September 2013 – LACANONLINE.COM

Reading ‘The Neurotic’s Individual Myth’ – Lacan’s Masterwork on Obsession

September 23, 2013July 13, 2025Owen Hewitson9 Comments

Lacan’s Take on Obsession – Symptoms, Mechanisms and Structure ‘The Neurotic’s Individual Myth’, Lacan’s masterwork on obsession and the Rat Man case history, is quite rare to find in English. It originated from a lecture Lacan delivered in Paris in the early 1950s, an unofficial text of which was quickly distributed in 1953. A modified […]

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5 Lacanian Cinematic Clichés that Hollywood Loves – V

September 9, 2013March 26, 2017Owen Hewitson6 Comments

5. Men in Love Case in point: Friends with Benefits ‘There is no such thing as a sexual relationship’ is a slightly odd translation of Lacan’s well-known maxim Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. In the French, Lacan uses a word that is so commonly employed in English that it doesn’t really need translation […]

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News – August 2013

September 3, 2013September 8, 2013Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

The Symptom 14, the free online journal from Lacan.com, was released mid-way through August – take a read up on the site. It includes articles by Eric Laurent on sublimation, Marie-Helene Brousse on the imaginary register, and a translation from Jacques-Alain Miller’s course on Lacanian orientation from 1982 entitled ‘From Symptom to Fantasy and […]

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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.

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.