Jacques Lacan

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Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan (1901 – 1981) was a French psychoanalyst.

a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis

Lacan has become an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis.

The most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud himself, Lacan has had an immense influence on literary theory, philosophy, and feminism, as well as on psychoanalysis itself.

Lacan's work has done more than that of any other analyst to make psychoanalysis a central reference to w hole field of discipline within the human sciences.

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 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.

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Lacans began his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein in 1934, and was elected to the SPP in the same year.

Ironically, Loewenstein 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 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 dialectic of desire.

The influence of Kojève's seminar on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (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.

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The paper of language and speech in psychoanalysis (1953) read to the founding congress of the SFP in Rome in 1953 (and therefore often referred to as the "Rome Discourse") is the first great manifesto of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Lacan calls for a "return to Freud," stressing the pressing need to read Freud in detail (and preferably in German) and enouncing the dominant tendencies within contemporary psychoanalysis (ego-psychology, Kleinian psychoanalysis and object-relations theory) as so many forms of revisionism.

At the same time he elaborates an immensely broad synthetic vision in which psychoanalysis appropriates the findings of philosophy (notably Kojève and Heidegger), the structural anthropology of Lèvi-Strauss and the linguistics of Saussure.

This vision is consistent with the thesis that psychoanalysis is indeed a "talking cure", with spech and language as its only media, but it also allows Lacan to devlop a universalist theory of the origins of human subjectivity.

Lèvi-Strauss's accounts of the non-conscious structures of kinship and alliance, and of the crucial transition from nature to culture, allow Lacan to describe the Oedipus complex as a structural moment that integrates the child into a preexisting symbolic order by obliging it to recognize the Name-of-the-Father and to abandon its claim to being the sole object of the mother's desire (phallus).

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Although the 1953 paper abounds in reference to language and linguistics, it is only in his paper on the aency of the letter (1957) that Lacan truly begins to explore and appropriate the legacy of Saussure.

At the same time he also relies heavily on Jakobson's work of phoneme analysis and on metaphor/metonymy, which are likened to the mechanisms of condensation and displacement.

Language is now defined as a synchronic system of signs which generate meaning through their interaction; meaning insists in and throuhg a chain of signifiers, and does not reside in nay one element.

The structural isomorphism between the workings of language and the unconscious mechanisms of dream-work allows Lacan to conclude that the unconscious is structured like a language.

For Lacan there is never any direct correspondence between signifier and signified, and meaning is therefore always in danger of sliding of slipping out of control.

An element of stability is, he argues, provided by privileged signifiers such as the phallus and the Name-of-the-Father, and it is this claim that exposes him to Derrida's accusations of logocentrism and phallogocentrism.

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Lacan's early use of linguistics anticipates a distinctive feature of his later work in that he makes use of quasi-mathematical formulae to illustrate the workings of metaphor and metonymy.

The initial formulae are no doubt little more than pedagogic devises, but they gradually develop into a so-called Lacanian algebra and a set of amthemes designed to ensure that psychoanalytic theory can be subjected to a formalization and to guarantee its integral transmission.

Works

Lacan offered his most significant contributions through his seminar lectures.

Lacan's most important papers are collected in his Écrits (1966); fewer than one-third of them are included in the English Écrits: A Selection (1977).

Until the publication of Écrits, the main vector for the dissemination of his ideas was the weekly [[seminar] that began in 1953 and continued until shortly before his death. (confused over a period of more than two decades)

Editted transcripts of the seminar began to be published during his lifetime, and twenty-six volumes re planned.

Career

Lacan's career was dogged by controversy and regularly punctuated by conflicts with the psychoanalytic establishment, most of them focusing on his refusal to follow the conventions of the 'analytic hour' and his insistence on using short sessions of varying length during training analyses.

In 1953 Lacan and others resigned from the Société Psychanalytique de Paris Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse (SPP) to found the Société Psychanalytique de France Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP).

Lacan's continued use of short sessions ensured that the latter was never recognized as a competent society by the International Psycho-Analytical Association (IPA).

In 1963, similar issues led to a split in the new association and to the foundation of the École Freudienne de Paris (Psychoanalytic School of Paris), which was unilaterally dissolved by Lacan himself in 1980.