Lacan Introduction For English Speakers

Lacan in Context: An Introduction to Lacan for the English-Speaking Reader
Author(s): Tamise Van Pelt

Source: College Literature, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jun., 1997), pp. 57-70
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112297
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Lacan in Context: An
Introduction to Lacan
for the English-Speak
ing Reader
TAMISE VAN PELT
" T acan reads Freud," Malcolm Bowie

Van Pelt is assistant pr
I announces decisively, "This is the sim
fessor of theory in the
-L-iplest and most important thing about
him" (Freud 100). Yet Lacan alsodepartment
reads Aristoof English
tle. He reads Plato and Plautus. He reads Nico
Idaho State University.
las of Cusa, Kierkegaard, and Merleau-Ponty.
Lacan reads Sophocles and Moli?re,
HerLucretius
work on Lacan, ps
and Pascal, Val?ry and Rimbaud and Poe. He
choanalysis,
reads the work of other psychoanalysts: Annaand theor
Freud, Melanie Klein, Ernst Kris and Ernest
have appeared in Lite
Jones. Lacan reads case studies. Interestingly,
when he wants to differentiate ture and Psychology,
the signifier
Postmodern
from the signified, Lacan comments briefly onCulture,
Saussure, acknowledges his intellectual debt to
Benveniste, and then reads Saint Style, and Belgian
Augustine!
Moreover, when Lacan wants to analyze
Essays in Language
desire?that insatiable insistence of the sym
Literature.
bolic?he spends the better part of a year-long
seminar reading Shakespeare.
Lacanian reading is psychoanalytic read
ing, and the model of Lacanian reading is
Lacan's own work itself. However, for English
speaking readers and theorists, Lacanian influ
ences are more abundant than Lacanian texts.
Commonly, English-speaking readers meet
Lacan through secondary works written about
him, polemics written against him, or theoret
ical appropriations of him. Today, culture
studies and film theory and their outgrowths,
feminist psychoanalytic theory, and semiotics
all share Lacanian concepts as a common intel
57
lectual currency.l While these diverse and widespread secondary sources tes
tify to the importance of Lacanian ideas, such secondary applications rarely
convey Lacan's concepts with the force and aptness of his own primary texts.
Because Lacan's influence has become so widespread, it seems important
to give the potential reader of Lacan himself the opportunity to enter Lacan
studies via the context of Lacan's own work and his own sources rather than
in the context of his secondary sources, however good those sources may be.
Thus, this discussion has four goals: first, to situate Lacan in the context of his
own project by providing an historical overview of his development as a writer
and a theorist; next, to account for the mystique of difficulty created by Lacan's
reception, a mystique that discourages the reading of Lacan's primary texts;
third, to define Lacan's methods and values as a reader; and finally, to offer a
program of reading that provides a manageable plan for acquiring Lacan.
LACAN'S SPOKEN WRITINGS
Lacan's intellectual production spans the years from 1926 through 1980,
and some sense of the contours of his theoretical career seems necessary for
any single work to be fully appreciated. At least part of the now-legendary
Lacanian inscrutability?his infamous "difficulty"?stems from the fact that his
works are generally considered singly, in isolation from the body of ideas in
which they live and move and function, and outside of the context of Lacan's
scholarly production. Lacan's education first in medicine and then in psychia
try provides the prologue to his reading of Freud, a project that spans more
than half a century. His history as a psychoanalyst?a reader and a "writer"?
articulates itself as a discourse punctuated by the social upheavals and institu
tional conflicts of his times.
Lacan's earliest publications consisted of articles written for psychiatric
journals such as Revue neurologique, L'enc?phale, and Annales m?dico-psy
chologiques, co-authored with fellow medical researchers during the 1920s and
30s. After the publication of his doctoral thesis De la psychose parano?aque
dans ses rapports avec la personnalit?, Lacan began to publish in the literary
journal Le minotaure and, later, in Cahiers d'art as well. His thesis was, in fact,
a detailed case study of a female paranoid psychotic whose delusions centered
upon her fantasies of becoming a great poet, and who was institutionalized after
attempting to murder a famous French actress. From Lacan's thesis onward, a
merger of psychoanalytic and literary interests marked his early work.
