Jacques Lacan and Contemporary Psychoanalytic Criticism

Jacques Lacan is definitely one of the most remarkable figures of post-structuralism. Being influenced by Saussure’s and Claude Levi-Strauss’s views, he fundamentally changed contemporary psychoanalysis. Lacan’s ideas are, in other words, a review of Freud’s thoughts, which are mainly known as a “Return to Freud”. But the fact is that Lacan’s being influenced by structuralist ideas provided him with a new undersstanding of the unconscious. The unconscious, in Lacan’s view, has no autonomous identity but possesses a linguistic structure; in addition to that, he provided us with a new definition for subjectivity which is based on “lack”. Subject, in Lacan’s theory, does not essentially bear a unified, consistent form, but it is the “other” that forms the heart of the identity for the subject. The presence of the “other” helps the subject to find identity and to come to self-knowledge through this “other”. Psychoanalysis takes an important place in post-structuralist criticism. Object-centrality and decentralism, two important features of Lacanian psycchoanalysis, distinguish it from the classical psychoanalysis. In Lacan’s theory, there are three basic orders in the life of human being which are the key terms as well: desire, gender and unconscious language. In this article, I first define theses key terms in brief; then bring Lacan’s own analysis about these terms into discussion and study some of the examples in order to make a better understanding of them. Finally, I will briefly discuss the differences between Lacanian criticism and other post-structuralist readings.