Jacques Lacan And The Structure Of The Unconscious

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was an important figure in the Parisian intellectual community for much of the 20th century. His name is often related to psychoanalysis.

He wrote and taught people about the importance of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. He explored the concept from the context of theory and practice for analysis in and of itself, as well as its connection to a wide range of disciplines.

For those interested in the philosophical dimensions of Freudian thinking, Lacan’s work is invaluable. In the last century, Lacanian ideas became the center of various psychoanalytic discussions in philosophical forces.

The first years of Jacques Lacan’s life

Jacques Lacan was born on April 13, 1901. He was the first son of a wealthy and bourgeois family. His parents, Alfred Lacan and Emilie Baudry, belonged to a solid Catholic family.

In 1907, Lacan started at the prestigious Collège Stanislas School, a school that served the Parisian bourgeoisie. There he received a solid primary and secondary school education with a strong religious and traditionalist focus. He finished school in 1919 and began to develop his philosophical beliefs.

Lacan’s professional achievements

Although Lacan’s first publications were published in the late 1920’s, his editorial activities did not really gain momentum until the next decade. The Lacanian milestones appeared in the 1930s:

• In 1932, Lacan published his doctoral dissertation in psychiatry, entitled ” On Paranoic Psychosis as it Relates to the Personality “.

• He became an important figure in the artistic community through his collaborations with surrealists and Dadaists.
• Lacan gave his first presentation on the famous theory of the “mirror stage” at the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in Marienbad in 1936.
• In 1938, one of Lacan’s essays, entitled ” Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual “, was published in the French encyclopedia.

The 1930s were crucial years for Lacan’s development. His youth was marked by a clash of interests and influences related to, among other things, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, philosophy, art and literature.

This period also marked the beginning of a strong interdisciplinary element in Lacan’s work. Not only did he study Freudian analysis, but he also considered the Hegelian dialectic and the Kojevian pedagogy. Lacan made his own contribution to these three perspectives. He added the different experiences of “madness” from a variety of perspectives.

The post-war period

The 1940s were crucial to Lacan’s journey. During this decade he became a great analytical thinker. During this time he produced a lot of written material, including seven annual seminars and many of his famous essays.

After the war, Lacan learned about Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralism and its followers, such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson.

Researchers agree that Levi Strauss’ book, The Structural Elements of Parentage , helped start the structuralist movement in France. This movement flourished during the 1950s and 60s and challenged the theoretical superiority of existentialism.

This change in French social theory led to a fundamental reorientation of Lacan’s worldview. Despite changing this worldview, however, Lacan remained true to Freudian structuralist psychoanalysis.

Lacan considered himself the sole defender of an orthodox Freudianism. He firmly believed that regaining the meaning of language for analysis was the key to Freud’s revolutionary focus on psychic subjectivity.

Lacan spelled out all these ideas and established “lacanism” in his comprehensive manifesto entitled: ” The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis .”

Death and inheritance

In 1980, as he neared the end of his life, Lacan decided it was appropriate to close his school, Ecole Freudienne. This was a controversial decision that led to internal conflicts among his successors.

However, Lacan did not have much chance to participate in these discussions because he died in 1981. The son-in-law and editor of Le Seminaire , Jacques-Alain Miller, reopened the school.

The theory of the three registers forms the framework for different concepts during Lacan’s intellectual path. The three registers correspond to the imaginary, the symbolic and the real.

However, these concepts did not remain static during his lifetime. The characterizations of each register and the relationships between them went through many revisions and changes during his long career.

Language and cultural codes according to Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan gave us the idea that “the unconscious is the discourse of the other” since everything is completely distant and outside the self. The second is the environment you were born in, the one you have to “translate” in order to survive and flourish.

In your life, you gradually acquire awareness and understanding of a variety of signals. The signalings are signs or codes that represent concepts and ideas.

These signals can only reach us from the outside world. Therefore, they must have been part of the language or “discourse”, as Lacan called it, the “other”.

According to Lacan, you can only express the ideas and feelings you have through language. The only language you can use to express yourself is the language of others.

Your unconsciousness generates emotions and images constructed based on the language of others. That is why Lacan says that the unconscious is the discussion of the “other.”

We can conclude that Lacan’s theories have had a significant influence on psychoanalytic practice. They have also made a more objective and open interpretation of the unconscious possible.