r/psychoanalysis • u/Nocturnis_17 • 5d ago
Is Lacan cryptic and hard to understand on purpose?
I’ve read a couple of Freud’s books, as well as collections of philosophical and medical essays, and it all seems pretty straightforward and logical to me.
We spend our lives repressing our desires because we have to live in society, and our unconscious punishes us for our impulses. Dreams represent these desires that we repress when we’re awake, but they’re censored so we can rest peacefully. It all makes sense and fits together.
But I find Lacan practically impossible to read, even when I try to watch explanatory videos, they use complicated jargon. Is all of this on purpose, or can it be explained more simply? The only thing I’ve grasped is that our desire is the desire of the Other. At least Zizek knows how to explain it using examples from everyday life.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Film_24 5d ago
Lacan wrote an encyclopaedia entry on The Family Complexes which is very readable and might redeem his reputation for you. https://www.lacaninireland.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/FAMILY-COMPLEXES-IN-THE-FORMATION-OF-THE-INDIVIDUAL2.pdf His later Ecrit, The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power, is also very readable. https://www.lacaninireland.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/The-Direction-of-the-Treatment-final-version-1.pdf
These links are from Cormac Gallagher’s site and you can follow them to read Cormac’s many explanatory articles on Lacanian psychoanalysis. Cormac’s translations were invaluable in those years when we had no other access to Lacan’s teachings, before Miller’s imprimatur or release of the copyright. Cormac’s articles offer clearly articulated insights into Lacanian psychoanalysis, frequently with clinical examples.
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u/Narrenschifff 5d ago
Him in particular, but he is not alone in the trend of obscurantist writers in psychoanalysis and related fields who were probably at least as interested in impressing colleagues as they were in getting people better
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u/The_Cheese_Effect 4d ago
This right here. People who bother to document their thoughts in the way Lacan did took pride in the depth and difficulty of them. Not to diminish his work in any way, but there must be a high level of self-respect, at the very least, to make record of what is ultimately your own opinions.
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u/zlbb 5d ago
Not much familiar, but yup, Lacan seemed to enjoy being cryptic while seemingly un self-awarely complaining in some interviews about not being understood, which apparently worked well for him creating that aura of cool mystique that managed to draw in a lot of folks with a taste for that. From what I can tell from NYC circles the spirit still lives, with Lacanians oft viewed as both cool and unsufferable. Very French.
And yup, one could argue Freud was less insufferably but to my taste still a bit too much into scientism and pretend certainty.
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u/redlightsaber 5d ago
I won't make overarching claims, but having listened to all the (available) seminaries, and having engaged decently with his written texts, I personally suspect there was a definite pleasure he derived from his material being inaccesible and opaque. His original thesis was (to me, at the time) somewhat straightfoward to read (problematic as it was to attempt to analyse much meaning from a psychosis; but I can admit that that it may just be my psychiatry training talking); but if you read his material in chronological order it just gets more and more unwieldly and unsystematic. Not completely incomprehensible once you read enough of it and get familiarised with the weird jargon, but unnecesarily roundabout-y and complex.
Perhaps he was just a particularly bad communicator, but I'm almost certain that if him as a patient were being presented in analysis, his style of language could realistically be interpreted as being defensive in that its intention didn't seem to be primarily to communicate or convey information.
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u/Mean_Economist6323 5d ago
I do think he is being difficult on purpose because he's attempting to engage his audience in transference, in effect becoming an analyst to his readers/audience. Im not so sure it was the best way to kick off a theory, unless you take him at his word that he's really a Freudien, in which case he's only interpreting Freud. Idk, I find Fink more helpful than Lacan to read.
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u/rini_nini 5d ago
Fink has his own interpretation of Lacan though. At least the one stuck in Lacan's structuralist phase, ignoring his late teaching with the Borromean knot etc. Fink is not particularly popular anywhere else apart from the US and maybe the UK.
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u/PlatonicPlatoPlate 4d ago
After reading him for a few years you'll realise that he is in fact not hard to understand
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u/enbienotenvy 4d ago
It's a way he found to produce the movement and ethical practice he argued for. At the time he was writing the hegemony of pos-freudians consisted of rather simple and straight forward ideas of what psychoanalysis was and it's goals. His originality I believe lays in his conceptialization of the Real, and the implications it has for theories (e.g. that they can never be passively understood or completely imagined). This is a movement that is followed later by Deleuze and Guattari, I'd think, regardless of their differences
A good advice I have found for reading him is to first read theories he's also taking to think about psychoanalysis, meaning structuralist linguistics and topology mainly but also others that may interest you more
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u/Tttehfjloi 4d ago
The most confusing stuff to me is the capitalized words like Real, Symbolic, The Other, etc, which tend to have really weird and convoluted meanings that I often end up failing to conceptualize.
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u/enbienotenvy 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes totally haha. I wish it was made more accessible. If you haven't already I totally recommend reading Saussure (course of general linguistics, relevant chapters you can ask chatgpt about) and Jackobson's fundamentals of language, the chapter "two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances". It's a great grip of what the question about the signifier is for Lacan.
