Lacan and the Question of the Psychotherapist's Ethical Orientation

Abstract

This article addresses the thorny issue of the psychologist or psychotherapist's values or ethical orientation. The suggestion is made that certain aspects of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical theory provide the resources to overcome the obstacle of arbitrariness or relativism faced by psychotherapists who unavoidably have to take an ethical stance — implicitly if not explicitly — in relation to clients' or analysands' lives and decisions. The dilemma faced by the psychotherapist is recontructed and specific aspects of the poststructuralist psychoanalytical theory of Lacan are addressed. These include the function of the subject's position in the symbolic register (in contrast to the imaginary register of the ego), the role of the unconscious as the ‘discourse of the Other’, of narrative and of repressed signifiers as ethical ‘anchoring points’. Crucially, however, the implications of the register of the ‘real’ for the ethics of the psychoanalyst as psychotherapist are added. These, offer invaluable means of overcoming the dilemma of ethical relativism faced by psychotherapists.

Full text

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Bert Olivier
Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy
University of the Free State
OlivierG1@ufs.ac.za
Lacan and the question of the psychotherapist’s ethical orientation.
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This paper first appeared in South African Journal of Psychology 35 (4), 2005, pp. 657-
683, and was reprinted in Philosophy and Psychoanalytic theory. Collected essays. London
and Frankfurt: Peter Lang Academic Publishers, 2009, pp. 53-89.
Abstract:
In this article I address the thorny issue of the psychologist or psychotherapist’s values or ethical
orientation. I suggest that certain aspects of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory provide the
resources to overcome the obstacle of arbitrariness or relativism faced by therapists who unavoidably
have to take an ethical stance – implicitly if not explicitly - in relation to clients’/analysands’ lives and
decisions. I reconstruct the dilemma faced by the therapist before turning to specific aspects of the
poststructuralist psychoanalytical theory of Lacan. These include the function of the subject’s position
in the symbolic register (in contrast to the imaginary register of the ego), the role of the unconscious as
the ‘discourse of the Other’, of narrative and of repressed signifiers as ethical ‘anchoring points’.
Crucially, however, one has to add the implications of the register of the ‘real’ for the ethics of the
psychoanalyst as therapist. These, I believe, offer invaluable means of overcoming the dilemma of
ethical relativism faced by psychotherapists.
Some time ago, during the final years of the apartheid era in South Africa, a
psychologist I knew was required, as part of his postgraduate work, to offer
psychotherapy to political prisoners in what was then a hospital for blacks in Port
Elizabeth. He soon realized that he was faced with the invidious task of ‘helping’
these prisoners ‘adapt’ to a social and political situation that was as unacceptable to
himself as to the prisoners. Paradoxically, he was expected to ‘normalize’ individuals
in an obscenely ‘abnormal’ situation, something which confronted him graphically
with his own values or ethics. The result was that he refused to carry out the required
psychotherapeutic work and in the end opted out of the postgraduate programme
concerned and left Port Elizabeth. In Lacanian terms, he ‘assumed his desire’ (a
phrase that will be elucidated in due course). What became of him afterwards I do not
know.
This would-be psychologist’s situation highlights the dilemma experienced by
therapists (as well as people like philosophers and theologians) in political situations
which are unacceptable to them for moral or axiological reasons. The theologian
Dietrich Bonnhoeffer, who was executed for his unwavering opposition to the Hitler
regime is a case in point, as are all those scientists and intellectuals, such as Theodor
Adorno, who had to flee Germany during that time. They all realized that German
society had become ‘abnormal’ or ‘inhuman’ in the sense of ethically unacceptable, as
indeed did the young psychologist in question regarding apartheid South Africa. In
these cases it may not seem to be such an insurmountable problem to know what to do
– or perhaps what not to do; the problem may be to a greater extent having to gather
the courage to act according to one’s ethical insights in a situation claimed to be
‘normal’ by the political authorities of the day and subscribed to by many people
around one, including family and friends.

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The dilemma faced by psychotherapists is much more difficult to resolve
when the social and political situation appears to be ‘normal’ in the sense of
satisfying, for all intents and purposes, at least the politically and economically
valorized principles of the day – in the contemporary era those of a constitutionally
entrenched democracy, globally functioning, almost without exception, in conjunction
with late capitalism. Here the difficulty manifests itself not in therapists having to
help clients adjust to a distorted society, but in facing the task of assisting them in
attaining psychical equilibrium or functionality without compromising their (the
therapists’) own ethical principles. This would entail, for instance, not condoning or
encouraging murder on the part of the client while simultaneously not acting
prescriptively either, for the sake of avoiding clients’ dependence on them and,
instead, cultivating a sense of responsibility on their part.
What would be the danger regarding ethical relativism here? The spectre of such
an approach rears its paralysing Medusa-head precisely because the therapist eschews
being prescriptive or judgemental – for ostensibly sound reasons concerning client-
accountability, the goal of psychological independence on her or his part, as well as
(the ethical requirement of) confidentiality. But this could entail having to ignore
evidence of moral misdemeanours on the part of the client, with the result that the
latter’s status quo-situation is implicitly confirmed or reinforced. To be sure, given
that psychotherapists’ professional training usually imparts to them practical avenues
to negotiate quandaries of a relativistic nature, through skilful questioning of the
client they – especially ‘critical’ therapists – may well lead the latter to grasp the
moral untenability of his or her situation. But this is unlikely to happen where
therapists are exclusively intent on drawing from clients their own feelings about a
situation, selectively described by them in the first place. (As I shall show, the case is
significantly different with Lacanian psychoanalysis.)
The situation I am sketching here corresponds roughly to what Painter and Terre
Blanche (2004, 520-521) characterize as mainstream psychology (here as elsewhere)
being ‘…a product and producer of global capitalism’, and as being largely in the
service of ‘…neo-colonialism, racism, capitalist exploitation and neo-liberal market
ideologies’, with the result that ‘…an American-style, aggressively professional and
market-orientated individual psychotherapy industry’ flourishes. Small wonder, then,
that in the kind of society that is, on the one hand, globally multicultural – differences
on which market capitalism thrives, as Hardt and Negri (2001, 150-154) have pointed
out – and on the other systematically constructed by market forces that promote and
exacerbate all kinds of differences in needs and tastes on the part of consumers, one
encounters a condition of postmodern fragmentation, where there is scant evidence of
a common ethos or Weltanschauung in which people share. On the contrary, the
prevailing global situation – one that psychotherapists ineluctably have to face in their
consulting rooms – is one of pervasive relativism. Even if therapists are to some
extent prepared, through training, for such a situation through the insistence on
maintaining strict standards of professional ethics, the contemporary, multicultural or
‘postmodern’ era is no longer one where anyone can innocently believe in a unified
world or worldview. As Lyotard (1984, xxiv) has famously put it: ‘…I define
postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives’ – where ‘metanarratives’ entail
distinct universalistic appeals to some metadiscourse or ‘grand story’ (such as
Christianity or Marxism), which putatively provides a touchstone for the truth of
everyday linguistic utterances.
This situation has been given fictional prominence in the popular award-winning
television series, The Sopranos, where mafia boss Tony Soprano’s therapist finds

