Jacques Lacan (Encyclopædia Britannica Online).

Jacques Lacan (Encyclopædia Britannica Online)

Jacques LacanFrench psychologist in full Jacques Marie Émile Lacan

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born April 13, 1901, Paris, France died Sept. 9, 1981, Paris

French psychoanalyst who gained an international reputation as an original interpreter of Sigmund Freud’s work.

Lacan earned a medical degree in 1932 and was a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Paris for much of his career. He helped introduce Freudian theory into France in the 1930s, but he reached prominence only after he began conducting regular seminars at the University of Paris in 1953. He acquired celebrity status in France after the publication of his essays and lectures in Écrits (1966; Eng. trans. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis). He founded and headed an organization called the Freudian School of Paris from 1964 until he disbanded it in 1980 for what he claimed was its failure to adhere with sufficient strictness to Freudian principles.

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 influence he gained extended well beyond the field of psychoanalysis to make him one of the dominant figures in French cultural life during the 1970s. In his own psychoanalytic practice, Lacan was known for his unorthodox, and even eccentric, therapeutic methods.

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• association with Guattari ( in Guattari, Pierre-Félix )…during the 1950s at La Borde, a clinic near Paris that was noted for its innovative therapeutic practices. It was at this time that Guattari began analysis with the celebrated French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose reevaluation of the centrality of the “unconscious” in psychoanalytic theory had begun attracting many disciples. In the mid-1960s Guattari broke with Lacan, whose…
• contribution to French culture ( in French literature: Lacan and Foucault )The teaching and writing, much of it dating to the 1930s, of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (Écrits [1966; Ecrits: A Selection]) influenced many major thinkers in the 1960s and ’70s. Lacan proved to be a major influence on avant-garde French feminism, and he led Freudian thought in fresh directions through his work on the part played by…

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European Graduate School – Biography of Jacques Lacan

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Jacques Lacan (French psychologist)

French psychoanalyst who gained an international reputation as an original interpreter of Sigmund Freud’s work.

Lacan earned a medical degree in 1932 and was a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Paris for much of his career. He helped introduce Freudian theory into France in the 1930s, but he reached prominence only after he began conducting regular seminars at the University of Paris in 1953. He acquired celebrity status in France after the publication of his essays and lectures in Écrits (1966; Eng. trans. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis). He founded and headed an organization called the Freudian School of Paris from 1964 until he disbanded it in 1980 for what he claimed was its failure to adhere with sufficient strictness to Freudian principles.

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 influence he gained extended well beyond the field of psychoanalysis to make him one of the dominant figures in French cultural life during the 1970s. In his own psychoanalytic practice, Lacan was known for his unorthodox, and even eccentric, therapeutic methods.

Aspects of this topic are discussed in the following places at Britannica.

• association with Guattari Guattari, Pierre-Félix…during the 1950s at La Borde, a clinic near Paris that was noted for its innovative therapeutic practices. It was at this time that Guattari began analysis with the celebrated French…

Freudian School of Paris (French organization)

Aspects of this topic are discussed in the following places at Britannica.

• Irigaray Irigaray, LuceIrigaray was a member of the Freudian School of Paris, founded by Jacques Lacan, and taught at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes from 1968 until she was dismissed in 1974 because of her doctoral thesis. Entitled Speculum de l’autre femme (Speculum of the Other Woman), it argues that history and culture are written in patriarchal language, that they exclude women’s needs and…
• Lacan Lacan, Jacques…of his essays and lectures in Écrits (1966; Eng. trans. The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis). He founded and headed an organization called the Freudian School of Paris from 1964 until he disbanded it in 1980 for what he claimed was its failure to adhere with sufficient strictness to Freudian principles.

Tel Quel (French journal)

French avant-garde literary review published from 1960 to 1982 by Éditions du Seuil. Founded by Philippe Sollers and other young writers, this eclectic magazine published works by such practitioners of the nouveau roman (“new novel”) as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, as well as works by these writers’ acknowledged predecessors— e.g., James Joyce and Francis Ponge.

Much influenced by Surrealism, Tel Quel had as a goal the evaluation of 20th-century literature; it printed previously unpublished works by Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, and Ezra Pound, as well as contemporary literary criticism by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. From 1966 to 1970 Tel Quel represented a Maoist view of Marxism.

