Jacques Lacan

French psychoanalyst

• Born: April 13, 1901
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: September 9, 1981
• Place of death: Paris, France

Lacan’s work emphasized that the unconscious has a structure like that of language and hence can be systematically examined, work that helped to make him the single most important figure in the development of psychoanalysis in twentieth century France. His powerful rereading of Freud and rethinking of Freud’s fundamental concepts made him a key figure in French intellectual life from the 1950’s until his death thirty years later. His work has affected philosophy, feminist theory, literary criticism, film studies, and cultural studies, among other fields.

Early Life

Jacques Lacan (zhahk lah-caw) was born into an upper-middle-class Parisian family. His academic training focused first on medicine, then on psychiatry. He studied with the distinguished French psychiatrist Louis-Nicholas Clérambault, receiving his doctorate in 1932 with a thesis on the relationship of paranoia to personality structure. While still working as a psychiatrist, Lacan began psychoanalysis with the distinguished Freudian analyst Rudolf Loewenstein and in 1934 became a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society.

During the 1930’s, a complex set of influences helped form the mind of the young Lacan, laying the foundation for the mature work that would make him a leading luminary in the febrile Parisian atmosphere of the decades following World War II. In addition to his growing absorption in the thought and teaching of Sigmund Freud, Lacan associated closely with the Surrealist circle of artists and writers and contributed essays and poems to Surrealist publications. This Surrealist connection attests his lifelong fascination with language and its power to shape human life.

Lacan was also strongly influenced, as were many others of his generation, by the teaching of the Russian émigré thinker Alexandre Kojève. It was primarily through Kojève’s lectures at the École Normale Supérieure on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel between 1933 and 1939, with particular emphasis on the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1931), that the work of the great German philosopher first made a major impact on French thought. Thus, at the same time that he was immersing himself in Freud’s theories, Lacan attended Kojève’s lectures emphasizing the Hegelian account of the problems for the development of human self-consciousness. This complex of Lacan’s interests in the 1930’s psychiatry, Freud, Surrealism, Hegel typifies what would always mark his work: a breathtaking catholicity of scope buttressed with remarkable erudition, reminiscent of Freud himself.

Lacan’s position as an important thinker within Freudian psychoanalysis was first established for an international audience in 1936, when he spoke at the Fourteenth Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association. In this address, Lacan presented his theory of the mirror stage. He argued that the earliest development of the human ego (at somewhere between six and eighteen months) occurred on the basis of the infant’s imagined relationship with its own body as first perceived in a mirror and with that of the significant others typically the mother in its life. Lacan’s conclusion was that the human ego is never a coherent entity, even from its very inception. This moment 1936 at which Lacan chose to present his developing theory is significant, for it was at this time that Freud’s daughter Anna and others following her lead were beginning to argue for the coherence of the ego and to elaborate its varied mechanisms of defense and adaptation. Thus Lacan’s first step onto the international psychoanalytical stage veered toward possible schism from the keepers of Freudian orthodoxy, thereby prefiguring the series of rifts and splits within the psychoanalytic movement that Lacan would repeatedly provoke later in his career.

Life’s Work

Lacan was a dominant intellectual presence in French cultural life for three decades, and his influence radiated far outward from its psychoanalytic base into disciplines such as philosophy, literary criticism, and linguistics and into broader interdisciplinary fields such as feminist theory, cultural studies, film theory, and some variants of Marxism. The extent of Lacan’s impact both within and beyond psychoanalysis highlights what he himself considered to be his primary purpose as analyst and writer: to revivify psychoanalysis by a radical return to Freud’s work and to do so by putting Freud’s thought in touch with the latest developments in contemporary thought. For Lacan, these two intentions were inextricable, and together they define both the originality of his contribution to twentieth century thought and the breadth of his influence.

Lacan’s published work consisted primarily of essays, the most important of which were collected and published as Écrits (1966; Écrits: A Selection, 1977). However, his most immediate impact on the French intellectual public came not from his writings but rather through the biweekly seminars (actually public lectures) that he conducted for more than three decades, very few of which appeared in print during his lifetime. Lacan’s verbal brilliance, personal flamboyance, and intellectual charisma fused in lectures that became veritable performances to which important thinkers from many fields in French culture came at one time or another.

The impact Lacan had on French psychoanalysis was pervasive as well as divisive. No one escaped his influence, but that influence provoked repeated divisions and splits. In 1953, Lacan and several colleagues broke with the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, the official French branch of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and formed a new Societé Française de Psychoanalyse. Then, in 1964, Lacan reformed his analytic society, calling it L’École Freudienne de Paris, only to dissolve it in 1980 to create a new organization he called La Cause Freudienne. These schismatic moves bear witness to Lacan’s growing worry that his teachings were becoming too institutionalized and thereby overly rigid and narrow, a fear similar to Freud’s earlier concern that the professionalization of psychoanalysis as a branch of medicine would unduly constrict its applicability in the broad arenas such as education, where Freud hoped his science’s impact would be most profound. Lacan’s ambitions for his own rethinking of Freud’s work were equally far-reaching.

Lacan’s protean thought defies summary, but certain emphases within it can be isolated as indicative of major currents within his work. He always stressed that the core of Freud’s vision lay in Die Traumdeutung (1900; The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913) and the works that immediately followed it. There the core concepts of psychoanalysis the unconscious and sexuality were first developed and elaborated. Lacan argued that Freud perceived that the unconscious could be understood as having a structure. In his own reworking of Freud, this was one of the places where Lacan turned to contemporary thinkers to elaborate on a core Freudian insight, typified by Lacan’s most frequently quoted phrase: “The unconscious is structured like a language.” Twentieth century linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson had argued that when human beings acquire the use of speech they are subsumed into a symbolic order that preexisted them as individuals and that could be shown to have a systematic structure. Since the unconscious makes itself visible and audible primarily through speech (as well as symptoms, dreams, and involuntary acts of omission and commission), Lacan emphasized that the unconscious has a structure like that of language and hence can be systematically examined.