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herself in the invidious position of realizing that those ‘chapters’ of her client’s life
that he routinely refuses to discuss with her involve murders, extortions and a host of
other crimes that he ultimately has to take responsibility for. By not challenging him
on these, and adopting the relativist position of refusing to judge the morality of his
actions – concentrating only on the state of his own psyche, so to speak – she knows
she is compromising her own ethical principles. By contrast, when his wife consults a
psychotherapist because her conscience weighs on her unbearably, he
(uncharacteristically) confronts her starkly with the obvious choice: either connive at
your husband’s crimes (and moral misdemeanours, like routinely cheating on her) and
enjoy the material benefits of your life of luxury, or leave him and face a financially
uncertain, but morally justified future. Which of these two therapists acted ‘correctly’,
and on what grounds can one decide the matter? Are there such grounds at all which
are available to the psychotherapist, or is every therapist unavoidably in the position
of recognizing that no such grounds exist (especially in the contemporary, so-called
‘postmodern’ era of pervasive ‘anything goes’ sentiments in which one is faced with
the utter arbitrariness of moral, ethical and axiological relativism)? After all, even a
so-called rational, rule-based ethics, whether consequentialist or deontologically
derived, does not invite or promote consensus in the present situation. On the contrary
– it only seems to add to the proliferation of conflicting claims in the ethical arena, in
this way exacerbating what already amounts to extreme relativism. In the present
article I want to argue against such relativism.
To avoid confusion, it has to emphasized at the outset that the concept of ‘the
ethical’ addressed in this paper has to be comprehended specifically as that which
operates in the context of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. As such (and as will
become apparent), it is fundamentally different from, if not at odds with, ‘ethics’ as
usually understood by the majority of South African psychotherapists, namely as a
concept pertaining to a code of behaviour governing their professional training and
eventual practice. Unless one were willing to go to the (sometimes very demanding)
lengths of familiarizing oneself with Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, what it comprises
as a distinct mode of thinking about the human subject, and therefore also what the
place of the ‘ethical’ is within it, is bound to be elusive.
Lacan and ego-psychology:
To be able to understand the value and pertinence of Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory
of the human subject for the problem of axiological arbitrariness raised above, one has
to place it against the backdrop of his critique of the concept of the ego, and
concomitantly of ego-psychology. Broadly speaking, Lacan’s misgivings about the
concept of the ego as it was developed in Freud’s later structural theory (where the id,
ego and superego are the components or agencies comprising the mind, psyche or
human personality) (Mitchell & Black, 1995, pp. 19-21) hinges on his conviction that
the subject’s identity, which is inseparable from the putative unity and autonomy of
the ego, is not something which emerges from contact with ‘reality’.
It is well-known that ‘ego-psychology’ developed in the course of various
theorists interpreting and revising or elaborating on Freud’s structural theory of the id,
ego and superego. These include the pioneer of this school of thought, namely his
daughter, Anna Freud, as well as Ernst Kris, Heinz Hartmann, René Spitz, Margaret
Mahler and Edith Jacobson, all of whom developed or refined certain aspects of ego-
psychology (Mitchell & Black, 1995, pp. 23-59). As Mitchell and Black (p.24)
remark, ego- psychology is distinguished from other schools of thought that

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developed on the basis of Freud’s theoretical and professional legacy by its ‘careful
preservation of Freud’s drive theory’. More specifically, they point to the focus, on
the part of ego psychologists, on the relationship between ego-defences and (libidinal
as well as aggressive) drive impulses. It should become clear in the course of this
paper that Lacan’s objection to the work of ego psychologists issues from his critique
of the ego or self which he sees as being grounded in the fiction or fantasy of the
mirror-image, instead of being the supposed representative of ‘reality’ and the
regulator of the drives in the face of this ‘reality’.
Hence Lacan’s (1977a, p. 42) advice to psychoanalysts, to ‘suspend’ the
analysand’s ‘certainties’ in the interest of liberating him or her from the mirages of
imaginary identifications (which are essentially ego-constructs; the sense of this
should become apparent in the course of this paper). Mitchell and Black (1995, pp.
196-197) illustrate the ease with which one could fall prey to imaginary constructs in
their discussion of Lacan with reference to a specific case, and connect this with what
Lacan took as the mistake on the part of ego-psychology, namely that of being a
‘psychology of a social construction, a mirage mistaken for a reality’ (p.198).
In other words, the very same ‘ego’ that was the object of ego-psychologists’
attempts, among other things, to strengthen and develop the subject’s ego-capacities
in the interest of psychic equilibrium, according to Lacan, was an entirely fictional
construct, designed to give the subject a spurious sense of unity and coherence in the
face of its experience of un-coordination, disunity and fragmentation. He formulates it
as follows (Lacan, 1977, p. 2):
This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage,
still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to
exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is
precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of
identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the
universal, its function as subject….the important point is that this form situates
the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction,
which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which
will only rejoin the coming-into-being…of the subject asymptotically…this
Gestalt…symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it
prefigures its alienating destination…
What Lacan claims here, is that the infant’s sense of identity is given a ‘foundation’ in
its first experience of its own image, and – importantly – that this ‘foundation’ is an
ambivalent one in so far as it is fictional and alienating while simultaneously, given
its (misleading) appearance of wholeness and unity, being indispensable for the
subject’s further development. Moreover, because it is situated at the level of the
imaginary, it is ‘irreducible’ regarding the uniqueness of the subject at this level, and
it is only when the latter acquires language that the universalistic conceptual moment
of being human is added to this imaginary aspect of its identity. Neither can the two
registers ever coincide – the subject of the imaginary (ego) and the subject of the
symbolic or language (‘I’ or ‘je’) are irreducibly different subject-positions, and the
subject is forever stretched between these (as well as a third position – the subject of
the real, a register which will be addressed later in this article).
These startling insights were put forward in Lacan’s well-known early paper
known as The mirror stage (1977), where, in contrast to Freud’s belief that the
Oedipus complex (Bowie, 1991, pp. 30-32) marks the locus of the dramatic

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emergence of the subject’s ‘identity’ in the context of rivalry with and eventual
submission to the father by the boy-child (the Oedipal path of the girl-child being
more complicated), he put forward a model which is more fundamental or
‘prototypical’ insofar as it involves a (largely narcissistic) relationship on the part of
the subject with him- or herself. ‘Lacan invites us,’ says Malcolm Bowie (1991, p.
32), ‘to look back beyond the play of rivalries and aliases that the Oedipal phase
initiates, and to behold an anterior world in which the individual has only one object
of desire and only one alias – himself’. This entails, according to Lacan (1977, pp. 2-
4), a simultaneous identification and alienation: the child (between 6 and 18 months)
‘recognizes’ itself in its own mirror-image, but simultaneously experiences alienation
because the ‘unified’ image is false – it is really, according to Lacan, a
‘misrecognition’. The child-subject does not experience the unity or coordination
apparently exhibited by the mirror-image, which makes it (the image), in Lacan’s
words (1977, p. 4), ‘orthopaedic’. In other words, it embodies something desired as a
corrective to a given state of affairs, but not actualized at this (or at any later) stage in
the subject’s life. The subject is therefore split between what it is at this early stage –
fragmented, incoherent, uncoordinated – and what it desires and mistakenly takes to
be its ‘identity’, namely the fiction of a unitary image of itself, which is, in the final
analysis, nothing more than ‘imaginary’.
For Lacan this state of affairs does not (ever) make way for one where the adult
subject can truly be said to be unified and ‘coherent’. Human beings are irremediably
torn between their desire for, and moments of spurious ‘experience’ of ‘unity’ (see
Olivier, 2003 in this regard). As Lee (1990, p. 47) points out:
That the human subject is essentially a place of conflict between the je and the
moi, between the symbolic and the imaginary, will remain one of Lacan’s
central theses throughout his career.
Indeed – as the above excerpt indicates – the human subject will, from this moment
on, always be caught between the particular imaginary ‘irreducibility’ imparted to it
by its specular image, and its symbolic or linguistic status as subject (articulated by
means of universalistic concepts when language is acquired), and the two will never
coincide. Bowie (1991, p. 21) captures the import of this short, but decisive text well:
A hint that Lacan’s ‘ego’ (moi) is to be a schismatic and not a stabilizing
notion is detectable in the very title of his best-known early paper. The mirror
stage (stade du miroir) is not a mere epoch in the history of the individual but
a stadium (stade) in which the battle of the human subject is permanently
being waged….But the pun has large ambitions behind it: to find an early
moment in the human life-cycle when the individual’s humanity is already
fully at stake, and to find a new beginning for the moral drama of
psychoanalysis. Lacan’s account of the ‘specular’ moment provides the ego
with its creation myth and its Fall.
Not only is the reason for Lacan’s resolute opposition to ego-psychology apparent in
the last sentence of Bowie’s commentary; given the theme of the present article, it is
significant that he employs phrases like ‘the battle of the human subject’ and ‘the
moral drama of psychoanalysis’ insofar as these clearly implicate the field of ethical
responsibility and values. And while it is certainly the case that Lacan’s focus in The
mirror stage is on the provenance of the subject’s (spurious) sense of identity, it is no

