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LITERATURE & PSYCHOANALYSIS SERIES
ON JACQUES LACAN AND LITERARY CRITICISM
Jan Miel (1966). ‘Jacques Lacan and the Structure of the Unconscious,’ Yale French
Studies, No. 36/37, Structuralism, pp. 104-111.
John Gasperoni (1996). ‘The Unconscious is Structured Like a Language,’ Qui Parle,
Vol. 9, No. 2, Spring/Summer, pp. 77-104.
Elizabeth Wright (1988). ‘Another Look at Lacan and Literary Criticism,’ New
Literary History, Vol. 19, No. 3, Spring, History, Critics, and Criticism: Some
Inquiries, pp. 617-627.
Régis Durand (1983). ‘On Aphanisis: A Note on the Dramaturgy of the Subject in
Narrative Analysis,’ Modern Language Notes, Comparative Literature, Vol. 98, No.5,
pp. 860-870.
INTRODUCTION
The main wager in the literary criticism that is inspired by the theories of Jacques
Lacan is that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language.’ If that were not the case,
there would be no reason to invoke Lacan in literary criticism. Lacan’s value to a
literary critic would be no more than that of any other psychoanalyst. The best that
could be said about Lacan in such a case is that he offers themes that resonate with
those of a given writer. There is however an important difference between merely
invoking Lacan in an inter-textual context and actively incorporating his insights
about the linguistic structure of the unconscious as an important precept in terms of
the critical methodology of literary analysis. The theorists listed above read,
interpret, and incorporate Lacan mainly at the level of method rather than at the
level of analytic themes. That is why it is worth our while to summarize the main
arguments and the main points that they raise in the four papers cited above. If
literary criticism in the wake of Jacques Lacan is based on his understanding of the
unconscious, we must first get an idea of what exactly is at stake in the Lacanian

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unconscious. What this means is that we have to understand why it is important for
Lacan to maintain that the unconscious not only bears a resemblance to but is indeed
structured by language. What does Lacan mean by language? Is he using this term
literally or metaphorically? How do we differentiate, for instance, between terms like
‘langue and parole,’ and ‘competence and performance?’ How do we make sense of
the debates between Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan and Jean
Laplanche? These questions matter because they have important implications for
how we read, or should attempt to read, literary texts. In the case of Lacan and
Derrida the disagreement was on whether the psyche should be modelled on a text
or vice versa. In the case of Lacan and Laplanche it was a question of whether ‘the
unconscious is structured like a language’ or whether ‘language is structured like the
unconscious.’ While all these difficult questions cannot be resolved in this brief
essay, it will suffice if we can at least attempt to answer what exactly is at stake in
comparing the structure of the unconscious to the structure of language and leave
the other questions for another occasion in this series of essays on literature and
psychoanalysis.
THE SCIENCE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Jan Miel argues that the invocation of the structure of language within the attempts
to model the unconscious in the history of psychoanalysis was based on the hope
that it would be possible to make a science of psychoanalysis. Miel’s point is not that
psychoanalysis can become a deterministic science like physics, but that it can at
least aspire to become as rigorous as structural linguistics. The main difference
between these areas is that in physics, it is possible to predict how particles in
motion will behave at least within a Newtonian space; that however is not possible
in linguistics. What linguists mean by science is more akin to having a formal
representation of linguistic phenomena without necessarily attaining the high levels
of determinism or predictability that characterise physics. In other words, the term
‘science’ is being invoked here as akin to mathematical formalisation. Furthermore, if
psychoanalysis is conceived to be a science then there is no place for orthodoxy, and
analysts should be allowed to disagree with the founding precepts of Sigmund
Freud. The question in that case is to what extent an analyst can disagree with Freud
before he is deemed to be doing a different type of psychoanalysis altogether. If the
range of deviation exceeds a pre-given limit then that is tantamount to starting a
new school of thought. The scientific approach to psychoanalysis actually led to the
development of a number of competing schools of analysis.1 Each of these schools
seems to attract the kind of patient who is most suitable to the fundamental precepts
of these schools. How else can we explain that all the schools were doing reasonably
1 See, for instance, Joseph Schwartz (1999). Cassandra’s Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis
(New York: Penguin Books).

