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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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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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 […]
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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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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? […]
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Recently here in London the Freud Museum organised a three-day conference on the subject of Psychoanalysis, Money and the Economy. Amongst the keynote speakers was Bruce Fink, translator of Lacan’s Ecrits into English and author of many fine books on Lacan, including The Lacanian Subject and Lacan to the Letter. As he rarely speaks in […]
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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? […]
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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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