ABSTRACT
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan draws on the Hegelian tradition and extends it into the terrain opened up by Sigmund Freud with the help of Saussurian linguistics. Lacan's relationship to more orthodox branches of psychoanalysis has not been unproblematic. Like Hegel, Lacan posits human consciousness as always searching for self-certainty and transforming itself and its world in its attempts to achieve such certainty. Lacan's linguistic turn brings the question of the relationship of self and other, self and world, into arenas already staked out by the contemporary philosophical interest in language. To understand the Lacanian view of a "split" subject unaware of much of the signifying activity motivating her words, one must be familiar with Lacan's terminology, in particular, premirror, mirror, and postmirror stages of early childhood development. The interesting feature about Donald W. Winnicott's account that Lacan glosses over is the particular context required for the emerging significance of the self.
