Jacques Marie mile Lacan (1901-1981)
Jacques Lacan was born in 1901 to
a bourgeois Catholic family. He was an admirable student, and excelled
especially at Latin and philosophy. He went to medical school, and began
studying psychoanalysis in the 1920s with the psychiatrist Gatan de
Clrambault. He studied at the Facult de Mdecine de Paris, and worked with
patients suffering from dlires ý deux, or "automatism," a
condition in which the patient believes his actions, writing, or speech, are
controlled by an outside and omnipotent force. A growing psychoanalytical
movement in France had been showing a particular interest in similar patients.
Lacan wrote his thesis for his doctorat d'tat in 1932 titled De la psychose paranoaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalit, in which he drew a connection between phsychiatric
medicine and psychoanalysis. It was this combination of the theoretical and the
clinical that would become Lacan's practice and inform what he would call his
"return to Freud." In his lifetime, Lacan extended the field of
psychoanalysis into philosophy, linguistics, literature and mathematics,
through close readings of Freud and continued clinical practice.
In discussions of Lacan's career, it is often divided
into four stages. The first, from 1926 to 1953, marks an evolution from
conventional psychiatric work to the gradual inclusion of psychoanalytical
concepts in the clinic, both in diagnosis and treatment. His first publications
are case studies. In 1936 Lacan developed his theory of the "Mirror
Stage", and published a number of articles about its importance in the
development of the subject. This work was particularly influenced by the
psychologist Henri Wallon, as well as J.M. Baldwin, Charlotte Bhler, and Otto
Rank. The Mirror Stage concerns the ability of an infant (6 to 18 months of
age) to recognize its own image in mirror, before it is able to speak or have
control over its motor skills. The infant must see the image of itself as both
being itself and not itself, in that it is the reflection of its own face and
only a reflected image at the same time. To become a subject, or social being,
the infant must come to terms with the reflection not being identical to itself
as a subject. This marks the child's entry into language, and the formation of
ego. The Mirror Stage changes the emphasis in subject formation from a
biological base to a symbolic or language base. As Lacan writes in the Discourse of Rome, "Man
speaksbut it is because the symbol has made him man."
The Discourse of Rome is the more common name given to Lacan's lecture
presented in Rome in 1953 originally titled Fonction
et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse. This paper became the manifesto of the new Socit franaise de
psychanalytique (SFP), which Lacan formed the same year when he broke with the
International Psycho-Analytical Association (IPA). His break with the IPA was
based on major disagreements Lacan had with the ego psychology of the group,
which placed the ego at the origin of psychic stability. Lacan argued against
therapeutic pretensions, claiming that the ego could never be
"healed", and that the true intension of psychoanalysis was never
cure, but analysis itself.
Lacan attracted philosophers, linguists, and other thinkers
to his renowned weekly seminar at St. Anne's Church. Barthes, Foucault,
Levi-Strauss, and Althusser sat in his audience and were influenced by his
work. From this lecture series came what is perhaps his most celebrated work, crits (1966).
From 1953-63 Lacan concentrated on structural
linguistics and the role of the symbolic in the work of Freud. He felt that
Freud had understood that human psychology is linguistically based, but would
have needed Saussure's vocabulary and structuralist concept of language as a
system of differences to articulate the relationship. In Les Psychoses: Seminar III, Lacan claims that the unconscious is "structured like a
language," and governed by the order of the signifier. This is contrary to
the idea that the unconscious is governed by autonomous repressed or
instinctual desires. Saussure's linguistic theory, especially on the relation
of constant separation between signifier and signified, led Lacan to show that
no signifier ever rests on any particular signified. He went on to argue that
the Symbolic order, the order of signs, representations, significations and
images, is the place where the individual is formed as a subject. He stated
that the subject is always the subject of the signifier.
"I identify myself in language, but only by
losing myself in it like an object. What is realized in my history is not the
past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of
what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been
for what I am in the process of becoming." (From crits)
Lacan translated Martin Heidegger's work into French
and the evidence of Heidegger's influence can be read in Lacan's essay The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis, in which he concentrates on the idea that
subjectivity is symbolically constituted. Lacan was also influenced by Hegel's
work, and by his discussions with both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. He was the
first to introduce structural linguistics to psychoanalytical theory, and
because of this he attracted attention both nationally and, later in the 1970s,
internationally. He was considered unorthodox and unusual in his
psychoanalytical practice, and his lectures were a form of practice alongside
his work as an analyst, in that they put his theory into practical form. His
lectures made his theory evident: that language can say something other than
what it says, and that it speaks through humans as much as they speak it.
Language is of the Symbolic order, one of three orders
that constitute the subject in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the other two being the
Imaginary and the Real. The Imaginary is the place where the subject fails to
see the lack of reality in the symbolic, and mis-recognizes its nature,
believing in its transparency. The Imaginary is the place of necessary
illusion. At the level of the Imaginary, the de-centering of the subject that
occurs at the Mirror Phase is not acknowledged. The Real can be understood, in
one sense, as that that is always "in its place," because only what
is absent from its place can be symbolized. The Symbolic is the substitute for
what is missing from its place; language cannot be in the same place as its
referent.
In the years 1964-73 Lacan departed further still from
Freud and traditional psychoanalysis. His discourse became uniquely
"Lacanian", and he became known for his neologisms and complex
diagrams. His view of the ego as the seat of neurosis rather than the place of
psychic integration, and the Symbolic order as the primary place for subject
formation, made his work groundbreaking. He still claimed to be continuing
Freud's work, which had only been obscured by Freud's followers, and this
accusation caused tension within the SFP. Lacan left this group in 1963 to form
the cole Freudienne de Paris (EFP). The decision to start the new group was
inspired by a series of lectures, given at the cole Pratique des Hautes
Etudes, in which he read Freud's texts closely but also introduced new terms to
the readings from outside the original work.
These lecture attracted still more attention from
outside the psychoanalytical circle, including the press, who associated Lacan
with the "structuralists" practicing in France at the same time. The
training methods of Lacan's new school, the EFP, departed considerably from the
traditional training offered to analysts at the IPA, causing the IPA distress.
Tension between Lacan and the traditional psychoanalytic community grew greater
still when he took the position of "Scientific Director" at the
University of Paris at Vincennes in 1974, heading the department of
psychoanalysis which had opened in 1969. Lacan hoped the new department at the
University would integrate linguistics, logic and mathematics with psychoanalytical
training, giving it a scientific rigor.
Lacan strived to create a more precise mathematically
based theory in the last stage of his career. His "meta-theory" of
psychoanalysis uses mathematics, casting the trilogy he conceived of earlier
(the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary) in the language of topology and mathemes
rather than linguistics. He claimed that "La mathmatisation seule atteint
ý un reel." From 1974 he studied the intersection of the three
registers through complicated topological figures. He began to confound even
his most faithful followers, and students became suspicious of how applicable
this type of education might be to their clinical practice. Lacan decided to
dissolve the EFP and found another association, the cole de la Cause Freudienne,
which he maintained until his death in 1981. By the time of his death, Lacan
had become one of the most influential and controversial intellects in the
world. His work has had a significant effect on literature, film studies, and
philosophy, as well as on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
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Last modified Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:00:18 GMT GMT -05:00;
The URL is http://www.egs.edu/resources/lacan.html.
Jacques Marie mile Lacan,
European Graduate School EGS, 04/11/2008, <http://www.egs.edu/resources/lacan.html>
Academic year 2008/2009
a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Fors Lpez
Beln Garca Castiglioni
Universitat de Valncia Press