The Witty Butcher's Wife

I want to consider in this essay the meaning of the importance of identification in desire. One of the most fruitful trends in psychoanalytic thought of the last decade is a rediscovery of the extraordinary significance of narcissism, or of the specular conditions of any playing out of desire, any establishing of relations, any symbolizing activity. This trend can be seen as a critical reaction against Lacan's privileging of the Symbolic order over the Imaginary as the dimension in which negativity of the really productive and interesting kind occurs, in which speech or language in the full sense goes on. The notion of entry into the Symbolic order via castration as the condition of full speech went along it seemed with the denunciation of the Imaginary or the mirror-stage, like American ego-psychology, as the locus of delusion-as the dimension of mystification which individual subjects should get over and which psychoanalytic theory should successfully altogether avoid. To the extent that Lacan's indictment of the Imaginary sounded like a dismissal of its importance, to the extent that the denunciation of ego psychology sounded like a discouragement against thinking about the ego, it was inevitable that the pendulum should eventually swing the other way, toward a reemphasis on the importance, persistence, unavoidability, and productiveness of the Imaginary

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