earticle

영어

From the perspective of phylogeny, the genre transition from ancient Greek myth to ancient Greek lyric shows us that it underwent a process of the formation of subject and that of individuation. This transition is such a rare historical event that we can examine Lacanian ontogeny. Homer’s epical world parallels “the imaginary,” that is, the mirror age in Lacanian psychology. The self-eroticism of “the real” in Lacan is compared to the collective soul or mind in the primitive age. This age of omnipotent thinking corresponds to Freud’s and Piaget’s infantile age. In this paper, first I will discuss the origination of gods and individualized souls in the primitive Greek age in comparison to “the real” in Lacan. Next, I will inquire the reason why the symbolic, which is the law of Father, occurred prior to the imaginary in phylogeny, and challenge the Lacanian ontogeny with a view based on Piaget’s child psychology. In Homeros’ epics, gods were the metaphor of the mind, and the limbs, composed of muscles and joints, were the metonymy of the body. Then, Lacan considers that body ego formed in the imaginary is subject to the Other’s desire. I will criticize this view through Piaget’s child psychology. Last, I will examine the formation of subject in ancient Greek lyrics in relation to Lacanian ethics. By doing so, I will show that the dialectic of subject, that is, the dialectic of alienation and separation can be found in Archilochos’ and Sappho’s lyrics, which sing the anguish of desire and the trauma of love.