Jacques Lacan
The unconscious is structured like a language, and the ego is formed when a child first recognises itself in a mirror image.
Placement
The unconscious is structured like a language; the mirror stage forms the ego.
Key ideas
- Mirror stage
- Real, Symbolic, Imaginary
- Desire of the Other
Influence
Influenced by 6
Teresa of Ávila
influenced by
In his seminar Encore (1972–73; publ. 1975) Lacan took Bernini’s Teresa as an image of a feminine jouissance beyond the phallus, attested by the mystics. J. Lacan, Le séminaire XX: Encore (1972–73; ed. J.-A. Miller, 1975); SEP “Jacques Lacan”
Evidence: AI draft
Teresa of Ávila › 1515–1582
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
influenced by
Lacan, who attended Kojève’s Hegel seminar (1933–39), took from the master–slave dialectic that desire is the desire of the other and seeks recognition (‘Subversion du sujet’, 1960). J. Lacan, “Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir dans l’inconscient freudien” (1960), in Écrits (1966); A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (1947); SEP “Jacques Lacan”
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel › 1770–1831
Sigmund Freud
influenced by ✓
Lacan called for a return to Freud and reread condensation and displacement as metaphor and metonymy, the unconscious being structured like a language (‘L’instance de la lettre’, 1957). J. Lacan, “La chose freudienne” (1955); “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud” (1957), both in Écrits (1966); SEP “Jacques Lacan”
Sigmund Freud › 1856–1939
Ferdinand de Saussure
influenced by ✓
Lacan inverted Saussure’s sign, placing the signifier over the signified and giving it primacy, so that meaning slides along chains of signifiers (‘L’instance de la lettre’, 1957). J. Lacan, “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient ou la raison depuis Freud” (1957), in Écrits (1966); F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916); SEP “Jacques Lacan”
Ferdinand de Saussure › 1857–1913
Martin Heidegger
influenced by ✓
Lacan, who met Heidegger in 1955, translated his ‘Logos’ for La Psychanalyse (1956) and drew on his thinking of speech and truth (Écrits, 1966). M. Heidegger, “Logos”, trans. J. Lacan, La Psychanalyse 1 (1956); J. Lacan, Écrits (1966); E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (1993); SEP “Jacques Lacan”
Martin Heidegger › 1889–1976
Claude Lévi-Strauss
influenced by
Lacan took from Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that a symbolic law of exchange orders human relations, the core of his symbolic order (‘Fonction et champ’, 1953). J. Lacan, “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse” (1953), in Écrits (1966); C. Lévi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949); SEP “Jacques Lacan”
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
Claude Lévi-Strauss › 1908–2009
Influenced 5
Louis Althusser
influenced
Althusser took up Lacan’s return to Freud (‘Freud and Lacan’, 1964) and modelled ideology’s imaginary relation of individuals to their conditions on Lacan’s mirror stage (1970). L. Althusser, “Freud et Lacan”, La Nouvelle Critique (1964); “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État” (1970); SEP “Louis Althusser”
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
Louis Althusser › 1918–1990
Frantz Fanon
influenced
In Black Skin, White Masks (1952, ch. 6) Fanon took up Lacan’s mirror stage in a long note: once the mechanism Lacan described is grasped, the real Other for the white man is the Black man, perceived on the level of the body image. F. Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), ch. 6 “Le nègre et la psychopathologie”; J. Lacan, “Le stade du miroir” (1936/1949)
Evidence: AI draft
Frantz Fanon › 1925–1961
Lélia Gonzalez
influenced
Gonzalez drew on Lacan to set consciousness, the site of misrecognition, against memory, the site of an unwritten history (‘Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira’, 1984). L. Gonzalez, “Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira”, Ciências Sociais Hoje 2 (1984)
Evidence: AI draft
Lélia Gonzalez › 1935–1994
Julia Kristeva
influenced ✓
Kristeva took up Lacan’s symbolic order and mirror stage but placed before them a ‘semiotic’ level of drives and rhythms (La révolution du langage poétique, 1974). J. Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique (1974); J. Lacan, “Le stade du miroir” (1949), in Écrits (1966); SEP “Jacques Lacan”
Julia Kristeva › b. 1941
Slavoj Žižek
influenced ✓
Žižek took up Lacan’s registers of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real and his concept of fantasy to analyse ideology and popular culture (Looking Awry, 1991). S. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989); Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1991)
Slavoj Žižek › b. 1949
Criticism
Criticized by 4
Cornelius Castoriadis
criticised by
Castoriadis rejected Lacan’s view of the imaginary as specular illusion, conceiving it as radical creation, and attacked Lacanian practice (Imaginary Institution, 1975; ‘La psychanalyse, projet et élucidation’, 1977). C. Castoriadis, L’institution imaginaire de la société (1975); “La psychanalyse, projet et élucidation”, in Les carrefours du labyrinthe I (1978), pp. 81–157
Evidence: AI draft
Cornelius Castoriadis › 1922–1997
Jacques Derrida
criticised by
In ‘Le facteur de la vérité’ (1975) Derrida read Lacan’s seminar on Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’ as phallogocentric and contested that a letter always reaches its destination. J. Derrida, “Le facteur de la vérité”, Poétique 21 (1975), repr. in La carte postale (1980); J. Lacan, “Le séminaire sur ‘La lettre volée’”, in Écrits (1966)
Evidence: AI draft
Jacques Derrida › 1930–2004
Luce Irigaray influenced
influenced
Irigaray, trained in Lacan’s École freudienne, took over his view that the subject is constituted in language and asked which sex that language serves (Speculum, 1974). L. Irigaray, Speculum de l’autre femme (1974); Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (1977); M. Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (1991)
Evidence: also in InPhO · InPhO
criticised by
Irigaray argued that Lacan’s symbolic order, organised around the phallus, admits woman only as lack (‘Così fan tutti’, in Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, 1977). L. Irigaray, “Così fan tutti”, in Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (1977); Speculum de l’autre femme (1974)
Evidence: AI draft
Luce Irigaray › b. 1930
Judith Butler
criticised by
Butler objected that Lacan’s symbolic law fixes sexual positions around the phallus as quasi-timeless, and recast the phallus as a resignifiable norm (Bodies That Matter, 1993, ch. 2). J. Butler, Gender Trouble (1990), ch. 2; Bodies That Matter (1993), ch. 2 “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary”
Evidence: AI draft
Judith Butler › b. 1956
Works
- 1966Écrits
The mirror stage and the instance of the letter in the unconscious.
Position
Lacan called for a “return to Freud,” whom he read through Saussure’s linguistics and structural anthropology. His famous thesis: the unconscious is structured like a language – it works with displacements and condensations like metaphor and metonymy. In the “mirror stage” the infant recognises itself in its mirror image and forms an ego that is from the outset an imaginary, alienated identification. Human beings are subjects of the “symbolic order” of language and law, into which they are born and which divides them. Lacan distinguished the registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, and described desire as “the desire of the Other.” His difficult work influenced literary theory, film studies, feminism and philosophers such as Žižek.
Life & context
Lacan was born in Paris in 1901 and trained as a psychiatrist; his dissertation on paranoia attracted the interest of the surrealists. From 1953 he gave a public seminar for almost three decades that became a Parisian intellectual institution. Expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association, he founded the École freudienne de Paris in 1964, which he dissolved shortly before his death in 1981.
Further main works
- The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function (1949)
- The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI) (1973)
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