What does Lacan talk about?

Lacan claims to find desire manifested in the same place that Freud finds the wish – namely, in dreams. Freud’s central thesis in the Interpretation of Dreams is that dreams represent a wish fulfilled (SE IV, 122). But for Lacan, to have a wish for something is not the same as desire.

What is Lacan’s theory of desire?

Lacan’s desire refers always to unconscious desire because it is unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis. The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to recognize his/her desire and by doing so to uncover the truth about his/her desire.

What does Lacan say about the real?

THE REAL (Lacan): The state of nature from which we have been forever severed by our entrance into language. Only as neo-natal children were we close to this state of nature, a state in which there is nothing but need.

What does Lacan mean by his claim that because I love you I mutilate you?

“I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a—I mutilate you. This is the meaning of that breast-complex, that mammal-complex […] except that the orality in question has nothing to do with food, and that the whole stress is placed on this effect of mutilation.

What should I read before Lacan?

I would recommend anything by the ‘earlier period’ Zizek, but especially The Sublime Object of Ideology and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture . Whilst he divides opinion amongst Lacanians, these two works in particular are a pleasure to read.

How is Lacan’s theory different from Freud’s?

The unconscious is important for both Freud and Lacan. As Freud deals with the human mind only, Lacan goes beyond the human mind and interprets the inner workings of a language in terms of how the mind works in a human being.

What were the main ideas of Lacan in psychoanalysis?

Lacan focused largely on Freud’s work on deep structures and infant sexuality, and how the human subject becomes an ‘other’ through unconscious repression and stemming from the Mirror phase. The conscious ego and unconscious desire are thus radically divided.

What is Lacan’s symbolic order?

SYMBOLIC ORDER (Lacan): The social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law (also called the “big Other”). Once a child enters into language and accepts the rules and dictates of society, it is able to deal with others.

What according to Lacan are the three stages of child development?

According to Lacan, there are three stages of the first four years of one’s life. These stages: The Real, The Imaginary, and The Symbolic, are each important in the studies of psychoanalysis, but for our purposes we will be focusing on The Imaginary or, as it is more well known, The Mirror Stage.

What is the real Zizek?

The ‘real’, for Lacan (or at least for the Lacan that Žižek identifies with), is precisely the residue or supplement that is not fully captured in symbolic discourse. For Žižek, following Hegel, the ‘truth’ of a text can be uncovered only retroactively, through its rereading from a position that has surpassed it.

What does Lacan say about love?

And so we come to Lacan’s most well-known aphorism on love: ‘loving is to give what one does not have’.