The title of Lilian Munk Rösing’s recent publication Pixar with Lacan: The Hysteric’s Guide to Animation (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016) contains many of my favourite words. With. The. Hysteric. But seriously, the blending of Jacques Lacan’s structuralist re-visioning of psychoanalytic theory with the stable of Pixar animation is both a provocative and insightful one. Lacanian theory – known by many as either as source of theoretical intrigue or frustration – offers a dense, abstract, often impenetrable but always insightful and innovative way of making sense of the world or, rather, a way of envisioning how we as subjects make sense of the world.
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