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Experience Beyond The Imaginary: Reading Freud’S “Elisabeth Von R.” With Lacan’S “The Mirror Stage”, Jeffrey Mccurry

Middle Voices

While many read Lacan as a structuralist who sought to overthrow the authority of first-person conscious experience, his work also has resonances and affinities with a broadly phenomenological approach to psychoanalysis. This connection comes into focus when we bring Lacan’s concept of the imaginary stage into dialogue with Freud’s early work on hysteria. Lacan implied that the imaginary stage, while necessary for human development, nevertheless frustrates a significant dimension of being human, viz. the human being’s internally conflictual and contradictory experience that calls into question the very idea of a unified self or subject. When we read the early Freud’s …