Poe, Lacan and Psychoanalysis
Ever since the French poet and author Charles Baudelaire translated and popularised the works of Edgar Allan Poe in the late 19th century, they have become predominant in many discourses by the European theoreticians. One of the central texts around which many debates have arisen is Poe's tale of 1844, 'The Purloined Letter', which the French theorist Jacques Lacan took as the starting point for his collection of seminars entitled Écrits. The purpose of these seminars was to comment on and explicate Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', where he addresses the notion of Wiederholungszwang or "repetition automatism" . Freud had observed the tendency of many of his patients to mechanistically repeat unpleasant experiences (such as dreaming of previous war trauma) is direct contradiction to "the pleasure principle". He thereby arrived at the idea of a force in the psyche more powerful than the pleasure principle, which he labelled the "death instinct". Freud, in his 'Project for a Scientific Psychology', had previously examined repetition where he conceived the unconscious as being occupied with finding some irretrievably lost object. This was seen to take the form of an unconscious repetition of the losing of it. The repet
Lacan arrives at this conclusion by observing how, when the Minister is the one who is concealing, he adopts the attributes of femininity, which are "propitious to the act of concealing. Which makes it miss a scene" since there is a third scene, partly concerned with activities outside the tale. The symbol constitutes us, rather than vice-versa. This is, I feel, why Lacan attributes the Police's failure to "realist's imbecility". Lacan's interpretation focuses on two main issues of the tale: that of the enigmatic nature of the eponymous letter, and the pattern of the intersubjective relationships in the tale. " Which is why she is rendered helpless to Minister's actions, and he is obviously the thief of this scene. Dupin has now descended from his previously privileged third position to the second (in accordance with the dynamics of repetition) as his quotation from Crebillon in the false letter shows that he does not withdraw himself from the symbolic order, but in fact becomes "fully participant in the intersubjective triad. Another parallel with psychoanalysis can be seen in Lacan's use of sensuous imagery, which evokes the problem of femininity expressed in the closing stages of the seminar. However, this "lost" book may only be displaced, i. " This seems to add up to a fairly inscrutable statement by Lacan about the nature of femininity, but also implies a specific theory about the role of the phallus as a signifier in the sexual differentiation of the subject. " This is why we must question Baudelaire's translation of the story's title as "la letter volee" or "the stolen letter" because, as Lacan states, we never own a letter that is sent to us, it owns us. For example, the power that derives from holding the letter is dependent on its non-use, so the Minister is forced into passivity, i. " Lacan's second concern with the text, that of the intersubjective relationships, elaborates on a point made about the letter's function, that it acts as a pivot around which relations move. Lacan uses the analogy of the library to illustrate this point, showing how a piece of paper can symbolise a book missing from its place.
Common topics in this essay:
Police Queen,
Derrida Lacan's,
Prefect Police,
Minister Lacan,
Scientific Psychology',
Minister Lacan's,
Irene Harvey,
Pleasure Principle',
Purloined Letter'',
D- Police,
third position,
holding letter,
role thief,
literary example,
intersubjective relationships,
feminine quality,
retrieve letter,
third scene,
lack penis,
dynamics repetition,
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