June 2016 – LACANONLINE.COM

What Does Lacan Say About… Love?

June 27, 2016March 26, 2017Owen Hewitson9 Comments

The following story, first told by Lacan in 1960, is exemplary of what he said about love. I will call it the story of the fruit and the flame. It goes like this: Imagine you see in front of you a beautiful flower, or a ripe fruit. You reach out your hand to grab it. […]

News – May 2016

June 2, 2016June 3, 2016Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

The Lacanian Review released its first issue in May. The journal replaces its predecessor Hurly-Burly as the Anglophone periodical of the New Lacanian School. The first issue – entitled Oh my God(s)! – deals with the interface between psychoanalysis, religion, and science. It includes a newly-translated text by Lacan on religion, and two texts by […]

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.