April 2020 – LACANONLINE.COM

A Tour of The Graph of Desire

April 21, 2020April 2, 2023Owen Hewitson5 Comments

This video goes on a tour of Lacan’s famous Graph of Desire, as elaborated in ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’ in his Écrits. We look at each form of the Graph, check in at each of its points, explain what all the algebra means, and go through the concepts behind […]

News – March 2020

April 5, 2020April 7, 2020Owen Hewitson2 Comments

Want to receive this news via email each month? Sign up here. In the light of the Coronavirus pandemic those events that have not been cancelled or postponed are being switched to digital delivery where possible. This offers an excellent opportunity to engage in Lacanian events around the world, many of which would not have […]

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.