seminars – LACANONLINE.COM

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 […]

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 […]

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.