Toward Reading Lacan: Pages for a Workbook: Chapter 2: Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis

This essay dates from mid-May, 1948, when it was presented as a paper to the Eleventh Congress of the Psychanalystes de langue francaise (Brussels), in the form of a theoretical discussion of aggression following upon a more clinical discussion of the same theme. Composed, then, before the published version of the “mirror phase” essay, it is clearly complementary to the latter, for its principal theme is that the “notion of aggressivity” is a “correlative tension of the narcissistic structure” (1977, p. 22/116) with which the essay deals. In explaining this “correlative tension,” the author introduces many subordinate themes from which we shall try to disengage it, though for the sake of clarity we shall follow the author's own rather scholastic format: a short introduction followed by the exposition of five theses.

Lacan chooses as the starting point for his reflection the “aporia” that Freud was trying to deal with when, still attempting to understand man's experience “in the register of biology,” he suggested the possibility of a “death instinct” (1977, p. 8/101). We recall the nature of that aporia: stubborn phenomena like the repetition compulsion, hatred, ambivalence, destructiveness toward self and others (e.g., masochism, sadism), were difficult—if not impossible—to explain by a monistic theory of instinct. Freud's suggestion, then, was that we conceive of two basic instincts in man, Eros and the destructive instinct: “The aim of the first of these basic instincts is to establish ever greater unities and to