoming coquettish and flirting openly with the successful men that were present. Riviere argued that the lecturer’s behaviour was a masquerade, where she put on a show of femininity so as not to seem to be competing with the men in power. Riviere argued that this is true for all women who must hide their masculine side in case they show men up. Riviere thus supported the idea that one’s gender is not innate but learned and involves a performance. This idea was since adopted taken up by Jacques Lacan and most notably by the philosopher Judith Butler who argues that culture reaches down to form not only one’s gender but one’s sex.

The Unconscious

Although Freud was not the first to develop this concept, the unconscious plays a key role in his theory, which was radical for its time.⁸ Indeed it is only comparatively recently that consumer researchers have rediscovered the importance of what they prefer to call non-conscious processing.⁹ Freud at first thought the unconscious was solely comprised of disturbing material that is repressed from consciousness, but revised this to argue that the greater part of the executive processes of what we call the self are unconscious.¹⁰ He developed two different models of the unconscious, the topographical model and the structural model.

Freud’s Topographical Model

The topographical model consists of three layers comprising the unconscious, preconscious and consciousness. All the memories we are aware of are stored in consciousness. The line or “limen” separating conscious and unconscious thought is policed by a censor which exists to shield the ego. This censors ideas and memories that might disturb the functioning of the ego which are repressed, preventing them access to consciousness. Those ideas which pass the censor do not enter consciousness directly but exist in the preconscious, where they become capable of becoming conscious.¹¹ In this explanation, consciousness seeks to filter out words that are associated with socially unacceptable thoughts. Rude words such as “hymen”, “penis” and “whore” should take longer to process than neutral words such as “door”. This hypothesis was investigated in an experiment by Bruner & Postman (1947), who confirmed this effect.¹² Their name for the operation of the censor is perceptual defence. Against expectations, they also found that some subjects spotted the taboo words more rapidly than the neutral ones, describing this phenomenon as perceptual vigilance, which is a form of hypersensitivity to violations of the ordinary. Subsequent experiments have confirmed the existence of perceptual defence and selective perception, or wishful seeing, where we are motivated to see what we want to see and ignore what we wish to avoid.¹³

Subliminal Influences

Some spotted the commercial potential of Freud’s topographical model. By the 1950s, hundreds of practitioners of “depth” approaches offered marketing consultancy services to US business. The two big names were Louis Cheskin of the Color Research Institute of America and James Vicary, who specialized in researching the meaning of words used in ads. Vicary experimented with techniques to bypass the censor by firing promotional messages below the limen and straight into the unconscious. In 1956, the London Sunday Times published an article that purportedly described events in a cinema in New Jersey where split-second ads for ice-cream were flashed on the screen during showings of a film. The story was read by a young journalist, Vance Packard who included a brief statement in his book The Hidden Persuaders (1956). Packard’s reference to this experiment was seized on by marketing academics who denied that it could have any effect.¹⁴ However this was taken so seriously that subliminal advertising was investigated by a Congressional committee. Concerns about subliminal advertising have since been raised in every decade since.¹⁵ Recent research shows that subliminal advertising works, but only when its prompting is in line with its target’s goals. In one study, subliminally exposing experimental subjects to the brand name Lipton Ice increased the choice of and intention to drink Lipton Ice, but this only worked for participants who were thirsty.¹⁶ However, goals, too, can be primed. For example, subjects at first primed to be sad were subsequently persuaded to listen to a CD that put them in a good mood rather than one that made them feel strong and powerful.¹⁷

Supraliminal Influences

While subliminal advertising garnered most publicity, most consultants who used Freud’s topographical scheme, such as his nephew Edward Bernays, Cheskin and Dichter, focused on the influence of supraliminal stimuli. These are innocuous stimuli in the descriptive unconscious that are in front of us, but we don’t notice. Bernays persuaded women of the cachet of Lucky Strike cigarettes by engineering the fashionable allure of the pack’s forest green colour. Louis Cheskin was also extensively involved in the use of colour in pack design for Philip Morris and other big cigarette companies. The Motivation Research Institute established by Ernest Dichter (1960) engaged in extensive research to explore the meanings of product attributes that consumers take for granted in their everyday usage. Sidney Levy (1959) drew the attention of business academics to the importance of attending to the meaning of products and brands. However, by the early 1960s the locus of research interest shifted in a different direction and for the next forty or so years that elapsed up to the Millennium, virtually no research was carried out in this fundamental area.

The long silence on the role of the unconscious in consumer behaviour was broken when John Bargh (2002) published a paper in the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR), to argue the need to study the role played by automatic non-conscious influences on judgement and behaviour. Bargh had been influenced by pioneering research originally conducted in the 1970s by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman into the operation of heuristics and biases. From their research programme they developed a raft of now familiar concepts such as the ‘anchoring and adjustment’ heuristic, which challenged were critical neoliberal arguments that consumers are rational and that the market operates efficiently. Although at the time neoliberal economists found it relatively easy to dismiss the work of these psychologists, publications by the behavioural economist Richard Thaler were less easy for them to ignore. Thaler is best known for his work on ‘non-conscious’ processing endowment effect and for the development of ‘nudge’ economics which operates through the ‘non-conscious’ priming of behaviour.

Research on Priming

Since Bargh’s (2002) paper a number of publications explored the processes at work in what Kahneman (2011) calls ‘System 1”, by studying the operation of the silent, sub-personal processes that work non-consciously to influence our behaviour as consumers. Bargh (2002) had argued against the effectiveness of employinbg subliminal stimuli on the ground that these do not occur in nature and are usually too weak or too brief to enter consciousness. Rather, he advocated the use of supraliminal primes which are there in front of us but to which we pay little or no attention. For example, does the logo displayed on the sweater worn by the person you are speaking to influence your behaviour?¹⁸ Findings that much consumer behaviour that was once thought conscious is open to unconscious influence raised once more the question of the existence of unconscious defences. One group of researchers hypothesized that consumers erect unconscious defences against the effects of slogans which, unlike brands, are known to be persuasive devices. The results of this study confirmed this, offering initial evidence by finding that slogans cause reverse priming effects.¹⁹

One line of research into non-conscious processing focused on whether the ‘chameleon effect’²⁰ can be extended to the automatic activation of social stereotypes.²¹ Following unconscious priming with a ‘professor’ stereotype subjects scored higher on a knowledge quiz, while in contrast, after being primed with an ‘elderly’ stereotype, college students subsequently walked more slowly and had poorer incidental memory (Bargh, Chen & Burrows, 1996). Chameleon effects were subsequently found to operate in relation to brands. For example, subjects primed with an Apple logo were found not only to unconsciously identify with the stereotype of an ‘Apple’ person but to act this out in their overt behaviour, acting more creatively than others who primed with Microsoft logo.²²

Others developed a creative approach to better understand mimetic processes that work non-consciously to influence identification. The authors of one study asked how chronic dieters react to models who are overweight, or obese? Fo instance, will they identify with an overweight or obese model by selecting the food choices they recommend and by eating more? In one study the researchers found that in a buffet queue individuals chose a larger portion if they observed the person in front of them doing so, but helped themselves to a smaller portion if this person was obese rather than thin (McFerran, 2010a). In a related study, the authors asked if a person’s food choices would be influenced by the body-shape of the person serving them. In this study they reported that dieters and non-dieters acted in opposite ways such that non-dieters ate more snacks when the server was thin, while dieters ate more when the server was large. The authors argued that dieters may also have identified with a heavy rather than thin server as they were more persuaded by her recommendation to choose a healthy or an unhealthy snack, than by the recommendation made by a thin server (Mc Ferran, 2010b). In a subsequent study the findings suggested that anybody who exhibited an undesirable behaviour could unconsciously be taken as a model for imitation.²³

Discussion

Results from the studies discussed above can seem magical, providing a rare glimpse of into a mystical realm where behaviour is driven by a complex web of sub-personal processes. Some argued at the time that the results were too good to be true and it has turned out that these sceptics were partially correct. While one might expect replication of scientific research to be important to ensure the validity of findings, before the millennium this was rarely carried out in practice. Additionally, a common practice was for researchers who were overwhelmingly from US universities to use their students as guinea pigs for their experiments in exchange for course credit.²⁴

Complacency in the field of social psychology was badly shaken when researchers failed to replicate aspects of studies once regarded as sacrosanct, such as Festinger’s theory of cognitive-dissonance and the classic studies of Milgram and Zimbardo into the effects of conformity on human behaviour.²⁵ Such findings were not alone, as retractions of papers mounted steadily in journals in the in science and medicine.²⁶ While replications were once viewed as largely unnecessary by journal editors, investigations across the sciences indicated that around sixty percent of retractions involved fraud of one kind of another.²⁷ Particularly damaging to the field of social psychology was the finding of fraud in over thirty papers by the previously renowned social psychologist Diederik Stapel²⁸ who had published papers on non-conscious influences on moods and social status. A number of publications were also retracted by Brian Wansink who had studied unconscious stimuli in relation to food consumption.²⁹ A widely-circulated paper by Arielly on honesty in insurance cases was retracted,³⁰ which was damaging to the field by association due to the wide circulation of, ‘Predictably Irrational’ (Arielly, 2008) which drew on studies by Tversky and Kahneman. Additional damage was done to the field by the failure to replicate the study by Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1996) mentioned above.

In a letter to Nature, Daniel Kahneman (2012) offered a variety of reasons for the failure to replicate results from research into priming, of which one was that this is a particularly difficult area to research. He warned that research on social priming had become the ‘poster child’ for doubts about the integrity of psychological research, warning of a potential ‘train wreck’ that might occur should research fail to be replicated. This was not without precedent, as he mentioned the chilling effect on research of previous failures to replicate findings on the effectiveness of subliminal stimuli and cognitive dissonance. In response, Kahneman called for a ‘multi-lab’ approach where a particular priming effect would be investigated sequentially by a number of laboratories. Several institutions have since taken up Kahneman’s suggestion and the furore over replications seems to have somewhat died down. Now that the smoke has begun to clear it seems that most of the findings mentioned above in relation to the chameleon effect are still maintained as valid and additionally, a review of over two hundred articles has confirmed the effectiveness of Thaler’s ideas on ‘choice architectures’ and ‘nudging’.³¹

In light of the above, it is easier to understand why Freud who had initially trained as a neurologist decided to abandon the scientific study of the human mind as simply

too complex to investigate using the methods available. He read widely, turning to inspiration from philosophy to develop foundational concepts such as those relating to erotic desire and narcissism. These would then be tested by being subjected to a rigorous form of dialectical reasoning where he would present an hypothesis followed by arguments for and against in an evolving sequence, through his observation of analysands. While this approach fails to meet the rigorous objective standard imposed by positive science it enabled Freud to move well beyond its narrow strictures to provide a deeply resonant account of human subjectivity. It is partly for this reason that psychoanalysis which has long been welcomed as providing insight into the arts, continues to struggle to find a foothold in the sciences. Some argue today from the emerging perspective of neuropsychoanalysis that it is now possible to construct an evidence base for psychoanalysis, and for those interested an understanding of the body from this perspective is briefly discussed in chapter eight.

Figure 8.2. Freud’s Structural Model

Figure 8.2. Freud’s Structural Model

Freud’s Structural Model

Freud’s structural model is familiar as it informs the theory of Norbert Elias, whose theory is discussed in chapter one. The structural model highlights the dynamic qualities of consciousness which erects defences to protect the self from traumatic or troubling thoughts and memories. Normal adults believe that they are civilized and are shocked by the intrusion of thoughts that are aggressive or considered as sexually bizarre. These thoughts may spring from memories of activities that were once a source of pleasure and delight during infancy are later regarded with shame and embarrassment in the older child and adult. Freud’s structural model discusses relations between three agencies; the superego, ego and id. The id is entirely unconscious whilst the ego is largely conscious but has an unconscious dimension.

The ego is the agency that corresponds to the self. The ego seeks to moderate the powerful erotic demands of the id which presses for the immediate gratification of impulses against the dictates of the reality principle, by conforming to the command issued by the imperious superego. One can picture the ego as torn between two forces that seek to pull it in different directions. Freud once likened the ego to the rider of a powerful horse who must skilfully guide it if he is not to be thrown. The school of psychoanalysis known as ego psychology aims to strengthen the ego to control the powerful impulses emanating from the id as to enable the individual to better conform with the societal demand to behave as a ‘normal’ individual. However although the above may encourage one to think of the ego as a homunculus or little person inside one’s head, the ego is better described as a label which integrates the diverse and largely unconscious executive functions of the mind.

The main role played by those functions that make up the “I”, or the ego, is to act as a secondary process that inhibits the automatic functions of the mind. Consciousness plays a relatively incidental role in the structural model. Just as we become aware of the external world by representing its objects through perception, so consciousness acts as a spectator that tries to make sense of unconscious mental processes. It is thus not difficult to understand why we can exaggerate the extent of our conscious autonomy and misperceive our agency in formulating the goals and attitudes we take to be products of our own volition.³²

The structural model uses spatial analogies. The ego is placed at the surface to signify the relative proximity of its operations to consciousness. Freud also thought that phylogenetically its functional equivalent in the brain was closer to the surface than the more ancient primary processes located closer to the brainstem which he associated with the id.

Defence mechanisms

Repression and sublimation are two ways in which the ego deals with the expression of unacceptable desires. During latency the infant develops feelings of shame and disgust at activities that were once enjoyable. Sublimation involves the redirection of childhood pleasures into new aims that are socially acceptable. For example, the child who once obtained pleasure from retaining and releasing his faeces may later sublimate this by forming a reaction against what is unclean and disturbing, by prizing orderliness, reliability, conscientiousness and cleanliness (Freud, [1917], 1963). Sublimation involves the translation of socially unacceptable impulses or ideas into acceptable actions or behaviour. Freud argued that sublimation is responsible for some of the greatest human endeavours in art and architecture.

Repression occurs when the executive functions of the ego repress material that is traumatic or unacceptable to the executive’s view of itself. Repression of trauma and the re-attachment of traumatic affects to substitute objects is key to its formation, enabling the complex operation of substitutions and displacements which together constitute the dreamwork. Despite the inhibitory power of the ego, the unconscious makes its presence felt by means of dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue and symptoms.

Perversion: A perverse character is formed when the infant disavows the Oedipus Complex, by taking the mother simultaneously to have and to lack a penis. By refusing to accept this the individual seeks to obtain the benefits of both worlds by holding onto the polymorphous pleasures they enjoyed when they were in their infancy and obeying authority when it suits them. They do not form reaction formations of shame and disgust at their actions and so fail to develop any moral sense that differentiates right from wrong. Symptoms manifested in the perverse character structure in adults such as sadism and masochism are argued to be due to a failure to idealize one or other parent or caregiver and as a consequence to take themselves as an ideal (Freud [1914] 1991: 81).

Inversion: Freud argues that inversion is a byproduct of voyeurism, or the desire to look. The desire to look leads the young boy to view the genitals of others and his fright at the apparent castration of girls leads him in the first instance (homosexuality) to repress the sight and to deny that women are castrated. Freud (1920) argues that future inverts in the earliest years of their childhood pass through a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation to a woman, usually their mother and that after leaving this behind they identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. This is narcissistic as they take themselves as a model and look for a man who resembles themselves, whom they can love as their mother loved them. Their compulsive longing for men has turned out to be determined by their ceaseless flight from women

Unconscious Processes

The Freudian unconscious is dynamic, open to many influences. The neurotic repression of trauma and their re-attachment of traumatic affects to substitute objects is key to its formation, enabling the complex operation of substitutions and displacements that together constitute the dreamwork. Despite the inhibitory power of the ego, the unconscious makes its presence felt by means of dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue and in symptoms. Because of the key role played by identification it is considered important to consider the desire of the subject in relation to important others. Freud argues that the unconscious involves the operation of two central processes, condensation and displacement which can be observed in symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue and jokes. Below we discuss how displacement features in Freud’s interpretation of the dream recounted to him where a lady finds she must abandon her plans for a supper party because she only has smoked salmon.

