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Lacan, Jacques (1901-1981), French psychoanalyst and philosopher

in The Encyclopedia of Modern Europe, Europe Since 1914 - Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction, Edited by Jay Winter and John Merriman, Published by Charles Scribner's Sons, September 2006.

In 1932 Lacan defended his MD dissertation in psychiatry, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (On Paranoid Psychosis in Relationship to Personality). In 1934 he became a member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris, which certified him as a psychoanalyst in 1938. In 1953, refusing to submit to the time rule of a forty-five minute session with the patient, he resigned from the Société and joined the Société Française de Psychanalyse founded by Daniel Lagache. In so doing, he lost his membership in the International Psychoanalytical Association. In 1964 he left the new society and founded his own school of psychoanalysis, the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), which lasted until 1980, when, sixteen months before his death, he established the École de la Cause Freudienne. This tormented relationship with institutionalized psychoanalysis testifies to Lacan’s complicated personality but is also a symptom of the difficulty involved in including psychoanalysis as a formal discipline in an academic setting (a problem Sigmund Freud had already tackled).

Contributions to Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan redefined Freud’s psychoanalysis in an oeuvre spanning fifty years and comprising the Écrits (1966), the Autres écrits (2001) and twenty-six Seminars, based on courses conducted between 1953 and 1979. From beginning to end, this immense body of work is characterized by its conceptual coherence and the vast knowledge put to the task: philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève, Karl Popper), logic (Aristotle, George Boole, Jaakko Hintikka), mathematics and topology (Kurt Gödel, August Möbius, Georg Cantor), linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure), game theory, literature (Sophocles, Jaufré Rudel, Arnaut Daniel, Shakespeare, the Marquis de Sade, Paul Claudel, André Gide, Marguerite Duras, James Joyce), religion, mythology, and art. No field of human endeavor is left untouched by Lacan.

            His major contributions to psychoanalysis fall into three categories. First, he redefined the practice of psychoanalysis. The patient is called the analysand because he is doing the investigative work into this own mind. Sessions are ended when the analysand makes a discovery, not when the traditional forty-five minutes have elapsed. (Lacan took that practice to an unethical extreme when, at the end of his career, he limited the sessions to three minutes.) Second, he reemphasized the importance of the unconscious and the superego in Freud, unlike Freud’s direct heirs, who worked mainly on the ego. Third, he displaced Freud’s theories by submitting them to a logical and mathematical formalization in order to ensure their pertinence and transmissibility. Psychoanalysis was to operate as a reflective theory repositioning the humanities and the hard sciences within a general epistemology.

Agencies of the Psyche

Lacan distinguishes three agencies in the psyche: the symbolic order, the imaginary order, and the real. The corresponding categories in Freud would be, respectively, the superego, the ego, and the id, though Lacan’s renaming is a full remapping of Freud’s work.

              The symbolic order is the set of signifiers. For Lacan, signifiers are not just words: he gives the concept a tremendous extension, since any object in the human sphere is marked by language and thus functions as a signifying element. Also, he stresses the supremacy of the symbolic order: for him, it is the foundation and beginning of all psychic mechanisms. For example, the universal prohibition of incest (and hence the shift from animal instinct to human desire) depends on its formulation within the symbolic order. The symbolic order determines the human subject by its signifying chains, undermining the ego’s autonomy. Indeed, the ego is submitted to an absolute determinism, which it chooses to largely ignore or repress.

The symbolic order is a universal characteristic of human societies; a group can be said to be human only if it is subordinated to a symbolic structure. At the same time, this mark of humanity differs by linguistic group: each existing language determines a symbolic order particular to the community that speaks it. The symbolic order is where societies hold their signifiers in common, and where the superego and cultural constraints operate.

            The imaginary order replaces Freud’s ego agency. Its contents are the signified i.e. the concept evoked by the signifier, significations, and representations produced by the ego processes, namely, identification and projection on objects in the world. As such, it is always built between two poles, the ego itself and its mirror image, the other (written with a lowercase o). The imaginary order is in charge of bringing about repression; it is to be assimilated to what was known before psychoanalysis as “reality,” which Lacan understands as an imaginary construct. Hence, imaginary reality has to be differentiated in principle from the Lacanian real, which is the locus of meaning and truth.

The imaginary order is completely subordinated to the symbolic order, also called “the Other” (capital O): the chain of signifiers is the determinant that organizes the signifieds and representations within the imaginary order. The imaginary order is the set comprising all the representations of an individual as he or she shares them with the group, community, ethnicity, nation, and so on. As such, the imaginary order defines a subject’s particularity, through which he identifies himself as part of a group.

