Page 153 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 13: The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious—Jacques Lacan: An Introduction

To intimates like Dolto, "Lacan was like a narcissistic and wayward child... All he thought about Notes
was himself and his work". Yet if Lacan was a narcissist, if his writings are essentially "the
confessions of a self-justifying megalomaniac", fuelled by "Lacan's craving for recognition-his
almost demonic hunger"-if they reveal "a narcissistic enjoyment of mystification as a form of
omnipotent power... phantasies of narcissistic omnipotence", yet Lacan was clearly one of "what
Maccoby calls 'productive narcissists'... [who] get others to buy into their vision and help to make
it a reality... the narcissists who change our world.
Self-Assessment
1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Lacan was a ............... psychoanalyst.
(a) French (b) German
(c) American (d) None of these
(ii) Lacan developed the Theory of Mirror in ............... .
(a) 1930 (b) 1935
(c) 1936 (d) 1940
(iii) The Mirror style concerns the ability of ............... .
(a) A boy (b) A girl
(c) An infant (d) A man
(iv) The discourse of Rome is the more common name given to Lacan’s lecture presented in
Rome in ............... .
(a) 1950 (b) 1953
(c) 1945 (d) 1960
13.7 Summary

• Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent
contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial
psycho-analyst since Freud".
• Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Emilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father
was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic-his younger
brother went to a monastery in 1929 and Lacan attended the Jesuit Collège Stanislas. During
the early 1920s, Lacan attended right-wing Action Française political meetings and met the
founder, Charles Maurras. By the mid-1920s, Lacan had become dissatisfied with religion
and quarrelled with his family over it.
• 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 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),

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