Through the encounter with French structuralism and particularly with structural linguistics, psychoanalysis received new and significant impulses after 1945. This reorientation, which simultaneously represents a return to Freud and a revision of his texts, is closely associated with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his school. The resulting teachings have not only decisively influenced clinical psychoanalysis in theory and practice, albeit controversially, but have also opened up new perspectives on cultural and societal phenomena, insofar as they are connected to the question of unconscious meanings, significances, and motivations. In particular, the introduction of the categories of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic has allowed for the development of a media theory that is traditionally psychoanalytic.