August Ruhs / Jeanne Wolff Bernstein

Jacques Lacan,
born April 13th, 1901 (Paris) and died September 9th, 1981 in Neuilly near, Paris.
Jacques Lacan was the youngest child of a family of Orleans-based vinegar merchants and
was raised by a strictly Catholic mother and a father who was perceived to be rather weak.
He was the oldest of four children, with one sister and two younger brothers, of whom one
died, and the other joined a Benedict monastery where he became a priest in 1929. Lacan
pursued his early studies at the prestigious Jesuit College Stanislav and began his medical
studies in 1926, specialising in psychiatry at the Sainte Anne Hospital, Paris. During his
medical studies Lacan broke with Catholicism and developed a growing interest for
philosophy, especially the works of Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger and Spinoza, and he
attended seminars about Hegel given by Alexandre Kojeve. (see also: Hegel, Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich 61047) He also professed a strong interest in literary studies and art, in
particular in the literary works of James Joyce and the Surrealist movement. He was close
friends with Andre Breton and Salvador Dali and published some of his earliest writings in the
Surrealist magazine Minotaure. Had it not been for his particular French character, one who
was interested in philosophy, history and language, Lacan might have not been as
successful as he was in introducing psychoanalysis to France, a country that had been highly
suspicious of the foreign roots of psychoanalysis.

In 1931, Lacan received his license to become a forensic psychiatrist and in 1932 he starts
his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein. Within the same year he finished his
dissertation on „The Paranoid Psychosis and its Relation to the Personality“ in which he
analyses the case of a woman, „Aimée“, who later turns out to be the mother of his initial
companion and later rival Didier Anzieu, who became a prominent psychoanalyst in his own
right. Aimée (the pseudonym for Anzieu’s mother) had attempted to kill a famous actress
whom she had imagined had spread slander about her, and Lacan had interpreted this
attempted murder as Aimée’s unconscious wish to merge her own image with that of an
idealized other one, whom Aimée had thought to destroy in a wish for self-punishment.
Aimée’s case burgeoned Lacan’s long-standing interest in paranoiac themes, such as
jealousy, persecution, grandiosity and the essential importance of the image and its influence
on the identity formation of the subject. In writing about this case which he had seen at the
St. Anne Hospital, Paris, Lacan was greatly influenced by Freud’s (1922) paper Some
Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality, (see also Freud,
Sigmund, 61036) which he also translated from German into French, a practice, incidentally,
he maintained throughout his life, of translating papers from German or English into French
which were of importance for his psychoanalytic studies and publications. From Freud’s text
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and the case of Aimée, Lacan took the idea that a paranoiac knowledge existed at the core
of each subject and that the con-fusing image of the Other strongly shaped, as he would
later formulate in his concept of The Mirror Stage, the formation of the Ego (the “moi
imaginaire”). A painter, like Salvador Dali, strongly agreed with Lacan’s basic tenet that a
paranoiac mechanism exerted a strong force in the construction of each subject.

In addition to his collaborations with the Surrealist writers and painters of his epoch, Lacan
was also fascinated during his medical studies by his teacher, Gaetan Gatian de
Clearambault who had been a well known forensic psychiatrist and an avid collector of
photographs of North-African female garments. However, he had become even more
prominent through his “spectacular” suicide since he shot himself in the head, sitting in front
of a mirror, after he had learned that he was destined to lose his eyesight due to a retina
infection. The tragic irony of Clearambault’s specular suicide is not lost on most readers of
Lacan’s work since it powerfully illustrates the aggression underlying the narcissistic ego
formation, which Lacan discusses in his concept of the mirror stage.