From 1974 the review relinquished political involvement, becoming a supporter of such intellectuals as Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann and others in the “new philosophers” movement. The critical orientation of Tel Quel shifted toward the classical Greco-Hebrew tradition, including discussion of biblical and theological questions. Its new stance included unequivocal support of worldwide human rights and the beginnings of an appreciation of modern culture, particularly that of the United States.

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• place in French literature French literature…style of filmmaking. The nouveau roman was taken up by the literary theorist Jean Ricardou and promulgated by him through the avant-garde critical journal Tel Quel. (Founded in 1960 by Philippe Sollers and other writers, Tel Quel reflects the transformation and politicization of Parisian and…
• significance to Sarduy Sarduy, Severo…fearful of its persecution of homosexuals and the censorship imposed on writers, Sarduy never went home. In Paris he became close to the group of critics and theoreticians…

Jean-François Revel (French philosopher and journalist)

French philosopher and journalist (b. Jan. 19, 1924, Marseille, France—d. April 30, 2006, Kremlin-Bicêtre, near Paris, France), was a defender of American liberal democracy, an unusual position for a French intellectual. Ricard adopted the pen name Revel in the Resistance during World War II. He graduated in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure in 1943, after which he taught in Algeria, Mexico, and Italy before returning to France in 1956. His polemical Pourquoi des philosophes? (1957) criticized Marxism, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In 1963 Revel left teaching for full-time journalism. Among his most influential books were Ni Marx, ni Jésus (1970; Without Marx or Jesus, 1971), La Tentation totalitaire (1976, The Totalitarian Temptation, 1977), Comment les démocraties finissent (1983; How Democracies Perish, 1984), and L’Obsession anti-américaine (2002; Anti-Americanism, 2003). In 1997 Revel was elected to the Académie Française.

semiotics (study of signs)

the study of signs and sign-using behaviour. It was defined by one of its founders, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, as the study of “the life of signs within society.” Although the word was used in this sense in the 17th century by the English philosopher John Locke, the idea of semiotics as an interdisciplinary mode for examining phenomena in different fields emerged only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the independent work of Saussure and of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.

Peirce’s seminal work in the field was anchored in pragmatism and logic. He defined a sign as “something which stands to somebody for something,” and one of his major contributions to semiotics was the categorization of signs into three main types: (1) an icon, which resembles its referent (such as a road sign for falling rocks); (2) an index, which is associated with its referent (as smoke is a sign of fire); and (3) a symbol, which is related to its referent only by convention (as with words or traffic signals). Peirce also demonstrated that a sign can never have a definite meaning, for the meaning must be continuously qualified.

Saussure treated language as a sign-system, and his work in linguistics has supplied the concepts and methods that semioticians apply to sign-systems other than language. One such basic semiotic concept is Saussure’s distinction between the two inseparable components of a sign: the signifier, which in language is a set of speech sounds or marks on a page, and the signified, which is the concept or idea behind the sign. Saussure also distinguished parole, or actual individual utterances, from langue, the underlying system of conventions that makes such utterances understandable; it is this underlying langue that most interests semioticians.

This interest in the structure behind the use of particular…

 

Jacques Lacan

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Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Name	Jacques Lacan
Birth	April 13, 1901
Death	September 9, 1981
School/tradition	Psychoanalysis, Structuralism
Main interests	Psychoanalysis
Notable ideas	The Mirror Stage, The Real, The Symbolic, The Imaginary
Influenced by	Hegel, Saussure, Heidegger, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Kojève
Influenced	Guattari, Miller, Milner, Althusser, Žižek, Laclau, Mouffe, Irigaray, Badiou, Castoriadis, Lefort, Butler, McLuhan

Part of a series of articles on Psychoanalysis

Constructs Psychosexual development Psychosocial development Conscious • Preconscious • Unconscious Id, ego, and super-ego Libido • Drive Transference • Sublimation • ResistanceImportant Figures Sigmund Freud • Carl Jung Alfred Adler • Otto Rank Anna Freud • Margaret Mahler Karen Horney • Jacques Lacan Ronald Fairbairn • Melanie Klein Harry Stack Sullivan Erik Erikson • Nancy Chodorow Susan Sutherland Isaacs Ernest Jones • Heinz Kohut John Bowlby Important works The Interpretation of Dreams Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis “Beyond the Pleasure Principle“ Civilization and Its Discontents Schools of Thought Self psychology • Lacanian Analytical psychology • Object relations Interpersonal • Relational Attachment • Ego psychology

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Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (French pronounced [ʒak lakɑ̃]) (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. His yearly seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981, were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and ’70s, particularly among post-structuralist thinkers.

