Category: Lacan

Let’s start with an obvious question that followed from the first article in this series: how is the use of topology in psychoanalysis not just metaphorical? How is it not, even, mystification? Remember that Lacan is making a bold assertion, as stated in L’Étourdit from 1972: “Topology is not ‘designed to guide us’ in structure. […]

For Part II, click here. This is the first of two articles that will explore Lacan’s idea that human subjectivity has the structure of a topological space. In the early eighteenth century the city of Königsberg, now part of modern-day Russia, was connected by seven bridges which linked the two islands of the city with […]

Hidden behind the rather unassuming title ‘Presentation on Transference’ deep within the Écrits, Lacan’s seminal work on Freud’s most famous female patient is often overlooked. It is in reality just the short text of an intervention Lacan made at the equally unremarkable-sounding 1951 ‘Congress of Romance Language-Speaking Psychoanalysts’. But the case of the patient to […]

I thought more people should know about Lacan’s work on obsession and his interpretation of the Rat Man case history, so I put together the video below as a more digestible, condensed version of the article previously published on this site for those who prefer to watch rather than read. It’s the first animated video […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]