Jacques Lacan

During the early 1920s, Lacan actively engaged with the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde. Having met James Joyce, he was present at the Parisian bookshop where the first readings of passages from Ulysses in French and English took place, shortly before it was published in 1922.^[10] He also had meetings with Charles Maurras, whom he admired as a literary stylist, and he occasionally attended meetings of Action Française (of which Maurras was a leading ideologue),^[9]: 104 of which he would later be highly critical.

In 1920, after being rejected for military service on the grounds that he was too thin, Lacan entered medical school. Between 1927 and 1931, after completing his studies at the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris, he specialised in psychiatry under the direction of Henri Claude at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the major psychiatric hospital serving central Paris, at the Infirmary for the Insane of the Police Prefecture under Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and also at the Hospital Henri-Rousselle.^[11]: 211

1930s

Lacan was involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the 1930s, associating with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso.^[12] For a time, he served as Picasso's personal therapist. He attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded and published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. "[Lacan's] interest in surrealism predated his interest in psychoanalysis," former Lacanian analyst and biographer Dylan Evans explains, speculating that "perhaps Lacan never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as 'convulsive beauty', its celebration of irrationality."^[13] Translator and historian David Macey writes that "the importance of surrealism can hardly be over-stated... to the young Lacan... [who] also shared the surrealists' taste for scandal and provocation, and viewed provocation as an important element in psycho-analysis itself".^[14]

In 1931, after a second year at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Lacan was awarded his Diplôme de médecin légiste (a medical examiner's qualification) and became a licensed forensic psychiatrist. The following year he was awarded his Diplôme d'État de docteur en médecine [fr] (roughly equivalent to an M.D. degree) for his thesis "On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality" ("De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité".^{[15][11]: 21 [a]} Its publication had little immediate impact on French psychoanalysis but it did meet with acclaim amongst Lacan's circle of surrealist writers and artists. In their only recorded instance of direct communication, Lacan sent a copy of his thesis to Sigmund Freud who acknowledged its receipt with a postcard.^[11]: 212

Lacan's thesis was based on observations of several patients with a primary focus on one female patient whom he called Aimée. Its exhaustive reconstruction of her family history and social relations, on which he based his analysis of her paranoid state of mind, demonstrated his dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry and the growing influence of Freud on his ideas.^[16] Also in 1932, Lacan published a translation of Freud's 1922 text, "Über einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität" ("Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality") as "De quelques mécanismes névrotiques dans la jalousie, la paranoïa et l'homosexualité" in the Revue française de psychanalyse [fr]. In Autumn 1932, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which was to last until 1938.^[17]

In 1934 Lacan became a candidate member of the

It was Wallon who commissioned from Lacan the last major text of his pre-war period, a contribution to the 1938 Encyclopédie française entitled "La Famille" (reprinted in 1984 as "Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu", Paris: Navarin). 1938 was also the year of Lacan's accession to full membership (membre titulaire) of the SPP, notwithstanding considerable opposition from many of its senior members who were unimpressed by his recasting of Freudian theory in philosophical terms.^[9]: 122

Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin in January 1934 and in January 1937 they had the first of their three children, a daughter named Caroline. A son, Thibaut, was born in August 1939 and a daughter, Sybille, in November 1940.^[9]: 129

1940s

The SPP was disbanded due to

In a relationship they formed before the war, Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), the estranged wife of his friend Georges Bataille, became Lacan's mistress and, in 1953, his second wife. During the war their relationship was complicated by the threat of deportation for Sylvia, who was Jewish, since this required her to live in the unoccupied territories. Lacan intervened personally with the authorities to obtain papers detailing her family origins, which he destroyed. In 1941 they had a child, Judith. She kept the name Bataille because Lacan wished to delay the announcement of his planned separation and divorce until after the war.^[9]: 147

After the war, the SPP recommenced their meetings. In 1945 Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, where he met the British analysts Ernest Jones, Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. Bion's analytic work with groups influenced Lacan, contributing to his own subsequent emphasis on study groups as a structure within which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis. He published a report of his visit as 'La Psychiatrique anglaise et la guerre' (Evolution psychiatrique 1, 1947, pp.  293–318).