Lacan’s ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis.

Contents [hide] 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 1930s 1.3 1940s 1.4 1950s 1.5 1960s 1.6 1970s 2 Major concepts 2.1 The ‘Return to Freud’ 2.2 The mirror stage (le stade du miroir) 2.3 Other/other 2.4 The Three Orders 2.4.1 The Imaginary 2.4.2 The Symbolic 2.4.3 The Real 2.5 Desire 2.6 Drives 2.7 Other concepts 3 Writings and seminars 4 Criticism 5 Sources 6 References 6.1 Bibliography 6.1.1 Works about Lacan’s Work and Theory 7 External links 7.1 Introductions 7.2 Practice 7.3 Theory 7.4 Criticism

[edit] Biography

Because Lacan, like Freud, destroyed most of his records, it is difficult to disentangle the myths, anecdotes, and rumors that have surrounded him.

[edit] Early life

Jacques Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest child of three born to Emilie and Alfred Lacan. Alfred was a successful, middle-class salesman dealing in soap and oils. Emilie was an ardent Catholic, and Lacan’s younger brother eventually entered monastic life in 1929. Lacan attended the Collège Stanislas, a well-known Jesuit high school. In the early 1920s, Lacan attended some meetings of right-wing group Action Française and met its founder Charles Maurras. By the mid-1920s, Lacan’s growing anti-religious sentiment led to tensions with his Catholic family.^[1][2]

Too thin to be accepted into military service, Lacan went directly into medical school in 1920, specializing in psychiatry from 1926. He took his clinical training at Sainte-Anne, the major psychiatric hospital in central Paris. 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 attended the famous seminars on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève.

Beginning in the 1920s, Lacan undertook analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which continued until 1938.

[edit] 1930s

In 1931 Lacan received his license as a forensic psychiatrist, and in 1932 was awarded the Doctorat d’état for his thesis, De la Psychose paranoiaque dans les rapports avec la personnalité. While this thesis drew considerable acclaim outside psychoanalytic circles, particularly among the surrealist artists, it was largely ignored by psychoanalysts. In 1934 Lacan became a candidate for the Société Psychoanalytique de Paris. In January of that year, he married Marie-Louise Blondin, who gave birth to their first child, Caroline, the same month. Another child, Thibaut, was born in August of 1939.

He presented his first analytic paper on the “Mirror Phase” at the 1936 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad. According to Roudinesco, Lacan’s reading was interrupted by chairman of the congress, Ernest Jones, who was unwilling to offer more than the alloted time. Frustrated with what he considered an insult, Lacan left the congress to witness first hand a mass event manipulated by Nazis, in the form of the Olympic Games in Berlin. No copy of Lacan’s original lecture remains extant.^[3]

Lacan was very active in the world of Parisian writers, artists and intellectuals during the inter-war period. In addition to André Breton and Georges Bataille, he was also associated with Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. He attended the mouvement Psyché founded by Maryse Choisy. Several of his early articles were published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and he was present at the first public reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Dylan Evans has speculated that Lacan was a surrealist at heart, “his interest in surrealism predates his interest in psychoanalysis. Perhaps Lacan never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as ‘convulsive beauty’, its celebration of irrationality, and its hostility to the scientist who murders nature by dissecting it.”^[4] As such company would suggest, during this period Lacan was better known in literary circles than psychoanalytic ones.

[edit] 1940s

The Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP) was disbanded due to Nazi Germany’s occupation of France in 1940 and Lacan was subsequently called up to serve in the French army at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, where he spent the duration of the war. His third child, Sibylle, was born in 1940.

