December 2019 – LACANONLINE.COM

News – December 2019

December 30, 2019January 3, 2020Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

Beginning with a round-up of new books published in the last month, Touria Mignotte’s Cruelty, Sexuality, and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and the Body of the Void was released at the start of December, aiming to integrate the life sciences and quantum physics with the themes in its title. Cruelty, she argues, […]

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What is Repression? (Part II)

December 24, 2019December 24, 2019Owen Hewitson7 Comments

Part II of a short series of videos introducing the concept of repression in psychoanalysis, looking at one of Freud’s most famous cases, and Jacques Lacan’s take on it. By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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News – November 2019

December 6, 2019December 6, 2019Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

A petition against the exclusion of psychoanalysis and in support of diversity in research and care methods has been launched in Europe. It has been prompted by the latest attempt from the film maker Sophie Robert to have psychoanalysts ousted from the public sphere. Her campaign this time aims to prevent psychoanalysts from being able […]

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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.