August 2014 – LACANONLINE.COM

The Dora Parallax

August 24, 2014May 22, 2019Owen Hewitson2 Comments

Hidden behind the rather unassuming title ‘Presentation on Transference’ deep within the Écrits, Lacan’s seminal work on Freud’s most famous female patient is often overlooked. It is in reality just the short text of an intervention Lacan made at the equally unremarkable-sounding 1951 ‘Congress of Romance Language-Speaking Psychoanalysts’. But the case of the patient to […]

News – July 2014

August 3, 2014Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

“I am also convinced that within ten years at the utmost, people reading my work will find it entirely transparent, like a good glass of beer. Perhaps then they’ll say ‘This Lacan, he’s so banal!” The above quote comes from a 1974 interview Lacan gave to the journalist Emilio Granzotto for the Italian magazine Panorama. […]

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.