In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage, 'The Mirror-Stage, as Formative of the I, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience', to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich. The same year he set out in the Doctrine de la Commission de l'Enseignement, produced for the Training Commission of the SPP, the protocols for the training of candidates.^{[11]: 220–221}

1950s

With the purchase in 1951 of a country mansion at

In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris in which he inaugurated what he described as "a return to Freud," whose doctrines were to be re-articulated through a reading of Saussure's linguistics and Levi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan's 27-year-long seminar was highly influential in Parisian cultural life, as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.^[9]: 299

In January 1953 Lacan was elected president of the SPP. When, at a meeting the following June, a formal motion was passed against him criticising his abandonment of the standard analytic training session for the variable-length session, he immediately resigned his presidency. He and a number of colleagues then resigned from the SPP to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP).^[11]: 227 One consequence of this was to eventually deprive the new group of membership of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Encouraged by the reception of "the return to Freud" and of his report "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," Lacan began to re-read Freud's works in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology, and topology. From 1953 to 1964 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in the collection Écrits, which was first published in 1966. In his seventh seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959–60), which according to Lewis A. Kirshner "arguably represents the most far-reaching attempt to derive a comprehensive ethical position from psychoanalysis,"^[20] Lacan defined the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and presented his "ethics for our time"—one that would, in the words of Freud, prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the "discontent of civilization." At the roots of the ethics is desire: the only promise of analysis is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play on words between l'entrée en je and l'entrée en jeu). "I must come to the place where the id was," where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails "the purification of desire." He defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and that the analytic field is the only place from which it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.^[21]

1960s

Starting in 1962, a complex negotiation took place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan's practice (with its controversial indeterminate-length sessions) and his critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy led, in August 1963, to the IPA setting the condition that registration of the SFP was dependent upon the removal of Lacan from the list of SFP analysts.^[22] With the SFP's decision to honour this request in November 1963, Lacan had effectively been stripped of the right to conduct training analyses and thus was constrained to form his own institution in order to accommodate the many candidates who desired to continue their analyses with him. This he did, on 21 June 1964, in the "Founding Act"^[23] of what became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), taking "many representatives of the third generation with him: among them were Maud and Octave Mannoni, Serge Leclaire ... and Jean Clavreul".^[24]: 293

With the support of

1966 saw the publication of Lacan's collected writings, the Écrits, compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller. Printed by the prestigious publishing house Éditions du Seuil, the Écrits did much to establish Lacan's reputation to a wider public. The success of the publication led to a subsequent two-volume edition in 1969.

By the 1960s, Lacan was associated, at least in the public mind, with the far left in France.

Throughout the final decade of his life, Lacan continued his widely followed seminars. During this period, he developed his concepts of masculine and feminine jouissance and placed an increased emphasis on the concept of "the Real" as a point of impossible contradiction in the "symbolic order". Lacan continued to draw widely on various disciplines, working closely on classical Chinese literature with François Cheng^[28][29] and on the life and work of James Joyce with Jacques Aubert.^[30] The growing success of the Écrits, which was translated (in abridged form) into German and English, led to invitations to lecture in Italy, Japan and the United States. He gave lectures in 1975 at

Lacan's failing health made it difficult for him to meet the demands of the year-long Seminars he had been delivering since the fifties, but his teaching continued into the first year of the eighties. After dissolving his School, the EFP, in January 1980,[32] Lacan travelled to Caracas to found the Freudian Field Institute on 12 July.^[33]

The Overture to the Caracas Encounter was to be Lacan's final public address. His last texts from the spring of 1981 are brief institutional documents pertaining to the newly formed Freudian Field Institute.

Lacan died on 9 September 1981.^[34]

Major concepts

Return to Freud

Lacan's "return to

Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue", jokes, and the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in subjects' own constitution of themselves. In "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud," he proposes that "the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious the whole structure of language". The unconscious is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. Lacan is associated with the idea that "the unconscious is structured like a language", but the first time this sentence occurs in his work,^[41] he clarifies that he means that both the unconscious and language are structured, not that they share a single structure; and that the structure of language is such that the subject cannot necessarily be equated with the speaker. This results in the self being denied any point of reference to which to be "restored" following trauma or a crisis of identity.