After six years of analysis, Lacan left his analysis with Rudolf Loewenstein in disagreement.
He nonetheless joined the Parisian Psychoanalytic Society in 1938 and becomes a member
of the SPP. At the 14th Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in
Marienbad in 1936, he presents his first analytic paper on „The Mirror Stage as Formative of
the Function of the Ego“. (see also Self development during infancy across cultures
23010) His presentation is disrupted by Ernest Jones, the president of the IPA, after ten
minutes, because he was unwilling to extend Lacan’s slated presentation time. Lacan leaves
the congress in protest and presents the paper thirteen years later in its full and extended
version at the Zurich IPA-Congress in Switzerland. Jones’ autocratic behaviour at this highly
politicized congress set yet another signal to Lacan of the increasing influence the ego
psychologists would hold over the developing psychoanalytic discourse. His own former
training analyst, Rudolf Loewenstein in conjunction with Heinz Hartmann, David Rapaport
and Ernst Kris were pursuing a psychoanalytic path that was already highly suspect to Freud
himself, and which focused on the powerful character of the ego and the therapeutic benefits
that would be gained with the strengthening of the ego. In line with Freud’s (1936) own late
misgivings about the seeming normality of the ego, Lacan unmasks the ego as an illusionary
and deceiving structure which alienates the subject from his or her unconscious desire.
Instead of strengthening the ego, Lacan advocates the dismantling of the ego as a means of
setting free the subject’s unconscious desire, allowing the subject to speak its own truth. In
1949, Lacan writes:

“The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation- and
which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of
phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call

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orthopaedic-and, lastly, to the assumption of an armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with
its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.” (p.4)
Lacan defines “The Mirror Stage” both as a developmental process and a permanent, “rigid”
structure through which the young “infans” (that means without language) forms an image of
his body through the Gestalt in the mirror which promises a more unified and complete body
image than the child’s actual motoric capacity. The young infant typically greets this more
unified image with jubilation (jouissance) because the child recognizes in the mirror a body
that holds out the illusion of a unity and mastery that he cannot yet physically experience but
which sets him up on an anticipatory level for a desire to reach for a more complete specular
version of himself than he is capable of. The tension between the perceived image and the
body creates a phantasma of a body felt to be in pieces (fantasme du corps morcelé) which
appears in psychotic regressions or also at moments in the psychoanalytic treatment when
certain levels of awareness are reached. The unified image the child prematurely obtains is
always at risk to fall apart and threatens haunt the subject in his own subjectivity. While the
mirror stage was held to be initially a primarily specular process, where the infant identifies
with the image projected ahead of him and mistakes that image to be himself, Lacan later
also always emphasizes that this imaginary process unfolds in the presence of an Other, a
third who speaks to the child and identifies him as the child in the mirror. “Look who is there,
there is little Peter”. Through the language of the Other, typically the mother or father who
holds the infant in her/his arms, a symbolic identity is introduced intertwined with the
imaginary one. In the moment of the parent saying or expressing to the child something like
“This is you!”, a triangulation takes shape in terms of the imaginary, symbolic and real
registers, the image, the word and the referent. With the mirror stage, Lacan not only
expands Freud’s concept of the ideal ego and ego ideal, but he also provides a radically new
idea about the process of identification as a specular, desiring and alienating process where
the “I is the Other”. (see also The Self, Philosophical aspects of 63086, Infant and Child
Development, Theories of 34017) By unmasking the ego as an agent of deception, Lacan
also pays tribute to Freud’s late realization that the ego is not normal but shares many
characteristics with the psychotic, as Freud describes in his 1937 text, Analysis Terminable
and Interminable.

During World War II, and while The Société Psychanalytique de Paris was closed by the
Nazis, Lacan served in the French army at the Val-de-Grace military hospital in Paris. By the
beginning of the war, Lacan had been married for 6 years to Marie-Louise Blondin and had
fathered two children, his daughter Caroline, born in 1934 followed by his son Thibault in
1939. In 1940, a third child, Sibylle, was born. However, a year later, Lacan fathers another
girl, Judith with another woman, Sylvie Bataille, the estranged wife of George Bataille, whom
he marries in 1953 after having divorced Blondin beforehand. Judith, his youngest daughter,

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will become later very important for the transmission of her father’s work together with her
husband Jacques-Alain Miller. He will be in charge of Lacan’s publications and distributions
of seminars after Lacan’s death.