Displacement: The Dream of the Failed Supper Party

Freud thought that dreams provide an important means to access the meaning of unconscious thoughts. However it is puzzling to understand dreams because the fragments of the dream thoughts are expressed in the form of a rebus or word-picture. The meaning of some dreams, such as appearing naked before others, may be relatively self-evident, but others are more difficult. Freud developed free association as a method which attends to the wider circumstances occurring in the person’s daily life to better understand the dream.

In order to provide some insight into Freud’s technique it is useful to describe a case in some detail drawn from his early work on dreams. This featured a young woman who was the wife of a butcher he knew who had mentioned to him that she had a dream that refuted his contention that dreams are forms of wish fulfilment. She mentions the dream to Freud to support her argument that not all dreams seek to fulfil unconscious wishes. She describes the dream where she wants to invite some friends to a dinner party but has nothing to offer them except some smoked salmon. She considers going shopping, but it is Sunday afternoon and the shops are closed. She contacts caterers who don’t answer and so reluctantly, she realizes that she must abandon the idea of the dinner. Hence, her wish is unfulfilled.

Freud asks the butcher’s wife to describe the daily goings on in her recent life. She begins by telling him that the previous day her husband had said he was getting too fat and that he intended to get up early, exercise, go on a strict diet and, above all else, accept no further invitations to dinner parties. She next describes to Freud her fantasy, where she imagines she can have a bread roll with caviar every morning. Her husband is aware of this fantasy and tells her that he would gladly buy her the caviar, but she tells him not to, because she likes to tease him.

Although he does not mention this to her, Freud does not find this explanation convincing and wonders about the true reason why she denies herself caviar? She then recalls an incident from the previous day when she had paid a visit to a young female friend, of whom she is jealous because her husband always speaks so well of her. Fortunately, this friend is very thin and her husband is only interested in plump women. During the conversation her friend had mentioned her desire to gain some weight and had also asked the butcher’s wife when she might next be invited for dinner.

The dream fragment recalled by the butcher’s wife is condensed as it is compressed into a few lines. Freud argues that one should not accept the surface, or manifest description of the dream but should regard this as the starting point to uncover the latent, hidden, dream thoughts. He provides two interpretations for the dream, each of which is based on wish fulfilment. The first is that the dream fulfils the wish of the butcher’s wife that her friend/rival remains skinny. If the friend/rival actually came for dinner, she would put on weight and thus would become even more attractive to her husband and more of a threat. However, Freud rejects this account as it fails to explain the appearance of the smoked salmon in the dream. He asks the butcher’s wife what might have led her to think of this? She replies instantly that smoked salmon is her lady friend’s favourite dish. This leads Freud to his second potential explanation. He now knows that smoked salmon is her friend’s favourite food and that her own is caviar, so why does smoked salmon and not caviar appear in the dream? His answer is direct but challenging. The butcher’s wife has identified with her friend/rival by putting herself in the other person’s shoes. Identification can occur when one seeks to master an external threat by bringing it into the self;

She is putting herself in her friend’s place in the dream because the friend is putting herself in her place in the eyes of her husband, because she – the friend – would like to occupy her place in the husband’s reflections.³³

By unconsciously putting herself in her friend/rival’s shoes, the butcher’s wife denies herself caviar in real life. Also, by placing herself in her friend’s/rival’s shoes she achieves her wish to be pre-eminent in her husband’s affections by taking her friend’s place in his regard. The focus is on the triangle involving the butcher’s wife her friend/rival and the butcher. In this second explanation Freud argues that the butcher’s wife places herself in her friend’s shoes, seeking to control this troublesome desire by bringing this into her own psyche.

The dream of the butcher’s wife described above is focused on in relative detail because it illustrates several aspects of Freud’s work. Firstly, it shows attention he paid to a person’s life circumstance and history. Secondly, the unconscious cannot be read like a map, but consists of a complex process of interpretation. Third, Freud’s analysis points to his belief that we are inextricably bound up with those others whom we take as our models and our rivals. Finally, it questions the idea that we consume products on purely rational grounds.

Once one acknowledges that the person mentioned as the protagonist in the dream is not necessarily the butcher’s wife herself, but consists of her identification with another, this opens up an entire field of possibilities for identification. For instance, Lacan argued that the butcher’s wife identified not with the desire of her friend or rival but with the desire of her husband. Clément, (1983) pushed further to argues that, if indeed she identified with her husband’s desire, this opened the possibility that the butcher’s wife had made a forbidden homoerotic object choice. Indeed, by means of identification desire can be displaced on to a range of alternatives. Diana Fuss (1998) summarizes that;

The butcher’s wife has been read, variously, as a feminine-identified heterosexual (Freud), a masculine-identified heterosexual (Lacan), a maternal-identified infant (Chase), and a feminine-identified lesbian masculine-lesbian. (ibid.: 242)

From the above, the desire of the butcher’s wife seems impossible to pin down, as she might be identifying with the desire of any of the others in the dream. Indeterminacy in this case enables the provision of a number of differing potential explanations and so is at once, anathema to scientific understanding and grist to the mill for literary critics and social theorists. That said, the core process of identification is open to scientific investigation.

Condensation and Screen Memories: The Case of Emma

Emma Eckstein was one of Freud’s first patients who undertook analysis with him for three years, providing inspiration for his early seduction theory. In one discussion she recounts how she finds it impossible to go into a shop alone but cannot understand why. Asked to recollect her shopping experiences she remembers that when she was twelve, she once went into a shop, fleeing the scene when she noticed one of the two male shop assistants laughing at her. She recalls feeling ashamed because the men were laughing at her clothes and because she was aroused sexually, because she found one of these men attractive. Later, during another session Emma recalls an early incident that occurred when she was aged eight. She remembers that she had entered a sweetshop where the shopkeeper had ‘goosed’ her in the genitals through her clothes whilst grinning at her. This did not seem to affect her at the time and it was only after the second incident that she developed her fear of going into shops alone.

Freud explains that Emma’s memory of the later event involving the shop assistants acted as a screen which masked her memory of the more disturbing earlier incident. This is an example of the process of condensation, where each incident shares the same broad structure. On each occasion she had entered a shop to purchase something and someone had laughed. Focusing on this commonality obscured the act of molestation by the shopkeeper during the first visit. Freud explained why despite its seriousness she was not overly disturbed by this event at the time it occurred and continued to visit shops alone. The event occurred during latency, a period of sexual quiescence and so would not have provoked concern at that time. However, the girl had reached puberty by the time of the second incident, evidenced by her experience of sexual arousal and distress. Freud reasoned that this second experience acted as a cue to recover her memory of the original incident which she now reinterpreted in light of her knowledge of sexuality, and immediately repressed. Freud argues that whilst Emma developed amnesia as a defence against the trauma, its memory persisted as a symptom in her physical behaviour through her phobia of entering shops alone.

Condensation is an unconscious process to defend against trauma by substituting a screen memory. Alternatively the memory might have been displaced. This might have involved focusing specifically on one aspect of the scene such as shutting the door. In this situation Emma might remember all the traumatic events clearly but would but would treat them lightly as if they were of little consequence or emotional importance to her. Instead she might insist that doors should be left open and been terrified when they were closed. The obsessive ritual involving the need to keep doors open would have involved a displacement of the emotion of the traumatic scene onto one aspect of this, which is the door of the shop, which she would have wished was kept open (Leader, 2011: 36).

Death

Psychoanalysis has a lot to say about death. In his early work Freud had focused on Eros, the life force constituted by the ego and sexual drives discussed earlier. Here, impelled by the drive to survive, the self strives to master and to exert its control over the world. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, [1920] 1991) which was inspired by his experience of dealing with men returning from the First World War, Freud introduced his theory of Thanatos, the death drive.

Veterans returning from war suffering from shell-shock and from witnessing and participating in appalling events were tormented by the constant recollection over and over again of the same vivid memories. It was as if there were a ‘too muchness’ to their experience, as each time these memories were brought to mind they could not be absorbed, resulting in incessant repetition. Freud’s ruminations brought him to reflect on a simple everyday scene that most of us would have passed over and taken for granted which occurred when he was visiting a relative. Freud was sitting in the parlour where his nephew was also seated in his pram. For some reason Freud’s sister had to leave the room and as a result the infant became agitated when he could no longer see his mother. In the pram there was a little cotton reel containing a small amount of sewing thread and the infant held the thread and then threw the reel out of the pram shouting vehemently as he did so “fort” (“gone”) and then retrieving the reel exclaiming joyfully ‘da’! (‘back’).

From this simple observation Freud argued that he had witnessed something very important that is common to all which is how we attempt to master anxiety and distress. The boy’s mother had really left the room which caused him acute anxiety. His response was to try to master her absence and his anxiety symbolically by means of the game, indulging his aggression by projecting “her” violently out of the pram and then by joyfully retrieving “her”. Freud argued that by doing so the infant used the repetitive action as a means to master the trauma of the ‘narcissistic scar’ produced by the absence of his mother. Consequentially, the anxiety brought on by her absence sparked a premonition of mortality in the young infant to which the game was has response, acting as a symbolic shield to help him cope with his loss. Consequently, Freud modified his theory to argue that the drive for life is always accompanied by the drive for death and indeed that living can be described as the long detour we make on the road back to our initial state.

In The Denial of Death (1973) Ernest Becker developed these ideas much further to argue that humans are terrified against death, against which culture acts as a shield. For Becker, the child seeks to shape himself into the controller of his destiny. The child in the narcissistic oral state believes that she controls her mother and in the anal phase the child demonstrates her mastery by refusing to ‘do her duty” by making a deposit in her potty. This sense of mastery vanishes during the Oedipal stage when children becomes aware of the vulnerability of their bodies, being shocked and horrified by the site of the mutilated mother. Becker argues that from then onwards humans wrap themselves in a protective skin which shields him from the reality of their mortality and helps them cope with the primeval fear of death. There are echoes here with Lacan’s discussion of the fragmented body which is discussed later. Becker’s point is that humans have a terrifying awareness that we will die and that cultures have evolved ways to prevent the rawness of this terror from overwhelming us. The blunting by culture of the true nature of experience is double-edged; on the one hand, the majesty and beauty of the world is diminished, as the young child who has not been conditioned by culture experiences the raw beauty and terror of the world; on the other hand, the buffer provided by culture enables us generally to live our lives in a bubble as if we are immortal. We behave as if we are “somebody”, as free and self-determining agents. However an essential part of this is a fear of self-knowledge. We seek to protect our self-esteem and fear any knowledge that might lead us to despise ourselves. We construct a shell, a fantasy or illusion made up of our glib everyday conversations and roles, while underneath lies the terror that is the true authentic self.

In this view anxiety acts as the spur which motivates action. We forge symbolic relationships with others to gain some relief from being alone and helpless. However we are deeply ambivalent about our ties to others which we perceive to bind and enslave us against our will and so we strain against them in order to become free once more. In so doing, and unconscious of our motives, we are thereby straining against the armour based on those very relationships we initially clung to defend against our terror of death. Life thus becomes an incessant play of seeking to live within certain limits and of seeking to transcend these very limits. Becker is insistent that when one plays with such limits one is playing with a screen and not the reality. The screen can take many forms. Some seek to challenge the limits by experimenting with drugs, others by speculating on the stock market, abandoning a safe career option or perhaps by engaging pursuing an ‘extreme’ experience such as white-water rafting or mountain climbing. Against the reality of despair, asserts Becker we play with toys such as these that represent the real world in the playpen of our fantasies (Becker, 1973: 57).

Terror Management Theory (TMT)

Rather unusually, experimental psychologists were able to operationalize aspects of Becker’s theory to understand the relation between the unconscious fear of mortality and core cultural beliefs and values. Labelled as Terror Management Theory (TMT) (Greenberg, Psyzcynski & Solomon, 1986), proponents argue that the worldview expressed by any culture forms an anxiety buffer that helps to protect the individual from the anxiety that results from his or her vulnerability and mortality. TMT suggests that people will seek to cling to their faith in cultural conceptions of reality to which they subscribe and to defend these conceptions against threats.

When we are conscious of our death we activate proximal defences against this. We can seek to escape the fear by burying ourselves in the busyness of everyday life. Here “hurry sickness”, one of the by-products of the time-starved lifestyle experienced by many in consumer societies, can be interpreted as a means for warding off the fear of death. So can any form of busyness, such as that concerned with building a career. Alternatively, one can consider the many ways in which individuals strive for immortality. Many people obtain consolation by rearing children and grandchildren as an image of their own reproduction. Others seek immortality by gaining great wealth or fame that will pass down through the ages.

Distal defences relate to the cultural anxiety buffer such that we adhere more closely to the core aspects of our culture when these are triggered. Being conscious of death does not trigger the distal process. However when morality salience is primed unconsciously, this activates distal defences that have no logical relation to death. For example, when unconsciously primed, individuals will derogate others whose values differ from their own and attempt to boost their self-esteem. Moral principles are part of the cultural anxiety buffer that protects individuals from anxiety relating to mortality. Rosenblatt et al. (ibid.) found that unconsciously reminding individuals of their death increases rejection and punishment of moral transgressors. Thus a person living in a consumer society where materialism is celebrated as a value, will tend to over-value consumption when reminded of their death.

TMT posits that cultural conceptions of reality operate as buffers against anxiety and the dread that is ultimately related to the fear of death. Consequently people are highly motivated to defend these cultural conceptions against threats. Protection from anxiety requires that one should achieve a sense of value or self-esteem within the cultural context. This is because cultures promise security only to those who live up to the cultural standards of value. Cultures provide this security in two ways; firstly by fostering the idea that the world is a just place and that in a truly just world bad things would not happen to good people. Secondly, cultures promise real and symbolic immortality to those who live up to the culturally specific standards of value. Real immortality is offered by religious ideas of an afterlife, whilst symbolic immortality can be ensured by permanent contributions to the death-transcending culture (Rosenblatt, Greenberg et al. 1989). For instance, Freud had argued that we can achieve something of immortality through our progeny who not only carry our genes but retain us in memory and through our lasting achievements in life. Our cultural worldview thus provides the context within which we can conceive of ourselves as valuable participants in a meaningful world and enabling us to function in the face of the terrifying prospect of our ultimate mortality.

Rosenblatt and his colleagues mention the considerable prejudice that existed in the scientific community against their idea that human behaviour is governed by the unconscious terror of death which they sought to counter by demonstrating its effectiveness in a series of experiments (ibid. 16). In one experiment they demonstrated that when subjects are unconsciously primed with mortality salience (MS) they will behave aggressively towards perceived threats to their cultural world-view (McGregor, Lieberman et al. 1998). Other experiments specifically explored the relation between mortality salience, materialism and conspicuous consumption in the USA, where the values of material consumption are woven deeply into the cultural frame of reference (Arndt, Solomon et al. 2004). The stereotype of the ideal consumer presented by mass-media in the USA constructs the vision of a fit, tanned, sculped body, possessing immaculate hair, gleaming teeth, draped in expensively casual clothes and surrounded by the accoutrements of success; the watch, the car, the yacht, the helicopter, the plane and the private island. Earlier studies indicated that reminding people of their death increases the value accorded to consumer goods. Subjects in Mandel & Heine (1999) who were reminded of their death gave higher rankings to high-status objects such as a Lexus car and Rolex watch than did the control group. Another study found that women who were reminded of their mortality were especially likely to avoid products that were not conducive to a slim figure (Goldenberg, Arndt et al. 2004). Arndt and his colleagues confirmed their hypothesis that triggering morality salience will result in subjects seeking to acquire more material possessions as a bid to mitigate against the negative effects of mortality salience.

The implications of the experiment described above are potentially profound, as the findings suggest that warning consumers in materialistic cultures such as the USA of the catastrophic effects of human-made global warming may well be counterproductive as it might lead to increased acquisitiveness. During times of uncertainty when fear of death is unconsciously raised not just by talk of global warming but also by fears of unconstrained growth in the human population, nuclear war, terrorism, plastic-saturated oceans and the unravelling of political and economic alliances, the literature on TMT helps explain why intolerance lined to xenophobia can quickly take hold.

