Lacanianism or Lacanian psychoanalysis is a theoretical system initiated by the work of Jacques Lacan from the 1950s to the 1980s. It is a theoretical approach that attempts to explain the mind, behaviour, and culture through a structuralist and post-structuralist extension of classical psychoanalysis. Lacanian perspectives contend that the human mind is structured by the world of language, known as the Symbolic. They stress the importance of desire, which is conceived of as perpetual and impossible to satisfy. Contemporary Lacanianism is characterised by a broad range of thought and extensive debate among Lacanians. Lacanianism has been particularly influential in post-structuralism, literary theory, and feminist theory, as well as in various branches of critical theory, including queer theory. Equally, it has been criticised by the post-structuralists Deleuze and Guattari and by various feminist theorists. Outside France, it has had limited clinical influence on psychiatry. There is a Lacanian strand in left-wing politics, including Saul Newman's and Duane Rousselle's post-anarchism, Louis Althusser's structural Marxism, and the works of Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. Influential figures in Lacanianism include Žižek, Julia Kristeva and Serge Leclaire.
Overview Lacanians view the structure of the mind as defined by the individual's entry as an infant into the world of language, the Symbolic, through an Oedipal process. Like other post-structuralist approaches, Lacanianism regards the subject as an illusion created when an individual is signified (represented in language). However, this initial signification is incomplete, as there is always something about the subject which cannot be properly represented in language, which means that signification also divides the subject. The Symbolic is defined by the Other, those parts of the outside world with which the subject cannot identify, which is the place where signifiers are given meaning. Language is hence a discourse of the Other, outside conscious control. The unconscious mind is constituted by a network of empty signifiers that resurface in language—particularly dreams and Freudian slips—and Lacanian clinical practice focuses closely on the precise words used by the analysand (patient), which Lacan characterised as a "return to Freud". Analysis focuses largely on desire. Lacanians contend that desire cannot be satisfied, as the object and cause of desire is an unobtainable object, the objet petit a, which the subject continually associates with different things that they wrongly believe will satisfy their desire. Objet a exists as a consequence of the division of the subject in signification, so desire is said to result from an unsolvable lack at the heart of the subject. Lacanianism posits that all people belong to one of three "clinical structures" and are either psychotic, perverse, or, most commonly, neurotic. Neurotic subjects—that is to say, most people—are then always either hysterical or obsessional. The three clinical structures describe the subject's relationship to the Other and are each associated with a different defence mechanism: psychotics use foreclosure, a rejection of the father's authority in the Oedipus complex that results in a failure to form a Symbolic unconscious; perverts use disavowal, failing to accept that lack causes desire and nominating a specific object as its cause, their fetish; and neurotics use repression. Psychical reality is constituted by the Symbolic, the Imaginary, the Real, and for Lacanians who follow Kristeva, the Semiotic.
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