Jacques Lacan

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It would be fair to say that there are few twentieth century thinkers who have had such a far-reaching influence on subsequent intellectual life in the humanities as Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s ‘return to the meaning of Freud’ not only profoundly changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. His seminars in the 1950’s were one of the formative environments of the currency of philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960’s and 70’s, and which has come to be known in the Anglophone world as ‘post-structuralism’. Both inside and outside of France, Lacan’s work has also been profoundly important in the fields of aesthetics, literary criticism and film theory. Through the work of Althusser (and more lately Ernesto Laclau, Jannis Stavrokakis and Slavoj Zizek), Lacanian theory has also left its mark on political theory, and particularly the analysis of ideology and institutional reproduction. This article, which seeks to outline something of the philosophical heritage and importance of Lacan’s theoretical work, is divided into four parts, each of which has subsections.


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Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist.

His work, like most psychoanalytic work, owes a heavy, explicit debt to Sigmund Freud, but also drew from a number of other fields, including linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics.

This interdisciplinary focus in his work has led him to be an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis - particularly within critical theory.

His central idea was that the human subject is a creation of its use of language. From this understanding Lacan develops his study of psychoanalysis and his treatment strategies. His work, while controversial, continues to influence the development of psychoanalysis worldwide. In France and elsewhere various "schools" of Lacanian thought have emerged.

Although there exist various competing emphases on Lacan's work among these "schools", all agree in the fundamental importance of the unconscious. By structuring the options available to any speaking subject in the articulation of his or her desires, the unconscious determines the very fabric of human life as we may come to know it, according to Lacan.

Career

Lacan took up the study of medicine in 1920 and specialised in psychiatry from 1926. He undertook his own analysis around this time with Rudolph Loewenstein and this continued until 1938. Lacan was very active in the world of Parisian writers, artists and intellectuals of the time: he was a friend of André Breton, Salvador Dalí and PicassoTemplate:Fact, and attended the mouvement Psyché founded by Maryse Choisy. He made contributions to several Surrealist publications and was present at the first public reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In his studies he had a particular interest in the philosophic work of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger and, alongside many other Parisian intellectuals of the time, he also attended the famous seminars on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève.

Lacan presented his first analytic paper on ‘The Mirror Phase’ at the 1936 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad. He was called up to serve in the French army after the German occupation of France and was posted to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. After the end of the war Lacan visited England for a five week study trip, meeting English analysts Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. He was much influenced by Bion’s analytic work with groups and this contributed to his own later emphasis on study groups (in France, cartels) as a structure with which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis.

In 1951 Lacan started to hold a weekly seminar at the St-Anne Hospital Paris, urging what he described as ‘a return to Freud’ and, in particular, to Freud’s concentration upon the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology. Very influential in Parisian cultural life as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, the seminars drew large crowds and continued for nearly thirty years.

Lacan was a member of the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse (SPP), which was a member body of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In 1953, after a disagreement about analytic practice methods, Lacan and many of his colleagues left the SPP to form a new group the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One of the consequences of this move was to deprive the new group of membership within the IPA. In the following years a complex process of negotiation was to take place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan’s practice, with his controversial innovation of variable-length sessions, and the critical stance he took towards much of the accepted orthodoxy of psychoanalytic theory and practice led, in 1963, to a condition being set by the IPA that the registration of the SFP was dependent upon Lacan being removed from the list of training analysts with the organisation. Lacan refused such a condition and left the SFP to form his own school which became know as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP). Leaving the St-Anne Hospital where he had delivered his seminar up to this point Lacan began to give it instead at the elite higher education establishment the École Normale Supérieure. Lacan began to set forth his own teaching on psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues who had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale’s students.

Many students of Lacan became important psychoanalysts and/or wrote influential contributions to philosophy and other fields. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques-Alain Miller, Luce Irigaray, Jean Laplanche, and even Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, all attended Lacan's seminars at some point. Lacan's first seminar in 1964 was later published in English as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Lacan continued to deliver his public exposition of analytic theory and practice for the next seventeen years.

