Jacques Lacan

[Liam_Donovan330]

I was hoping someone could post the Sidereal chart for Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who combined Freud with semiotics.

Lacan was born April 13, 1901 at 2:30PM (according to Elisabeth Roudinesco's biography) in Paris, France (coordinates 48.8566° N, 2.3522° E).

Lacan has made the most complete map of the mind that I have found. I've found his ideas get a lot of people genuinely excited. If you're interested in his philosophy the best online resource I've found is the No Subject wiki here: https://nosubject.com/Main_Page

"Lacan was a kind of antihero, not at all cut out for a normal life, destined to eccentricity and incapable of knuckling under to the countless commonplace rules of behavior- hence his excessive interest in the discourse of madness, as the only key to understanding a crazy world." - Roudinesco, p. 71

I'd be curious to see what his chart looks like. Thank you!

[Jim Eshelman]

The biography would only be B-rated data, but we can call this one AA: The Gauquelin collection has the birth record for the same time, April 13, 1901, 2:30 PM, Paris, France.

He was a Pisces-Capricorn with Mars (in Leo) on EP and partile trine Sun. His closest aspect is Mercury square Neptune (0°16'). The Venus-Saturn square is surely of great importance.

Something not evident ecliptically is that Eris is 4° below Descendant, and therefore of some importance. Also, only in the mundoscope do his partile Sun-Saturn square and his Mercury-Uranus-Pluto T-square show, with Mercury-Uranus partile).

Not nearly as interesting as the chart I first thought he had when I mistakenly typed March instead of April <g>. But, then, I know very little of his life, his work, or the workings of his mind.

[Jim Eshelman]

Here is the horoscope. I'll come back later today and delete the illustration to save storage space as usual.

[FlorencedeZ.]

Jim, I think you may have used a different birth month in the horoscope and mundoscope for Jacques Lacan.

[Jim Eshelman]

Jim, I think you may have used a different birth month in the horoscope and mundoscope for Jacques Lacan.

Agh, you're right. Too much to do this morning and went too fast.

[SteveS]

At first glance the key Sidereal Astrology aspects are a partile 180 of Uranus-Pluto, but more importantly from a personal standpoint his partile 90 of Mercury-Pluto. Using Ebertin's COSI, these two partile aspects offer a revolutionary spokesperson in a specialized field gaining influence with a specialized audience.

[SteveS]

Correction: Lacan does not have a partile Mercury-Pluto 90. I was looking at his Direct Midpoint of Me/ASC=Pluto-Uranus, which I think is his main Natal Signature and still offers Ebertin same words I posted.

[Jim Eshelman]

Correction: Lacan does not have a partile Mercury-Pluto 90. I was looking at his Direct Midpoint of Me/ASC=Pluto-Uranus, which I think is his main Natal Signature and still offers Ebertin same words I posted.

Mundanely, he has a near-partile Mercury-Pluto and partile Mercury-Uranus. It's breathtaking. Ecliptically the key Mercury aspect is that close square to Neptune.

[SteveS]

I just finished reading his bio and critics on Wikipedia and related this all back to his chart. Planetary, I see his chart dominated by Mercury-Uranus-Pluto with strong influence of Neptune. Without a doubt, a revolutionary innovator thinker in his specialized field. As an underlying life tone, Ebertin offers from his book COSI as a combo of these 3 planets:

An intense thought-activity, restless mind, indefatigable mental worker, creative activity, an inventive and resourceful person. The constant occupation with new things and plans.

Obviously with his Mercury emphasis combo with Uranus-Pluto, he shook things-up in his specialized field of thinking.

[Jim Eshelman]

All true. Those mundane aspects are most interesting, yes?

Something I find interesting about his luminaries, though: He had no Hub luminary. This is pivotal in terms of his ultimate importance, I think. People who found great things, who are pivot points of movements, nearly always have at least one Hub luminary and often two. (See Fagan's summary on p. 197 of Astrological Origins, for example.) The only thing I've seen that can make up for this is a similarly "hubbish" angular Sun.

Freud's character is easiest to see in his Aries Sun, but it's his Taurus Moon and angular Sun that made him a center around which the future was built. Jung was a double Rim but had an exactly angular Sun. Lacan has the luminary signs of one of the "worker bees" that populate a movement after it is up and running.

