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| − | [[Jacques Lacan|Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan]] (1901 – 1981) was a [[French]] [[psychoanalyst]].
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| − | a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis
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| − | [[Lacan]] has become an important figure in many fields beyond [[psychoanalysis]].
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| − | 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.
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| − | [[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.
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| − | ==Biography==
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| − | [[Lacan]]'s original training was in medicine and psychiatry, and his prepsychoanalytic work was on [[paranoia]].
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| − | 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.
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| − | [[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]].
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| − | His notion of the [[fragmented body]] is one of the clearest indications of his debt to [[surrealism]].
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| − | 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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| − | [[Lacan]]s began his [[analysis]] with [[Rudolph Loewenstein]] in 1934, and was elected to the [[SPP]] in the same year.
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| − | Ironically, [[Loewenstein]] was one of the pioneers of the [[ego-psychology]] that [[Lacan]] came to loathe so much.
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| − | [[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]].
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| − | For reasons that have never been clearly explained, it has never been published; the version included in ''[[Écrits]]'' was written thirteen years latter (1949).
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| − | 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]].
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| − | At the [[intersubjective]] level, the [[subject]] is dran at a very early age into a [[dialectic]] of [[identification]] with an [[aggression]] towards the [[Other]].
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| − | 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]].
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| − | 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]].
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| − | [[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.
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| − | At the same time he elaborates an immensely broad synthetic vision in which [[psychoanalysis]] appropriates the findings of [[philosophy]] (notably [[Kojève]] and [[Heidegger]]), the [[structuralism|structural]] [[anthropology]] of [[Lèvi-Strauss]] and the [[linguistics]] of [[Saussure]].
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| − | This vision is consistent with the thesis that [[psychoanalysis]] is indeed a "[[talking cure]]", with [[speech]] and [[language]] as its only media, but it also allows [[Lacan]] to devlop a universalist theory of the origins of human subjectivity.
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| − | [[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]].
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| − | 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]].
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| − | [[Language]] is now defined as a [[synchronic]] system of [[sign]]s which generate meaning through their interaction; meaning insists in and throuhg a [[chain]] of [[signifier]]s, and does not reside in nay one element.
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| − | 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]].
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| − | For [[Lacan]] there is never any direct correspondence between [[signifier]] and [[signified]], and meaning is therefore always in danger of sliding of [[slip]]ping out of control.
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| − | 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]].
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| − | 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.
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| − | ==Works==
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| − | [[Lacan]] offered his most significant contributions through his [[seminar]] lectures.
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| − | [[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).
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| − | 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)
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| − | Editted transcripts of the [[seminar]] began to be published during his lifetime, and twenty-six volumes re planned.
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| − | ==Career==
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| − | 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.
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| − | In 1953 [[Lacan]] and others resigned from the [[Société Psychanalytique de Paris]] [[Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse]] ([[SPP]]) to found the [[Société Française de Psychanalyse|Société Psychanalytique de France]] [[Société Française de Psychanalyse]] ([[SFP]]).
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| − | [[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]]).
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| − | 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.
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