            The real replaces Freud’s unconscious. It is the locus of singularity, defined as an interdicted entity that is impossible to formalize or represent: as such, it cannot be called an order, unlike the symbolic and the imaginary. It overlaps with the real in science, which the incompleteness of our mathematical representations prevents us from knowing in its totality. Escaping any formalization, the real is where truth, meaning, and sense are to be. We have only partial access to the real, through lapses, dreams, and bungled actions: “The unconscious is to not remember what one knows.” (Lacan 2001, p. 333) Hence, “Truth can be told only in half, because, beyond this half said, there is nothing to say. . . . Here, in consequence, discourse disappears. We don’t speak about what is unutterable.” (Lacan 1991, p. 192)

Mathematical Formalization

Lacan strove to transmit his theory unencumbered by the interferences that always appear in human linguistic communication. That is why he devoted himself to a mathematical formalization of his concepts, since, in an algorithm, everything is transmissible and not subject to the loss that occurs in ordinary language. At stake is a map of the psyche that connects the agencies (symbolic, imaginary, and real) and that dispenses with Freud’s unusable diagram of the psyche published in The Ego and the Id (1923). Lacan’s first attempt, based on vector analysis, is schema L’, published in 1956 (Écrits, p. 53). The last formalization is grounded in topology and knot theory; Lacan uses the Borromean knot and the Möbius strip as his models.

Lacan’s theory belongs to the realist philosophical tradition, which holds that linguistic categories structure real, existing objects in the world. That is why he cannot be bundled with a nominalist “French philosophical school” represented by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, for example. In addition, Lacan belongs to a materialist tradition: matter, in his theory, is language, “the signifier transcended into language” (2001, p. 209). As such, language can be submitted to the procedures of modern (real) logic; it can also be submitted to mathematical formalization. This is his crowning, but not yet fully understood, contribution: the giant step taken by Lacan, and by no one else, was to mathematically formalize some parts of ordinary language while including in this formalization the unconscious “structured as a language.” Of course, mathematicians and logicians (Gottlob Frege, Boole, Alfred Tarski, and Bertrand Russell, for example) have long been at work on this endeavor. But their goal is to refine the operation of language into an entirely consistent (that is, self-reflexive and conscious) set; their formalizations do not include the unconscious, which is inconsistency itself. Here lies Lacan’s profound originality, which makes him one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century. Lacan created a new discipline that rigorously takes into account the symbolic effects of language on human beings.

Lacan’s influence on psychoanalysis and other disciplines in the humanities has been enormous throughout the world. Lacanian schools have surfaced everywhere, especially in Latin countries with a Catholic tradition in Europe and South America. In the Protestant Anglo-Saxon world, his legacy has been more limited, restricted to literature departments and some scattered psychoanalytic societies. It has slowly faded as a theory and a practice to cure mental illnesses. America’s rejection of Lacan can be explained by cultural differences: the American emphasis on clarity and pragmatism; the demonstrated efficiency of the imaginary order in America; the misinterpretation of Lacan’s theory by feminist readers; Lacan’s own anti-Americanism. All these factors work against an easy acceptance of his work in America.

Lacan predicted the demise of psychoanalysis as cure: “When psychoanalysis has been vanquished by the growing impasses of our civilization (a discontent that Freud foresaw), the Écrits indications will be taken up by somebody” (2001, p. 348). What will his legacy be when that moment arrives? It will consist in his breakthrough contribution to a general epistemology that combines and opposes the social sciences and the humanities on one side, and mathematics on the other. If psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice dies, we will be left with Lacan’s truly immense contribution to epistemology, a contribution that has not yet been fully mapped in English-speaking countries.

Bibliography

Feher-Gurewich, Judith, and Michel Tort, eds. Lacan and the New Wave in American Psychoanalysis, The Other Press, 1999.

Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, N.J., 1995.

Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire, Livre XVII: L’envers de la psychanalyse, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris, 1991.

———. Autres écrits. Paris, 2001.

Leupin, Alexandre. Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion. New York, The Other Press, 2004.

General introduction to his work

Mitchell, Juliet, and Jaqueline Rose, eds. Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan, and the École Freudienne. Translated by Jaqueline Rose. New York, 1985.

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, ed. Lacan in America. New York, 2000.

Vanier, Alain. Lacan. Translated by Susan Fairfield. A general introduction. New York, 2000.