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less true that, in the same seminal paper, he already hints where one should expect to
find an indication of the subject’s capacity to transcend its potential imprisonment by
the alienating straitjacket of its image-dependent ‘identity’, namely in the
universalizing function of language. Why ‘universalizing’, and how is this connected
to the question of ethical responsibility?
The symbolic register, the subject and narrative:
It will be remembered that, in the above quotation, Lacan speaks about language
‘restoring’ to the subject its function in the ‘universal’. This means that no one could
be a human subject without language, because it is through language that one
occupies, via the Oedipal relationship of submission to authority, one’s place in
kinship relations and society at large. As Jonathan Lee (1991, p. 20), commenting on
Lacan’s work, reminds one, it is through one’s entry into language that one is able to
situate oneself socially as an individual with a name and belonging to a specific
family. It is no accident that this happens through language – language is not merely
the bearer of meaning, but also of all the values and norms that pre-exist the
individual and to which she or he submits her- or himself by entering into what Lacan
calls the ‘symbolic’ sphere (that is, language in the encompassing sense of all those
systems of meaning which constitute a culture, from a natural language like English
or French to science, art, architecture, fashion and the like). To be a subject means to
be ‘subject to’ all the relations of authority and value embodied in language in this
wide sense – something that Lacan’s friend, the structuralist anthropologist Lévi-
Strauss, had demonstrated at length in his work (Lee, 1990, pp. 34-38; 62-63).
This explains why Lacan, to the bafflement of many readers, maintains that
the unconscious ‘is structured…like a language’ (1977c, p. 234) and refers to it as the
‘discourse of the other’ (Lee, 1990, pp. 59-60; Lacan, 1977a, p. 55). After all, if one’s
entry into language amounts to the wholesale submission of the subject to the values
of society, it stands to reason that no one is conscious of the whole complexity of all
these interlinked values in the form of taboos, prescriptions, valorizations and so on,
at any given time. Most of the time one is completely unconscious of them, and yet,
they structure one’s actions, choices and pronouncements in a thoroughgoing manner.
Even murderers like fictional mafia boss Tony Soprano show every sign of being well
aware of the egregious moral reprehensibility of their deeds, even as they continue
perpetrating them. Tony’s actions – such as his tell-tale avoidance, in the presence of
his therapist, of the subject of those deeds that he knows would offend her, and which
continue plaguing his conscience intermittently – are no less structured by the
normativity embedded in language than are those of law-abiding citizens. To put it
differently: individuals who have been socialized along the ‘normal’ trajectory of
acquiring language, know when they ‘do wrong’ in terms of prevailing societal norms
(which are embedded in language).
In this respect Lacan’s ‘unconscious’ resembles Saussure’s concept of the
underlying system of language, langue, which comprises the unconscious, trans-
individual repository of grammatical rules and social conventions on which a speaker
draws when she or he articulates linguistic utterances, or what Saussure calls parole
(Lee, 1990, pp. 35-36). Moreover, the ‘otherness’ of language (as ‘discourse of the
Other’) is for Lacan a precondition of being a speaking subject – language as the
symbolic order transcends and pre-exists the subject, who eventually finds her or his
place in society through their entry into language.

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How is all of this related to the question of the analyst’s intervention regarding
the analysand’s pathology, specifically in so far as his or her ethical orientation and
the direction of therapy are concerned? A brief examination of Lacan’s stance on the
function of speech and language in psychoanalysis (1977a) is required to answer this
question.
It is well-known that psychoanalysis developed out of a reciprocal relationship
between Freud’s clinical practice (and initially Breuer’s), on the one hand, and his
theorization of various aspects of the subject’s psyche, as well as appropriate
techniques of addressing the latter’s pathological needs, and that Freud, following
Bertha Pappenheim or the so-called Anna O. (one of Breuer’s early ‘psychoanalytical’
patients, if not their very first; Freud, 1957, p. 5; Lacan, 1977a, p. 46), referred to
psychoanalysis as the ‘talking cure’. To this extent, there is no quarrel between him
and Lacan, but when it comes to what they understood by ‘speech’ or ‘language’ as
the indispensable medium of psychoanalytic practice, it is evident that Lacan – who
refers to language as the ‘symbolic order’ - has read Freud through the lenses of
Saussurean structural linguistics and Lévi-Strauss’s cultural-anthropological
elaboration of it. ‘Lacan’s difference from Freud’, observes Bowie (1991, pp. 57-58),
…is nowhere more evident than in his talk of ‘the Symbolic’. This category
was important to Lacan precisely because it was versatile and inclusive and
referred in a single gesture to an entire range of separate signifying practices.
It linked, in what promised to be a coherent and durable fashion, the world of
unconscious mental process to that of speech, and both of them to the larger
worlds of social and kinship structure. ‘The Symbolic’, for Lacan in the mid-
fifties, is a supra-personal structural order…
How did Lacan arrive at this position, which depends heavily on the sense that Lévi-
Strauss gave to the symbolic as a cultural system (Bowie, 1991, pp. 58-59; Lee, 1990,
pp. 62-64)? To answer this question, one has to turn to the important paper, ‘The
function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis’ (Lacan, 1977a).
Criticizing ego-psychologists and object-relations theorists (Lee, 1990, pp. 32-
34), Lacan here claims that analysts have only the speech of the analysand to work
with, and proceeds to show, via an analysis of the phenomenon of the ‘free-
associating’ analysand’s frustration in the face of the silently listening analyst, that the
subject (as analysand) is led to the disconcerting discovery that his or her ‘identity’ is
an illusion, that is, that it is the result of ‘misrecognition’ (as it was theorized in ‘The
mirror stage’, where the infant mistakenly but understandably regards its mirror-
image as itself) (Lacan, 1977a, pp. 41-42). He further argues that the subject comes to
grasp that what had always been experienced as his or her ‘desire’, really belongs to
an imaginary construct (p. 42), and that his or her speech had therefore in a certain
sense been ‘empty’ – in Lee’s (1990, p. 40) formulation, ‘…it has been emptied of the
subject by being filled with his alienating moi identity’.
Essentially, this means that the analysand discovers, by way of the inescapable
experience of frustration, that there is a chasm separating him or her from what was
previously thought of as their ‘identity’, but is now uncovered as something
alienating. As Lacan puts it (1977a, p. 42; see also Lee, 1990, p. 39):
…he [the analysand] ends up by recognizing that this being [of his] has never
been anything more than his construct in the imaginary and that this construct
disappoints all his certainties…For in this labour which he undertakes to

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reconstruct for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation that made him
construct it like another, and which has always destined it to be taken from him
by another.
Instead of indulging the subject’s need for security supposedly attainable by
strengthening the ego or moi, Lacan therefore recommends nothing less than the
cultivation of uncertainty on the subject’s part by ‘suspending’ her or his ‘certainties
until their last mirages have been consumed’ (Lacan, 1977a, p. 42). Simultaneously,
the subject is led to the realization that there is a significant ‘gap’ between one’s
imaginary constructs of oneself (moi- or ego-identities as manifestations of the subject
of what is said) in sentences such as ‘I am a considerate husband’ and the position
from which one speaks about oneself (the je or ‘I’ as subject of the speaking) (Lee,
1990, pp. 40-41). This ‘gap’ between the two distinct subject-positions also indicates
the crucial function of repression. This is easily demonstrated in so far as the ‘I’ or je,
which designates the position from which one speaks (that is, the subject of
language), cannot be confronted directly. The moment one focuses on it in thought or
language, it has become a moi or ‘me’, and such focusing is always performed from
an un-objectifiable ‘I’-position.
Moreover, in opposition to ego-psychologists and object-relations theorists,
Lacan’s approach here is predicated on the claim that speech is all that the therapist
has at his or her disposal – in fact, it would be downright detrimental to the analysand
to have recourse to any form of unitary, but illusory, alienating and ultimately
constricting imaginary construct, the dependence on which is precisely what the
patient has to free him- or herself of. It is at this point where the crucial difference
between psychoanalysis and other therapeutic models, which was alluded to earlier,
becomes evident. The reason for Lacan’s opposition to mainstream and ego
psychology – which simultaneously signals psychoanalysis’ distinctive position
regarding the availability of a universalistic ethical framework to the psychotherapist
– is succinctly formulated by Parker (2001, 68):
Lacan objected to psychology. He objected, because psychology entails a
profound misunderstanding of the discursive basis of psychoanalytic
phenomena, and this error is compounded by ego psychology which pursued the
aim of adaptation of the subject to society through the elaboration of a model of
the ‘individual’ which is amenable to what he termed an ‘orthopaedics’…
What Parker is alluding to here, concerns the ‘abyssal basis’ of the difference between
Lacan and adherents of other psychological models regarding the ethical – an
oxymoron which beckons towards the universalistic (that is, constitutively human)
discursive ‘foundation’ comprising the unconscious, as well as towards the disruptive
relation of the third register, that of the ‘real’ (which still has to be taken into
account). This ‘discursive basis’ is constituted by the ‘abyss’ of the unconscious in the
specifically Lacanian sense of the concept, which – as will become apparent – is
‘trans-individual’, and hence not susceptible to pitfalls of relativism as in the case of
‘individual’-centred psychologies (for reasons explained at the outset in this article).
Unlike other psychological theories of the human subject, psychoanalysis – and
here specifically the Lacanian variety – avails itself of a ‘third term’ (Lacan, 1977a, p.
49) over and above the analyst and the analysand, namely the unconscious. In fact,
were it not for the decisive function of the unconscious, one might get the impression
in ‘Function and field’, that the dialogue between the therapist and the patient would

