Since psychoanalysis is an interaction that uses the medium of speech, and since the language is the most fundamental structure that makes us human, symbolic order has an absolute privilege among the three orders. It is what constitutes being a speaking being and what links an individual to their social environment. Thus, without decreasing the importance of real and the imaginary, balance between all three in the structure of the subject is the final aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis and philosophy. This is possible only through the restoration of the symbolic order.

Symbolic order is the order of the language, as well as of all human structures, such as law, traditions, culture, as well as the world of symbols and rules. Language is formulated by human beings, and in return, is dominating them. This also is related to the Saussurean linguistics, on which Lacan bases his own psychoanalytic theory. Symbolic is the order of signifiers. As Saussure pointed out, the relation between the signifier and signified is an arbitrary relationship. However, once the signifier is established, it becomes tied to its signified, as two sides of a paper, inseparable from each other. On a broader level, this relates to the language itself as well, thus, once the language/culture/law is established, it becomes as if it has always existed, and is inseparable from the human order. “Everything which is human has to be ordained within a universe constituted by the symbolic function.” (Lacan, SII, 29)

On the other hand, however, while it looks like [the symbolic] does “spring from the real”, “one should not think that symbols actually have come from the real” (Lacan, SII, 238). This is to highlight and also remind that symbols are arbitrary, that they are constituted, and constructed. This does not change their primacy.

For the very reason that the symbolic order is inseparable from the existence of the human order, Lacan, following the trial Freud started with Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious, goes on investigating the aspects of language, finds the rules of the language in the formation of symptoms, sees the rules of the human law and culture (e.g. incest) in their relation to the formation of personality (Oedipus Complex). Also for this reason, he criticizes the post-Freudians for forgetting the symbolic order and reducing everything to the imaginary (Evans, 2001). For Lacan, “Freud’s discovery was that of the field of the effects in the nature of man of his relations to the symbolic order and the tracing of their meaning right back to the most radical agencies of the symbolization in being. To ignore this symbolic order is to condemn the discovery to oblivion, and the experience to ruin” (Lacan, Écrits, 70).

YASEMIN DINC

References:

EVANS, D. (2001). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. NY: Brunner-Routledge.

LACAN J. (1988b). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955 (Seminar II). MILLER, J-A. ed. (translated by Silvana Tomaselli). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LACAN, J. (1989). Ècrits: A Selection. (translated by Alan Sheridan). London: Routledge.