Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a great psychoanalyst, and is considered one of Sigmund Freud's main interpreters. His work is considered to be complex to understand. He founded his own psychoanalytic current: Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

Lacan's Psychoanalysis: a synthesis

Lacan presented invocations in psychoanalysis, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. According to Lacan, psychoanalysis has only one possible interpretation, and that is the linguistic interpretation.

In psychoanalysis, the unconscious is seen as the source of pathological phenomena. Therefore, as also advocated by other psychoanalysts, it is a task to discover the laws by which the unconscious is governed; laws that are discovered by the manifestations of the unconscious, and thus, one can treat these pathologies.

Lacanian Psychoanalysis constitutes a system of thought that promoted several alterations in relation to the doctrine and clinics proposed by Freud. Lacan created new concepts, besides having created his own technique of analysis. His differentiated technique arose from a different methodology of analysis of Freud's work, especially in comparison to other psychoanalysts whose theoriesdiverged from its predecessor.

Jacques Lacan is considered as the only one of Freud's great interpreters who sought to return literally to his texts and his doctrine. That is, Lacan did not only study him with the intention of surpassing or conserving his doctrine.

In this way, his theory became a kind of revolution in reverse, as if it were an orthodox replacement of Freud's doctrine.

The Complexity of Lacan's Work

Many scholars consider Lacan's work to be complex and difficult to understand. However, because Lacan's work is based on Freud's work, this facilitates or guides the study of Lacan's work. Therefore, it is important to understand Freud's work in order to understand Lacan's work.

One of the reasons that makes Lacan's work difficult to understand is his own way of writing. He writes in a way that does not lead to a clearly defined position. His usually employed writing style, thus, ends up differentiating his work from Freud's work.

Within this, contradictions end up being frequent in Lacan's work. He claimed that his work proposed a return to Freud's work, as in a resumption movement. Nevertheless, for example, he was clearly opposed to the naturalistic science proposed by Freud.

For Lacan, psychoanalysis had only one possible interpretation, which was the linguistic interpretation. Within this conception, he said that the unconscious had the structure of a language, an expression that became very well known in his work.

Jacques Lacan was, besides being a psychoanalyst, a literary critic, structuralist, philosopher, linguist, semiotician, and also an analyst. All these areas ended up converging and being reflected in his work, as well as in his way of interpretation and in the way he described his psychoanalytic theories. This all adds to the complexity of understanding his work.

Characteristics of Lacan's psychoanalytic work

Some important factors or characteristics must be considered in order to understand the work of Jacques Lacan First, we must consider that Lacan believed in the unconscious. Another factor is that he had an enormous interest in language. Moreover, his work can appear simple and clear, and at the same time it can be complex and obscure.

Freud created a framework for understanding the mind based on three elements: the id, the ego, and the superego. Lacan established his trilogy, using the imaginary, the symbolic, and sometimes the real as elements.

By stating that the infantile world is the foundation for the formation of adult identity, Lacan agrees with Freudian theory. For Lacan, however, the fantasies and aggression present in the infantile consciousness are mixed together to form the individual, through language.

According to Lacan's theory, we do not live in a world of realities. Our world is made up of symbols and signifiers. The signifier is something that stands for something else.

Lacan not only states that the unconscious is like language, he also proposes that before language, the unconscious does not exist for the individual. It is only when the child acquires a language that he becomes a human subject, that is, when he becomes part of the social world.

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Differences between the works of Freud and Lacan

Lacan's thought introduced phenomenology to Freud's theory, based on German philosophers, among them Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. Lacan, thus, introduced psychoanalysis to the field of philosophy.

Another characteristic exposed in Lacan's work, and which differentiates him from Freud and his primary followers, is something he calls "The Mirror Phase". In this theory, in a first moment, the baby is in a disordered phase, without knowing where his physical and emotional limits are. Suddenly, he discovers an image of himself as a complete being, a coherent and wonderful being.When he sees himself in the mirror, he recognizes or imagines himself as a cohesive being.

Regarding dreams, a subject much discussed in Freud's work. Freud claimed that dreams, in a certain way, represent the fulfillment of a desire. Lacan, on the other hand, considered that the desire of a dream would be a kind of representation of the "other" of a dreamer, and not a way to excuse the dreamer. Thus, for him, the desire would be the desire of this "other". And reality is only for those who do notcan support the dream.

In analysis, Jacques Lacan preferred that there should be no interference with the patient's discourse, that is, he let it flow so that the person being analyzed could discover his or her own questions, since by interfering in the discourse, the analyst could contaminate it with his or her signifiers, with his or her interpretations.

In this way, we see that, despite having declared that his first intention was to resume Freud's theories, Lacan ends up going beyond the work of his predecessor. And, thus, his work, in many moments, ends up differentiating and progressing in relation to Freudian studies.