February 2014 – LACANONLINE.COM

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

February 9, 2014March 26, 2017Owen Hewitson3 Comments

Lesson 3 – Surprise, Punctuation, Pace, Silence When psychoanalysis was still in its infancy there were a lot of people interested in practicing it. They wanted to train as psychoanalysts but there was no textbook or guidelines for how they should go about it. So naturally they turned to Freud. And so by 1911, when […]

News – January 2014

February 5, 2014February 5, 2014Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

The World Association of Psychoanalysis has announced the launch of Radio Lacan, which began broadcasting on 3rd February. The first podcast was from the École de la Cause Freudienne in Paris on the topic of the next WAP Congress, ‘A Conversation towards a Real for the XXIst century’, featuring a discussion between leading Lacanian psychoanalysts. […]

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.