Being Human

What does it mean to be human? There are differences from human to human.

The singularity of every human subject is one of the principal psychoanalytic discoveries. But what do different people have in common? All people are made of the same matter, the same matter as dreams. This matter might be called a symbolic matrix.

People live together in this matrix. One human subject is open to another. The human subject is not closed in itself; it is not monadic; it finds its continuation in the Other. Humans are beings with a lack, with a lack of the organic. They are organic helplessness, as Freud used to say. This lack opens one human being to another. This Other might be a helper and they might be a opponent, but first of all they serve as a Vorbild, as a matrix for assembling self, as a role model.

Lack makes the human subject not only human, but also an excess. A subject finds its continuation in the Other, in the societal network, in the symbolic matrix. More than that, the subject’s intimacy is not in them, but in the Other, and Lacan exchanges intimacy for extimacy.

What is an elementary particle of the symbolic matrix? A signifier. What is a signifier? An acoustic image of the word, a word presentation. What does the word consist of? Of the letters. And here comes Sigmund Freud asking a rhetorical question, whether it is possible to find letters in nature? Humans are not natural but technological beings, or as Freud used to say: humans are prosthetic gods. Human evolution is technological. And now it has come to the point where prosthetics are gods ready to control humans.

Victor Mazin, Ph.D., is a practicing psychoanalyst. He is the founder of Freud's Dream Museum in St. Petersburg (1999) and an honorary member of The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles). He is the head of the department of theoretical psychoanalysis at the East-European Institute of Psychoanalysis (St. Petersburg), and associate professor at The Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University, honorary professor of the Institute of Depth Psychology (Kiev). He is also a translator from English and French into Russian, and was editor-in-chief of the Kabinet journal and member of the editorial boards of the journals Psychoanalysis (Kiev), European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Rome), Transmission (Sheffield), Journal for Lacanian Studies (London). He has published numerous articles and books on psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cinema and visual arts.