Page 172 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories Gowher Ahmad Naik, Lovely Professional University

Notes Unit 15: The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconcious—
Jacques Lacan: Critical Appreciation

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
15.1 Text—The Insistence of Letter in the Unconscious
15.2 Critical Appreciation
15.3 Summary
15.4 Key-Words
15.5 Review Questions
15.6 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Examine the Insistence of the Letter in the Unconcious.
• Understand Lacan’s Metonymy and Desire.
Introduction

Lacan belong to a bourgeois eatholic family. He was an admirable student, and excelled especially
at Latin and Philosophy. In The Letter in the Unconscious. Lacan uses his concept of the letter to
distance himself from the Jungian approach to symbols and the unconscious. Whereas Jung believes
that there is a collective unconscious which works with symbolic archetypes, Lacan insists that we
must read the productions of the unconscious à la lettre - in other words, literally to the letter (or,
more specifically, the concept of the letter which Lacan's essay seeks to introduce).
In Freud's theory of dreams, the individual's unconscious takes advantage of the weakened ego
during sleep in order to produce thoughts which have been censored during the individual's
wakened life. Using Lacan's concept of the letter, we should be able to see how, in Fink's example,
the unconscious cleverly produces the censored thought associated with the word "algorithm". (Of
course, this does not actually tell us why this particular hypothetical analysand has consciously
censored a thought associated with the word "algorithm".)
15.1 Text—Insistence of Letter in the Unconscious

'Nature and Culture' in the study of Unconscious as projected by Jacques Lacan in his essay "The
Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious".
Jacques Lacan, being influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic structuralism and
psychoanalytical theory of Sigmund Freud, gives insistence on projection of unconscious in a
linguistic framework. It is Freud who summarizes unconscious as chaotic and indefinable; Lacan
starts his investigation from this point and interprets unconscious in terms of letter or utterance.
Lacan analyses unconscious through a linguist's methodology and considers unconscious as
structured system like language. His procedure is to recast Freud's key concepts and mechanism
into linguistic mode, viewing human mind not as pre-existent to, but as constituted by language
we use. Lacan also follows Roman Jacobson's theory of metaphor and metonymy to stimulate and
validate his argument. Lacan analyses the entire process of metaphor and metonymy from

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