The following year, Lacan fathered a child, Judith (who kept the name Bataille) with Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), estranged wife of his friend Georges. There are contradictory stories about his romantic life with Sylvia Bataille in southern France during World War II. The official record shows only that Marie-Louise requested divorce after Judith’s birth, and Lacan married Sylvia in 1953.

Following the war, the SPP recommenced their meetings, and Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, meeting English analysts Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. He was influenced by Bion’s analytic work with groups and this contributed to his own later emphasis on study groups as a structure with which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis.

In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich.

[edit] 1950s

In 1951 Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris, urging what he described as “a return to Freud” concentrating upon the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan’s twenty-seven year long seminar was very influential in Parisian cultural life as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.

In 1953, after a disagreement about analytic practice methods, Lacan and many of his colleagues left the Société Parisienne de Psychoanalyse to form a new group the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One of the consequences of this was to deprive the new group of membership within the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Encouraged by the reception of “the return to Freud” and of his report – “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (Écrits) – Lacan again returned to Freud, re-reading the canon in relation with contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology and topology. From 1953 to 1964 at Sainte-Anne Hospital , he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in Écrits, a selection of which was first published in 1966. In his seventh Seminar of 1959-60, ‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’, Lacan defined his ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and constructs his “ethics for our time”; according to Freud, an ethics that would prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the “discontent of civilization”. At the roots of the ethics is desire: analysis’ only promise is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play of words between ‘l’entrée en je’ and ‘l’entrée en jeu’). ‘I must come to the place where the id was’, where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails ‘the purification of desire’. This text functions throughout the years as the background of Lacan’s work. He defends three assertions: that psychoanalysis must have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; that the analytic field is the only place from where it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.

[edit] 1960s

Starting in 1962 a complex negotiation took place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan’s practice—with his controversial indeterminate-length sessions in which he charged a full fee for truncated sessions, had his hair cut during sessions,^[5] and Lacan’s critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy—led, in 1963, to a condition being set by the IPA that registration of the SFP was dependent upon removing Lacan from the list of SFP training analysts. Lacan left the SFP to form his own school which became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP)

With Lévi-Strauss and Althusser’s support, he was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He started with a seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure (in his first session he thanks the generosity of Fernand Braudel and Claude Lévi-Strauss). 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. He divided the École de la Cause freudienne into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analyzed but haven’t become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who have neither completed nor started analysis are welcome); the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (it concerned the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences (Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste à l’Ecole).

By the 1960s, Lacan was associated—at least in the public mind—with the far left in France.^[6] In May 1968 Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary a Department of Psychology was set up by his followers at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). Echoing this sentiment, “Shortly after the tumultuous events of May 1968, Lacan was accused by the authorities of being a subversive, and directly influencing the events that transpired.”^[7]

In 1969 Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon) where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice till the dissolution of his School in 1980.

[edit] 1970s

Throughout the final decade of his life, Lacan continued his widely followed seminars. During this period, he focuses on the development of his concepts of masculine and feminine jouissance, and puts special emphasis on his concept of “The Real” as a point of impossible contradiction in the “Symbolic Order”. This late work had the greatest influence on feminist thought, as well as upon the informal movement that arose in the 1970s or 1980s called post-modernism.

[edit] Major concepts

[edit] The ‘Return to Freud’

Lacan’s “return to Freud” emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud and a radical critique of Ego psychology, Melanie Klein and Object relations theory. Lacan thought that Freud’s ideas of “slips of the tongue”, jokes, etcetera, all emphasized the agency of language in subjective constitution. “Correcting” Freud from within the light of Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Barthes, Lacan’s “return to Freud” could be read as the realization that the pervading agency of the unconscious is intimately tied to the functions and dynamics of language, where the signifier is irremediably divorced from the signified in a chronic but generative tension of lack. In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud” (Écrits, pp. 161 – 197).) he argued that “the unconscious is structured like a language”; it was not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, but a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. If the unconscious is structured like a language, he claimed, then the self is denied any point of reference to which to be ‘restored’ following trauma or ‘identity crisis’.

