Exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan
Periodically, Freud comes back into fashion as a new wave of thinkers from a variety of disparate disciplines ‘rediscover’ and apply his work to their respective fields. And so it was that Discover magazine decided to devote its latest issue, released in March, to ‘The Second Coming of Sigmund Freud’. There are no great surprises […]
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Lesson 4 – The Value of Stupid Questions “There is nothing more interesting for us than stultae questiones [stupid questions]” – Lacan, Seminar XIII, 2nd February 1966. If a stupid question is one that we should already know the answer to, Lacan asked many stupid questions. Here are a couple, as related by two of […]
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As Elisabeth Roudinesco notes in the introduction to her new work – Lacan: In Spite of Everything – publication of which was brought forward last month, it is as if everything that could have been said about Lacan has already been said. Roudinesco is a controversial figure in the Lacanian world, so with her new […]
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Lesson 3 – Surprise, Punctuation, Pace, Silence When psychoanalysis was still in its infancy there were a lot of people interested in practicing it. They wanted to train as psychoanalysts but there was no textbook or guidelines for how they should go about it. So naturally they turned to Freud. And so by 1911, when […]
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The World Association of Psychoanalysis has announced the launch of Radio Lacan, which began broadcasting on 3rd February. The first podcast was from the École de la Cause Freudienne in Paris on the topic of the next WAP Congress, ‘A Conversation towards a Real for the XXIst century’, featuring a discussion between leading Lacanian psychoanalysts. […]
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In The Question of Lay Analysis from 1926, Freud imagined himself being asked by an ‘Impartial Person’ whether psychoanalysis is a confession. He imagines the following question being thrown at him: “‘You assume that every neurotic has something oppressing him, some secret. And by getting him to tell you about it you relieve his oppression […]
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Publications Heralding the WAP (World Association of Psychoanalysis) Congress in Paris in April this year, December saw the publication of Editions 9 and 10 of What’s Up, the WAP’s regular newsletter. They can be found on the Congress’s site here and include a number of orientation texts that make for preparatory reading ahead of the […]
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From the symptom to the sinthome The title of this short article will resonate with readers of the Écrits,but rather than Kant or Sade here I am going to argue for why Lacan should be read with another Master of his art – the father of modern-day karate, Gichin Funakoshi. At the end of his […]
Continue ReadingLesson 2 – “Everyone wants to give you something, you just have to figure out what it is”. Let’s start this article not with Lacan but with this guy: His name was Hardy Amies. In the last post we looked at how the imaginary is never simply imaginary, that the realm of images has to […]
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