Jacques Lacan [Jacques Lacan [1]1901.04.13-1981.09.09], French psychologist, philosopher, doctor, psychoanalyst. He was born in a merchant family with Catholic tradition in Paris, France, and died of intestinal cancer in Paris, France.
He is the eldest son of the family, with a younger brother and a younger sister. His younger brother Mark later became a priest. Lacan studied in the classical class of stanislas Middle School managed by Jesus Church in his early years, where he became familiar with Greek, Latin and mathematics. /kloc-at the age of 0/5, he began to write poems in a classical way and contribute to magazines. /kloc-at the age of 0/7, Lacan met Joyce and other important modern literary masters. At the same time, young Lacan became interested in philosophy from an early age, especially Spinoza's thoughts. During the First World War, he witnessed the brutal killing between people, so he doubted God and betrayed his family's religious beliefs before he was 20 years old. 19 19 Autumn, Lacan entered the Medical College of Paris University to study psychoanalysis. During seven years of medical study, he also studied literature and philosophy.
1927, Lacan became a resident in the mental hospital of Santa Ana Hospital. 1928, he came to the specialized hospital attached to the police station as a full-time doctor. Here, his interest gradually shifted to the fields of psychopathology and criminology. In the same year, he published the article "The sequel to the war: the disease of a woman who can't move forward" to explore the social and psychological diseases that appeared in a specific period. Lacan officially became the medical examiner of Russell Hospital in 1929, and then returned to Santa Ana Hospital in 193 1, and began to analyze the notes of mental patients with linguistic methods, and gradually took paranoid diseases as his main research object. It is worth noting that Dali has clearly put forward the so-called "paranoid critical method" at this time. It is also in this study that Lacan began to pay attention to the phenomenon of "psychological automaticity" of patients, that is, the unconscious subordinate inertia of subjective psychology to some external force. This study of "psychological automaticity" benefits from his trainee tutor, Klein, who is in a completely different context from the "automatic writing" advocated by surrealists. It is here that Lacan "leads to Freud".
1932, Lacan completed a paper entitled "On the Concept and Personality of Experiential Paranoid Psychosis" under the guidance of Professor Henry Claude, and obtained a doctorate from Paris University. Since then, he has been mainly engaged in psychoanalysis teaching and medical work. From 65438 to 0933, Lacan had increasingly close contacts with surrealist artists such as Dali. He published an article in Ba Taye's surrealist magazine Minotto, discussing the relationship between mental illness and artistic style, and one of the articles was particularly eye-catching [2]. In the same year, Lacan was invited by Ba Taye (1897- 1962) to participate in the discussion of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by A. Kejiewei. Kauff's and hippolyte's explanation of the relationship between desire and Hegel's dialectical thought of master and slave profoundly influenced Lacan. At the same time, Lacan also attended the course of psychologist Henry Walloon at the French Academy. Walloon's "mirror experiment" in the research of children's psychology became the direct scientific basis of the mirror theory he put forward soon. 1934, Lacan became an alternate member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society and began psychoanalysis. In the same year, she married the attending doctor's daughter, Mary-Louis Blondin, and they had three children. On the afternoon of July 3rd1,1936, at the annual meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Society 14 held in Malinbad, Czech Republic, Lacan published a report on the theory of mirror stage, and put forward the mirror theory for the first time. 1938 became a full member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society.
1939- 1945 during the second world war, Lacan first served in a military hospital and soon lived in seclusion in Nice, a small town in southern France. During this period, Lacan studied Chinese and Japanese, and kept close relationship with Ba Taye's wife Sylvia. 194 1 year, Lacan and a famous actress gave birth to their daughter Judith. After 1946, Lacan participated in the activities of the Paris Psychoanalysis Association as a psychoanalyst, and became the president of the Association on 1953+0, but resigned in June of the same year and joined the French Psychoanalysis Association. In July, he and Ba Taye's ex-wife Sylvia started his second marriage. 1In July, 953, Lacan put forward the slogan of "returning to Freud" for the first time in the article Symbol, Truth and Imagination. In September of the same year, Lacan gave a report on the role and scope of speech and language in psychoanalysis at the 17 International Psychoanalysis Conference. At the end of the year, Lacan began his 27-year public seminar. He gives a report almost every week or every other week, which attracts many scholars. 1963, the French Psychoanalytic Society was dissolved. 1964, Lacan and Manoni formed the French psychoanalysis school, which was quickly renamed Freudian school in Paris.
In his later years, Lacan's academic thought gradually entered a metaphysical state with unique personality. In this last period, the thorny "desire structure", "real world", "symptoms" and "object A" became the center of his discussion. From 1970, he was interviewed by TV stations and invited to give lectures by top universities in Italy, Belgium and the United States, becoming a celebrity at that time. 1980 65438+ 10, Lacan announced the dissolution of the Freudian school in Paris, and in February of the same year, a new Freudian school was established.
Lacan was the most independent and controversial European psychoanalyst after the Second World War, and was called "Freudian in France". He severely criticized the American psychoanalysis school for deviating from Freud's subconscious theory and moving towards "self-psychology". In the United States, psychoanalytic therapy pays attention to self-awareness, explains pathological psychological defense, and promotes the growth of adaptability without conflict and contradiction. Lacan completely denied this practice. According to him, the "self" that does not exist in the conflict-free field is hostile to the subconscious and the main psychoanalytic process. He believes that psychoanalysis is a kind of consultation, not a kind of treatment. For Lacan, the study of animals excludes the concept of psychology, because psychology is bound to be related to language, meaning and values.
Lacan was dissatisfied with the popular Freud's theory, advocated "reinterpretation" and demanded to return to Freud's point of view. He put forward the theory of mirror stage. It is believed that babies see themselves in the mirror at 6- 18 months after birth. At first, babies can't tell their own mirror images from those of others; Later, I distinguished my mirror image from myself; Finally, I know that my mirror image is my own mirror image, and I realize that I am different and connected with others. In this way, the baby gradually becomes a person with feelings and ideas.
Lacan's activity in the mirror image stage is a kind of understanding, that is, when the subject is in contact with the outside world, the image that people realize is always the deformation of the object, which is the image that people imagine. Therefore, Lacan's theory of mirror stage leads to personality or personality theory at three levels: imagination, symbol and reality. The level of imagination records the conscious, unconscious, known and imagined through the mirror stage, forming the image of the world. Symbol is a symbolic thing and a symbolic understanding of the world. It is similar to the "signifier" in structuralist linguistics, and its various factors are meaningful only when they are related. The combination of imaginary things and symbolic things is reality, so reality is not an objective thing, it is only a phenomenon formed by human subjectivity, and the objective thing is just an "unknown" in his view.
Lacan summed up his theory as "unconsciousness has a linguistic structure" and "unconsciousness is the discourse of the other", that is, unconsciousness has a linguistic structure, sometimes in the form of displacement and compression, and people can examine the inner unconscious structure through its performance. This unconscious structure includes the relationship between self and others and other things.
Lacan's works are mysterious, obscure, skillful, poetic and difficult to read. Existentialism, New hegelianism and linguistic theory all have great influence on Lacan. Especially his later works are even more difficult to understand, because he put topology and mathematics at the center of theory.