Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
"In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth." Jacques Lacan
Lacan is a French psychoanalyst who embraced the challenge to revive psychoanalysis consistent with Freud’s concepts in the mid 1950’s. Lacan called himself a Freudian: he offered to re-read Freud’s text, clarify some of Freud’s ambiguities, defend Freud’s exceptional contribution, and further Freud’s research. For 26 years starting in 1953, Lacan gave weekly lectures, initially to medical students but then to a much broader intellectual and professional audience. This verbal teaching is referred to as Lacan’s Seminar; some sessions are published or translated, while others are only accessible as transcript of attendees’ recordings. Lacan’s published writing consists mostly in Les Écrits (1966) now ably translated into English by Bruce Fink (Lacan, 1966/2006), but also in Autres Écrits (Lacan, 2001) which has not yet been translated. Both books essentially compile Lacan’s journal articles and writings for specific events, such as conferences.
Theoretical Contributions
Most authors agree that Lacan is primarily a clinician, and secondarily a theoretician who aims at a “broader understanding of the unconscious and mental illness” (Homer, 2005). His theoretical contribution stands, although he indisputably demonstrates strong animosity toward theorization itself in the course of his teaching. Lacanian psychoanalysis studies “human passions” (Bowie, 1991) and provides radical innovations on the knowledge of the human mind, treating body and mind as inseparable.
Lacan’s wide-ranging intellectual environment uniquely influenced him in the elaboration of his thought. French psychiatry was entrenched in a medical paradigm and rejected psychoanalysis in the early 1960s—when Lacan defended his doctoral thesis in 1938, as few as 24 persons were officially practicing psychoanalysis in France. So, rather than psychiatry, it was the surrealist movement that had been propagating psychoanalytical thought in France since the mid-1920s. Lacan figured in the surrealist artistic scene, befriending André Breton, Salvador Dali, and later Pablo Picasso, and even publishing some papers in surrealist journals. In his lifetime, Lacan associated with many of his contemporary thinkers, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Françoise Dolto, Jean Genet, Philippe Solers, or Julia Kristeva, as well as Louis Althusser, to name a few. Lacan’s vast body of knowledge and traditional French education allowed him to absorb and transform central ideas from diverse fields of investigation. His influences included phenomenology (e.g., Husserl, Heidegger), philosophy (e.g., Sartre, Plato, Hegel, Sojève), linguistics (e.g., de Saussure, Jakobson), anthropology (e.g., Lévi-Strauss), experimental psychology (e.g., Wallon), and ethology (e.g., Caillois).
According to Sturrock (2003), Lacan contributed to the development of structuralism as a mode of thought in the 1960s, together with Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, and Althusser. Structuralism concerns a thought of systems, as opposed to individualism, where individuals are “forced by the nature of things to think within” systems (p. 19). Structuralism is therefore the study of systems and the role elements play in the system itself—especially through the relationships between elements. These relationships reveal universality among structures despite the multiple forms they may take (Sturrock, 2003). Lacan brings together Freud and structuralism when he emphasizes language as the subject matter of psychoanalysts. For Lacan, the unconscious is the structure that governs speech, while language produces the unconscious, which is simultaneously submitted to the rules of language.
Clinical Work
While Freud centers psychoanalysis on sexuality and the unconscious, Lacan grounds his theory in language and the unconscious and examines cultural matters based on “human behavior and speech”. Lacan considers psychoanalysis to be first and foremost a therapeutic act aimed at the unconscious and based on language, and also a meticulous theoretical discourse using innovations from other fields, especially “linguistics and symbolic logics” (Rabaté, 2003).
For Lacan, the foundation of psychoanalysis is to study the unconscious manifestations of a constructed subject, as a result of a formation through that person’s individual and cultural history. Lacan’s project of unveiling the construction of the human subject led him to develop his theory of language based on structural linguistics. For him, human beings are born into language and are constructed within its terms, which do not belong to them. Therefore, “the human subject is created from a general law that comes to it from outside itself and through the speech of other people, though this speech in its turn must relate to the general law” (Mitchell & Rose, 1982). The subject in Lacan is a split subject (a result of the illusion of identity created at the mirror stage) and therefore no wholeness can be reached. What a baby perceives as himself is in fact the result of an identification with what others, outside himself, identify as him. Therefore, a subject is constructed in this split between the experience of his own body and—through language—the person others desire him to be. Sexuality also is elaborated in this scission.
Following in Freud’s footsteps and in reference to weaning, Lacan identifies desire as sprouting from the moment when the object of satisfaction disappears (milk for the infant), and thus always carrying in itself the loss of the object. It is the lack of an object that creates desire to start with. For this reason, although a need can be satisfied, desire never can be fulfilled. If “desire is the subject-matter of [Lacanian] psychoanalysis” (Bowie, 1991), it is because the price human beings pay for belonging to culture and language is the permanent separation of desire and its objects. If wholeness constitutes the reunion of the object of desire with the subject, then human beings can only hope for wholeness as the ultimate realization of desire. Therefore, wholeness results from an illusion of the ego and desire can never be satisfied.
