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New site, fantastic resource: LacaninIreland.com

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com August 9, 2010 Blog 1 Comment

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...

What is Psychoanalysis?

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com July 24, 2010 Blog No Comment

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...

Money and Psychoanalysis

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com July 13, 2010 Blog 1 Comment

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...

The Short Session

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com July 4, 2010 Blog 4 Comments

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...

Why is Freud upside down?

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com May 3, 2010 Blog No Comment

Freud’s image is ubiquitous, perhaps overly so, and has come to represent much more than Freud and his work. His image, featured at the top of this site, is...

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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.

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.