Jacques Lacan (Routledge Critical Thinkers)
Sean Homer
Language: English
Pages: 155
ISBN: 0415256178
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Jacques Lacan is one of the most challenging and controversial of contemporary thinkers, as well as the most influential psychoanalyst since Freud. Lacanian theory has reached far beyond the consulting room to engage with such diverse disciplines as literature, film, gender and social theory. This book covers the full extent of Lacan's career and provides an accessible guide to Lacanian concepts and his writing on: the imaginary and the symbolic; the Oedipus Complex and the meaning of the phallus; the subject and the unconscious; the real; sexual difference.
Locating Lacan's work in the context of contemporary French thought and the history of psychoanalysis, Sean Homer's Jacques Lacan is the ideal introduction to this influential theorist.
law. In Freud's myth of origins the primal father is a figure of absolute power; the father who aggregates to himself the women and wealth of the primal horde by expelling his sons and rivals. What distinguishes this tyrannical figure from the Oedipal father is that he is not himself subordinated to the law – the law that prohibits his son's access to the women of the horde. This other father, therefore – the cruel and licentious one – is the reverse side of the law. Both fathers function
desires originating in the unconscious and seeking expression in consciousness; the topographical model of the conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious; and finally the structural model of the id, ego and superego (see Thurschwell (2000: ch. 5) for an account of these different models). Similarly, Lacan developed a number of different definitions of the unconscious and the emphasis that he placed on each conceptualization changed throughout his career. We will consider three specific definitions
what am I in the Other's desire? and can thus differentiate itself from the desire of the Other. While the desire of the Other always exceeds or escapes the subject, there nevertheless remains something that the subject can recover and thus sustain 'him or herself in being, as a being of desire' (Fink 1995:61), or a desiring subject. That remainder is the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire (see Chapter 5). THE LACANIAN SUBJECT The Lacanian subject is, therefore, constituted through
and functionsunconsciously, intruding into our symbolic reality in the form of need. The real is a kind of ubiquitous undifferentiated mass from which we must distinguish ourselves, as subjects, through the process of symbolization. It is through the process of cancelling out, of symbolizing the real, that 'social reality' is created. In short, the real does not exist, as existence is a product of thought and language and the real precedes language. The real is 'that which resists
of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience', in Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Routledge/Tavistock, pp. 1–7. –––– (1977b [1956]) 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis', in Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Routledge/Tavistock, pp. 30–113. –––– (1977c [1957]) 'The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud', in Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Routledge/Tavistock, pp. 146–78.