We've talked a lot about Jacques Lacan. We have to realize he died in 1981 when he was 80. Stuff has happened in Neuroscience and those sort of areas since the simpler and infinitely more comprehensible times. One of the topics Lacan put high priority on was the moments when a person started developing a self image.
For Lacan this idea of self image was an attempt to make yourself into a mirror image a bigger and more confident other. You built it as a protection against the terror of reality. All very well being frightfully clever but an honest appraisal of a self in the world, for Lacan, was an absolute recipe for anti-social, psychotic behaviors.
There were two sorts of images, or others for Lacan. He thought of these others as objects. The one object was a mirror image of what you as a person decided you needed and wanted to be in order to fit into the world as best you could. You could look at yourself in this mirror and judge your progress. The other other, the other object, which he called objet petit a, was what you'd left behind of yourself in the process of turning yourself into something that mirrored this wonderful image of yourself. Good looking, tall, successful, fun to be around....
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that to manage the day to day you'd turned yourself into a very fine, highly polished Wardrobe. Everyone loved it, envied it, though it was great. Your other object, the objet petit a, would be the sawdust, waste wood, unfinished cans of varnish and cigarette butts you'd left laying around, or hidden away somewhere.
Oh sure, the Jung's of this world could go on about the archetypes around which a desperate and self conscious self could model itself, and Jung did mention shadows, which is what he called his cigarette butts and sawdust, being an ominous presence in the psyche. Lacan, in his model, put much more than a mere shadow into his objet petit a, his other other.
First of all, Lacan didn't want people messing with what he'd called his other other. He wanted it written and understood just as it was. Objet petit a, as far as he was concerned, was as good as an algebraic formulation.
Secondly the objet petit a, would always be a remainder, it was definitely a left over bit of reality that both the conscious and the unconscious could sense. But for Lacan, the moment we people started using symbols to make a language that tried to enable us to communicate with the object petit a, this other other, like a vampire, would remain outside the mirror, it couldn't be trapped by language, it was for ever a lurking misfortune, an unwanted appendage. And yet, no doubt about it, there was something in the periphery that refused to be ignored, it was lurking around, making the odd wistful sound that verged on whimpering, it had some sort of point to make that lay outside the Symbolic Order, so probably best to prescribe Quaaludes.
Finally, the objet petit a, this other other, means we can never be whole, our mirror, when we looked into it to check progress would never reflect what we'd become