[edit] The mirror stage (le stade du miroir)

Lacan’s first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage which he described “… as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience”. By the early fifties, he no longer considers the mirror stage as only a moment in the life of the infant, but as the permanent structure of subjectivity. In the paradigm of The Imaginary order, the subject is permanently caught and captivated by his own image. Lacan writes, “[T]he mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image”.^[8]

As he further develops the concept, the stress falls less on its historical value and ever more on its structural value.^[4] In his fourth Seminar, La relation d’objet, Lacan states that “the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship”.

The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of objectification, the Ego being the result of feeling dissention between one’s perceived visual appearance and one’s perceived emotional reality. This identification is what Lacan called alienation. At six months the baby still lacks coordination, however, he can recognize himself in the mirror before attaining control over his bodily movements. He sees his image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. This contrast is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with his own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens him with fragmentation, and thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego.^[4] The moment of identification is to Lacan a moment of jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery, yet the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother.^[9] This identification also involves the ideal ego which functions as a promise of future wholeness sustaining the Ego in anticipation.

In the Mirror stage a misunderstanding – “méconnaissance” – constitutes the Ego–the ‘moi’ becomes alienated from himself through the introduction of the Imaginary order subject. It must be said that the mirror stage has also a significant symbolic dimension. The Symbolic order is present in the figure of the adult who is carrying the infant: the moment after the subject has jubilantly assumed his image as his own, he turns his head towards this adult who represents the big Other, as if to call on him to ratify this image.^[10]

[edit] Other/other

While Freud uses the term “other”, referring to der Andere (the other person) and “das Andere” (otherness), Lacan’s use is more like Hegel’s, through Alexandre Kojève.

Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts:^[11] the big Other is designated A (for French Autre) and the little other is designated a (italicized French autre). He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: ‘the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a,^[12] so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other’.^[13]

1. The little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego. He is both the counterpart or the other people in whom the subject perceives a visual likeness (semblable), and the specular image or the reflection of one’s body in the mirror. In this way the little other is entirely inscribed in The Imaginary order. See Objet Petit a.
2. The big Other designates a radical alterity, an otherness transcending the illusory otherness of the Imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with language and the law: the big Other is inscribed in The Symbolic order, being in fact the Symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The Other is then another subject and also the Symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject.

‘The Other must first of all be considered a locus, the locus in which speech is constituted’.^[14] We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense, only when a subject may occupy this position and thereby embody the Other for another subject.^[15]

When he argues that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject, but in the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond one’s conscious control; they come from another place, outside consciousness, and then ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the Other’.^[16] When conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud’s concept of physical locality, in which the unconscious is described as “the other scene”.

“It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child, it is she who receives the child’s primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message”.^[4] The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this Other is not complete, that there is a Lack (manque) in the Other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the Other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete Other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete Other is the ‘barred Other’.^[17][18]

[edit] The Three Orders

[edit] The Imaginary

Lacan thought the relationship between the Ego and the reflected image means that the Ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: “alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order”.^[14] This relationship is also narcissistic. So the Imaginary is the field of images and imagination, and deception: the main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, similarity.

The Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic order: in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues how the visual field is structured by symbolic laws. Thus the Imaginary involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the Symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has Symbolic and Imaginary connotations; in its Imaginary aspect, language is the “wall of language” which inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. On the other hand, the Imaginary is rooted in the subject’s relationship with its own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.

Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order by making identification with the analyst the objective of analysis (see Écrits, “The Directions of the Treatment”). He proposes the use of the Symbolic as the way to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary: the analyst transforms the images into words. “The use of the Symbolic is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification.”^[19]

[edit] The Symbolic

In his Seminar IV “La relation d’objet” Lacan asserts that the concepts of Law and Structure are unthinkable without language: thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. Yet, he does not simply equate this order with language since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper of language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier, that is a dimension in which elements have no positive existence but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.

The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity, that is the Other: the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. Besides it is the realm of the Law which regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. We may add that the Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (das ding an sich) and the death drive which goes “beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition”—”the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order.”^[11]

It is by working in the Symbolic order that the analyst can produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand; these changes will produce imaginary effects since the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.^[4] Thus, it is the Symbolic which is determinant of subjectivity, and the Imaginary, made of images and appearances, is the effect of the Symbolic.