André Green objected that "when you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition doesn't work for a minute. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says is constituted by thing-presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong to the pre-conscious".^[35]: 5n Freud certainly contrasted "the presentation of the word and the presentation of the thing... the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone"^[42] in his metapsychology. Dylan Evans, however, in his Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, "... takes issue with those who, like André Green, question the linguistic aspect of the unconscious, emphasizing Lacan's distinction between das Ding and die Sache in Freud's account of thing-presentation".^[35]: 8n Green's criticism of Lacan also included accusations of intellectual dishonesty, he said, "[He] cheated everybody... the return to Freud was an excuse, it just meant going to Lacan."^[43]

Mirror stage

Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, which he described as "formative of the function of the 'I' as revealed in psychoanalytic experience." By the early 1950s, he came to regard the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the infant; instead, it formed part of the permanent structure of subjectivity. In the "imaginary order", the subject's own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. Lacan explains that "the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".^[44]

As this concept developed further, the stress fell less on its historical value and more on its structural value.^[45] In his fourth seminar, "La relation d'objet," Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship. "

The mirror stage describes the formation of the

Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic," since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth." The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of his or her body as fragmented, induces a movement from "insufficiency to anticipation."^[47] In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self.

In the mirror stage a "misunderstanding" (méconnaissance) constitutes the ego—the "me" (moi) becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension, due to the presence of the figure of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly assumed the image as their own, the child turns their head towards this adult, who represents the big other, as if to call on the adult to ratify this image.^[48]

Other

While Freud uses the term "other", referring to der Andere (the other person) and das Andere (otherness), Lacan (influenced by the seminar of Alexandre Kojève) theorizes alterity in a manner more closely resembling Hegel's philosophy.

Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts: the big other (l'Autre) is designated A, and the little other (l'autre) is designated a.^[49] He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: "the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a, so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other".^[45]: 135 Dylan Evans explains that:

• The little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the ego. Evans adds that for this reason the symbol a can represent both the little other and the ego in the schema L.^[50] It is simultaneously the counterpart and the specular image. The little other is thus entirely inscribed in the imaginary order.
• The big other designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with language and the law, and hence the big other is inscribed in the order of the symbolic. Indeed, the big other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The other is thus both another subject, in its radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness, and also the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject."^[51]

For Lacan "the Other must first of all be considered a locus in which speech is constituted," so that the other as another subject is secondary to the other as symbolic order.^[52] We can speak of the other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the other for another subject.^[53]

In arguing that speech originates in neither the ego nor in the subject but rather in the other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from another place, outside of consciousness—"the unconscious is the discourse of the Other".^[54] When conceiving the other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene".

"It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child", Dylan Evans explains, "it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message".

Feminist thinkers have both utilised and criticised Lacan's concepts of castration and the phallus. Feminists such as Avital Ronell, Jane Gallop,^[56] and Elizabeth Grosz,^[57] have interpreted Lacan's work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory.

Some feminists have argued that Lacan's phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of understanding gender biases and imposed roles, while others, most notably Luce Irigaray, accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis.^[58] For Irigaray, the phallus does not define a single axis of gender by its presence or absence; instead, gender has two positive poles. Like Irigaray, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in criticizing Lacan's concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other.^[59][60]

Three orders (plus one)

Lacan considered psychic functions to occur within a universal matrix. The Real, Imaginary and Symbolic are properties of this matrix, which make up part of every psychic function. This is not analogous to Freud's concept of id, ego and superego since in Freud's model certain functions take place within components of the psyche while Lacan thought that all three orders were part of every function. Lacan refined the concept of the orders over decades, resulting in inconsistencies in his writings. He eventually added a fourth component, the sinthome.^[61]: 77

The Imaginary

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the Symbolic order structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has symbolic and Imaginary connotations—in its Imaginary aspect, language is the "wall of language" that inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. The Imaginary, however, is rooted in the subject's relationship with his or her own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.

Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order.^[63] Instead, Lacan proposes the use of the symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary—the analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic", he argued, "is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification."^[64]

The Symbolic

In his Seminar IV, "La relation d'objet", Lacan argues that the concepts of "Law" and "Structure" are unthinkable without language—thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. This order is not equivalent to language, however, since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper to language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier—that is, a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.

