Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Lacanian psychoanalysis, or Lacanianism, is a theoretical and clinical system built on the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan from the 1950s through the 1980s. It extends classical Freudian psychoanalysis through a structuralist and post-structuralist framework centered on language, holding that the unconscious is structured like a language and organized around three interlocking registers, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. Especially influential in France and across continental philosophy and critical theory, it represents one of the major national schools into which post-Freudian psychoanalysis divided.