The 'Return to Freud'

Following Freud's death, psychoanalytic practice split into many differing schools of thought. Against the backdrop of these divergent currents of psychoanalytic theory, Lacan called for a 'return to Freud'. Lacan accused later psychoanalysts of a superficial understanding of Freud, claiming they had so cautiously adhered to his ideas that they had served to block rather than to induce scientific investigation of the mental process. Lacan wanted to return to Freud's thought, and expand it in light of its own tensions and currents. In fact, near the end of his life he remarked to a conference, "It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian."

It should also be emphasised that Lacan insisted that his work was not, in his eyes, an interpretation but a translation of Freud into structural-linguistic terms. Freud's ideas of 'slips of the tongue', jokes and suchlike – Lacan insisted – all emphasised the agency of language in subjective constitution, such that had Freud lived contemporaneously with Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and, principally, had Freud been aware of the work of Saussure, he would have done the same as him. In his famous essay, "Freud and Lacan", fellow structuralist Louis Althusser makes this point particularly well:

"In his first great work The Interpretation of Dreams […], Freud studied the ‘mechanisms’ and ‘laws’ of dreams, reducing their variants to two: displacement and condensation. Lacan recognized these as two essential figures of speech, called in linguistics [respectively] metonymy and metaphor. Hence slips, failures, jokes and symptoms, like the elements of dreams themselves, become signifiers, inscribed in the chain of an unconscious discourse, doubling silently, i.e. deafeningly, in the misrecognition of ‘repression’, the chain of the human subject’s verbal discourse. […] Hence the most important acquisitions of de Saussure and of the linguistics that descends from him began to play a justified part in the understanding of the process of the unconscious as well as that of the verbal discourse of the subject and of their inter-relationship, i.e. of their identical relation and non-relation in other words, of their reduplication and dislocation (décalage)." (Althusser, ‘Freud and Lacan’ in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 191 – 192.

The 'return to Freud', therefore, is primarily the realisation that the pervading agency of the unconscious is to be understood as intimately tied to the functions and dynamics of language, where, for example, the signifier is irremediably divorced from the signified, ultimately resulting in Lack. It is here that Lacan began his work on "correcting" Freud from within. As Malcolm Bowie puts it:

"For Lacan, Freud's central insight was not [...] that the unconscious exists, but that it has structure, that this structure affects in innumerable ways what we say and do, and that in thus betraying itself it becomes accessible to analysis". (Malcolm Bowie, 'Jacques Lacan' in John Sturrock (ed.), Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 118).

(The 'return to Freud' in the full sense of the term, as briefly explained above, begins with his paper ‘The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud’ (Écrits, pp. 161 - 197).) Lacan's principal challenge to Freudian theory is the privilege that it accords to the ego in self-determination. The central pillar of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is that "the unconscious is structured like a language". The unconscious, he argued, was not a more primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, but rather, a formation every bit as complex and linguistically sophisticated as consciousness itself. If the unconscious is structured like a language, Lacan argues, then the self is denied any point of reference to which to be 'restored' following trauma or 'identity crisis'. In this way, Lacan's thesis of the structurally dynamic unconscious is also a challenge to the ego psychology that Freud himself opposed.

Major concepts

The mirror stage (le stade du miroir)

The mirror stage is described in Lacan's essay, "The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience", the first of his Écrits, which remains one of his seminal papers. Some have crudely put this as the point at which the child 'recognises' him- or herself in the mirror image, but this is unfaithful to what Lacan has in mind and also confuses his terminology. Lacan's emphasis here is on the process of identification with an outside image or entity induced through, as he puts it, "insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development" (Lacan, Écrits (rvd. edn., 2002), 'The mirror stage', p. 5).

