The Other Who Gives Me My Image

When speaking does not resolve the conflict

We often imagine that when people begin speaking instead of fighting, something has already been resolved. There are words where there might otherwise have been violence. Therapy may then seem to offer a place to put anger into words.

Yet words can wound. Someone can humiliate another without raising their voice. Reassurance can establish superiority. A generous offer may leave the person receiving it feeling diminished.

This is one of the difficulties Jacques Lacan takes up in “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis.” Aggressivity can inhabit the conversation that appears to overcome it.

For me, this raises a question about the work of therapy: what makes speaking in a session different from another exchange in which each person has to defend their position?

Lacan approaches this question through five theses, moving between speech, the formation of the ego, the analytic encounter, and the social world.

Listening to what is being said

A raised voice, a threat, or a blow can be observed. But what happens between people cannot be understood through observable behaviour alone.

“You seem very pleased with yourself.”

These words might express affection. They might also carry envy, reproach, or an attempt to unsettle the person being addressed. Their significance depends on who says them, to whom, and where they occur in the person’s history and speech.

This is why your particular experience matters in therapy. A sentence cannot be separated from the person speaking it and still tell us everything about what is happening.

Lacan begins with this subjective dimension. Taking it seriously requires rigour. It does not give the analyst permission to invent hidden meanings or decide in advance what you really mean.

The method has to allow speech and relations to be investigated, and the analytic experience to be transmitted and renewed with another participant. It cannot borrow its entire model from measuring physical objects.

In the sessions, this means allowing what you say to acquire its significance through the work, with attention to how you address another person and what becomes difficult in that address.

Aggressivity does not always look like an attack

Someone may never strike another person and still maintain a relation that persistently undermines them. Hostility may appear through reproaches, hesitations, recurring omissions, or fantasies, without a conscious decision to attack.

Lacan distinguishes aggressive intention from an overt aggressive act. Intention here does not necessarily mean something deliberately planned.

But this distinction cannot become a checklist through which everything you do is interpreted as hostility. Arriving late is not automatically an attack. Its place in your speech and history has to be established. Otherwise, the person listening becomes someone who already knows what everything means.

Lacan also draws attention to images of bodily fragmentation: being mutilated, dismembered, or devoured. Such images in dreams and fantasies bring another difficulty into view.

Our bodily image helps organise the experience of being one person. When that unity feels threatened, the force of the experience may seem disproportionate to the immediate event.

How secure, then, is the image through which we recognise ourselves?

The image through which I become myself

Lacan’s account of the mirror stage concerns a child encountering an image of bodily coordination before fully possessing that coordination in movement. The image offers an anticipated unity. There is something coherent to identify with while bodily mastery remains incomplete.

But the image is outside the child. Something external becomes the means through which a sense of self takes shape.

This is the contradiction: the image gives me unity, yet I never entirely coincide with it.

Lacan calls this an alienating identification. It involves misrecognition, because I take the coherence of the image for the truth of my being.

Narcissism, in this account, concerns the formation of the ego through an image. It means more than vanity or excessive admiration of oneself.

Another person may seem to possess the confidence, mastery, or satisfaction I seek. I may admire them, imitate them, and resent them. These feelings can belong to the same relation.

A toy becomes desirable when another child picks it up. A colleague’s recognition may become intolerable because their success seems to diminish my own value.

The person closest to my ideal image can become my most troubling rival. Aggressivity belongs to the tension through which the ego takes form. We cannot assume an originally harmonious ego that conflict only later disturbs, or a self that transparently knows itself.

Resemblance, then, does not necessarily bring peace. Someone who seems very much like us may also disturb the image through which we hold ourselves together.

When these difficulties enter therapy

These relations can also take shape in the sessions.

You may experience the analyst as superior, withholding, or humiliating. Reassurance may seem the obvious answer, but demonstrating goodwill can sometimes deepen the difficulty. The analyst may appear to possess precisely the goodness or maturity against which you feel deficient.

There can be something painful in seeking help while finding it unbearable that another person should provide it. Receiving help may be experienced as defeat, or as becoming indebted.

Good intentions do not place the analyst outside this problem.

Lacan’s emphasis on restraint concerns limiting the analyst’s personal display so that the work does not become a contest between two egos. Coldness offers no guarantee either. An insistently impassive analyst may present an image of being beyond vulnerability.

The question is what the analyst’s presence makes possible.

In transference, the analyst may come to bear earlier imagos: formative images through which your relations with others have been organised. Something of those relations can emerge in the present encounter.

“You need to prove that you know better than me.”

Immediately arguing against this accusation might reproduce the competition it describes. Simply accepting it as fact could also close the question.

What matters is how the relation takes shape, what repeats within it, and what can be spoken. This includes examining what the analyst has actually done. Interpretation may allow something to be articulated differently; its purpose cannot be reduced to convincing you that the analyst is right.

The work needs to allow aggressivity to emerge without fixing it into a personal struggle. There is a difference between hearing hostility in what is said and requiring the person speaking to surrender.

Making room for the other

Does this mean that we are condemned to rivalry?

Lacan also considers how identification can establish distance and reorganise a relation. He develops this through Oedipal identification and the pacifying function of the ego ideal. A shared identification can mediate rivalry, allowing people to coexist without remaining confined to measuring themselves against one another.

This offers no promise that maturity, generosity, or altruism will remove every aggressive tension.

A conflict can change its organisation without disappearing altogether. We also need to read the paper historically: its formulations about sexual normality and cultural development require critical examination.

The question remains: can the other have a place without that place requiring my disappearance, or mine requiring theirs?

When being strong means having to win

The social world also enters this difficulty. Competition, conquest, and self-sufficiency may be celebrated as measures of human worth. Aggressivity can be praised as strength, and social competition presented as a biological necessity.

Lacan’s discussion of Hegel brings recognition into view. Dominating another does not release someone from dependence on the recognition they seek.

We can hear a contemporary version of this problem in the demand to become independent, establish your value, and continually demonstrate success. Proving autonomy may make someone increasingly dependent on comparison, while deepening their isolation.

If therapy simply helps a person become a more successful competitor, it may reinforce the arrangement in which their suffering has become caught.

Lacan closes with the more modest possibility of opening a way towards meaning through a “discreet fraternity.”

The analyst’s knowledge, generosity, and image of themselves can enter the struggle for mastery too. Speaking in therapy makes that struggle available for questioning.

In the psychoanalytic sessions, we make room for what hostility articulates, without needing either the patient or the psychoanalyst to emerge as the victorious ego, and in therapy this is worked through over the course of the sessions with the support of the analytic setting in my consulting room in person in Hawthorn or online. Bookings