Due to his appeal for a return to Freud and his earlier writings, Lacan comes to the forefront
of the international psychoanalytic scene in the 1950’s. This appeal is linked to an intensive
focus on the philosophical thoughts of Heidegger, the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure
(see also Saussure, Ferdinand de 61118) and the structuralistic concepts of Lévi-Strauss.
(see also Lévi-Strauss 61237). Lacan’s post-war writings are increasingly focused on the
theory of the symbolic register, language, speech and the fundamental concept of the Other
as a representative of the law, culture and the storehouse of signifiers. Re-reading Freud’s
early texts, like The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
(1901) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), through a lens of
structuralism and linguistics, brings into sharper focus the fact that the human subject is
primarily constituted in and through language and that this language which precedes the
subject, speaks the subject as well. (see also Freud, Sigmund 61036)

In the above mentioned essays, Freud not only discovers the laws and rules of the primary
process as the structure of the language-like psychoanalytic unconscious, but he also proves
himself to be a forerunner of modern linguistics by representing conceptions which relate
closely to the later school of semiotics, in particular to the work of Saussure and Roman
Jakobson.

With the discovery of the mechanisms of condensation and displacement which are so
essential for the work of dreams, jokes and parapraxes and which will later be
conceptualized as metaphor and metonymy in the field of linguistics, Freud provided not only
the basics of a rhetoric which illustrated the poetic aspects of the unconscious but also the
principles of signification in any language. (see also Historical Linguistics, overview
53021, Psycholinguistics 57010, Theories of Language Development 23118,
Linguistics, overview 53012)

Identifying the unconscious as a linguistic mechanism lead to the understanding that thinking
and speaking were not hierarchized activities, but processes which were mutually
constituting themselves. The human language does not consist of deep structures which
shape thinking or the oral expression of words, but it is instead constituted by what
Saussure calls “signs”, which are elements that combine sounds with concepts. The concept
is called the signified and the sound of the word is called signifier. The sign is not a primary
name which identifies an external phenomenon, but it consists instead of combination of a
signifier and signified which are related to one another in an arbitrary way. Language is thus
no longer thought to be representational, but primarily conceived in terms of articulation, in

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terms of sounds relating to one another in an arbitrary fashion. Language, conceptualized in

terms of articulatory principles, is governed by a constitutive law of difference , represented
by the symbolic order and held in contrast by the constitutive law of similarity, which is
instituted by the register of the imaginary. The relationship between Signifier and signified is
arbitrary and co-determined by social conventions/Understanding/agreement. For instance,
signifiers and signifieds alike exist because they are something, which others are not.
Sounds, in other words, single letters can only function as signifiers as long as they
differentiate themselves from others. A thought or concept) can only become a
concept/thought as long as it is different and separate from another. Binary opposition and
differentiation mark the structure of an articulated speech.

Unlike Saussure who privileged the signified over the signifier, Lacan reverses this
connection, and sets the signifier over the signified, underscoring thereby the importance of
sound over an agreed-upon social meaning. Lacan also wanted to place particular
importance upon the signifier’s ability to shift between meanings because without this ability,
a joke or a dream cannot properly function. We hear for instance the word „Wait“ and can
hear the word „weight“ at the same time , and it is this sliding between sounds in each
language which accounts for the multiple layers of meanings between words embedded in
each language. In addition, Lacan wanted to emphasize that speech comes before thinking
in the development of the human being, and that the human subject is already spoken and
phantasized about long before his actual birth. He is impregnated by the parents’ conscious
and und unconscious wishes, desires and expectations and is thus intrinsically captured in
his being through the language of the Other. The human subject is not dominated by
language, but he is constituted in and through language.

