Some Remarks on the Symptom and the Social Link: Lacan with Marx

Although nothing predestined Lacan to come into contact with Marx, that encounter did take place early in his life through people and works influenced by Marxist theory. In the 1930s Lacan frequented the surrealist circle of poets, and between 1933 and 1938 he attended the lectures on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. A more remote connection was Lacan's friendship with the Communist psychologist, Henri Wallon, for whom Lacan wrote Les complexes familiaux in 1938. Of course, the events of modern history also involved Lacan with Marx. Finally, it is well known how important Marxist thought was for the French intelligentsia of the postwar period.

Lacan stressed man's social being in his earliest writings, and he used Freud as a major reference, quoting, in particular, a passage from Group Psychology in which Freud notes how “in the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so, from the very first, individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable use of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well” (69). The Other is thus involved with the subject from the beginning. In the same way, Lacan's stade du miroir—which he borrowed from Wallon and a number of other psychologists—demonstrates the necessity of an Other from which the subject can differentiate in order to build personal unity in the image. The “other” at that time was the subject's fellow man, his look-alike, but also the Other who names and whose mediation is needed to confer an image. For Henri Wallon, the premature birth generic to our species attested the biological roots of man's social being and explained the importance of imaginary capture. Indeed, the idea of premature birth allowed Lacan to theorize the anticipation of the maturation process evidenced in the stade du miroir, a concept which accounts for the importance of imaginary capture in man's life. We should note he