As Lacan's psychoanalytic interests supplanted his psychiatric origins
through the 1930s and 40s, he published mainly in the psychoanalytic journals
Revue fran?aise de psychanalyse and Evolution psychiatrique . Lacan's inter
est in philosophy revealed itself as early as the mid-30s when he reviewed
Minkowski's Le temps v?cu: ?tudes ph?nom?nologiques et psy
chopathologiques for Recherches philosophique. By the mid-50s, he was
translating Martin Heidegger's "Logos" for psychoanalysts and writing to
philosophers on the status of psychoanalysis, publishing in both Les ?tudes
philosophiques and Bulletin de la Soci?t? fran?aise de philosophie. It was at
58 College Literature
this time that Lacan announced his break with the International Psychoana
lytical Association in his polemical "Discourse of Rome," bringing his theoret
ical conflicts with ego psychology to the attention of a wider interdisciplinary
audience.
Together, these varied writings represent the first stage of Lacan's theo
retical work. From his 1932 thesis on paranoia to his 1949 mirror stage essay,
aggressivity, mirroring, and dialectical interaction are definitive themes; the
philosophical orientation is explicitly phenomenological, and continual refer
ences to the "psychoanalytic experience" pervade his texts. Thus, the central
text and the summation of this twenty-year-long period is "The mirror stage as
formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience," a
paper delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis in
Zurich, July 17, 1949. This essay presents a developmental portrait of the
child's entry into language, an event that irremediably splits the child into a
speaking subject (nj?) decentered from an ideal ego (mot) whose unattainable
image of perfection the child narcissistically wishes to find reflected by oth
ers, especially the mother. In toto, Lacan's writings of this stage coalesce into
a critique of the unified Cartesian subject. Against unity, Lacan postulates both
the split in the speaking subject and the dialectical nature of the speaking
experience. Though these themes will be transformed in subsequent theoret
ical stages, they will never be abandoned.
The bulk of Lacan's textual production is represented by his now-famous
seminars, twenty-seven all told, running from 1951 through 1980. For two
years, Lacan held only small, informal seminars, but after the theoretical break
announced in his "Discourse of Rome," the recorded seminars began. Thus
after late 1953, at Saint Anne's Hospital, Lacan continually proclaimed his
"return to Freud." Critics generally agree that this break marks a new stage of
Lacanian theory, the linguistic and structural stage. Though the mark of this
phase is Lacan's emphasis on the three registers, the symbolic, the imaginary,
and the real, his central statement, "The Function and Field of Speech and Lan
guage," clearly emphasizes the dominance of the symbolic. WTiere Lacan's
previous theory implied a developmental sequence through a mirror "stage"
into a symbolic order, his structural theory indicates the dynamic and syn
chronous interaction of the imaginary and the symbolic registers. This crucial
shift from a developmental to a structural psychoanalysis allows Lacan to relo
cate his diachronic impulses in narrative and in history.
Lacan's structural phase is his textual phase, and most of the terms asso
ciated with Lacanian psychoanalysis reach a peak of clarity and definition
here. This is the phase of the signifier and the signified, of metonymy and
metaphor. Lacan's emphasis on the signifier?on the mark rather than the
meaning?is one hallmark of this period. Ideas of the Name-of-the-Father, of
paternal prohibition, and of Law, stem from Lacan's distinct reworking of
Freud's Oedipal model. The Oedipal triangle, in turn, provides a structural
"third term," and this structural idea of the third and of triangularity constructs
what Lacan calls the symbolic register. Throughout, he is spatial and geomet
Tamise Van Pelt 59
rical, ever in search of the diagram that would best convey his ideas in apt the
oretical relationship. In this phase, the insistence on both geometric models
and on the disruption of binaries by third terms makes Lacan's theory simul
taneously structural and post-structural.
After a decade, this impressive and fertile phase of Lacanian thought dead
ends in French psychoanalytic politics. By the mid-1960s, Lacan's excommu
nication from the Soci?t? fran?aise de psychanalyse forced the removal of his
seminar from Saint Anne's to the Ecole Normale Sup?rieure. There, his audi
ence widened to encompass prominent intellectuals of his day from many
fields outside psychoanalysis proper and to include a large cult following as
well. Changes in audience paralleled changes in theory. The third and final
stage of Lacan's work dates from his founding of the Ecole Freudienne in 1964
and brings the problem of the register of the real to prominence. Though
Lacan had continually spoken of the real, it remained an emergent discourse
throughout his earlier theorizing?important more as a third element that dis
couraged (unsuccessfully, his reception suggests) the binary opposition of the
symbolic to the imaginary.
