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.
Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality
Forensic Psychology: A Very Short Introduction
The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Penguin Psychology)
Addiction Essentials: The Go-To Guide for Clinicians and Patients
Non-Obvious 2016 Edition: How To Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict The Future
to begin to engage you in an activity which is productive, constructive and potentially lifechanging. * * * ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Bob Eaglestone and Liz Thompson for their patience and encouragement during the writing of this book. I would also like to thank Eugenie Georgaca for her invaluable criticism and advice. * * * WHY LACAN? Jacques Lacan (1901–81) is arguably the most important psychoanalyst since Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the originator and
intimate reasons, but at the same time there is a wider social or symbolic aspect to this relationship. A relationship or marriage concerns not just the two people involved but also a whole social network of friends, relations and institutions. Thus, personal relationships situate men and women in a symbolic circuit of social meanings. According to Lacan, therefore, we must distinguish between the real people involved and the symbolic structures that organize relationships between men and women.
psychology'. Ego psychology developed in the United States in the years following the Second World War and focused on ways of strengthening the defence mechanisms of the conscious mind rather than the unconscious motivation of our actions, as in classical psychoanalysis. Rudolph Loewenstein, Lacan's training analyst, had been one of the founding fathers of Ego psychology, having fled Nazi persecution in the 1940s. Lacan saw both as a betrayal of psychoanalysis. He was strongly opposed to the
positive content – the sign 'woman' has no positive or empirical signified. There is no universal category of women to which the sign 'Woman' refers. To appeal to the notion of women therefore as a homogeneous group is to appeal to an imaginary, and therefore illusory, identity. Furthermore, when Lacan talks about existence, he is referring to something at the level of the symbolic. If the woman was to exist she would have to exist at the level of the symbolic and this has a number of
away and throws up. After this failed sexual encounter their relationship is reversed and Dil becomes obsessively in love with Fergus, while he remains distant towards her. What we see here, therefore, is precisely the asymmetry that Lacan describes in all sexual relationships between 'what the lover sees in the loved one and what the loved one knows himself to be' (1994:103). This is the inescapable deadlock of all sexual relationships, according to Lacan. Dil's love for Fergus is so absolute
