January 2014 – LACANONLINE.COM

The Deepest Secret

January 2, 2014March 26, 2017Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

In The Question of Lay Analysis from 1926, Freud imagined himself being asked by an ‘Impartial Person’ whether psychoanalysis is a confession. He imagines the following question being thrown at him: “‘You assume that every neurotic has something oppressing him, some secret. And by getting him to tell you about it you relieve his oppression […]

News – December 2013

January 1, 2014Owen Hewitson2 Comments

Publications Heralding the WAP (World Association of Psychoanalysis) Congress in Paris in April this year, December saw the publication of Editions 9 and 10 of What’s Up, the WAP’s regular newsletter. They can be found on the Congress’s site here and include a number of orientation texts that make for preparatory reading ahead of the […]

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.