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Lacanianism or Lacanian psychoanalysis is a theoretical system initiated by the work of Jacques Lacan from the 1950s to the 1980s. It is a theoretical approach that attempts to explain the mind, behaviour, and culture through a structuralism and post-structuralist extension of psychoanalysis. Lacanian perspectives contend that the human mind is structured by the world of language, known as the Symbolic. They stress the importance of desire, which is conceived of as perpetual and impossible to satisfy. Contemporary Lacanianism is characterised by a broad range of thought and extensive debate among Lacanians.
Lacanianism has been particularly influential in post-structuralism, literary theory, and feminist theory, as well as in various branches of critical theory, including queer theory. Equally, it has been criticised by the post-structuralists Deleuze and Guattari and by various feminist theorists. Outside France, it has had limited clinical influence on psychiatry. There is a Lacanian strand in left-wing politics, including Saul Newman's and Duane Rousselle's post-anarchism, Louis Althusser's structural Marxism, and the works of Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. Influential figures in Lacanianism include Slavoj Žižek, Julia Kristeva and Serge Leclaire.
The unconscious mind is constituted by a network of empty signifiers that resurface in language—particularly dreams and —and Lacanian clinical practice focuses closely on the precise words used by the analysand (patient), which Lacan characterised as a "return to Freud". Analysis focuses largely on desire. Lacanians contend that desire cannot be satisfied, as the object and cause of desire is an unobtainable object, the objet petit a, which the subject continually associates with different things that they wrongly believe will satisfy their desire. Objet a exists as a consequence of the division of the subject in signification, so desire is said to result from an unsolvable lack at the heart of the subject.
Lacanianism posits that all people belong to one of three "clinical structures" and are either psychotic, perverse, or, most commonly, neurotic. Neurotic subjects—that is to say, most people—are then always either hysterical or obsessional. The three clinical structures describe the subject's relationship to the Other and are each associated with a different defence mechanism: psychotics use foreclosure, a rejection of the father's authority in the Oedipus complex that results in a failure to form a Symbolic unconscious; perverts use disavowal, failing to accept that lack causes desire and nominating a specific object as its cause, their fetish; and neurotics use repression.
Psychical reality is constituted by the Symbolic, the Imaginary, the Real, and for Lacanians who follow Kristeva, the Semiotic.
As this concept developed further, the stress fell less on its historical value and more on its structural value.Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis In his fourth seminar, "La relation d'objet", Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship. "
The mirror stage describes the formation of the ego via the process of objectification, the ego being the result of a conflict between one's perceived visual appearance and one's emotional experience. This identification is what Lacan called "alienation". At six months, the baby still lacks physical coordination. The child can recognize themselves in the mirror before they gain full control of their body movements.The child sees their image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the lack of coordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. The child experiences this contrast initially as a rivalry with their image because the wholeness of the image threatens the child with fragmentation—thus, the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the child identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart forms the ego. Lacan understood this moment of identification as a moment of jubilation, since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery; yet when the child compares their own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother, a depressive reaction may accompany the jubilation.Lacan, J., "La relation d'objet" in Écrits.
Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic" since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth". The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of his or her body as fragmented, induces a movement from "insufficiency to anticipation".Lacan, J., "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I", in Écrits: a selection, London, Routledge Classics, 2001; p. 5 In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self.
In the mirror stage, a "misunderstanding" ( méconnaissance) constitutes the ego—the "me" ( moi) becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant The Symbolic dimension due to the presence of the figure of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly assumed the image as their own, the child turns their head towards this adult, who represents the big other, as if to call on the adult to ratify this image.Lacan, Tenth Seminar, "L'angoisse," 1962–1963
The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to recognize their desire and by doing so to uncover the truth about their desire. However this is possible only if desire is articulated in speech:Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton University Press, 1996), "It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term."Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique 1953–1954(W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), And again in The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: "what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence. The subject should come to recognize and to name their desire. But it isn't a question of recognizing something that could be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world."Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955(W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire; whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus.Lacan, J., "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Powers" in Écrits: A Selection translated by Bruce Fink (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004),
Lacan distinguishes desire from need and from demand. Need is a biological instinct where the subject depends on the Other to satisfy its own needs: in order to get the Other's help, "need" must be articulated in "demand". But the presence of the Other not only ensures the satisfaction of the "need", it also represents the Other's love. Consequently, "demand" acquires a double function: on the one hand, it articulates "need", and on the other, it acts as a "demand for love". Even after the "need" articulated in demand is satisfied, the "demand for love" remains unsatisfied since the Other cannot provide the unconditional love that the subject seeks. "Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second."Lacan, J., "The Signification of the Phallus" in Écrits Desire is a surplus, a leftover, produced by the articulation of need in demand: "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need". Unlike need, which can be satisfied, desire can never be satisfied: it is constant in its pressure and eternal. The attainment of desire does not consist in being fulfilled but in its reproduction as such. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire".Žižek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso 1997), p. 39.
