[[Image:Lacan-TV.gif|thumb|right]]
[[Jacques Lacan|Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan]] (1901 – 1981) was a [[French]] [[psychiatrist]] and [[psychoanalyst]].
[[Lacan]] has become an important figure in many fields beyond [[psychoanalysis]].
[[Lacan]] became one of the most important figures in the history of [[psychoanalysis]].
His impact has been felt across a broad range of disciplines, from feminist philosophy and film theory to the spheres of literature, politics, and cultural studies.
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.
---
A dramatic personage with enormous intellectual energy, Lacan maintained friendships and theoretical engagements with a wide variety of people, from the artists André Breton and Salvador Dali, to the philosophers Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and such historians of thought as Alexandre Kojève and Alexandre Koyré who transformed the intellectual landscape in France in the 1930s.
In the years following the war, from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, Lacan taught a yearly seminar in Paris that was attended by many of France’s most prominent intellectuals.
This work not only established Lacan as earned a major figure medical degree in psychoanalysis, but served as the platform by which psychoanalytic theory both absorbed 1932 and challenged major intellectual movements was a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in structuralism, anthropology, linguistics, phenomenology, and disciplines such as anthropology and mathematics, with which Lacan sustained serious and extended dialogueParis for much of his career.
Lacan is arguably the leading figure, after Freud, in the effort to bring psychoanalytic thought into dialogue with other disciplines, and he is largely responsible for the place occupied by psychoanalysis today in literary and cultural theory.
IDEAS
==Biography==LANGUAGEnotable poststructuralist, he reinterpreted Freudian psychoanalysis, esp. the theory of the unconscious, in the light of structural linguistics and anthropology.
Born He reinterpreted Freudian psychoanalysis in 1901 to an upper-middle class family the light of successful merchants from Orleans structural linguistics and anthropology; he saw the unconscious as developing simultaneously with strict Catholic roots, Lacan attended the prestigious Collège Stanislaus where he received a rigorous classical education in Latin, poetry, philosophy and theologylanguage.
The protected environment of the institution was disrupted [[Lacan]] carried out influential work in reinterpretating Freudian psychoanalysis in 1915 when part light of the Collège was transformed into a hospital for wounded soldiers. In 1919, Lacan started his medical training developments in Paris, where he became friends with Breton, Aragon, Dali, structural linguistics and other members of the Surrealist movementanthropology.
By 1927, he had entered clinical training His endeavour was to reinterpret Freud in psychiatry at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, where he would later teach (and where Foucault would also work), and he began light of the structural approach to publish a series of neurological papers on paralysis, mental automatism, war trauma, and hallucinatory mechanisms, based on clinical case studieslinguistics inaugurated by Saussure.
In 1932 he finished his doctoral thesis on paranoia, translated Freud’s paper on jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality into French, and started his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein.
--
[[Lacan]]'s original training was in medicine and psychiatry, and his prepsychoanalytic work was on [[paranoia]].
Language becomes a manifestation of the structures present in the unconscious. T
Lacan emphasized the primacy of language as the mirror of the unconscious mind, and he tried to introduce the study of language (as practiced in modern linguistics, philosophy, and poetics) into psychoanalytic theory. His major achievement was his reinterpretation of Freud's work in terms of the structural linguistics developed by French writers in the second half of the 20th century.
The publication he central theme is that the growing child must give up the narcissistic stage of his doctoral thesisabsorption in the mother, which dealt mainly with and becomes aware of loss and difference as it begins to take its place in a woman patient suffering from network of linguistic and social roles. The repressions involved in this procedure open up a [[psychosis]] that led her to attempt to murder an actress (1932), won him the admiration world of [[Breton]] and the [[surrealism|surrealist group]], with which he was birefly associatedinsatiable desires.
[[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 ORGANIZATION He founded and headed an organization called the [[fragmented body]] is one Freudian School of the clearest indications of his debt Paris from 1964 until he disbanded it in 1980 for what he claimed was its failure to adhere with sufficient strictness to [[surrealism]]Freudian principles.
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 Loewenstein]] in 1934, and was elected to the [[SPP]] in the same year.
IronicallySEMINARS, [[Loewenstein]] was FAME - WORKSThe influence he gained extended well beyond the field of psychoanalysis to make him one of the pioneers of dominant figures in French cultural life during the [[ego-psychology]] that [[1970s. In his own psychoanalytic practice, Lacan]] came to loathe so muchwas known for his unorthodox, and even eccentric, therapeutic methods.
[[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; His influence rested on the version included in ''[[Écrits]]'' was written thirteen years latter (1949)series of seminars he gave at the univeristy of Paris from 1953 which decisively influenced French thought of the time.
In the late 1940s [[Lacan]] he reached prominence only after he began to use conducting regular seminars at the idea University of Paris in 1953. He acquired celebrity status in France after the [[mirror stage]] to elaborate a theory publication of his essays and lectures in Écrits (1966; Eng. trans. The Language of subjectivity that views the [[ego]] a a largely [[imaginary]] construct based upon an [[alienation|alienating]] [[identification]] with the mirror-image Self: The Function of the [[subject]]Language in Psychoanalysis).
At Lacan's work is notoriously obscure, repeating the [[intersubjective]] levelsame shifting nature of dreams and, presumably, the [[subject]] unconscious; like that of Derrida after him it is dran at a very early age into a [[dialectic]] of [[identification]] also replete with an [[aggression]] towards wordplays, puns, and reason-defying leaps. His lectures, in transcript, are collected in the [[Other]]two-volume Écrits (1966, 1971, trs. under the same title, 1977).
