TECHNIQUES

Jacques Lacan

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 - September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor. Lacan's ‘return to the meaning of Freud' profoundly changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, which started in 1953 and lasted until his death in 1980, has come to be known in the Anglophone world as post-structuralism. This entailed a renewed concentration upon the Freudian concepts of the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego conceptualised as a mosaic of identifications, and the centrality of language to any psychoanalytic work. His work has a strong interdisciplinary focus, drawing particularly on linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics, and he has become an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis, particularly within critical theory.

 

Jungian Archetype

The concept of psychological archetypes was advanced by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, c. 1919, and generally adopted in the social sciences. In Jung's psychological framework, archetypes are innate, universal prototypes for ideas and may be used to interpret observations. A group of memories and interpretations associated with an archetype is a complex, e.g. a mother complex associated with the mother archetype. Jung treated the archetypes as psychological organs, analogous to physical ones in that both are morphological givens that arose through evolution.

Jung outlined four main archetypes: The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation; The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possess nonetheless; The Anima, the feminine image in a man's psyche; The Animus, the masculine image in a woman's psyche