Jacques Lacan's lifetime Lacan considered the human psyche to be framed within the three orders of
The Imaginary,
The Symbolic and
The Real (RSI). The three divisions in their varying emphases also correspond roughly to the development of Lacan's thought. As he himself put it in Seminar XXII, "I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic...and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real". Lacan's early psychoanalytic period spans the 1930s and 1940s. His contributions from this period centered on the questions of image, identification and unconscious
fantasy. Developing
Henri Wallon's concept of infant mirroring, he used the idea of the
mirror stage to demonstrate the imaginary nature of the ego, in opposition to the views of
ego psychology. In the 1950s, the focus of Lacan's interest shifted to the symbolic order of kinship, culture, social structure, and roles—all mediated by the acquisition of language—into which each one of us is born and with which we all have to come to terms. The focus of therapy became that of dealing with disruptions on the part of the Imaginary of the structuring role played by the signifier/Other/Symbolic Order. Lacan's approach to psychoanalysis created a dialectic between Freud's thinking and that of both
Structuralist thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, as well as with Heidegger, Hegel and other continental philosophers. The 1960s saw Lacan's attention increasingly focused on what he termed the Real—not external consensual reality, but rather that unconscious element in the personality, linked to
trauma, dream, and the drive, which resists signification. The Real was what was lacking or absent from every
totalising structural theory; and in the form of
jouissance, and the persistence of the symptom or synthome, marked Lacan's shifting of psychoanalysis from modernity to postmodernity. Then, the Real, together with the Imaginary and the Symbolic, came to form a triad of "elementary registers." With Lacan's break with official psychoanalysis in 1963–1964, however, a tendency developed to look for a pure, self-contained Lacanianism, without psychoanalytic trappings.
Jacques-Alain Miller's index to
Ecrits had already written of "the Lacanian epistemology...the analytic experience (in its Lacanian definition...)"; and where the old guard of first-generation disciples like
Serge Leclaire continued to stress the importance of the re-reading of Freud, the new recruits of the 1960s and 1970s favoured instead an ahistorical Lacan, systematised after the event into a rigorous if over-simplified theoretical whole. Three main phases may be identified in Lacan's mature work: his 1950s exploration of
the Imaginary and
the Symbolic; his concern with the Real and the lost object of desire, the
objet petit a, during the 1960s; and a final phase highlighting
jouissance and the mathematical formulation of psychoanalytic teaching. As Lacan developed a distinctive style of teaching based on a linguistic reading of Freud in the 1950s, he also built up a substantial following within the
Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP), with
Serge Leclaire only the first of many French "Lacanians". It was this phase of his teaching that was memorialised in
Écrits, and which first found its way into the English-speaking world, where more Lacanians were thus to be found in English or Philosophy Departments than in clinical practice. However the very extent of Lacan's following raised serious criticisms: he was accused both of abusing the positive
transference to tie his analysands to himself, and of magnifying their numbers by the use of shortened analytic sessions. The questionable nature of his following was one of the reasons for his failure to gain recognition for his teaching from the
International Psychoanalytical Association recognition for the French form of Freudianism that was "Lacanianism"—a failure that led to his founding the
École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964. Many of his closest and most creative followers, such as
Jean Laplanche, chose the IPA over Lacan at this point, in the first of many subsequent Lacanian schisms. Lacan's 1973
Letter to the Italians, nominated
Muriel Drazien,
Giacomo Contri and
Armando Verdiglione to carry his teaching in Italy. As a body of thought, Lacanianism began to make its way into the English-speaking world from the 1960s onwards, influencing
film theory, feminist thought, queer theory, and
psychoanalytic criticism, as well as politics and social sciences, primarily through the concepts of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. As the role of the real and of jouissance in opposing structure became more widely recognised, however, so too Lacanianism developed as a tool for the exploration of the divided subject of
postmodernity. Since Lacan's death, however, much of the public attention focused on his work has begun to decline. Lacan had always been criticised for an
obscurantist writing style; and many of his disciples simply replicated the mystificatory elements in his work (in a sort of
transferential identification) without his freshness. Where interest in Lacanianism did revive in the 21st century, it was in large part the work of figures like Slavoj Žižek who have been able to
use Lacan's thought for their own intellectual ends, without the sometimes stifling orthodoxy of many of the formal Lacanian traditions. The continued influence of Lacanianism is thus paradoxically strongest in those who seem to have embraced
Malcolm Bowie's recommendation: "learn to unlearn the Lacanian idiom in the way Lacan unlearns the Freudian idiom". Examples include Michael J. Miller's integration of Lacanian theory into American psychotherapy alongside his critique of Lacanianism .
During Lacan's lifetime Élisabeth Roudinesco has suggested that, after the founding of the EFP "the history of psychoanalysis in France became subordinate to that of Lacanianism...the Lacanian movement occupied thereafter the motor position in relation to which the other movements were obliged to determine their course'". There was certainly a large expansion in the numbers of the school, if arguably at the expense of quantity over quality, as a flood of psychologists submerged the analysts who had come with him from the SFP. Protests against the new regime reached a head with the introduction of the self-certifying 'passe' to analytic status, and old comrades such as
François Perrier broke away in the bitter schism of 1968 to found the Quatrieme Groupe. However, major divisions remained within the EFP, which underwent another split over the question of analytic qualifications. There remained within the movement a broad division between the old guard of first generation Lacanians, focused on the
symbolic—on the study of Freud through the structural linguistic tools of the 1950s—and the younger group of mathematicians and philosophers centred on
Jacques-Alain Miller, who favoured a self-contained Lacanianism, formalised and free of its Freudian roots. Just as Lacan, in the 1970s, spoke of the mathematicisation of psychoanalysis and coined the term "
matheme" to describe its formulaic abstraction, Leclaire brusquely dismissed the new formulas as "graffiti". Nevertheless, despite these and other tensions, the EFP held together under the charisma of their Master, until (despairing of his followers) Lacan himself dissolved the school in 1980 the year before his death.
Post-Lacanianism The start of the 1980s saw the
post-Lacanian movement dissolve into a plethora of new organisations, of which the
Millerite (ECF, 273 members) and the Centre de formation et de recherches psychoanalytiques (CFRP, 390 members) are perhaps the most important. By 1993, another fourteen associations had grown out of the former EFP; nor did the process stop there. Early resignations and splits from the ECF were followed in the late 1990s by a massive exodus of analysts worldwide from Miller's organisation under allegations of misuse of authority. Attempts were made to re-unite the various factions, Leclaire arguing that Lacanianism was "becoming ossified, stiffening into a kind of war of religion, into theoretical debates that no longer contribute anything new". But with French Lacanianism (in particular) haunted by a past of betrayals and conflict—by faction after faction claiming their segment of Lacanian thought as the only genuine one—reunification of any kind has proven very problematic; and Roudinesco was perhaps correct to conclude that "'Lacanianism, born of subversion and a wish to transgress, is essentially doomed to fragility and dispersal".
Contemporary Lacanianism Three main divisions can be made in contemporary Lacanianism. • In one form, the academic reading of a de-clinicalised Lacan has become a pursuit in itself. • The (self-styled) legitimatism of the ECF, developed into an international movement with strong Spanish support as well as Latin American roots, set itself up as a rival challenge to the IPA. • The third form is a plural Lacanianism, best epitomised in the moderate CFRP, with its abandonment of the passe and openness to traditional psychoanalysis, and (after the 1995 dissolution) in its two successors. == Schools of thought ==