JACQUES LACAN'S LINGUISTIC TURN: THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE, THE UNCONSCIOUS, AND THE DECENTRED SUBJECT

Abstract

Jacques Lacan is one of the most challenging and controversial of the contemporary philosophers as well as the most influential psychoanalyst since Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis. In the history of psychoanalytic theory, it was Lacan, who from the 1950s, with his call for a ‘return to Freud’, had insisted on the necessity of taking forward the theorisation of language in psychoanalysis. Lacanian thought has reached far beyond this, and it now pervades the diverse disciplines of literature, film studies, gender and social theory. He heralds a return to the writings of Freud, in order to discover in his texts, the idea of the ‘unconscious’. Lacan’s texts provide an insight into his richly complex thinking about spoken and written language, about the importance of language for an understanding of the unconscious and the politics of culture, and about the inter-relationships among literature, philosophy, linguistics and psychoanalysis. This paper seeks to explore the linguistic turn in psychoanalysis taken by Jacques Lacan. After introducing Lacan, it focuses primarily on the language and philosophy in his works. In addition to this, this paper aims to incorporate two topics that Lacan emphasizes in his writings-to demonstrate the link between the structure of language and that of the unconscious; and to provide a comprehensive account of the human subject with reference to ‘decentring’ of the subject. In short, the three main themes explored in this paper are: (1) Lacan's emphasis on language and linguistics, (2) his theory that the unconscious is structured like a language, and (3) his concept of the decentred/split subject.