Lacan places at the forefront the double birth of the human being – of the „I“ (Ego/moi)
through the specular identificatory process during the mirror stage, and of the subject
(je)through the determination of the signifier in
the acquisition of language. The human subject is however furthermore alienated through his
premature birth and his subsequent fundamental helplessness which Lacan connects with
Heidegger’s notion of „Seinsverfehlung“ and translates as „manque-a-etre“, which is akin to
the English neologism „Want-to-be“. Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory can be conceptualized as
a theory of lack for which culture is destined to complement the deficits of the human drives
and his essential drivenness.

With his theory of the double birth of the human being as an imaginary ego and a symbolic
subject (corresponding to the myths of Narcissus and Oedipus), Lacan introduces an object-
relations theory with medial dimensions running parallel to Freud’s drive theory. (see also

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Psychoanalysis, History of 03045). As categories of representation the imaginary and

symbolic realms capture the internal and external world of the human being in permanent
modifications, while the real as a third dimension covers all those aspects of the human
world which cannot be symbolized, are not mediated and are beyond human grasp. Lacan
will devote the last part of his theoretical work to the workings of this register of the Real, and
devote his clinical focus upon the various aspects of the human’s use of jouissance as a kind
of excess pleasure going beyond images and language, not undergoing symbolic castration,
which implies the acceptance of an inevitable lack of being.

In contrast to Freud, but in agreement with Melanie Klein, Lacan situates the oedipal
complex in the early development of the child. (see also Klein, Melanie 61068). During the
third phase of the mirror stage, around the 14th month of his life, the baby enters into the part
of the early stage of the oedipal complex as he is gradually identifying his bodily „moi“ with
the image projected of himself by the outside world. Since the young infant is born
prematurely and is therefore totally dependent upon the help of the Other, he is dependent
upon the desire of the mother. In experiencing this desire the child strives to be the object of
the desire of the Other, thus identifying with the fundamental maternal lack and
unconsciously with the desire to become the mother’s phallus. Eventually, the father
intervenes into this imaginary triangle as one who spoils this game of illusionary omnipotence
between mother and child. He intervenes as the representative of the law and culture and
forbids the child his phallic identification and thereby also prohibits the mother to use her
child as her phallic substitute. Lacan identifies the appearance of the Father as the
representative of the law as the second step in the oedipal complex.
During the third phase of the oedipal complex, the child is supposed to identify with the father
and to submit himself to the symbolic order, the order of language. The father is identified as
the carrier of the word and the representative of the law, but he has to be credible in this
symbolic function in order to be accepted as the „nom-du –père.“ „Nom“ and „Non“ - the two
signifiers sound alike and combine the function of the father in one word as the who has to
act in his own name when he says „no“ to the mother/child phallic dyad. The mother has to
accept the father as a representative of the law so that the child can accept the name of the
father as well. If there is no maternal recognition of this symbolic father and if the child
refuses the law, the imaginary predominates and the child remains submitted to the mother
(Neurosis or perversion). In the worst case which is the case of psychosis not only this
separation is lacking but also what Lacan calls alienation: the child functions as a real part of
the dyadic and symbiotic mother-child relationship and therefore will not really arrive at a
clear differentiation between the self and the Other.
If, however, both mother and child accept the paternal law, which does not have to be