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be sufficient to render the latter ‘completely’ and unfailingly in charge of her or his
life without further ado, as some varieties of ‘pop’-psychology (of the ‘Yes!’ I love
myself!’-type) claim to do – a promise, needless to say, that no psychological model
is able to live up to. Moreover, as I shall show, it is this function of the unconscious as
repository of cultural value-systems that enables the psychoanalyst to eschew the
pitfalls of a relativistic ethical stance – something which ultimately substitutes
relativistic amorality for morality.
How is this achieved? Briefly put, Lacan shows that the analyst’s task, far
from aiming for some putative experience of the ‘reality’ of the subject (Lacan,
1977a, p. 44) - which inevitably results in exploring imaginary relations - consists in
assisting him or her to come to grasp the symbolic significance of their ‘free
association’, a discourse ineluctably structured from the perspective of the je- or ‘I’-
position of the subject. Along this trajectory the ‘empty speech’ of the subject (which
correlates with the imaginary moi or ego) will be transformed into the ‘full speech’ of
the je or ‘I’ (corresponding, in turn, to interpretation at the level of the symbolic
register; Lacan, 1977a, p. 46).
2
One cannot overlook the irony, that the ‘empty
speech’ marking the subject’s alienated position within the imaginary, reflects a
certain experience of ‘fullness’, albeit a spurious one deriving from the paradigmatic
function of the mirror stage, while the ‘full speech’ of the psychoanalytically
actualized subject at the level of the symbolic correlates with an absence of imaginary
‘fullness’ (that masks a more significant emptiness). What the analysand’s attainment
of ‘full speech’ instantiates, is her or his understanding of the ‘hidden dynamic’
according to which she or he is (at least potentially) the narrator of her or his own life-
story (Lacan, 1977a, pp. 46-47; Lee, 1990, pp. 41-42). In a nutshell, what Lacan is at
pains to demonstrate here is the itinerary for the construction of a temporal, that is, a
narrative subject through psychoanalytical discourse: she or he who has been like this,
and who has or anticipates a future – a future, moreover, that will bestow on past
events in the subject’s life-story their overall significance or ‘truth’ (Lacan, 1977a, p.
47). In other words, the integrative narration on the part of the subject, which has the
effect of rendering a ‘coherent tale’, constitutes the ‘meaning’ of his or her life, and is
made possible by the intersubjective character of the psychoanalytical dialogue.
Lee reminds one that what is important in the narration of the subject’s personal
narrative is less the historical ‘accuracy’ – if such a thing is at all possible – of the
events recollected by the analysand, but rather the intersubjectively comprehensible
narrative reconstruction of these events in the form of a life-story. Lacan puts it as
follows (1977a, p. 48):
…in psychoanalytical anamnesis, it is not a question of reality, but of truth,
because the effect of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring
on them the sense of necessities to come, such as they are constituted by the
little freedom through which the subject makes them present.
The ‘little freedom’ invoked here, is, of course, the subject’s capacity for language or
speech, without which there could be no question of truth or falsity. They are
ineluctably a function of language, whether truth be defined in terms of
correspondence, coherence, pragmatics or disclosure.
It will be remembered, however, that we referred earlier to the role of the
unconscious as a ‘third term’ in the psychoanalytical situation, and that this mitigates
the impression of ‘too much’ arbitrarily imposed (imaginary) coherence on the part of
the analysand’s narrative. One cannot simply construct any life-story one might

10
choose, as the fancy strikes one. What is at stake here is what Lacan (1977a, p. 49)
refers to as the ‘transindividual reality of the subject’ – ‘trans-individual’ in so far as
the ‘third term’ structuring the conversation, namely the unconscious, is not merely
something peculiar to each individual in the form of particular ‘tendencies’, but (as
pointed out earlier) the ‘discourse of the other’ (Lacan, 1977a, p. 55), in the sense of
the unconscious, but encompassing symbolic order as repository of (among other
things) a culture’s ethical values.
What access does the analyst have to the unconscious as a structuring force on
the part of the analysand, though? Per definition it is not directly accessible. Lacan’s
answer is exemplarily Freudian, in so far as he acknowledges the significance of
parapraxes or ‘slips’ of all kinds as meaningful signifiers - the ‘language’ of the
unconscious is legible in, among other things, the subject’s somatic symptoms, the
memories of her or his childhood and in the very specific, ‘idiosyncratic’ diction or
verbal expressions on his or her part (Lacan, 1977a, p. 50; Lee, 1990, p. 44). In his
elaboration on the significance of Freud’s The psychopathology of everyday life
(1901), Lacan (1977a, p. 58) clarifies the sense in which a so-called ‘Freudian slip’,
despite being a ‘mistake’ or ‘failure’ in speech as far as conscious intention is
concerned, may be understood as being ‘successful’ in a different sense, namely to the
extent that it reveals, as a linguistic fragment of the ‘discourse of the Other’, what
unconsciously determines the subject as conscious moi.
In fact, the ‘gaps’ in the subject’s unavoidably fragmentary or ‘incomplete’ free-
associative discourse are filled in through interaction with the analyst (who
‘punctuates’ the discourse) by drawing on these manifestations of the ‘censored
chapter’ of the subject’s life constituted by the unconscious. The importance of this
insight cannot be emphasized too strongly, because it is the contributing role played
by the unconscious (the ‘discourse of the Other’)
3
, as it appears in the range of
manifestations mentioned above, which presents analysand and analyst alike with a
transindividual repository of societal values that function to prevent – or, at least,
militate against – any semblance of arbitrary ethical judgments by either party in the
course of the unfolding discourse. This is why the ‘subject’ as he or she is actualized
in the psychoanalytical situation – the je, ‘I’, or subject of the symbolic register -
surpasses the so-called ‘subjective experience’ of the individual or ego/moi (Lacan,
1977a, p. 55); it is the subject as it is positioned within the encompassing symbolic
order which represents, in the sense that Lévi-Strauss gave to it, a cultural system akin
to an unconscious ‘background’ language (Lee, 1990, pp. 63-64). Within this
symbolic domain the subject is precisely a ‘subject’ in so far as she or he is ‘subject’
to the ethical norms that govern society. It is in this way that the subject as je is able
to tell a life-story that goes beyond the imaginary constructions of the ego or moi – a
narrative filled in, with the aid of the punctuating interventions of the analyst, through
recourse to the signifiers representing the unconscious.
The unconscious as repository of ethical values:
One may wonder, however, on what grounds it may be asserted that the
unconscious, which is ‘structured like a language’, is also the repository of ethical
norms. Why does Lacan (1981, p. 34), following Freud (see, for example, Freud,
1957, pp. 12-15), say explicitly that the status of the unconscious is ‘ethical’?
4
I have
already referred to the encompassing ‘background language’ that constitutes the
unconscious as trans-individual repository of social values. But it would not make
sense if all the values which circulate in a society at any given time were on a par with

11
one another – there has to be some organizing principle or ‘anchoring point(s)’ for
organizing the system of values which structures social and cultural practices.
Precisely such organizing principle(s) are singled out by Lacan. Referring to the
structure of language as ‘signifying chain’, he says (1977b, p. 154):
There is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the
punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts
suspended ‘vertically’, as it were, from that point.
This ‘vertical’ dimension involves the relation between language as a (metonymical)
chain of signifiers and the network of signifieds (conceptual meanings) with which it
is unavoidably connected (even if every signified is again, in turn, a signifier referring
to other signifieds). Language as a chain of signifiers is metonymical in the
Saussurean sense of there being no positive terms (referring to some extra-linguistic
‘reality’, as the older referential model of language implied), but only differences
among signifiers, so that the meanings of terms are determined with reference to all
other signifiers (and their signifieds, which also function as signifiers), so that each
signifier in the system of language functions as a metonymy, that is, as a part
representing the whole. Derrida would say that every signifier bears the ‘trace’ of
every other signifier.
One might say, then, that the linear chain of signifiers, manifested in the
subject’s discourse, is ‘tied down’, to use Lee’s words (1990, p. 61), by the operation
of metaphor, where metaphor functions as the replacement of ‘repressed’ signifiers by
others, but also refers to the ‘anchoring’ or stabilizing signifieds or meanings of the
subject’s signifying discourse which fulfill a crucial axiological function. These
anchoring points are themselves ‘unsaid’ in so far as they may not appear overtly in a
particular discourse but nevertheless ‘ground’ or organize the other signifiers in a
systematic axiological manner. In contemporary society, for instance, despite the
apparent social changes in favour of women’s emancipation that have occurred over
the last hundred years, it is arguably the case that we still live in a largely patriarchal
culture – one structured by and ‘anchored’ in the so-called ‘name of the father’
(Lacan, 1977a, p. 67; 1977d, p. 199) as largely occulted but nevertheless pervasively
grounding, authoratitive signifier which imparts to all other signifiers their axiological
‘place’ in the cultural system. (The fact that the ‘name of the father’ is the repressed
signifier that occupies the position of central authority in contemporary culture –
hence the description of the patriarchal order as ‘phallogocentric’, that is, centred by
the phallic logos or word – does not mean that its centrality cannot and has not been
challenged, of course. It has indeed been challenged consistently and persistently by
many thinkers, especially, for obvious reasons, feminist ones such as Luce Irigaray
[1994], Julia Kristeva [1997] and others.)
5
To use a more specific example: in the mafia discourse structuring the
previously mentioned television series, The Sopranos, the authority of the mafia boss
or leader, which sometimes appears overtly in the exchanges among members of the
‘family’, is itself covertly anchored in the patriarchal signifier of the ‘name of the
father’ – a signifier which, of course, structures all patriarchal discourses from those
of the Roman Catholic Church and Islamic religion to that of mainstream Hollywood
cinema, but here functions with particular ferocity in so far as no resistance to the
authority of the mafia ‘boss’ (that is, the particular incumbent of this symbolic
position at any given time) is tolerated. The interesting thing in this case is that the
functioning of the repressed signifier (the ‘name of the father’) is perverted so that,