Counter to the dire warnings of TMT theorists Rindfleisch & Burroughs (2004) question the usefulness of materialism as a defence against fear of death. They argue that this is just one means to cope with the fear of death and question why should people opt for this relatively transient form? Given that the terminally ill often question their need for material possessions and turn instead towards religion and relationships, they argue that perhaps resorting to materialism is simply an initial and temporary manifestation of a more complex coping process. Moreover they argue that materialism is incapable of satisfying higher order intrinsic needs such as love and belonging. Materialism is negatively related to age, such that as one gets older, so the possession of luxury goods becomes less important to self-image. However TMT argues the opposite, which is that as one gets older mortality salience increases, which according to TMT, should result in higher levels of materialism.

Driven towards Death?

Alastair McIntosh (1996) dedicated his paper in memory of his father who died from lung-cancer. In the paper he describes the actions of the tobacco industry as insidious, due to its use of death imagery to advertise its products, which must have been galling given the advertisements won a series of awards. The advertisements made no sense but appeared as dream-images. For instance advertisements for Silk Cut frequently featured silk slashed by a knife, or shown alongside knives or scissors. One iconic advertisement closely resembled the famous Shower Scene in the film Psycho. The advertisements were not all like that. One poster from 1995 shows a row of people lined up outside a toilet. They are standing or crouched, dressed in purple silk with chess pawns on their heads. A knife hangs on the door. When McIntosh described this to an M&C Saatchi staff member as ‘dying for a fag’ he was corrected; the intended meaning was ‘dying for a slash’. McIntosh argues that these advertisements unconsciously primed consumers with images of death. He argues that the consumer has no choice but to accept the brand. Astonishingly, when he discussed these advertisements with advertising creatives, they said that they genuinely had not intended to use images of death. McIntosh writes that when he ‘pointed out’ his interpretation of the latent meaning of the ads to a creative involved in their production, the man was horrified and quit his job.

Given that cigarette advertisements primed consumers with images of death, what then would Terror Management Theory suggest would be the effect? These theorists would answer that the advertisements would reinforce their core cultural values and affiliations and lead them to boost their self-esteem. Given that status plays a role in smoking then perhaps the advertisements would influence smokers to increase their consumption as a coping mechanism against the death imagery presented in the advertisements? Admittedly this seems rather odd, although it accentuates the point made by Terror Management theorists, which is that death only sells to the extent that we erect unconscious defences against it. But what if we are curiously attracted to death and actively court its prospect? Freud was an inveterate smoker and struggled with his addiction to tobacco throughout his life, which resulted in several cancers and eventually led to his death. When nicotine in pure form is administered even in minute doses, it causes instant death. Stephen Klein (1993) argues that no one who smokes can fail to recognize from their first puff, that they are inhaling a dangerous poison. He also notes that rather than stopping smokers, an understanding of the noxious effects of cigarettes seems to be an absolute condition of confirming the habit. The dangerous excitement provided by engaging in risky behaviours, for instance continuing to engage in unprotected sex in the middle of an HIV epidemic.

Jacques Lacan: The Knotted Subject

I need to state my misgivings about including Lacan in this text. Firstly, I feel ill-equipped to discuss his work in the context of consumer behaviour. Like Freud, Lacan produced a formidable body of work. I initially read sections of the Ecrits and then became aware of translations of the seminars. I recently sat down and wrote out a list of these – there are twenty-six books in all – to note that I have only dipped into three or four. Of course, he himself wrote much more than this. Book six on desire alone consists of a translation of twenty-seven seminars and stretches to almost 350 densely worded pages. The task would be made easier if Lacan’s argument was as straightforward as Freud’s; you might try reading the original from the selection generously provided free by Cormac Gallagher at lacanireland.com. You will find that it does not take long to confirm that Lacan’s style is allusive, opaque and difficult. A typical quote is, “desire is the metonymy of being in the subject; the phallus is the metonymy of the subject in being”.³⁴ This may appeal to your curiosity and may enchant your imaginary double to picture yourself perhaps on a sidewalk café on the West Bank, a Gauloises blonde dangling nonchalantly from your lips as you stare into the mid-distance to ponder the weighty insight. Beware! Added to this, even in the early seminars Lacan makes much use of charts and logical symbols which are more evident in his later, difficult, work. As if this complexity were not enough, although he used terms such as “Imaginary”, “Symbolic” and “Real” throughout, their overall meaning changes through the course of Lacan’s writing. The first seminars were mostly concerned with the Imaginary, then followed by a focus on the Symbolic, while later work focussed more on the Real and the intersections between the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic.

Although Jacques Lacan based his theory on close readings of Freud, his explanation differs from his model in fundamentally important ways. Lacan offers an understanding of human subjectivity that is complex, involving a similar tripartite structure to Freud but one that dispenses entirely with Freud’s biological references. Although there are crude similarities, there is no equivalence between Freud’s concepts of id, ego and superego and Lacan’s orders of the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic. Lacan twists Freud’s id into a negative space, the “real” which ex-sists (insisting from the outside). His discussion of infantile development which excludes references to biology is more palatable than is Freud to cultural theorists.

The three orders outlined in Figure 8.1 construct the human subject, whom they also endlessly frustrate. The three interlocking rings were originally chosen as the coat of arms for the Borromeo family to symbolize their strength in unity. Lacan twists this image of strength and solidity to present a vision of the human subject as tied up in knots and so endlessly frustrated. It is important that you understand what is meant by “the subject”, a term that is used rather indiscriminately but has a very specific dual meaning in Lacanian psychoanalysis, that simultaneously links it to agency and to subjection. Firstly “the subject” refers to what Lacan argued to be the uniquely human capacity for language, such that one has the capacity to act as a social and cultural agent. This capacity is linked to the expectation that one can be called on to give an account of one’s actions to others, being subject to the prevailing norms and prohibitions of one’s culture. Lacan believed that a person only becomes fully human when they have developed a level of symbolic understanding.³⁵ The “subject” is thus associated purely with the order of the Symbolic shown in the Figure. While most humans have the capacity to act as subjects, none of us can have a full experience of the Real. This is because the Real is the mode of being that pre-exists our formation as subjects of culture and so is unthinkable, ungraspable and incomprehensible. Although our initiation into culture begins prior to birth, and although every aspect of our being is subjected to culture, nonetheless, a shard of the Real persists that is unassimilable by culture. Somewhat confusingly the Imaginary is not what it seems but is the cloak that shields us from the Real that enables us to go on living.

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Real: The Real has nothing to do with our subjective sense of reality. This is because it describes a degree of access to raw experience that the individual was open to prior to birth from which the subject is shielded by imaginary and symbolic layers. This shield is constructed in part by our self-formation through identification with our mirror image and by our formation as subjects of culture. Jouissance is the term (best left untranslated) to describe the intermingled joys and terrors of raw experience that persist in our being as a remnant of the Real.

Imaginary (a-a’)

Aged between six and eighteen months we identify with our mirror image as “me”. Lacan describes this as a moment of profound mis-recognition, because this other we identify with is plainly not me but a mirror image. This provides the basis for how we subjectively experience of reality and for subsequent identifications. The self forms as we develop an ideal-ego which provides the place where we can have a point of view about ourselves. As individuals we no longer have access to the Real and lose access to unlimited jouissance.

Symbolic (A)

This is where we become fully human as speaking subjects and so subject to the rules and prohibitions imposed by our culture. To begin with the infant is at one with the mother. To become fully human by gaining access to the Other the infant must surmount two major hurdles. The first of these is the imaginary Mirror stage, which sets the scene for the imaginary order in which we are alienated by identification with the mirror image. The second gateway is that of symbolic castration when we are subjected to cultural norms and prohibitions. We can no longer do as we pleased when we were infants. If one thinks of jouissance as a liquid, this is successfully drained from the “normal” subject.

There are important points of overlap between the realms of the real, symbolic and imaginary. Importantly, there is a part of the real which is not assimilated by imaginary capture or cultural formation.

Object a

This is not an object at all, but rather is a scrap of the real that persists because it cannot be assimilated by imaginary capture in the mirror or by our later formation as cultural subjects. This is the object that causes our desire.

These are now described in more detail.

The Lacanian Imaginary

Importantly, the imaginary does not refer to our daydreams but rather to our “real” subjective experience of everyday life. This is puzzling, as surely our lived experience is real, so how can Lacan describe this as imaginary? Lacan argues that our subjective experience of reality is imaginary because our perception does not attend to reality as it is, but constructs a model by selectively organizing experience, rounding it off to support our point of view. The model we construct is harmonious so that we see what we want to see and block out threatening alternatives. There is a resonance on this point between Lacan, Freud and Ernest Becker in relation to the idea that the ego forms a defensive shield that protects the ego against anxiety. However, for Lacan the identification with one’s mirror image also cuts us off from the unlimited jouissance we experienced in the Real, towards which our desire is subsequently directed.

The Mirror Stage

Lacan stressed that humans are born prematurely, lacking coordination and control and tied by necessity to their mother. The infant is an ‘(h)ommelette’, whose being spills out to include pleasurable objects such as the mother’s breast. The mother is all-powerful in the infant’s early existence, likened to a huge crocodile who holds her young in her jaws.³⁶ The bond that ideally develops between mother and infant involves the mutual reverie of the caress, of rhythm, eye-contact and verbalisation. The proximity of the mother can be a source of anxiety for the infant, whose nascent sense of a separate self can be threatened by her overwhelming presence, like being devoured and engulfed by the crocodile. Lacan argues that the lack of a gap between self and (m)Other produces intense anxiety of being smothered. While the mother’s absences provide respite from the anxiety of being smothered, they induce acute distress of separation, which the infant tries to master by representing it, for instance through the ‘fort-da’ game described by Freud when he noticed his grandchild throwing the cotton reel out of the pram, exclaiming “fort!” (gone) and then retrieving it saying “da” (back). The game using the binary logic gone/back helped the infant work through his loss by symbolising it.

The Mirror Stage is a crucial development that usually occurs between the ages of six and eighteen months, when the infant develops a separate sense of self independent of her mother. Lacan developed from Henri Wallon, the insight that mirroring plays a key role in developing full reflective self-awareness which begins with proprioception and then extends to exteroception. One way of determining if this has been achieved is the rouge test. The procedure is simple; a little lipstick is smeared on her nose and she is placed facing a mirror; if she ignores the lipstick then she is judged to be lacking in self-awareness. If, on the other hand she points to her nose and perhaps also turns excitedly to her mother to point out, “that’s me!”, this is taken as evidence that she has attained a separate sense of self-awareness. Lacan argues that the mirror image is appealing to the infant whose anxiety is heightened by the corps morcelé, or the feeling that she is uncoordinated and that her body is in bits and pieces.

Seesawing (the a – a’ relation)

The double revealed in the mirror image is appealing and indeed compelling, by presenting a contrasting vision of the self to the corps morcelé, as whole, coherent and masterful. Identification with this image forms the basis for the establishment of the psychic agency of the ideal-ego. This imaginary agency (a’) sets the scene for the further development of the ego-ideal, which is the position that the subject adopts in the Symbolic realm, when one gains the ability to look at oneself as if from a third-person perspective. This ability, to see oneself from outside and to see others as if from inside, is not a given of nature, but is rather an important developmental achievement that is based on the individual’s response to the name-of-the-father.³⁷ Lacan understood the importance of a secure attachment relation between the child and adult caregivers asking whether, when the infant looks into the mirror and then back to her mother for reassurance, does the mother encourage the identification with the ideal-ego or does she appear indifferent? (Lacan, 1988: 141). If the infant is treated indifferently or worse, is traumatized, she may never achieve this level of consciousness and may be condemned to lack the ability to think metaphorically or metonymically but rather to think in concrete terms and to lack insight into her own behaviour and that of others.

Prior to the development of the ego-ideal, mirroring provokes aggression. Roger Caillois whose ideas influenced Lacan, observed that when viewing their own specular image, birds and some animals can viciously attack the reflected image, which they perceive as a threat. Lacan argues that this dual/duel (a-a’) relation is also apparent in humans because the ideal-ego that is established based on mirroring has a foreign quality that is definitively not “me”. When gazing into the mirror and exclaiming, ‘that’s me!’, the infant identifies with the masterful image, which is also definitively not “me”, but a reflected image. Indeed Lacan describes this as a mis-identification, as the mirror image offers the prospect of self-containment, enclosed within the boundary of our skin, despite the fact that we can never see the back of our head.³⁸ It is a mis-identification too in the sense that the infant comes to believe that the image really is “me”, but in a profound way it is not me, but an image. The foreignness of the image can be exacerbated when fed by the expectations, hopes and dreams imposed on us by our parents and grandparents, to somehow make up for their failures. Simultaneously with the joy of self-discovery comes an overwhelming sense of loss of something fundamental, of the experience of absolute oneness with the (m)Other³⁹, that had always there, which is now missing.

The allure of mastery offered by the image is only temporary, as the child enters into a see-saw relation between the alter-ego and the ideal-ego (portrayed as a-a’), sometimes taking the position of the grandiose, self-sufficient, controlling image that sees the alter ego as weak and pathetic and sometimes from the position of the alter-ego, recoiling in horror from the powerful and threatening force.⁴⁰ If you look back to chapter one you will notice that the oscillation between grandiosity and weakness is the logic used to explain the narcissistic subject. Lacan did not develop his ideas about the destructive power of imaginary identification from direct observation of infant, but from the case of an adult, Marguerite Pantaine. Marguerite attacked and wounded a famous actress Huguette Duflos, whom she had never previously met. Marguerite had harboured the ambition to become a successful author but had failed and at the time of the attack she was stuck in a dead-end job. Lacan diagnosed the attack as a case of self-punishment paranoia, arguing that Marguerite idealized the successful Duflos, but was simultaneously persecuted by the unrealisable ideal-image. Adopting the position of Duflos from the ideal-ego, Marguerite’s alter-ego seemed a pathetic failure, whilst from the position of the alter-ego the ideal-image of Duflos persecuted her, taunting her with a life of success, power and freedom that Marguerite could never attain. Lacan concluded that her hatred was not directed at the real actress but at the ideal-image, and consequently, the attack was essentially an act of self-punishment that aimed to destroy the persecutory image.

There are similarities with the case of Mark Chapman who identified with the former Beatle John Lennon in many respects such as by marrying an older Japanese woman and offering to keep house. Chapman later came to despise the model he had once idealised and came to hate the ideal image of Lennon. Chapman then identified with the fictitious character of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) from which position he labelled Lennon as a “pseud”. Following his murder of Lennon, one psychiatrist argued that Chapman had effectively committed a surrogate suicide. Subsequent analysis of Chapman revealed that he had made long string of positive and negative identifications including, in addition to Lennon and Caulfield,the Wizard of Oz, Captain Nemo and Todd Lundgren. to name a few (Jones, 1992: 102).

Lacan constructed a complex apparatus involving a plane mirror and a curved mirror to explore the illusions constructed by visual perception. These are too complex to describe here, but illustrate how a false unity with a mirror image can be achieved by means of a curved mirror in place of the eye (“I”) which inverts reality, which when situated in relation to a plane mirror, achieves the illusion that a bunch of flowers (“me”) is contained in a vase (“my body”), whereas in reality the vase is upside down underneath the table that the flowers are on.⁴¹ By means of this spatial organization Lacan sought to illustrate the complex operation of visual perception, which does not passively record what is really there but actively constructs and distorts reality. The discussion of perception is continued in the chapter on the body.

