Lacanian psychoanalysis

Lacanianism is the study of, and development of, the ideas and theories of the dissident French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Beginning as a commentary on the writings of Freud, Lacanianism developed into a new psychoanalytic theory of humankind, and spawned a world-wide movement of its own.

Fredric Jameson has argued that "Lacan's work must be read as presupposing the entire content of classical Freudianism, otherwise it would simply be another philosophy or intellectual system".

Lacan considered the human psyche to be framed within the three orders of The Imaginary, The Symbolic and The Real (RSI). The three divisions in their varying emphases also correspond roughly to the development of Lacan's thought. As he himself put it in Seminar XXII, "I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic...and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real".

Lacan's early psychoanalytic contributions centered on the questions of image, identification and unconscious fantasy. Developing Henri Wallon's concept of infant mirroring, he used the idea of the mirror stage to demonstrate the imaginary nature of the ego, in opposition to the views of ego psychology.

In the fifties, the focus of Lacan's interest shifted to the symbolic order of kinship, culture, social structure and roles — all mediated by the acquisition of language — into which each one of us is born and with which we all have to come to terms.

The focus of therapy became that of dealing with disruptions on the part of the Imaginary of the structuring role played by the signifier/Other/Symbolic Order.

The sixties saw Lacan's attention increasingly focused on what he termed the Real — not external consensual reality, but rather that unconscious element in the personality, linked to trauma, dream and the drive, which resists signification.

The Real was what was lacking or absent from every totalising structural theory; and in the form of jouissance, and the persistence of the symptom or synthome, marked Lacan's shifting of psychoanalysis from modernity to postmodernity.

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