12
instead of it being the anchoring point of a ‘benign’ patriarchal order – where it
supposedly (but debatably) guarantees ethical recourse to principles of justice for all
cultural subjects – it grounds the unquestionable authority of the boss in the concept
of a virtually untouchable, authoritarian and autocratic father-figure. Because Tony
Soprano’s psychologist knows this precisely through the symptomatic omissions and
refusals on his part – ‘signifiers’ which point to the ‘discourse of the Other’ as
repository of societal values as well as to repressed instances where this has been
breached – she also knows that it would be useless to draw his attention to the
incompatibility between his own moral depravity (in the guise of the perversion of
patriarchal authority into unscrupulous and unquestionable autocracy within the
organization) and the ethical responsibility implied and demanded by his symbolic
identity as father and leader of a community of sorts. The audience witnesses her with
a friend, lamenting her felt powerlessness to address Tony’s obvious resistance and
duplicity in his conversations with her. Needless to say, if he had felt free, in his
sessions with his psychologist, to talk through the things that weigh on his conscience
(including inescapable guilt in the face of being a murderer – indirectly, if not
directly), she would have been in a position to invoke the ethical values which find
their anchoring point in the ‘name of the father’, such as the prohibition of murder,
theft (on a grand scale), extortion, and so on. (Arguably, given her role as interpreter
of the analysand’s position vis-à-vis the ethical as ineluctable dimension of language,
she is in such a position anyway, regardless of whether he ‘comes clean’ with her or
not. The psychologist consulted by Tony’s wife, by contrast, does not hesitate to
confront her starkly with the ethical choices facing her, given her unhappiness in the
knowledge of her husband’s criminal way of life.) Here is a clear indication of where
the psychologist or psychoanalyst should turn for guidance regarding ethical values:
they are right there, in the censored ‘chapters’ of the analysand’s discourse - those
that are omitted precisely because of their ethical charge and which, for that reason,
are bound up with signs of guilt, even where this is negatively signified or expressed.
6
In Lacan’s work one could go even further than the ‘name of the father’ as
pervasively grounding signifier which organizes the ‘discourse of the Other’ as
unconscious linguistic-cultural system along axiological (if patriarchal), ethical lines.
If there is a signifier more fundamental than this one, it is the signifier referred to as
‘the phallus’
7
(which must be carefully distinguished from Freud’s concept of the
penis in his theory of castration) (Lee, 1990, pp. 66-67):
In effect, the phallus is the ultimate point de capiton, the signifier that fixes the
meaning of the signifying chains of every subject’s discourse, by virtue of its
being ‘veiled’ or repressed. The phallus is present beneath every signifier as
the signifier that has been repressed, and as such every signifier in effect is a
metaphor substituting for the phallus…As such a signifier, the phallus is not
anything that any man or woman could possibly ‘have’ (hence, it must not be
confused with the penis)…Precisely because no one can have the phallus, it
becomes that which all want to be. The phallus then serves to signify as well
that fullness of being, that complete identity, the lack of which is the fact of
our ineluctable want-of-being.
But if the ‘name of the father’ is the signifier that, according to Lacan (1977a,
p. 67), instantiates a ‘symbolic function’ linked to the ‘figure of the law’ with its
universalistic conceptual and ethical implications, it means that the ‘name of the
father’ indicates precisely the human subject’s separation, through language, from the

13
(unattainable) ‘fullness of being’ represented by the phallus. In light of this it seems
conceivable that another figure – possibly ‘the name of the mother’, or ‘the human
being in general’ – could take the place of the centralizing axiological figure of the
‘father’ as representative of the moral ‘law’. Whether or not the variety of critiques
launched against patriarchy by, among others, feminists and poststructuralists, will
eventually succeed in dislodging ‘the name of the father’ as symbolic figure of the
law, however, it seems to me unavoidable that the repression of the phallus (or
something else, such as ‘the circle’, rather than an apparently sex-specific concept like
‘phallus’ or ‘womb’) as symbol of unattainable fullness would have to correlate with
a signifier ‘anchoring’ the cultural system of ethical values at present represented by
the patriarchal signifier (the ‘name of the father’). In so far as this cultural system is
indirectly accessible to us – and to the psychoanalyst – at the level of the unconscious
as ‘discourse of the Other’, it is noteworthy that, as Lacan (1977e, p. 288) indicates, it
is the repression of the phallus as signifier (denoting the fullness of being that the
subject loses increasingly through its separation from the mother’s body, followed by
its passing through the mirror stage and eventually its entry into language) which
fundamentally functions to constitute the unconscious as discourse or ‘a language’.
Without this, as argued in this article, the psychoanalyst would not have access
(albeit indirectly) to a medium which serves as a touchstone for the relation of the
subject as analysand to the ethical values in terms of which a culture functions, even if
– as indicated – these values are not impervious to critique. Most importantly, for
reasons advanced here, this medium or discourse provides an indispensable means to
resist the ubiquitous pitfalls of relativistic moral stances that tend to render the
psychologist helpless. One might say that the unconscious considered as ‘structured
like a language’ constitutes the cultural system in its axiological ‘structuredness’,
against the backcloth of which various identifiable ‘conventional moralities’ may be
identified which deviate from (or pervert) the normative implications of the system as
such. ‘Conventional’ morality does not simply coincide with the axiological
articulation of the unconscious. The ‘conventional morality’ of the mafia (according
to which the mafia boss has the right to eliminate members of the cosa nostra whose
positions have become untenable within its operations), or of apartheid, or of Nazi-
Germany of the Third Reich, would be such perversions. Normatively speaking, the
unconscious, to the extent that it is structured as outlined above, and to the degree that
(through psychoanalytically astute interpretation of the way) it manifests itself
‘negatively’ in the analysand’s discourse, could therefore function as a basis of
critique regarding so-called conventional morality.
The ethical import of the ‘real’ in psychoanalysis:
It would be a mistake, however, to think that this is all there is to it – that all the
therapist has to figure out is where the subject stands in relation to all those
‘anchored’ values which structure the unconscious as discourse of the Other. This
would be to ignore the complicating function of the third Lacanian register, that of the
‘real’ (which should not be confused with ‘reality’). What, precisely, is the ‘real’ in
Lacan? The (impossible) ‘real’ in Lacan’s work may appear to correspond roughly to
what Kant understood by the Ding-an-sich or the noumenal realm, which is
‘thinkable’, but not ‘knowable’, as phenomena in space and time are. ‘Reality’ (or the
phenomenal realm for Kant) would comprise the combined realms of the imaginary
and the symbolic for Lacan (where the imaginary fills in the gaps in the symbolic
through fantasy, as it were), while the ‘real’ is that which escapes or resists