It is worthwhile watching the film Black Swan if you find it difficult to get a feel for the profound distortion of perception that can ensue from a negative relation to one’s body-image double. Lacanian analysts Cormac Gallagher and Mary Darby (1994) illustrate similar processes in their description of the cases of Miriam and Jane. Miriam, aged thirty has been anorexic since the age of fifteen. Her constant fear is that she will lose control of her diet and be overwhelmed by her “fat” body. She still lives with her parents, turning to her mother for guidance on everything, especially clothes. One day the phone rings – in those days there was only one central phone in the house - and the caller is a man who tells her he has dialled the wrong number. However, Miriam enjoys the call and runs to answer when he subsequently phones, when he describes to her his fantasies about her. Eventually Miriam agrees to meet the man and is surprised to find that he finds her physically desirable. This has a huge effect on Miriam’s perception of her body, which she comes to see as desiring and desirable. But things are not straightforward, as the desire that is awakened in her is not for this new man but rather for an old boyfriend whom she had once discouraged. Gallagher and Darby explain that Miriam had for years been constantly preoccupied with her image; “is it too fat, is it ugly, is it well dressed?” In her years of therapy she had tried to get the therapist to comment on her image by acting as a reflecting mirror. From a Lacanian perspective this would be mistaken, as the therapist would then simply focus on the alienating image and not on her as a desiring subject.

Gallagher and Darby argue that a mistake made by medics who focus entirely on the body-image, can have devastating consequences, by conflating the subject with the ideal-image that appears in the mirror. What they should do is to seek to understand the identifications made by the person and their situation in the cultural realm. They explain that Miriam had lived most of her life in a mirage of narcissism which was disrupted when the man’s words and his desire turned her head in a different direction, beyond the mirror. Gallagher and Darby also discuss the unfortunate case of Jane, who had a sexual encounter with a man, who later commented disparagingly on her small breasts. Within weeks of this she underwent breast augmentation. The relationship ended shortly after surgery. Jane now hated her breasts and wanted to rip her skin open to remove them so that, “I can have my old body back”.

Self-Containment

When Lacan says that the subject misrecognizes herself, he does not mean that her identification with the mirror image is a case of mistaken identity, but rather that the subject refuses to notice something. This is similar to when a person is told that a close friend has died but refuses to believe it. Knowledge at one level is denied at another, and in the case of the mirror-image this is the knowledge that internally, one is fragmented.⁴² Lacan, who liked to use cloth as a metaphor for the human subject said that humans have a béance, to signify a flaw in the warp and weft of their being which the subject attempts to suture through imaginary fixation with the image.⁴³ The subject is split, haunted by internal feelings of fragmentation which are aggressively projected onto others and through the construction of an identity that is harmonious.

This above description of the subject differs sharply from the self-assured and self-contained rational agent of homo economicus. Today’s consumer is expected to be self-motivated and self-directed. The process of identification described by Lacan challenges this idea by describing subjectivity as fundamentally intersubjective. When one expresses the need to be X or Y, one is expressing another’s desire, or more accurately their demand, for as Lacan enigmatically puts it, desire is always for nothing. When I express the desire for something there is always another person there on the horizon, the one whom I take as a model, or a rival, constantly seeing myself from the point of view of these others. Given the constant but generally unacknowledged influence of others on human desire researchers should be cautious in relying on direct accounts of ‘personal’ experience. This is because they are very likely to encounter the ‘empty speech’ of the belle âme (beautiful soul), who falsely believes him or herself to be self-contained and as the author of his own desires and actions.

Anamorphosis

Anamorphosis describes a deformed image which can only be seen properly from a particular angle. Lacan employs this term to explain how we construct a shield around our fear of death and how this forms part of the general human tendency to in-form reality by rounding it off. He uses Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, to illustrate the process whereby we strive to construct a harmonious image of the world as a shield against images of fragmentation and death. The figure of death can be seen clearly in this painting but only when it is viewed from an oblique angle. Anamorphosis is so much part and parcel of our everyday understanding of the world that we rarely stop to consider its pervasiveness. The quest for harmony is fundamental. A room looks somehow wrong because a picture has been hung slightly askew. This is called the ‘Diderot Effect’, named by Grant McCracken (1990) in honour of Diderot’s short piece, Regrets on parting with my old dressing gown, where he noticed that when he bought a new one, suddenly everything else in his room seemed shabby and demanded to be replaced. This tendency is exemplified by the Gestalt principles of closure, similarity, proximity, continuity and connectedness, for instance when presented with a series of dots we see a triangle. These principles are well-known to marketing practitioners who employ them in a wide range of contexts from the design of retail spaces, to the provision of advertising cues. If you have a picture hanging on a wall in your room, you can test this simply by tilting it at any angle and seeing how long you, or others, can live with it at that angle. Ariely et al (2003) coined the term ‘arbitrary coherence’, to describe how, when asked to benchmark the price of a product to the last two digits of their social security number, subjects anchored their subsequent offers by sticking close to this arbitrary figure.

The tendency to value harmony also significantly affects our perceptions of other people. For instance, in the nineteenth-century it was widely believed that physiognomy, or the shape of one’s head or facial appearance, determined one’s inner character. Physically attractive people are still thought to be kind, noble and generous. It has even been argued that prettier people really are morally better than most because that is how they are treated by others.⁴⁴ Malcolm Gladwell coined this the ‘Warren Harding Error.’⁴⁵ Harding was an imposing hunk of a man, tall, dark, tanned and handsome, with calm grey eyes and a well-proportioned and supple body. When Harry Daugherty, spied Harding, he at once thought, ‘He looks like a Senator, wouldn’t he make a great President!’ Daugherty backed Harding’s campaign and he was duly elected. Harding turned out to be one of the worst Presidents in American history, as he was pompous, ambivalent, not particularly bright and counted drinking and the pursuit of women amongst his favourite hobbies – this may remind you of more recent incumbents. Despite this, the belief that attractive people are better than others is hard to shake off. Teachers expect that their more attractive pupils are more intelligent than their peers,⁴⁶ and attractive candidates are more successful in interviews.⁴⁷ The downside for those considered unattractive is not only that they will be discriminated against at school and in the workplace but also are likely be treated more aggressively by others.⁴⁸. Robin Cook who was an exceedingly able British politician and statesman was never felt to be in the running for British Prime Minister because of his gnome-like appearance.

It is a cliché that advertising invariably deploys images of beautiful, successful people to promote products. Anti-advertising sites such as Adbusters employ parody and irony to deconstruct ads and provide a means for consumer resistance. Many are unaware that over one hundred years ago at the time of the First World War Lacan and the artists he associated with from the DADA and Surrealist schools shared a similar distrust of the image. In Britain there was no conscription, so advertising romanticised the war by associating it with comradeship and duty amongst ‘pals’, thousands of whom subsequently went to their deaths on the Western Front. The DADA school sought to graphically depict the falseness of the image in their work. Imagine the reaction of the art lover who encounters an exhibit in the gallery that consists of a mirror in which they see their reflection. They stop to read the caption - Portrait d’un Imbecile. Like Lacan, Phillippe Soupault (1920) points out in this work that the reflected image is not the subject, but is an image separate from ‘me’, standing outside of ‘me’ and the fact that” I” (the subject) readily assume that it is ‘me’ is imbecilic. A similar point is made by Henri Magritte in his work Ceci n’est pas un pipe (1928-1929). Max Ernst exhibited a photomontage based on a photograph by Man Ray for an exhibition called dernieres oeuvres, which is regarded as an allusion to Lacan’s Mirror Stage. The glass plate of the photo has been smashed and the face of the artist appears as if in a fractured mirror, Here Ernst is parodying the traditional function of photography as a mimetic reading of reality by shattering representation and forming a new reality which, with its splintered pieces, challenges the view of photography as self-presence. As with Lacan, identity is presented as the construction of a split subject, whose fragments are held together by the symbolic glue of culture. The surrealist artist Andre Breton’s Portrait d’Andre defies convention because there is no image there⁴⁹. Instead, the canvas features several splodges of paint surrounded by text, “impuissance” and “LUNE DE MIEL ... Dans quelque train que ce soit, il est dangereux de se pencher par la portière.” Here the point is that the subject – Andre Breton – does not correspond to his imaginary mirror image but to the symbolic signifiers that construct his identity.

Social Media and the Imaginary

The symbolic function of the law acting “in the name of the father” is an important issue in the regulation of virtual worlds. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Ask.fm that were originally designed to enhance human relationships, but have since degenerated into platforms where some can bully others with impunity. Such lawless behaviour was there at the start of the Internet. The wizards who created LambdaMOO and PMCWorld, which were the first virtual worlds, believed in an egalitarian ethos that emphasized freedom of speech in politics and the market. Principles of trust and harmony quickly evaporated and became dystopias characterized by incivility and rivalry. New forms of incivility developed in the next generation of virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft, uWorld, Lineage and Second Life relating to the conduct of avatars. High level avatars preyed on their virtual neighbours, robbing them, sexually molesting them, even killing them. Sometimes internal conflicts for an item that attained hyper value in the virtual world, such as a magic cloak or dagger, would spill over into real life fights with real weapons. The dual-duel nature of these Imaginary spaces presented major problems for their designers. Left to their own devices these worlds descended into chaos. Wizards who intervened against their principles by deleting the identities of avatars, risked full scale revolt, as occurred in PMCMOO and Lineage. This has led to calls for the introduction of a judicial system and forms of political regulation such as a Parliament to regulate behaviour.⁵⁰

While Teresa Brennan (1993) sought to explain the state of European consumer consciousness in the 1990s, her argument has more resonance today, when news reports are filled with studies of continuing mass extinction. She draws from Lacan, Melanie Klein and Karl Marx to argue that the European consumer society is governed by the illusion of an eternal present, where consumers are told that they are producers who are in control, while the reality is that they are passive, producing nothing. Moreover the relations between human culture and the natural world which is seen as its other are overwhelmingly exploitative, as culture strives to control this other by moulding it to its image. Whiles in Lacanian psychoanalysis passivity, erasure of history, illusions of omnipotence and aggressivity towards the image of the other are most commonly linked to narcissism, Brennan goes further to argue that the consumer society is psychotic because reality is denied. Discussing Lacan she argues that;

his theory suggests that the ego can only make the world over in its own image by reducing the lively heterogeneity of living nature and diverse cultural orders to a grey mirror of sameness. And it can only do this by consuming living nature in producing a proliferation of goods and services whose possession becomes the sine qua non of the good life. Of course if nature is endlessly consumed in the pursuit of a totalizing course, then that course is dangerous for living; it constitutes a danger to one’s own survival as well as that of others. That, approximately is the technical, legal definition of psychosis.⁵¹

Brennan’s point, which is that in late capitalist consumer society marketing promises the abolition of waiting time offering the consumer instant gratification, was made long before the formation of Amazon. The consumer is waited upon and the service promise that is wrapped up in the marketing concept appeals to the infantile desire for domination and control. The car is the exemplar of this tendency, where the driver is fully in control, yet passive.⁵². Marx’s influence is evident in her argument that the aim of the entire capitalist enterprise is to abolish waiting time, such that the consumer is constantly reminded to live for now, to think only of the present and thus to forget the impact of the consumer lifestyle on the prospect for future generations and for life on the planet more generally. However she also critiques Marx for not considering the effects of capitalist expansion on the natural world. She describes tellingly how in the capitalist process the extinction of a species is masked by a seemingly endless process of substitution. Growing demand and constantly evolving technologies for the exploitation of nature lead to an apparently endless sequence, so that once one species has died out, it is substituted by another down the chain. Her argument made me think of scampi. Scampi is a fish product that used to be made from Dublin Bay Prawns or langoustine. When these went into sharp decline, prawns were substituted for by monkfish and then years later, when monkfish became scarce, it was in turn substituted by Vietnamese Pangasius catfish, which is almost tasteless. Brennan argues that this process of substitution is ubiquitous and that there are ever growing examples of extinction. Most importantly, the natural reproduction time of species is not respected and at some point we really will come to the end of the line, a reality still too often denied in the narcissistic culture in which we live.

While Brennan’s complex argument is simplified in the above, her main point is that our deeply held tendency to preserve harmony and to see what we want to see, enables us to convince ourselves that, despite our knowing that the ocean floor and shorelines are carpeted in plastic, that thousands of species on land and at sea are on the verge of extinction, that forests continue to disappear at an unprecedented rate, and the climate continues to warm and despite our vocal complaints and even despair about the above, we pay lip-service to this, continuing to consume as if resources were unlimited and we lived in a pristine world.

The Symbolic Order

The symbolic order is the language system, comprising the set of conventional distinctions organised as binary oppositions together with those prohibitions that comprise the cultural context we are born into. The symbolic order brings things into existence by naming them. While this may seem rather obvious but consider that you are in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language and are experiencing extreme discomfort, but lack the language to express this. To be able to describe what we are feeling to others and to respond to their questions (Is it a dull ache or a sharp pain? Where exactly is it?) enables us to identify and differentiate hunger pangs from indigestion, nausea and acute conditions such as appendicitis. Learning speech enables the child to communicate with others and to name hurts and ills that were previously felt but could only be expressed through its cries. Symbolic language also further separates and alienates the child from the mother as desire comes to be formed in language which is the discourse of the Other.

Lacan’s idea of the Symbolic order came from his reading of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and is also related to his contemporary, the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss. While de Saussure described la langue as the language system existing at one point in time, Levi-Strauss had widened this to argue that this system also comprises the taken-for-granted and largely unconscious set of rules that structure the kinship system, the economic system, cuisine and styles of dress, acting to classify the range of appropriate behaviour according to one’s social position, gender or ethnicity. A network of interlacing unspoken rules govern expectations of ‘normal’ behaviour in particular settings such as, who should clean the dishes, do the hoovering, wash the car, mow the lawn, mend a broken plug, or do DIY? Lacan refers to this system as the Big Other. Just as the relation between the infant and her image is represented as a-a’, so the Big Other, or Autre is labelled A.

The Paternal Metaphor (Nom/Non du Père)

During the Mirror Stage the whole comprising mother-infant is cracked open when the infant makes her or his first alienating identification with her ideal-ego. Subjected to the see-saw of desire, she seeks desperately to return to the blissful union with the (m)Other. The scene for the Oedipal stage is set as a widening gap opens. The mother is frequently absent, perhaps at work, or attending to others and the child reasons that she has been drawn away by the father, who possesses the phallus. Lacan speaks of the phallus, a potent symbol of power in place of Freud’s focus on the penis. Lacan also de-literalizes Freud through the paternal metaphor which does not refer to the actual father, but the symbolic father. For Lacan the symbolic father was not his actual father but his forceful maternal grandfather. The symbolic father is the image that the child hates and is fearful of on those occasions when he is naughty and his mother says, “Just wait until your father gets home, he’ll deal with you!” The father in this sense is feared as most powerful when he is absent. Lacan loved puns and the “Nom du Pere” puns with “Non”, linking to the symbolic prohibition of enjoyment and to the symbolic prohibition linked to the “Name of the Father” that any Catholic will immediately recognize. In sum, for the “Name of the Father” to take effect, this does not rely on the presence of a real father, but rather on any authority figure who can be appealed to that can create a division between the mother and the child.

The child, whether male or female, (possession of a penis is irrelevant in this respect) eventually comes to recognize in the figure of this third party, the father, that they can never be the exclusive focus of his or her mother’s desire and consequently, they can never be the phallus. In giving up the phallus, the child acknowledges his or her symbolic castration. At the point of identification with the father’s values, the phallic signifier, comprising the child’s desire to be the phallus for their mother, is repressed, and replaced by the paternal signifier, the nom du père. This act of repression of the phallic signifier is a metaphorical substitution which forms the basis for the formation of the dynamic unconscious and the ability to use language flexibly by employing metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche. Henceforth, the true nature of desire though ever-present, remains unknown. The ‘nom’ in nom du père, signifies both the father’s name and his non, his prohibition. By identifying with the name-of-the father the child accepts his or her position as being subject to the Symbolic order. Henceforth, he or she is a subject in several senses of the term; subject to the lure of Imaginary identifications with others; subjected to the law prohibiting incest; a subject of language which forms the unconscious and within a particular culture, being placed in order of precedence within a family setting (‘Daddy, Mummy, Me’); and as a gendered subject who is placed in a particular social place depending on the social standing of their birth.

