Exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan
This is the first of two articles looking at the theory of the mirror stage in Lacan’s work. This first part looks at the presentation of the mirror stage as we find it in the Ecrits, specifically in the 1949 paper, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in […]
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The Lacanian maxims that psychoanalysis is a practice based on speech, and that the unconscious is structured like a language, are now so classical that they are almost boring. Elsewhere on this site these maxims are explored and their implications discussed. This post however is specifically about Lacan’s references to rhetoric. As Fink notes in his excellent Lacan […]
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As I was looking up references to rhetoric in Lacan’s work for a post I am planning to write on the subject I stumbled upon this site: http://www.lacaninireland.com. For any English-speaker who has ever struggled to understand anything of Lacan’s work beyond the relatively meagre selection currently available in English, the name Cormac Gallagher will […]
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How would you answer the question ‘What is psychoanalysis?’ For anyone interested in psychoanalysis, having to explain concisely what psychoanalysis is and what it involves can elicit more than a little uncertainty and perhaps even some dread. If someone who knew something about psychoanalysis was asked this question in polite company how should they respond? […]
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Recently here in London the Freud Museum organised a three-day conference on the subject of Psychoanalysis, Money and the Economy. Amongst the keynote speakers was Bruce Fink, translator of Lacan’s Ecrits into English and author of many fine books on Lacan, including The Lacanian Subject and Lacan to the Letter. As he rarely speaks in […]
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The problem that this blog post seeks to address is quite simple: what is the rationale for the short session as practiced in Lacanian psychoanalysis? Or to put it in more brutal terms, why would someone pay for a psychoanalysis per session without knowing how much of the analyst’s time they were going to get? […]
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“That there are in the unconscious signifying chains which subsist as such, and which from there structure, act on the organism, influence what appears from the outside as a symptom, this is the whole basis of analytic experience” (Seminar V, 21.05.58., p.7). In this post I wanted to look at several passages from Lacan’s work […]
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This documentary was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in the autumn of 2000 to mark the centenary of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. As Freud scholars often remind us, this work was actually published first in 1899, but Freud had the publisher print the date as 1900, perhaps so as to not make the book […]
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The context – a lack of theoretical work on affects by the post-Freudians Most Lacanian writers commenting on affect note the fact that Lacan is often criticised by other theorists and schools for neglecting the dimension of affects. The issue of whether Lacan has a theory of affects – or gives enough place to affects […]
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In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life Freud links the experience of déjà vu to unconscious fantasies. Rather than focusing on ‘here and now’ of the person’s physical or mental state, or what they are doing at the time, Freud detects the influence of an unconscious dynamic stemming from repressed desires. Thus “It is in my view wrong […]
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