[edit] The Real

Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also located outside the Symbolic. Unlike the latter which is constituted in terms of oppositions, i.e. presence/absence, “there is no absence in the Real.”^[11] Whereas the Symbolic opposition presence/absence implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, “the Real is always in its place.”^[19] If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements, signifiers, the Real in itself is undifferentiated, it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces “a cut in the real”, in the process of signification: “it is the world of words that creates the world of things – things originally confused in the “here and now” of the all in the process of coming into being.^[20]

Thus the Real is that which is outside language, resisting symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as “the impossible” because it is impossible to imagine and impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, being impossibly attainable. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. In his Seminar “La relation d’objet”, Lacan reads Freud’s case on “Little Hans.” He distinguishes two real elements which intrude and disrupt the child’s imaginary pre-oedipical harmony: the real penis which is felt in infantile masturbation and the newly born sister.

Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety in that it lacks any possible mediation, and is “the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence.”^[11]

[edit] Desire

Lacan’s désir follows Freud’s concept of Wunsch and it is central to Lacanian theories. For the aim of the talking cure – psychoanalysis – is precisely to lead the analysand to uncover the truth about their desire, but this is only possible if that desire is articulated, or spoken.^[21] Lacan said that “it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term.”^[22] “That the subject should come to recognize and to name his/her desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world.”^[11] “[W]hat is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence.” Now, although the truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, discourse can never articulate the whole truth about desire: whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover, a surplus.^[21]

In The Signification of the Phallus Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function, on one hand it articulates need and on the other acts as a demand for love. So, even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied and this leftover is desire.^[23] For Lacan “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second” (article cited). Desire then is the surplus produced by the articulation of need in demand (Dylan Evans). Lacan adds that “desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need” (article cited). Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as Slavoj Žižek puts it “desire’s raison d’être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire.”

It is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. If they belong to the field of the Other (as opposed to love), desire is one, whereas the drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire (see “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”). If one can surmise that objet petit a is the object of desire, it is not the object towards which desire tends, but the cause of desire. For desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque). Then desire appears as a social construct since it is always constituted in a dialectical relationship.

[edit] Drives

Lacan maintains Freud’s distinction between Trieb (drive) and Instinkt (instinct) in that drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually round it, so the real source of jouissance is to repeat the movement of this closed circuit. In the same Seminar Lacan posits the drives as both cultural and symbolic (discourse) constructs, to him “the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial”. Yet he incorporates the four elements of the drives as defined by Freud (the pressure, the end, the object and the source) to his theory of the drive’s circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and then returns to the erogenous zone. The circuit is structured by the three grammatical voices:

1. the active voice (to see)
2. the reflexive voice (to see oneself)
3. the passive voice (to be seen)

The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic, they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears. So although it is the “passive” voice, the drive is essentially active, “to make oneself be seen” instead of “to be seen.” The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.

Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips, the partial object the breast), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze) and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice). The first two relate to demand and the last two to desire. If the drives are closely related to desire, they are the partial aspects in which desire is realized: again, desire in one and undivided whereas the drives are partial manifestations of desire.

[edit] Other concepts

• Name of the Father
• Oedipal drama and the Oedipal signification
• Objet Petit a
• The Seminars of Jacques Lacan
• Signifier/ Signified
• The Letter
• Foreclusion – Foreclosure
• Jouissance
• Lack (manque)
• The Phallus
• Das Ding
• The gaze
• The four discourses
• The graph of desire
• Sinthome
• Lacan’s Topology

[edit] Writings and seminars

Although Lacan is a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, his Seminar lectures – contains the majority of his life’s work, though some of these remain yet unpublished. Jacques-Alain Miller, the sole editor of Lacan’s seminars, has been regularly conducting since 1984 a series of lectures, “L’orientation lacanienne”, within the structure of ParisVIII. Miller’s teachings have been published in the US by the journal Lacanian Ink.

Lacan claims that his Écrits were not to be understood, but would produce a meaning effect in the reader similar to some mystical texts. Lacan’s writing is notoriously difficult due to the repeated Hegelian/Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from other psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, and Lacan’s obscure prose style.

