News | LACANONLINE.COM

News – July 2012

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com August 5, 2012 News No Comment

With Lacan Quotidien, the daily Lacanian newsletter, taking a break for the summer to resume in September, news from France has been somewhat scattered. This hiatus does however present...

News – June 2012

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com July 2, 2012 News 1 Comment

CFAR’s annual conference took place here in London on 23rd June with the title ‘Bipolar or Manic Depressive? Lacanian Perspectives’. Amidst contributions from an array of speakers, one common...

News – May 2012

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com June 3, 2012 News No Comment

May began with the sad news of the death of Jean Laplanche, one of Lacan’s former pupils and a great psychoanalyst in his own right. He is perhaps best...

Jean Laplanche, Psychoanalyst, 1924-2012

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com May 15, 2012 News 5 Comments

It was announced last week that psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche has died in Beaune, near Dijon, France, aged 87. Coincidentally he passed away on 6th May, the 156th anniversary of...

News – April 2012

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com May 3, 2012 News No Comment

Echoes of the debate on autism and psychoanalysis reverberated around mainstream French media in April. French weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur devoted a good proportion of its 19th...

News – March 2012

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com April 7, 2012 News No Comment

The debate around the treatment of autism continues to dominate almost all current French psychoanalytic output. On 8th March the French public health body the Haute Autorité de Santé published...

News – February 2012

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com March 1, 2012 News No Comment

The debate on autism in France, first reported on last month, rumbles on. The pages of February’s Lacan Quotidien have been filled with comment on the debate sparked by...

News – January 2012

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com January 24, 2012 News 1 Comment

Autism Scandal A controversy has broken out in French psychoanalytic circles around a documentary on autism by filmmaker Sophie Robert. Her documentary Le Mur (or The Wall) includes interviews...

News – December 2011

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com December 31, 2011 News No Comment

The picture above shows Lacan posing alongside numerous other European intellectuals of the 1930s, including Picasso and Satre. At the time this photograph was taken Lacan was busy refining...

News – November 2011

Owen Hewitson - LacanOnline.com November 21, 2011 News No Comment

After being imprisoned for over two months, Lacanian psychoanalyst Rafah Nached was released by the Syrian authorities Wednesday 16th November, bringing to a successful conclusion the worldwide campaign...

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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.