1) Like Freudian critics they pay close attention to unconscious motives and feelings, but instead of excavating for those of the author or characters, they search out those of the text itself, uncovering contradictory under currents of meaning, which lie like a subconscious beneath the 'conscious' of the text. This is another way of defining the process of 'deconstruction'.
2) They demonstrate the presence in the literary work of Lacanian psychoanalytic symptoms or phases, such as the mirror-stage or the sovereignty of the unconscious.
3) They see the literary text as an enactment or demonstration of Lacanian views about language and unconscious, particularly the endemic elusiveness of the signified, and the centrality of the unconscious. In practice, this results in favaouring the anti-realist test which challenges the conventions literary representation.
4) They treat the literary text in terms of a series of broader Lacanian orientations, towards such concepts as lack or desire, for instance.