The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity—that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the

By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the person undergoing psychoanalysis. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.[45]

The Real

Lacan's concept of

The term "sinthome" (French:

Lacan's concept of desire is related to Hegel's Begierde, a term that implies a continuous force, and therefore somehow differs from Freud's concept of Wunsch.[67] Lacan's desire refers always to unconscious desire because it is unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to recognize his/her desire and by doing so to uncover the truth about his/her desire. However this is possible only if desire is articulated in speech:^[68] "It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term."^[69] And again in The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: "what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence. The subject should come to recognize and to name her/his desire. But it isn't a question of recognizing something that could be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world."^[70] The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire; whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus.^[71]

Lacan distinguishes desire from need and from demand. Need is a biological instinct where the subject depends on the Other to satisfy its own needs: in order to get the Other's help, "need" must be articulated in "demand". But the presence of the Other not only ensures the satisfaction of the "need", it also represents the Other's love. Consequently, "demand" acquires a double function: on the one hand, it articulates "need", and on the other, acts as a "demand for love". Even after the "need" articulated in demand is satisfied, the "demand for love" remains unsatisfied since the Other cannot provide the unconditional love that the subject seeks. "Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second."^[72] Desire is a surplus, a leftover, produced by the articulation of need in demand: "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need".^[72] Unlike need, which can be satisfied, desire can never be satisfied: it is constant in its pressure and eternal. The attainment of desire does not consist in being fulfilled but in its reproduction as such. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire".^[73]

Lacan also distinguishes between desire and the drives: desire is one and drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire.

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues that "man's desire is the desire of the Other." This entails the following:

1. Desire is the desire of the Other's desire, meaning that desire is the object of another's desire and that desire is also desire for recognition. Here Lacan follows Alexandre Kojève, who follows Hegel: for Kojève the subject must risk his own life if he wants to achieve the desired prestige.^[75] This desire to be the object of another's desire is best exemplified in the Oedipus complex, when the subject desires to be the phallus of the mother.
2. In "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious",^[76] Lacan contends that the subject desires from the point of view of another whereby the object of someone's desire is an object desired by another one: what makes the object desirable is that it is precisely desired by someone else. Again Lacan follows Kojève. who follows Hegel. This aspect of desire is present in hysteria, for the hysteric is someone who converts another's desire into his/her own (see Sigmund Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" in SE VII, where Dora desires Frau K because she identifies with Herr K). What matters then in the analysis of a hysteric is not to find out the object of her desire but to discover the subject with whom she identifies.
3. Désir de l'Autre, which is translated as "desire for the Other" (though it could also be "desire of the Other"). The fundamental desire is the incestuous desire for the mother, the primordial Other.^[77]
4. Desire is "the desire for something else", since it is impossible to desire what one already has. The object of desire is continually deferred, which is why desire is a metonymy.^[78]
5. Desire appears in the field of the Other—that is, in the unconscious.

Last but not least for Lacan, the first person who occupies the place of the Other is the mother and at first the child is at her mercy. Only when the father articulates desire with the Law by castrating the mother is the subject liberated from desire for the mother.^[79]

Drive

Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt). Drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around it. He argues that the purpose of the drive (Triebziel) is not to reach a goal but to follow its aim, meaning "the way itself" instead of "the final destination"—that is, to circle around the object. The purpose of the drive is to return to its circular path and the true source of jouissance is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit.^[80] Lacan posits drives as both cultural and symbolic constructs: to him, "the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial".^[80] He incorporates the four elements of drives as defined by Freud (pressure, end, object and source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and returns to the erogenous zone. Three grammatical voices structure this circuit:

1. the active voice (to see)
2. the reflexive voice (to see oneself)
3. the passive voice (to be seen)

The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic—they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears, implying that, prior to that instance, there was no subject.^[80] Despite being the "passive" voice, the drive is essentially active: "to make oneself be seen" rather than "to be seen". The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.

To Freud sexuality is composed of partial drives (i.e. the oral or the anal drives) each specified by a different erotogenic zone. At first these partial drives function independently (i.e. the polymorphous perversity of children), it is only in puberty that they become organized under the aegis of the genital organs.^[81] Lacan accepts the partial nature of drives, but (1) he rejects the notion that partial drives can ever attain any complete organization—the primacy of the genital zone, if achieved, is always precarious; and (2) he argues that drives are partial in that they represent sexuality only partially and not in the sense that they are a part of the whole. Drives do not represent the reproductive function of sexuality but only the dimension of jouissance.^[80]

Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips (the partial object the breast—the verb is "to suck"), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces, "to shit"), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze, "to see") and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice, "to hear"). The first two drives relate to demand and the last two to desire.

