Psychoanalytical Criticism- Jacques Lacan

 

Jacques Lacan

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Psychoanalytical Criticism- Jacques Lacan

Following our research on Freudian basics, we now turn to a thinker who at the same time revolutionized and shocked the world of psychoanalysis: the French master, Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Where Freud delved into the hidden chambers of the mind, Lacan insisted that the key to these chambers was not buried deep within, but was in fact all around us—woven into the web of language itself.

This Newsletter Psychoanalytical Criticism- Jacques Lacan delves into Lacan’s complex and inspiringly disruptive ideas. We will unpack his central claim—that the unconscious is structured like a language—and explore its deep implications for literature, identity, and the very notion of selfhood. Our investigation will focus on the intricate interplay between writing and the formation of identity, scrutinising how social, medical, and historical constructions of insanity are not just reflected in, but are produced by, the language we use to describe ourselves and our world.

Introduction:

To understand Lacan is to understand a fundamental shift. While Freud used language as a tool to access the unconscious (through free association, dream interpretation), Lacan argued that language is the very structure of the unconscious itself. For Lacan, we do not use language; we inhabit it. Our desires, our fears, and our very sense of self are constituted within its networks and constraints.

This perspective makes Lacanian theory exceptionally powerful for literary studies. If the unconscious and literature both operate under the same linguistic rules, then a literary text becomes a privileged object for analysis—not as a symptom of an author’s neurosis, but as a direct manifestation of the unconscious processes of language.

Key Concepts: A Lexicon for the Modern Analyst

Navigating Lacan requires a new vocabulary. Here are the essential terms, decoded.

• The Unconscious is Structured Like a Language

Ø  This is Lacan’s most famous and foundational axiom. He rejected the idea of the unconscious as a seething, chaotic cauldron of primal urges. Instead, he proposed it is orderly, logical, and follows the rules of linguistic systems. We can analyse dreams, slips of the tongue, and literary texts using the same tools we use to analyse poetry or prose—specifically, the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy.

• Signifier and Signified

Ø  Lacan draws from linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. A signifier is the sound-image or written word (e.g., the letters T-R-E-E). The signified is the mental concept it evokes (the idea of a tall, woody plant). For Saussure, the two were inseparable. Lacan, however, radically pried them apart. He argued the relationship between signifier and signified is never stable or guaranteed. The signified is perpetually slipping under the chain of signifiers. We never finally grasp meaning; we endlessly move from one signifier to another in a never-ending quest for a fullness of meaning that is always deferred.

• The Mirror Stage

Ø This is Lacan's theory of how the ego is formed. Between 6-18 months, an infant recognises its own reflection in a mirror (or similar reflective surface, like the affirming gaze of a parent). This image is a misrecognition (méconnaissance)—it provides an illusion of coherence, mastery, and totality that the infant, who still experiences its body as uncoordinated and fragmented, does not truly feel. This idealised, external image becomes the core of the ego, which Lacan therefore saw as fundamentally built on a fantasy. The ego is not the seat of autonomy but a constructed entity, born from identification with an external image.

• The Three Orders: The Real, The Imaginary, The Symbolic

Ø  Lacan described human experience as structured by three intertwined registers:

§  The Real: Not everyday reality, but that which is beyond language, unrepresentable, and impossible to articulate. It is the traumatic, pre-linguistic stuff of experience, always outside symbolisation. We encounter it in moments of shock, trauma, or overwhelming jouissance.

§  The Imaginary: The realm of images, identification, and illusion. It is dominated by dyadic relationships (like mother-child) and is the seat of the ego. It is the order of misrecognition and deception, where the self feels whole and unified. It is associated with the maternal.

§  The Symbolic Order: The most crucial order for Lacan. This is the realm of language, law, culture, and social structures. It is the "big Other" that governs our lives with its rules, prohibitions, and norms. Entering the Symbolic Order through language is what socialises us but also introduces lack and separation from the immediate, dyadic world of the Imaginary. It is associated with the Name-of-the-Father, the symbolic law that breaks the primordial bond with the mother.

• Desire and Lack

Ø For Lacan, desire is not a biological drive towards a specific object (like hunger). It is a constant state of lack (manque). We are born into lack upon entering the Symbolic Order, which separates us from the (imagined) plenitude of the maternal body. We then spend our lives seeking objects (objets petit a) that we believe will fill this void. But these objects always fail. Desire is always the desire for something else, and it is this endless movement of desire, not its satisfaction, that defines the human condition. Literature is a profound record of this endless pursuit.