This final theoretical phase began, aptly enough, with the interruption of
the Names-of-the-Father seminar of 1964 and its replacement by the seminar
on the Four Fundamental Principles of Psychoanalysis. The abandonment of
the Names-of-the-Father seminar, with its emphasis on a central symbolic con
cept, seems prophetic. Freudians tend to see this as the point at which Lacan
forgoes Freudian theory altogether in favor of a mathematical elaboration of
his own concepts. Considered Lacan's topological phase, this is the part of his
work that is identified by the impossible objects and Borromean knots. At this
stage, Lacan moves from three terms to three dimensions?and beyond.
Though some critics further subdivide this final phase of his work, the whole
of his theorizing after 1964 specifies and manipulates distinctly Lacanian con
structs. Lacan is constructing ideas about Lacanian ideas; this is his meta-theo
retical and self-referential phase.
All together, Lacan's prodigious multi-faceted intellectual output provides
a ground against which individual essays and single seminars appear as con
tributions to a larger effort. Rarely have English-speaking readers seen Lacan's
work in context because so little of his work has been translated. In fact, the
vagaries of publishing and translation account for much of the resistance to his
ideas, and many would-be readers of Lacan have been discouraged by the
myth of Lacanian difficulty and the ad hominem of stylistic self-indulgence
and anti-Americanism.
IMPORTING LACAN
Though publication of Lacan's seminars began during his lifetime, when
he died on September 9, 1981, only Seminar XI on the fundamental concepts
of psychoanalysis (1973), XX on feminine sexuality (1975), I on Freud's tech
nical papers (1975), and II on the ego (1978) had been published by Editions
du Seuil. Seuil released Seminar III on the psychoses that year, and followed
with Seminar VII on ethics in psychoanalysis in 1986. The Seuil texts, edited
by Lacan's son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller, were established by Miller and
some were confirmed by Lacan himself. Miller addressed the textual chal
lenges posed by his transcription of the seminars in a note in Seminar XI, the
first Seuil publication, in which he acknowledged the inevitability of inaccu
racies and deletions as well as the imposition of meaning produced by the
introduction of punctuation into Lacan's oral presentation (Miller xi). From
1975 on, Ornicar?, the journal of Lacan's own organization the Champs Freu
dien [Freudian Field], published the preliminary transcriptions of the later
seminars XX through XXV, XXVII, and a large portion of Seminar VI on desire
and its interpretation. Seminar VI contained Lacan's sessions on the reading of
Hamlet. As of 1992, fourteen of the seminars remained unpublished in
French, yet Lacan's French readers had access to a far greater portion of his
oeuvre than did English-speaking readers.
Three factors characterize Lacan's work as it has become available to Eng
lish-speaking readers, and each has a bearing on its reception. First, and most
obvious, the Anglo-American reader reads Lacan in translation. Translation, in
turn, demands a rendering of "this peculiar French into less than peculiar Eng
lish" (Wilden viii), and each of the five seminars published in English (Seminars
XI [1978], I [1988], II [1988], VII [1992], and III [1993]) has had its own trans
lator, continuity being maintained by Jacques-Alain Miller's editorship. Second,
though each of Lacan's works has a clear place in his overall project when his
theoretical project is viewed as a whole, his major English translations
appeared as much in response to cultural curiosity about that odd French
"ph?nom?ne Lacan" and the political furor surrounding him as out of a con
cern for making crucial theoretical advances available to English-speaking crit
ics and analysts. Indeed, the piecemeal translation of Lacan's major works into
English has done little to combat the impression of a certain incoherence that
dogs Lacan's reception outside of France. Finally, Lacan writes within a Euro
pean intellectual tradition that contemporary Anglo-American readers may not
share, and though his dominant influences are neither numerous nor obscure,
they are sometimes implicit rather than explicit.
