Editing Jacques Lacan (section)

===Return to Freud===
Lacan's "return to [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]]" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud, and included a radical critique of [[ego psychology]], whereas "Lacan's quarrel with Object Relations psychoanalysis"{{r|n=Jacobus2005|r={{cite book | last=Jacobus | first=Mary | title=The poetics of psychoanalysis: in the wake of Klein | publisher=Oxford University Press | publication-place=Oxford New York | year=2005 | isbn=978-0-19-924636-6 | oclc=67231305}}|p=25}} was a more muted affair. Here he attempted "to restore to the notion of the Object Relation... the capital of experience that legitimately belongs to it",<ref>Jacques Lacan, ''Ecrits: A Selection'' (London 1997) p. 197</ref> building upon what he termed "the hesitant, but controlled work of [[Melanie Klein]]... Through her we know the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the ''imago'' of the mother's body",<ref>Lacan, ''Ecrits'' p. 197 and p. 20</ref> as well as upon "the notion of the [[transitional object]], introduced by [[D. W. Winnicott]]... a key-point for the explanation of the genesis of [[fetishism]]".<ref>Lacan, ''Ecrits'' p. 250</ref> Nevertheless, "Lacan systematically questioned those psychoanalytic developments from the 1930s to the 1970s, which were increasingly and almost exclusively focused on the child's early relations with the mother... the pre-Oedipal or Kleinian mother";<ref>Lisa Appignanesi/John Forrester, ''Freud's Women'' (London 2005) p. 462</ref> and Lacan's rereading of Freud—"characteristically, Lacan insists that his return to Freud supplies the only valid model"<ref>David Macey, "Introduction", Jacques Lacan, ''The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis'' (London 1994) p. xxii</ref>—formed a basic conceptual starting-point in that oppositional strategy.

Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue", jokes, and the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in subjects' own constitution of themselves. In "[[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud]]," he proposes that "the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious the whole structure of language". The unconscious is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. Lacan is associated with the idea that "the unconscious is structured like a language", but the first time this sentence occurs in his work,<ref>Lacan, "Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever". In ''The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy'', ed. R. Macksey & E. Donato, Baltimore & London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970, 186–195</ref> he clarifies that he means that both the unconscious and language are structured, not that they share a single structure; and that the structure of language is such that the subject cannot necessarily be equated with the speaker. This results in the self being denied any point of reference to which to be "restored" following trauma or a crisis of identity.

[[André Green (psychoanalyst)|André Green]] objected that "when you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition doesn't work for a minute. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says is constituted by thing-presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong to the pre-conscious".{{r|Jacobus2005|at=5n}} Freud certainly contrasted "the presentation of the ''word'' and the presentation of the ''thing''... the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone"<ref>Sigmund Freud, ''On Metapsychology'' (Penguin 1984) p. 207</ref> in his metapsychology. Dylan Evans, however, in his ''Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis,'' "... takes issue with those who, like André Green, question the linguistic aspect of the unconscious, emphasizing Lacan's distinction between ''das Ding'' and ''die Sache'' in Freud's account of thing-presentation".{{r|Jacobus2005|at=8n}} Green's criticism of Lacan also included accusations of intellectual dishonesty, he said, "[He] cheated everybody... the return to Freud was an excuse, it just meant going to Lacan."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.apadivisions.org/division-39/publications/reviews/dead-mother|title=The Dead Mother: The Work of André Green (Book Review)|website=apadivisions.org|access-date=21 May 2019|archive-date=18 December 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191218203151/https://www.apadivisions.org/division-39/publications/reviews/dead-mother|url-status=live}}</ref>