The Image of the Body
in Psychoanalysis

Jacques-Alain Miller

 

[...]Lacan claims that the Marquis de Sade was right when he stated that you can only jouis one part of the other's body. But this is not true about the child's body: when it comes to children, one can jouis their bodies in their entirety. As for children, we can say that their entire bodies are an objet a. We can connect this example to Freud's observation of the fort-da child, the child manipulating the thread bobbin. But in this case—which is paradigmatic for other cases—the child's body is clearly the bobbin. And when this happens, when the child is the bobbin, he is surely at a stage prior to the classic fort-da. I won't turn it into a typical stage, like the mirror stage, but it's interesting to notice that this takes place just before the child enters the mirror stage.[...]

This preeminence of the image of one's own body is a characteristic of the human species. In animals, we find the image of a similar other. In the early stages of his teaching, Lacan underlined the importance of the image of the similar other in the development of animal organisms: there are animals that need to see the image of a similar other so that their organism can continue to develop. There are also functions in animal life in which the enemies are used in an imaginary way, but as far as I know there is no privilege of one's own body in animals that can be compared to what happens in humans.

The way in which Lacan repeatedly states the preeminence of one's own body in human beings is related to the supposition of a lack, an absence, which the image of the body would fill, cover. The specific privilege of this image cannot be understood without supposing that it conceals an essential lack.[...]

Subscribe to Lacanian Ink click here.

Purchase Lacanian Ink click here.