Jacques Lacan: A Post Structural Psychoanalyst

Abstract

The present paper is an attempt to trace the Lacanian concepts. These concepts made Lacan one of the most original thinkers on the intellectual scene of France. His concepts have proven an important influence on contemporary critical theory, cultural theory and film study. Throughout his life, he tried to analyze Freud and doing so invented his own psychoanalytical approach. What Lacan calls this as Return to Freud where he emphasizes renewed attention to the original texts of Freud and radical critique of ego psychoanalysis? As above stated, that Lacan’s ideas were centered on Freudian field such as unconscious, Oedipus Complex, fear of castration, ego and the centrality of language in the construction of self. His substantial corpus of writing, speeches and seminars can be read as an attempt to unify and reground what are the four fundamental objectives of Freud’s theoretical writings namely 1. A Theorization of Psychoanalytical Practice as a Curative Procedure; 2. The Generation of a Systematic Meta-Psychology capable of providing the basis for 3. The Formalization of Diagnostic Method of Mental Illness; and 4. The construction of the Self and the Development of the Civilized Human Psyche. While doing so, Lacan brought, however, a keen knowledge of the latest developments in the human sciences, drawing especially on structuralist linguistics of De Sassure, the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, topology and game theory. In the sense his work was a mixture of inter-disciplinary philosophies such as linguistics, philosophy, mathematics and etc. Lacanian theories left an enduring influence on literary and cultural theories of the present time.