Exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan
For Part I click here The psychoanalyst as incarnation of object a The shift from Seminar X Around the time of Seminar X in 1963 there is a big shift in how Lacan interprets Freud’s major contribution on the question of the end of a psychoanalysis, Analysis Terminable and Interminable. By this time Lacan is no […]
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Introductory Remarks The first question we have to confront is a terminological one: in what sense do we mean the ‘end of a psychoanalysis’? This phrase could refer simply to the final session, regardless of whether a ‘psychoanalysis proper’ has been undertaken prior to this moment. Or it could refer to the conclusion of an […]
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Where does resistance come from? The first question we have to ask about resistance is a very simple one: where exactly does resistance come from? In 1953, at the start of what were to become yearly seminars, Lacan pursues a close reading of Freud’s work on psychoanalytic technique. From the earliest days of his […]
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We might begin by asking how it is that ‘acting out’ has come to be given the status of a concept in psychoanalysis? This is a valid question to start with because, if we turn to the Index of Stratchey’s Standard Edition of Freud’s complete work, it might surprise us that we find only two […]
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Most people without an interest in psychoanalysis do not know what it is. To the man in the street, psychoanalysis – indeed, anything carrying the prefix psy- – denotes something in the field of psychology, and so this is the closest reference most people have. To the uninitiated psychoanalysis is sometimes looked upon as a […]
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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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“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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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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