The Wedding and Its Medialization from the Perspective of the Ljubljana Lacanian School

• Published in: Religions (Basel, Switzerland ) Switzerland ), 2024-09, Vol.15 (9), p.1139
• Main Author: Löffler, Paul
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Communications industry; Identification; Lacan; Language; Marriage; Mass media; Methods; Parents & parenting; Psychoanalysis; Psychological aspects; Religiosity; Rites & ceremonies; Rituals; Sexuality; Social aspects; Social order; Speaking; Structuralism; wedding; wedding photography; Weddings
• ISSN: 2077-1444; 2077-1444
• DOI: 10.3390/rel15091139

The ritual of marriage serves as a nexus for various dimensions of social and personal life, including sexuality, gender, religiosity, family, and parenthood. This pivotal event is laden with a multitude of expectations, hopes, and fears for all involved parties. The psychological energies converge not only within the spouses or participants but extend to encompass the entire cultural community. Simultaneously, it represents a ritualistic identification, where individuals, through the ritual, become what they are, establishing an identity. This article aims to provide a Lacanian interpretation of the marriage ritual, informed by the interpretation popularized by the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s framework allows for the conceptualization of identification as a socially mediated process, revealing the psyche as extending beyond the individual into intersubjective structures. This approach might help to clarify the inner logic of the ritual, allowing for a better understanding of the role of medialization. It will be shown, that under these lenses wedding photography and other forms of medialization do not only preserve memories of the event afterward but are already playing an active and even constitutive role during the event.