Explaining Lacan’s Freudian Thing

All right, let’s get right into it. Picture this. It’s 1955. Postwar Vienna is just starting to find its voice again. And the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is about to give a lecture. But he doesn’t start with a theory. He starts with this really strange story, a kind of symbolic scandal that for him pointed to a deep, deep problem at the very heart of psychoanalysis. He called it the Freudian thing.

So, Lacan kicks things off not with some dry argument, but with this beautiful poetic image of Vienna. He’s reminding everyone listening, hey, remember where we are. This city, this was the cradle of a revolution. This is where Sigmund Freud made a discovery that completely knocked us off our pedestal. You know, it’s like just as Copernicus showed us the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe, Freud revealed that our conscious mind, yeah, it’s not even the center of our own being.

Now, the scandal wasn’t about the plaque itself. It was meant to honor Freud, which is great. The real scandal, the thing that got under Lacan’s skin was who failed to put it there. It wasn’t the international psychoanalytic community, the very people whose entire profession existed because of Freud. For Lacan, this wasn’t just some administrative slip up. No, no, this was a symptom. And that’s the real question, isn’t it? What on earth had been lost? What fundamental truth had psychoanalysis given up on that allowed the keepers of Freud’s flame to basically forget him in his own hometown?

This is the mystery Lacan is setting out to solve. And the answer Lacan argued, well, the clues could be found across the Atlantic. He saw this massive distortion of Freud’s ideas, a kind of betrayal that took a dangerous explosive truth and turned it into a nice, comfortable therapy, especially in the United States. This quote, this gets right to the heart of it. When Freud landed in America, he didn’t think he was bringing some gentle feel-good cure. He literally saw psychoanalysis as a plague, a disruptive, worldshaking force that was going to challenge everything people thought they knew about themselves, about morality, about who’s really in control.

And you can see the difference right here. On one side, you have Freud’s plague. It’s all about confronting the messy, disruptive truth of your unconscious. On the other side, you have the American cure, which became known as ego psychology. And its goal was basically the opposite. Let’s strengthen the conscious self, the ego, so you can fit in better, be more productive, and adapt to society. Lacan saw this as a total betrayal of Freud’s radical principles, all for the sake of just getting practical results.

And you got to remember the context here. We’re talking about analysts fleeing Nazi Europe. They get to the US and they’re faced with this huge choice. Do we stick to Freud’s really tough, challenging ideas? Or do we adapt? Do we make it more palatable for a culture that wants quick fixes and efficiency? Well, the temptation was just too strong, and they caved, becoming what Lacan called, and this is such a sharp phrase, managers of souls, who were really just selling intellectual comfort instead of confronting structural truth.

So, what was Lacan’s solution to all this? His answer was a call for a return to Freud. But listen, this wasn’t about nostalgia. It wasn’t about turning Freud into some kind of saint. It was about something way more radical than that. See, Lacan’s idea of a return was actually pretty clever. He wanted to use the ways psychoanalysis had been twisted to show what it was never supposed to be. This meant going back to what Freud actually wrote, reading his texts with an almost obsessive focus to dig up the genuine gamechanging discoveries that had been completely buried under all that ego psychology stuff.

And right at the heart of this return to Freud was a really deep look at one of the oldest questions there is. What is truth? For Lacan, Freud’s discovery had totally changed the answer.

Okay, so here’s one of Lacan’s most startling moves. He literally gives truth a voice. He has truth itself announce I truth speak. What does that even mean? Well, for Lacan, truth isn’t some static object we go out and find. It’s an event. It’s something that happens in and through language, usually where we’re not even looking for it.

So, how does truth speak? Well, it speaks in the gaps. Lacan grabs this idea from linguistics, this split between the signifier, which is just the word like tree, and the signified, the actual concept of a tree. It’s in the slippage, the space between the word and the idea, that’s where the unconscious does its work and where truth pops out.

Lacan gives us this incredible allegory to explain it. He says, ‘Look, truth isn’t found in a treasure chest. It’s not some pure, precious, shiny object we need to protect. No, truth lies at the bottom of a well, a place that’s kind of improper, maybe a little smelly, hidden away. To find it, you have to be brave enough to look in the messy, the repressed, the uncomfortable parts of yourself. And this is why for both Freud and Lacan, the best way to get to the unconscious isn’t through some grand philosophical quest. It’s through the stuff we usually ignore. a half-remembered dream, a Freudian slip, a dumb pun, the nonsense of a joke. The unconscious speaks in a code, kind of like a riddle, and the analyst’s job is to just learn how to listen to that weird fragmented language.

Okay, this brings us to Lacan’s final and honestly pretty chilling metaphor for what a psychoanalyst really is. It’s not a safe job. It’s not about being a master of knowledge. It’s a position of profound danger. and he captures it perfectly with the ancient myth of Actaeon.

So, the myth is simple and it’s brutal. Actaeon is a hunter out in the woods and he makes a mistake. He accidentally stumbles upon a sight he was never meant to see. The goddess Diana naked as punishment for glimpsing this forbidden truth, she transforms him into a deer. And then, in this absolutely horrific twist, he’s hunted down and torn to pieces by the very things he used to command, his own hunting dogs.

Lacan’s rereading of this myth is just stunning. He says the analyst is Actaeon. By getting a glimpse of the forbidden truth of the unconscious, the analyst is forever changed. They become the prey. They are hunted down and torn apart, not by something outside of them, but by the hounds of their own thoughts, their own theories, their own desires. Being an analyst isn’t a safe, objective job. It’s a passionate, dangerous pursuit that rips you apart.

So it all comes back to this. The analyst has to listen for the truth where it actually emerges, which is precisely at the sight of the symptom, right where the suffering is. Because as Freud discovered and Lacan never let us forget, the unconscious doesn’t speak where everything is neat and tidy. It speaks where it hurts. And so Lacan’s entire project, this return to Freud, leaves us with this really unsettling question. If the goal of analysis isn’t to heal in the simple sense, if it’s not to make things better, but instead to engage with a truth that literally dismembers you, then what does it truly mean to listen to another person? What does it mean to listen at all?