It is significant that this process of identification is the first step towards the manufacture of the subject because all that follows it - the transition into the Imaginary and the Symbolic order - is based on this misrecognition (méconnaissance): this is the process that Lacan detects as manifesting itself at every subsequent identification with another person, identity (not to be confused with 'identification') or suchlike throughout the subject's life. This is the start of a lifelong process of identifying the self in terms of the Other. What is also occasionally overlooked is the experiential basis of Lacan's early paper. As one writer has observed: "To evidence concerning the role of the other in childhood – the situation known as "transitivism," for instance, where the child will impute his own actions to another – Lacan adds evidence from animal biology, where it has been experimentally shown that a perceptual relationship to another of the same species is necessary in the normal maturing process. Without the visual presence of others, the maturing process is delayed, although it can be restored to a more nearly normal tempo by placing a mirror in the animal’s cage." (Anthony Wilden, "Lacan and the discourse of the Other" in Lacan, The Language of the Self: the Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 159 – 160.)

The Other

In contrast to the dominant Anglo-American ego-psychologists of his time, Lacan considered the self as something constituted in the "Other", that is, the conception of the external. Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic movement towards understanding the ego as a coherent force with dominion over a person's psyche was rooted in a misunderstanding of Freud. In Lacan's view, the self remained in eternal internal conflict and that only extensive self-deceit made the situation bearable.

His developmental theory of the objectified self was inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure's insights into the relationship of the signifier and the signified - the role of language and reference in thought were central to his formulations, particularly the Symbolic.

The Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic

Lacan also formulated the concepts of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, which he used to describe the elements of the psychic structure. Lacan's notion of the Real is a very difficult concept which he, in his later years, worked to present in a structured, set-theory fashion, as mathemes. The Imaginary, or non-linguistic aspect of the psyche, formulates human primitive self-knowledge while the Symbolic, his term for linguistic collaboration, generates a community-wide reflection of primitive self-knowledge and creates the very first set of rules that govern behavior. The Real is the unspeakable reality, always present but continually mediated through the imaginary and the symbolic.

The Imaginary is the realm of spatial identification that begins with the mirror stage (see above), and is instrumental in the development of psychic agency. As discussed, it is here that the emerging subject is able to identify his or her mirror image as 'self', as distinguished from 'other'. However, this process entails a certain structural alienation in that what is designated as 'self' is formed through what is Other – namely, the mirror image. What becomes the Subject proper is made through inception into the Symbolic order, which is when the infant acquires the ability to use language – that is, to realise his or her desire through speech.

Other important concepts

Writings and seminars

Although Lacan is a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, he made his most significant contributions not in the traditional form of books and journal articles, but through seminar lectures - in fact, he explicitly disclaimed publication in his later life. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, conducted over a period of more than two decades, contains the majority of his life's work, though several of these remain unpublished. Furthermore, the accuracy of the transcriptions of the seminars is disputed, with Sherry Turkle claiming that Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law, made extensive changes to add clarity to the material (Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, p. 254-255).

His only major body of writing, Écrits, is notoriously difficult to read. Seminar XX remarks that his Écrits were not to be understood, but would produce a meaning effect in the reader similar to some mystical texts. Part of the reason for this, it should be emphasised, are the repeated Hegelian allusions (themselves derived from Kojève's lectures on Hegel, which Lacan attended) and similar unheralded theoretical divergences and not, first and foremost, Lacan's obscure prose style, as some have alleged.

Lacan and his discontents

Although Lacan is often associated with it, he was not without his critics from within the major figures of what is broadly termed postmodernism. (Several writers, such as Slavoj Žižek, have argued specifically against considering Lacan a poststructuralist theorist.) Along these lines, Jacques Derrida (though Derrida did not endorse nor associate himself with postmodernism) made a considerable critique of Lacan's analytic writings, accusing him of taking a structuralist approach to psychoanalysis, but this is hardly surprising. In particular, Derrida criticises Lacanian theory for an inherited Freudian phallocentrism, exemplified primarily in his conception of the phallus as the 'primary signifier' that determines the social order of signifiers. It could be said that much of Derrida's critique of Lacan stems from his relationship with Freud: for example, Derrida deconstructs the Freudian conception of 'penis envy', upon which female subjectivity is determined, to show that the primacy of the male phallus entails a hierarchy between phallic presence and absence that ultimately implodes upon itself.

