Hegel's subject, Lacan's mirror

Abstract

The relation of Jacques Lacan to Sigmund Freud is in many ways similar to that of G.W.F. Hegel to Immanuel Kant. Both saw themselves as being devout followers of their theoretical masters, duty-bound to retrieve the spirit of their teachings in the face of interpretative errors and, perhaps most controversially, the failure of the masters themselves to grasp the radically original nature of what they proposed. In Lacan’s view, the problem with the then-prevalent reductionist reading of Freud, which was often used to critique his theories, is exemplified in what Lacan identifies as a mistranslation in the James Strachey translation of Freud’s works: the translation of both the German instinkt and the German trieb to ‘instinct’. Such a mistranslation eliminates the distinction between the merely animal instinct and the solely human drive (Evans 1996, s.v. drive), whilst Lacan’s unorthodox reading of Freud is founded on the emphasis that he places on this distinction. Whilst Hegel sought to save Kant from the thing-in-itself which rendered its knowledge purely subjective (Hegel 2015, secs. 40-60; Lumsden 2014, p. 86), Lacan seeks to save Freud from “explaining the human in terms of the non-human … the danger [being] that the peculiarly human will somehow be lost in the reducing glass,”