Lacan also distinguishes between desire and the drives: desire is one, and drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire.Lacan, J. The Seminar: Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), Lacan's concept of " objet petit a" is the object of desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack ( manque).
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues that "man's desire is the desire of the Other." This entails the following:
Last but not least for Lacan, the first person who occupies the place of the Other is the mother, and at first, the child is at her mercy. Only when the father articulates desire with the Law by castrating the mother is the subject liberated from desire for the mother.Lacan, J. Le Séminaire: Livre IV. La relation d'objet, 1956-1957 ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris; Seuil, 1994)
Lacan's early psychoanalytic period spans the 1930s and 1940s. His contributions from this period centered on the questions of image, identification and unconscious fantasy. Developing Henri Wallon's concept of infant mirroring, he used the idea of the mirror stage to demonstrate the imaginary nature of the ego, in opposition to the views of ego psychology.Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1995) p. xx–xxii and p. 279
In the 1950s, the focus of Lacan's interest shifted to the symbolic order of kinship, culture, social structure, and roles—all mediated by the acquisition of language—into which each one of us is born and with which we all have to come to terms.R. Appignanesi/C. Garratt, Postmodernism for Beginners (1995) p. 92-3
The focus of therapy became that of dealing with disruptions on the part of the Imaginary of the structuring role played by the signifier/Other/Symbolic Order.Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (1997) p. 87
Lacan's approach to psychoanalysis created a dialectic between Freud's thinking and that of both Structuralist thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as with Heidegger, Hegel and other continental philosophers.
The 1960s saw Lacan's attention increasingly focused on what he termed the Real—not external consensual reality, but rather that unconscious element in the personality, linked to trauma, dream, and the drive, which resists signification.Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1994) p. 280
The Real was what was lacking or absent from every totalising structural theory;Y. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left (2007) and in the form of jouissance, and the persistence of the symptom or synthome, marked Lacan's shifting of psychoanalysis from modernity to postmodernity.
Then, the Real, together with the Imaginary and the Symbolic, came to form a triad of "elementary registers." Lacan believed these three concepts were inseparably intertwined, and by the 1970s, they were an integral part of his thought.
Three main phases may be identified in Lacan's mature work:James M. Mellard, Beyond Lacan (2006) p. 49-54 his 1950s exploration of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; his concern with the Real and the lost object of desire, the objet petit a, during the 1960s; and a final phase highlighting jouissance and the mathematical formulation of psychoanalytic teaching.
As Lacan developed a distinctive style of teaching based on a linguistic reading of Freud in the 1950s, he also built up a substantial following within the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP), with Serge Leclaire only the first of many French "Lacanians".Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (Cambridge 2005) p. 248 It was this phase of his teaching that was memorialised in Écrits, and which first found its way into the English-speaking world, where more Lacanians were thus to be found in English or Philosophy Departments than in clinical practice.David Macey, 'Introduction', Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1994) p. xiv
However the very extent of Lacan's following raised serious criticisms: he was accused both of abusing the positive transference to tie his analysands to himself, and of magnifying their numbers by the use of shortened analytic sessions.David Macey, 'Introduction', Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1994) p. xii–iv The questionable nature of his following was one of the reasons for his failure to gain recognition for his teaching from the International Psychoanalytical Association recognition for the French form of Freudianism that was "Lacanianism"Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (Cambridge 2005) p. 248—a failure that led to his founding the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964.David Macey, 'Introduction', Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1994) p. xiii Many of his closest and most creative followers, such as Jean Laplanche, chose the IPA over Lacan at this point, in the first of many subsequent Lacanian schisms.Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (Cambridge 2005) p. 259
Lacan's 1973 Letter to the Italians,J. Lacan Letter to the Italians, 1973 – see [1] translation as pdf: [2] nominated Muriel Drazien, Giacomo Contri and Armando Verdiglione to carry his teaching in Italy.
As a body of thought, Lacanianism began to make its way into the English-speaking world from the 1960s onwards, influencing film theory, feminist thought, queer theory, and psychoanalytic criticism,J. Childers/G. Hentzi, The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1996) p. 270 and p. 246-8 as well as politics and social sciences,Y. Stravrakakis, The Lacanian Left (2007) p. 20 primarily through the concepts of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. As the role of the real and of jouissance in opposing structure became more widely recognised, however, so too Lacanianism developed as a tool for the exploration of the divided subject of postmodernity.Anthony Elliott, Social Theory Since Freud (2013) p. 3-7
Since Lacan's death, however, much of the public attention focused on his work has begun to decline. Lacan had always been criticised for an Obscurantism writing style;R. Minsky, Psychoanalysis and Gender (1996) p. 175 and many of his disciples simply replicated the mystificatory elements in his work (in a sort of Transference identification)Y. Stravrakakis, Lacan and the Political (1999) p. 5-6 without his freshness.
