Lacan -

Critics call him a charlatan who hid a paucity of ideas behind mathematical gibberish (the mathemes ). Defenders call him the most important thinker of subjectivity since Freud.

The Symbolic order is the structure of society. It dictates what is meaningful and what is taboo. However, it is structurally incomplete. No matter how many laws we write or words we speak, we cannot capture the fullness of being. This is why we speak—to try, and fail, to articulate the inarticulable. The Symbolic is the order of the subject , not the ego. The subject is the empty point where language occurs. Here is where Lacan becomes vertiginous. The Real is not "reality." Reality (our day-to-day life) is a construct woven together by the Imaginary and Symbolic. The Real is the impossible —that which resists symbolization absolutely. Critics call him a charlatan who hid a

This identification is a misrecognition ( méconnaissance ). The ego is born from this alienating identification. For the rest of our lives, we chase this phantom of coherence. The Imaginary is the domain of rivalry, aggression, and seduction. It is the logic of "either/or"—if you look like a whole being, then I must too; if you have the object of desire, you are my rival. Love and hate are two sides of the same Imaginary coin. If the Imaginary is the world of the image, The Symbolic is the world of the word, the law, and the social contract. It is the order of language, kinship structures, and mathematics. Lacan calls this the Big Other (capital 'O'). It dictates what is meaningful and what is taboo

In politics, Lacan warns us against totalitarianism. The fascist leader tries to embody the objet a —"I know what you lack, and I am it." Lacanian psychoanalysis is an ethics of "not giving ground on one’s desire." It is not about "being happy" (which is a superego injunction); it is about staying true to the singular, traumatic kernel that makes you you . Lacan was expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in 1963 for his unorthodox practice: the "variable-length session." He would famously end an analysis after a few minutes or, conversely, after a few seconds, cutting off a patient mid-sentence to force an eruption of the unconscious. This is why we speak—to try, and fail,