Jacques Lacan

Introduction

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, often described as the most controversial psychoanalyst since Sigmund Freud. Trained in medicine and clinical psychiatry, he spent his career re-reading Freud through structural linguistics, Hegelian philosophy and, in his later years, topology, and he transmitted that re-reading in a weekly Paris seminar he held from 1953 until shortly before his death.

Lacan is known for four linked claims: that the unconscious is structured like a language; that the ego is formed through the "mirror stage," in which an infant identifies with an external and misleading image of wholeness; that psychic life is organized by three registers he called the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real; and that desire is desire of the Other, mediated by language and law rather than by instinct. His collected papers, Écrits (1966), made him a figure well beyond clinical practice, and his ideas became central to literary theory, film theory, feminist theory and continental philosophy. They also attracted unusually sharp criticism, from empirical psychologists who consider his claims untestable and from physicists who accuse him of borrowing mathematical language without using it meaningfully.

Early Life and Education

Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of three children in a prosperous Catholic bourgeois family. His father, Alfred, was a successful salesman of soaps and oils; his mother, Émilie, was devoutly religious, and his younger brother entered a monastery in 1929. He was educated at the Collège Stanislas de Paris between 1907 and 1918, where an early interest in philosophy, particularly Spinoza, led him away from religious faith to atheism and produced some tension in the family.

Rejected for military service in 1920 because he was too thin, Lacan entered medical school. Between 1927 and 1931 he specialized in psychiatry, training under Henri Claude at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the main psychiatric hospital serving central Paris, under Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault at the Infirmary for the Insane of the Police Prefecture, and at the Hospital Henri-Rousselle. He received his doctorate in medicine in 1932 for a thesis on paranoia and personality, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, built around the case of a patient known as Aimée; the surrealists around André Breton took the thesis up almost immediately, and it was not published in book form until 1975.

During the 1920s and 1930s Lacan moved in the Parisian avant-garde, meeting James Joyce and associating with Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, for whom he served for a time as personal therapist. His own training analysis was conducted by Rudolph Loewenstein, and he joined the Société psychanalytique de Paris in 1934. Two further intellectual encounters shaped him decisively: the lectures on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève in the 1930s, and the work of the psychologist Henri Wallon, whose 1931 observations of infants and chimpanzees before a mirror supplied the empirical starting point for the mirror stage.

Academic and Professional Career

Lacan was chiefly a clinician and a teacher rather than a university scientist. He worked as a psychiatrist at Sainte-Anne, rising to chef de clinique, and began private psychoanalytic practice in 1936. That same year he presented the paper on the mirror stage at the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress in Marienbad; the original text was never published and was substantially rewritten for a 1949 congress in Zurich.

In 1951 he began the weekly seminar in Paris that he called a "return to Freud," by which he meant a return to Freud's texts read through Saussurean linguistics and structural anthropology rather than through the ego psychology then dominant in the English-speaking world. In 1953 he was elected president of the Société psychanalytique de Paris but resigned within months, and he joined colleagues in founding the Société Française de Psychanalyse. From 1953 to 1964 his seminar was held at Sainte-Anne; his 1953 Rome report, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," set out the program of the return to Freud in full.

The break with organized psychoanalysis came over technique. Lacan used variable-length sessions, ending them at a point determined by the logic of the material rather than by the clock, sometimes after only a few minutes. When the Société Française de Psychanalyse sought affiliation with the International Psychoanalytical Association, negotiations that began in 1962 ended in August 1963 with the association making recognition conditional on Lacan's removal from the list of training analysts; the society complied in November, and Lacan lost the right to conduct training analyses. He referred to the outcome as his excommunication.

On 21 June 1964 he founded the École Freudienne de Paris, taking with him many of the younger analysts, and with the support of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser he was appointed a lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. His seminar that year, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, was the only one published in his lifetime, appearing in 1973. The Écrits appeared in 1966 with an index of concepts compiled by his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller, and its success led to a two-volume edition in 1969 and to invitations to lecture abroad, including at Yale, Columbia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975. In 1967 he introduced the "pass," a procedure through which analysands testified to the end of their own analysis before a jury as a route to authorization as an analyst. In January 1980 he abruptly dissolved the École Freudienne de Paris and endorsed the founding of the École de la Cause freudienne. He died in Paris on 9 September 1981.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The mirror stage

Drawing on Wallon's observations, Lacan proposed that between roughly six and eighteen months an infant, still motorically uncoordinated, anticipates a bodily unity it does not yet possess by identifying with its mirror image. The identification is a jubilation and also a misrecognition: the coherent image contrasts with a felt experience of fragmentation, and the ego is constituted by taking an external image as the self. Lacan emphasized that the mirror is a figure for any imago through which a subject is captured, not only a literal glass, and he increasingly treated the mirror stage as a permanent structure of subjectivity, the paradigm of the Imaginary order, rather than as a datable developmental phase.

The unconscious is structured like a language

Lacan argued that the unconscious is not a reservoir of instinct but a system of signifiers organized by the same operations that Roman Jakobson identified in language. He mapped metaphor onto Freud's condensation and metonymy onto displacement, so that slips of the tongue, jokes, dreams and symptoms become readable as formations of a signifying chain. His reformulation of the Saussurean sign gave priority to the signifier over the signified, and he summarized the position in the formula that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other: a subject's most intimate productions are structured by a linguistic and cultural order that precedes and exceeds the individual.

