The elements in the unconscious-wishes,desires, images-all form signifiers (and they're usually expressed in verbalterms), and these signifiers form a 'signifying chain'-one signifier has meaningonly because it is not some other signifier.
Lacannotes that Freud's dream analyses, and most of his analyses of the unconscioussymbolism used by his patients, depend on word-play-on puns, associations,etc. Both are essentially linguistic phenomena, wheremeaning is either condensed (in metaphor) or displaced (in metonymy).
In Lacanianpsychoanalysis, the unconscious is the ground of all being.Where Freud is interested in investigating how the polymorphously perversechild forms an unconscious and a superego and becomes a civilized and productive(as well as correctly heterosexual) adult, Lacan is interested in how the infantgets this illusion we call a 'self.' His essay on the Mirror Stage describesthat process, showing how the infant forms an illusion of an ego, of a unifiedconscious self identified by the word 'I.' Central to the conception of the human, in Lacan, is the notion that the unconscious,which governs all factors of human existence, is structured like a language.He bases this on Freud's account of the two main mechanisms of unconscious processes,condensation and displacement. The ego can never take the place ofthe unconscious, or empty it out, or control it, because, for Lacan, the egoor 'I' self is only an illusion, a product of the unconscious itself. Lacan reinterprets Freud in lightof structuralist and post-structuralist theories, turning psychoanalysis froman essentially humanist philosophy or theory into a post-structuralist one.One of the basic premises of humanism, as you recall, is that there is sucha thing as a stable self, that has all those nice things like free will andself-determination. You might think of Lacan as Freud+ Saussure, with a dash of Levi-Strauss, and even some seasoning of Derrida.But his main influence/precursor is Freud.
He was originally trained as a psychiatrist,and in the 1930s and 40s worked with psychotic patients he began in the 1950sto develop his own version of psychoanalysis, based on the ideas articulatedin structuralist linguistics and anthropology. For Freud and for psychoanalysis in general,however, actions, thought, belief, and the concepts of 'self' are all determinedor shaped by the unconscious, and its drives and desires.Jacques Lacan is a French psychoanalyst. On the one hand, our usual (Western humanist) ideas of selfor personhood are defined by operations of consciousness, including rationality,free will, and self-reflection.
Klages on Lacan Jacques LacanIn his discussion of the absolute division between the unconscious and theconsciousness (or between id and ego), Freud introduces the idea of the humanself, or subject, as radically split, divided between these two realms of consciousand unconscious.
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