Page 144 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, in which he drew a connection between phsychiatric
medicine and psychoanalysis. It was this combination of the theoretical and the clinical that
would become Lacan's practice and inform what he would call his "return to Freud." In his lifetime,
Lacan extended the field of psychoanalysis into philosophy, linguistics, literature and mathematics,
through close readings of Freud and continued clinical practice.

Lacan was an admirable student, and excelled especially at Latin and philosophy.
He went to medical school, and began studying psychoanalysis in the 1920s with
the psychiatrist GaÎtan de Clérambault. He studied at the Faculté de Médecine de
Paris, and worked with patients suffering from délires ý deux, or "automatism," a
condition in which the patient believes his actions, writing, or speech, are controlled
by an outside and omnipotent force.

In discussions of Lacan's career, it is often divided into four stages. The first, from 1926 to 1953,
marks an evolution from conventional psychiatric work to the gradual inclusion of psychoanalytical
concepts in the clinic, both in diagnosis and treatment. His first publications are case studies. In
1936 Lacan developed his theory of the "Mirror Stage", and published a number of articles about
its importance in the development of the subject. This work was particularly influenced by the
psychologist Henri Wallon, as well as J.M. Baldwin, Charlotte Bühler, and Otto Rank. The Mirror
Stage concerns the ability of an infant (6 to 18 months of age) to recognize its own image in mirror,
before it is able to speak or have control over its motor skills. The infant must see the image of
itself as both being itself and not itself, in that it is the reflection of its own face and only a reflected
image at the same time. To become a subject, or social being, the infant must come to terms with
the reflection not being identical to itself as a subject. This marks the child's entry into language,
and the formation of ego. The Mirror Stage changes the emphasis in subject formation from a
biological base to a symbolic or language base. As Lacan writes in the Discourse of Rome, "Man
speaks…but it is because the symbol has made him man."
The Discourse of Rome is the more common name given to Lacan's lecture presented in Rome in
1953 originally titled Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse. This paper
became the manifesto of the new Société française de psychanalytique (SFP), which Lacan formed
the same year when he broke with the International Psycho-Analytical Association (IPA). His
break with the IPA was based on major disagreements Lacan had with the ego psychology of the
group, which placed the ego at the origin of psychic stability. Lacan argued against therapeutic
pretensions, claiming that the ego could never be "healed", and that the true intension of
psychoanalysis was never cure, but analysis itself.
Lacan attracted philosophers, linguists, and other thinkers to his renowned weekly seminar at St.
Anne's Church. Barthes, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser sat in his audience and were
influenced by his work. From this lecture series came what is perhaps his most celebrated work,
Écrits (1966).
From 1953-63 Lacan concentrated on structural linguistics and the role of the symbolic in the work
of Freud. He felt that Freud had understood that human psychology is linguistically based, but
would have needed Saussure's vocabulary and structuralist concept of language as a system of
differences to articulate the relationship. In Les Psychoses: Seminar III, Lacan claims that the
unconscious is "structured like a language," and governed by the order of the signifier. This is
contrary to the idea that the unconscious is governed by autonomous repressed or instinctual
desires. Saussure's linguistic theory, especially on the relation of constant separation between
signifier and signified, led Lacan to show that no signifier ever rests on any particular signified.
He went on to argue that the Symbolic order, the order of signs, representations, significations
and images, is the place where the individual is formed as a subject. He stated that the subject is
always the subject of the signifier.

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