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represented by a real father figure, but can be assumed by another figure or instance filling
out this symbolic position, the child identifies with this third element supposed to carry the
phallus as something the mother is longing for outside of the child himself. The symbolic
father is the one to place the phallus in its rightful position. He marks the phallus both as a
desire of the mother and as a signifier of a principal lack. Nobody really possesses the
phallus, as the identification of the phallus with the masculine penis proves to be the result of
an illusionary misjudgement. The child is no longer the one the mother lacks, it is other and
instead of being a desired object it becomes a desiring subject. Through an identification with
this Other, the child enters into the category of having and leaves behind the primacy of
being.
The movement from being to having is a symbolic castration: The father castrates the
child by differentiating him from the phallus and by separating him from the mother.
With this shift the child becomes a subject who differentiates himself from the other
two subjects. As the child moves from the imaginary to the symbolic register, his
counterpart also changes from being a double to becoming a speaking Other.
However, even the symbolic castration does not abolish the internal subjective
division because the subject remains still alienated after his specular identification,
since he can neither find a „Seinsgrundlage“ (ontological fixation) in speech. He is
also only represented by the signifier referring to another signifier, or, as Lacan
writes, that “ ....a signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier”
(1978, p. 207)
When the subject says „I“, his division becomes obvious, he is at the same time the
subject of his enunciation and subject of his expression. Lacan identifies the mature
subject as a permanently divided subject and symbolizes that division through a bar
of the subject: S. (Attention editor: S with a cross bar!)

As the incestuous desire for the mother is being repressed through the installment of the
name of the father, the phallus as a sign of lack is also repressed. The repression of the
phallus is equivalent to primary repression, which constitutes the unconscious and initiates
secondary repressive mechanisms. In this constitutive process, the signifier of lack, of a
border, and of a prohibition is anchored in the unconscious. The infantile wish to be joined
with the primary Other is forever repressed which does not mean, that the human subject
does not continue to keep looking for it and to find only substitutes for it in its place. In this
way, the wish turns into the unsatisfiable desire which so characterizes Freud’s notion of a
wish and which is part and parcel of Freud’s definition of the unconscious. Since desire is
embedded in this open system of language –where a signifier always points towards another
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signifier, which means that meaning can never be limited, Lacan comes to the conclusion
that the unconscious is not just made of desires (wishes), but that it is also constructed like a
language. The unconscious can be seen as a site of repressed and displaced signifiers,
which began to be formed through the repression of the fundamental signifier of the phallus.

The signifiers belong to an order of letters- sound letters- and are therefore less bound to a
system of meanings or sense. Lacan references Freud’s idea that the dream uses signifiers
through condensation and displacement to shift and distort meanings to evade the censor,
and this work of distortion is less guided by a system of contents but rather by a system of
formal structures. The unconscious is a system of writings as Freud already described it in
Letter 52 to Wilhelm Fliess in 1896 when he identiied the unconscious as an apparatus of
„Niederschriften“ (written inscriptions). Language and writing come from the outside, come
from the Other who speaks. For this reason, Lacan also defined the unconscious as The
Other who speaks (and writes) in us and by whom we are also spoken (and written).

As a consequence of these considerations, Lacan’s differentiates between need, demand

and desire which constitutes his detailed elaboration and re-working of Freud’s drive model.
To begin with, one has to remember that each drive is a partial drive, which is bound to a
particular erotogenic zone. Even though the genital drive is the one to privilege sexual
strivings, other drives are also sexually bound. Each drive is also an amalgam of eros and
thanatos because the moment the drive is satisfied, it works towards its own self-destruction.
As Freud already described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the human being is also mortal
through his sexual procreation. In order to repress the destructive part of the drive, the drive
has to be blocked, tamed and pushed back. In Lacan’s writings, the drive is primarily bound
to the lack (manque) to the exigencies of life („Not des Lebens“) as Freud formulated it. The
drive expresses itself initially as a need which forms a closer link to the psycho-somatic than
to the psychic life because it does not necessarily require a subjective experience to be
registered intrapsychically, as is the case in an insulin coma for instance, where the body’s
need for glucose bypasses any intra-psychic awareness.
Pure need aims at an object and finds satisfaction in it. The infant’s first needs can only be
satisfied through another person, primarily hunger which is satisfied through nursing- and
here the infant encounters for the first time a forceful power over which the mother wields
because she can give and withdraw her breast as she sees fit. Lacan focuses on this power
(differential) which installs itself prior to the satisfaction of needs and transcends the
satisfaction or deprival of needs which in turn points to the dynamics of what Lacan calls
„the demand“. Demand is not really concentrated upon real objects but is essentially
focused upon a demand for love and exerts itself through presence and absence, through

