Page 146 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Lacan strived to create a more precise mathematically based theory in the last stage of his career.
His "meta-theory" of psychoanalysis uses mathematics, casting the trilogy he conceived of earlier
(the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary) in the language of topology and mathemes rather than
linguistics. He claimed that "La mathématisation seule atteint ý un reel." From 1974 he studied the
intersection of the three registers through complicated topological figures. He began to confound
even his most faithful followers, and students became suspicious of how applicable this type of
education might be to their clinical practice. Lacan decided to dissolve the EFP and found another
association, the École de la Cause Freudienne, which he maintained until his death in 1981. By the
time of his death, Lacan had become one of the most influential and controversial intellects in the
world. His work has had a significant effect on literature, film studies, and philosophy, as well as
on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.

In 1931, Lacan became a licensed forensic psychiatrist. In 1932, he was awarded
the Doctorat d'état for his thesis On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the
meetings and met the founder, Charles Maurras. By the mid-1920s, Lacan had
become dissatisfied with religion and quarrelled with his family over it.

13.2 Lacan’s Major Concepts

Lacan's "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud, and
included a radical critique of Ego psychology, whereas "Lacan's quarrel with Object Relations
psychoanalysis" was a more muted affair. Here he attempted "to restore to the notion of the Object
Relation... the capital of experience that legitimately belongs to it", building upon what he termed
"the hesitant, but controlled work of Melanie Klein... Through her we know the function of the
imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the imago of the mother's body", as well as upon "the
notion of the transitional object, introduced by D. W. Winnicott... a key-point for the explanation
of the genesis of fetishism". Nevertheless, "Lacan systematically questioned those psychoanalytic
developments from the 1930s to the 1970s, which were increasingly and almost exclusively focused
on the child's early relations with the mother... the pre-Oedipal or Kleinian mother"; and Lacan's
rereading of Freud-"characteristically, Lacan insists that his return to Freud supplies the only
valid model"-formed a basic conceptual starting-point in that oppositional strategy.
Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue," jokes, and the interpretation of dreams
all emphasized the agency of language in subjective constitution. In "The Agency of the Letter in
the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud," he proposes that "the unconscious is structured like a
language." The unconscious is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the
conscious, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as complex and structurally
sophisticated as consciousness itself. One consequence of the unconscious being structured like a
language is that the self is denied any point of reference to which to be "restored" following
trauma or a crisis of identity.
Andre Green objected that "when you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition doesn't work
for a minute. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says is constituted by thing-
presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong
to the pre-conscious". Freud certainly contrasted "the presentation of the word and the presentation
of the thing... the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone" in his
metapsychology. However "Dylan Evans, Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis... takes issue
with those who, like Andre Green, question the linguistic aspect of the unconscious, emphasizing
Lacan's distinction between das Ding and die Sache in Freud's account of thing-presentation".
Green's criticism of Lacan also included accusations of intellectual dishonesty, he said, "" [He]
cheated everybody… the return to Freud was an excuse, it just meant going to Lacan."

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