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==Jacques Lacan=====History=======Early Lectures====In 1951, [[Lacan]] began to give private lectures in [[Sylvia Bataille]]'s apartment at 3 rue de Lille. The lectures were attended by a small group of [[trainee]] [[psychoanalysts]], and were based on readings of some of [[Freud]]'s [[case histories]]: [[Dora]], the [[Rat Man]] and the [[Wolf Man]]. <!-- In 1953 Lacan began a fortnightly public seminar at Hôpital SainteAnne, the psychiatric hospital where he worked (for the previous two years he had given private weekly lectures in the apartment of Sylvia Bataille, then the wife of the philosopher and writer George Bataille (1897-1962) and shortly to become Lacan's second wife). The original French titles are listed below seminar would continue for the next 26 years. Each year he would take a text or concept from Freud and devote the seminar to the English onesstudy of that text or idea.-->
====École Normale Supérieure====
After ten years at the [[Hôpital Sainte-Anne]], the [[seminar]] moved to the [[École Normale Supérieure]] in 1964, and to the Faculté de Droit in 1973. These changes of venue were due to various reasons, not least of which was the need to accommodate the constantly growing audience as the [[seminar]] gradually became a focal point in the Parisian intellectual resurgence of the 1950s and 1960s.
====Speech====
Given [[Lacan]]'s insistence that [[speech]] is the only medium of [[psychoanalysis]],<ref>{{E}} p. 40</ref> it is perhaps appropriate that the original means by which [[Lacan]] developed and expounded his ideas should have been the spoken [[word]]. Indeed, as one commentator has remarked: "it must be recalled that virtually all of Lacan's 'writings' were originally oral presentations, that is many ways the open-ended Seminar was his preferred environment."
===Transcripts===
As [[Lacan]]'s [[seminar]]s became increasingly popular, demand grew for written transcripts of the [[seminar]]. However, apart from a few small articles that he wrote on the basis of some lectures delivered in the course of the [[seminar]], [[Lacan]] never published any account of his own [[seminar]]s. In 1956-9 [[Lacan]] authorised Jean-Bertrand Pontalis to publish a few summaries of sections of the [[seminar]] during those years, but this as not enough to satisfy the growing demand for written accounts of [[Lacan]]'s teaching. Hence unauthorised transcripts of [[Lacan]]'s [[seminar]] began increasingly to be circulated among his followers in an almost clandestine way. Even during [[Lacan]]'s lifetime, the [[seminar]] circulated in the form of photocopies of diverse and unreliable written versions of the spoken text. Beginning in 1973, [[Lacan]] entrusted the transcription of the [[seminar]] to [[Jacques-Alain Miller]]. In 1973, [[Lacan]] allowed his son-in-law, [[Jacques-Alain Miller]], to publish an edited transcript of the lectures given in 1964, the eleventh year of the [[seminar]]. In an editor's note to ''[[The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis]]'', the first of his publications of [[Lacan]]'s [[seminars]], [[Miller]] writes:
<blockquote>"My intention here was to be as unobtrusive as possible and to obtain from Jacques Lacan's spoken work an authentic version that would stand, in the future, for the original, which does not exist."<ref>{{S11}} p. xi</ref></blockquote>
Since then, [[Miller]] has continued to bring out edited versions of other years of the [[seminar]], although the number published is still fewer than half. [[Miller]]'s role in editing and publishing the [[seminar]] has led to some very heated arguments, with opponents claiming he has distorted [[Lacan]]'s original. However, as [[Miller]] himself has pointed out, the transition from an oral to a written medium, and the editing required by this, means that these published versions of the [[seminar]] could never be simple transcripts of the lectures given by [[Lacan]].<ref>[[Jacques-Alain Miller|Miller, Jacques-Alain]]. ''Entretien sur le Séminaire, avec François Ansermet. [[Paris]]: Navarin, 1985</ref> So far only nine of the yearly [[seminar]]s have been published in book form, while authorised extracts from others have appeared in the journal [[Ornicar?]]. Unauthorised transcripts of the unpublished years of the [[seminar]] continue to circulate today, both in [[France]] and abroad.
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Under the general editorship of Jacques Alain-Miller many of these seminars have now been reconstructed from notes and transcripts made by his former students, and a steadily increasing number have been translated.
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=====References=====
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