A Personal Experience with Lacanizm

In 1953/1954 I was a second-year student in a new department of psychology, headed by a French trained psychoanalyst. The teaching staff was varied in their specializations and their original places of training. A new member joined that staff and happened to be a psychoanalyst and a close student of Lacan (Safwan). He came with a good translation and study of Lacan’s paper on the “Mirror Stage”. He did not mention -and none of us realized- that this fascinating and pioneering paper related to Freud’s concept of Narcissism. I distinctly remember considering it a paper in child psychology because I had no idea of Freud’s paper on narcissism (at that time we did not have in Egypt a copy of the Standard Edition).

Shortly after Lacan published that paper on the duality of the subject as a foundational element in his identity he introduced the three orders of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The paper of the duality of the Moi (me) and the Je(I) entered a new very complex system of “orders” and was lost in a typical Lacnian style of de-mystifications. He was inclined to ‘explain’ his wonderful ideas in a manner that keeps them mystified and no one could claim that they know what the master really meant. He always had something more to say about even what he said.

When I mentioned the origin of narcissism in the Myth of Narcissus (I think around the time of the interest in the idea of OTHERNESS) a very experiences senior analyst (did not take her permission to mention her name) raise a very interesting issue: how different psychoanalysis would have been if the central myth in the psychoanalytic theory was Narcissus and not Oedipus!  The answer as I have been envisioning since (more than a year ago) is no Anna Freud and ego psychology but Melanie Klein and the intrapsychic (instead of object relations). The main issue of interfamily psychodynamics would have changed to serious consideration of the stages of development and the evolution of the sense of identity (the crux of change in real psychoanalysis and less so in psychotherapy).  

The other difference the myth of narcissus could have created is a dependable ability for self-analysis (auto-analysis). The reason is that the duality of I/me is confusion that could be discerned and the analyst as well as the patient have a gap from which the it will be possible to ask and answer too: is it Me that feels…sees… thinks, etc. or is I ? A good analytic work will reveal to the patient that difference which is taken over at the beginning by transference.