• Jouissance

Ø A term notoriously difficult to translate, often rendered as "enjoyment" but meaning something far more intense and paradoxical. It is a form of extreme pleasure that is so intense it tips over into pain. It is the forbidden enjoyment that exists beyond the pleasure principle, linked to the Real. Society, through the Symbolic Order, limits jouissance for its own stability. The pursuit of jouissance is often associated with self-destructive behaviour and forms of "madness" that defy social logic.

Writing the Fractured Self: Literature and Identity Formation

For Lacan, there is no essential, core self waiting to be expressed. The self is a fiction constructed in the Imaginary and structured by the Symbolic Order of language. Therefore, the act of writing is not an expression of a pre-formed identity but an attempt to constitute one through the signifier.

The author does not master language; language speaks through the author. The text, therefore, is riddled with the traces of the unconscious—not the author’s personal history per se, but the slips, gaps, and contradictions inherent in language itself. A Lacanian critic does not ask, "What does the author mean?" but rather, "How does the text function? Where does meaning break down? What is being repressed by the text’s narrative?"

The Discourse of Insanity: A Linguistic Construction

Lacan’s work forces us to question what we call "madness." If our sanity is predicated on our successful insertion into the Symbolic Order (accepting its laws, its language, its norms), then insanity can be seen as a different relationship to this order.

• Social & Historical Construction: What a society defines as "mad" is what falls outside its dominant symbolic framework. The hysteric’s symptoms, for instance, are a language of the body (corporalised speech) that emerges when direct speech is impossible within the constraints of their social (e.g., patriarchal) Symbolic Order.
• Medical Construction: Lacan was fiercely critical of a medical model that sought to quickly "cure" symptoms without listening to their truth. The symptom is a message from the unconscious; it is a formation of desire. To simply suppress it pharmacologically is to ignore the subject’s truth. The analyst’s role is to help the subject traverse the fantasy structuring their desire, not to impose a normative idea of "health."

Gender, Language, and the Madness of the Feminine

Lacan’s work on gender is among his most controversial and searched-for topics. He stated, "The Woman does not exist" (La femme n'existe pas). This is not a misogynistic dismissal but a radical claim about identity and the Symbolic Order.

He argued that while sexual difference is a fundamental symbolic opposition (having/being the phallus as a signifier of lack), the category "Woman" is not a fixed essence. It is an unattainable ideal, a fantasy constructed within a phallocentric Symbolic Order that defines woman as man’s negative other. Therefore, female identity is even more profoundly constituted by lack and otherness than male identity.

This has dire consequences. If a woman’s desire and jouissance have no adequate representation in the dominant Symbolic Order, her expression may be forced into the realm of the symptom. The "madness" of literary heroines—from Ophelia to Bertha Mason—can be read not as a biological flaw but as the only available language to express a desire that has no other sanctioned means of articulation. Their "hysteria" is a silent protest against a symbolic order that offers them no valid subject position. Writing, therefore, becomes a critical act of forging a new language, of finding a voice from within the gaps of the existing Symbolic Order.

Case Study: Lacan Reads Poe's "The Purloined Letter"

Lacan’s famous seminar on this story is a masterclass in his method. The plot involves a stolen letter whose contents are never revealed, yet it exerts immense power over all who possess it.

• The Letter as Signifier: For Lacan, the letter’s content is irrelevant. What matters is its position within a symbolic circuit. The letter is a pure signifier—its meaning is entirely determined by its place in a triadic structure of looks (the king who doesn’t see, the queen who tries to hide, the minister who sees her hiding).
• The Subject is Determined by the Signifier: Each character who possesses the letter (the Queen, the Minister, Dupin) has their identity and actions dictated by their position relative to this signifier. They do not control the letter; it controls them.
• The Unconscious is the Discourse of the Other: The letter represents the unconscious itself—its content is hidden, but its effects are visible everywhere in the behaviour it generates. We can never "open" the unconscious to see its secrets, just as we never learn the letter’s contents. We can only interpret its effects. This mirrors how we must read a text: not for a hidden meaning, but for how its signifiers structure its narrative and its characters.

Conclusion: 

Lacan provides a sophisticated toolkit for moving beyond simplistic psycho-biographical readings. He teaches us to see the literary text as a dynamic field where the structures of the human psyche—desire, lack, misrecognition, and the relentless pursuit of the unattainable—play out in the medium of language itself.

Further Reading 

• Lacan, J. Écrits (1966) - The key primary text.

• Lacan, J. The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

• Lacan mirror stage explained

• Lacan real symbolic imaginary

• Lacan desire and lack

• Lacan femme n'existe pas

• Lacan purloined letter summary

• Fink, B. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (1995) - An excellent guide.

• Evans, D. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1996) - Invaluable.