News – November 2011

Owen Hewitson November 21, 2011 News – November 20112011-11-21T22:30:46+00:00 News No Comment

After being imprisoned for over two months, Lacanian psychoanalyst Rafah Nached was released by the Syrian authorities Wednesday 16th November, bringing to a successful conclusion the worldwide campaign by psychoanalysts – Lacanian and non-Lacanian – and those from other walks of life for her release. More on this excellent news from Lacan Quotidien (in French) here and translated into English here.

A treasure-trove of videos from the PULSE Seminars in New York in October has been uploaded to Lacan.com here. The talk by Eric Laurent on Lacan’s own analysis with Rudolph Lowenstein is fascinating, especially where he quotes the letter Lacan writes to Lowenstein after the analysis has ended.

Catch Philosophy Now’s podcast on Freud’s ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’ from October, featuring David Bell, President of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

The contributors to the Cambridge Companion to Lacan discuss Lacan’s Télévision, broadcast on French public service channel ORTF in 1973: http://slought.org/content/11175/. Run forward to 34:18 to skip the weird ‘reading out’ of the text as the video plays in the background. Interesting discussion of the historical context of some of what Lacan said, including Lacan’s discussion with the students at Vincennes.

Audio of Darian Leader’s talk at the RSA in October on madness, the subject of his most recent book.

Alison Bancroft’s Fashion and Psychoanalysis is released on 18th December. Certainly one for the Christmas socking!

Jean-Louis Gault speaks on the theme of ‘Reading a Symptom’ in a preparatory seminar hosted by the London Society of the New Lacanian School ahead of the 10th Congress of the NLS. His talk is entitled ‘The Symptom between Speaking and Writing’ and will take place in London on 19th November at 2:30. Full details: http://www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk/pdfs/LSNLS%20Seminars%202011-2012.pdf

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Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, 1901 – 1981.
Trained as a psychiatrist, he abandoned the profession in favour of psychoanalysis in the early thirties. After publishing his paper on the Mirror Stage in 1949, for which he is probably best known to the general public, in the early fifties Lacan embarked on a project he called the ‘Return to Freud’.

Lacan began holding yearly seminars, starting in 1952, re-examining Freud’s work. At the time, the theory and technique of psychoanalysis was facing a complete overhaul at the hands of post-Freudian psychoanalysts, many of whom had emigrated to the United States after the war. Lacan railed against their teaching of Freud, seeing it as an oversimplification of his work and a corruption of psychoanalytic technique reducing it to the status of life management. Through his seminars he offered another interpretation of Freud’s work and psychoanalytic theory. Inventive, radical and adventurous, many still believe Lacan’s to be a creative mis-reading of Freud.

However Lacan’s seminars grew in popularity and as his teaching developed from a reading of Freud’s text to an elaboration of his own concepts his teaching became more influential. Lacan continued to give yearly seminars until the year before his death in 1981. By that time, he had become a major intellectual figure in public life and had both created and disbanded his own school, separating his members both from the established psychoanalytic institutions and from each other.

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Today, Lacanian theory is advanced by a number of disparate groupings of his followers and the technique of psychoanalysis he developed is practiced clinically by Lacanian analysts around the world.