Jacques Lacan

1901-1981 · French · Psychoanalysis

The unconscious is structured like a language.

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose rereading of Freud through structural linguistics reshaped psychoanalysis, and whose expulsion from the international movement made him the founder of his own. He trained in psychiatry in Paris, took his doctorate in 1932 with a thesis on paranoid psychosis and its relation to the personality, and moved in surrealist circles before the war. His first substantial contribution, the mirror stage, was presented in 1936 and again in 1949: the infant's jubilant recognition of itself in the mirror is a recognition of an…

Topics Jacques Lacan addresses

• the return to Freud
• the mirror stage
• the imaginary, the symbolic and the real
• the unconscious structured like a language
• the signifier and the signified
• the primacy of the signifier
• the subject of the unconscious
• the barred subject
• full speech and empty speech
• the Other and the other
• the discourse of the Other
• the Name-of-the-Father
• foreclosure and psychosis
• the paternal metaphor
• metaphor and metonymy in the unconscious
• desire is the desire of the Other
• need, demand and desire
• objet petit a
• the graph of desire
• jouissance
• the death drive beyond the pleasure principle
• the ethics of psychoanalysis
• do not give ground relative to your desire
• the signification of the phallus

Questions to put to Jacques Lacan

The Mirror Stage and the Imaginary

• What happens in the mirror stage?
• Why is the ego founded on misrecognition?
• What's wrong with trying to strengthen the ego in analysis?
• How is the imaginary different from the symbolic?
• What do you mean when you say the ego is an object rather than a subject?

The Unconscious and the Signifier

• What do you mean when you say the unconscious is structured like a language?
• How does the signifier produce meaning without being anchored to things?
• What's the difference between condensation and displacement in dreams?
• Why do you put the signifier over the signified instead of the other way around?
• How is your reading of Freud different from what ego psychology made of him?

Desire, Demand, and the Other

• What's the difference between need, demand, and desire?
• What do you mean when you say desire is the desire of the Other?
• What is objet petit a and why can't it be reached?
• How does desire survive even when we get what we thought we wanted?
• Why is demand always also a demand for love?

The Name-of-the-Father and Psychosis

• What is the Name-of-the-Father?
• How does the paternal metaphor install the symbolic order?
• What happens when the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed?
• How is psychosis different from neurosis in your account?
• Why does the symbolic order require a paternal function?

Jouissance and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

• What is jouissance and how is it different from pleasure?
• What do you mean by 'do not give ground relative to your desire'?
• How does the death drive go beyond the pleasure principle?
• Why is jouissance a satisfaction that is not pleasant?
• What's at stake for you in opposing Aristotelian and Kantian ethics?

Sexuation, the Four Discourses, and the Late Work

• What do you mean when you say The woman does not exist?
• How do the masculine and feminine positions differ in the formulas of sexuation?
• What are the four discourses and what do they organize?
• Why do you end sessions at different lengths rather than at the clock?
• What is the sinthome and how does Joyce exemplify it?

Converse with Jacques Lacan on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Jacques Lacan's own writing, cited to the page.