Sexual desire is no exception to this central characteristic of desire, making it impossible to juxtapose sexual difference with an aspiration to completeness of the male-female. Therefore, like Freud, Lacan considers sexual difference alienating, inevitable, and the result of a division. An individual cannot become a subject without situating himself or herself, with more or less confidence, as masculine or feminine. Like Freud, Lacan also does not consider sexuality to be linked to biology. Although Freud often referred to medical science with the hope that it might bring answers or validity to his work in the future, he insisted that psychoanalysis be kept separate from anatomy, physiology, and biology. In the same vein, human sexuality in Lacanian psychoanalysis is unrelated to biological sexuality and instincts, because it results from myriad unconscious and conscious fantasies. In fact, Lacan postulates a definite opposition to biological explanations of the mind, and rather requires a focus on cultural forces: in his theory, the irremediable fracture caused by weaning in infancy triggers the irreversible shift from the biological to the mental realm. No return is possible, except in fantasy. Therefore, Lacan warns against “biologizing explanations of the mind [for they] are themselves the products of such phantasy” (Bowie, 1991).
The feud between Lacanian and other psychoanalytical schools fuels mostly on very different approaches on sexuality. Lacan’s project and theory attend to the “history of the fractured sexual subject”, exactly because the subject is formed in a split and therefore doubts her or his sexuality. Hence, Lacan considers that psychoanalysis should allow analysands to go beyond the illusion of wholeness and sexual certainty, and explore their unconscious fractures. Object-relation and Kleinian analysts consider their approach based on object identification as an attempt to right the discrimination against women by Freud’s prejudicial theory on penis-envy as linked to the castration complex, and accuse Lacan of phallocentrism. In turn, Lacan accuses them of giving into demagogy by avoiding to address sexual differences. For Lacan, two of Freud’s major discoveries are: subjectivity’s precariousness reflected in bisexuality, and subjectivity’s division shown in the unconscious. Overall, Lacan stresses out the impossibility of sexual identity although each subject must submit to its process.
Today, not only do 50% of analysts in the world use Lacanian psychoanalysis, but Lacan’s theory also permeates a huge array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences as well as feminist, literary, Marxist, and film studies. In other words, Lacan’s “revolutionary theories in psychoanalysis have immediate relevance for philosophy, linguistics, literary theory, gender theory, and human sciences and humanities” in general (Ragland, 2004).
"In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth." Jacques Lacan
Lacan is a French psychoanalyst who embraced the challenge to revive psychoanalysis consistent with Freud’s concepts in the mid 1950’s. Lacan called himself a Freudian: he offered to re-read Freud’s text, clarify some of Freud’s ambiguities, defend Freud’s exceptional contribution, and further Freud’s research. For 26 years starting in 1953, Lacan gave weekly lectures, initially to medical students but then to a much broader intellectual and professional audience. This verbal teaching is referred to as Lacan’s Seminar; some sessions are published or translated, while others are only accessible as transcript of attendees’ recordings. Lacan’s published writing consists mostly in Les Écrits (1966) now ably translated into English by Bruce Fink (Lacan, 1966/2006), but also in Autres Écrits (Lacan, 2001) which has not yet been translated. Both books essentially compile Lacan’s journal articles and writings for specific events, such as conferences.
Theoretical Contributions
Most authors agree that Lacan is primarily a clinician, and secondarily a theoretician who aims at a “broader understanding of the unconscious and mental illness” (Homer, 2005). His theoretical contribution stands, although he indisputably demonstrates strong animosity toward theorization itself in the course of his teaching. Lacanian psychoanalysis studies “human passions” (Bowie, 1991) and provides radical innovations on the knowledge of the human mind, treating body and mind as inseparable.
Lacan’s wide-ranging intellectual environment uniquely influenced him in the elaboration of his thought. French psychiatry was entrenched in a medical paradigm and rejected psychoanalysis in the early 1960s—when Lacan defended his doctoral thesis in 1938, as few as 24 persons were officially practicing psychoanalysis in France. So, rather than psychiatry, it was the surrealist movement that had been propagating psychoanalytical thought in France since the mid-1920s. Lacan figured in the surrealist artistic scene, befriending André Breton, Salvador Dali, and later Pablo Picasso, and even publishing some papers in surrealist journals. In his lifetime, Lacan associated with many of his contemporary thinkers, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Françoise Dolto, Jean Genet, Philippe Solers, or Julia Kristeva, as well as Louis Althusser, to name a few. Lacan’s vast body of knowledge and traditional French education allowed him to absorb and transform central ideas from diverse fields of investigation. His influences included phenomenology (e.g., Husserl, Heidegger), philosophy (e.g., Sartre, Plato, Hegel, Sojève), linguistics (e.g., de Saussure, Jakobson), anthropology (e.g., Lévi-Strauss), experimental psychology (e.g., Wallon), and ethology (e.g., Caillois).
