24,656
edits
Changes
no edit summary
==Biography==
[[Lacan]]'s original training was in medicine and psychiatry, and his prepsychoanalytic work was on [[paranoia]].
The publication of his doctoral thesis, which dealt mainly with a woman patient suffering from a [[psychosis]] that led her to attempt to murder an actress (1932), won him the admiration of [[Breton]] and the [[surrealism|surrealist group]], with which he was birefly associated.
[[Lacan]]'s writings are steeped in allusions to [[surrealism]], and it is probable that surrealist experiments with [[language]] and speculations about the relationship between forms of [[language]] and different psychical states had a long-term influence on his famous contention that the [[unconscious]] was structured like a [[language]].
His notion of the [[fragmented body]] is one of the clearest indications of his debt to [[surrealism]].
The association with surrealim is les surprising htna it might seem; the surrealists, to Freud's irration, wer much more sympathetic to his ideas than the French medical establishment.
---
[[Lacan]]s began his [[analysis]] with [[Rudolph Lowenstein]] in 1934, and was elected to the [[SPP]] in the same year.
Ironically, [[Lowenstein]] was one of the pioneers of the [[ego-psychology]] that [[Lacan]] came to loathe so much.
[[Lacan]]'s first contribution to [[psychoanalysis]] was made in 1936, when he presented his paper on the [[mirror-stage]] to the Marienbad Conference of the [[IPA]].
For reasons that have never been clearly explained, it has never been published; the version included in ''[[Écrits]]'' was written thirteen years latter (1949).
In the late 1940s [[Lacan]] began to use the idea of the [[mirror-stage]] to elaborate a theory of subjectivity that views the [[ego]] a a largely [[imaginary]] construct based upon an [[alienation|alienating]] [[identification]] with the mirror-image of the [[subject]].
At the [[intersubjective]] level, the [[subject]] is dran at a very early age into a [[dialectic]] of [[identification]] with an [[aggression]] towards the [[Other]].
Originally based upon the findings of child psychology and primate ethology (from which [[Lacan]] adopts th thesis that a child, unlike a young chimpanzee, recognizes its own image in a mirror), the theory of subjectivity is subsequently recast in terms of a [[dialetic]] of [[desire]].
The influence of [[Kojève]]'s seminar on [[Hegel]]'s ''[[Phenomenology of Mind]]'' (1947) is crucial here; [[Lacan]] was an assiduous attender, and all his numerous allusions to [[Hegel]] should in fact be read as allusions to [[Kojève]].
