The dialectic of the Other Lacan and the sources of Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s new thinking about alienation

In 1947–1948, while they were respectively writing Le Deuxième Sexe and Cahiers pour une morale, de Beauvoir and Sartre’s approach to alienation changed profoundly. Alienation now lay at the very heart of the subject’s project of the self, which internalizes the influence of others in an original way. This article puts forward the hypothesis that the analyses of the young Lacan, in “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu” (1938), played a decisive role in this evolution.