[edit] Criticism

Although Lacan is associated with it, he was criticized by major figures associated with post-structuralism (and the related postmodernism school). Jacques Derrida characterized Lacan as taking a structuralist approach to psychoanalysis. Derrida claimed this led Lacan to inherit a Freudian “phallocentrism,” exemplified by Lacan’s conception of the phallus as the “primary signifier” that determines the social order of signifiers. Derrida deconstructs the Freudian conception of “penis envy”, upon which female subjectivity is determined “as an absence,” to show that the primacy of the male phallus entails a hierarchy between phallic presence and absence that ultimately collapses.

While he has been criticized for adopting a Freudian phallocentric stance in his psychoanalytic theories, many feminists believe Lacan provides a useful analysis of gender biases and imposed roles. Some feminist critics, such as Luce Irigaray,^[24] accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Others feminists, such as Judith Butler,^[25] Jane Gallop,^[26] Bracha Ettinger, ^[27] and Elizabeth Grosz,^[7] have each interpreted Lacan’s work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory.

Other critics have often dismissed Lacan and his work in a more-or-less wholesale fashion. François Roustang^[28] called Lacan’s output “extravagant” and an “incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish.” Noam Chomsky described Lacan as “an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan”^[29].In Fashionable Nonsense, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Lacan of “superficial erudition” and of abusing scientific concepts he does not understand.

Defenders of Lacanian thinking dispute most external criticism, stating that these critics’ misunderstand—or often simply have not read—Lacan’s texts. Bruce Fink has dismissed Sokal and Bricmont, claiming they have “no idea whatsoever what Lacan is up to,” and accuses them of elevating a distaste for Lacan’s writing style into an attack on his thought as a whole.^[30] Similarly, Arkady Plotnitsky claims that Lacan uses the mathematical concepts more accurately than do Sokal and Bricmont.^[31]

[edit] Sources

• Chronology of Jacques Lacan
• The Seminars of Jacques Lacan
• Jacques Lacan’s Complete French Bibliography
• Jacques Lacan; Kant with Sade
• Of Structure as the Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever Johns Hopkins University – 1966
• The Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”
• The Crime of the Papin Sisters
• Chomsky’s remarks

[edit] References

1. ^ Roudinesco, Elisabeth Jacques Lacan & Co.: a history of psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, 1990, Chicago University Press
2. ^ Perry Meisel (April 13, 1997). The Unanalyzable. New York Times.
3. ^ Roudinesco, Elisabeth. ‘The mirror stage: an obliterated archive’ The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. Cambridge: CUP, 2003
4. ^ ^{a b c d e} Evans, Dylan “From Lacan to Darwin”, in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005
5. ^ Review of Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique
6. ^ French Communist Party “official philosopher” Louis Althusser did much to advance this association in the 1960s. Zoltán Tar and Judith Marcus in Frankfurt school of sociology. ISBN 0878559639 (p.276) write, for example, Althusser’s call to Marxists that the Lacanian enterprise might … help further revolutionary ends, endorsed Lacan’s work even further.
7. ^ ^{a b} Elizabeth A. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction
8. ^ Lacan, J., Some reflections on the Ego in Écrits
9. ^ Lacan, J., La relation d’objet in Écrits
10. ^ Lacan, Tenth Seminar, L’angoisse, 1962-1963
11. ^ ^{a b c d e} Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II : The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), ISBN 9780393307092
12. ^ Lacan, J., The Freudian Thing in Écrits
13. ^ Lacan, J., Psychoanalysis and its Teaching in Écrits
14. ^ ^{a b} Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses
15. ^ Lacan, Seminar VIII: Le transfert
16. ^ Lacan, J., Seminar on “The Purloined Letter” in Écrits
17. ^ Lacan, J., The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious in Écrits
18. ^ Lacan, Seminar V: Les formations de l’inconscient
19. ^ ^{a b} Lacan, J. Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
20. ^ Lacan, J., The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis in Écrits
21. ^ ^{a b} Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton University Press, 1996), ISBN 9780691015897
22. ^ Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I : Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954 “…what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence” (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), ISBN 9780393306972
23. ^ Lacan, J., ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ in Écrits
24. ^ Irigary, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One 1977, (Eng. trans. 1985)
25. ^ Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993)
26. ^ Gallop, Jane, Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
27. ^ Ettinger, Bracha L., The Matrixial Borderspace, University of Minnesota Press, 2006 (essays from 1994-1999, published in French as “Régard et éspace-de-bord matrixiels”, Bruxelles: La Lettre Volée, 1999) and Special Issue of Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 21, n.1, 2004.
28. ^ Roustang, François, The Lacanian Delusion
29. ^ Usenet, 1996
30. ^ Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter
31. ^ Arkady Plotnitsky, The Knowable and the Unknowable

[edit] Bibliography

Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan Dot Com.

