Jaques Lacan

Disciplines > Psychoanalysis > Theorists > Lacan

Jaques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychoanalyst who reconceptualized Freud using post-structuralism. He sought to return psychoanalysis on the unconscious, using Saussure's linguistics, structural anthropology and post-structural theories.

He describes three phases of psychosexual development:

• The neonatal phase: Birth to six months.
• The Mirror phase: Six to eighteen months.
• The Symbolic Register: Eighteen months to four years.

Other points of note include:

• Jouissance: Pleasure too great to bear.
• Infant sexuality: Breast, phallus, castration, Oedipus, etc.
• Three registers of human reality: Real, Imaginary, Symbolic.
• Desire: A deep need for lack.
• Lacanian psychoanalysis: Deeper stuff.

For Lacan, the ego arrives in the Mirror phase, as an act of primary narcissism and idealization, being created through regarding of an Other.

Other words used by Lacan

Lacan used the German words Umwelt (environment or surroundings) and Innenwelt (the inner world) to emphasize the interaction between the external physical world and the imaginary interior space of the 'I' occupies and where the human subject is situated.

He uses the French word méconnaissance ( to misconstrue or misrecognize) to describe the infant's confusion between its image and it's physical self. The German term Verneinung (denial) is used to explain the separation of ego division as a result of méconnaissance.

Lacan uses the Latin Imago (image) to indicate the image, drawing on the connotation from the Christian use of 'imago Dei' as the image of God to which Christians should strive to conform.

Aha-Erlebnis is the Eureka 'aha' experience as the child recognizes its image as itself.

'Object petit a' is the sense of something misssing, a lack.

'Nom du pere', or 'name of the father' is an indication of the cultural codes and language gained from the father in the symbolic register.

See also

Saussure, Other