December 2013 – LACANONLINE.COM

Lacan avec Funakoshi

December 22, 2013May 22, 2019Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

From the symptom to the sinthome The title of this short article will resonate with readers of the Écrits,but rather than Kant or Sade here I am going to argue for why Lacan should be read with another Master of his art – the father of modern-day karate, Gichin Funakoshi. At the end of his […]

Lessons from Lacan’s Practice – Everyday Psychoanalysis, from the Classroom to the Boardroom (II)

December 15, 2013February 13, 2021Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

Lesson 2 – “Everyone wants to give you something, you just have to figure out what it is”. Let’s start this article not with Lacan but with this guy: His name was Hardy Amies. In the last post we looked at how the imaginary is never simply imaginary, that the realm of images has to […]

News – November 2013

December 6, 2013December 6, 2013Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

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.