The dynamic unconscious is typically formed when the child identifies with the paternal signifier ‘the name of the father’, with the phallus as its signified. Through this the typical child represses the desire to be the phallus that completes the m(Other), or to be the object of desire of the m(Other). Repressed desire must now operate through the unconscious medium of language. There is a lot to explain in the above. Firstly, what is meant by “typical”? The answer is that in ‘atypical’ responses the child may exhibit an extreme reaction to the repression of the paternal metaphor resulting in an hysterical or obsessive character structure. Or they may refuse to repress the paternal signifier, resulting in a psychotic structure, or disavow it, leading to a perverse structure. These different structures are discussed later.

Identification: Ideal-Ego and Ego-ideal

To recap, the subject’s ego is formed in the Mirror Stage which is the arena of the Imaginary. In this order self-sameness and self-coherence are formed by identification with others, most importantly one’s parents. The imaginary is an arena in that it establishes a dual/duel (a – a’) relationship between the individual and their mirror image. Language is an intrinsic part of these identifications, since parents and other people attach different values to objects, and consequently direct the child’s identifications. (Fink 1995, 25, 36.) Thus culture, in the form of the Other has always been at work in the formation of our subjectivity – hence the oft-used term “we are always-already subjects”. The Mirror Stage when the child identifies with her ideal-ego is mediated symbolically because the acceptability of the ideal-ego is mediated by the ego-ideal, represented by the one who takes the role of the (m)Other. Because of their similarity these terms can be confused, although the ideal-ego is formed in the Imaginary, while the ego-ideal is a symbolic formation

The formation of an ego-ideal signifies that we exist as a subject, as someone who has worth and is recognized and loved, which helps us cope with the lack at the centre of our being. If love represents the attention we receive from others, a continuing crucial aspect of our lives is the self-respect we gain by earning and maintaining the approbation of others.

Object a

Object a is what causes our desire which emerges when the subject is instantiated as a split being separate from the (m)Other. Lacan formulated object a at around the time of Seminar X on anxiety as a replacement for the Thing, a concept that refers more directly to the Real rawness of separation and loss from the (m)Other. The typical subject who is split by identification with the paternal signifier comes to desire what others desire. The imaginary erects a fantasy image, the object-a that acts as the lost object that brings our desire into being. Relating to Aristophanes’ tale in the Symposium, object a is instantiated in the gap in being that emerges when the individual is torn from their other half, to remind them of their lost plenitude and propelling their fruitless quest. Object a is a remainder of the experience of Real full jouissance, fuelling the illusory expectation that this can be regained. It is particular to each individual and can be anything that puts me in touch with my repressed desire for my lost object. Put another way, object a causes my desire by referring to the imaginary lost object that will make me whole again.

Object a is always more than any concrete object, so that desire has no substantial consistency. The dreams that astute advertisers pick up of beauty, sexual prowess or money are not what is really important but rather object a, the element in the object that the subject ‘believes’ will truly satisfy their desire by making them whole again. Object a is the cause of our desire and not the thing itself, the agalma. Lacan refers to the scene where the talented, beautiful and vain Alcibiades drunkenly professes his desire for the physically unattractive Socrates. Alcibiades proclaims that Socrates’ decrepit body contains the precious agalma. Even Alcibiades, who has the adulation of the entire population and is the envy of most men, is subject to lack and desire, in this case for the beautiful mind of Socrates.⁵³

Object a points to the ineffable quality of that which attracts us to other people, which is often linked to specific quality of the body or its deportment such as a certain look, the tone of voice, the colour of their eyes, a certain smile, or virtually anything that makes the other irresistible to us. A Scottish author – I can’t remember whom – mentioned that he fell in love with his wife the day he saw her across a crowded room as she absent-mindedly reached back to scratch the nape of her neck and how he was gripped by a powerful desire to be her blouse to experience her skin! Bruce Fink suggests that object a helps explain why a partner who has been spurned or in modern parlance, dumped, by their lover, often finds it impossible to ‘let go and move on’, but clings to the other with all their might, like a barnacle to a rock. These individuals, he explains, have imbued their partner with object-a and following their rejection, the problem is their belief that they simply cannot find desire elsewhere.⁵⁴

The discussion of object a becomes more complex when one takes into consideration differences in the structure of the subject, for not everyone identifies with the paternal signifier. The typical subject desires what the Other desires, which fuels the neurotic’s pursuit of symbolic achievements that never seem sufficient in relation to the Other. Object a plays a different role depending on the clinical structure. The hysterical subject seeks to become object a of the Other’s desire, whereas the obsessive subject stubbornly clings to the belief that they retain object-a and refuses to admit the fissure of desire. Contrary to the hysteric, the perverse subject seeks to become object-a for the Other’s jouissance. The psychotic subject on the other hand is lacking object a as they are engulfed by the (m)Other.

The Ego and the Subject

The subject of the Symbolic must be differentiated from the ego or self. Described earlier, the ego, or self, is an imaginary formation that arises from identification with the image that comprises our ideal-ego. The imaginary is a state of warfare involving a dual/duel relation between inside and outside, as this imaginary self exists as an object in our inner world but is opaque, so that we do not know what is inside of it. Because it pre-linguistic and cannot be articulated, the imaginary is inaccessible to psychoanalysis. However imaginary strivings for fixity and coherence often manifest in our symbolic utterances when as speaking subjects we attribute meanings to our actions. The subject is thus a very specific term used to describe the subject of meaning. Psychoanalysis is thus interested in us as subjects of meaning but not in questions such as whether we are good at sports (Miller, 1996, 22).

The Lacanian subject exists in the discourse of the Other in that we are allotted a specific identity in advance of our birth, as culture has already largely determined the opportunities open to us, depending on if we are born able-bodied or not, black or white, rich or poor, female or male. Cultural conventions are ordered by binary oppositions. For example even today those born with female genitalia are often dressed in pink and will be given presents fluffy rabbits and dolls, whilst males are more likely to be dressed in blue and will be given action toys. Parents and caregivers participate in this socialization of the child into ‘appropriate’ roles. Most importantly, the symbolic system consists of unspoken rules, the most fundamental of which is the prohibition against incest in relation to which Lacan modifies Freud to present a cultural version of the Oedipus complex.

Language and the Unconscious

What does it mean then to say that through the repression of the paternal signifier the unconscious becomes structured like a language? The conscious “I” is alienated in that it is spoken by the language of the unconscious as an external agency that comes from beyond the self (a-a’). Lacan does not so much describe language acquisition as an individual propensity, but rather as a form of invasion that organizes and codifies the individual’s subjectivity by imposing a pre-formed grid on the territory of their inchoate experience. The language of the culture we are born into predates us and is imperfect to describe our experience so that a given signifier never quite expresses what we mean to say. This brings us to Lacan’s critique and revision of de Saussure’s structural linguistics.⁵⁵

The unconscious for Lacan is not a place occupying a specific location in the brain but is rather a set of processes that operate on the same lines as language. He was later to use a Moebius Strip⁵⁶ to illustrate how the unconscious subject of the enunciation expresses itself obliquely in our everyday speech. present in what we say. We humans are naturally attuned to acquire language and to use it flexibly, employing metaphorical reasoning, which involves substituting one term for another and metonymic reasoning whereby one term stands for another. These capacities are made possible by the repression of the phallic signifier which splits the subject, as language can only be used flexibly in the presence of a lack or gap. Consider those word puzzles where the words are scrambled so that one must shuffle the pieces one at a time into the single empty space on the square to change them. Without the space the words cannot be shifted. In a similar manner for those individuals who have not repressed the paternal signifier, there is no gap so that their use and comprehension of language lacks flexibility and they treat words literally with no understanding of figures of speech nor of corresponding humorous intent. This can lead to serious miscommunication, for instance where one person asserts humorously, “I’d kill for a sandwich”, while the person they are speaking to who thinks in concrete terms wonders who it is that they are thinking of killing? At the extreme as in psychosis, signifiers can take on a truly terrifying aspect.

Language is extremely important in psychoanalysis as it provides a means to access our conscious fantasies and unconscious phantasies. From the above we cannot take it for granted that language understanding is universal but rather that neurotic, perverse and psychotic characters will use it differently. Further complexity is added when we consider that the meanings we attribute to what a person are not transparent. Lacan critiqued the influential theory of semiological linguisitics which had been developed by Ferdinand de Saussure who argued that there is an equivalence between the signifier, for instance a sound image such as when someone says ‘tree’, and the signified, the image or concept that pops into our head. Lacan referred to the example offered by de Saussure to illustrate the relation between the signifier and signified where he had drawn an illustration of a tree (Sr) which he then linked to the concept “tree” (Sd). While de Saussure had argued that the drawn image is equivalent to the concept “tree”, Lacan disputed this, arguing that in reality this is much more complex. He pointed out that the image of a tree drawn by de Saussure was a conventional representation of just one type of tree, and that there are many more types. If someone uses the signifier “tree” in a sentence, then the listener cannot just rely on this one term to derive the meaning of what they are saying because there are so many different types of actual tree to which symbolic meanings are added. In England where “Hearts of Oak’ is almost a national anthem, the tree takes on an especial significance and here one could go on to discuss the symbolic meanings of willow, laurel, yew, hawthorn and so on, for different cultures. The ‘christmas tree’, which is now ubiquitous, does not have to be a tree at all, while more abstract renderings of tree include the ‘family tree’ and the ‘decision tree’.

From above the listener cannot take it for granted that the meaning of a term is transparent, especially in the context of psychoanalysis. Lacan also argued that the meaning of an utterance is always deferred, in that we have to wait until an utterance is finished before we can begin to understand the signifier in the overall context. Meaning is thus not transparent but arises in the chain of signifiers. In any event the notion that any signifier could ever entirely capture or explain its signified would lead to a static and inflexible situation where no need for forms of substitution such as metaphor and metonymy. I recall the following example from the research project I was involved in some time ago into customer relations in a car dealership. During the course of our interviews it had become clear that service technicians were rewarded not on the basis of the quality of the job they did but rather on how much faster they completed a service against the time set by the manufacturer. I quizzed a superviser about this during an interview and according to my interview notes he had replied, “We always strive to offer the best service possible”. Later, when reviewing my note of the interview taken at the time against the recording I could hardly believe my ears, because he had then quickly whispered the addendum, “or we don’t!”, which I had failed to pick up on at the time.

Psychoanalysts are very much aware that language use is suffused by metaphor, where one signifier is substituted for another by means of the similarity of their properties, through metonymy where the substitution is made by means of the contiguity of ideas, or through synecdoche where the part stands for the whole. Lionel Bailly uses fishing as an example. The statement that one is “fishing for pearls” is metonymic, deriving from the idea that fishing involves taking things from the ocean, although with the knowledge that this activity does not involve a fishing rod or net. Statements such as, “fishing for information”, or “fishing for compliments” involve a metaphorical transfer to an entirely new domain which does not rely on the contiguity of signifieds but on the similar properties of the process.

Added to the above, Lacan argued that the unconscious is structured by the same rules as those pertaining to language. This is discussed next.

Language and the Unconscious

I must admit that I am terrible at cryptic crosswords and have great respect for those who are good at solving them. For those who are unfamiliar with them the solution often involves the use of anagrams, reversals and metaphor and metonymy. Lacan pointed out even more forcefully than Freud the importance of such wordplay in deciphering the meaning of terms in psychoanalysis. He was particularly drawn to Freud’s description of a seemingly trivial incident involving his failure to recollect, when, driving from Ragusa in Dalmatia to Herzegovina he asks his travelling companion if he had ever been to Orvieto to see the famous frescoes painted by ……….? Frustrated, Freud cannot remember the name of the artist. Even more annoying is that the names that then do pop into his head, of Botticelli and Boltraffio, definitively did not paint the frescoes. Freud learns much later that the name of the actual artist was ‘Signorelli’ and this prompts him to engage in introspection in order to discover what had gone on in his psyche to prompt his mistake.

Asking why he failed to recall the right name, Freud recalls that just prior to this incident, he had been remarking to his companion that the Turks living in Bosnia and Herzegovina had great trust in their doctors. If nothing could be done for a patient their family members would tell the doctor, “Herr (Sir) what is to be said. I know that if you could have saved him, you would’. Freud conjectured that there must be some kind of link between “Bosnia”, “Herzegovina”, “Botticelli”, “Boltraffio” and “Herr”, which once made explicit would explain his curious lapse of memory. He recalled that at the time he had wanted to mention that the Turks value sexual ability so much that they would rather die than lose it. He remembered that he had suppressed making this comment because he did not think it appropriate to share this information with a stranger. He also recalled not long before this incident, whilst staying at the village of Traffoi, that he had learned that a valued patient had committed suicide on learning that he was infected with an incurable sexual disorder. Although he had no conscious awareness of this incident at the time of his memory lapse, Freud’s remembrance of the suicide then led him to follow the distressing and repugnant chain of associations described above. Freud concluded from this that his forgetting the name of Signorelli was not a chance event because while consciously he strove to recall the name, his motive for being unable to do so was that he wished to forget disturbing knowledge involving references to sex and death bound up in the suicide of his analysand.

Unconscious Meaning and Cryptic Crosswords

How does the above tie in to cryptic crosswords? Lacan makes explicit the metaphorical and metonymic operations at work in this deceptively simple act of forgetting. Herzegovina acts as a retrieval cue for Herr, (in the reference to the Turk’s preference to die rather than lose libido) and Herr is in turn a substitute for Signor, the first part of Signorelli. The two artists Freud recalls also relate to the repressed memory as a form of word puzzle. The elli in Botticelli is the last syllable in Signorelli. The first syllable Bo links to the first syllable of Boltraffio. However, with one small difference, the second syllable traffio that links clearly to Traffoi, the place where Freud had learned his analysand had killed himself.

From the above the repressed emotion is not linked immediately to meaning which does not suddenly pop out but it can only be painstakingly unravelled by following the chain of signification. Notice too that the meaning in the above is not buried deep in some labyrinthine space but is rather hidden in full sight in the form of a puzzle to be solved. And here I should dispel the widely believed view of the dynamic unconscious as a place, because for Freud, Lacan and other psychoanalysts it consists of a set of processes. In his discussion of this example of forgetting, Lacan argues that, “all we can discover are metonymic ruins connected to a pure and simple combination of signifiers”.⁵⁷ To reiterate an earlier point, the retrieval of the forgotten meaningful term that fell into the unterdruckt, or nether region in Freud’s consciousness, was made possible by the traces left by a combination of signifiers (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Botticelli and Boltraffio).

To recap, the dawning of the Symbolic occurs when the infant develops his or her first concept “that’s me!” by identifying with her mirror image or through being treated as an individual by a parent or caregiver. This develops more fully when she represses her desire for her mother by repressing the phallic signifier. A bar is instated that separates the unconscious from conscious thought. The ego, which is the conscious moi (homo economicus) is an imaginary formation, a self that believes that it consciously self-directed and self-contained. The reality is that when the subject speaks, he or she is subject to and spoken by the unconscious. When consciously proffering an account to others it is difficult to discern exactly who it is that is doing the talking, given that the moi or me comprises a myriad of identifications with ideals (with parents, frenemies, heroes) that Lacan disparagingly refers to as a pile of old coats. From moment to moment it is difficult to know which one of them is speaking. The unconscious speaks too as repressed desire erupts through fissures in this self-contained mantle through telltale slips of the tongue, dreams and memory lapses. For instance, a word may be impossible to locate or it might appear as words trapped inside the body –

Need, Demand and Desire

The stage has largely been set for the discussion of desire. Need, in Lacan’s formulation exists purely in the realm of biology. He accepted that some animals are capable of imaginary identification but argued that only humans are capable of symbolic reflective awareness. Demand and desire are not biological but cultural constructs. His statement, that desire opens in the space that appears between need and demand reflects that from childhood many of the specific demands we make for the attention of others, where we ask for something or point something out to them, are for something else, which is their undivided attention to us. Bruce Fink makes the apposite point that desire would not exist without lack; if all our needs were met, all the time, then we would not demand anything, nor would we desire anything, nor would we require language to communicate our desire. Just as with the word-picture mentioned above, a gap is necessary for the operations of substitution and combination, of metaphor and metonymy that enable the fluidity of linguistic expression and of desire. Given the fluid indeterminacy of the signifier, then how is it possible for the subject to construct a consistent and stable identity? This is made possible through the operation of Fantasy, which appears at the intersection of the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

Desire and Fantasy

To speak of desire in Lacanian terms must involve a basic understanding of character structure. Commentators generally describe desire in relation to the neurotic and sometimes they will differentiate the desire of the hysteric from that of the obsessive character. Given that neurotics have acceded to symbolic castration by accepting the prohibition of the Name of the Father (NOTF) they are now cut off from jouissance provided by the Real, which they seek to recover. The neurotic wishes to be the object of desire for others and longs for union with the one that will close off their lack. Neurotic desire operates within the sphere of the Big Other which prescribes the limit points of socially sanctioned behaviour, in relation to which fantasy enables the subject to retain something of the quality of lost jouissance. Desire does not arise spontaneously but is kindled and inflamed by our unconscious phantasies and conscious fantasies that partially fill in the gap established by our separation from the delights and terrors of the Real. Through fantasy the subject establishes coordinates for object a, by situating themselves in relation to those objects that enflame their desire and by establishing boundaries that delineate what is pleasurable and turns them on, from that which does not.

