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This brief introduction to Lacan1 is meant to help orient Jungian analysts to some of the fundamental insights and vocabulary of Lacan's view of psychic dynamics.2 We can begin by looking at three of Lacan's central ideas: the role of language, the function of desire and the structure of the subject. All of these are embedded in Lacan's three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. It is very important, as it is reading Jung, that one does not assume very much about the signifier's connection with the signified in understanding these terms. After this the parallels with Jung's concepts can be explored.
Lacan claimed to stage ‘a return to Freud’ by analysing the linguistic nature of psychological symptomology. This claim can be read as more of a battle cry since Lacan was concerned that the Freudian community was moving away from a conception of the unconscious as structured, full of motive, and designated by radical alterity. At the same time, he re-read Freud through a Saussurian linguistic lens in a way that is both compelling and hardly recognizable as Freudian.3 The concept of a structured, motivated and completely other unconscious should be familiar to Jungians, whereas the emphasis on linguistic metaphors will likely be foreign at first.
Lacan's linguistic move is compelling. It designates the ego's use of language as the means of diagnosis and cure. The suffering ego cannot express desire to the extent that it exists within a closed and futile symbol system dominated by a master signifier. A change in this system entails a grasping of the subject's locus in the network of signifiers and a realization that only the gaps in (the grammar of) an idealized worldview lead to an understanding of the speech of