Jacques Lacan

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Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was born in Paris on April 13 1901 to a family of solid Catholic tradition, and was educated at a Jesuit school. After completing his baccalauréat he commenced studying medicine and later psychiatry. In 1927, Lacan commenced clinical training and began to work at psychiatric institutions, meeting and working with (amongst others) the famous psychiatrist Clerambault. His doctoral thesis, on paranoid psychosis, was passed in 1932. In 1934, he became a member of La Societe Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP), and commenced an analysis lasting until the outbreak of the war. During the Nazi occupation of France, Lacan ceased all official professional activity in protest against those he called "the enemies of human kind". Following the war, he rejoined the SPP, and it was in the post-war period that he rose to become a renowned and controversial figure in the international psychoanalytic community, eventually banned in 1962 from the International Psychoanalytic Association for his unorthodox views on the calling and practice of psychoanalysis. Lacan's career as both a theoretician and practicioner did not end with this excommunication, however. In 1963, he founded L'Ecole Freudienne de Paris (E.F.P.), a school devoted to the training of analysts and the practicing of psychoanalysis according to Lacanian stipulations. In 1980, having single-handedly dissolved the EFP, he then constituted the Ecole for "La Cause Freudienne", saying: “It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish; I am Freudian”. Lacan died in Paris on September 9, 1981. Intellectual Biography Lacan's first major theoretical publication was his piece "On the Mirror Stage as Formative of the I". This piece originally appeared in 1936. Its publication was followed by an extended period wherein he published little. In 1949, though, it was re-presented to wider recognition. In 1953, on the back of the success of his Rome dissertation to the SPP on "The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis", Lacan then inaugurated the seminar series that he was to continue to convene annually (albeit in different institutional guises) until his death. It was in this forum that he developed and ceaselessly revised the ideas with which his name has become associated. Although Lacan was famously ambivalent about publication, the seminars were transcribed by various of his followers, and several have been translated into English. Lacan published a selection of his most important essays in 1966 in the collection Ecrits. An abridged version of this text is available in an English-language edition. (see Bibliography). Theoretical Project Lacan's avowed theoretical intention, from at least 1953, was the attempt to reformalise what he termed 'the Freudian field’. His substantial corpus of writings, speeches and seminars can be read as an attempt to unify and reground what are the four interlinking aspirations of Freud's theoretical writings: (1.) a theorisation of psychoanalytic practice as a curative procedure; (2.) the generation of a systematic metapsychology capable of providing the basis for (3.) the formalisation of a diagnostic heuristic of mental illness; and (4.) the construction of an account of the individual and specie-al development of the 'civilised' human psyche. Lacan brought to this project, however, a keen knowledge of the latest developments in the human sciences, drawing especially on structuralist linguistics, the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, topology, and game theory. Moreover, as Derrida has remarked, Lacan's work is characterised by an engagement with modern philosophy (notably Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre) unmatched by other psychoanalytic theorists, especially informed by his attendance at Andre Kojeve's hugely influential Paris lectures on Hegel from 1933-1939.

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Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. His work, like most psychoanalytic work, owes a heavy, explicit debt to Sigmund Freud, but also drew from a number of other fields, including linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics. This interdisciplinary focus in his work has led him to be an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis - particularly within critical theory.

His central idea was that the human subject is a creation of its use of language. From this understanding Lacan develops his study of psychoanalysis and his treatment strategies. His work, while controversial, continues to influence the development of psychoanalysis worldwide. In France and elsewhere various "schools" of Lacanian thought have emerged.

Although there exist various competing emphases on Lacan's work among these "schools", all agree in the fundamental importance of the unconscious. By structuring the options available to any speaking subject in the articulation of his or her desires, the unconscious determines the very fabric of human life as we may come to know it, according to Lacan.