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well during the high phase of psychoanalysis? What do these schools have in
common? While these schools may disagree on the importance that should be
accorded to specific analytic themes, what they had in common was the importance
of terms like ‘repression, the unconscious, and the transference.’ These categories
exist in all schools of analysis though the intellectual scaffolding invoked to make
sense of these terms as causal mechanisms in a theory of the subject will vary in
emphasis. That is why the outward forms of the analytic session have endured
across different schools of analytic thought even when doctrinal matters remained
controversial or were subject to disagreement.
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LINGUISTICS
The Lacanian position was that Freud knew what he was doing and did not merely
stumble upon the precepts of analysis. In other words, Freud was not just a secular
equivalent of a shaman. He was a scientist who could relate the discoveries of
psychoanalysis with those of the sciences that were being developed in the 19th
century. So, for instance, later commentators were able to relate psychoanalysis to
areas like evolutionary biology, neuro-anatomy, philosophy, psychology, and
literature. That kind of intellectual scope goes way beyond the contention that Freud
was just a shaman with a medical degree. If that were the case then why is it that
anthropologists have not been able to implicate the history of shamanism with the
history of ideas? So, then, clearly Freud was a lot smarter than shamans. What is it
that Freud knew that shamans did not? The answer to this question will vary but
whatever he knew that shamans did not was to earn him a place in the history of
medicine and the history of science.2 So, for instance, it appears from a close reading
of Freud’s work on the ‘interpretation of dreams’ that he understood that the
structure of a natural language is differential. This is all the more remarkable
because Freud had not read the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. That
however did not prevent Freud from coming up with a theoretical representation of
the formations of the unconscious comprising the psychic mechanisms that he
termed ‘condensation, displacement, secondary revision, and conditions of
representability.’ Though Freud did not explicitly compare these mechanisms to
metaphor and metonymy, he came as close as he possibly could to the equivalences
that were formalized later by Roman Jakobson, Kenneth Burke, and Jacques Lacan.
These resemblances between psychic and linguistic phenomena are what made it
possible for the incorporation of the Lacanian model of the unconscious into
linguistic and literary studies.
2 See Iago Galdston (1956, 1973). ‘Freud and Romantic Medicine,’ Freud: Modern Judgements
edited by Frank Cioffi (London: Macmillan), pp. 103-123; and Jacalyn Duffin (1999, 2000).
‘Wrestling with Demons: History of Psychiatry,’ A Scandalously Short History of Medicine
(London: Macmillan) pp. 276-302.

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LINGUIST OF THE MIND
Linguistics provided a stronger foundation for psychoanalysis than either biology or
psychology. That is because while these areas are useful for psychoanalysts, they do
not have a full-fledged theory of the unconscious that can be deployed in the
analytic clinic. What biology and psychology have in common is the preoccupation
with finding a niche in which an animal can survive or in learning to adapt to an
environment. The discovery of the unconscious however complicates matters
pertaining to human behaviour because human beings are not as adaptive as they
were thought to be from an evolutionary point of view; that is the most important
implication of the discovery of the unconscious. There is something inherently dis-
adaptive about the unconscious; that is why Sigmund Freud had to finally invoke
the death instinct in his studies on the pleasure principle. So while Freud was
initially thought to be a ‘biologist of the mind,’ it was not possible to take a reductive
approach to psychoanalysis. Those who do so do not understand the difference
between psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology (which is based on
evolutionary biology). The entire point of the Lacanian intervention is to
demonstrate that while biology is based on natural phenomena, psychoanalysis is
based on socio-cultural phenomena. It is therefore not possible to explain the self as
a collection of biological instincts. The expression of the instincts in human beings,
unlike animals, is mediated by the unconscious. This mediation by language is referred
to in structural anthropology as a ‘kinship system.’ Both psychoanalysis and
structural anthropology model these phenomena by using the differential linguistics
of Saussure as a modelling device; hence, the importance of structural linguistics for
both Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan.3 This archaic language of kinship is
subject to repression and recovered in the analytic dialogue. In order to do so,
however, the usual protocols of communication are suspended in favour of an
asymmetrical structure where the analyst ‘returns the patient’s message in an
inverted form’ (albeit within the affective dynamics of the transference). This
theoretical shift from biology to language as a conceptual platform is the main
accomplishment of Lacanian psychoanalysis. That is why a literary critic who
attempts to use Lacan to read literary texts must understand the difference between
a linguistic and a non-linguistic model of the unconscious. It turns out then that
whether or not Freud was a ‘biologist of the mind,’ Lacan was certainly a ‘linguist of
the mind.’4
3 See Patrick Wilcken (2010). Claude Lévi Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (London:
Bloomsbury).