For the neurotic subject desire asks a question of the Other, che vuoi? (What do you want of me?). The subject seeks to fill the gap in the Other by becoming the image of the Other’s desire. Desire is not simply expressed for a specific object but emerges through the process of elaborating the fantasy in which the object plays a role. For instance, the fantasy that awakened the desire of Freud’s grand-daughter for strawberry cake was provided by the image of her parents fondly watching her when she first ate one. Fantasy is that aspect of desire that invokes, however briefly, our lost fullness of being. Unlikely as it may seem, the Elaborated-Intrusion theory of desire developed in the cognitive psychology literature (May et al., 2014), shares with Lacan, a focus on the power of fantasy and the fundamentally affective nature of desire. For instance, Kavanagh et al. (2005) ask us to imagine that you are reading a boring tome such as this when the image of drinking a cup of coffee pops into your head. You immediately picture a nearby café, already savouring the familiarity of the barista’s smile of recognition, anticipating the smell of fresh-ground coffee beans, the hiss of the espresso machine, the taste of the coffee and the delicious croissant you will buy to complement it, an image quickly followed up by your rationalisation that the ambience will enable you to better concentrate on the tedious book you must read. Lacan adds to this that every fantasy should be understood as "articulated in terms of the subject speaking to the imaginary other" and as such "human desire is adjusted not to an object, but to a phantasy" (Lacan 1958–1959: 11/12/58). Thus phantasy/fantasy always involves an Other.

The neurotic only rarely and momentarily gets what they desire. On arrival at the café the barista is flustered and peremptory; the café is packed, they have run out of croissants and when the coffee finally arrives, it is cold. For most mortals the perfect experience, whether our routine visit to a café or our ‘holiday of a lifetime” is encapsulated purely by our anticipatory fantasy of it. This is just as well, because as Lacan argues in Seminar X, the worst outcome may be that we actually do get what we we really desire, in which case desire would itself be extinguished. To actually come within reach of achieving one’s desires can be a cause of extreme anxiety. For the neurotic, desire aims always to circle around the object and indeed to be threatened with the actual achievement of one’s desire creates intense anxiety in the subject.

Channelling Desire

Given that the phantasy of the neurotic subject is to be the sole object of the desire for the Other and to be the one who fills the gap in the Other, this can act as a powerful means by which to socialize children into the pre-given roles that society offers them. Valerie Walkerdine (2000) researched the story lines in British weekly “comics” Bunty and Tracy aimed at pre-teen girls that were widely read in the UK some years ago. Because of their wide readership the stories, which featured cartoon characters whose conversations were represented as speech bubbles and were highly accessible operated at the level of unconscious phantasy by channelling the desire of their readers to fit with social expectations. Stories often mimicked the plot of a classic fairy tale, ending with “happy-ever-after” solutions, centred mostly of the insertion of the girl at the centre of the story into an ideal family. A recurring theme was of a girl who found herself in a daunting and difficult situation where she was impoverished, or orphaned and treated unkindly by her caregivers, despite which she acted with unselfish helpfulness towards others. The stories provided a contrasting vision of the happy family, portrayed as a nuclear family, living in a comfortable house, well-furnished, with all the requisite possessions requisite to living the good life. Walkerdine argues that these themes, although not overtly sexual, were central to the production of a form of femininity and female sexuality, where the arrival of a male like the proverbial ‘knight in shining armour’ was portrayed as the typical solution.

Walkerdine’s (2000) analysis points to how desire is inserted into specific discourses, noting for example that the meaning of signifiers such as “good” is not transparent but is revealed through its articulation to other signifiers. To be a “good” girl in one discourse might signal that she is well behaved, whilst in another, it might index “intelligent”, or “studious”. What is important is the relation that is struck between signifiers within a particular discourse and the positions offered by that discourse for the construction of identity. A level of complexity is introduced if both discourses feature in the same story, which may result in a degree of slippage, discontinuity and paradox as the reader shifts from one meaning to the other.

Walkerdine argues that the comics produced constellations of meaning that provided vehicles for gender resolution. Acknowledging that reading is an active process, she is careful to argue that such images of normalization cannot be imposed onto the subject, preferring to describe this as canalization, or the channelling of desire towards investment into certain objects. She recalls from her own experience the complexity arising as even siblings can have a very different upbringing from each other which can have important consequences for how the individual subject engages with such material. Walkerdine herself recalled a father who was all good, for whom she worked hard – she was his little girl – On the other hand her younger sister remembered a father who was weak and ill, in relation to whom she felt too powerful. A simple model is impossible – because the relationship between positioning, signification and desire is too complex.

Looking back at these comics of days gone by Walkerdene laments the failure of counter-stereotypical attempts, for instance by depicting women engaging in activities traditionally undertaken by men, where the mother as it were wields the phallus by holding a spanner or wrench. Such counterstereotypes fail to produce new social conditioning. She argues that a major problem for girls is the move from desire for the mother who is originally perceived as the Phallic mother, who does not turn out to possess the phallus. She notes how social conditions have changed and women now fill a host of positions that invest them with some quality of the phallus. However she also points out Lacan’s argument as they are subject to symbolically castration, no neurotic can possess the phallus.

Identity: Button Ties and Master Signifiers

How does the subject forge a sense of identity in the endlessly shifting landscape of the signifier? Driven by repression from access to the Real, the subject is caught in the endless loops of language, where one signifier refers to others in an apparently endless chain of references. Here the Imaginary steps in to provide respite from this interminable slippage enabling the subject to gain the purchase of temporal consistency for the construction of identity. Lacan was found of drawing references from upholstery to illustrate his arguments and here he argues that in the same way the upholsterer uses button ties to

As described above how, given the indeterminacy of language, a given signifier never fully captures its signified and so another signifier is required and then another, ad infinitum. How then is any fixity of meaning possible? Thankfully for the subject, the imaginary drive for coherence and fixity that provided the original grounding of the Symbolic order, steps in to arrest the sliding of the signifier. Without this imaginary role the Symbolic order would self-destruct.⁵⁸ Lacan, who was fond of using upholstery as a metaphor argued that the imaginary forms points de capiton, or quilting points in discourse. Just as the upholsterer fixes the stuffing of a chair or mattress in place by stitching the stretched fabric in place at a quilting point (point de capiton), so the typical or neurotic subject halts the free flow of signification by stitching together constellations of signifiers. This is essential for the functioning of the subject and the individual who lacks this point of fixity is prone to develop psychosis.⁵⁹ This facility of buttoning down meaning can be exemplified in a myriad of examples in private and public discourse.

Signifiers that anchor constellations of meaning are known as master signifiers. For instance in the USA “Watergate” and “Pizzagate” stitch together constellations of meaning that are in many respects different but which relate to views on “big” government. These master signifiers are places where different value and identity systems collide and to an extent, converge. The master signifiers can be unique to an individual. Bailly argues that master signifiers are “the very stuff of the human Subject”, which change the signifying chain into one which supports the ego (Bailly, 2012: 61/64). One analysand described himself as a keen sailor who during his youth had used his skill as helmsman to outdo his brothers in their fierce rivalry for their father’s attention. He recounted that his father had also been a keen sailor. The master signifier “sailor” thus formed an important support for the analysand’s identity. Bailly also notes this as an example of how the Name of the Father hides the true meaning of the true object of desire, as the object of the analysand’s mother’s desire had also been a sailor (his father) (Bailly, 2012: 133). Bailly also describes a case which better explains how a master signifier can support a person’s identity by distorting the signifying chain (Bailly, 2012: 62-63). A girl who relentlessly bullied another girl repeated “I’m so lucky” in several contexts. She reiterated how lucky she was not to have to go to a hairdresser, that she had a rare purple bracelet and because she did not have to take the entrance exam for entry to a private school. The girl she had been bullying was being sent to a private school that the Subject had wanted to go to but could not because her family could not afford the fees. In this case while supporting her ego the master signifier “I’m so lucky”, masked its opposite.

Some people seem to be stuck in a loop, endlessly repeating the same old story over and over. Often this can concern a slight or a hurt, for example in the story recounted to me several times by the chance companion I met on a walking holiday, who kept repeating the story of how as a senior manager for a major company he had played an indispensable role and how inexplicably, he had been cruelly sacked. Valerie Walkerdine describes the initial irritation she experienced on her visits to the working-class Cole household. She initially took Mr. Cole’s constant references to fighting, such as when he endlessly replayed round fifteen of the fight scene from Rocky 2 on the TV whilst she sat in the lounge, as evidence of a stupid, fascist, macho attitude linked to a fantasy of omnipotence, heroism and salvation.⁶⁰ She tells us that she came to understand how the fantasy of fighting and of being a fighter played an important role in the Cole household. The family had been stalwarts of the protest asbestos at the local school and Mr. Cole relayed to his sons the importance of fighting their corner and was proud of their bruises and scrapes. Mr. Cole was likewise constantly on guard against being thought soft or feminine.

Of working class extraction herself, Walkerdine came to understand that fighting was a point de capiton for Mr. Cole, becoming fixed in his history of powerlessness and the constant struggle not to sink, to get rights, not to be pushed out. Understood in this way this is quite different to a liberal anti-sexist discourse that would interpret it as ‘macho’. Here one might argue that her interpretation might be informed by her own fantasy, as one might easily imagine the perverse enjoyment experienced by Mr. Cole by her discomfiture at having to watch interminable sequences of Rocky 2. Walkerdine shifts attention to discuss how the Rocky franchise established fighting as a central theme, where the protagonist wins out eventually against the odds. While this may seem a natural progression, she argues that if watched backwards the film reveals the role of chance and contingency in arriving to this end – it could all have turned out so very different. As Walkerdien sees it millions of viewers identified with the image of the fighter is a point of connection which illustrates how this point de capiton inheres in the wider discourse. Moreover the success of Rocky 2 and its star Sylvester Stallone, depended for their success on the fact that they could connect with the fantasies of the millions of “Mr. Cole’s”, for whom the escape route that it offers, is closed.

The master signifiers that act to anchor our identity can seem to be simultaneously obvious and inchoate as the words or signifiers we use to communicate them can seem to be inadequate. When asked to explain why one’s faith, family, children or an activity such as sailing, climbing mountains, or publishing endless papers are so important to us we may simply shrug our shoulders and exclaim “because they are!”. The answer goes without saying. The master signifier stops an otherwise endless sequence of questions whose answers propel us from one signifier to another in the chain (Q: “So sailing is really important to you”. A: “Yes, it’s healthy”. Q. “How so?”. A: “It gets me out of the house” Q. Why? “Well, it’s adventurous”. Q. “Why?” “It teaches one to deal with adversity in life?” Q. “How”… and so on ad infinitum.. until …”Because it is!”). Master signifiers are thus unarguable and self-validating.

The Real

Lacan’s works, which became increasingly difficult to decipher⁶¹ focused increasingly on topology and the Real, especially from Seminar XXIII on RSI in 1976 he developed the idea of the Borromean knot and the Sinthome. This is illustrated in the figure at the start of this section, and derives from the old French word for symptom.⁶² The Borromean knot shifts our attention from the individual components of Real, Imaginary and Symbolic to focus on their inter-relation. Every human endeavour or topic involves all three dimensions. The field of science tries hard to focus purely as a means of Symbolic explanation and to exclude the Imaginary and the Real, although it is intimately bound up with the Imaginary identity projects of its adherents and the Real they try to engage with.

There seems to be literally no point in attempting to describe the Real given that it lies in a region which is beyond symbolisation. All humans who become subject to imaginary identification and cultural formation are forever barred access to the Real, beyond which limit lies unimaginable bliss and the terror of the experience of unlimited jouissance. While jouissance is often translated into English as “enjoyment”, in French it has a parallel meaning to orgasm. Jouissance is linked to libido or erotic energy described by Freud. Freud originally used jouissance as a term to explain the paradoxical situation where his analysand had completed their analysis and can now understand the cause of their neurosis but refuses to move on by clinging to their symptoms. He argued that this must be because they derive a bittersweet painful libidinal enjoyment (jouissance) from continuing to experience their symptoms. Considering that such symptoms can include addiction, self-starvation, compulsive washing and a myriad forms of self-degradation, this is nothing like the conventional meaning of “enjoyment” that is so often used instead by social and management theorists.

In Lacan’s formulation jouissance is like libido in that it builds up in the body such that the body of the psychotic begins to fizz with jouissance if it is not discharged, whilst the life of the overly repressed neurotic who is lacking in jouissance is flat. Lacan’s reworking of jouissance emphasizes its excessive character, such as the excessive “enjoyment” experienced at orgasm which provides a momentary experience of the bliss and pain of the Real. The body of the infant is buzzing with jouissance which must be organised by culture and drained from the body in the process of becoming a subject. However, those who defy the imposition of prohibition of the nom/non du pêre, who are thus prone to psychosis continue to experience an excess of jouissance.

Jouissance is transgressive of symbolic social reality to the extent that society is constructed on its renunciation or sacrifice to the social good. This sacrifice of individual desires to social necessity is analogous to Freud’s Reality Principle. The Symbolic and jouissance are mutually reliant on each other for their existence; without the Symbolic law, the subject would not exist in the first place and would remain in the Real. The striving for jouissance can thus be understood as the drive to regain the primordial unity of being. Uncontrolled jouissance constitutes a mortal threat to society. The citizen is asked to sacrifice her or his private enjoyment for the broader good of the community, to ensure freedom from violence and disorder. Jouissance is thus inevitably transgressive of social norms, but at the same time is taken to represent the pursuit of what is truly worthwhile. The stock response of the neurotic addict who continues to smoke, drink or shoot-up despite overwhelming pressure from family and friends is ironically, ‘But you’ve gotta live!”.

Although the neurotic must sacrifice it in the interest of social order, jouissance is gained from the act of sacrifice itself. Religions instruct their members to forego earthly pleasures in order to gain eternal pleasure in heaven. In curbing such pleasures practitioners gain jouissance from their sacrifice. The prohibition of jouissance is the bond that links individuals through their shared dissatisfaction. This is the salient feature of the society of prohibition. Once a person has passed through the Real to become a subject of the Symbolic, the clock cannot be turned back. The subject is forever barred from the pure Real they experienced in its pre-Symbolic sense. Pure jouissance of the Real is yearned for as it offers the reinstatement of lost wholeness. But the Real is to be feared, as fusion with the Other threatens our existence as symbolic subjects. This calls to mind those bizarre sex games one used to read about occasionally where a celebrity was found dead from asphyxiation linked to some sexual game, that is now apparently something of a craze amongst the young.