Originally based upon the findings A number of child psychology and primate ethology (from which [[Lacan]] adopts th thesis that a child, unlike a young chimpanzee, recognizes its own image 's articles and lectures are collects in a mirrorÉcrits (1966), 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]].
---
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 [[structuralism|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 [[speech]] 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]]).
---
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 [[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.
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 [[slip]]ping out of control.
An element of stability is, he argues, provided by privileged signifiers such as the ==Theory==[[phallusLacan]] and the 's [[Name-of-the-FatherJacques Lacan:Bibliography|work]], and it is this claim that exposes him to has transformed [[Derridapsychoanalysis]], both as a '''theory'''s accusations of [[logocentrism]] and [[phallogocentrism]]as a '''practice'''.
--In the 1950s, [[Lacan]] emphasized the role of [[language]] (and the [[symbolic order]]) in [[psychoanalysis]] and formulated his most important thesis: that ''the unconscious is structured like a language''.
[[(This was an extraordinarily innovative period for Lacan]]'s early use and he introduced many of [[linguistics]] anticipates a distinctive feature of his later work in the concepts that he makes use of quasi-mathematical formulae to illustrate would preoccupy him for the workings rest of [[metaphor]] and [[metonymy]]his career.)
The initial formulae are no doubt little more than pedagogic devises, but they gradually develop into a so-called [[Lacanian]Lacan] [[algebra]] and drew on a set field of study known as '''[[amthemesStructuralism]] designed to ensure that ''' and on '''[[psychoanalytic linguistics|linguistic theory]] can be subjected to a [[formalization]] and to guarantee its integral transmission'''.
[[Claude Lévi-Strauss]]'s ''elementary [[structure]] of kinship'' provided the basis for [[Lacan]]'s conception of the [[symbolic]] [[order]] and the formation of the [[unconscious]].
==Works==[[Lévi-Strauss]]'s [[structuralism|structural anthropology]] was facilitated by the work of the Swiss [[linguistics|linguist]] [[Ferdinand de Saussure]] (1857-1913) and it was through [[Lévi-Strauss]] that [[Lacan]] began to read [[linguistics]].
In the process he made radical and far-reaching changes to [[LacanSaussure]] offered his most significant contributions through his 's concept of the [[seminarlinguistics|linguistic]] [[sign]], completely reversing any conventional understanding of the relationship between the [[speech|speaking]] [[subject]] and [[language]] lectures.
Finally, we will look at the Russian [[linguistics|linguist]] [[LacanRoman Jakobson]]'s most (1896-1982) work on [[metaphor]] and [[metonymy]], as this was crucially important papers are collected in his ''for [[ÉcritsLacan]]'' (1966); fewer than one-third s conceptualization of them are included in the English ''[[Écrits: A Selectiondesire]]'' (1977).
Until the publication of ''[[ÉcritsLacan]]'', the main vector for the dissemination s conception of his ideas was the weekly [[seminarsubject] that began ] as constituted in 1953 and continued until shortly before his deaththrough [[language]]. (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.
------------
Further information about [[{{PAGENAME}}]] can be found below:
* {{Z}} ''[[Looking Awry|Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture]]''. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. pp. 5–6, 21, 28–29, 33–39, 65, 75, 88, 90–91, 95–96, 98, 103, 108–110, 118–119, 125–126, 128–132, 135–139, 151–153, 158, 161–169
==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 Française de Psychanalyse|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 ParisImage:Board.jpg]] (Psychoanalytic School of Paris), which was unilaterally dissolved by [[LacanImage:Lacan3.gif]] himself in 1980[[Image:Lacan_4.jpg]]
One of the most important -- and most controversial -- figures in the history of [[Lacanpsychoanalysis]] considered his work to be an authentic ", [[return to FreudLacan]]" -- is also acknowledged for his influence across a broad range of disciplines in opposition the humanities and the social sciences, from the field of cultural studies, literary and film criticism, to [[ego-psychology]]the field of social and political theory, women and gender studies, and philosophy.
This entailed a renewed concentration upon the Freudian concepts of the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego conceptualised as a mosaic of identifications, and the centrality of language to any psychoanalytic work. His work has a strong interdisciplinary focus, drawing particularly on linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics, and he has become an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis, particularly within critical * [[Psychoanalytic criticism|Literary theory. Lacan argued that this conflict could not be resolved—the ego could not be “healed”—and pointed out that the true intention of psychoanalysis was analysis and not cure. ]]His collection of papers, Ecrits (1966, tr. 1977), though notoriously difficult reading, has been influential in linguistics, film * [[Film theory, and literary criticism.]] 1901-81), French psychoanalyst. After receiving a medical degree, he became a psychoanalyst in Paris. Lacan was infamous for his unorthodox methods of treatment, such as the truncated therapy session, which often lasted only several minutes. A staunch critic of modern (particularly American) revisions of psychoanalytic * [[Feminist theory, Lacan supported the traditional model of psychoanalysis espoused by Sigmund Freud. He argued that contemporary psychoanalytic theories had strayed too far from their roots in Freudian psychoanalysis, which held that there was constant conflict between the ego and the unconscious mind. Lacan argued that this conflict could not be resolved-the ego could not be "healed"-and pointed out that the true intention of psychoanalysis was analysis and not cure. His influential collection of papers, Ecrits (1966, trans. 1977), though notoriously difficult reading, has been highly influential in disciplines such as linguistics, film theory, and literary criticism.]]