The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real

Lacan's three registers organize his whole later teaching. The Imaginary is the order of images, identifications and the dual relation of ego to counterpart. The Symbolic is the order of language, law and kinship, into which the child enters through the intervention that Lacan described with Freud's term the Name-of-the-Father, and which he read through Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology. The Real is what resists symbolization absolutely, the traumatic kernel that returns as symptom, anxiety or psychotic break. In clinical terms, the aim is not the adaptation of the ego to social norms, which Lacan considered collusive, but the subject's assumption of the desire structured by these three orders.

Desire, the Other and objet petit a

Lacan held that desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack, and that it is always desire of the Other: it is mediated by recognition, by language and by the symbolic order. The objet petit a names the unattainable object-cause that sets desire in motion. His distinction between the anatomical penis and the symbolic phallus, together with the claim that there is no pre-discursive sexual relation, made his account of sexual difference influential and, for many feminists, deeply contentious.

Later formalizations

From the late 1960s Lacan turned to mathematical and topological formalization, using mathemes, graphs, the Möbius strip and the Borromean knot to display how the three registers interlock, and developing the notion of the sinthome as the singular knotting that holds a subject together. He also developed the concept of jouissance, an enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle that repeatedly breaches its own limits.

Major Publications

De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (doctoral thesis, 1932; published 1975).
Écrits (1966), the collected papers of twenty-five years, including the Rome report and the seminar on "The Purloined Letter."
Télévision (1973).
Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1973).
Le Séminaire, Livre I: Les écrits techniques de Freud (1975).
Le Séminaire, Livre II: Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (1978).
Le Séminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (1981).

Impact and Legacy

Lacan's influence has been greatest outside empirical psychology. His rereading of Freud shaped post-structuralism, critical theory and feminist thought, informed Louis Althusser's account of ideology, and underwrites the work of Slavoj Žižek in cultural and political critique. In film studies the mirror stage and the concept of the gaze became standard tools. Clinically, Lacanian schools descended from the École de la Cause freudienne, including the World Association of Psychoanalysis, sustain a distinct tradition of practice organized around the variable-length session and the pass.

The criticisms are equally substantial. The first concerns evidence. The psychiatrist Norman N. Holland declared that there is no evidence whatsoever for the mirror stage, and the physician Raymond Tallis argued in 1988 that taken literally the theory predicts that congenitally blind people would lack selfhood and be unable to enter language, a consequence for which there is no support. Research using the mirror test places reliable self-recognition at roughly fifteen to twenty-four months, later than the six-month onset Lacan first proposed, and developmental work associates it with the emergence of linguistic self-reference rather than with a prelinguistic visual event. Dylan Evans, himself a sympathetic commentator, conceded that by the 1950s the concept had become so abstract as to be untestable and therefore of no scientific value. Lacanians reply that the mirror stage was never a chronological claim about infants at all but a structural account of how an ego forms through identification, and that the mirror is only one among the imagos that can serve, so the empirical timetable does not bear on the argument.

The second and best-known criticism is epistemological. In Fashionable Nonsense (1997, also published as Intellectual Impostures), the physicist Alan Sokal and the mathematician Jean Bricmont devoted a chapter to Lacan's use of scientific concepts. They argued that he imported the vocabulary of mathematics and topology without demonstrating any connection between the formalism and the psychological phenomena under discussion, and they judged the analogy between topology and mental illness to be not merely false but gibberish. Their emblematic target is the passage in which the erectile organ is equated with the square root of minus one. Thomas Nagel, Richard Dawkins and Noam Chomsky supported the book, Dawkins remarking that a thinker caught at such an equation has forfeited his credentials in subjects the reader cannot check.

Defenders have replied in detail. Bruce Fink, in Lacan to the Letter, argues that Lacan explicitly used mathematical concepts metaphorically rather than claiming his concepts were mathematically founded, that several terms Sokal and Bricmont treat as arbitrary have histories in linguistics, and that the two authors converted a disagreement about writing style into an attack on a body of thought they did not understand. John Sturrock, reviewing the book in the London Review of Books, charged them with linguistic reductionism. Arkady Plotnitsky defended the conceptual link between irrational and imaginary numbers while conceding that the square root of minus one is not the erectile organ. The dispute therefore turns on whether a metaphor drawn from a technical field carries an obligation of technical correctness, and on that question the two sides have not converged.

Two further lines of criticism are institutional and political rather than epistemological. The variable-length session was denounced by the Paris Psychoanalytic Society as unethical, with detractors seeing manipulation or self-promotion in sessions that could end after two minutes; Lacan's supporters maintain that the cut punctuates the analysand's discourse and disrupts imaginary identification rather than gratifying the analyst. And feminist theorists, above all Luce Irigaray, attacked the phallocentric cast of the Symbolic order and the claim that woman is a symptom of man; Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous developed alternatives from within French psychoanalysis. Lacanians answer that Lacan's sexual difference is symbolic rather than biological and that his account of the absence of a complementary sexual relation destabilizes fixed identity, which is precisely why queer theorists and Judith Butler have been able to use it.