Living with Lack, The Beauty of Incompleteness


I am a man full of holes

Walking through my life has been like crossing a land riddled with them. For years I was afraid to look down, because whenever I did, I fell. And each fall took time, sometimes too much time, before I could climb out and keep moving.

This is not only my story. It is the story of all of us. Every human life is marked by gaps, absences, and losses. Dreams broken. Opportunities that never returned. Relationships that turned out differently than we hoped. Some holes we can name; others we only recognize through the excruciating pain of stumbling into them.

Life (work, family, diplomas, etc) offers no guarantee of fulfillment. Even if we gather everything we once longed for, it can vanish in the blink of an eye.

How do we live with lack?

At the core of our being there is no solid foundation, only a fragile balance around a void that can never be filled. We resist it, fight it, deny it. But resistance only multiplies suffering.

Psychoanalysis gave me another way to think about it. To become what Lacan called a Man (Figure 1), and I called the "Symbolic Man", not a biological male, but a position of maturity, means standing in the balance between lack, desire, and law. Lack is everything missing from our lives. Desire is the longing those absences provoke. Law is the frame that shapes how we live with both. To take that position is like being a juggler, keeping the three forces in motion without letting them crash into the three triangles of suffering (Neurosis, Perversion or Psychosis).

Figure 1.

These three forces extend into what Lacan described as the registers of the psyche (Figure 2): the Symbolic (rules, language, law), the Imaginary (the images and identities we cling to), and the Real (the raw, impossible kernel of experience that cannot be tamed).


Figure 2.

Seen this way, the “man” at the center is not completeness but what Lacan called objet petit a (p.o.a in Figure 2): the elusive remainder we can never fully possess, the spark that causes desire itself.

The balance and the sinthome

So how do we keep balance? Lacan suggested that each of us creates a unique invention to hold ourselves together; he called it the sinthome (the segmented line in Figure 1). For me it is writing, music, tutoring, coaching, work that brings value. For others it might be faith, love, or art. It doesn’t erase the voids in our path, but it keeps us from falling headlong into them.

And yet, this too is not enough. Because most of the time we are functional, we socialize, we play our roles. We walk the center of the triangle. But when confronted with lack head-on, when life throws our absences in our face, we suffer. We measure ourselves against what could have been, and we are forced to see what we don’t want to see.

Acceptance and reframing

That is why acceptance is the deeper path. Not plain acceptance in the same old words—words that can build prisons as well as universes—but acceptance reframed in new words that bring freedom. This reframing does not close the void, but it teaches us to live beside it. To stand at its edge without falling in. To cry when it hurts, to fight when it matters, but not to cling to the illusion that one day it will vanish.

Renaming means reframing: not saying “I am unemployed,” but “I am looking for the right job.” Not saying “I am divorced” (if that word still wounds), but “I am in the process of finding the closest partner.” Redefining means reshaping the meaning of lack itself.

For some, lack is an absent father. For others, an absent mother. For others still, it is the impossibility of the love we dream of, or the world’s failure to guarantee meaning or justice.

Carrying the void

Becoming a “symbolic man,” or better, a wise adult, means recognizing this truth: the void cannot be healed. It can only be carried.

And yet, here lies the paradox: from that emptiness springs desire. Desire drives us to create, to build, to work, to love. Lack wounds us, but it also moves us.

Our task, then, is not only to endure the absence but to transform it. To use our creativity, or our work, not just to hold ourselves together, but to make something beautiful.

Not because the world demands it.
Not for approval.
Not to erase the void.

But simply for ourselves, and in spite of the lack.

That act of creation, that small, stubborn defiance, is the consequence of desire that is never fulfilled. And in the pursuit of happiness, incompleteness becomes the chance to invent, to connect, and to shape beauty against the void.

Also published at Lacanian Online (Substack).

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