There is a Lacanian strand in left-wing politics, including Saul Newman's and Duane Rousselle's post-anarchism, Louis Althusser's structural Marxism, and the works of Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.
Lacanians view the structure of the mind as defined by the individual's entry as an infant into the world of language, the Symbolic, through an Oedipal process.
The unconscious mind is constituted by a network of empty signifiers that resurface in language—particularly dreams and Freudian slips—and Lacanian clinical practice focuses closely on the precise words used by the analysand (patient), which Lacan characterised as a "return to Freud".
The three clinical structures describe the subject's relationship to the Other and are each associated with a different defence mechanism: psychotics use foreclosure, a rejection of the father's authority in the Oedipus complex that results in a failure to form a Symbolic unconscious; perverts use disavowal, failing to accept that lack causes desire and nominating a specific object as its cause, their fetish; and neurotics use repression.
[2] In his fourth seminar, "La relation d'objet", Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child.
[3] Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic", since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth".
[22] In the fifties, 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.
[24] 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.
[21][25] The sixties 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.
[26] The Real was what was lacking or absent from every totalising structural theory;[27] and in the form of jouissance, and the persistence of the symptom or synthome, marked Lacan's shifting of psychoanalysis from modernity to postmodernity.
[21] Lacan's thinking was intimately geared not only to the work of Freud but to that of the most prominent of his psychoanalytic successors—Heinz Hartmann, Melanie Klein, Michael Balint, D. W. Winnicott and more.
[29] Jacques-Alain Miller's index to Ecrits had already written of "the Lacanian epistemology...the analytic experience (in its Lacanian definition...)";[30] 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 sixties and seventies favoured instead an ahistorical Lacan, systematised after the event into a rigorous if over-simplified theoretical whole.
As the fifties Lacan developed a distinctive style of teaching based on a linguistic reading of Freud, so too he built up a substantial following within the Société Française de Psychanalyse [SFP], with Serge Leclaire only the first of many French "Lacanians".
[34] 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.
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.
Lacan had always been criticised for an obscurantist writing style;[44] and many of his disciples simply replicated the mystificatory elements in his work (in a sort of transferential identification)[45] without his freshness.
[49] 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.
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.
[55] 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".
Attempts to rejoin the IPA remain problematic, however, not least due to the persistence of the 'short session' and of Lacan's rejection of countertransference as a therapeutic tool.
"[67] The Deleuzoguattarian critique of Lacanianism attacks its conception of desire as "negative", in that it results from a lack in the subject, and its belief that the unconscious mind is "structured like a language".
Deleuze and Guattari argued that the unconscious mind was schizophrenic, characterised by rhizomes of libidinal investment, and that desire was a creative force that powered the essential building blocks of psychical structures, desiring-machines.
Hence Lacanian analysis works to solve neurosis, but it fails to see that neuroses are a second-order problem that reveal nothing about the unconscious—as does Freud's classical psychoanalysis.
Deleuze and Guattari proposed an alternative post-structuralist extension of classical psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, which was defined in opposition to these apparent flaws in Lacanianism.
Unlike Lacanianism, schizoanalysis openly repudiates parts of Freud, particularly his neurotic conception of the unconscious, and Deleuze and Guattari insisted that it was distinct from psychoanalysis.