Exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan
Lesson 1 – Disrupt the Imaginary Register… Before Jacques Lacan became Jacques Lacan, he was a young medical student with an interest in psychiatry, training in Paris. But he kept very good company. He immersed himself in a broad and extremely interdisciplinary world. Surrealists, feminists, abstract painters, and poets… All of these were on an […]
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“It’s a de-analysis that you need.” – Lacan, to his patient Anne-Lise Stern. As recounted in Les Impromptus de Lacan, p.52. This is a short post as a prelude to an article, or series of articles, about how Lacan worked, both inside and outside his clinic. As such, this is about his style, and in […]
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In Belgium last month, a law was proposed with the aim of regulating psychoanalysis by assimilating it with the psychotherapies. Regulars to this site will remember that a similar law was proposed in the UK and opposition to it was extremely strong, not just from the Lacanian scene but from across the psychotherapies. This resulted […]
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In recent years a lot of Lacanians have grown weary of the constant conflations of Zizek’s teaching with Lacan’s. As Zizek himself has grown in popularity many, especially in the United States, have been introduced to Lacan through the medium of Zizek’s work and some have found it all too easy to equate Lacan’s work […]
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Lacan’s Take on Obsession – Symptoms, Mechanisms and Structure ‘The Neurotic’s Individual Myth’, Lacan’s masterwork on obsession and the Rat Man case history, is quite rare to find in English. It originated from a lecture Lacan delivered in Paris in the early 1950s, an unofficial text of which was quickly distributed in 1953. A modified […]
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5. Men in Love Case in point: Friends with Benefits ‘There is no such thing as a sexual relationship’ is a slightly odd translation of Lacan’s well-known maxim Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. In the French, Lacan uses a word that is so commonly employed in English that it doesn’t really need translation […]
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The Symptom 14, the free online journal from Lacan.com, was released mid-way through August – take a read up on the site. It includes articles by Eric Laurent on sublimation, Marie-Helene Brousse on the imaginary register, and a translation from Jacques-Alain Miller’s course on Lacanian orientation from 1982 entitled ‘From Symptom to Fantasy and […]
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4. The Subject Supposed to Know and the ‘Magical Negro’ The ‘Magical Negro’ is a cinematic cliché in itself. The term was coined by director Spike Lee to denote a cinematic trope in which a black character has a special – often mystical – insight or ability, which is then imparted to a white character. […]
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3. Horror Movies and the Mirror Image Here’s a horror story in just two sentences: This sends a chill down most spines. The ideas that it plays on – the duplication of the image, that specular representations can’t be trusted, that one’s image is actually someone else’s – are ideas that Lacan explores again and […]
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2. The Male Exception Case in point: Zodiac, The Usual Suspects, all Bond films, almost all movies about unsolved murders committed by men, and virtually any superhero film of the last 10 years For the second of the cinematic clichés in this series we need to invoke Lacan’s formulas for sexuation from Seminar XX: Immediately […]
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