Exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan
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 […]
Continue Reading
May saw the launch of an English translation of Colette Soler’s Lacan – The Unconscious Reinvented with a half-day seminar at the Freud Museum in London where Soler presented an overview of the reading of Lacan’s work that she details in the book. In particular, Soler zeroes in on the little-known but succinct summary of […]
Continue Reading
April saw the ninth Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis gather in Paris to explore the theme ‘A Real for the 21st Century’. Helpfully, Radio Lacan has recordings of some of the sessions for those who were not able to attend. You can also order the accompanying edition of the journal Scilicet on the […]
Continue Reading
Periodically, Freud comes back into fashion as a new wave of thinkers from a variety of disparate disciplines ‘rediscover’ and apply his work to their respective fields. And so it was that Discover magazine decided to devote its latest issue, released in March, to ‘The Second Coming of Sigmund Freud’. There are no great surprises […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
As Elisabeth Roudinesco notes in the introduction to her new work – Lacan: In Spite of Everything – publication of which was brought forward last month, it is as if everything that could have been said about Lacan has already been said. Roudinesco is a controversial figure in the Lacanian world, so with her new […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
The World Association of Psychoanalysis has announced the launch of Radio Lacan, which began broadcasting on 3rd February. The first podcast was from the École de la Cause Freudienne in Paris on the topic of the next WAP Congress, ‘A Conversation towards a Real for the XXIst century’, featuring a discussion between leading Lacanian psychoanalysts. […]
Continue Reading
In The Question of Lay Analysis from 1926, Freud imagined himself being asked by an ‘Impartial Person’ whether psychoanalysis is a confession. He imagines the following question being thrown at him: “‘You assume that every neurotic has something oppressing him, some secret. And by getting him to tell you about it you relieve his oppression […]
Continue Reading
Publications Heralding the WAP (World Association of Psychoanalysis) Congress in Paris in April this year, December saw the publication of Editions 9 and 10 of What’s Up, the WAP’s regular newsletter. They can be found on the Congress’s site here and include a number of orientation texts that make for preparatory reading ahead of the […]
Continue Reading