Lacanian Psychoanalysis
from 1953
The unconscious is structured like a language, the self is a misrecognition that begins in a mirror, and desire is always for something that is missing.
- Active
- from 1953
- Where
- Paris
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
Three registers: the imaginary, of images and identification; the symbolic, of language and law; and the real, which is what resists both. The subject is an effect of the symbolic rather than its author.
What it held
Lacan's return to Freud rereads him through Saussure. The unconscious is structured like a language, which means condensation and displacement are metaphor and metonymy, and dreams are read the way a text is read rather than decoded against a key.
The mirror stage is the entry point. An infant, still uncoordinated, sees a whole image in a mirror and identifies with it — and that identification is founding and false. The self is an image adopted from outside, which is why alienation is not something that happens to the subject but how it is constituted.
Desire is the other pillar. It is not appetite and has no object that would satisfy it; it circles a lack, and what it wants most reliably is the desire of the other — to be desired, to be recognised. The objet petit a is the name for the thing that seems to be what is missing and never is.
His seminars ran for nearly thirty years and his written style is deliberately difficult, on the view that a clear exposition would let the reader consume it without being changed.
How it argued
Weekly public seminar over three decades, plus writings whose obscurity is intentional, plus a clinical practice including sessions of variable length that got him expelled from the international association.
What it was arguing against
Ego psychology, which he regarded as an American betrayal of Freud aimed at adapting patients to society rather than confronting them with their desire.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the obscurity is necessary or a defence. Whether the clinical innovations were justified — the variable-length session was the proximate cause of his expulsion.
Common misconceptions
That it is a therapy aimed at making people better adjusted. Lacan's aim is for the analysand to come to terms with the structure of their desire, which he explicitly distinguishes from adaptation or cure.
How it began
A psychiatrist whose doctoral thesis on a paranoid woman impressed the surrealists, who then spent his career arguing that psychoanalysis had lost its own discovery.
What became of it
Living, with a substantial clinical and academic presence in France, Latin America and Slovenia, and repeated institutional schisms.
Lasting influence
Film theory, feminist theory and literary criticism took him up heavily. Žižek's work is largely Lacan applied to politics and popular culture.
Why it still matters
The account of the self as constituted through identification with an external image is a serious position in philosophy of mind, and it has empirical company.
Put another way
An infant delighted by a mirror, and mistaken about who is in it.
Where to start
The mirror stage paper, then Seminar XI. The seminars were spoken and are correspondingly clearer.
The surprising bit
He was expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1963, largely over sessions that could last five minutes, and treated the expulsion as his excommunication — comparing himself to Spinoza.
In their own words
The unconscious is structured like a language.
Desire is the desire of the Other.
Connections
- Answers
- Structuralism, Hegelianism
- Influenced
- Post-Structuralism
The verdict
The most demanding rereading of Freud, written to be difficult on purpose.