Visualization of Jacques Lacan’s Registers of the Psychoanalytic Field, and Discovery of Metaphor and of Metonymy. Analytical Case Study of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”

Abstract

We start with a description of Lacan’s work that we then take into our analytics methodology. In a first investigation, a Lacan-motivated template of the Poe story is fitted to the data. A segmentation of the storyline is used in order to map out the diachrony. Based on this, it will be shown how synchronous aspects, potentially related to Lacanian registers, can be sought. This demonstrates the effectiveness of an approach based on a model template of the storyline narrative. In a second and more comprehensive investigation, we develop an approach for revealing, that is, uncovering, Lacanian register relationships. Objectives of this work include the wide and general application of our methodology. This methodology is strongly based on the “letting the data speak” Correspondence Analysis analytics platform of Jean-Paul Benzecri, that is also the geometric data analysis, both qualitative and quantitative analytics, developed by Pierre Bourdieu.