The Uncanny – Object a and Anxiety in Freud and Lacan

Owen Hewitson April 1, 2023 The Uncanny – Object a and Anxiety in Freud and Lacan2024-01-01T20:40:01+00:00 Blog No 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 Displacement’, together with artists and curators.

References:

Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) – https://amzn.to/3TZt1wi
Freud, ‘The Wolfman’ case (1918) – https://amzn.to/3G6wpjg
Lacan, Seminar X, ‘Anxiety’ (1962-63) – https://amzn.to/3Klmx6P
Lacan, ‘Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar’ (1964) – https://amzn.to/3M1WSlY
Lacan, Seminar XII, ‘Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis’ (1964-65) – http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/translations/seminars/
Miller, ‘Reading Lacan’s Seminar on Anxiety II’, Lacanian Ink 27 – https://amzn.to/3nAEVAG

Check out videos on other topics, here.

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

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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.

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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.