Jacques Lacan

In addition to the orthodox academic philosophical circles, Jacques Lacan’s thoughts have been widely and deeply spread in the global intellectual community, and he has exerted great influence on Reshaping the ideological landscape after World War II had far-reaching consequences. Although the Chinese intellectual community’s understanding and interpretation of Lacan is relatively lagging behind and weak compared to Lacanian research in Europe and Latin America, Lacanian research in China is still making steady progress, and the latest achievement in this field is Professor Huang Zuo’s recent The published masterpiece "Floating Signifiers: Lacan and Contemporary French Philosophy" (People's Publishing House 2019).

Lacan divides human existence into three dimensions: imagination, symbol and reality. During his half-century academic career, his attention to these three dimensions was slightly different. In the early period, he mainly focused on imagination, and in the later period, he was obsessed with exploring impossible realities, but his exploration of symbols was consistent. The reason for this is not only because language is the key to Lacan's revolutionary transformation of psychoanalysis founded by Freud, but also because the work of imagination and reality can only be detected in the operation of symbols or language.

Lacan has a famous saying: The unconscious is the discourse of the big Other. There are two other similar expressions of this maxim: the unconscious has the structure of language, or the unconscious is structured like language. At any time, this concise and mysterious expression is not only a magnet for people to have strong curiosity about Lacan's thought, but also a barrier that prevents people from entering the palace of Lacan's thought. It draws people toward Lacan, but then prevents people from approaching Lacan. To a certain extent, to understand Lacan is to understand this maxim, and therefore to understand another of Lacan's equally mysterious maxims: Man's desire is the desire of the Other.

The fundamental reason why Lacan is recognized as the greatest psychoanalyst after Sigmund Freud is that he introduced the discoveries of modern linguistics into psychoanalysis, thereby revolutionizing This emerging discipline, and thus the reinterpretation of the two basic concepts of the unconscious and desire (and almost all psychoanalytic concepts for that matter), completely purged the traces of biologicalism that remained in Freud's thought. As an emerging discipline or discourse, the basic concept of psychoanalysis is the unconscious, because the unconscious is the object of study of this discipline. But what exactly is the unconscious?

There is no doubt that the unconscious is the basic object of psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis is the science of the unconscious. Throughout Freud's long academic career, whether he explored dreams, symptoms, and erratic movements, desire, self, and personality, or art, religion, and culture, the unconscious remained at the core of his work. In order to explore the unconscious, Freud successively put forward three viewpoints, namely topological, dynamic and economic viewpoints. These three viewpoints constitute the pivot of his meta-psychology. However, the unconscious is not only the cornerstone of the edifice of psychoanalysis, but also a difficult problem that Freud struggled with throughout his life but failed to solve satisfactorily in the end.