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giving and withdrawing the longed-for love. The early helpness of the young infant is the
source of this demand which Freud had described as follows:

“The biological factor is the long period of time during which the young of the human species
is in a condition of helplessness and dependence. Its intra-uterine existence seems to be
short in comparison with that of most animals, and it is sent into the world in a less finished
state...The biological factor, then, establishes the earliest situations of danger and creates
the need to be loved which will accompany the child through the rest of its life. (1926, p.155)”

The power, which distorts the access to the object, has a tendency to debase and minimize
the need for satisfaction and to destroy the demand for love within the same act. A consistent
misrecognition for a demand of love can have disastrous consequences as one can see in
cases of anorexia nervosa. Lacan asserts that in anorexia nervosa, the child is always given
what the Other one has (nutrition) but is not given what the Other one does not have, which
is love. As a result, the child refuses any nourishment and sets into play a complex dynamic
of refusal and desire. (see also Eating Disorders 64069).
Desire is the third term Lacan enlists in his triadic structure of need, demand and desire and
it is most akin to Freud’s concept of a wish (Wunsch) which aims in the unconscious for
something that cannot be satisfied. Lacan’s assertion that „the desire is the desire of the
Other“, which means that we receive the desire through the words of the Other and that what
we desire is always other, is always different.
While working on these different psychoanalytic concepts in the 1950’s and developing a
new body of psychoanalytic thinking through a simultaneous return to Freud’s early texts,
Lacan encounters during these productive years several conflicts with other psychoanalytic
institutions. In the early 1950’s a crisis erupts in the „Société Psychanalytique de Paris“,
which eventually leads to a division that is primarily based upon the question of lay analysis.
Due to his code of analytic practice, in particular, the variable duration of analytic sessions,
Lacan joins the liberal group around Daniel Lagache – much to the discontent of his own
orthodox institute. This group develops into the „Sociéte Francaise de Psychoanalyse“ and is
established as a second Parisian Association in 1953. In Lacan’s opposition to American
Ego-Psychology he is strongly supported by the child-psychoanalyst Francoise Dolto.
However, as a result of its controversial stance, the group loses its membership in the IPA
without either wanting or noticing it. (see also Psychoanalysis, History of 03045).
After long and difficult years of negotiations for re-entry, the IPA demands Lacan’s and
Francoise Dolto’s expulsion as trainees. In 1964 Lacan finally founds his own school called
„Ecole Freudienne de Paris“. 34 articles by Lacan are published as “Ecrits” in 1966. During
1966 and 1976, Lacan frequently travels throughout the United States for the purpose of
lecturing. Due to Lacan’s teachings, the University of Paris VIII founds a department for
Psychoanalysis in 1969, offering a psychoanalytic doctoral program. In some way influenced

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by the students’ revolts of 1968 Lacan develops his theory of discourse as an attempt to
insert his concept of the unconscious into social relationships. In 1969 Lacan also introduces
the so-called „passe“ for the training of psychoanalysts. This special type of accreditation,
however, is not recognised by everyone and, as a result, some of the members leave the
school in order to establish their own psychoanalytic society („Quatrième groupe“).
During the last years of his life, Lacan is preoccupied with topology and mathematics in order
to grasp the dimension of the real with its elements of the “thing” (la chose, near to Freud’s
“Ding”) and the object “a”, attempting also to elaborate the very connections between the
categories of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. At the same time His „Ecole
Freudienne de Paris“ is increasingly weakened as an institution due to the assumption that
Lacan is no longer capable of acting in his own name, because of his son-in-law’s, Jacques-
Alain Miller’s, supposed take-over of Lacan’s school. In 1980, the school is finally closed as
an act for a new beginning. Shortly before Lacan dies due to a malignant intestinal tumor on
September 9th, 1981, the school is re-founded as „Ecole de la Cause Freudienne“. (See for
further biographical discussion: Elisabeth Roudinesco 1999)