14
symbolization and imaginary representation. But Lacan’s ‘real’ is not synonymous
with Kant’s Ding-an-sich. One could say that, instead of being that – the noumenon –
which is somehow ‘behind’ Kantian phenomena, the ‘real’ is that which remains after
the imaginary and the symbolic have been ‘subtracted’ from reality, albeit in an
unrepresentable fashion.
The question regarding the ‘real’ is complicated (if not rendered absurd) by the
consideration that, by definition, it is that which resists symbolization, which cannot
be ‘said’. Perhaps the distinction between what can be ‘said’ and what can be ‘shown’
is appropriate here, which would explain why arts like painting and cinema are
capable of conjuring up a sense of the ‘real’ by ‘showing’ the inexpressible. (A case
in point is Claire Denis’s film, Chocolat, set in colonial and postcolonial Cameroon,
where at various stages in the narrative the camera confronts the audience with the
‘real’ in its ineffable, yet powerful presence as that which, while escaping
signification, has far-reaching effects in the symbolic sphere.) Although the matter
cannot be further pursued here, I would argue that Lacan’s ‘real’ is further related to
what Derrida and Badiou call the ‘event’ (see Derrida, 2003, pp. 85-91; and Zupancic,
2000, p. 235) and to that sense of ‘nothingness’ which evokes, for Nietzsche, either
‘passive’ or ‘active’ nihilism on the subject’s part (see Olivier, 2004b). ‘Active’
nihilism is an active, creative axiological response to the realization that all the value-
systems that have ever existed, including the Platonic-Christian, rest on – or hang
above – an abyss or nothingness. ‘Passive’ nihilism is what ensues on the horrified
retreat from this abyss, in the (chosen) illusory belief that the old value system still
retains its value: the subject continues acting as if nothing has changed. ‘Active’
nihilism is the active creation or generation of value (meaning, sense) in the
realization that there is no pre-existing value (there is only the void of meaning, or
Lacan’s ‘real’: that which is left over after imaginary and symbolic constructions have
been removed from ‘reality’). This – the fact that there are no intrinsic values – would
explain why one’s own, actively generated values are as ‘good’ as any inherited
axiological system, which has also been similarly generated, after all. It would also
explain – as I will argue further – why what Lacan describes as ‘assuming one’s
desire’ (what Nietzsche calls ‘active’ nihilism) would always have to display the
character of transgression of the social and axiological status quo or conventional
morality, so that the crucial question is raised: can such a transgression function as a
paradigm of ethical action which is worth emulating in a new, (perhaps impossible)
society?
Another kind of example of the ‘real’ would be the body in its ‘pure’,
(conclusively) unsymbolizable organic state, the needs of which one ‘feels’ without
being able to articulate them as felt needs, but only as symbolized demands – for
example: ‘Mom, I am hungry’, where the symbolization of hunger on the part of the
child may manifest or show more than could ever be articulated or said in language,
namely a need for the parent’s love. Because there is always an unclosable gap
between these needs and their articulation as demands, this gap is what constitutes
desire, for Lacan (Lacan, 1977c, p. 263; Lee, 1990, pp. 55-59). But the ‘real’ also
alludes to the realm of excess – the noumenal, in Kantian terms – in a different sense,
where, if humans could belong fully to it (as they cannot), they could act fully in
accordance with the moral law or imperative that requires acting on the grounds of
duty alone. It would therefore seem that, in terms of what was argued earlier in this
article, ethical action according to culturally approved values, anchored in the phallus
as transcendental signifier, would be possible – in fact, resides in the realm of the
conventionally ‘possible’, even if (as indicated) decoding the logic of the unconscious

15
is not easy – in a less problematic manner if human existence did not imbricate the
‘impossible’ real. The ‘real’ is ‘impossible’, just as acting consistently according to
the moral law is impossible. In this sense, then, ethics is ‘…the dimension of desire,
which circles around the real qua impossible’ (Zupancic, 2000, p. 3).
In The ethics of psychoanalysis (1997, p. 20) Lacan remarks:
…my thesis is that the moral law, the moral command, the presence of the
moral agency in our activity, insofar as it is structured by the symbolic, is that
through which the real is actualized – the real as such, the weight of the
real…(p. 21)…Moral action is, in effect, grafted on to the real. It introduces
something new into the real and thereby opens a path in which the point of our
presence is legitimized.
Although Lacan here refers to the (‘our’) activity of psychoanalysts, it applies, I
believe, to that of all people. It is notable that he appears to reverse his claim: the
symbolically structured moral agency is that through which the real is actualized, but
the former is also ‘grafted’ on to the real. This seems to suggest that the way to align
the inescapable, albeit unsymbolizable real with the function of therapy as the ‘talking
cure’ at the level of the symbolic register, is to take into account the effects that this
real has in the symbolic, that a symbolically disruptive encounter with unpredictable
and uncontrollable ‘events’ elicits in relation to the world of symbolically mediated
moral action. This could occur in the guise of being brought face to face with one’s
own possible death, or with the possible death or permanent absence of a loved one,
for instance. The ‘ethical logic’ of desire in relation to the ‘real’ here is as follows:
human life does not have ‘meaning’ or ‘make sense’ by itself, but depends on
something which ‘surpasses’ – or, for that matter, ‘limits’ – it in a double sense for
such meaningfulness – that is, life is not self-justifying, but requires a moment of
excess in more than one sense for its justification. On the one hand this ‘excess’ (or
limit) refers to the ‘real’ as the brute, meaningless, symbolically resistant facticity of
the ‘given’, while on the other it alludes to one’s desire as that which ‘is not’ insofar
as it is precisely what would be ‘grafted on to the real’ if the subject is able to ‘take
up’ her or his desire (something that is not at all self-evidently the case).
An ethical act would hence be one where, for the sake of such justification,
life itself could, paradoxically, be sacrificed (as in the case of Antigone [Lacan, 1997,
pp. 243-287], or of Hamlet, for that matter), or one’s happy relationship with a loved
one is sacrificed, paradoxically, for the sake of the latter’s happiness (as in the case of
the woman in the film, Welcome to Sarajevo, who renounces her maternity to enable
her daughter to be adopted by a British journalist) (Žižek, 2000, p. xii). Or it could
manifest itself in the guise of someone transgressing the symbolically mediated, moral
code of her society by choosing to do something that conflicts with this code, and
hence renders her guilty or ‘criminal’ in relation to the extant law, but simultaneously
indicts this law as incapable of accommodating the desire of the individual, and hence
as being in need of ‘re-invention’ for the sake of a ‘singular justice’, as Derrida might
put it (Caputo, 1997, pp. 136-137). Hence Lacan’s injunction (1997, pp. 311-325),
that the subject should ‘act in conformity with’ her or his ‘desire’. Only by following
the path of one’s (usually hidden or repressed) desire is it possible to confront, in the
form of an ethical act, the effects of the (impossible) real in human reality – effects
which are likely to reconfigure one’s world in surprising or decisive ways.
It is important not to misunderstand what this entails, as Judith Butler
evidently does when she insists, in her debate with Žižek, on construing the ‘real’ as

16
something completely ‘outside’ the symbolic (see Žižek, 2000a, p. 214): the ‘real’
must be understood, instead, ‘…as the internal limit of the process of symbolization
that sustains the space of historicity’ (Žižek, 2000a, p. 214). In other words,
contingent, symbolically meaningful (or, on the other hand, nonsensical) historical
acts would be unthinkable if the symbolic sphere were somehow capable of semiotic
saturation. The fact is that the latter cannot be self-sufficient; it always fails to attain a
plenum or fullness of meaning – hence the constant need for ideologies as the false
promise of such fulfillment. It is this failure of the symbolic to achieve totalization or
completeness that is symptomatic of the ‘real’ as its inescapable (internal) limit. Joan
Copjec articulates this insight in terms of the limits to signification (2002, pp. 95-96):
Lacan’s definition of the real is precisely this: that which, in language or the
symbolic, negates the possibility of any metadimension, any metalanguage. It
is this undislodgeable negation, this rigid kernel in the heart of the symbolic,
that forces the signifier to split off from and turn around on itself. For, in the
absence of any metalanguage, the signifier can only signify by referring to
another signifier…Far from positing the existence of an elsewhere, the real as
internal limit of the symbolic – that is, the very impotence of the signifier – is
the obstacle that scotches the possibility of rising out of or above the symbolic.
By further characterizing it ‘…as a certain disturbance or dislocation in the order of
historical being’, Copjec (2002, p. 97) highlights what I am here arguing, namely that
the ‘experience’ or impact of the real on one’s life can reconfigure or overhaul its
symbolic-historical parameters, down to its very foundation, for example what was
referred to earlier as the ‘name of the father’, or alternatively, capital as major phallic
signifier in the contemporary hegemonic economic system. An experience of the
internal limits of capital – for instance via a wilderness-adventure which is both
devastating and enriching – may indeed drive home the fact that capital does not
instantiate the only possible symbolic universe. And such an awareness, with its
concomitant desire, opens the way to ethical action.
What Žižek, referring to the traumatic effect of the Second World War, says
about the ‘real’ as that which causes us to ‘think’, is also true of it as that which
impels us to act ethically (2000a, p. 213):
…what provokes us to think is always a traumatic encounter with some
external Real which brutally imposes itself on us, shattering our established
ways of thinking. As such, a true thought is always decentred: one does not
think spontaneously, one is forced to think.
One should remind oneself that what may seem to be transcendental logic here, in fact
entails a quasi-transcendental twist: it is not simply a matter of life depending for its
justification, or action for its ethical status, on something exceeding it or limiting its
symbolic universe – this could, erroneously, be understood as some sort of
‘guaranteed’ justification. That which exceeds or limits it as the real should perhaps
rather be understood as having a quasi-transcendental ethical function insofar as it
justifies existence, but not in an unproblematical or ‘pure’ sense, so that existence, or
motherhood for example, may unproblematically be sacrificed through an ethical act.
The moral law to do one’s ‘duty’ regardless of its consequences, for example,
confronts one with the most difficult of choices. It justifies life ethically, but not in an
uncomplicated, straightforward manner, just as ‘living for one’s child’ (or for one’s

