What is Anxiety? Video Introduction to Lacan’s Theory

Lacan

June 20, 2019June 20, 2019Owen Hewitson9 Comments

10 minute video introducing Lacan’s theory of anxiety as the sensation of the desire of the Other, through the story of the praying mantis he tells in Seminars IX and X, and the example of childhood phobia.

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

Creative Commons Licence

All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

9 thoughts on “What is Anxiety? Video Introduction to Lacan’s Theory”

Chris Nelson says:

June 28, 2019 at 2:59 pm

This is excellent Owen. I hope you keep making more of these!
Matt says:

July 17, 2019 at 2:08 am

I’m currently reading Roberto Harari’s book on Lacan’s year long seminar on Anxiety. Have you read it, if so, what were your thoughts? If not, apart from the text itself, have you read anything on the seminar you would recommend?
Anonymous says:

August 24, 2019 at 4:31 pm

Very good
klsdjaf says:

September 6, 2019 at 3:52 am

🙁
Julian says:

October 18, 2019 at 9:00 pm

Nice exposition thank you
Pingback: Noah begat 3 sons
B. says:

January 31, 2020 at 11:36 am

Excellent, thank you. Please keep them coming.
Pingback: LA NUEVA A-NORMALIDAD El Pequeño Lacancito Ilustrado
Martin F. Rodarte says:

January 9, 2021 at 6:42 pm

Sir could I use the transcript to translate this video to Spanish for my girlfriend who is hearing impaired?

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

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.