Lacan - Lack, Desire, Drives and Other/other

 Lack
Lack is a concept that is always related to desire. Lacan distinguishes between three kinds of lack, according to the nature of the object which is lacking.

        - Symbolic Castration and its object related is the Imaginary Phallus; 

Symbolic castration anxiety refers to the fear of being degraded, dominated or made insignificant, usually an irrational fear where the person will go to extreme lengths to save their pride and/or perceives trivial things as being degrading making their anxiety restrictive and sometimes damaging.

         - Imaginary Frustration and its object related is the Real Breast; 

         - Real Privation and its object related is the Symbolic Phallus. 

The symbolic phallus is the concept of being the ultimate man, and having this is compared to having the divine gift of God.

The three corresponding agents are the Real Father, the Symbolic Mother, and the Imaginary Father. Of these three forms of lack, castration is the most important from the perspective of the cure.

Other/other 

The little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego.  The little other is thus entirely inscribed in the imaginary order. The big Other designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. The big Other is inscribed in the order of the symbolic. Indeed, the big Other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularised for each subject. The Other is thus both another subject, in his radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness, and also the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject.

We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the Other for another subject.

In arguing that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject but rather in the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from another place, outside of consciousness—"the unconscious is the discourse of the Other." When conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene".

Desire

A lack is what causes desire to arise. Lack and desire are synonymous. When you do not have something and feel a sense of loss, then you are actually feeling desire for that lost thing. Lack implies an incomplete and unachievable wholeness. The resultant desire is a haunting ache that is more than the lust for something more achievable. Desire relates to the need to possess, to have, to own, to control. We thus lust after people and possessions. 

It is important to distinguish between desire and the drives. Even though they both belong to the field of the Other, desire is one, whereas the drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack.

 Lacan writes that "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other." Even our unconscious desires are, in other words, organized by the linguistic system that Lacan terms the symbolic order or "the big Other." In a sense, then, our desire is never properly our own, but is created through fantasies that are caught up in cultural ideologies rather than material sexuality. For this reason, according to Lacan, the command that the superego directs to the subject is, of all things, "Enjoy!" That which we may believe to be most private and rebellious (our desire) is, in fact, regulated, even commanded, by the superego.

Drives

Drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around it. 

Lacan incorporates the four elements of the drives as defined by Freud (the pressure, the end, the object and the source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and returns to the erogenous zone. The three grammatical voices structure this circuit:

1. the active voice (to see)
2. the reflexive voice (to see oneself)
3. the passive voice (to be seen)

The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic—they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears. Despite being the "passive" voice, the drive is essentially active: "to make oneself be seen" rather than "to be seen." The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.