17
honour, as the Greek heroes did), does not dictate in clear, positive, algorithmic
fashion exactly what one’s course of ethical action should be, but reminds one
through the experience of a bad conscience or guilt when one has violated it (see
Copjec, 1996, pp. xiv-xv). Similarly, the ‘real’ may be claimed to have a quasi-
transcendental function: given the assumption (or alternatively the voluntary sacrifice)
of one’s ‘singular’ desire (which radically individualizes the acting person), it is the
condition of possibility of ethical action as well as of its ‘impossibility’ (that is, of un-
ethical action from the perspective of the symbolic sphere of conventional values).
Žižek (1993, pp. 206-207) draws one’s attention to a paradigmatic instance, in
Freud’s work, of what is at stake here – one that simultaneously demonstrates the
dependence of a non-relativistic psychotherapeutic stance on the symbolic sphere of
societal values, as well as on the ‘impossible real’ as that which, by exceeding the
symbolic, provides the (non-symbolizable) opportunity or event for an encounter with
the radically singular nature of the subject’s desire, which has to be seized if the
normativity or law of the symbolic is to be mediated by the requirements for ethical
fulfillment on the part of the individual subject. By this I mean that, insofar as the
individual subject’s ‘desire’ is hidden from her or him by repression or foreclosure
8
, it
will always to a lesser or greater degree be incompatible with societal values
(otherwise it would not be repressed or foreclosed). Hence, as the following case
demonstrates, the psychotherapist is confronted by the value-system embedded in
language, as well as by the analysand’s desire as conflicting with, but simultaneously
calling for a re-configuration of, the symbolic in such a way as to allow the realization
of her or his desire. The pertinent example from Freud involves a woman married to a
lawyer or ‘Doctor of the Right’, that is, a ‘Doctor of Law’ (‘Doktor der Rechte’), who
saw him on her wedding anniversary, and who had inadvertently nicked her left-hand
ring finger while clipping her nails. In Austria wedding bands are worn on the right
hand ring finger, and Freud realized the symptomatic relevance of her ‘slip of the
finger’ when she informed him that the man she had been in love with was a medical
doctor (colloquially called a ‘Doktor der Linke’ or ‘Doctor of the Left’): her act of
cutting her left ring finger on her wedding anniversary betrayed her unconscious – in
fact, foreclosed (see note 8) – desire for this man from her past. Because such a desire
on the part of a married woman conflicted with the values of Austrian society at the
time, she was incapable of admitting to herself that it even existed in an unconscious,
foreclosed state, but from the perspective of the wound on her finger (an instance of
the objet petit a, as Lacan calls it, in which her desire is concentrated and can
therefore become ‘visible’), this desire was perceivable to the analyst (Freud). For her
to ‘assume her desire’ and all it entailed would have appeared immoral, if not criminal
in the symbolic terms of conventional morality, even if such an act would have been
radically singular, and as such expressive of an implicit wish to re-invent extant
society in a manner that would assimilate or accommodate her desire symbolically.
Alternatively, were she able to face the ‘real’ which disrupts her symbolic universe
via the little wound on her finger, one could say that a truly ethical act on her part
might be precisely not to follow the path where the assumption of her desire would
seem to lead (namely to divorce her husband, leave her family and seek out her long-
denied love), but to sacrifice or ‘give up’ her desire for the sake of the happiness of
her family (and perhaps another family too).
The most difficult question of all here is the following: what if the desire of
the subject is such that it conflicts so drastically with the values of society that it does
not so much offer a re-invention or renewal of the latter, but renders it null and void
or excludes it conclusively? It is one thing to say that the Viennese woman who loved

18
the medical doctor may have shocked her contemporaries by leaving her husband and
seeking out her first love (but nothing more than that); and another to say that, by
assuming her desire she would have pointed to the need for a re-invention of society,
towards a future society where such hypocritical mores would not stand in the way of
one’s desire. But what about someone like Timothy McVeigh as a man who, in
assuming his desire, inflicted death on hundreds of others (in Oklahoma City) who did
not have a choice in the matter? Or Hitler as such a subject? Should one not perhaps
say that radically singularizing, ethical actions of the Nietzschean type: ‘Become who
you are’, subvert their own ethical status in Lacanian terms if they do not offer
themselves as models to other subjects, that is, if they cannot function as a model for
being ‘repeated differently’ by other, equally singularizing subjects (none of whom
would be identical in terms of their own ‘desire’)?
As Derrida might put it, as far as the tension between law and justice is
concerned: justice (here, the Viennese woman’s desire) is impossible, because it
conflicts with the (conventional) law; hence, the law has to be temporarily suspended
and re-invented for this singular justice to prevail (Caputo, 1997, pp. 136-137). But
the moment this has been done, or phenomenalized, justice is, again, lost because of
the (unattainable) ‘entry’ into the symbolic of the ‘real’ of her singular desire, which
would do other people in her life an ‘injustice’. Hence the claim that Derridean
justice, like the Lacanian real, is the ‘impossible’, and hence that the truly ethical
thing to do on her part, once she has acknowledged her desire, may in fact be to ‘give
it up’ – not because this accords with the conventional morality of being ‘loyal to
one’s family’, but precisely insofar as it (her singularizing desire) has been ‘assumed’,
recognized, and yet been set aside for the sake of others. This seems to be what Lacan
implies where he says (Lacan, 1997, pp. 21-22): ‘…the ethical limits of
psychoanalysis coincide with the limits of its practice. Its practice is only a
preliminary to moral action as such – the so-called action being the one through which
we enter the real’. In other words, assuming one’s desire is only a preparation for
possible moral or ethical action, and a condition for it, because such taking up of
one’s desire – in accordance with it being radically and irreducibly singular for each
person (see Lacan, 1997, p. 24) – would invariably have the character of a
transgression of conventional (that is, conventionally sanctioned) morality. This is
also why the unconscious as discourse of the Other plays an important role here as a
kind of backcloth to such moral action – it is always in relation to this that the
shattering experience or event of ‘confronting the (impossible) real’ happens, and
against which both a transgressive acting according to one’s desire and a sacrifice of
this very (acknowledged) desire would attain ethical import. Hence, from a Lacanian
point of view, neither of these possibilities can be regarded as the manifestation of
mere whim, to be given utterly relativistic status: both possibilities are situated within
an unconscious ‘symbolic-cultural’ network which is questioned via the subject’s
(transgressive, because utterly singular) desire, and whatever the course of action the
subject embarks on (sacrifice of or acting in accordance with this desire), in ethical
terms it is not arbitrary, but potentially transformative or reconfigurative of the very
conventional morality it presupposes and questions. This implies further that, through
such transgressive, transformative action, the ethical agent introduces a radical
modification into the symbolic universe that she or he challenges via their action, and
simultaneously reconfigures their very identity, in this way opening up the prospect of
a differently configured symbolic universe – something that could assume the form of
a radically new politics, even a new social order. Žižek (2000a, p. 220) clarifies what
is at stake here:

