Lacan's Psychoanalysis LDJN

• Lacan's Psychoanalysis

Lacan holds that human psyche is formed of three orders (the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real) which mold the
unconscious mind and motivate human actions and reactions. He believes that in the formation of the first psychic
order, the Imaginary, "the child, in the presence of his mother, begins to manifest his needs. It is here that he encounters
the mother as a speaking subject" (S5, 1957, p. 425). It is a world of satisfaction for the child where" the infant emerges
from satisfaction, and not from frustration, to construct a world" (p. 424) that is the realm of ideal completeness in
which the child feels no lack or loss, since it is governed by the illusive joyful unity of the child and its mother.
Moreover there are no traces of language in this order. When the child is six-month old, Lacan holds, it starts to
distinguish itself from its mother in a phase that Lacan terms the Mirror Stage in which the child sees its own image
distinct from that of its mother, and thereby the illusion of unity with the mother crumbles down.
In the next stage, Lacan argues, the Symbolic Order is formed in the child's mind. In contrast to the Imaginary, the
Symbolic is an order in which the identity of the subject is formed, since it is associated with language and signs.
Whereas mother governs the Imaginary Order, the symbolic Order is the territory of father whose laws and rules shape
the identity of the child. In the Imaginary Order, the desire of the mother is mediation necessary for the child, whereas
this mediation is "precisely given by the position of the father in the symbolic order" (S5, 1957, p. 163). The Symbolic
Order is also the realm of the Other presented by the law of the father and the ideology in which the child learns to
speak. Lacan holds that the meaning of "the Other as another subject" is strictly secondary to the meaning of "the Other
as Symbolic Order", since "the Other must first of all be considered a locus, the locus in which speech is constituted"
(S3, 1955, p. 274).
Another key notion in Lacan's terminology is Object petit a which is the lack created by the subject's entry into the
Symbolic – the lack which will never be compensated for and attained, since the subject has fallen into the web of
language and its floating signifiers. From the moment the subject feels lack, Lacan argues, s/he is in search of what is
lacked, in search of satisfying it by different means such as knowledge, love and sexual fulfillment. Regarding those
means, he affirms that ''the Object petit a ... serves as a symbol of the lack. It must be an object firstly separable and
secondly that has some relation to the lack'' (S11, 1964, p. 112). However as we live in the world of signs and
ideologies, no desire can bring us back to the initial Imaginary world of completeness.
The Real Order in Lacanian terminology resists representation, as it emerges as something outside language, resisting
"symbolization absolutely" (S1, 1953, p. 66). This remains a constant theme through the rest of Lacan's work and leads
him to link the Real with the concept of impossibility. He believes that the "Real is the impossible" (S11, 1964, p. 167),
because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to engage the Symbolic Order, and impossible to attain. The Real is an
unknown zone, as Homer tries to define it: "exists at the limit of this socio-symbolic universe and is in constant tension
with it" (2005, p. 81). It is the most inaccessible part of human psyche that cannot be experienced, since nothing real
exists in the Symbolic Order, Lacan argues, and what we see as reality is just ideology imposed by the Other on us.
However he holds that we can experiences the Real in the fleeting moments of joy and terror (Jouissance) or in our
traumas which cut the process of signification and representation. These feelings of disturbance and sufferings, as
Booker calls them, place the person in the Real which is "available to consciousness only in extremely brief and fleeting
moments of joy and terror that Lacan describes as Jouissance" (1996, p. 35)

•  A Lacanian Reading of Long Day's Journey into Night

Lacan's key concepts such as the Imaginary Order, the Symbolic Order, the Real Order, the Other representing the law
of the father, Object petit a, desire and lack are traceable in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1941). The play
dramatizes one day of Tyron family's life through which the personalities of its members are revealed via their
memories and also their disputes with each other. O'Neill shows that the mind of all four members of the family is
haunted by the past, and all suffer from some lacks they try to compensate for by such means as drinking alcohol, using
morphine, acting as an actor or a man of literature, while they constantly fail to do so, as they are entangled in the web
of ideology and the law of the Other imposed on them, though in different ways. The members of the family make
efforts to escape from the unbearable reality of their life to experience the Lacanian Real which remains, however,
impossible to experience throughout the play.
One of the noteworthy features of O'Neill's play is the fogginess of the stage throughout the play that creates a gloomy
atmosphere, and signifies the delving into the unconscious mind, since fog is the symbol of unconsciousness. Lacan
believes the child does not acquire the unconscious till its initiation into the symbolic world of language wherein all
desires are repressed by the law of the father and hence stored in the unconscious. The fog symbolizes that process for
the whole family that seems to experience the loss, lack and repression of the Symbolic Order. This is somehow
illustrated in the play when Mary the mother of the family expresses her feelings toward the fog in this way to Cathleen (the maid): "hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is
what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you anymore", thus it is "the foghorn I hate. It won't let you alone. It
keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back. But it can't tonight. It's just an ugly sound. It doesn't
remind me of anything" (LDJ, III. P. 2044)ii
.
Mary hates the fog, because it reminds her of the past, happy times to which she cannot return. It seems that the fog has
detached her and other members of the family from the rest of the world, as Jean Chothia argues that "the audience
learns through references in the dialogue and through the repeated sounding of the foghorn in the latter part of the play
that fog has descended on the surrounding world and presses close around the house, isolating its occupants the more
thoroughly" (1998, p. 199). Considering Lacan's ideas, her annoyance of remembering the past, besides the fogginess
of the stage signify loss, lack and repression – all residing in the Symbolic Order where the desire for return to the
Imaginary Order is repressed and stored.
Every character of the Long Day's Journey into Night wishes to re-experience the lost union of the Imaginary Order
which they ultimately find, nonetheless, impossible to regain. As the result of that wish, their mind is obsessively
haunted by the past, as Mary says: "the past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life
won't let us" (LDJ, II. P. 203). The characters seek to fill in the lack they have experienced in their life (after the
Imaginary and through the formation of the Symbolic Order), via such means as poetry, alcohol, and morphine,
however they fail to fill in their lack. Regarding the matter of loss in the play, it has been already been argued by
Shaugnessy that it "confirms the timeless mystery of loss" (2007, p. 68).

Important points

1] Entanglement of characters


2] Traumas and Jouissance


3] The mother's desires to return to the imaginary order


4] Unfulfilled desire of the son's


Work Citation


Ali, Emman. “Lacanian Orders in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, www.academia.edu/3111234/Lacanian_Orders_in_Eugene_ONeills_Long_Days_Journey_into_Night.