At the textual level, translation cannot be separated from theory since
Lacan's theory of signification disjoins the signifier from the signified. In Lacan
ian theory, words signify but do not mean. However, translations differ in their
presentations of this post-Saussurean position on the signifier's dominance,
even though distinctions between signification and meaning are crucial in
Lacanian theory. For instance, John Forrester and Sylvana Tomaselli, translators
of, respectively, Seminar I and Seminar II, follow Alan Sheridan in rendering sig
nification as "signification" and sews as "meaning." Stuart Schneiderman, how
ever, reverses this distinction by translating signification as "meaning" and
sens as "sense." Russell Grigg, who translates the seminar on the psychoses, fol
lows Schneiderman, thus breaking with the practice of the four previous sem
inar translators. Because translations differ significantly, the English-speaking
reader of Lacan must read particulars within the larger Lacanian theoretical
Tamise Van Pelt 61
context. There can be no absolute guideline for translation beyond fidelity to
Lacanian analytic practice. Thus, Anthony Wilden, whose translation of Lacan's
essay "The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis" pre
cedes Sheridan's by a decade, details such difficulties as the problem of sepa
rating meaning from signification. Difficulties ultimately stem less from Lacan's
sometimes intuitive use of the terms than from the fact that he makes a dis
tinction that "in English...hardly exists at all" (Wilden xvii).
Beyond the local textual confusions endemic to translation, greater con
fusions over Lacan's project were engendered in large part by the asequential
translation of his major works. By the mid-1950s, English-speaking psychoan
alysts had their first encounter with Lacan's return to Freud. "Some Reflec
tions on the Ego," published in the International Journal of Psycho-analysis
in 1953, presents Lacan's mirror stage theory of the genesis of the divided ego.
The wordplay at work in the article's title hints at Lacan's future style. Subse
quently, "Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real," co-authored
with Wladimir Granoff, was anthologized in the American volume Perversion:
Psychodynamics and Therapy. This article concentrates on the dynamic
interaction between the symbolic and the imaginary registers of signification
and experience. Written in the straightforward academic prose characteristic
of psychoanalytic journals, the two articles taken together, provide a valuable
and most accessible introduction to central Lacanian concepts.
The Lacan first encountered by literary theorists was not the Lacan
encountered by his fellow analysts?Lacan the psychoanalytic researcher. The
literary Lacan was in small part Lacan the training analyst, the teacher, the
seminarian but in large part the Lacan of the 1960s psychoanalytic politics.
This controversial Lacan became the icon whose major works finally saw
translation internationally. Michael Clark's Jacques lacan, An Annotated Bib
liography lists translations o? ?crits into Spanish (1971), Japanese (1972), Ger
man (1973), Portuguese (1974), Italian (1974), and English (1977), as well as
unverified reports of translation into Serbo-Croatian and Norwegian.
Few English-speaking readers introduced to Lacan through either ?crits or
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis seemed to acknowledge
that they had entered in mid-stream a decades-long technical psychoanalytic
debate. The ?crits are not writings, as the title implies, but revisions of spo
ken texts: theoretical reports, public lectures, conference papers. Some, like
"On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis," condense
the content of a year-long seminar (in this case, the 1955-56 seminar on the
psychoses) into a single essay. Thus, each "writing" has already been per
formed, and must be listened to?must be heard?as well as read. As Cather
ine Cl?ment points out, "Lacan spoke as the hawk flies, circling about an idea
before grabbing it in a lightning swoop" (14). Thus, in Lacan, the reader con
fronts the nonlinearity inherent in all complex thought about complex issues,
a nonlinearity well-captured both in his numerous diagrams and sch?mas and
in the structural theories of Lacan and his contemporaries. However, the most
important thing to recall about ?crits is that it speaks to an audience familiar
with Lacan's style and with his public presentations.
Though The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis sounds as if
it is a straightforward introduction to basic Freudian ideas, Lacan's eleventh
seminar draws heavily upon concepts he has established over the preceding
decade. Michael Clark's summary of the seminar indicates the cumulative
nature of this Lacanian text which expects of its reader both an analyst's
understanding of Freudian concepts and some familiarity with Lacan's previ
ous explications of them as well:
Even when Lacan does turn to more conventional Freudian topics, such as
the four concepts "fundamental" to psychoanalysis?the unconscious, repe
tition, transference, and the drive?he conceives them entirely within the
parameters developed in the earlier seminars. The unconscious is merely "a
play of the signifier" [SXI, 130], a gap in the signifying chain. Repetition is
derived not from the instinctual need but from the subject's conjunction with
the inevitable lack that marks the signifier's relation to the real. Transference
is a repetition of the "missed encounter" inherent in symbolic relations and
the subject's inevitably ex-centric position in relation to his own subjectivity.