The closest thing I can find in his chart to something that would anchor a long-term future significance for him is his 3°40' Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. Its commitment to orthodoxy can go two ways: Most people with a strong Jupiter-Saturn aspect align with existing orthodoxies, but those that have unusual genius become, themselves, "the new orthodoxy." (Freud is a great example of this with his 2°11' square. Even Jung, who didn't actually start the movement, had a 0°48' trine. In other fields, we find the unspoken "I am the new orthodoxy in my field" in, say, John Lennon with his 0°37' conjunction.)

In Lacan's chart, the conjunction isn't terribly strong: a background Class 2 aspect. I think he will continue to be seen as an "interesting variant" on Freudism at most.

[Liam_Donovan330]

Steve I think your assessment was on, Lacan gave around thirty years of seminars on psychoanalysis in Paris.

Probably the best introduction to his work is in the big idea of the Real/Symbolic/Imaginary.

For Lacan existence is made up like a Venn Diagram, the three circles of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary overlapping each other

The Real is the real of jouissance, of enjoyment. Jouissance is impossible: the Real can never actually be spoken of (or it would be the Symbolic).

The Symbolic is language, the subtracting-minus of the signifier (an A can’t just be the immediate perception of the Real-A, it has to be the Symbolic-A).

And the Imaginary is our fantasy (Is Chuang-Tzu dreaming a human dreaming he is a butterfly, or is he a butterfly dreaming he is a human?).

Overlapping the Real and Imaginary is JA, the jouissance of the Other.

Overlapping the Real and the Symbolic is phallic jouissance, which is always unsatisfactory.

Overlapping the Symbolic and the Imaginary is Meaning.

And overlapping all three is object a (stands for autre, the little other), which is like how we comport ourselves with respect to the other. It’s not quite the self-image but somewhat related.

He has like thirty years of formulas. There’s so much gold in his work. One of my favorite formulas is knowledge is the jouissance of the Other, that our knowledge is basically just certainty in how the Other enjoys.

One of the troubles I think he faces is that his ideas are seen as so complicated. I made a YouTube channel explaining his ideas after I read the transcripts for the seminars, and on the one video that got a lot of views, people were so grateful that I was able to impart the ideas. Even my friends from high school who I don’t think even read were able to get it when I explained it. Everyone loves his ideas on sexuality.

He just clears so many things up. For Lacan the end goal of analysis is certainty, and he doesn’t really make any guarantees of what will happen after analysis, either. The patient is “left to their destiny.”

It’s hard for me to clear up what his personality was actually like because he’s so controversial. I have that difficulty with a lot of the people I learn deeply from.

I thought an overview of his ideas might help with the astrology factor to get a better idea of his work (and I like explaining them).

I was thinking the Mercury-related aspects would be about communication, communicating these abstract ideas. And he was also a public speaker for thirty years of his life when he was giving his seminars.

[Jim Eshelman]

Overlapping the Real and the Symbolic is phallic jouissance, which is always unsatisfactory.

Is this, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao"?

And overlapping all three is object a (stands for autre, the little other), which is like how we comport ourselves with respect to the other. It’s not quite the self-image but somewhat related.

I chuckled at this: A Piscean Sun formulating a concept of self that has nothing to do with there being a self. (Presuming I understand it correctly.)

Of course, my reaction to him is a function of my being a Virgo. It's easy, with a Sun-sign polarity, to feel terror and rage and an offensive sense of wrongness about the other end of the seesaw. (Since I know this about myself I can chuckle with it.) When I was very young, I experienced this about Rudhyar and I had to grow up a little more, meet him, go through the right transits, and then finally connected to what he was saying primarily through our shared Aquarius Moon. To this day, I can read something he wrote and instinctively spark at the moments of lucid genius when he relates to the actuality of something while still shaking my head when he simply surrenders to the streams of free association and the unspecific.

[Liam_Donovan330]

Is this, "The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao"?

Maybe. It's not really a trap formula like jouissance is impossible. Phallic jouissance tends to occur in a masculine structure, one which turns the Other into object a. Kind of like the controlling boyfriend.

It's actually just something I've been learning about this week, which is maybe why my definition was unclear. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it.

I chuckled at this: A Piscean Sun formulating a concept of self that has nothing to do with there being a self. (Presuming I understand it correctly.)

That's interesting, I wouldn't have thought of it that way. I think object a might be better thought of as a drive rather than a self, though.

[Jim Eshelman]

I found this discussion interesting because it basically shows Lacan fully in his Sun-sign - Neptune ruled and with Venus exalted (a Venus + Neptune constellation):
https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/eng ... esire.html

The same root symbolism seems involved in his insistence that femininity is fundamentally a masquerade. ("Masquerade" keeps popping up as a theme in spot-reading about this Piscean's model.)