References:

Freud, S. (1892-1899): Extracts from the Fliess papers, In J.Strachey (Ed & Trans.) The
edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. (Vol. 1)) London: Hogarth
Press.
Freud, S. (1900): The interpretation of dreams. In J.Strachey (Ed & Trans.) The
edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. (Vol. 4)) London: Hogarth
Press.
Freud, S. (1922): Some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality.In
J.Strachey (Ed & Trans.) The standard edition of the complete psychological works of
Sigmund Freud ( Vol. 18, pp. 221-234) London: Hogarth Press
Freud, S. (1926): Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. In In J. Strachey (ed. &trans.) The
standard Edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud ( Vol. 20, pp. 77-
178) London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1937): Analysis terminable, Interminable. In J. Strachey (ed. &trans.) The
standard Edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud ( Vol. 23, pp. 209-
254) London: Hogarth Press.
Lacan, J. (1977): Ecrits (A. Sheridan) New York: W.W. Norton & Company
Lacan, J. (1932/1975): De la psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la personalite
suivi d’ Ecrits sur la paranoia, Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1978): The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. by Jacques-
Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Roudinesco, E. (1999): Jacques Lacan, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Abstract for Chapter on Jacques Lacan

By August Ruhs & Jeanne Wolff Bernstein

The authors discuss the life and work of Jacques Lacan, one of the most influential
post-War World War II psychoanalyst in France. They explain Lacan’s self-avowed
return to Freud as his re-interpretation of Freud’s early texts under a linguistic lens,
leading Lacan to conclude that the unconscious is structured like a language and that
unconscious processes like condensation and displacement, so essential for Freud’s
discovery of distortion in the work of dreams and jokes, are equivalent to the
linguistic processes, defined by Roman Jakobson, as metaphor and displacement.
Instead of expanding psychoanalysis into a direction of ego- and later object-related
world, Lacan reversed this process, emphasizing the fact that the human being is a
divided subject, split between conscious and unconscious processes, between
language and speech, and constituted in and through language. Lacan redefines
human existence, as living in between the realms of the imaginary, the symbolic and
the real, covering all those aspects of human life which are visually and symbolically
represented and capturing also those which lie beyond human grasp through the
register of the Real. The authors emphasize that Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory is a
theory of lack in which the human subject is held in his fervent longings between a
complex interplay of need-demand and desire. Because every human subject is born
prematurely, entirely dependent upon another human being, the Other, in his early
existence, his subjectivity is profoundly shaped by the desire and the law of the
Other, leading Lacan to deduce that the desire of the subject is the desire of the
Other since it is for and through the Other that human desire is founded. The
symbolic position of the Father as the representative of the law and culture and as
the one responsible for the separation of the child from his incestuous desire for and
by the mother, regains a crucial role in Lacan’s reconceptualization of Freud’s
oedipal complex. For Lacan, the oedipal complex is not a developmental stage but a
permanent structure through which the human being negotiates his desire within or
outside the law.

15 Key words for Chapter on Jacques Lacan:

mirror stage, symbolic, real, speech, language, writing, The Other, signifier, signified,

need, demand, desire, phallus, laws of signification, lack;

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_______________________________________________________
August Ruhs, M.D., Assoc. Prof., psychiatrist, personal and supervising psychoanalyst of the Vienna
Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy at the Medical
University of Vienna.

[email protected]

Postal address:

Landskrongasse 5/14

A-1010 Wien

Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D., personal and supervising analyst, Psychoanalytic Institute of
Northern California, San Francisco, California & Faculty, New York University Post-Doctoral Program,
Psycho-Analysis and Psychotherapy.

[email protected]
Postal address:
Wildpretmarkt 1

A-1010 Wien

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