The notion of dualism is maintained throughout Freud's various reformulations of the drive-theory. From the initial opposition between sexual drives and ego-drives (self-preservation) to the final opposition between the life drives (Lebenstriebe) and the death drives (Todestriebe).^[82] Lacan retains Freud's dualism, but in terms of an opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary and not referred to different kinds of drives. For Lacan all drives are sexual drives, and every drive is a death drive (pulsion de mort) since every drive is excessive, repetitive and destructive.^[83]

The drives are closely related to desire, since both originate in the field of the subject.^[80] But they are not to be confused: drives are the partial aspects in which desire is realized—desire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are its partial manifestations. A drive is a demand that is not caught up in the dialectical mediation of desire; drive is a "mechanical" insistence that is not ensnared in demand's dialectical mediation.^[84]

Other concepts

Lacan on error and knowledge

Building on Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Lacan long argued that "every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say 'well-turned', discourse", highlighting as well "sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more than perseverance".^[85] In a late seminar, he generalised more fully the psychoanalytic discovery of "truth—arising from misunderstanding", so as to maintain that "the subject is naturally erring... discourse structures alone give him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and orient him; if he neglects, forgets, or loses them, he is condemned to err anew".^[86]

Because of "the alienation to which speaking beings are subjected due to their being in language",^[87] to survive "one must let oneself be taken in by signs and become the dupe of a discourse... [of] fictions organized in to a discourse".^[88] For Lacan, with "masculine knowledge irredeemably an erring",^[89] the individual "must thus allow himself to be fooled by these signs to have a chance of getting his bearings amidst them; he must place and maintain himself in the wake of a discourse... become the dupe of a discourse... les non-dupes errent".^[88]

Lacan comes close here to one of the points where "very occasionally he sounds like Thomas Kuhn (whom he never mentions)",^[90] with Lacan's "discourse" resembling Kuhn's "paradigm" seen as "the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community".^[91]

Clinical contributions

Variable-length session

The "variable-length psychoanalytic session" was one of Lacan's crucial clinical innovations,

With respect to what he called "the cutting up of the 'timing'", Lacan asked the question, "Why make an intervention impossible at this point, which is consequently privileged in this way?"[94] By allowing the analyst's intervention on timing, the variable-length session removed the patient's former certainty as to the length of time that they would be on the couch.^[95]: 18 When Lacan adopted the practice, "the psychoanalytic establishment were scandalized"^{[95]: 17 [96]}—and, given that "between 1979 and 1980 he saw an average of ten patients an hour", it is perhaps not hard to see why. Psychoanalysis was "reduced to zero",^[24]: 397, though the treatments were no less lucrative.

At the time of his original innovation, Lacan described the issue as concerning "the systematic use of shorter sessions in certain analyses, and in particular in training analyses";^[97] and in practice it was certainly a shortening of the session around the so-called "critical moment"^[98] which took place, so that critics wrote that "everyone is well aware what is meant by the deceptive phrase 'variable length' ... sessions systematically reduced to just a few minutes".^[99] Irrespective of the theoretical merits of breaking up patients' expectations, it was clear that "the Lacanian analyst never wants to 'shake up' the routine by keeping them for more rather than less time".^[100] Lacan's shorter sessions enabled him to take many more clients than therapists using orthodox Freudian methods, and this growth continued as Lacan's students and followers adopted the same practice.^[101]

Accepting the importance of "the critical moment when insight arises",^[102] object relations theory would nonetheless suggest that "if the analyst does not provide the patient with space in which nothing needs to happen there is no space in which something can happen".^[103] Julia Kristeva would concur that "Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless intrinsic to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualize it as a technique of scansion (short sessions)".^[104]

Writings and writing style

According to Jean-Michel Rabaté, Lacan in the mid-1950s classed the seminars as commentaries on Freud rather than presentations of his own doctrine (like the writings), while Lacan by 1971 placed the most value on his teaching and "the interactive space of his seminar" (in contrast to Sigmund Freud). Rabaté also argued that from 1964 onward, the seminars include original ideas. However, Rabaté also wrote that the seminars are "more problematic" because of the importance of the interactive performances, and because they were partly edited and rewritten.^[105]

Most of Lacan's psychoanalytic writings from the 1940s through to the early 1960s were compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller in the 1966 collection, titled simply Écrits. Published in French by Éditions du Seuil, they were later issued as a two-volume set (1970/1) with a new "Preface". A selection of the writings (chosen by Lacan himself) were translated by Alan Sheridan and published by Tavistock Press in 1977. The full 35-text volume appeared for the first time in English in Bruce Fink's translation published by Norton & Co. (2006). The Écrits were included on the list of 100 most influential books of the 20th century compiled and polled by the broadsheet Le Monde.