Career

Lacan took up the study of medicine in 1920 and specialised in psychiatry from 1926. He undertook his own analysis around this time with Rudolph Loewenstein and this continued until 1938. Lacan was very active in the world of Parisian writers, artists and intellectuals of the time: he was a friend of André Breton, Salvador Dalí and PicassoTemplate:Fact, and attended the mouvement Psyché founded by Maryse Choisy. He made contributions to several Surrealist publications and was present at the first public reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In his studies he had a particular interest in the philosophic work of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger and, alongside many other Parisian intellectuals of the time, he also attended the famous seminars on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève.

Lacan presented his first analytic paper on ‘The Mirror Phase’ at the 1936 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad. He was called up to serve in the French army after the German occupation of France and was posted to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. After the end of the war Lacan visited England for a five week study trip, meeting English analysts Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. He was much influenced by Bion’s analytic work with groups and this contributed to his own later emphasis on study groups (in France, cartels) as a structure with which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis.

In 1951 Lacan started to hold a weekly seminar at the St-Anne Hospital Paris, urging what he described as ‘a return to Freud’ and, in particular, to Freud’s concentration upon the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology. Very influential in Parisian cultural life as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, the seminars drew large crowds and continued for nearly thirty years.

Lacan was a member of the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse (SPP), which was a member body of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In 1953, after a disagreement about analytic practice methods, Lacan and many of his colleagues left the SPP to form a new group the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One of the consequences of this move was to deprive the new group of membership within the IPA. In the following years a complex process of negotiation was to take place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan’s practice, with his controversial innovation of variable-length sessions, and the critical stance he took towards much of the accepted orthodoxy of psychoanalytic theory and practice led, in 1963, to a condition being set by the IPA that the registration of the SFP was dependent upon Lacan being removed from the list of training analysts with the organisation. Lacan refused such a condition and left the SFP to form his own school which became know as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP). Leaving the St-Anne Hospital where he had delivered his seminar up to this point Lacan began to give it instead at the elite higher education establishment the École Normale Supérieure. Lacan began to set forth his own teaching on psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues who had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale’s students.

Many students of Lacan became important psychoanalysts and/or wrote influential contributions to philosophy and other fields. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques-Alain Miller, Luce Irigaray, Jean Laplanche, and even Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, all attended Lacan's seminars at some point. Lacan's first seminar in 1964 was later published in English as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Lacan continued to deliver his public exposition of analytic theory and practice for the next seventeen years.


Writings and seminars

Although Lacan is a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, he made his most significant contributions not in the traditional form of books and journal articles, but through seminar lectures - in fact, he explicitly disclaimed publication in his later life. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, conducted over a period of more than two decades, contains the majority of his life's work, though several of these remain unpublished. Furthermore, the accuracy of the transcriptions of the seminars is disputed, with Sherry Turkle claiming that Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law, made extensive changes to add clarity to the material (Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, p. 254-255).

His only major body of writing, Écrits, is notoriously difficult to read. Seminar XX remarks that his Écrits were not to be understood, but would produce a meaning effect in the reader similar to some mystical texts. Part of the reason for this, it should be emphasised, are the repeated Hegelian allusions (themselves derived from Kojève's lectures on Hegel, which Lacan attended) and similar unheralded theoretical divergences and not, first and foremost, Lacan's obscure prose style, as some have alleged.

Lacan and his discontents

Although Lacan is often associated with it, he was not without his critics from within the major figures of what is broadly termed postmodernism. (Several writers, such as Slavoj Žižek, have argued specifically against considering Lacan a poststructuralist theorist.) Along these lines, Jacques Derrida (though Derrida did not endorse nor associate himself with postmodernism) made a considerable critique of Lacan's analytic writings, accusing him of taking a structuralist approach to psychoanalysis, but this is hardly surprising. In particular, Derrida criticises Lacanian theory for an inherited Freudian phallocentrism, exemplified primarily in his conception of the phallus as the 'primary signifier' that determines the social order of signifiers. It could be said that much of Derrida's critique of Lacan stems from his relationship with Freud: for example, Derrida deconstructs the Freudian conception of 'penis envy', upon which female subjectivity is determined, to show that the primacy of the male phallus entails a hierarchy between phallic presence and absence that ultimately implodes upon itself.