4 See Frank J. Sulloway (1979). Freud, Biologist of theMind (New York: Basic Books).

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FORMATIONS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
While Jan Miel initiates a useful description of the relationship between the
unconscious and language, he is not able to list and discuss all the attributes of the
unconscious; for that we must turn to John Gasperoni. There are three important
aspects of the unconscious that he highlights. The articulation of the unconscious is
dependent on language but in addition to language (conceived as the realm of
abstract combinations) the unconscious is also dependent on the patient’s speech. In
everyday life, the unconscious is that which remains ‘unnoticed.’ Lacan was fond of
saying that the unconscious is not something hidden; it is merely something that we
habitually ‘overlook.’ These precepts of the Freudian unconscious are derived from a
close reading of Freud’s texts on dreams, jokes, and the psychopathology of
everyday life. What these texts have in common constitute the formations of the
unconscious. Freud does not differentiate between the neurotic and normative
subject in this context. Both have dreams which can be analysed from the point of
view of wish-fulfilment. The dreams of all subjects are subject to distortions since a
dream is a ‘disguised fulfilment of a wish.’ If that were not the case, the dreamer will
wake up when confronted too directly by his repressed desires. A dream must not
only express a repressed wish in disguise, it must also preserve the subject’s desire
to sleep. What the manifestations of the unconscious in dreams, everyday life, and
jokes have in common is that they are ‘trans-individual.’ In other words, the
unconscious partakes of the symbolic dimension of language. The different levels
within the psyche constitute the primary and secondary process. What is at stake in
analytic interpretation then is translating successfully between these two systems of
mental functioning.5 Gasperoni then explains the significance of the mirror phase and
the Oedipus complex in the developmental history of the subject. The most
important thing that he has to teach us however is at the level of language. There are
four levels in the psyche. These relate to perceptions, thing-presentations, word-
presentations, and the representative of the representation. Any theory of the
unconscious must account for these dimensions. That is why it is not possible to
reduce the psyche to the instincts. The importance of invoking differential linguistics
is that it makes it possible to show how these four levels affect each other within the
Freudian model of the unconscious. These four levels are also invoked to explain the
difference between repression and the unconscious. The term, ‘unconscious,’ has to
be understood in both a descriptive sense within the topographical model and in a
functional sense in order to relate it to repression. While everything that is repressed
5 See Sigmund Freud (1911, 1991). ‘Formulation on the Two Principles of Mental
Functioning,’ translated by James Strachey, edited by Angela Richards, On Metapsychology:
The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11 (London: Penguin Books), pp. 29-44; see also Andrew
Benjamin (1989). ‘Psychoanalysis and Translation,’ Translation and the Nature of Philosophy
(London and New York; Routledge), pp. 109-149.

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is defined as unconscious, not everything that is unconscious is repressed. Those
elements of the unconscious that are not subject to repression can be activated
through free-association in the clinic. The repressed is however thought to be the
prototype of the unconscious.6 That is because in the absence of the repressed as
content and repression as a function under the aegis of primary and secondary
repression, the term ‘unconscious’ will not have any affective charge in relation to
either psychopathology or human identity.7
THE ENJOYMENT OF MEANING
In addition to langue and parole, Lacan also explains the need for a category like
lalangue. This is a pre-semiotic state before language is marked out into phonemes.
