The return to Freud: Jacques Lacan, a reader of André Breton

Abstract

his research centers its interest in the studies of the existing relations between the psychoanalytic theory and André Breton's surrealism, insofar as it deals with the influence of psychoanalytic conceptions - such as the unconscious, free association, libido and drive (trieb) - in the constitutive process of his experience of the surrealist language - écriture automatique. In this manner, he conceives the Bretonian use of language not as a mimetic representation of psychoanalytic avatars; but as an activity which commences - through the subversion of Freudian concepts - specific relations between the unconscious, the decentering of the Self and language. Regardless of the transfigurations of Freudian knowledge promoted by this pattern of language, the study conjecture that it would be fruitful, nonetheless, for the post-Freudian psychoanalytic field, once it is supposedly presented - as a parallel to Saussure's linguistics, Lévi-Strauss' structuralism, among other references - as a mediator for the reformulation of psychoanalysis, made by Lacan in the Return to Freud. As a result, the objective is to argue that such experience of the language, constructed by André Breton, from Freud, contributes in a way that the French psychoanalyst can find - together with other epistemological references - a "philosophy of language" in the subjectivation precesses and, by correlation, an ontology regarding the subject, nonexistent in Freud. The problematization of the hypothesis and the objectives is carried out, on the one hand, from the analysis of Breton's texts centered on the relation between language, psychoanalysis and subject - especially the narrative Introduction Discour sur le peu de Réalité (1926) and underlying texts, such as Il N'Aura Une Fois (1931), L'Imaculée Conception (1931) and Revolver à Cheveux Blancs (1932); On the other hand, there are texts written by Lacan that are used, basal for the understanding of the subject and the Symbolic order, in Return to Freud - Function and Field of Speech and Language and Psychoanalysis (1953); Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious (1950) and The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious (1957). The reading of these works is guided by the philosophical and historical interpretation of philosophical systems, proposed by Victor Goldschmidt, in "Temps historique et temps logique dans l'interprétation des systemes philosophiques" (1968). This research is interdisciplinary, in the manner that it contributes to the study of the connection between psychoanalytic theory, literature and aesthetic reflection. (AU)