Post-structural Meditations of Jacques Lacan on Human Subjectivity

Abstract

The present article explores psychoanalytical discourse of Jacques Lacan on human subjectivity. Jacques Lacan is an important psychoanalyst who extends Freud’s ideas about the human mind. If closely seen, Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis is far different from Freud’s psychoanalysis. As stated above, Freud’s emphasis was on intra-psychic processes that take place during childhood and their role in making an individual to be a member of the civilization. They have greater impact on entire life of the individual. Freudian theory of psychoanalysis was later expanded by Jacques Lacan. He, like Freud, made his contribution to the development of psychoanalysis. Poststructuralist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Louis Althusser (1918-1990), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and Jacques Lacan, disagreed with the humanistic notion of an individual as rational being capable of thinking and understanding the outer reality and as separate from the ideological structures. The individual becomes subject of unconscious with the imposition of language and culture which are already there before the birth of an individual, says Lacan. The present article also unfolds his analysis on the three registers of human life i.e. imaginary, the symbolic and the real. The role of unconscious into psychic development of human subject is also discussed.

Keywords: Psychoanalytical, Unconscious, Language, Culture, Symbolic

https://doi.org/10.37948/ensemble-2021-0301-a013