Lacan’s first theoretical publication, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I, in 1936, explored the significance of a child, between the ages of six to eight months, seeing its own reflection and acknowledging itself as a separate entity from the rest of the world.

It was a listening station for the whole conversation of mankind, a working model of the human world, a contrapuntal portrait of things as they are. Was a theory of the desiring speech in which all human beings live and die. Malcolm Bowie suggests, in Lacan, that Lacan’s theory: Lacan’s theory on psychoanalysis opened up a number of different interpretations for literary texts as it delves in to the origins of human psychosis and explores the causes of human behaviour. Over fifty per cent of the world’s analysts now employ Lacanian methods.’ Lacan’s work is not limited to just clinical practice, however, as Homer explains:įrom the perspective of literary studies, the discovery of Lacan in the mid-1970s, initially by feminist and Marxist literary critics, revitalized the rather moribund practice of psychoanalytic criticism and reinstated psychoanalysis for Freudian and post-Freudian readings of literature. Sean Homer comments on Lacan’s success, in Jacques Lacan, ‘Deeply controversial, Lacan’s work has transformed psychoanalysis, both as a theory of the unconscious mind and as a clinical practice.

Lacan published three texts on psychoanalysis before commencing a series of annual seminars in Paris in 1952, that spanned over twenty-eight years the seminars were then edited and published by Jacques-Alain Miller. Jacques Lacan is a French philosopher, born in 1901, whose theories expand on Freudian ideas. This concept can be seen within the American Dream, as Anthony Brandt claims it ‘stretches endlessly and forever toward the horizon.’ And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation.’ Lacan’s theory suggests that the nature of human desire is, not to attain full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as a new desire. With reference to Achilles pursuit of Hector in The Illiad, Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek, writes, in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan, ‘the relation of the subject to the object experienced by every one of us in a dream: the subject, faster than the object, gets closer and closer to it and yet can never attain it.’ This notion is what Lacan explains as desire, ‘a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. These lines from Homer’s The Iliad present the idea of an infinite attempt to achieve one’s aim the continuous, never-ending pursuit of satisfaction is a concept Jacques Lacan defines as desire.

As a man in a dream who fails to lay hands upon another whom he is pursuing - the one cannot escape nor the other overtake- even so neither could Achilles come up with Hector, nor Hector break away from Achilles.

Lacan some reflection on the ego