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This is a long and complicated paper in which Steven Joseph, using Lacan's Ecrits, attempts to show why mainstream scholars in psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology and literary critics dismiss Jung's work on the symbolic process. He also introduces Lacan's thought to Jungian readers.
Joseph explores Lacan's work ‘through Jungian lenses’. Lacan regarded his approach as a return to the work of Freud from the viewpoint of structural linguistics. He was typical of psychoanalysts in his dismissal of Jung as not part of the mainstream post-modern symbolic consciousness. Lacan was interested in the ‘symbolising’ nature of the psyche and concentrated on what he ‘envisioned’ as the parallel nature of the unconscious and language. ‘Interpretation is based on no assumption of divine archetypes but on the fact that the unconscious is structured in the most radical way like a language … Jung's divine archetypes are nothing but protomorphic proliferations of the images that flourish in the veil of the narcissistic mirage which affects a seduction and capture of whatever is reflected in it’. Lacan argues that archetypes belong to the Imaginary and so have nothing to do with ‘cure’; they are part of the problem not part of the solution. ‘Cure is a symbolizing of the Imaginary’.
Joseph explains Lacan's three main stages of life—Imaginary, Symbolic and Real. In the primary experience there is no sense of wholeness but a ‘motor incapacity and nursling dependence’. Psychic life proper begins with an initial act of identification. ‘The infant, less than a year old, sees another child or her image in a mirror, it is “like meeting like” and is an appearance of wholeness, but based on false identification.’ The child is captivated and fascinated by the mirror image. The Imaginary ego identification compensates for a lack of wholeness. The Imaginary is inadequate for life, and so there is a move to the Symbolic. ‘The Imaginary is repudiated because it is prohibited by the child's begin