Lacan and Laplanche

Lacan's Mirror Stage - Perceived wholeness in contrast with fragmented body. The identification with self as image leads to the formation of the ego and the libidinal connection with physical body image. Ego formed on misunderstanding between subject and perceived image.

Self-reflexivity in early video art as seen in Three Transistions by Peter Campus.



Laplanche: Sexual drive/instinct

"It is sexuality which represents the mode of every drive and probably constitutes the only drive in the strict sense of the term." (8)

Instinct (instinkt) leads to drive (Trieb)

Four dimensions of drive:

1. Impetus (Drang) - a building pressure (hard to separate from drive itself)
2. Aim (Ziel) - what appeases the impetus
3. Object (Objekt) - not necessarily an inanimate object or an object of knowledge, not a scientific or perceptual object but an object of the mind. Could be a person or a part of a person. Through object, drive reaches aim. Drive is independent of object, object is of minimal concern.
4. Source (Quelle) - relating to the body, stimulus, you. What relates the somatic to the psychical.

Model of sexuality compared to instincts like hunger is inaccurate. Freud points to perversions as evidence. Laplanche says because of duplicity, like how breastfeeding has two phases:

1. Nourishment
2. Sensual pleasure

In his example of breastfeeding, the sexual drive is propped upon a non-sexual, vital function.

Laplanche also describes how the sexual drive cannot be compared to hunger because we are never satiated. We seek more than we need and are never fulfilled.

"The finding of an object is the refinding of it" -Freud

"The object to be rediscovered is not the lost object, but its substitute by displacement; the lost object is the object of self-preservation, of hunger and the object one seeks to refind in sexuality is an object in relation to that of the first object." - Laplanche