According to Sturrock (2003), Lacan contributed to the development of structuralism as a mode of thought in the 1960s, together with Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, and Althusser. Structuralism concerns a thought of systems, as opposed to individualism, where individuals are “forced by the nature of things to think within” systems (p. 19). Structuralism is therefore the study of systems and the role elements play in the system itself—especially through the relationships between elements. These relationships reveal universality among structures despite the multiple forms they may take (Sturrock, 2003). Lacan brings together Freud and structuralism when he emphasizes language as the subject matter of psychoanalysts. For Lacan, the unconscious is the structure that governs speech, while language produces the unconscious, which is simultaneously submitted to the rules of language.
Clinical Work
While Freud centers psychoanalysis on sexuality and the unconscious, Lacan grounds his theory in language and the unconscious and examines cultural matters based on “human behavior and speech”. Lacan considers psychoanalysis to be first and foremost a therapeutic act aimed at the unconscious and based on language, and also a meticulous theoretical discourse using innovations from other fields, especially “linguistics and symbolic logics” (Rabaté, 2003).
For Lacan, the foundation of psychoanalysis is to study the unconscious manifestations of a constructed subject, as a result of a formation through that person’s individual and cultural history. Lacan’s project of unveiling the construction of the human subject led him to develop his theory of language based on structural linguistics. For him, human beings are born into language and are constructed within its terms, which do not belong to them. Therefore, “the human subject is created from a general law that comes to it from outside itself and through the speech of other people, though this speech in its turn must relate to the general law” (Mitchell & Rose, 1982). The subject in Lacan is a split subject (a result of the illusion of identity created at the mirror stage) and therefore no wholeness can be reached. What a baby perceives as himself is in fact the result of an identification with what others, outside himself, identify as him. Therefore, a subject is constructed in this split between the experience of his own body and—through language—the person others desire him to be. Sexuality also is elaborated in this scission.
Following in Freud’s footsteps and in reference to weaning, Lacan identifies desire as sprouting from the moment when the object of satisfaction disappears (milk for the infant), and thus always carrying in itself the loss of the object. It is the lack of an object that creates desire to start with. For this reason, although a need can be satisfied, desire never can be fulfilled. If “desire is the subject-matter of [Lacanian] psychoanalysis” (Bowie, 1991), it is because the price human beings pay for belonging to culture and language is the permanent separation of desire and its objects. If wholeness constitutes the reunion of the object of desire with the subject, then human beings can only hope for wholeness as the ultimate realization of desire. Therefore, wholeness results from an illusion of the ego and desire can never be satisfied.
Sexual desire is no exception to this central characteristic of desire, making it impossible to juxtapose sexual difference with an aspiration to completeness of the male-female. Therefore, like Freud, Lacan considers sexual difference alienating, inevitable, and the result of a division. An individual cannot become a subject without situating himself or herself, with more or less confidence, as masculine or feminine. Like Freud, Lacan also does not consider sexuality to be linked to biology. Although Freud often referred to medical science with the hope that it might bring answers or validity to his work in the future, he insisted that psychoanalysis be kept separate from anatomy, physiology, and biology. In the same vein, human sexuality in Lacanian psychoanalysis is unrelated to biological sexuality and instincts, because it results from myriad unconscious and conscious fantasies. In fact, Lacan postulates a definite opposition to biological explanations of the mind, and rather requires a focus on cultural forces: in his theory, the irremediable fracture caused by weaning in infancy triggers the irreversible shift from the biological to the mental realm. No return is possible, except in fantasy. Therefore, Lacan warns against “biologizing explanations of the mind [for they] are themselves the products of such phantasy” (Bowie, 1991).
The feud between Lacanian and other psychoanalytical schools fuels mostly on very different approaches on sexuality. Lacan’s project and theory attend to the “history of the fractured sexual subject”, exactly because the subject is formed in a split and therefore doubts her or his sexuality. Hence, Lacan considers that psychoanalysis should allow analysands to go beyond the illusion of wholeness and sexual certainty, and explore their unconscious fractures. Object-relation and Kleinian analysts consider their approach based on object identification as an attempt to right the discrimination against women by Freud’s prejudicial theory on penis-envy as linked to the castration complex, and accuse Lacan of phallocentrism. In turn, Lacan accuses them of giving into demagogy by avoiding to address sexual differences. For Lacan, two of Freud’s major discoveries are: subjectivity’s precariousness reflected in bisexuality, and subjectivity’s division shown in the unconscious. Overall, Lacan stresses out the impossibility of sexual identity although each subject must submit to its process.
Today, not only do 50% of analysts in the world use Lacanian psychoanalysis, but Lacan’s theory also permeates a huge array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences as well as feminist, literary, Marxist, and film studies. In other words, Lacan’s “revolutionary theories in psychoanalysis have immediate relevance for philosophy, linguistics, literary theory, gender theory, and human sciences and humanities” in general (Ragland, 2004).