Nonetheless, Lacan can be said to enjoy an awkward relationship with feminism and post-feminism in that, while he is much criticised for adopting (or inheriting from Freud) a phallocentric stance within his psychoanalytic theories, he is also taken by many to provide an accurate portrayal of the gender biases within society. Some critics accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Others, such as Judith Butler and Jane Gallop have offered readings of Lacan's work that opened up new possibilities for feminist theory, making it difficult to seriously reject Lacan wholesale due to sexism - although specific parts of his work may well subject to criticism on these grounds. In either case, traditional feminism has profited from Lacan's accounts to show that society has an inherent sexual bias that denigratingly reduces womanhood to a status of deficiency.

Within the world outside the humanities and critical theory, criticism of Lacan tends to dismiss him/his work in a more or less wholesale fashion. François Roustang, in The Lacanian Delusion, called Lacan's output "extravagant" and an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish". In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Lacan of abusing scientific concepts. Defenders of Lacanian theories dispute the validity of such criticism, and point out that Sokal has explicitly stated that he does not understand Lacan's texts. According to Lacanians, the dismissal by Sokal and his allies precludes any valid criticism of his theories, and is instead motivated by a desire to "police the boundaries" of what constitutes an appropriate use of scientific terminology.

Sources

Bibliography

Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan Dot Com or Peter Krapp's page

*referenced above

Works about Lacan's Work and Theory

  • Benvenuto, Bice; Kennedy, Roger, The Works of Jacques Lacan (London, 1986, Free Association Books.)
  • Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991). (An introduction.)
  • Dor, Joel, The Clinical Lacan (New York: Other Press, 1999)
  • Dor, Joel, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language (New York: Other Press, 2001)
  • Elliott, Anthony and Frosh, Stephen (eds.), Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). (A recent overview.)
  • Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 1996.
  • Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
  • Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely, University of Minnesoty, 2004.
  • Forrester, John, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1985).
  • Fryer, David Ross, The Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan Press; and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
  • Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
  • Gherovici, Patricia, The Puerto Rican Syndrome (New York: Other Press, 2003)
  • Harari, Roberto, Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • ------, Lacan's Seminar on "Anxiety": An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2005)
  • Lander, Romulo, Subjective Experience and the Logic of the Other (New York: Other Press, 2006)
  • Leupin, Alexandre, Lacan Today (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Mathelin, Catherine, Lacanian Psychotherpay with Children: The Broken Piano (New York: Other Press, 1999)
  • McGowan, Todd and Kunkle, Sheila, Eds., Lacan and Contemporary Film (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Moustafa, Safouan, Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
  • Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, 2nd edition, Guildford Press, New York, 1992
  • ————— and Wollheim, Richard, ‘Lacan: an exchange’, New York Review of Books, 26 (9), 1979, p. 44.
  • Soler, Colette, What Lacan Said About Women (New York: Other Press, 2006)
  • Van Haute, Philippe, Against Adaptation: Lacan's "Subversion" of the Subject (New York: Other Press, 2002)
  • ----- and Geyskens, Tomas, Confusion of Tongues: The Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Ferenczi, and Laplanche (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Wilden, Anthony, ‘Jacques Lacan: A partial bibliography’, Yale French Studies, 36/37, 1966, pp. 263 – 268.
  • Slavoj Žižek, ‘The object as a limit of discourse: approaches to the Lacanian real’, Prose Studies, 11 (3), 1988, pp. 94 – 120.
  • —————, Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London and New York: Continuum, 2005).

External links

Introductions

Practice

Theory

Criticism

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