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Lacan and Levi-Strauss or the Return to Freud by Marcos Zafiropoulos (translated by John Holland) examines the interplay of the theoretical developments of Levi-Strauss in anthropology and of Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis in the fruitful years from 1951-1957. This was the period immediately following Claude Levi-Strauss' articulation of structural anthropology, a development that produced not only a revolution in his own discipline, but also had similar consequences and implications for many fields. In particular his friend and contemporary Jacques Lacan, who was one of Levi-Strauss' most incisive interlocutors, quickly grasped the significance of structuralism for psychoanalysis.
Lacan had for some time been utilizing anthropology in his theoretical work, placing himself, according to Zafiropoulos, in line with Derkheim the “father of French Anthropology.” In the upheaval caused by Levi-Strauss' use of structural linguistics to completely rethink anthropology, Lacan quickly saw the implications for his own approach to psychoanalysis.
From the beginning of his trajectory as a psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan had a significant impact on the European psychoanalytic community. Among his initial theoretical contributions, his development of the mirror stage in its relation to the formation of the “I” thoroughly de-centered the place of the ego, showing its dependence on an image taken from the exterior. His reading of Hegel informed his concept of unconscious desire as the desire of the Other, which proposed an equally alienated position of the subject in relation to what constituted the formation of the human psyche. Both of these theoretical positions postulated the human subject as constituted in relation to a void or a lack, rather than around some “essence” or core.
These early theoretical advances had major implications not only for the conceptualization but also for the practice of psychoanalysis, as well as for its teaching and transmission and would ultimately put La