Fonction de l'image dans l'appareil psychique (review)

The ambition to read pictorial images as though they were words is a venerable one: in nineteenth century France, in particular, it found hosts in Stendhal, Gautier, Baudelaire, Zola and Huysmans, just to name a few. It also influenced theories to come: it was implied by Ferdinand de Saussure whose Cours de linguistique générale promised that linguistics would find a place in the larger field of semiology; it underlies Erwin Panofsky's iconology, where the interpretation of images is systematized, and relies on the designation of discrete icons. More modern works in this vein are those of Ernst Gombrich, Roland Barthes, and Louis Marin. And of course, Freud took the works of da Vinci and Michelangelo as puzzles whose meaning needed to be teased out. All of these attempts presuppose that devices such as perspective, superposition, and shading, on the one hand, and attributes, poses, and scenes on the other, form part of an explicit code, the existence of which needs to be recalled only because it was learned so easily and so early. But the existence of "forgotten" codes, and their correlate, the almost universal conceit that pictures "resemble" their subjects, are troubling: we acknowledge that language is arbitrary, a code that must be learned before it can be said to represent anything. Why don't we say as much about drawing, painting, or photography?

One thinker for whom the concept of language as code is fundamental is Jacques Lacan, whose Écrits now are an essential reference in discussions of psychology and language. Visual images are both central to Lacan's theory of psychological development and recur in his works as illustrations of ways in which the psyche functions. His many returns to the "mirror stage," his use of paintings by Holbein and Zucchi, his diagrams of flowers in vases, his reformulation of Sartre's regard, to say nothing of his late fascination with knots, imply the centrality of vision and of visual images. Further, the mirror-stage and the diagrams refer to unconscious and preconscious formations. Because Lacan invokes images as a trigger of a psychological development, and because he returns to them so often to explain other features of the psyche, the role of the image is capital for him.

If one knows anything at all about Lacan, it is that for him "the unconscious is structured like a language." Glosses on this phrase as well as others are innumerable, but tend to revolve around the distinction set forth by Saussure of signifier and signified. The arbitrary relation of word to meaning both causes and instantiates the repression that creates the unconscious. If language is at the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and if pictorial images are central to it, there must be a relation between language and image, one that stands in need of further specification.

Céline Masson has taken on this daunting project in her Fonction de l'image dans l'appareil psychique. Approaching mental images as Freud did, from several directions at once, she postulates that they are structured by perceptions of the world (objects such as breasts and faces), that images arose simultaneously with language, and that both pictorial images and mental images serve the pleasure principle by offering an object (memory or picture) to a desire which otherwise would encounter only absence.

Among the theses Masson puts forth, ones that appear to this reviewer to be truly innovative, are the following:

• • That, following Freud, desire exists only where there exists memory of a need satisfied, and thus that images, which originate in memory, elicit desire: "La création d'images participe de ce retour à l'image mnésique d'une perception ayant provoqué la satisfaction" (66–67). Correlatively, desire does not exist where there is no memory of a need satisfied.

• • That the use of visual images in dreams results from the attraction that visual memories exert on unconscious thoughts: ". . . la transformation des pensées en images visuelles...