September 2015 – LACANONLINE.COM

Inside Out and the ‘Science’ of Emotions

September 20, 2015March 26, 2017Owen Hewitson1 Comment

No film in recent years has had quite as much input from the field of psychology as Disney and Pixar’s latest offering, Inside Out. Charming though the film is, its portrayal of emotional life tells us a lot about how current psychological theories treat the study of emotions. This gives us an excuse to contrast […]

News – August 2015

September 5, 2015Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

As the summer ends many Lacanian organisations are announcing their programme of events and seminars for the coming academic year. Après-Coup, the New York-based psychoanalytic association, has announced the timetable for its 2015-2016 programme of events. The various seminars will take place under the theme “Psychoanalysis, Savoir-faire, and the Social Link” and start on 25th […]

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.