Where interest in Lacanianism did revive in the 21st century, it was in large part the work of figures like Slavoj Žižek who have been able to use Lacan's thought for their own intellectual ends, without the sometimes stifling orthodoxy of many of the formal Lacanian traditions.Y. Stravrakakis, The Lacanian Left (2007) p. 148 The continued influence of Lacanianism is thus paradoxically strongest in those who seem to have embraced Malcolm Bowie's recommendation: "learn to unlearn the Lacanian idiom in the way Lacan unlearns the Freudian idiom".Quoted in Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (1994) p. 162
However, major divisions remained within the EFP, which underwent another split over the question of analytic qualifications. There remained within the movement a broad division between the old guard of first generation Lacanians, focused on the Symbolic orderJames A. Mellard, Beyond Lacan (2006) p. 54—on the study of Freud through the structural linguistic tools of the 1950sÉlisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (Cambridge 2005) p. 334—and the younger group of mathematicians and philosophers centred on Jacques-Alain Miller, who favoured a self-contained Lacanianism, formalised and free of its Freudian roots.
Just as Lacan, in the 1970s, spoke of the mathematicisation of psychoanalysis and coined the term "matheme" to describe its formulaic abstraction, Leclaire brusquely dismissed the new formulas as "graffiti".David Macey, 'Introduction', Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1994) p. xxxii–ii Nevertheless, despite these and other tensions, the EFP held together under the charisma of their Master, until (despairing of his followers) Lacan himself dissolved the school in 1980 the year before his death.
Attempts were made to re-unite the various factions, Leclaire arguing that Lacanianism was "becoming ossified, stiffening into a kind of war of religion, into theoretical debates that no longer contribute anything new".Quoted in Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (Cambridge 2005) p. 431 But with French Lacanianism (in particular) haunted by a past of betrayals and conflictGérard Pommier, Erotic Anger (2001) p. xxii—by faction after faction claiming their segment of Lacanian thought as the only genuine oneAnn Casement, Who Owns Psychoanalysis? (2004) p. 2o4—reunification of any kind has proven very problematic; and Roudinesco was perhaps correct to conclude that "'Lacanianism, born of subversion and a wish to transgress, is essentially doomed to fragility and dispersal".Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (Cambridge 2005) p. 433
Attempts to rejoin the IPA remain problematic, however, not least due to the persistence of the 'short session' and of Lacan's rejection of countertransference as a therapeutic tool.Jean-Michel Quinodoz, Reading Freud (2006)
The Deleuzoguattarian critique of Lacanianism attacks its conception of desire as "negative", in that it results from a lack in the subject, and its belief that the unconscious mind is "structured like a language". Deleuze and Guattari argued that the unconscious mind was schizophrenic, characterised by rhizomes of libidinal investment, and that desire was a creative force that powered the essential building blocks of psychical structures, desiring-machines. The networks of signifiers to which so much weight is given in Lacanianism are structures created by desiring-machines, above the level of the unconscious. Hence, Lacanian analysis works to solve neurosis, but it fails to see that neuroses are a second-order problem that reveals nothing about the unconscious—as does Freud's classical psychoanalysis.
Deleuze and Guattari proposed an alternative post-structuralist extension of classical psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, which was defined in opposition to these apparent flaws in Lacanianism. Unlike Lacanianism, schizoanalysis openly repudiates parts of Freud, particularly his neurotic conception of the unconscious, and Deleuze and Guattari insisted that it was distinct from psychoanalysis. Schizoanalysis was further elaborated on in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and Guattari's individual work in the 1980s and early 90s.
Luce Irigaray accuses Lacan of perpetuating Phallocentrism mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse.Luce Irigaray, "Cosi Fan Tutti," in Clive Cazeaux, Continental Aesthetics Reader (New York, 2011), pp. 377–386. Others have echoed this accusation, seeing Lacan as trapped in the very phallocentric mastery his language ostensibly sought to undermine.Jacqueline Rose, "Introduction – II", in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, Feminine Sexuality (New York 1982) p. 56 The result—Cornelius Castoriadis would maintain—was to make all thought depend upon himself, and thus to stifle the capacity for independent thought among all those around him.Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (Cambridge 1997) p. 386
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