Nonetheless, Lacan can be said to enjoy an awkward relationship with feminism and post-feminism in that, while he is much criticised for adopting (or inheriting from Freud) a phallocentric stance within his psychoanalytic theories, he is also taken by many to provide an accurate portrayal of the gender biases within society. Some critics accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Others, such as Judith Butler and Jane Gallop have offered readings of Lacan's work that opened up new possibilities for feminist theory, making it difficult to seriously reject Lacan wholesale due to sexism - although specific parts of his work may well subject to criticism on these grounds. In either case, traditional feminism has profited from Lacan's accounts to show that society has an inherent sexual bias that denigratingly reduces womanhood to a status of deficiency.

Within the world outside the humanities and critical theory, criticism of Lacan tends to dismiss him/his work in a more or less wholesale fashion. François Roustang, in The Lacanian Delusion, called Lacan's output "extravagant" and an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish". In Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Lacan of abusing scientific concepts. Defenders of Lacanian theories dispute the validity of such criticism, and point out that Sokal has explicitly stated that he does not understand Lacan's texts. According to Lacanians, the dismissal by Sokal and his allies precludes any valid criticism of his theories, and is instead motivated by a desire to "police the boundaries" of what constitutes an appropriate use of scientific terminology.

Sources

Bibliography

Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan Dot Com or Peter Krapp's page

*referenced above

Works about Lacan's Work and Theory

  • Benvenuto, Bice; Kennedy, Roger, The Works of Jacques Lacan (London, 1986, Free Association Books.)
  • Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991). (An introduction.)
  • Dor, Joel, The Clinical Lacan (New York: Other Press, 1999)
  • Dor, Joel, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language (New York: Other Press, 2001)
  • Elliott, Anthony and Frosh, Stephen (eds.), Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). (A recent overview.)
  • Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 1996.
  • Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
  • Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely, University of Minnesoty, 2004.
  • Forrester, John, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1985).
  • Fryer, David Ross, The Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan Press; and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
  • Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
  • Gherovici, Patricia, The Puerto Rican Syndrome (New York: Other Press, 2003)
  • Harari, Roberto, Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • ------, Lacan's Seminar on "Anxiety": An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2005)
  • Lander, Romulo, Subjective Experience and the Logic of the Other (New York: Other Press, 2006)
  • Leupin, Alexandre, Lacan Today (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Mathelin, Catherine, Lacanian Psychotherpay with Children: The Broken Piano (New York: Other Press, 1999)
  • McGowan, Todd and Kunkle, Sheila, Eds., Lacan and Contemporary Film (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Moustafa, Safouan, Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
  • Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, 2nd edition, Guildford Press, New York, 1992
  • ————— and Wollheim, Richard, ‘Lacan: an exchange’, New York Review of Books, 26 (9), 1979, p. 44.
  • Soler, Colette, What Lacan Said About Women (New York: Other Press, 2006)
  • Van Haute, Philippe, Against Adaptation: Lacan's "Subversion" of the Subject (New York: Other Press, 2002)
  • ----- and Geyskens, Tomas, Confusion of Tongues: The Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Ferenczi, and Laplanche (New York: Other Press, 2004)
  • Wilden, Anthony, ‘Jacques Lacan: A partial bibliography’, Yale French Studies, 36/37, 1966, pp. 263 – 268.
  • Slavoj Žižek, ‘The object as a limit of discourse: approaches to the Lacanian real’, Prose Studies, 11 (3), 1988, pp. 94 – 120.
  • —————, Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London and New York: Continuum, 2005).

External links

Introductions

Practice

Theory

Criticism

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