Lacan's writings from the late sixties and seventies (thus subsequent to the 1966 collection) were collected posthumously, along with some early texts from the nineteen thirties, in the Éditions du Seuil volume Autres écrits (2001).

Although most of the texts in Écrits and Autres écrits are closely related to Lacan's lectures or lessons from his Seminar, more often than not the style is denser than Lacan's oral delivery, and a clear distinction between the writings and the transcriptions of the oral teaching is evident to the reader.

An often neglected aspect of Lacan's oral and writing style is his influence from his colleague and personal friend Henry Corbin, who introduced Lacan to the thought of Ibn Arabi.^{[106][107][108]} Similarities have been pointed out between the writing styles of Lacan and Ibn Arabi.^[109]

Although Lacan is a major influence on psychoanalysis in France and parts of Latin America, in the English-speaking world his influence on clinical psychology has been far less and his ideas are best known in the arts and humanities. However, there are Lacanian psychoanalytic societies in both North America and the United Kingdom that carry on his work.^[45]

One example of Lacan's work being practiced in the United States is found in the works of Annie G. Rogers (A Shining Affliction; The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma), which credit Lacanian theory for many therapeutic insights in successfully treating sexually abused young women.^[113] Lacan's work has also reached Quebec, where The Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research and Clinical and Cultural Interventions (GIFRIC) claims that it has used a modified form of Lacanian psychoanalysis in successfully treating psychosis in many of its patients, a task once thought to be unsuited for psychoanalysis, even by psychoanalysts themselves.^[114]

Legacy

In his introduction to the 1994 Penguin edition of Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, translator and historian David Macey describes Lacan as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud".^[6] His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, French philosophy, film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis.^[115]

In 2003, Rabaté described "The Freudian Thing" (1956) as one of his "most important and programmatic essays".^[105]

Criticism

Theory of psychoanalysis

Former Lacan student Didier Anzieu, in a 1967 article titled "Against Lacan," described him as a "danger" because he kept his students tied to an "unending dependence on an idol, a logic, or a language," by holding out the promise of "fundamental truths" to be revealed "but always at some further point ...and only to those who continued to travel with him." According to Sherry Turkle, these attitudes are "representative of how most members of the Association talk about Lacan."^[b][119]

By 1977, Lacan was declaring that he was not "too keen" ("pas chaud-chaud") to claim that "when one practices psychoanalysis, one knows where one goes," stating that "psychoanalysis, like every other human activity, undoubtedly participates in abuse. One does as if one knows something."^[120]

Lacan's charismatic authority has been linked to the many conflicts among his followers and in the analytic schools he was involved with.^[121] His intellectual style has also come in for much criticism. Eclectic in his use of sources,^[122] Lacan has been seen as concealing his own thought behind the apparent explication of that of others.^[24]: 46 Thus, his "return to Freud" was called by Malcolm Bowie "a complete pattern of dissenting assent to the ideas of Freud . . . Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him".^[123] Bowie has also suggested that Lacan suffered from both a love of system and a deep-seated opposition to all forms of system.^[124]

Therapeutic practice

Lacan, in his psychoanalytic practice, came to hold sessions of diminishing duration.^[125] Eventually, Lacan's student relates, they often lasted no more than five minutes, held sometimes with Lacan standing in the typically open door of the room.^[c] According to Godin, Lacan sometimes struck patients, once literally kicking out a female patient.^[126]: 82 Author and Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller asserts that "[Lacan]'s morality derives from a superior cynicism."^[127]

Lacan was criticised for being aggressive with his clients, often physically hitting them, sometimes sleeping with them,^{[128]: 304 [d]} and charging "exorbitant amounts of money" for each session.^[129][e] Jean Laplanche argued that Lacan could have "harmed" some of his clients.^[130]

Others have been more forceful still, describing him as "The Shrink from Hell"^{[131][132][133]} and listing the many associates —from lovers and family to colleagues, patients, and editors— who were left damaged in his wake.

