This was originally written on 1/21/2021.
One can think about Lacan’s master signifiers in any number of different ways and there’s probably a solid argument in most of them. It’s a feature, not a bug, that certain psychoanalytic ideas and constructs are fluid. For the purpose of this post, let’s consider a master signifier to be one that organizes other signifiers, beliefs, courses of action, etc. It’s a signifier to which all other signifiers refer back.
A master signifier then, in this conception of it, can completely (perhaps “nearly completely” is more accurate) orient one’s choice of career, romantic partner, likes and dislikes, and so on. So that’s what I’d like to write about today — a master signifier around which I think I have been oriented.
I remember as a kid that I used to enjoy what are probably normal activities for most kids — especially things involving building, such as LEGOs or construction paper based Rube Goldberg machines — but that my dad called “wacky projects.” I still don’t know why he named them this way, or what possessed him to name them in the first place.
But I do know that now, more than 20 years later, I can look back and see how that little phrase, “wacky projects” organized so many things that came after. I started to play guitar and write rock music; write short stories and poetry; and play the French horn and write orchestral music. I would stay up well past my bedtime doing all these things, and when I inevitably slept in past the afternoon my dad would ask me some variation of, “burning the midnight oil on that wacky project?”
Eventually I found a new project in psychoanalysis, and after a while undergoing it, this theme came up during a session. When I said it and described what it meant to me, the analyst told me, “I think you might have found a master signifier.” Our session ended after whatever I said in response.