Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

CHAPTER 17
Jacques Lacan
DONYELL L. ROSEBORO
When Jacques Lacan died at the age of 80 in 1981, he left behind avid followers in the field
of psychoanalysis and staunch critics. His writings and seminars attracted those who were genuinely
drawn to his explanations of the human psyche, but others were simultaneously convinced
that psychoanalysis was nonsense. Whatever your feelings toward psychoanalytical theory,
Jacques Lacan undeniably influenced the way we conceive of identity as socially constructed
through/within/across language. When he first introduced his theories, Lacan stimulated countless
discussions about the connectedness of language to cognitive development. His work, therefore,
has enormous potential for any reconceptualizations of identity. Indeed, his fascination with the
human ability to identify led him to various explanations about cognitive development, all of
which are rooted in his understanding of the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). To discuss
Lacan as critical to future understandings of educational psychology, we must first situate him
theoretically and historically. Not only the times he lived in but the social and political context as
well shaped his thinking and writing.
Born in Paris in 1901 to an upper-class Catholic family, Lacan entered the world at a time when
anti-Semitism was on the rise in France and Jewish people found themselves caught in the middle
of a national debate between those who wanted the Catholic church involved in government and
those who favored a more strict separation of church and state. Lacan would go on to attend a
Jesuit (Catholic) school, where he studied Latin and philosophy (among other subjects). Later he
would attend medical school and would begin studying psychoanalysis in the 1920s at the Faculté
de Médecine in Paris. He was particularly interested in patients who suffered from “automatism,”
a condition that pushed the individual to feel they were being manipulated by a force outside of
themselves, a force that was all-powerful and all-knowing. When he completed his clinical training
in 1927, he worked at psychiatric institutions and, in 1932 (10 years after Benito Mussolini took
over Italy and 1 year before Hitler’s rise to power in Germany), he completed his doctoral thesis
on paranoid psychosis. By the time of its completion, the nations of Europe were embroiled in a
series of continental conflicts, which would eventually lead to the second World War.
Intellectually and theoretically, Lacan grounds his theory in the psychoanalytic work of Freud
and the structural linguistics of Claude Levi-Strauss. As a Freudian, he elaborates on several basic
principles of human development. He uses Freud’s explanation of the id (the pleasure-seeking,