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Lacanian psychoanalysis 101

disposal’ (1973b: 36). This raises some very interesting theoretical issues with regard to
the meaning of texts. It suggests that the meaning of a text is not merely in the text
itself; rather, that we need to know the associations a reader brings to bear upon the
text. In other words, he is clearly pointing to the claim that the reader does not pas-
sively accept the meaning of a text: he or she actively produces its meaning, using the
discourses he or she brings to the encounter with the text. My particular reading of
Little Redcape is only possible because of my knowledge of Freudian discourse.
Without this knowledge, my interpretation would be very different.
Freud’s translation of psychoanalysis to textual analysis begins with a somewhat
crude version of psychobiography and ends with a rather sophisticated account of how
meanings are made. However, his suggestions about the real pleasures of reading may
have a certain disabling effect on psychoanalytic criticism. That is, if meaning depends
on the associations a reader brings to a text, what value can there be in psychoanalytic
textual analysis? When a psychoanalytic critic tells us that the text really means X, the
logic of Freudian psychoanalysis is to say that this is only what it means to you.

Lacanian psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan rereads Freud using the theoretical methodology developed by struc-
turalism. He seeks to anchor psychoanalysis firmly in culture rather than biology. As
he explains, his aim is to turn ‘the meaning of Freud’s work away from the biological
basis he would have wished for it towards the cultural references with which it is shot
through’ (1989: 116). He takes Freud’s developmental structure and rearticulates it
through a critical reading of structuralism to produce a post-structuralist psychoanalysis.
Lacan’s account of the development of the human ‘subject’ has had an enormous
influence on cultural studies, especially the study of film.
According to Lacan, we are born into a condition of ‘lack’, and subsequently spend
the rest of our lives trying to overcome this condition. ‘Lack’ is experienced in different
ways and as different things, but it is always a non-representable expression of the
fundamental condition of being human. The result is an endless quest in search of
an imagined moment of plenitude. Lacan figures this as a search for what he terms
l’objet petit a (the object small other); that which is desired but forever out of reach;
a lost object, signifying an imaginary moment in time. Unable to ever take hold of this
object, we console ourselves with displacement strategies and substitute objects.
Lacan argues that we make a journey through three determining stages of develop-
ment. The first is the ‘mirror stage’, the second is the ‘fort-da’ game, and the third is the
‘Oedipus complex’. Our lives begin in the realm Lacan calls the Real. Here we simply
are. In the Real we do not know where we end and where everything else begins. The
Real is like Nature before symbolization (i.e. before cultural classification). It is both
outside in what we might call ‘objective reality’ and inside in what Freud calls our
instinctual drives. The Real is everything before it became mediated by the Symbolic.