In a related vein, and with important cues taken from the work of anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss on kinship structures and totemic relationships, Lacan theorized that the human subject is situated within different orders, or planes of existence, which he called the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The Imaginary evolves out of the mirror stage but extends into adult life; it is the realm of all false or fantasized identifications that a human subject makes with an Other. The Symbolic is the realm of social and cultural symbolism and of language. Entrance of the child into the domain of the Symbolic with the acquisition of language means that the laws of language and society come to dwell within him or her, thus laying the foundation for social, mediated relationships with others that are different from the self-centered but alienating relationships of the Imaginary. This constituted Lacan’s reworking of Freud’s fundamental concept of the Oedipus complex. Finally, the Real for Lacan was everything that was neither within the Imaginary nor the Symbolic; hence, in a typical Lacanian paradox, the Real was what could not be known directly about a human subject.

Lacan’s unorthodox approach to psychoanalytic training was as provocative and disturbing as his revisions of Freudian theory on the basis of linguistic concepts or his attempts to reevaluate the status of psychoanalytic knowledge in the light of the new directions emerging from other disciplines. The classic psychoanalytic session lasts fifty minutes, but Lacan introduced shorter sessions of varying length, some lasting only a few minutes. This tampering with a cornerstone of psychoanalytic practice was a key factor in helping to precipitate Lacan’s break with the Paris Psychoanalytic Society in 1953. From Lacan’s point of view, sessions of variable length better preserve the overall movement of a patient’s discourse during the course of an analysis, while adherence to the standard length session is constraining and rigid for both patient and analyst.

Over and over again, both in his theoretical work and in his practice as a psychoanalyst, Lacan sought to challenge the limits to psychoanalysis, which he thought had been created by Freud’s disciples. He sought to recapture the radical core of Freud’s vision in his own work and to transmit it to his audiences with the aid of what he took to be the best tools available in the intellectual milieus with which he was familiar. His achievement was similar but far more extensive than that of his early mentor Kojève. Just as the Russian philosopher was almost single-handedly responsible for the widespread impact of Hegel’s thought on French intellectual life after the 1930’s, so Lacan was the single most important figure in the rather belated reception of Freud into twentieth century French cultural life.

Significance

With the publication of Écrits in 1966, Lacan became not only a thinker known in French intellectual circles but also an intellectual presence of major impress on Western culture. Practitioners of a variety of the intellectual disciplines that the French call the human sciences found inspiration in Lacan’s work, and his influence spread beyond Western Europe to various parts of the world. There was widespread interest in Lacanian ideas in South American psychoanalytic circles. His work proved to be a fertile source for new approaches in film criticism and literary studies in England and the United States as well as on the European continent.

Especially after his 1972-1973 seminar Encore, in which he turned his attention to the place of love and sexuality in psychoanalysis with particular attention to female sexuality, Lacan’s thought became a focus of much critical attention by European and American feminist theorists. As Malcolm Bowie has noted, part of the reason for Lacan’s profound impact on European thinking after World War II was that “his writing proposes itself consciously as a critique of all discourses and all ideologies.” For Lacan, as for Freud before him, psychoanalysis was to be the basis for a self-critique of Western culture itself, not merely of individuals within it, although, like his great predecessor, Lacan never abandoned the idea that the fundamental basis of Freud’s science was the spoken dialogue between analyst and analysand.

The implications of Lacan’s work were always disturbing. His thought can be seen as part of a broader twentieth century critique of the notion of a unified human subject, thus placing his work alongside that of his Parisian contemporaries. Where Lacan’s peculiar originality lay was in his understanding of the radicality of Freud’s discoveries and in his desire to push the consequences of those discoveries to their logical limits. In doing so, he may indeed have become, as the philosopher Ellie Ragland-Sullivan writes, “the most important thinker in France since René Descartes and the most innovative and far-ranging thinker in Europe since Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.”

Bibliography

Benvenuto, Bice, and Roger Kennedy. The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction. London: Free Association Books, 1986. A straightforward, chronologically oriented discussion of Lacan’s key writings from his early years until his death.

Chiesa, Lorenzo. Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007. An introduction to Lacan’s basic and most original ideas, in which Chiesa argues that understanding these ideas is essential to understanding contemporary philosophy.

Clément, Catherine. The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Originally published in France in 1981, this book by a former disciple of Lacan is a provocative meditation on the meaning and significance of his life and work in and for contemporary culture.

Felman, Shoshana. Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. This complex book explores the implications of Lacan’s work for the practice of reading and interpretation in contemporary culture.

Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985. A series of powerful psychoanalytic readings of Lacan’s work by a literary critic. This book both demonstrates the importance of Lacan’s thought for work in the humanities disciplines in general and is a representative instance of the impact Lacan’s thought has had on feminist theory.

Homer, Sea. Jacques Lacan. New York: Routledge, 2005. An introduction to Lacan’s basic concepts of imaginery, the symbolic, and the real, and how his thought influenced literature, film, and gender and cultural studies.

Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Important effort to probe the philosophical implications of Lacan’s thought.

Wilden, Anthony. “Lacan and the Discourse of the Other.” In Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, by Jacques Lacan. Translated by Anthony Wilden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. An excellent wide-ranging introduction to and critique of Lacan’s work and its place in the broader currents of twentieth century intellectual life.

Žiźek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. An overview of Lacan’s essential ideas.