Lacan & Harold Bloom MCQs: Mirror Stage, Anxiety of Influence

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Literary Theory · Part 11 of 25 · 1950s–1970s

Psychoanalysis II: Lacan, Bloom & Beyond

Mirror StageImaginary · Symbolic · RealName of the FatherAnxiety of Influence

What is Lacan & Bloom? Jacques Lacan re-read Freud through Saussure, claiming that “the unconscious is structured like a language” and describing the mirror stage and the orders of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) applied Oedipal rivalry to poets and their precursors.

This part covers Jacques Lacan, Harold Bloom and other psychoanalytic critics. The questions are drawn from previous UGC NET, SET, PhD entrance and Assistant Professor papers, and every answer comes with a short explanation. Tap an option to check your answer.

Jacques Lacan Harold Bloom

Jacques Lacan

1. Which Lacanian text, first delivered in 1957 to a “lay” audience of philosophy students, is the most important for literary students?

Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
The Insistence of the Letter
The Signification of the Phallus

‘The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious’ (1957), given to philosophy students at the Sorbonne, argues that the unconscious is structured like a language.

2. Lacan argues that the two “dream-work” mechanisms identified by Freud correspond to the basic poles of language identified by the linguist Roman Jakobson, namely ________ and ________.

Intention / intentionality
Langue / parole
Paradigm / paradigmatic
Metaphor / metonymy

Lacan equated Freud’s condensation with Jakobson’s metaphor and displacement with metonymy, supporting his claim that the unconscious is structured like a language.

3. The École Freudienne de Paris was established by which of the following figures?

Carl Gustav Jung
Jacques Lacan
Sigmund Freud
Harold Bloom

Jacques Lacan founded the École Freudienne de Paris in 1964 after his break with the International Psychoanalytical Association, and dissolved it in 1980.

4. Who proposed that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’?

Carl Gustav Jung
Melanie Klein
Sigmund Freud
Jacques Lacan

Lacan reread Freud through Saussure and Jakobson, holding that the unconscious is structured like a language, with condensation and displacement as metaphor and metonymy.

5. Who created “the mirror stage” theory?

Roofus Duff
Jacques Lacan
Peter McGregor
Emily Larson

Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage (1936, revised 1949) describes the infant’s misrecognition of its unified reflected image, founding the ego in the Imaginary.

6. Who among the following proposes that the unconscious comes into being only in language?

Sigmund Freud
Stuart Hall
Jacques Lacan
Paul de Man

Lacan held that the unconscious is structured like a language and arises with the subject’s entry into the Symbolic order.

7. Jacques Lacan posits three ‘orders’ which structure human existence. In the list that follows, identify the one that is not included by Lacan.

Unconsciousness
Imaginary
Real
Symbolic

Lacan’s three orders are the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real; the unconscious is not one of them.

8. In which decade of the twentieth century was Jacques Lacan born?

First
Second
Third
Fourth

Jacques Lacan was born in Paris on 13 April 1901, in the first decade of the twentieth century.

9. Lacan said that there was no direct access to which of the following?

Knowledge
Being
Language
Existence

For Lacan the subject is constituted in the Symbolic order of language, so there is no direct, unmediated access to being.

10. Who is called the French Freud?

I.A. Richards
Ernest Jones
Norman Holland
Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan, who called for a “return to Freud” and reread psychoanalysis through structural linguistics, is often called the French Freud.

11. ________ viewed that the unconscious and the perception of oneself are shaped in the “symbolic” order of language.

Freud
Jung
Lacan
Foucault

Jacques Lacan held that the unconscious is structured like a language and that the subject is constituted on entering the Symbolic order.

12. Who famously referred to the child as the “hommelette”?

Sigmund Freud
Jacques Lacan
Gilles Deleuze
Jacques Derrida

Lacan punned on homme and omelette to call the pre-Oedipal infant a “hommelette”, an unbounded, formless being not yet a unified subject.

13. Who famously referred to the child as the “hommelette”?

Sigmund Freud
Gilles Deleuze
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Lacan

Lacan punned on homme and omelette to call the pre-Oedipal infant a “hommelette”, an unbounded, formless being not yet a unified subject.

14. According to Lacan, misrecognition and alienation are features of:

Ego
Language
Mirror image
None of the above

For Lacan the ego is formed in the mirror stage through identification with an external image, so it is constitutively a site of misrecognition (méconnaissance) and alienation.

15. Which of these individuals believed that “the unconscious is structured like a language”?

Sigmund Freud
Carl Jung
Jacques Lacan
Julia Kristeva

Jacques Lacan reread Freud through Saussure and Jakobson, arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language, working by metaphor and metonymy.

16. In “the imaginary order” the subject’s own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. In the Lacanian model this statement refers to which ‘stage’?

Mirror
Symbology
Castration
Alterity

Lacan’s mirror stage founds the Imaginary order: the infant identifies with its unified specular image, a captivating misrecognition that shapes the ego.

Harold Bloom

17. The theory that an act of poetic creation implies a misreading of an earlier poet was developed by:

Paul de Man
Norman Holland
Harold Bloom
David Bleich

In The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975), Harold Bloom argued that strong poets creatively misread (misprision) their precursors.

18. In The Anxiety of Influence, which of the following definitions does Harold Bloom give to explain the term ‘clinamen’?

Poetic misprision
Poetic hyperbole
Poetic sublime
Poetic supplement

Bloom defines clinamen, the first revisionary ratio, as poetic misreading or misprision proper, a swerve away from the precursor.

19. Name the theorist who divided poets into “strong” and “weak” and popularized the practice of misreading.

Allan Bloom
Stanley Fish
Geoffrey Hartman
Harold Bloom

In The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975) Harold Bloom argued that strong poets creatively misread their precursors.

20. Which of the following books offers an argument diametrically opposed to T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”?

Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence
Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

Where Eliot sees the poet harmoniously joining tradition, Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) describes strong poets’ Oedipal struggle against and misreading of precursors.

21. Which critic is known for his work on the Western canon?

Harold Bloom
Catherine Belsey
Frank Kermode
Edward Said

Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994) defends a canon of 26 writers centred on Shakespeare against what he called the “School of Resentment”.

22. Who among the following posits the tradition of great writers as an inescapable fact, and takes the ambivalent position of considering it as both a blessing and a curse?

Allen Tate
F.R. Leavis
Harold Bloom
T.S. Eliot

In The Anxiety of Influence (1973) Harold Bloom treats the precursor tradition as inescapable, both enabling and burdening the belated poet who must misread it.

23. Harold Bloom put forth the theory of ________ based on the Oedipus complex.

Diachronic Approach
Hermeneutics
Diegesis
The Anxiety of Influence

Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) models the poet’s relation to a precursor on Freud’s Oedipal rivalry between son and father.

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1000+ Literary Theory MCQs – Part 11: Psychoanalysis II: Lacan, Bloom & Beyond

Jacques Lacan

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