Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This entry traces the diverse routes via which psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan's oeuvre, entered rhetorical theory and film/media theory—arguably the two most prominent subfields of communication studies. Media scholars in the mid‐1960s, followed by rhetoricians in the 1980s, engaged, in different ways, with Lacan's theory to address questions of identification and ideology, power and agency. By the 1990s, the two traditions began to come together through the combined work of Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau, both of whom forced a critical shift in focus toward what Lacan called the Real .