Identification is Creation. Stay strong and let's know what Jacques Lacan might have meant when he talked about the structure of language being tied to an understanding that permitted him to interpret the Psyche, a pit where the unconscious and primal writhed around in unholy complaint.
It always seems as though the business of being a human being starts off messy in its unutterred silence. It's not messy. Until it comes into the world it's a like a well packed suitcase, all neat and tidy in a small orderly space, and as an entropy expressing itself it sounds like an opportunity looking to escape, it needs a hole in the fence, it embraces disorder and it becomes one of us. Over the years, stuff get's lost, bad habits like the metaphysical absolute of irony get acquired, along with disease, wrinkles, rat poison instead of collagen, impossible fantasies, figments of the imagination, heart conditions and aneurysms. So no wonder people have yearned for a structure with which to interpret the language of the creature that lurks within, or the unconscious, sometimes called the Psyche, the Ego, it's a long list, each attempt at definition an inspiration behind a wonderful disparagement.
We all remember being called puerile and cretinous by shell-shocked teachers of Latin and Greek, but very few of us, I think, even as infants, have been called unmediated and prelinguistic and yet that's how the illiterate within, the raw unconscious, has been described by those fluent in the Symbolic Order, which is another way of signifying the mental range of ideas associated with the structure or the language of the unconscious. This mental range isn't simply did the cat sit on the mat or didn't it? No, this mental range of ideas includes language, law, culture, tradition, social structure, the weather and everything else. It's all there rolling around in the unconscious doing devious things, upsetting a lifestyle and confusing the emotions.
Let's call up a coherent self and give out the name Ego. This is the chap or chappess who does what he or she can to run the unconscious. The Ego is the one to open a dialogue with. In our coffee clutch, or whatever, we identify our feelings within the context of a Symbolic Order, which is still a mental range of ideas that includes language, law, culture, tradition, social structure, the weather and everything else. In the process of identifying a feeling we give it a signifier or a word that creates it in our minds and we start adding meaning to this signified feeling we've identified with a word. This stream of meanings includes where that word lies within the entire Symbolic order.
And soon enough, as dialogue continues, an unfillable void is observed, it's a great big hole Lacan called "lack," something missing, that needs to be filled. One of the titles that's been given to "lack" is the Source of Desire. Other things too, many of them the Ego might be reluctant to discuss because the "I" as manager of the unconscious, inventor of words and head communicator with the outside world isn't much of anything. The point is "lack" is structural, it's been there since first breath, if "Lack" were history Arendt's understanding of history would suit it. And there again, a lot of lack-pot-holes, have been filled by an immodest creator of words with buckets of make believe.
