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What Does Lacan Say About… The End, And Ends, of a Psychoanalysis? (Part II)

January 16, 2012March 26, 2017Owen Hewitson4 Comments

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 […]

What Does Lacan Say About… The End, and Ends, of a Psychoanalysis? (Part I)

January 15, 2012February 26, 2022Owen Hewitson7 Comments

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 […]

Henry Krutzen’s Index of Lacan’s Seminar

January 30, 2011March 26, 2017Owen Hewitson1 Comment

For English-speaking students of Lacan’s work it is unfortunate how little this book is known. This short post attempts to rectify that by giving a shout-out for Krutzen’s marvellous work and to encourage its dissemination amongst English-speakers. Firstly, to address the obvious problem: this is a French book and is written in French. But if you […]

What Does Lacan Say About… Acting Out?

December 19, 2010March 25, 2017Owen Hewitson3 Comments

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 […]

Three Non-Lacanian Authors That Every Lacanian Should Read

December 19, 2010March 26, 2017Owen Hewitson7 Comments

There is no shortage of former Freudians who have abandoned the field and turned their talents to writing testimonies against Freudianism or psychoanalysis in general. Often these are semi-autobiographical accounts of their own shift in allegiance and recount in personal terms the reasons for their abandonment of the discipline. Perhaps the most celebrated amongst these […]

What Does Lacan Say About… The Mirror Stage? – Part I

September 13, 2010March 25, 2017Owen Hewitson33 Comments

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 […]

What Does Lacan Say About… Rhetoric?

August 13, 2010March 25, 2017Owen Hewitson2 Comments

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 […]

New site, fantastic resource: LacaninIreland.com

August 9, 2010March 26, 2017Owen Hewitson1 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 any English-speaker who has ever struggled to understand anything of Lacan’s work beyond the relatively meagre selection currently available in English, the name Cormac Gallagher will […]

What is Psychoanalysis?

July 24, 2010March 26, 2017Owen HewitsonLeave a 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 a little uncertainty and perhaps even some dread. If someone who knew something about psychoanalysis was asked this question in polite company how should they respond? […]

The Short Session

July 4, 2010March 26, 2017Owen Hewitson5 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 in more brutal terms, why would someone pay for a psychoanalysis per session without knowing how much of the analyst’s time they were going to get? […]