February 2019 – LACANONLINE.COM

Amuse-Bouches IV – What Makes a Trauma Traumatic? (Part I)

February 25, 2019March 8, 2019Owen Hewitson3 Comments

Trauma often appears to be a very broadly-spread notion in psychotherapy. Its urgency in clinical settings seems to outpace the theoretical rigour we can give it, leading the label ‘trauma’ to have been been ascribed to all kinds of experience, from birth, to sex, war, and even to love. Moreover, it sometimes seems that the […]

News – January 2019

February 12, 2019Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

Among new books released last month was the collection Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious, edited by Patricia Gherovici and Christopher Christian. Refuting the accusation that psychoanalysis is an expensive luxury only for the wealthy, it shows how psychoanalytic principles are applied successfully to disenfranchised Latino populations. This published collection follows 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.