When a child learns the phonemic system in any language, he is working only with a
subset of phonemes that are available from within the primordial lalangue. That is
why Lacan emphasizes the fact that the choice of these phonemes in any given
language before speech can be fully activated in the subject is invested with a sense
of enjoyment that he terms ‘jouis-sens.’ This insight into the nature of how the
phonemic system relates to the function of speech will be re-visited in the context of
the analytic distinction between ‘empty speech and full speech’ in the context of
parole. Closure in analysis depends on whether the patient is able to make a
transition from empty speech to full speech. Lacanian techniques of ‘punctuation’
are based on the assumption that the patient will resist the disclosures of the
unconscious and seek recourse to the ego defence of empty speech unless the analyst
can precipitate the fantasy hidden in the patient’s symptoms. The main difference between
Miel and Gasperoni is that the former is mainly preoccupied with the symbolic
dimension of the Lacanian doctrine while the latter tries to account for the Real, the
Imaginary, and the Symbolic as well. These texts will also make it possible to
understand why the Lacanian model of the unconscious (structured like a language)
is relevant to the study of literary texts. In other words, a differential model of
language (without positive terms) renders the basic categories of literary criticism
like author, text, critic, intention, reception, meaning, translation, and interpretation
problematic. Literary criticism informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis then will
demand nothing less than a willingness to rethink these fundamental categories.
That is why when we turn to Elizabeth Wright’s description of literary criticism that
is informed by Lacan, we find that she differentiates between ‘pre-Lacanian’ and
6 See Sigmund Freud (1915, 1991). ‘Repression,’ translated by James Strachey, edited by
Angela Richards, On Metapsychology: TheTheory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11 (London: Penguin
Books), pp. 139-158.
7 See Charles Rycroft (1968, 1995). ‘Unconscious,’ A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
(London: Penguin Books), pp. 191-192. See also Dylan Evans (1997). ‘Unconscious,’ An
Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge), pp. 217-219.

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post-Lacanian criticism. In other words, she finds something theoretically
inadequate about pre-Lacanian approaches to literary criticism. An important aspect
of pre-Lacanian criticism is the assumption that psychoanalysis has interesting
things to say about a literary text only if the author is neurotic and the text is an
attempt to grapple with a neurosis. It is however not necessary to make such an
assumption in Lacanian criticism. Lacanians are more likely to concede that they
have as much to learn from literature as they have to say about it from a
psychoanalytic point of view. In other words, there is a lot more to literature than
sexual symbolism and the sublimation of neuroses in acts of literary creation.
Furthermore, unlike the Freudian model which is preoccupied with the regressive
representation of private forms of wish fulfilment; in the Lacanian model, desire is
future oriented. The differential function of the signifier imposes a structural gap
between the private experience of a wish and its representation or interpretation in
public. This constitutive gap is, quite simply, the Lacanian unconscious. Literary
criticism informed by the Lacanian unconscious is way then of exploring this
constitutive gap between the private and the public (i.e. the inner world and the
outer world.) Working through this constitutive gap in literary criticism is what is
involved in the enjoyment of meaning.
THE FUTURE OF LITERARY CRITICISM
An important aspect of Lacanian criticism is that it is directed towards the future; it
is not regressive in its representational choices. The critic is haunted by both the
imaginary and symbolic dimensions of desire in the text. So, for instance, the letter
functions as both the lure and the capture of the reader’s desire. This double function
is analogous to the dialectical relationship between the patient’s transference to the
analyst and the latter’s counter-transference to the patient. It is also possible to
differentiate between realist and non-realist approaches in terms of whether or not
the reader’s desire is satisfied. Wright concludes her analysis by differentiating
between Lacanian and non-Lacanian approaches. She is particularly interested in
differentiating between Lacanian analysis and the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari. What is at stake here is the difference between a linguistic and a
productive model of the unconscious. Lacan bases his approach on hysteria; Deleuze
and Guattari on schizophrenia. While the Lacanian model won this theoretical
conflict for the minds and hearts of literary critics, Wright’s work chronicles a phase
when that victory could not be taken for granted. It is important to note that the
arguments put forth by Deleuze and Guattari on what constitutes an acceptable
model of the unconscious were anticipated in the theoretical work of D.H. Lawrence.
