Within the depth-psychology corpus, Jacques Lacan occupies a contested but unavoidable position. He appears primarily as an interlocutor through whom post-Jungian theorists—above all Andrew Samuels—negotiate the boundaries between analytical psychology and structural psychoanalysis. Samuels undertakes the most sustained comparative work, mapping Lacan’s tripartite orders (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) against Jungian categories of collective unconscious and personal unconscious, and noting Lacan’s reported attempt to meet Jung personally. Arthur Frank mobilizes Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic in a phenomenology of ill bodies, treating the mirror-stage concept as an account of the self’s constitutive dependence on images from elsewhere. Winnicott, characteristically, acknowledges the influence of Lacan’s mirror-stage paper while marking his own divergence, insisting that Lacan neglects the mother’s face as the primordial mirror. The Écrits themselves—present in the corpus as primary source material—ground Lacan’s radical argument that the unconscious is structured like a language, that the signifier determines the subject, and that the analytic relation must be understood through the dialectic of speech and the field of language rather than through ego-psychological adaptation. Giegerich and Seaford cite Lacan as index reference only. The central tension throughout is whether Lacanian structuralism and Jungian depth-psychology are ultimately commensurable or irreconcilably divergent in their accounts of the subject, the unconscious, and the aims of analytic practice.
In the library
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Lacan went beyond the proposition that the unconscious is a structure that lies beneath the conscious world; the unconscious itself is structured, like a language. This alone would suggest parallels with Jung, and Lacan is said to have tried to meet him.
Samuels articulates Lacan’s foundational claim—the unconscious is structured like a language—as the primary basis for cross-theoretical comparison with Jung, sketching Lacan’s three orders and aligning them with Jungian categories.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
Jacques Lacan’s paper ‘Le Stade du Miroir’ (1949) has certainly influenced me. He refers to the use of the mirror in each individual’s ego development. However, Lacan does not think of the mirror in terms of the mother’s face in the way that I wish to do here.
Winnicott openly acknowledges Lacan’s mirror-stage as a generative influence while marking the crucial divergence: Lacan’s mirror is structural-linguistic, whereas Winnicott’s is relational and maternal.
Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary suggests that what we call the self is always a sedimentation of images from elsewhere. These images are worn like armor, and what is within this armor is certainly less than we often believe.
Frank deploys Lacan’s Imaginary as a critical framework for the mirroring body, arguing that the self is constitutively dependent on external images and that entry into the Symbolic is required for ethical bodily existence.
Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis
We may compare the three terms just introduced with the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. As Mitchell and Rose (in an introduction to Lacan’s work) put it: [We are speaking] of adamant rejection of any theory of the difference between the sexes in terms of pre-given male or female entities which complete and satisfy each other.
Samuels brings Lacanian sexual theory into dialogue with post-Jungian accounts of the masculine-feminine spectrum, highlighting Lacan’s structural rejection of pre-given gendered entities as a point of productive tension.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
On peut suivre à mesure des ans passés cette aversion de l’intérêt quant aux fonctions de la parole et quant au champ du langage.
Lacan diagnoses within post-Freudian psychoanalysis a progressive retreat from the primacy of speech and language, positing this aversion as the source of technical and theoretical distortion in analytic practice.
je pense où je ne suis pas, donc je suis où je ne pense pas. Mots qui à toute oreille suspendue rendent sensible dans quelle ambiguïté de furet fuit sous nos prises l’anneau du sens sur la ficelle verbale.
Lacan’s rewriting of the Cartesian cogito—‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think’—enacts his central thesis that the subject of the unconscious is constitutively split from the subject of enunciation.
L’Entstellung, traduite: transposition, où Freud montre la précondition générale de la fonction du rêve, c’est ce que nous avons désigné plus haut avec Saussure comme le glissement du signifié sous le signifiant, toujours en action (inconsciente, remarquons-le) dans le discours.
Lacan equates Freud’s Entstellung (dreamwork distortion) with Saussurean signifier-slippage, grounding the claim that condensation and displacement are rhetorical—metaphoric and metonymic—operations of the unconscious.
si l’homme vient à penser l’ordre symbolique, c’est qu’il y est d’abord pris dans son être. L’illusion qu’il l’ait formé par sa conscience, provient de ce que c’est par la voie d’une béance spécifique de sa relation imaginaire à son semblable, qu’il a pu entrer dans cet ordre comme sujet.
Lacan argues that the subject does not produce the Symbolic Order but is constituted by it, entering as subject through the gap opened by the imaginary relation to the other—a move that subordinates consciousness to structural determination.
L’analyse devient la relation de deux corps entre lesquels s’établit une communication fantasmatique où l’analyste apprend au sujet à se saisir comme objet; la subjectivité n’y est admise que dans la parenthèse de l’illusion.
Lacan critiques ego-psychological technique—the ‘two-body psychology’—as reducing analysis to fantasmatic communication in which the subject is trained to identify with an objectified self, corrupting the dialectical function of speech.
It is not a term that was easily chosen. It underlines essentially something which goes further than the simple notion of asymmetry between subjects. It poses in the very title… it rebels, as I might say from the beginning, against the idea that intersubjectivity can by itself alone provide the framework in which the phenomenon is inscribed.
In opening his Seminar on transference, Lacan insists that transference cannot be reduced to intersubjectivity, anticipating his structural account of the phenomenon as irreducibly tied to the position of the subject in relation to the Other.
Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
la psychanalyse reste-t-elle une relation dialectique où le non-agir de l’analyste guide le discours du sujet vers la réalisation de sa vérité, ou se réduira-t-elle à une relation fantasmatique où «deux abimes se frôlent» sans se toucher?
Lacan poses the foundational alternative for analytic technique: either a dialectical relation in which the analyst’s non-intervention guides the subject toward truth, or a fantasmatic mirroring that exhausts itself in imaginary regression.
Freud a fait rentrer le moi dans sa doctrine, en le définissant par les résistances qui lui sont propres. Qu’elles soient de nature imaginaire au sens des leurres coaptatifs… c’est ce que je me suis employé à faire saisir pour ce à quoi ces leurres se réduisent chez l’homme, soit pour la relation narcissique introduite par Freud et telle que je l’ai élaborée dans le stade du miroir.
Lacan situates the mirror stage within his broader revision of Freudian ego-theory, redefining the ego’s resistances as imaginary lures continuous with the narcissistic relation, thereby subordinating the ego to the logic of the signifier.
Je vagabonde dans ce que vous tenez pour être le moins vrai par essence: dans le rêve, dans le défi au sens de la pointe la plus gongorique et le nonsense du calembour le plus grotesque, dans le hasard.
In a rhetorical prosopopoeia, Lacan voices the unconscious as an agent that subverts conscious certainty precisely through dream, wordplay, and contingency—underscoring the irreducibility of the unconscious to rational mastery.
Giegerich’s index lists Lacan at two page references without elaboration, indicating that Lacan is cited as a touchstone within a broader philosophical argument about soul and logical negativity but receives no sustained treatment.
Seaford’s index cites Lacan at two page references in a study of money and early Greek thought, indicating engagement with Lacanian concepts—likely the signifier or desire—in the context of archaic economic and psychic exchange.
Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside