Lacan On Las Meninas: The Visual Structure Of The Human Subject

This paper summarises some of Lacan's thinking on Velasquez's Las Meninas, a painting that art experts voted the greatest ever painted in 1985.[l] For Lacan, the particularity of this painting is that it incarnates one of his four fundamental objects of psychoanalysis, that of the look. For me, it also embodies the psychoanalytic method, a method grounded in a conception of the human subject that is new, that is 'Copernican'.…