Reading Lacan-The Structure of the Unconscious.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Austrian neurologist who founded Psychoanalysis, took his experience and theories through many analyses and developments, before coming to name anything. He took great care to make his concepts and theories intelligible, while Lacan was more interested in what cannot be limited to ordinary definitions. He was interested in what happens between words and lines, with the margins of the psyche, with an unconscious La Linguisterie that is the art andscience of the word that fails. Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), the French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is considered the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. Lacan deliberately wrote in a Prose style, that would resist any neat summary of his concepts and avoid being over systematised. His style of writing and analysis is full of play, puns, jokes, metaphors, irony and contradictions that resemble the psychoanalytic ‘free association’ of images words ideas and meanings that change with context and reveal unconscious desires. For this essay, I am using ordinary psychoanalytic terminology and theory. In a Freudian understanding, this self-restriction to representing standard psychoanalytic theory, is achieved through the repressive function of my superego. In a Lacanian understanding, this writing function is achieved in the name of the Symbolic Father of Freud’s Totem and Taboo. If like Lacan however, the playful son, I allowed myself creativity and unconscious fluidity in writing about Freud and Lacan, this would be a very different kind of essay. My experience of studying, reading and interpreting Lacan however, was a fluid and erotic experience, so perhaps his theory of the intimacy of language and desire is correct. “Will our action go so far, then, as to repress the very truth that it bears in its exercise?” (1)

What made listening to Lacan a mixed pleasure was the fact that, while all these other speakers sensibly spoke in elegant French, Lacan insisted on speaking in terrible English. The reason he gave for this, typically enough, was so that the non-French-speaking representative of the Ford Foundation, which had funded the conference, could understand him.

The French psychoanalytic Jacques Marie Èmile Lacan (1901-81) reconceptualized Sigmund Freud using post-structuralism. For him human passion is structured by the desires and feelings of the relay of others as a social phenomenon. In this context psychoanalysis can be reduced to a theory of the human subject created by social interaction in - a combination of language, culture and the spaces between people. But Lacan also insists upon distinguishing between different kinds of desires in which he points to a fundamental incompatibility between desire and speech, because there is always a leftover which exceeds speech. This leftover is by Lacan considered the centre of the real and (like Freud) he is mainly concerned with the fundamental distinction between the conscious I (ego) and the unconscious subject, which often reveals itself in situations where the conscious ego is out of control.

Lacan, Language, and Philosophy cover image: Spring/Summer, Rebecca Driffield, 2003. cover image: colberg visual communication design philosophy / psychology r u s s e l l g r i g g Lacan, Language, and Philosophy

I attempt to provide a succinct account of Lacan's ideas on the unconscious from the 1950's through his two main contributions: “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953) and “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” (1957). I want to show what is exciting, insightful and relevant about such ideas whilst addressing some philosophical shortfalls. I will also look at the practical clinical application of his ideas which I will argue are capable of being employed in a dangerous manner.

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 2013

In this work I discuss the relevance of the psychoanalytic concepts of resistance and transference for an understanding of language from a psychoanalytic point of view, in particular how it is that human beings relate to language and whether or not we can conceive of a relation of reference between word and thing from the point of view of Jacques Lacan’s notion of the subject of the unconscious. This investigation takes us through the notion of reference and how it is possible (or not) for language to even refer to anything outside of itself from a psychoanalytic point of view. How does psychoanalysis force us to confront our prejudices about language? How might we understand the status of knowledge differently (and productively) after Lacan, taking into account the concept of the unconscious as “structured like a language”? We are concerned throughout with understanding the unconscious in material terms.

In this essay I will discuss the concept of the unconscious between Lacan and Freud; and, examine how it relates to desire, focusing on how desire reveals itself through Lacan's participation in Kojeve's dialogue with Hegel. In this examination of identity, Freud's concept of the unconscious is situated between, "Cause and that which it affects" (Lacan, 22). I will argue that Lacan and Freud not only privilege the male, but also accept and reconstitute the language of domination; therefore impacting the power structure of the other.

Choice Reviews Online, 2002