April 2023 – LACANONLINE.COM

News – March 2023

April 5, 2023April 5, 2023Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

20% off and free global shipping on all Routledge titles for LacanOnline.com readers. Use this link and code S031 at the checkout. Starting with news of new books recently announced for the year ahead (in addition to the schedule featured in last month’s news update). Firstly, Lacan, Jouissance and the Social Sciences: The One and the Many […]

The Uncanny – Object a and Anxiety in Freud and Lacan

April 1, 2023January 1, 2024Owen HewitsonLeave a Comment

Exploring the concept of the uncanny in psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud’s 1919 paper and how Lacan later returned to it in elaborating his ideas on anxiety and the object a. Based on a panel talk I gave at the Museum of the Home in London, September 2022 on ‘The Unhomely: Explorations of Disaspora and Cultural […]

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.