19
…what the Lacanian notion of ‘act’ aims at is not a mere displacement/
resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or her
identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring
‘principle’ of the existing symbolic order.
What I have just outlined is one way of addressing the difficult question regarding the
possibility of accommodating singularizing (if not criminalizing) ‘ethical’ action on
the part of individual subjects in the universal domain of the symbolic as repository of
cultural values. What would be the implications of this rather complex configuration
between the real and the human reality of symbolically mediated choices and
decisions for psychotherapy? And what is the connection between a person’s
encounter with the Lacanian real and ethical action? Two possibilities present
themselves here: either the person concerned could have ‘taken up her or his desire’ prior
to the devastating or traumatic events in question, or, alternatively, the confrontation
with the real, by putting the individual’s symbolic-ethical horizon in question, functions
powerfully to remind the person thus questioned that it is not the only such symbolic
framework available – it is revealed in its constructedness, and hence its possible
replaceability by another framework constructed by the radically questioned individual.
As I see it, therefore, the therapist faces the difficult task of guiding the analysand to
the point where she or he grasps the fact that ethical action requires the ‘assumption
of her or his desire’ in the sense of figuring out what it is that ‘justifies’ his or her life,
and acting accordingly when it is appropriate to do so.
In The Sopranos, referred to at the outset in this paper, Tony’s wife is confronted
with just this choice by her psychotherapist, when he points out to her that she could
either connive at Tony’s life of unmitigated crime and enjoy her life of luxury in a
familiar symbolic universe (while enduring or ignoring the pangs of guilty
conscience), or she could let the (silent) voice of conscience (silent, because it does
not prescribe anything in positive terms) turn her symbolic universe on its head and
‘take up’ her desire. That is, she could choose to leave him – a desire implicitly
communicated to the psychiatrist by consulting him – and live a ‘morally good’ life to
the best of her (finite) ability, but without the conventional approbation of the cosa
nostra community (which requires that a wife stand by her husband), or the material
wealth that he provides. In other words, she has to discover and acknowledge what
her ‘real desire’ is, in the face of the ‘real’ that impinges so powerfully on her life
with its excessive, incalculable weight – in the guise of those occasions when life,
denuded or devoid of value, asserts itself. Only when she has affirmed her desire in
this sense, does an ethical act become possible in Lacanian terms.
In J.M.Coetzee’s deeply disturbing novel, Disgrace (2000), one is afforded
another pertinent fictional instance of how, through specific events, the ‘real’ may
shatter or disrupt an individual’s symbolic universe, and how this confronts the
individual(s) concerned with an ethical choice – or rather, with the opportunity to act
ethically. Soon after disgraced academic David Lurie moved in with his daughter,
Lucy, on her Eastern Cape smallholding, they are subjected to a brutal assault by three
men, and Lucy is raped by them. While David wants justice, and tries his best to
persuade Lucy to want it, too, at least in the guise of laying a charge of rape against
their assailants, Lucy refuses to do anything – even when it becomes apparent that the
man who has bought part of her land from her, Petrus, may be implicated. It gradually
becomes clear that, while David inhabits the ‘western’ symbolic (moral and legal)
universe where certain acts (like rape) cannot be excused or accepted, Lucy has

20
already reconfigured her own mindset to adapt (or switch) to a different, ‘African’
symbolic universe, where ‘rape’ may function to impress on a woman the fact that she
is vulnerable and, as such, requires a man’s (Petrus’s?) protection. The fact that Lucy
refuses counselling and that she even decides to keep the baby that results from the
rape, is indicative, in my judgment, that she (having previously ‘taken up her desire’
by deciding to live in virtual subsistence economic terms on the land in close
proximity to African people) is acting ethically in a Lacanian sense. Whatever
residual attachment she may still have had to a typical western system of values, is
decisively obliterated by the traumatic experience of the ‘real’ through the rape, and
although some may argue that her subsequent decisions cannot be regarded as
‘ethical’ because they were forced by an act of terror (see Zupancic, 2000, pp. 213-
221), in my view this is not the case: Lucy does have a choice, and she decides in
favour of subjecting herself to what one may call an ‘African’ way of doing things –
much to the understandable consternation of her father, who (with his love of the
English romantics) is a European in cultural terms. In short: Lucy acts ethically in so
far as she gives up her right to ‘justice’ in legal terms in order to be assimilated into a
different symbolic universe where she believes she will be given a place to exist and
survive.
In light of the theme of this paper the interesting question here is: What would a
psychotherapist have advised Lucy if she had sought counselling? Any attempt to
guide her in the direction of seeking ‘justice’ on her father’s (and existing law’s)
terms would have elicited opposition from her (because she clearly thinks of such
‘justice’ as being irrelevant), as would any attempt to rationalize the rape as being
‘just one of those things’ in South African society. Although she accepts the rape
stolidly, despite signs of trauma and repression on her part, this is not simply a matter
of adapting to an ‘abnormal society’ (as was explained at the beginning of this paper
regarding what was expected from my friend the psychologist). Rather, in Lacan’s
terms, she is taking an ethical stand in accordance with her desire, to be ‘part of the
land’ in the Eastern Cape. And this ethical stance on her part requires of her to
reconfigure her own mindset to be able to be part of an African symbolic universe.
The child that she is carrying therefore becomes a powerful metaphor for a fusion of
her and Africa’s symbolic horizons, and the novel ends with her father symbolically
‘giving her up’ metonymically (something astutely observed by psychoanalytical
theorist Andrea Hurst in conversation), when he ‘gives up’ the young dog (which has
become attached to him) to death, in a profoundly moving act of soliciting a kind of
redemption through sacrifice.
As pointed out earlier, in facing the difficulties discussed above the (Lacanian)
psychotherapist has at his or her disposal the universalistic symbolic system of
cultural values as it is embedded in the (‘linguistic structure’ of the) unconscious –
something that is not vitiated by inter-cultural differences, given the fact that such
differences are ineluctably articulated in conceptually negotiable language: a mother’s
or a woman’s role may differ in various societies, but ‘mother’ and ‘woman’ are
concepts which occupy specific positions in relation to anchoring signifiers (such as
the phallus) in the signifying chain of language and therefore imply a universal
meaning, which is thus interpretively negotiable. In addition, however, the
psychotherapist must face the demands of the ‘real’ as that which shatters, limits or
exceeds the symbolic universe of the subject in the form of the singularizing event
that ‘frames’ the desire of the analysand. By implication the psychotherapist would
fail in her or his ethical task if they neglect an opportunity to draw the analysand’s
attention to that something – what Lacan calls the objet petit a (Žižek, 1993, pp. 206-

21
207) – from the perspective of which this singular desire can be seized. Only in doing
this, is the way prepared for ethical action in a non-relativistic manner.
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Notes
1
In the course of preparing for the writing of this paper I benefitted from the insightful contributions to
various pertinent discussions on the part of Wim Kuit, a student of philosophy as well as postgraduate
psychology student at the former University of Port Elizabeth (now NMMU). Needless to say,
whatever inadequacies still remain in the written text are my own responsibility and not his.
2
Lee (1990, pp. 38-47) provides an admirably lucid interpretive account of the ‘transformation’ of the
analysand’s ‘empty speech’ into ‘full speech’, as outlined by Lacan in ‘Function and field’ (1977a).
See also Olivier (2004) in this regard.
3
Especially in his later work, Lacan tends to capitalize ‘Other’ in the phrase ‘discourse of the Other’
(referring to the unconscious). On the significance of this sometimes confusing term in Lacan’s work,
see Bowie, 1991, pp. 82-83.
4
This question involves more than what can be addressed in the space of a mere paper. Here we shall
concentrate on what is most directly connected with the theme of the paper, namely the positioning of
the subject (je) as narrator of her/his life-story within the symbolic register, which – as ‘discourse of

23
the Other’ – bears the ethical norms of society. But it is not only the two registers, namely the
imaginary (instantiated by the mirror stage) and the symbolic, that affect the subject. The register of the
‘real’ – that which resists symbolization, and is in fact forever left behind when the subject enters
language – is equally important, especially because it involves the subject’s ‘desire’. ‘Desire’ is, for
Lacan, the gap that separates ‘need’ from its linguistically articulated ‘demand’ – such as when a child
asks a parent for something to eat. The upshot is that, no matter how hard the parent tries to satisfy the
child’s demand, the need can never be met, in so far as the demand masks what it is a disguised
expression of, namely a longing or desire for a ‘filling’ of the child’s (commonly human) ‘lack’ or
‘want’ of being by way of recognition by the other (here, the parent). Needless to say, every person’s
‘desire’ in this Lacanian sense (ultimately deriving from Plato’s account of eros in The Symposium), is
hidden from him or her by repression, in so far as (and this is the important point) their desire conflicts
in some way or other with the moral demands of society. Žižek (1993, pp. 206-207) adduces an
exemplary instance from Freud’s clinical practice of such a hidden desire (that conflicts with the moral
norms of society) on the part of the subject. The final section of this paper addresses the difficulties
involved here.
5
Besides, as Michel Foucault (1990, p. 84; see also Olivier, 2000, 2001 & 2003a) has argued, the
operation of a (dominant) discourse (in this case patriarchy) opens the way for a counter-discourse
(such as feminism) to oppose it.
6
Such a ‘negative’ expression of guilt could take the form of a denial of responsibility for certain states
of affairs, or of too vehement a refusal to discuss certain topics with the psychologist.
7
Interestingly, the ‘phallus’ may be regarded as the symbolic counterpart, not only of the penis, but
also of the clitoris (Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 1983, p. 768). This would legitimize Lacan’s
use of the term as signifier of (unattainable) fullness for both men and women.
8
‘Foreclosure’ denotes that which is so incompatible with the normative requirements of society that
(in contrast to what is first traumatically experienced and then repressed), the socialized (Oedipalized)
subject ‘rejects’ it from his or her consciousness. It is only to be perceived as a symptom on the body,
for example as hallucination. See Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986, pp. 146-153; Olivier, 1998, pp. 137-
139.