And the drive is more like a "montage" than an organic need, a montage
whose "partial" character arises because the sexuality of the subject must
pass through the "networks of the signifier" [SXI, 169, 177]. (I: liii)
Since it is the eleventh seminar in a series, Lacan's discussion of the founding

ideas of psychoanalysis can be seen as a portion of an ongoing exploration. As
such, it draws on terms whose function previous seminars have already estab
lished and whose uses have been repeatedly demonstrated. Detached and
decontextualized, it seems as inscrutable as the highly condensed ideas in ?crits.
In the American psychoanalytic community, reception of Lacan's ?crits
proved cold, if not outright resistant. Writing in the American Journal of Psy
chiatry, George H. Pollock lamented the lack of systematic exposition of psy
choanalytic theory. Anton Kris, reviewing ?crits for the Journal of the Amer
ican Psychoanalytic Association agreed, seeing the essays as dogmatic and
the arguments as unsupported assertion. Still more dismissive, Richard D.
Chessick echoed the same theme, labeling ?crits "an incredibly obscure
hodgepodge." Articles in humanities journals such as Choice, the Library
Journal, and Mankind, all commented on the difficulty?Morton wrote
"needless difficulty"?of Lacan's style. Writing in the Psychoanalytic Quar
terly, Stanley Leavy suggested that Lacan's style would actually prevent his
work from reaching readers who might otherwise derive real value from his
ideas. Even the highly favorable reviews of ?crits written by Lacan's most
ardent supporters, Stuart Schneiderman and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, admitted
that Lacan's style was difficult.
In fact, Lacan had brought at least some of the controversy over style
upon himself when he used Buff on's "Style is the man himself (Le style est
l'homme m?me) as the opening line of the French ?crits (9). Not unexpect
edly, the critical derision of Lacan's style has encouraged his supporters to
Tamise Van Pelt 63
explain, sometimes even to defend it. Thus, Jane Gallop remarks that "[Lacan]
transfers the subject matter of his discourse into his style and makes it present
in the actuality of his text. The unconscious or the signifier becomes not only
the subject matter but, in the grammatical sense, the subject, the speaker of
his discourse" (37). Malcolm Bowie characterizes Lacan's style as "a mode of
verbal production-in-performance," a position with which the attendees at
Lacan's later seminars would most likely concur. "Lacan's prose aspires per
petually to the condition of speech," Bowie writes, "and his aims in writing
like this are clear: to allow the energies of the unconscious to become palpa
ble in the wayward rhythm of his sentences, to discourage the reader from
building premature theoretical constructions upon the text and to compel
him to collaborate fully in the inventive work of language" ("Jacques" 121).
Though Lacan's critics would find this a generous assessment of his style,
Bowie's emphasis on the forestalling of meaning by signification itself high
lights a central Lacanian theoretical construct.
Some critics of Lacan's style reveal a nationalistic stereotypy in their char
acterizations of Lacan's "typical" Frenchness. Richard King, reading Lacan's
critique of American ego psychology's persistent dualisms as mere cultural
bias, labels ?crits deeply philosophical interrogation of American psycho
analysis "vulgar Ideologie-kritic" and dismisses it as mere French chauvinism.
Similarly, Richard Chessick identifies the book's style as typically opaque
French philosophizing. In a review of Lacan's Seminar XI: The Four Funda
mental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Anthony Clare borrows Sir Peter
Medawar's dismissal of De Chardin's style as: "that tipsy, euphoric prose-poet
ry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit."
Given the overall reception of Lacan's first major English language publica
tions, it is little wonder that the perceptively analyzed, compelling, witty Sem
inar I, introduction par excellence to Lacan's reading practice and to his psy
choanalytic return to Freudian theory, went unnoticed. Given Lacan's Ameri
can reception, it is also little wonder that readers who might well profit from
Lacanian theory have, instead, been reluctant to read Lacan.
LACAN THE READER
Lacan's own texts teach a way of reading by demonstrating the terms of
reading. If these texts persistently frustrate the impulses of mastery, they offer
alternative keys to analytic understanding. While it is a futile wish to master
Lacan, it is a valuable goal to learn to listen to what he hears, and what Lacan
hears repeatedly is the subtle dissonance of dissymmetry. Specifically, he uses
the phrases "absolute dissymmetry" and "radical difference" to describe the
relation between the symbolic subject of the unconscious and the imaginary
ego in his seminar on the ego in Freudian theory (Seminar II 59). From his
use of Hegel's paradigm of master and servant, to his emphasis on Freudian
dialectic, to his discovery of metonymy within metaphor, to his post-Saussuri
an revision of the sign, Lacan consistently resists the lure of dualism. The most
valuable Lacanian key of all?and the function best suited to the reader in
search of analytic understanding?is the structural dissymmetry between the
mirroring opposites of imaginary dualities and the Oedipal pattern of symbol
ic law. Given an overview of Lacan's analytic project, the English-speaking
reader can come to terms with his thought, can appreciate the subtleties of
Lacanian reading, can use the keys provided by Lacanian theory to open the
dissymmetries of any text to analytic understanding.
