Lacan in 90 Minutes/IPA Split

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Jacques Lacan’s growing influence did not go unnoticed by the institutions that governed psychoanalysis. By the mid-1950s, his teaching, methods, and public prominence had brought him into open conflict with the organizations responsible for regulating psychoanalytic training.

What followed was not a minor professional disagreement. It was a prolonged struggle over authority, legitimacy, and the very definition of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis as Institution

By the middle of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis was no longer a marginal practice. It had become institutionalized, with formal training programs, certification procedures, and international governing bodies.

These institutions were designed to preserve standards and ensure continuity. But they also produced orthodoxy. In Lacan’s view, psychoanalysis was at risk of becoming a profession rather than an intellectual practice—governed by rules rather than questions.

Lacan’s public seminars, unconventional teaching style, and refusal to conform to standardized training norms placed him increasingly outside acceptable boundaries.

The Question of Training

At the center of the conflict was a deceptively simple issue: how should psychoanalysts be trained?

Lacan challenged prevailing models that emphasized technical instruction and hierarchical supervision. He argued that psychoanalysis could not be reduced to procedural competence. Formation, for Lacan, involved a transformation of the subject—not merely the acquisition of skills.

This position unsettled institutions that depended on clear criteria, measurable progress, and administrative oversight.

Sanction and Exclusion

The tensions culminated in Lacan’s effective exclusion from official recognition by the international psychoanalytic establishment. He was barred from training analysts under institutional authority—a move often described as his “excommunication.”

The term captures both the drama and the stakes of the conflict. Lacan was not expelled for incompetence or malpractice. He was sanctioned for refusing to conform.

For Lacan, this moment confirmed a long-held suspicion: that institutional authority could suppress thought as easily as it preserved tradition.

Founding New Schools

Exclusion did not end Lacan’s teaching. Instead, it led him to establish new institutional forms outside official structures. These schools were experimental, provisional, and intentionally unstable.

Rather than reproducing existing hierarchies, Lacan sought to create spaces where psychoanalysis could remain intellectually open—even at the cost of coherence or comfort.

This strategy would shape the rest of his career, reinforcing both his influence and his reputation for controversy.

Conflict as Continuity

It is tempting to see this episode as a break in Lacan’s work. In fact, it continues a pattern already visible in his early career: resistance to simplification, suspicion of authority, and insistence on intellectual risk.

The institutional conflict did not interrupt Lacan’s teaching. It intensified it.

Freed from official constraints, Lacan’s seminars would soon take a decisive turn—drawing more explicitly on contemporary theories of language and structure.

That turn marks the next stage of the story.

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