Lacan: Key Concepts

1. Stages of Development
2. the tree orders (imaginary, symbolic, real)
3. desire
Lacan introduced the concept of the three stages
that correspond to three stages of development
  • 0-6 month beginning of socialization (a first step away from the Real) (naming body parts, boundaries and separation)
  • 6-18 recognition of the self's image precedes the entrance into language, after which the subject can understand the place of that image of the self within a larger social order. creation of an ideal version of the self gives pre-verbal impetus to the creation of narcissistic phantasies in the fully developed subject.
  • 18-4 By acquiring language, you entered into what Lacan terms the ”symbolic order"; you were reduced into an empty signifier ("I") within the field of the Other, which is to say, within a field of language

Language: a radical break from any sense of materiality

Reality vs Real
Reality: fantasy world constructed through language
Real: a materiality of existence beyond language and thus beyond expressibility

“the unconscious is structured like language”

Tension between Real and Reality / Symbolic constitute psyche

Entrance into Symbolic Order is associated with rules and limitations of social world-Law of the Father.

NAME-OF-THE-FATHER (Lacan): The laws and restrictions that control both your desire and the rules of communication

CASTRATION COMPLEX: The early childhood fear of castration that Freud and Lacan both saw as an integral part of our psychosexual development. It’s associated with restrictions, prohibition and fear.

OEDIPUS COMPLEX (Lacan): being made to recognize that we cannot sleep with or even fully "have" our mother
The Law of the father is in this way theorized by Lacan as the necessary mediator between the child and the mother. Child's socialization is its aspiration to be the fully satisfying object for the mother, a function which is finally (or at least normally) fulfilled by the Law-bearing words of the father.
Lacan and Feminism
PHALLOCENTRISM OR PHALLOGOCENTRISM: The privileging of the masculine (the phallus) in understanding meaning or social relations.
  • Women socialize differently because they don’t experience Castration complex and Oedipus complex
  • The process of moving through the Oedipus complex is a way of recognizing the need to obey social strictures and to follow a closed differential system of language in which we understand "self" in relation to "others.”
  • Males give up the link to Real (deny their sexuality) in order to enter into the social world (Law-of-the-Father)
Women, therefore, are more lacking and more full.
Evaluation of Lacanian Theory by Feminists
  • maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis
  • provides a useful means of understanding gender biases and imposed roles
  • opening up new possibilities for feminist theory


For more information on Lacan visit: http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/psychoanalysis/lacandevelop.html