Feminist criticism

Many feminist thinkers have criticized Lacan's thought. American philosopher Cynthia Willett accuses Lacan for portraying the mother less as a "loving," "nurturing" presence in the infant's world, but rather as a "whore" who abandons the child to a "higher bidder for her affections,"^[134] while Judith Butler, philosopher and gender studies scholar, reworks these notions as "gender performativity."^[135]

Psycholinguist and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray "ridicules" through "mimicry and exaggeration" these representations of femininity posited as natural and proper by Lacan.^[136] Irigaray accuses Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse.^[137][f]

Others have echoed this accusation, seeing Lacan as trapped in the very

In an interview with anthropologist James Hunt, Sylvia Lacan said of her late husband: "He was a man who worked tremendously hard. Tremendously intelligent. He was...what is called, well, a domestic tyrant... But he was worth the trouble. I have absolutely no reproaches to make against him. Just the contrary. But it was not possible to be a wife, a mother to my children, and an actress at the same time."[139]

Mathematics in psychoanalysis

In their work

Further reading

Biographical works

• Millot, Catherine (2018). Life With Lacan. Cambridge: Polity.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth (1999) Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and History of a System of Thought. Cambridge: Polity.

Introductory texts

• Benvenuto, B.; Kennedy, R. (1986). The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction. London: Free Association Books.
  ISBN 9780946960200
  .
• Bowie, Malcolm, (1991) Lacan London: Fontana.
• Dor, Joel, (2001) Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language, New York: Other Press.
• Evans, Dylan (1997). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
• Grosz, Elizabeth. (1991) Jacques Lacan: a Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge.
• Homer, S. (2005) Jacques Lacan. London: Routledge.
• Leader, D. & Groves, J. (1995) Lacan for Beginners. London: Icon Books.
• Lee, Jonathan Scott. (2002) Jacques Lacan. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.
• Neill, Calum (2023). Jacques Lacan: the Basics. Abington, Oxon: Routledge.

Textual commentaries

Écrits

• Fink, Bruce (2004) Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely. University of Minnesota Press.
• Hook, D., Vanheule, S. & Neill, C. (eds.) (2019) Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘The Freudian Thing’ to ‘Remarks on Daniel Lagache’. London: Routledge.
• Hook, D., Vanheule, S. & Neill, C. (eds.) (2022) Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Logical Time’ to ‘Response to Jean Hyppolite’. London: Routledge.
• Vanheule, S., Hook, D. & Neill, C. (eds.) (2018) Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Signification of the Phallus’ to ‘‘Metaphor of the Subject’. London: Routledge
• Neill, C., Hook, D. & Vanheule, S. (eds.) (2024) Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Overture to This Collection’ to ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’. London: Routledge.
• Johnston, Adrian (2017). Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's "The Freudian Thing". Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Muller, John P.; Richardson, William J. (1982). Lacan and Language: A Reader's Guide to Écrits. New York: International University Press.
• Nobus, Dany (2022) The Law of Desire: On Lacan's 'Kant with Sade'. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan.

The Seminars

• Cox Cameron, O. with Owens, C. (2021) Studying Lacan’s Seminar VI: Dream, Symptom, and the Collapse of Subjectivity. London. Routledge.
• Owens, C. and Almqvist, N. (2019) Studying Lacan’s Seminars IV and V: From Lack to Desire. London. Routledge.
• Feldstein, Richard; Jaanus, Maire; Fink, Bruce, eds. (1996). Reading seminars I and II: Lacan's return to Freud: seminar I, Freud's papers on technique, seminar II, the ego in Freud's theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York Press.
  OCLC 42854739
  .
• Feldstein, Richard; Jaanus, Maire; Fink, Bruce, eds. (1995). Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis: the Paris seminars in English. Albany: State University of New York Press.
  OCLC 42854927
  .
• Feldstein, Richard; Jaanus, Maire; Fink, Bruce, eds. (2002). Reading Seminar XX: Lacan's major work on love, knowledge, and feminine sexuality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
  OCLC 53275064
  .
• Harari, Roberto, Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction, New York: Other Press, 2004.
• Harari, Roberto, Lacan's Seminar on "Anxiety": An Introduction, New York: Other Press, 2005.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain, "Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety I", New York: Lacanian Ink 26, Fall 2005.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain, "Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety II", New York: Lacanian Ink 27, Spring 2006.