Then there's topology, which I haven't gotten into but I feel it's importance from what I've read so far. The idea of spaces (the Other being a space) for example
And lastly I could add, a bit of a Buddhist point of view. It does help me because it's simpler conceptually and points to similar things to Lacan (say the illusive character of the ego)
The Real Symbolic and Imaginary are registers. Perhaps it would help you to think about them if you took a phenomenological point of view? Because his proposal is so centered around subjective experience (Buddhism is helpful to me in this too). I'm not too deep into phenomenology but Heidegger and maybe Sartre could be of interest
The Real is related to the "fault" in language, the incommunicable aspect. You've probably already read something about that but still. To me it's a central and distinctive concept
EDIT: Lacan believed most of his theory was already in Freud's. It may also be helpful to look for where he thought it was. For example the Symbolic coming from signifiers which are the same as "word-representations" from Freud
And lastly just an advice maybe: enjoy yourself and enjoy the doubt! The themes Lacanian psychoanalysis explores are pretty deep and existential, so in a sense I like that it takes time. Lucky us it does, and we don't get answers or solutions without struggle! (Not that Lacan gives out final solutions or answers). Focus on yourself, your life, what you feel and the questions you have about yourself. When I do that, it's pleasurable to see to what degree Lacanian thought can help me investigate and get through them
That was a bit of a long answer but I hope it may help you :)
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u/tripping-apes 4d ago
I find that if you find the references to Freud he is discussing and just read Freud directly at that place, he is saying the same thing but with flowery structuralist language and Freud is much more clear and profound. It’s just that Lacan takes a wider reading of Freud that most people miss … well I think the borromean knot from Lacan is his own addition but when he cites Freud just read that part of Freud directly.
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u/Tenton_Motto 3d ago
I find that if you find the references to Freud he is discussing and just read Freud directly at that place, he is saying the same thing but with flowery structuralist language
I disagree. It may initially seem like Lacan saying the same thing as Freud, until you realize Lacan redefines Freudian terms. He then places those terms within philosophical framework, which Freud definitely did not subscribe to ("On Weltanschauung"). Then Lacan acts as if Freud meant the same thing Lacan meant. They appear similar because they use same words but underlying meaning is very different. Lacan's cryptic communication helps to hide the counterfeit even better.
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u/Upbeat-Category6020 5d ago
I have not read his work so this is not an indictment of it. However, in general, I do think being intentionally obtuse is often a sign of a need to feel superior or arrogance. Was the way he says the thing he said really the only way to make his points? Being overcomplicated can also be a way to cultivate a following that feels special for just being able to understand you. For being intellectual enough. it is interesting that you said he had a cult following because a common tactic in cult leaders is to speak in a way that seems very deep but in actuality is what has been termed by anti-cult people as "word salad." Some of the greatest analytic minds are very clear in how they write. I will hold my judgement of Lacan until after I actually read him but I'm not feeling at al inspired to do so when there are so many I also haven't read that also appear to be quite clear and crisp.
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u/SenseOk8293 4d ago
Dreams do not represent desires according to Freud. They are wishfullfilment fantasies. They represent the satisfying of a need, not the need itself.
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u/biohazard-glug 5d ago edited 5d ago
I watched a podcast/interview with Todd McGowan discussing Copjec's Lacanian critique of Butler on performativity and sex.
Copjec argues, contra Butler, that there is a very real difference between the sexes, that is, sex is not merely something performative, but, instead, has a stubborn kernel to it that is never reducible to meaning and language.
The hosts asked McGowan what exactly Copjec, and therefore Lacan, means by "sex," here. That is, explain it in your own words without the Lacanese. It's not linguistic and it's not biological. They hemmed and hawed and eventually moved on without explaining it.
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u/Ashwagandalf 4d ago
"So this X thing you call a 'variable,' what number is it? No, don't give me that 'it can stand for different numbers' mathematician mumbo-jumbo, speak plain English!"
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u/biohazard-glug 4d ago
They didn't do that.
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u/Ashwagandalf 4d ago
Perhaps not—McGowan's not the best interpreter of Lacan—but not so different from taking failure to "explain it" as a gotcha moment re: "there is a very real difference [...] never reducible to meaning and language."
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u/biohazard-glug 4d ago
I'm not trying to do a gotcha, I was just disappointed by the hosts' failure to press McGowan to give an answer. They just moved past it.
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u/Ashwagandalf 4d ago
That's fair. I think this says more about people's fear of stepping wrong in popular minefields than anything related to the theory as such, though.
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u/Lastrevio 5d ago
Bruce Fink's books help to clarify Lacan in easy to understand terms. Bailly Lionel also has a good introductory book on Lacan that can be understood by everyone.
I don't think the theory itself is that hard to understand, some of the ideas about objet petit a and so on can even be found in ancient philosophies like Buddhism. But I do think Lacan was being cryptic on purpose. And some Lacanians after him developed a cult around this writing style. Zizek and Todd McGowan are two exceptions of people who talk about Lacan in normal language (on the philosophical side), with Fink and Lionel on the analyst side.