ABSTRACT
Freud’s theoretical starting point was rooted in physiology generally and neural mechanisms particularly. He construed the psychic as emerging from the body and its drives, where Id was a great reservoir of bodily generated energy, and ego was “first and foremost a bodily ego.” Freud described psychic development by analogy to biological development, namely, as the unfolding of pre-determined structures. This is the context of the centrality of sexuality in shaping personality and the basis for a psychoanalytic anatomy. The coordination of the psychic and the physiological is orchestrated in the context of societal prohibitions, represented in superego imperatives. Whereas Freud’s work can be seen as a brave attempt at bridging mind and body, Lacan’s work offers to deconstruct this binary and examine its significance in his notion of the subject, articulated in three orders: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. In this chapter, the author describes mind-body relations in the context of a Lacanian logic of development. For Lacan, there are two logical moments in the formation of psychic life: the mirror stage and the Oedipal stage as he conceives of it. Both are predicated upon an other, transforming the binary system of body-mind into a triangulation of other-mind-body.
