Lacan's Fantasy: The Birth of the Clinical Concept

Abstract

The Lacanian concept of fantasy is an essential locus for the conception of subjectivity and reality in the work of Slavoj Žižek, particularly in his initial English texts from 1989–2002 (roughly from his first major book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, to Welcome to the Desert of the Real). Whilst looked at creatively in its various guises and extended beyond clinical applications in his vast oeuvre – e.g. toward the exploration of the social, in terms of ideological fantasy foremost, to fuller elaborations in The Plague of Fantasies and beyond – the conceptual heritage (from philosophical analogues to Freud's definitions and ruminations; to Freud's followers, particularly Klein; to the early works of Lacan, i.e. the scattered articles of the 1930s and 1940s as well as Family Complexes; and to a strictly Lacanian definition of fantasy developed in the early seminars) is in need of fleshing out within contemporary scholarship. To this end, and as part of a larger project currently underway, in the following we will trace the somewhat staggered development of the concept of fantasy in Lacan's initial meetings held at le Centre hospitalier Sainte-Anne between 1953 and 1961 where 'fantasy' as subjective component (as opposed to fantasies, fantasizing as such, etc.) was truly born. Ultimately, the understanding of this trajectory and the changing significations involved in conceptual evolution can broaden our insight into Lacan's (and therefore Žižek's) theoretical methodology as well as their insistence on retaining the category of subject in the philosophical tradition.