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My goal in this article is to provide an admittedly schematic account of Lacan's very different approaches to the treatment of neurosis and psychosis. First I present his structural model of diagnosis, which begins from the very basic idea that there are at least two fundamentally different dimensions to human existence: the imaginary dimension and the symbolic dimension. Those familiar with Lacan are aware that his later diagnostic schemas involve three dimensions (imaginary, symbolic, and real), but I confine my attention for the time being to the first two he introduces, starting in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Rather than introduce the imaginary dimension by starting with the mirror stage, as Lacan does, I discuss a number of its salient features, beginning with the all-important fact that Lacan does not call it imaginary to emphasize the dimension of illusion, the dimension of that which does not really exist, but rather to emphasize the importance of images, both in the animal kingdom and in human beings.
Lacan stresses the formative role of images in the animal kingdom, pointing out that images are important in pigeons: the female does not develop to sexual maturity without seeing an image of another pigeon like itself (a mirror image will do, or even a crude drawing or cutout). The same is true for certain kinds of grasshoppers (Schistocerca): A significant developmental process requires seeing something—an image of a member of its own species—for asocial grasshoppers to become gregarious.
Images are of crucial importance in aggression too. As Konrad Lorenz (1963) shows with many examples in his book On