Understanding Jacques Lacan
A book review of “Introducing Lacan” by Darian Leader
I discovered Lacan quite late. I’ve seen him referenced in quite a few places, but his work seemed impenetrable, so I never bothered to read anything about him. While I was in a bookshop, I saw this book and figured it would be a good chance to finally learn what Lacan was about.
It was my first book of this “graphic guide” series. I’ve seen it all over the place, but I was somewhat sceptical of its quality. But given Lacan seemed hard to read, having a short and introductory book seemed a good idea.
Lacan was a psychoanalyst, heavily influential in the 20th century. He was associated with the Parisian surrealist movement, being Picasso’s therapist and acquainted with many artists like Dalí. He was a key figure leading post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics and 20th-century French philosophy.
The book starts with his work on paranoia, which was his doctoral thesis. He recounts the case of Aimée, which tried to stab a well-known Parisian actress. She suffered from ideas of persecution, and the case was famous at the time. According to Lacan, Aimée’s identity was outside herself. The actress was the “ideal image”, an object of hate and aspiration. This is the starting pointing of a lot of Lacan’s thought — how the ego relates to the world, and also how the ego categorizes the world.
The “image” is the identification of the ego with something else. Lacan often presents this illustrating the emerging consciousness of a child who doesn’t have an identity yet. The child uses an “image” to gain further knowledge about the world and develop, but this causes the child to be trapped in the “imaginary” — it’s trapped in an image alien and outside of herself. Thus, the ego is fragmented because it’s only a collection of images. However, it tries to create wholeness and coherence, and it does so by distorting its own image — the falsifying ego.
The signifier is an image, while the signified is a concept. A word (the signifier) does not have an unambiguous and objective that results in the signified. In addition, signifiers form networks, in which each signifier is connected to another one in a large chain, that can’t, for the most part, be accessed consciously. This is crucial in Lacan’s thought because this is the landscape of the “symbolic”, the very organization of our phenomenological world.
This ties together with the previously mentioned development of the child. Not only does the child identify with external images, but it’s also shaped by the symbolic universe it’s embedded in. Language, in particular, seems to be the most important, since that’s the most common signifier. Although it also extends into social and cultural signifiers.
In addition to the Symbolic and Imaginary, Lacan names an extra dimension called the Real. The real is everything that isn’t in the symbolic nor the imaginary. Our everyday reality is the symbolic and imaginary, while the real is the “objective reality”, something like Kant’s noumenal world. Paradoxically and brilliantly, this is exactly what’s outside of our reality.
There is a lot more to Lacan’s thought, and the book covers a fair bit of work, but this is what I found the most interesting and useful, as far as I understood it. Some of it I found a bit nonsensical, particularly when he tried to develop Freud’s ideas. But overall, I regard him as an original and interesting thinker.
Regarding the book format, I think it was well done, and the illustrations were generally good. Nevertheless, I felt they should have been minimised. It has an illustration on literally every page, which of course results in having close to meaningless images just to fill in.
About the content itself, it was harder than I expected. Even being short, and even while being marketed as an introduction, a lot of it can get quite complex. I think the book tried to have a very extensive introduction of many aspects of Lacan’s thought. While this has its benefits, it cannot go into any single subject very deeply, and thus the explanations have to be shrunk considerably. I think perhaps picking the most important five Lacanian concepts would be more useful, rather than trying to explain thirty different ones in a couple of pages.
Nevertheless, you do get a sense of what Lacan was trying to achieve, and it’s not a terribly difficult read, so the book achieves its purpose. If you’re completely new to Lacan, you will likely benefit from it.
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Tiago V.F.
