July 2012 – LACANONLINE.COM

Reading Lacan – Where to Start?

July 14, 2012June 8, 2023Owen Hewitson18 Comments

A few people have contacted me recently via this site asking for suggestions of what to read, either by way of introduction to Lacan or for an alternative perspective on his work. The list below are some of the titles I usually recommend to them. By adding it to the site it will hopefully help […]

News – June 2012

July 2, 2012July 15, 2012Owen Hewitson1 Comment

CFAR’s annual conference took place here in London on 23rd June with the title ‘Bipolar or Manic Depressive? Lacanian Perspectives’. Amidst contributions from an array of speakers, one common theme was the lack of clarity of the distinction between the various disturbances classed amongst the overall category of affective disorders. Psychiatrist Furham Iqbal, the first […]

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.

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.