Lacan in 90 Minutes/Return to Freud

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By the early 1950s, Jacques Lacan had reached a decisive conclusion: psychoanalysis had lost its way—not by abandoning Freud, but by misunderstanding him. What Lacan famously called a “return to Freud” was not an act of nostalgia or orthodoxy. It was a challenge to how Freud was being read, taught, and institutionalized.

To understand Lacan’s project, it is crucial to see that he did not present himself as Freud’s successor. He presented himself as Freud’s reader.

Freud After Freud

After Freud’s death in 1939, psychoanalysis expanded rapidly, especially in the United States. In the process, Freud’s work was reorganized, systematized, and often simplified. New emphases emerged: adaptation, maturity, ego strength, and psychological health.

From Lacan’s perspective, something essential was being lost. Freud’s writings, he argued, were not manuals for adjustment or normality. They were explorations of conflict, contradiction, and the limits of self-understanding.

The problem was not that Freud was outdated. The problem was that Freud was being made too easy.

Reading Freud Literally

Lacan insisted on returning to Freud’s texts themselves—reading them closely, sentence by sentence, often in the original German. This close reading revealed a Freud far more attentive to language, ambiguity, and interpretation than many of his followers acknowledged.

Freud’s case histories, slips of the tongue, jokes, and dream analyses were not incidental illustrations. They were central to how psychoanalysis worked. Meaning did not appear transparently; it had to be interpreted, reconstructed, and sometimes misunderstood before it became intelligible.

Lacan treated Freud less as a theorist with a finished system and more as a thinker grappling with problems that resisted closure.

Why Language Mattered

One of Lacan’s most consequential claims was that Freud’s discoveries could not be separated from language. Symptoms spoke. Dreams used figurative logic. Patients said more than they intended.

Rather than treating language as a tool used by a pre-existing self, Lacan argued that language shaped subjectivity itself. This insight would later be developed in technical ways, but its core intuition is simple: human beings do not merely express themselves through language; they are formed by it.

This emphasis placed Lacan at odds with approaches that treated psychoanalysis as a form of psychological correction or emotional education.

A Polemical Gesture

The phrase “return to Freud” was deliberately provocative. It implied that psychoanalysis had drifted away from its founding insights—and that institutional authority did not guarantee conceptual fidelity.

Lacan’s return was therefore also a critique. It questioned who had the right to define psychoanalysis, how analysts were trained, and whether consensus had replaced thinking.

This polemical stance would soon have consequences. Lacan’s teaching attracted a devoted audience, but it also intensified tensions with established psychoanalytic organizations.

From Reading to Teaching

The return to Freud was not confined to scholarship. It became the foundation of Lacan’s public teaching. Beginning in 1953, he transformed Freud’s texts into material for live interpretation, debate, and rethinking.

These seminars did not present settled conclusions. They staged Freud as a problem to be worked through collectively—sometimes slowly, sometimes combatively.

With this move, Lacan shifted from being a controversial reader of Freud to becoming a central figure in French intellectual life. Psychoanalysis, once again, became a public event.

The next chapter follows that transformation.

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