ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to convey the theory and practice of Jacques Lacan's return to Anna Freud. Therefore, when Lacan studies madness, a term dear to the nineteenth-century Romantics and philosophers, and stresses alienation, he appears to bring psychoanalysis closer to Marxism than it ever was. Lacan stresses that, rather than going beyond Freud with the theory, he wants to differentiate himself from those who have gone back to an earlier stage. For Lacan, the conscious part of the mind, with its narcissism, search for wholeness, mirroring, totality, and identity, forms the Imaginary as against the Symbolic, the unconscious, linked to the father, and structured like a language. The paradox of the Lacanian universe consists in the notion of a being that is liberated through submission to the inevitability of self-alienation. The apparently contradictory statement concerning a suicidal narcissism for the sake of narcissistic wholeness, entailing the "successful" synthesis by the ego.