General commentaries

• Badiou, Alain, "The Formulas of l'Étourdit", New York: Lacanian Ink 27, Spring 2006.
• Badiou, A. (2006). "Lacan and the Pre-Socratics". Lacan Dot Com.
• Badiou, A.; Roudinesco, E.; Smith, J.E. (2014). Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue. Columbia University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-231-16511-2
  .
• Benvenuto, Sergio (2020). Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
  OCLC 1134622118
  .
• Bracher, Mark; Massardier-Kenney, Françoise; Alcorn, Marshall W.; Corthell, Ronald J. (1994). Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-1299-1.
• Brennan, Teresa (1993). History after Lacan. London: Routledge
• Dor, Joel (1999) The Clinical Lacan, New York: Other Press.
• Felman, Shoshana (1987). Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
• Fink, Bruce (1996) The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance Princeton University Press, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce (1997) A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Fink, Bruce (2014). Against Understanding, vol. 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
  ISBN 978-0-415-63543-1
  .
• Forrester, John (1985) Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.
• Glynos, Jason and Stavrakakis, Yannis (eds) (2002). Lacan and Science. London: Karnac Books.
• ISBN 978-0-820481-71-5
  .
• Johnston, Adrian (2005) Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
• Kovacevic, Filip
  (2007) "Liberating Oedipus? Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory" Landham, MD: Lexington Books.
• Macey, David (1988). Lacan in Contexts. London: Verso.
• Mandal, Mahitosh (2018) Jacques Lacan: From Clinic to Culture. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan
• McGowan, Todd and Sheila Kunkle Eds.(2004) Lacan and Contemporary Film, New York: Other Press.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain, "Jacques Lacan's Later Teachings", New York: Spring Lacanian Ink 21, 2003.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain, "The Paradigms of Jouissance" New York, Lacanian Ink 17, Fall 2000.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain, "Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier", Lacan Dot Com, The Symptom 2006.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain, "Religion, Psychoanalysis", Lacanian Ink 23, Spring 2004.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain, "Pure Psychoanalysis, Applied Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy", Lacanian Ink 20, Spring 2002.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain (2013). Applied Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis London: University of Minnesota Press.
  OCLC 842322946
  .
• Nasio, Juan-David, Book of Love and Pain: The Thinking at the Limit with Freud and Lacan, transl. by David Pettigrew and Francois Raffoul, Albany: SUNY Press, 2003.
• Nasio, Juan-David (1998) Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan, Albany, SUNY Press.
• Nasio, Juan-David (1999) Hysteria: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Susan Fairfield. New York: Other Press.
• Neill, Calum (2014). Without Ground: Lacanian Ethics and the Assumptions of Subjectivity. London: Palgrave.
• Nobus, Dany (ed.) (1999) Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Other Press.
• Nobus, Dany (2022). Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason: Studies in Lacanian Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.
• Parker, Ian (2011) Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity. London: Routledge.
• Pettigrew, David and François Raffoul (eds.), (1996) Disseminating Lacan, Albany: SUNY Press.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.), (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rose, Jacqueline (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth, 'Lucien Febvre à la rencontre de Jacques Lacan, Paris 1937'. with Peter Schöttler, Genèses, Année 1993, Vol.13, n°1.
• Roudinesco, Elisabeth (1990) Jacques Lacan & Co.: a History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth, "Lacan, The Plague", Psychoanalysis and History, ed. John Forrester, Teddington, Artesian Books, 2008.
• Safouan, Moustafa (2004) Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis, New York, Other Press.
• Schneiderman, Stuart (1983) Jacques Lacan: the Death of an Intellectual Hero, Harvard University Press.
• Soler, Colette (2006). What Lacan said about women: a psychoanalytic study. Translated by Holland, John. New York: Other Press.
  OCLC 58546399
  .
• Stavrakakis, Yannis (2007) The Lacanian Left, Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Turkle, Sherry and Wandollheim, Richard, 'Lacan: an exchange', New York Review of Books, 26 (9), 1979.
• Žižek, Slavoj, "Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses", Lacan Dot Com, 2008.
• Žižek, Slavoj, "Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father, or how Not to misread Lacan´s formulas of sexuation", Lacan Dot Com, 2005.
• Žižek, Slavoj, 'The object as a limit of discourse: approaches to the Lacanian real', Prose Studies, 11 (3), 1988, pp.  94–120.
• Žižek, Slavoj, "Jacques Lacan as Reader of Hegel", New York, Lacanian Ink 27, Fall 2006.
• Žižek, Slavoj, (2006) "How to Read Lacan London: Granta Books.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Jacques Lacan.

• Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research
• World Association of Psychoanalysis
• Homepage of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies
• The London Society of the New Lacanian School. Site includes online library of clinical & theoretical texts
• Lacan Dot Com