Lack in Lacan

Lacanian psychoanalysis describes lack as that around which the psyche revolves. The ego is irrevocably split from a fragmented body, language sunders the real, the subject is castrated, the death drive undermines any attempt at mastery. This lack is so fundamental as to be ontological; it is a lack of being itself (manque à être); reality is ordered by lack; there is no ground, there is no there there; at the base of human behavior spirals a vortex of depravity, emptiness and void. Desire, in turn, is run by the dynamo of lack. This “privational ontology” of re-warmed existential nothingness can make Lacano-analysis seem, at times, like nothing less than the misanthropist longings of one Jean-Paul Sartre. Lack becomes religious; the degree to which you remain true to lack in Lacan—faithful to doctrine—is expressed by how you deploy lack and its many similes and derivatives (in particular the objet petit a). While we admit that this lack can produce some thrilling arguments and the imagery of the void running thru the signifying chain is without rival in expressing a kind of teen angst (which, to be fair, is a valid position—teen angst is—and always relevant because adults are always stupid), I find that, per this lack’s existential antecedents, its premises are too philosophical by far. Such a fixation on lack seems, to this reader anyhow, rather hokey, in the same way that cosmic pessimism is hokey; good, perhaps, for black metal, but a bit obtuse in the treatment—having the effect of making an interpretation even before the patient enters the room. Must psychoanalysis really make such decisions about what it means to be human?