This reader Jacques Lacan hears the speech of his analysands and listens
to the signifiers in the literary text. "Commenting on a text is like doing an
analysis," he writes (Seminar 173), suggesting that for him these distinct sites
of reading both invoke the same analytic practice. Lacan reads and rereads
with a translator's eye to the full plurality of significance, so it is not surpris
ing that he characterizes reading as a "differentiation of levels" and a "critique
of concepts . . . with the aim of avoiding confusions" (Seminar I 57). His
depiction of reading as a distinguishing of textual levels restates Freud's com
parison of analysis to archaeology, a comparison that pervades Freud's writ
ings (see Bowie, Freud 18-26). Lacan's central metaphor, however, is a musi
cal one, and he distinguishes several "registers," and occasionally "keys," of
textual signification. These registers?the symbolic, the imaginary, and the
real?are the structural paradigms of the Lacanian reading practice. By show
ing how text operates simultaneously in more than one register, Lacan ana
lyzes confusions rooted in the oversimplification of central Freudian theoreti
cal concepts.
According to Lacan, the analytic reader attends to the complexities of a
text and appreciates its moment of confusion by resisting the urge to master
it. "[0]ne of the things we must guard most against is to understand too much,
to understand more than what is in the discourse of the subject" (Seminar I
73). WTiile the reader seeking mastery achieves it by forcing content into bina
ry constructs, the analytic reader concentrates on the discourse of the subject
in order to interpret what that discourse is doing.2 "To interpret and to imag
ine one understands are not at all the same things. It is precisely the opposite.
I would go as far as to say that it is on the basis of a kind of refusal of under
standing that we push open the door to analytic understanding" (Seminar I
73). So Lacan differentiates analytic understanding from the attempt to under
stand?to grasp the content?of a discourse. In this, as in his sense of the rich
plurality of text, Lacan follows Freud.
The power of Lacanian reading has been remarked by contemporary crit
ics. In his sweeping r??valuation of the problem of self in society, Social The
ory and Psychoanalysis in Transition, Anthony Elliott specifically names
Jacques Lacan as a thinker whose ideas establish "the principal terms of refer
ence for thinking about the interconnections between the psyche and social
field" (2). Reviewing ?crits for the New York Times Book Review, Stanley
Leavy praises Lacan's linguistic approach to the unconscious as an important
counter to the entrenched biological and neurological construction of the
unconscious. This Lacanian synthesis of Freudian theory with Saussurean lin
guistics which Leavy commends has indeed generated new terms, new con
Tamise Van Pelt 65
ceptual tools capable of providing a rich theoretical framework for critical
research and reading. In fact, Lacan's now-familiar terms (subject, Other, imag
inary, symbolic), though not especially numerous, are complex and multi
faceted, meant to help the analyst confront textual aporia and overdetermina
tions. Thus, Lacan's terms operate mathematically rather than definitionally or
categorically, as functions that allow certain analytic interventions to punctu
ate the progress of a discourse. Lacan's own texts reward those readers who
ask of a term "What is this doing?" rather than "What does this mean?"
The terms of the Lacanian reading operate dynamically, simultaneously.
Thus Lacan's follower-turned-critic Fran?ois Roustang writes that "[Lacan's]
style is wholly oriented towards the juxtaposition of terms which have to be
seen as related for a conclusion to be reached, but which the audience itself
is precisely forbidden to relate for fear of its discovering the incoherence, the
futility of the argumentation, indeed the exemplary trickery" (49). Roustang's
response to Lacan's "relentless form of self-contradictory rigor" correctly
stresses Lacan's plurality of terms, his multivalent patterning; however, Rous
tang's assertion that Lacan offers argumentation itself sets up the problems of
incoherence and inconclusiveness that he then sees as Lacan's trickery. The
suggestion of argumentation makes nonsense of Lacanian analysis because it
imposes an expectation of linear meaning-making upon the rich orchestration
of registers Lacan offers. To hear Lacan, one must listen for more than the
melody.
