Jacques Lacan

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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 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.

Contents

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 Loewenstien 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 Dali and Picasso. 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 in 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 dependant 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. To an audience of colleagues who had joined him from the SFP, and attracting also many of the École Normale’s students, Lacan began to set forth his own teaching on psychoanalysis. His 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.

Major concepts

The mirror stage

The mirror stage is described in Lacan's essay, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," the first essay in his Ecrits. The essay describes the scene of a young child who first recognizes herself in the mirror. This moment is the first time the child conceives of herself as a self with a body, instead of as a disassociated mass of body parts. But it also involves the child recognizing her lack of control over her body, and involves the child identifying herself not as an internal subject but as an external object in the mirror. This is the start of a lifelong process of identifying the self in terms of the other.

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 argued that the psychoanalytic movement towards understanding the ego as a coherent force with dominion over a person's psyche which 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 '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."

In his view, Freud's central achievement was the discovery of the unconscious, and it is here that Lacan began his work on "correcting" Freud from within. For Lacan, Freud's central insight was not that the unconscious exists, but that it has a structure - a structure Lacan identified as linguistic. This structure affects in innumerable ways what we say and do: in our dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes, symptoms, verbal and physical mannerisms, the unconscious seeks disguised expression, and in thus betraying itself becomes accessible to analysis. However, in order for us to know the structure of the unconscious, we must first be prepared to admit its inexhaustible capacity for displacement - its ability to continually both repress things and create new ways of transferring desires on the one hand, and on the other to continually bring these elements of repression to the foreground.

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. 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, Ecrits, 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.

Criticism

Although Lacan is often associated with it, he was not without his critics from within the major figures of what is broadly termed postmodernism. Specifically, Jacques Derrida made a considerable critique of Lacan's analytic writings, accusing him of taking a structuralist approach to psychoanalysis.

Lacan, like most psychoanalysts, has a complex relationship with feminist criticism. 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 open themselves to criticism on these grounds.

Lacan was described by Noam Chomsky (who had "met him several times") as "an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, though his earlier work, pre-cult, was sensible and I've discussed it in print". [1] Chomsky has also noted, however, that he finds Lacan's later work uninteresting, and so it is possible that this is more a dismissal than a reasoned critique.

Within the world outside the humanities and critical theory, criticism of Lacan has tended to dismiss him and/or 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), authors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accused Lacan of abusing scientific concepts.

Defenders of Lacanian theories dispute the validity of such criticism. They point out that Sokal has explicitly stated that he does not understand Lacan's texts, though Sokal's defenders suggest this is due more to Lacan's unintelligibility than Sokal's failure as a reader. According to Lacanians, the dismissal of 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

  • Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, 2nd edition, Guilford Press, New York, 1992
  • Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 1996.
  • Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely, University of Minnesoty, 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.

External links

de:Jacques Lacan es:Jacques Lacan fr:Jacques Lacan it:Jacques Lacan he:ז'אק לאקאן nl:Jacques Lacan ja:ジャック・ラカン pl:Jacques Lacan pt:Jacques Lacan sk:Jacques Marie Emile Lacan

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