Urna Semper

Instructor’s Name
25 November 2015

Psychoanalytic Reading: The

Purloined Letter
Lacan’s Imago, The Ego and

The theory regarding the I or the Imago as expressed in the readings of Jacques

Lacan a well placed in an analysis of the relationship between the stories unnamed

narrator and Inspector Dupin. I would argue that the narrator’s iterations regarding

the superlative nature of Dupin’s prowess of unraveling mysteries, without there

ever being recourse for an outsider to be given the slightest insight into a possible

shortcoming from the side of the notorious detective. The shortcoming I therefore

see is the nature of the narrator and concurrently Edgar Allen Poe, the author

himself. My suggestion is that Dupin is in fact a fully realised representation of

the “I” or Imago as Jacques Lacan Describes it.

The I as described by Lacan is that “ We have only to understand the mirror stage

as an identification. The transformation takes place in the subject when he

assumes an image.

This relation of an assumed image is taken on directly by the author Edgar Allen

Poe, particularly in his role as the unnamed narrator. In spite of the fact that

Lacan’s argument of The Mirror Stage and subsequently the formation of the “I”

taking place during infancy or early youth, the prerogative of my argument is in

relation to Lacan’s conception that “The spectacle of the initial encounter with a
mirror as an infant serves as the precipitation of the ‘I’.” With Poe as the egoic

subject, it is possible to state further that in light of the aforementioned, what

Lacan states is highly plausible in the instance of Poe as an individual himself.

Furthermore Lacan states that the initial encounter with the “I” precipitates the

objectification of said ‘I’, “in the dialectic of identification of the other.”

Assuming that the conception of the other is an alternate to the “I” as self, Poe’s

creation and characteristically infallible inception of Dupin, represents an alternate

“I” in the shape of an “other” as Lacan puts it; while fulfilling the

conceptualisation of the “Ideal I” as a manner of situating “the agency of the ego.

Before its social determination, in a fictional direction. ”

In addition Dupin fits the categorisation of the “Ideal I” perfectly because of what

is first a literal fictional direction and secondly because of the nature of the ease

with which he goes about superseding the Police Prefect in solving the mystery,

fulfilling Lacan’s prophecy of the child who “anticipates or foresee’s his own

powerful abilities as a mirage.An exteriority which is more constituent than

constituted.” The glory and magnificence through which the reader is intended to

perceive Dupin is entirely at the whim of Poe, this is highlighted best particularly

when Dupin goes about deducing the truth of the method behind the letter’s

concealment, stating in reference to the search carried out by the police that, “ the

measures adopted were not only the best of their kind, but carried out to

perfection.” As readers we are aware that in spite of their superlative method as

described by Dupin/Poe, they were nonetheless foiled in their attempts, but Poe’s

incarnation of Dupin transcends the very best, even by his own admission( as

stated above) by being not only capable of discovering but in also explaining his
method of deduction. Dupin states that the police failed by using methods

“inapplicable to the case, and to the man.” It therefore follows that in spite of

having no previous knowledge of the man or the case, no more than the police

themselves, Dupin is capable of deducing an intimate knowledge not only of the

case but the culprit himself, and it is here that Poe has failed to give satisfactory

reason for such superlative claims, for his description of the method of “even or

odd” is by Dupin’s own admission primarily a form of elaborate guesswork. It is

at this point that it is revealed that the possibility of Dupin being an “Ideal I”

functioning as Poe’s own mirage of his own “powerful abilities” is highly

plausible.