ACQUIRING LACAN
For the English-speaking reader, to acquire Lacan is to acquire a habit of
mind. Though the terms of Lacanian reading now have a certain cultural and
critical currency, the uses and definitions of these terms do not. A full appre
ciation of Lacan's theoretical approach is best acquired by honoring the Euro
pean intellectual tradition in which he writes. Lacan does make intellectual
demands on his reader. He assumes his audience shares the larger intellectual
interests of his day, interests which Anthony Wilden lists as Hegel and his
French commentators, early Heidegger and early Sartre, the structural linguists
Saussure and Jakobson, and the structural anthropologists Mauss and L?vi
Strauss (viii). A reader can begin to contextualize Lacan by reading those
works that bear directly on his central philosophical and Freudian ideas before
moving on to study Lacanian psychoanalysis itself.
1. General intellectual influences. Clearly, with Lacan as with any other
writer, familiarity with the sources he draws upon enriches a reader's com
prehension. Ferdinand de Saussure's "Nature of the linguistic sign" (from his
Course in General Linguistics) and L?vi-Strauss's "The Structural Study of
Myth" (Chapter 11 of Structural Anthropology) provide some grounding in
structural linguistics and anthropology. Both of these essays are frequently
anthologized. Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (Part III, Chapter
One, Section IV "The Look") and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (Sec
tions 25-27) offer a glimpse of the relevant phenomenology.3 The single most
important background source must surely be Alexandre Koj?ve's rereading of
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. In fact, Koj?ve's interpretation is more rel
evant to an understanding of Lacan than Hegel's Phenomenology itself.
Lacan's idea of the dialectic and its distinctly intersubjective form clearly
derives from Koj?ve, and dialectic is central to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Thus,
Koj?ve's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel presents ideas which pervade
Lacan's writings, particularly the first seventy-five pages in which Koj?ve dis
cusses Hegel's paradigm of the birth of history in the struggle to the death for
pure prestige between the master and the servant.
2. Freudian theory. Since Lacan's fundamental project is the rereading of
Freud, familiarity with Freud's major theories and models should go without
saying. Furthermore, Lacan makes no effort to translate or explain Freud's Ger
man terms, save where translation and terminology are themselves at issue,
since Lacan is predominantly an analyst addressing other analysts. Here, Peter
Gay's introduction appearing in any of the Norton volumes of The Standard
Edition of Freud's works provides a helpful historical overview of the stages
of Freudian theory. Specifically, Lacan repeatedly returns to The Interpreta
tion of Dreams (SE IV and V), especially Chapter 7 on forgetting, regression,
and repression; to the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (SE XV and
XVI); and to Beyond the Pleasure Principle (SE XVIII, 7-64), particularly
Chapter 2 where Freud discusses his grandson's Fort-Da game. Lacan fre
quently discusses Freud's major essays as well, emphasizing primarily "Nega
tion" (SE XIX 235-9), "A Note upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad'" (SE XIX 227-32),
"On narcissism: an introduction" (SE XIV: 73-102), and "Repression" (SE XIV
146-58). Since Lacan continually emphasizes Freud's discovery of the uncon
scious, Freud's essay "The Unconscious" (5^ XIV: 161-215) provides the nec
essary ground against which the Lacanian reinterpretation of the unconscious
structured like a language should be read.
3. Lacanian basics. Since Lacan's central textual interest is in problemat
ics, he writes to those readers who value knowing when to question more
than knowing what to answer. There is no better way to get the feel for the
timing of the question than to read the working Lacan, the Lacan of the semi
nars. Though most English-speaking readers first encounter Lacan through his
essays in ?crits, neither "The mirror stage" nor "The signification of the phal
lus" offers a solid starting place since both essays present halves of polemical
arguments, and since both constitute densely theoretical discussions. These
essays do define significant Lacanian theoretical positions for those readers
sufficiently familiar with Lacan to understand what is at stake in psychoana
lytic reading in general. At first, however, Lacan is more profitably approached
through his seminars in which he defines his terms and spells out his theoret
ical differences with mainstream psychoanalysis in detail. As of 1996, the first
three seminars are available in English translation, providing access to the
foundational concepts of Lacan's structural rereading of basic Freudian theo
ry: the registers (the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real) and the elements
Tamise Van Pelt 67
of subjectivity (the Subject, the ideal ego, the object other, and the Other as
the linguistic unconscious).
