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Jeff Lang
5/10/00
Mr. Roberts

Lacanian Psychoanalysis and ‘Surfacing’
The theories of Jacques Lacan give explanation and intention to the narrator’s actions throughout the novel “Surfacing”. Although Margaret Atwood may not have had any knowledge of the French psychoanalyst’s philosophies, I feel that both were making inferences on behavior and psychology and that the two undeniably synchronize with each other. I will first identify the complex philosophies of Jacques Lacan and then demonstrate how the narrator falls outside of Lacan’s view of society and how this leads to her demand for retreat from that society in order to become ‘whole’.
Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst that derived many of his theories from Sigmund Freud. His views of the conscious and unconscious being split and a phallocentric order as the center of society evolved from Freud’s. Lacan views our development in life as three stages or phases that one must enter into in order to become a......

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Approximate Word Count: 3348
Approximate Pages: 14 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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