The Lawrentian preoccupation with a theory of the subject that is unaffected by
oedipal considerations is precisely a pre-figuration of Deleuze and Guattari. While
analysing the precise form of this prefiguration is beyond the scope of this essay, it is

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worth noting that to be the case. That is partly because of the anxiety of influence
that Lawrence suffered from via-à-vis Sigmund Freud.8 In other words, Lawrence not
only wanted to write Sons and Lovers as though Freud had never existed, but he
wanted it to be read as though psychoanalysis does not matter to literary criticism. It
is this attempt to resist Freud and evade Lacan that constitutes a structural
homology between the projects of Lawrence and Deleuze and Guattari. The main
thrust of this essay however is to demonstrate that it is increasingly difficult to do
that in the history of literary criticism for reasons that this essay sets out to engage
with. That is because the linguistic dimensions of the unconscious have implications
for the narrative construction of not only literature but for the dramaturgy of the
literary subject.
CONCLUSION
Régis Durand points out that in order to render this dramaturgy historically it is
possible to take a literary text and analyse the forms of interpretations that it has
been subject to. In other words, a reception history that is specific to the analytic
approach to illustrate what analysts have been able to make of a text like Hamlet. The
main question for Durand is whether it is possible to develop and deploy Lacanian
terms within literary criticism. And, if yes, will such an exercise by construed as a
literal or metaphorical invocation of Lacanian theory within the history of literary
criticism informed by psychoanalysis? The Lacanian term that he focuses on is
borrowed from Ernest Jones (albeit as transformed by Lacan). This invocation and
appropriation is important because ‘aphanisis’ for Jones is symbolic of the
disappearance of sexual desire in the subject; this, Jones argues, is a bigger fear than
even that of castration. So the answer to whether Lacanian terms can be deployed in
the interests of literary criticism depends on whether aphanisis can be appropriated
and the cost involved in doing so for the literary critic. The essential move for
Durand is to explain the relationship between the ‘disappearance of desire’ in Jones
and the ‘disappearance of the subject’ in contemporary literary criticism. The
function of this disappearance is also known as the ‘fading of the subject’ within the
differential space of language. The inability to ground meaning in the locus of the
subject has obvious uses in reading modernist and postmodern narratives. Durand,
for instance, cites a text like Gravity’s Rainbow in this context. The reason for that is
that postmodern narratives seek to represent the limits of the epistemic world-view
and its relation to Newtonian science. To make sense of these acausal narratives,
literary critics find themselves forced to import categories from the philosophy of
science. That is why Lacanian terms which represent the disappearance of desire as
an analogue to the disappearance of the subject is an attractive move for Durand as a
8 See Harold Bloom (1997). The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York andOxford:
Oxford University Press).

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literary critic. There are however limitations to this differential approach to the
disappearance of the subject and desire, as Jacques-Alain Miller demonstrates in his
extimité seminar, because the constancy of the subject is not guaranteed by language
but by jouissance.9
Durand’s paper was written before Miller’s seminar and therefore works with a
purely differential model of language, desire, and the subject. But, despite these
limitations, these four papers will provide the basic rudiments of what the
differences are between pre-Lacanian and post-Lacanian approaches to literary
criticism that is informed by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN
9 See, for instance, Jacques-Alain Miller (1988). ‘Extimité,’ Prose Studies: Lacanian Discourse,
pp. 121-130. See also Jacques-Alain Miller (1988). ‘A and a in Clinical Structures,’ Acts of the
Paris-New York Psychoanalytic Workshops.