Seminar I. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud's Papers on
Technique, 1953-1954. Seminar I begins with Lacan's critique of Freud's essay
on negation and to a great extent the ideas of negation that permeate much of
Lacan's work are defined here. Two case studies of children, Melanie Klein's
well-known study of Little Dick and a Lacanian study of a young psychotic boy
whose only speech is "The wolf!," provide the focus for Lacan's thorough dis
cussion of the imaginary. The relation of the imaginary register to aggression,
to narcissism, to the ego and its ideals is thoroughly discussed as are the con
trasting concepts of libido and desire. This is a seminar devoted not only to
the idea of speech?from its dawn in the child to its flowering as truth but also
reading and to analysis, to the lie and to the error rather than to knowledge.
Lacan's final chapter, which defines the process of analysis, should make clear
to any reader just what is at stake in Lacanian reading and psychoanalysis.
Seminar II. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, The Ego in Freud's The
ory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955. This seminar further
defines the Lacanian registers with a particular emphasis on the symbolic. Cen
tral texts for this seminar are Freud's early texts on dreams, on slips of the
tongue, and on jokes, Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Poes "The
Purloined Letter." The last is the focus of Lacan's discussion of the "beyond" of
intersubjectivity, the position of language. Consequently, the central Lacanian
idea of the Other as a repository of language or treasury of signifiers receives sev
eral chapters of discussion. Lacan's critique of materialist ideas of consciousness
explains clearly the implications of the decentering of the subject. Don't "enti
ty" the subject, Lacan warns. Instead, he models an Hegelian dialectical
approach to reading the subject which avoids the totalizing impulses evoked by
the idea of the ego, particularly the ego as the unified agent of ego psychology.
Seminar II is, in brief, Lacan's rejection of ego-based Freudianisms in favor of his
intersubjective model of the Subject and the Other in symbolic relation.
Seminar III. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book HI, The Psychoses,
1955-1956. This most readable of the seminars offers far more than a discus
sion of psychosis. To be sure, Lacan's focal texts for this seminar are Daniel
Paul Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness and Freud's "Case History of
Schreber" (SE XII, 3-82). Further, Lacan applies his theory of the imaginary,
symbolic and real registers to Schreber's texts to show precisely and clearly
how the unconscious, structured like a language, reveals the linguistic differ
ences between psychosis and neurosis. However, his introductory chapter
offers his most detailed and valuable discussion of the famous Schema L, his
map of the subject. Schema L illustrates the structure of intersubjectivity and
defines the relations of his terms Subject (J?), ideal ego (moi), other (as
object), and Other (as language). Seminar III also explicates in detail Lacan's
theories of signifier and signified. Here, too, are the chapters on metaphor and
metonymy, and of the early seminars Seminar III is perhaps the most impor
tant for literary study, particularly for linguistically-oriented readers. Taken
together, these first three seminars present Lacan at the height of his theoretical powers.
Read with their Freudian and literary source texts and in the wider context of French
philosophical interests, the early seminars open up for the Engjishspeaking reader the
rich, fascinating, useful territory of Lacanian reading.
ENDNOTES
1 It's a good bet that more English-speaking readers have read Marjorie Garber's
Vested Interests (New York: HarperCollins, 1993) than Lacan's "Fetishism: the Sym
bolic, the Imaginary, and the Real," Elaine Showalter's "Representing Ophelia" (espe
cially the reprint in the St. Martin's Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Hamlet,
1994) than Lacan's "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet," or Kaja Silver
man's The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford, 1983) than Lacan's Seminar II.
The Lacanian concepts at issue are, respectively, the registers, the phallus and castra
tion, and subjectivity.
2 What the text "does" can be related to the philosophical concept of performa
tive language, a concept most often associated with the philosopher J.L. Austin, How
to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975), a concept that positions
speech within its contexts of production and reception. But the idea that words "do"
something is hardly exotic. The writing instructor who uses the opening line "I want
a wife!" in order to teach students the difference between the author's attempt to star
tle her readers (what the line does) and the verbal content with its implication that a
wife is a good thing to have (what the line says) makes the distinction Lacan employs.
3 I am indebted to William Schroeder, Department of Philosophy, University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign, for the background reading in philosophy suggested in
this article.
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" T acan reads Freud," Malcolm Bowie

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Since it is the eleventh seminar in a series, Lacan's discussion of the founding

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