What is Dedalus?

Our Newsletter makes reference to one of the most important characters in James Joyce’s work – the one to which Lacan referred, when he said that Joyce had a strong ego mainly because it has been invented. The writer’s ego was created through the construction of this character, this is an anchorage point for the artist.

Stephen Dedalus, who appears first in the novel Stephen Hero, is retaken by Joyce in one of his central novels: A portrait of the artist as a young man, and later in Ulysses. Sthephen is used by Joyce, because he is, somehow, the author himself embodied in another person. This operation is what allows him to sculpture through writing his labyrinth of a soul. As Lacan points out in seminar XXIII, Daedalus will lead him to decode his own enigma.

Later we can enter into the seeming labyrinth of the ordinary and the other psychoses, to verify that, under transference, we discover anchorage points in the otherwise confusing clinical content.