Fantasy and the Real

Fantasy was discussed earlier in relation to the Symbolic also occurs in the intersection of the Imaginary and the Real. The Imaginary enables safe access to the Real by mediating it in fantasy. The ego creates Imaginary fantasy as a shield against the terrors presented by the Real and the gaps in the Symbolic that point to the lack of the subject. Fantasy fills in the hole that was created when we became cultural subjects separated from the Real, in-forming it by generating images and experiences of wholeness and harmony. One may go where one pleases in fantasy to seek out jouissance that is legally condemned; one can rape and pillage an entire city in fantasy and no-one will be any the wiser. The imaginary context of such fantasies is very important. In his discussion of the notorious Marquis de Sade,⁶³ Lacan argues that de Sade may have been a sadistic monster in his writings but was not so in his real life, because he limited his jouissance to what was provided by his fantasies. Lacan’s point is that despite his disgusting fantasies, de Sade’s character was neurotic, not psychotic or perverse. On the other hand, the person who at the oedipal stage refuses to accept the symbolic law, who perversely retains the belief that he possesses the phallus into adulthood, may seek to turn jouissance into the law and act on what others fantasize about.

Lacan’s argument that de Sade is at root no monster, but merely a fantasist, invites us to look twice at our seemingly pacific neighbour; what unspeakable fantasies are harboured beneath his or her benign countenance? This is a highly relevant question given that studies of social media use reveal that a large number of men regularly access pornographic material that is often extremely violent and degrading to women and children, featuring images which if acted on in real life would be met with a long spell in prison. In a Lacanian reading the consumption even of hard-core pornography is relatively harmless, except for those hapless individuals who were exploited to make the images. Given that fantasy is imaginary, one cannot enjoy the thing itself, but only its image. What is lacking is the object a; it is only in the Real that one does not have to make a sacrifice of enjoyment. The image is what allows subjects in the society of prohibition to sustain themselves.

Although imaginary fantasies work in the interests of social prohibition they also comprise a threat to its order. Given that fantasy is Imaginary, one cannot enjoy the thing itself, but only its image. What is lacking here is the object a; it is only in the Real that one does not have to make a sacrifice of enjoyment. The image is what allows subjects in the society of prohibition to otherwise some form of satisfaction.

Desire, Jouissance and the Thing

Desire is a symbolic pursuit that represents a vain detour to attain the jouissance of the Other. Jouissance on the other hand what is beyond pleasure and is related to the Thing in the realm of the real. The metonymy of desire that engages us in the fruitless search from one object to another is often portrayed negatively. This fruitless quest also has a positive side, which is that it defends against the subject going beyond a limit in jouissance. Where desire comes from the Other, jouissance comes from the Thing. Goodness forbid that we ever really got what we desired, because that would bring us face to face with the unimaginable Thing.

Lacan discusses Freud’s dreams in order to illustrate how the imaginary dream process can bring one close to the void of the Real.⁶⁴ Freud describes a vivid dream where a female opens her mouth and Freud looks down into it to make a truly “horrendous discovery”, of something awful and un-nameable, a chasm, “of the flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, of the secretory glands par excellence”⁶⁵ Freud experiences acute anxiety feeling that he is being torn apart, which Lacan likens to an appearance of the corps morcelé at the point where the fantasy fails.⁶⁶

Phallic Jouissance and Other Jouissance

For Lacan “masculinity” and “femininity” are two different ways of structuring the subject. I have put these into scare quotes as he is not referring to biological difference nor to gender orientation. Bruce Fink reminds us that Lacan was unfamiliar with “gender orientation” as it was used up until the Millennium and especially not to recent understandings. In his day the use of gender in France was as a grammatical expression. At this later stage in his life Lacan was taken with developing and applying abstract logical formulations, as is the case with phallic and Other jouissance. Phallic jouissance is the jouissance that fails and consequently disappoints us. It reduces our partner to object a, the partial object, or little thing that serves as the cause of our desire, or what turns us on about that person. As explained earlier, the little thing could be anything from their tone of voice, a particular expression, or perhaps the way they carry themselves. For Lacan to reduce the other to object-a is to enjoy like a man. Phallic jouissance expresses itself in specific demands for this or for that. But there a great deal of slippage between what I say I want to others, or what I tell myself that I want, and the actual object I aim at. I tell my partner that “I want this”, she gives it to me and I say; “That’s not it.” She gives me that too, but desire’s object will not sit still. Desire always sets off in search of something else. The Other jouissance is what lies beyond that cannot be contained by Phallic jouissance.

“Encore, Encore!”

In Seminar XX, “encore’, meaning “more”, the “more” referred to is the demand of the infant for the mother, “more, more!” Lacan likens this to the quest for knowledge, which, he conjectures must have something to do with a failure of satisfaction. In this seminar his discussion of jouissance advances his earlier discussion of the inadequate and dispossessed subject. Jouissance is judged against a standard. This standard does not exist in the animal realm but comes into existence by means of its relation to the symbolic role of language. The human ability to symbolize allows the subject to believe that the jouissance they obtain is less than what it should be. Against this benchmark they come to believe that there must be something better and that others are enjoying more than they are. By constantly repeating this to oneself and to one’s friends, one gives some consistency to this Other jouissance⁶⁷ and indeed to accord it so much consistency that the jouissance one does experience appears inadequate.

The belief in an Other jouissance is constantly strengthened by the media and in consumption spaces. Images of perfection are constantly portrayed in romantic fiction and films, advertising and commodity spaces from the hyper-real “authentic” reproduction of times past in American Girl Place to the reality of Celebration. Bruce Fink offers the example of Hollywood’s depiction of sexual relations where there seems to be a guarantee of a satisfaction that is inevitable and reliable that can be obtained and attained to.⁶⁸ This Other jouissance ex-sists (made up of an amalgam of “ex”, as in exterior to the self, and “sists” in that it in-sists). Thus, it is perceived to come from outside the self and insists that there is something beyond our immediate circle that one can try, that will make one more complete. Compared to our current jouissance, this is what we should have. This Other jouissance has the quality of inevitability; since we can conceive of it, so it must be the case. Without this damaging fantasy we might be content with the jouissance we actually do possess. Lacan argues that were it not for this fantasy, we might be more content with the jouissance we do obtain; in other words, jouissance makes matters worse. (c’est la jouissance qu’ill ne faudrait pas). Here Lacan uses two senses of the word failloir; “it must be” and faillir “to fail” – which are grammatically identical. These two jouissance’s are not complementary but form a couple akin to being and non-being.

Commanded to Enjoy?

Given that jouissance is associated with deep hurts associated with addiction, starvation disorders and obsessive behaviours to name a few, then how can it make sense to argue that we are commanded to experience jouissance? Surely at least for the neurotic subject social order is based on the Symbolic and therefore on law based on the prohibition of the Name-Of-The-Father (NOTF)? Jouissance should be socially censured and severely restricted by the internal power of the ego-ideal, as it is anathema to the social order. The answer to this question lies in the superego. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud had argued that the superego, like the ego arises from the id. This enabled him to explain the cruel delight that the superego takes in blaming and chastising the ego. Although the superego forms the basis for the law, by means of the identification with the name of the father, this law takes the form of peremptory commands rather than reasoned judgement. The superego imperative, “you must” summons the vision of a ferocious, judgemental figure.

From the above the superego gains a cruel jouissance from prying into the affairs of the ego, that is amenable to social formations such as fascism. It has also been argued that it is also perfectly attuned to a change that has taken place in capitalism which in the early days was governed by the Protestant Work Ethic. Here I must go into a little more detail to discuss the relation between jouissance and “enjoyment” and the following is my perhaps botched attempt to reconcile them. The aim of consumerism is to persuade us that we can find meaning, identity and happiness in the enjoyment of commodities. Ultimately the aim of the firm is to make us brand-loyal, which is a synonym for addiction, in that nothing else will do and the depressingly compulsive figure of the addict who clings to his symptoms is an exemplar of jouissance. So as I see it, enjoyment is not itself jouissance but can result in jouissance as we progressively reach the apogee of the society depicted in Wall-E, that is drug-dependent, alcoholic and obese, that persists in clinging to a lifestyle that we know will lead to the destruction of our descendants – others may disagree - please now read on.

Since at least the Second World War the superego injunction behind the Protestant Work Ethic to act with moderation and restraint changed to the equally binding duty to enjoy.⁶⁹ I should note here that this argument thus uses the same characters as Norbert Elias to reach a different conclusion. Elias had argued that the enhancement of the superego in the modern age gave rise to a self-disciplined, isolated and privatized self who was cut off from the bonds of community. He drew our attention to the psychological damage done to individuals who had to contain the expression of emotions that in earlier centuries would have been freely expressed. The Lacanian argument on the other hand is that the wheel has turned away from prohibition and towards enjoyment. Taking the USA as an example, Horatio Alger was a nineteenth century novelist, who captivated the public imagination with his tales such as Young Dick, the story of an indigent New York youngster who became a boot-black and who, by dint of his own unceasing toil, “street-smart” style and exemplary lifestyle, made it out of the ghetto.⁷⁰ However in the 1950s, Ernest Dichter proclaimed Horatio Alger dead, arguing that consumers had the right to enjoy the good things in life without feeling guilty. Contrary to the Protestant Work Ethic, seen now as a barrier, Dichter urged that the typical American consumer should have the freedom to enjoy the objects of their dreams, right now. An important rider to this was that they could pay later, which wrought a massive change that was facilitated by a huge increase in the availability of credit and consequently of debt.

Not only could the masses enjoy the fruits of mass capitalist enterprise, it quickly became apparent that they should do so. In times of recession and after dire emergencies such as “9-11”, the Western public were urged in their role as consumers to go out and shop to “save the economy”, or their “way of life”. The increasingly narcissistic, present-minded hedonistic subject who holds sway under the command of enjoyment, is perfectly suited to the interests of capitalism in its official and criminal forms; one can live for the moment by purchasing that fast car, handbag, cocaine or booze. Todd McGowan argues that this duty has spread throughout society, where the values of positive psychology for example, take enjoyment rather than dissatisfaction as the normal state. The mention of duty in this context gives the idea of the commandment to enjoy a twist. Duty is usually referred to as a means to renounce enjoyment; for example a husband would be “doing his duty as a husband” if he acted as a role model for his children and did not chase women other than their mother.

The argument is made that the shift towards a life of commanded enjoyment leads to a decline in the role of the Symbolic and rise in the Imaginary in regulating social life. The Symbolic order, which provided a haven from jouissance is fading in the current consumer society. It is worth briefly recapping on the importance of the Symbolic realm. The symbol that is interposed between one person and another is important, because it removes self and other from a dual, fusionary and potentially combative relation, by providing symbolic distance and recognition. As that which ‘murders’ or is independent of the real thing; recall here the ‘fort-da’ story; the symbol substitutes for the real thing in its absence, thereby creating the social safety of symbolic distance. Societies marked by symbolic distance accord different levels of prestige and honour to different ranks in society, within which an individual can gain recognition. Symbols allow objects to endure even when the actual thing has disappeared. The symbol which is shared between people is evidence of a pact between them. With the onset of the symbol and the inception of the prohibition of pure jouissance, one can enjoy in a socially mediated way. This may be a pale imitation of true jouissance, but then few would wish for the terrifying experience of an encounter with the Real, as was related in Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection. By way of compensation, the Symbolic offers us recognition, conveying honour and symbolically mediated enjoyment for our sacrifice of enjoyment through socially useful activities. In the Symbolic realm, what is important is not immediate enjoyment, but rather social recognition. This helps explain why some who have spent a lifetime ruthlessly gaining wealth, will give their money away to gain such recognition. Understood as part of the symbolic context, ownership of a particular brand of car can imply that its owner has reached a certain status. That one spends time washing and waxing it suggests that symbolic recognition, rather than enjoyment is primary. Purchases of goods become increasingly symbolic -for example the purchase of a car, or a watch might provide considerable enjoyment to a person but could also be consumed as a symbol which could be recognized by others as a signifier of worth.⁷¹

Researchers at the Stanford Research Institute noticed the emergence of a new character in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which they labelled the self-expressive consumer. They labelled a subtype of this group the experiencer, to describe, as the name implies, those who are interested in consumption primarily for the experiences that it offers, rather than for prestige or status. The rise of the experiencer was paralleled by the introduction of a raft of new technologies, products and entire packaged experiences, from white water rafting to Everest expeditions, to space travel. Given that such experiences are consumed as commodities and the litigious nature of the modern consumer, the paradox of such experiences is that they offer the ultimate experience, with the risk (which is what supplies the jouissance) removed. Žižek makes the point that nowadays one can enjoy entire ranges of hitherto dangerous products and experiences, deprived of their malignant properties, ranging from coffee without caffeine, butter without fat, or in general, of the offering of a product without what makes it substantive, its jouissance.⁷²

Todd McGowan expresses well that from this commandment to enjoy, one should not assume that there is now more enjoyment than ever. Rather the opposite is true. The more that a person is commanded to do something, for instance in seeking to be more moral, the more powerful the role of the superego is pointing out their limitations and failings in this direction. Similarly, although individuals today feel commanded to enjoy, they are acutely aware of and are discontented, by constant reminders of their lack of enjoyment. An atmosphere of apathy, aggression and cynicism thus pervades the social realm. Surely, if the command to enjoy has displaced the traditional symbolic law of the father that demands individual sacrifice to the collective good, we should be witnessing social disorder and even collapse? One could either conform or rebel under the symbolic law of prohibition. But what would it mean to conform to or rebel against the sway of the command to enjoy? One potential answer is that the Symbolic order still holds sway but is not as explicitly present as it used to be. Individuals nowadays believe themselves to be acting autonomously but remain in its orbit. The Symbolic continues to constitute us even though we are increasingly unable to experience it. The phenomenological change in our experience leads us to believe that we are enjoying and that we are not bound by the symbolic structures that once deprived people of jouissance. But the enjoyment that we experience is only the image of enjoyment, which is an imagined enjoyment. In contrast to the society of prohibition the society of enjoyment thrives on this imaginary enjoyment. Enjoyment in the Real remains impossible, for this would result in the dissolution of us as a subject. The command to enjoy thus does not create more enjoyment but merely an obligation. However, because of its increasingly imaginary relation, this leads also to an increase in aggression towards others, such as immigrants, who are scapegoated because they are believed to be enjoying that which is rightfully someone else’s entitlement.

Discussion

The preceding sections discussed in sequence Lacan’s concepts of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real. This discussion represents my own limited understanding of these concepts. In this section I will very briefly summarize his potential contribution to the understanding of consuming desire and will also mention some points of critique.

There are very few authors who are agnostic about Lacan. Accounts vary from worshipful peons of praise to scornful rejections. He provides much ammunition for the latter, not least because of his deliberate obscurantism. Reading his seminars one is occasionally reminded of the school bully who, along with his gang of cronies, gives his opponents – and there are many - a systematic working over. At times he is brutal, not only in his arrogant dismissal of ego psychology, but even more particularly in doing in those such as Melanie Klein, whose work is closest to him theoretically. He is no less respectful to the master himself. Lacan preserves Freud in suspended animation. While constantly invoking the name of the master, he does not simply retrace Freud’s theory for a new era, but rather the “French Freud”⁷³, effaces the original, particular his later work.

With notable exceptions, the impossibility of reading Lacan has led to the rise of a profitable Lacan industry, particularly in the areas of cultural studies and film criticism. His work is perhaps better known in the latter area, thanks mainly to Slavoj Žižek, although Lacan’s influence is also clearly discernible in Metz (1982). Although consumer researchers are becoming more alive to the usefulness of video, the above points to a much more thoroughgoing engagement with the arts in exploring consumer desire.

Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary calls us to question the extent to which we unconsciously seek to put the world to rights by recasting it to our image of perfection. While Freud’s revolution displaces consciousness from the centre of our view of ourselves, this can so easily creep back to the centre. De-centring is hard to sustain and analysts keep slipping back into the old centre-periphery thinking. Thus, Lacan constantly reminds of the need to subvert this tendency. Lacan’s discussion of anamorphosis is most useful in this respect. In seeking to relate this to the world of products I felt that it would have been worthwhile to highlight the role played in this process by projection. Here I am thinking about the ways in which subjects project their fantasies onto others, for instance when playing imaginary games with their romantic others, using terms like ‘Bunnikins’ (Langford, 1997). Extended onto physical objects our projections animate and anthropomorphize them, bringing them to life through attributions of personality.

Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary also summons attention to those dual relationships that we form with others whom they take as models and as rivals. The relationships between subjects, models and objects were more fully developed by René Girard whose account is clearer and more straightforward than that of Lacan. Principally in Girard, we are presented with mimetic rivalry, corresponding to Lacan’s Imaginary, and with the erection of Symbolic prohibitions to this. Like Lacan, Girard argues that a pure state of mimesis can exist only in the animal realm. Both agree that humans occupy a unique symbolic position and that we become subject to symbolic prohibition when we are borne into the realm of language and culture. While Girard’s theory lacks a concept akin to jouissance, he probably feels no need of one. He would explain an increase in aggression in consumer societies in mimetic terms, by arguing that mimetic rivalry is increasing due to the dismantling of traditional symbolic constraints (manifested for instance, in the family and church). Having said that, negative concepts such as jouissance and object-a are interesting as they open possibilities to understand consuming desires that are beyond the limits of what Girard has to offer.

Lacan’s tendency, shared by Girard and many others, to effect a major dividing line between the realm of the human and that of the animal other was troubling for Jacques Derrida, for whom Lacan served as a model Lacan argued that the adult infant’s recognition of its ‘self’ in the mirror is a peculiarly human event, which an animal such as a chimpanzee has the good sense to ignore.⁷⁴ This argument, which is crucial to his development of the mirror-phase and thus of uniquely human access to the symbolic was severely dented by Derrida (2008) who subjected to a classic deconstructive analysis. In any event, anyone with a knowledge of ethology would nowadays dismiss Lacan’s claim regarding chimpanzees, as uninformed by the facts. The mirror stage also forms the basis for Billig’s (2006) claim that Lacan mis-used psychology. Billig refers to Lacan’s plagiarism of Wallon, which is is not particularly newsworthy, given it had been mentioned long before by Roudinesco (1997).⁷⁵ He also discusses the more interesting question as to the adequacy of the evidential base for Lacan’s mirror stage. Billig acknowledges that this is touchy ground, because critical psychologists reject the evidential basis of experimentalism and indeed of conventional psychology in general. He also notes that Lacan himself made use of conventional psychological theory when constructing his argument for the existence of the mirror stage. On investigation, Billig found that this could better be described as misuse, that, “raises some awkward questions for Lacanian theory”.⁷⁶ Billig found that Lacan was selective in choosing references that suited his explanation, was not accurate in citing these and ignored studies that ran counter to his theory. Billig’s article received a riposte from Yannis Stavrakakis (2007) on several grounds. Stavrakakis argued firstly, that as the paper on the mirror stage was written at an early point in his career, Billig’s criticism is limited to, “a period when Lacan is not yet ‘the Lacan of the 1960s and 1970s.’⁷⁷ Secondly he argued that even when Billig does not tell the reader about the usefulness of Lacan’s ideas nor of how these have been subsequently developed. Third, given that Lacan’s work is extensively used in cultural studies, one might wish to consider the emergent evidence for his ideas that spring from that field.⁷⁸ In doing so he tends to skirt the most important points that Billig is making.

Despite the criticisms no one can detract from Lacan’s immense contribution to the understanding of desire. In positing a subject who is impossibly and doubly split, tied up in knots by desire for lost unity, driven by an urge to centre the world and maddened by desire for jouissance, he has re-written Aristophanes for the modern age.

Conclusion

What contribution can psychoanalysis make to the study of consumption? Firstly, although it remains as a largely a speculative endeavour with the aim to account for processes that are too complex to meet the standards demanded by science, and although some of Freud’s original ideas have since been disproved or modified, several of the concepts he introduced that are discussed here such as that played by identification in the formation of the self, narcissism and the death drive retain explanatory power and relevance. Additionally, while the concept of ingrained character traits or structures has waned in favour of the more mobile concept of discourse, psychoanalysts continue to argue that there are fundamental differences in how neurotic, perverse and psychotic characters relate to themselves, to others and to the world at large.

In the above rush to condense a great deal of material I have been remiss in omitting discussion of contributions from psychoanalytically informed consumer research, in which case I hope that the following brief discussion of research on the body, some of which is informed by a psychoanalytic perspective, will make partial amends. Much if not all the information gathered has been based on personal interviews which provide a rich seam of experience, from which perspective the above account can seem anodyne and impersonal. There seems an obvious link between jouissance and research into the subjective experiences of pain, as in the accounts of the heavily tattooed women interviewed by Patterson and Schroeder, (2010), who construed their skin as forming a protective barrier to separate them from eruptions from within. For them tattoos were affirmative, providing the means for them re-appropriate their body to cope with psychic pain and self-destructive tendencies. Patterson and Schroeder (2010) argue from their research that the curious marriage of pleasure and pain inherent in the tattooing process brings people’s attention to their bodies. Discomfort with the ‘original body’ is also mentioned by Roux and Belk (2019 ) who applied Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to the novel realm of the body, as, ‘the place to which I am condemned’. They strike an optimistic tone in arguing that tattoos can represent heterotopias through the recreation of places of perfection against the chaos that reigns in the world. The authors describe how one of their participants had his unpleasant memories tattooed on his back and projected future selves on his front.⁷⁹ Others described their tattooed body as a more liveable space; for instance, Eric, whose mother says has ruined his body, takes it as a protective shield.

In these accounts physical pain offers a means to focus one’s awareness and to block psychological pain. From a study of mixed martial arts practitioners, Green (2011) argues that intense pain “has an immediacy that pushes inwards”⁸⁰, directing the subject’s attention to the body part that aches, entailing a retreat of the subject into his or her body, focusing on particular sensations and body parts. Roux (2014) cites the “cathartic value” of the pain of tattooing that makes one informant feel like “her body exists”.⁸¹ The paper by Scott et al. (2017) on TuffMudding brings home the extraordinary pain that many individuals are prepared to endure. Cova (2021) invokes Gergen to argue that through pain, “consumers experience an absence from themselves that lightens the load of the “saturated self”. While these papers offer useful and interesting insights, psychoanalysis may offer an alternative account of the complex processes involved.

In the context of research discussion in this chapter alerts us of the need in the context of research to be a good listener who can tune into what a person is saying, or not saying. The obvious problem is that we are probably lacking in some aspect of the natural curiosity, observational skill, perspicacity and sheer intellectual ability possessed by the likes of Freud or Lacan. For the individual who is not schooled in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis it is advisable to do all one can to steer clear of the temptation to become an armchair analyst and worst of all succumb to the facile temptation of “diagnosis”. Yet some understanding can help one resist the fetishisation of discourse analysis by raising awareness of the self-justifying nature of accounts and the importance of attending to what is left out and unsaid. Relatedly, psychoanalysis directs us to explore the more troubling aspects of consumption behaviour that the vast majority of researchers steers clear of and so offers a corrective to a literature that is with some exceptions, positive and celebratory.⁸². I Occasionally accounts stray across a boundary beyond thrills to a zone involving experiences of fear, terror and loss. Some situations may seem relatively trivial; for instance in relation to the case of ‘Mr Cole’ described by Valerie Walkerdine who constantly played sequences of Rocky 2. When describing the situation of climbers on Everest consumer researchers Tumbat and Belk (2010) approach close to the edge of such a boundary. A person can also act out trauma on their skin, as when a person inflicts self-harm in order to feel better, as is evident in accounts of tattooing by Patterson and Schroeder (2010) and Roux and Belk (2017).

While the pleasure of owning something and of experiencing its use can be lifelong, so can the trauma caused by the negative consequences suffered by those who have fallen victim when things have gone awry. Some issues such as addiction have occasionally been addressed by consumer researchers who have tended generally to steer clear of the discussion of dysmorphia and trauma when discussing bodily tattooing or plastic surgery, while “accidents’ such as those involving cars, skis or kayaks are beyond the Pale. That consumer researchers have focused on positive experiences to the exclusion of the latter is understandable, given that the experience of trauma can have difficult and far-reaching consequences for the individuals involved and consumer researchers are not trained as clinicians. While I am not suggesting that consumer researchers should dive in to explore terra incognita, I argue in the next chapter that there is something to be learned from the case records provided by psychologists in seeking to address this gap in understanding.

Finally, for those who are not otherwise interested, a basic knowledge of psychoanalytic theory can be useful in informing what Illich (1971) called your ‘crap detector’. Psychoanalytsis is often drawn on to inform theory in cultural studies, film studies and political theory, not all of which is well informed.

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¹ Fonagy, (1982) advocates that a common repository of anonymised case files should be made available to researchers and for the development of a more consistent set of psychoanalytic concepts, pointing out that analytic practice shares more in common than what differentiates it.

² Freud, ([1905] (1977: 213))

³ Freud, ([1905] 1977: 194). In footnote 2, Freud says that Little Hans made an almost identical remark to this.

⁴ Freud can be relatively non-specific. He offers up different reasons in other texts (c.f. Dollimore: (1999: 188-190).

⁵ Freud ([1905] 1977: 376).

⁶ However it is also argued that from the start Freud understood the importance of interpersonal relations see Lothane (2003).

⁷ See especially Turkle, (1979); Illouz, 2007) and also, Matthews, (1967); Burnham, (2012); Roudinesco, (2016).

⁸ Ellenberger, (1970) situates Freud’s contribution.

⁹ Bargh, (2002)

¹⁰ Freud, (1915). Freud also states this quite categorically in The Ego and the Id, part I: ([1923] 1991: 356).

¹¹ Freud, (1991,175).

¹² Bruner later mentioned how their experiment caused controversy due to lack of replication – I can’t find the reference right now but it was in the introduction to a book on perception.

¹³ see Balcetis & Dunning, (2010), for a review).

¹⁴ Bauer, (1958)

¹⁵ Rogers & Smith, (1993)

¹⁶ See Strahan et al., (2002) study of subliminal priming in relation to thirst and Karremans et al., (2005) for the study on thirst and Liptons Ice.

¹⁷ Bargh, (2002).

¹⁸ Bargh & Morsella, (2008, 74).

¹⁹ Laran et al., (2011).

²⁰ Chartrand & Bargh, (1999).

²¹ Dijksterhuis & Bargh, (2001).

²² Fitzimons et al., (2008).

²³ Campbell & Mohr, (2011).

²⁴ Heinrich et al., (2010).

²⁵ Haslam & Reicher, (2012). For the multi-lab report on cognitive dissonance see Sleegers et al. (2024).

²⁶ A growth in retractions was notable in the early noughties in disciplines from medicine to bio-sciences and social psychology. In 1997 forty journals made retractions, rising to 488 by 2016. However, by 2018 only four in every 10,000 papers were retracted, attributed to better oversight by journal editiors (You & Brainard, 2016).

²⁷ Ionnadis, (2005) made the rather astonishing claim that most articles published in medical journals were based on false information. The sixty percent figure comes from You and Brainnard, (2018).

²⁸ See Levelt Committee report (2012) on Stapel.

²⁹ Brian Wanskink conducted research from Cornell’s brand and food lab. He argued that unconsicous decisions we make about food can have profound implications for our body and weight and became most famous for his “bottomless bowl experiment”.

³⁰ See, O’Grady, C. (2012). Honesty study was based on fabricated data. Science, 373(6558), 950-951.

³¹ Mertens et al., (2021). However these authors had to remove papers that had previously been retracted.

³² Solms & Turnbull, (2002: 72).

³³ Freud, ([1905] 1999, 118).

³⁴ Lacan, J. Seminar VI: 12/11/1958: 15. Lacanonline.com. One must be very careful in reading translations. What is missing in the quotation which is foregrounded elsewhere is that desire appears as the metonymy of a lack of being whose signifier is the phallus that marks what the mother lacks. Source. Encyclopedia.com https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/want-beinglack-being

³⁵ Derrida was heavily influenced by Lacan and his concept of deconstruction has a strong affinity to psychoanalysis. In his later work he criticized Lacan’s claim that animals exist purely in the imaginary and not symbolic realm.

³⁶ Lacan, (2001).

³⁷ This is known today as mentalization, a concept coined and developed by Peter Fonagy. There is an extensive literature on this subject. See for example, Allen & Fonagy, (2006).

³⁸ Lacan (1988b).

³⁹ Lacan was acutely aware of the literal importance of language. The term “mother” contains “other”, so that by enclosing the m in brackets indicates that this relationship is the gateway to future relationships with others.

⁴⁰ Lacan, (1988d).

⁴¹ See Vanheuele, (2011), for a detailed description of this process.

⁴² Lacan ([1962], 2001c) Discours du Rome.

⁴³ Lacan, (1977] 2004) Four Fundamental Concepts.

⁴⁴ Dion, Berscheid & Walster, (1972).

⁴⁵ Gladwell, (2005, 72-5).

⁴⁶ Clifford & Walster, (1973).

⁴⁷ Bull & Rumsey, (1988).

⁴⁸ Matter & Matter, (1989).

⁴⁹ Given that there are many images of Andre Breton, please visit the website to locate that which is referred to here.

⁵⁰Another Perfect World, In search of Virtual Paradise, More4, 23/6/09.

⁵¹ Brennan, (1993, 4).

⁵² Brennan (1993, 90-95).

⁵³ Lacan, J. (1960-1961) The seminar of Jacques Lacan 1960-1961: Transference, Cormac Gallagher (Trans.) Lacan in Ireland. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/translations/seminars/. Accessed November 2021.

⁵⁴ Fink, (1997, 52).

⁵⁵ See books Seminar Four and especially Five. “The formation of the unconscious|: 1957-1958”, translated by Cormac Gallagher and hosted on lacaninireland: http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/translations/seminars/

⁵⁶ There are many examples of this on the internet, so please feel free to consult these.

⁵⁷ Lacan, Seminar V: 1957-1958: 25.lacaninireland.com

⁵⁸ Samuel Weber (1991: 108) succinctly expresses this in the following: “If the arresting images of the imaginary order are effectively inscribed in the force-field of the signifier, the latter would have neither field nor force without the dissimulation of the imaginary. Left to its own devices, the symbolic, like the primary process, would tend to dissolve and to displace the very determinations upon which it, “itself” depends. In short, without the imaginary, the symbolic would self-destruct.”

⁵⁹ See the seminar on psychosis. Also mentioned in Écrits, 2001: 170.

⁶⁰ Walkerdine, (1986, 172).

⁶¹ See for example Fierens reflections in the preface to his discussion of “L’Etourdit”. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Reading-Letourdit.pdf

⁶² Joyce and the Symptom, Part 1; Joyce and the Symptom, Part 2. Lacaninireland.com.

⁶³ Lacan, J. ([1960] 1992), The Jouissance of Transgression.

⁶⁴ Lacan, 1988: XIII: The dream of Irma’s injection: 146-160; XIV: The dream of Irma’s injection (conclusion): 161-171.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 154.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 167.

⁶⁷ Fink, (2002).

⁶⁸ Fink, (2002, 35).

⁶⁹ Enjoyment is a topic for a number of prominent authors today including Slavoj Žižek and Bruce Fink. My first encounter with this idea was in reading “Consumer Society” by Jean Baudrillard.

⁷⁰ Alger et al. (1868).

⁷¹ McGowan,( 2004, 25).

⁷² Žižek, ‘A cup of decaf reality.’ www.lacan.com

⁷³ Turkle, (1979).

⁷⁴ Lacan, (2001, 20).

⁷⁵ Roudinesco, (1997: esp. 81, 110, 140).

⁷⁶ Billig, (2006, 3).

⁷⁷ Stavrakakis, 2007: 132.

⁷⁸ Stavrakakis also contested Stavrakakis also the assertion that Lacan had plagiarized Wallon, asking why Lacan would be so naïve as to publish his paper on the mirror stage, which sure enough fails to mention Wallon’s name, in an article published under the editorship of Wallon himself?

⁷⁹ Roux & Belk, (2019, 16).

⁸⁰ Green, (2011, 381).

⁸¹ Roux, (2014, 76).

⁸² See for example the study of abortion by Patterson et al., (1995).