• The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis*, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968
• Écrits: A Selection*, transl. by Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977, and revised version, 2002, transl. by Bruce Fink
• Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, transl. by Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
• The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
• The Seminar, Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954,, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by J. Forrester, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1988
• The Seminar, Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Sylvana Tomaselli, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1988.
• The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1993.
• The Seminar, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Dennis Porter, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1992.
• The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Alan Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1977.
• The Seminar XVII, The The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2007.
• The Seminar XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998.
• Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1990.

*referenced above

[edit] Works about Lacan’s Work and Theory

• Badiou, Alain, “The Formulas of L’Etourdit” (New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.)
• —————, “Lacan and the Pre-Socratics”, Lacan Dot Com, 2006.
• Benvenuto, Bice; Kennedy, Roger, The Works of Jacques Lacan (London, 1986, Free Association Books.)
• Bowie, Malcolm, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991). (An introduction.)
• Dor, Joel, The Clinical Lacan (New York: Other Press, 1999)
• —————, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language (New York: Other Press, 2001)
• Elliott, Anthony and Stephen Frosh(eds.), Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). (A recent overview.)
• Ettinger, Bracha L., “The Feminine/Prenatal Weaving in the Matrixial Subjectivity-as-Encounter.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, VII:3, The Analytic Press, New York, 1997.
• —————, “Matrixial Gaze and Screen: Other than Phallic and Beyond the Late Lacan.” In: Laura Doyle (ed.) Bodies of Resistance. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001.
• —————, “Weaving Trans-Subjective Texture or The Matrixial Sinthome.” In : Thurston, Luke (ed.), Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the final Lacan. NY: The Other Press, 2002.
• Evans, Dylan, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
• —————, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely, University of Minnesota, 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)
• Gallop, Jane, Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
• —————, The Daughter’s Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
• Gherovici, Patricia, The Puerto Rican Syndrome (New York: Other Press, 2003)
• Glynos, Jason and Yannis Stravrakakis, ED, Lacan and Science. London :Karnac Books, May 2002.
• 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)
• Homer, Sean, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge, 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 Sheila Kunkle Eds., Lacan and Contemporary Film (New York: Other Press, 2004)
• Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar on Anxiety I ” (New York: Lacanian Ink 26, 2005.)
• —————, “Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar on Anxiety II” (New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.)
• —————, “Jacques Lacan’s Later Teachings” (New York: Lacanian Ink 21, 2003.)
• —————, “The Paradigms of Jouissance” (New York, Lacanian Ink 17, 2000.)
• —————, “Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier”, Lacan Dot Com, 2006.
• Moustafa, Safouan, Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 2004)
• Nasio, Juan-David , Book of Love and Pain: The Thinking at the Limit with Freud and Lacan. Translated by David Pettigrew and Francois Raffoul (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003)
• —————, Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan. Translated by David Pettigrew and Francois Raffoul (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998)
• —————, Hysteria: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 1998)
• Pettigrew, David and François Raffoul (eds.), Disseminating Lacan (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996)
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• Rose, Jacqueline, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986)
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth, “Jacques Lacan: His Life and Work”. Translated by Bray B. New York, Columbia University Press, 1997
• Turkle, Sherry, 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 Translated by John Holland (New York: Other Press, 2006)
• Thurston, Luke (ed.), “Re-inventing the Symptom”, NY: Other Press, 2002.
• Van Haute, Philippe, Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion” of the Subject (New York: Other Press, 2002)
• Van Haute, Philippe and Tomas Geyskens, Confusion of Tongues: The Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Ferenczi, and Laplanche (New York: Other Press, 2004)
• Webster, Richard, Why Freud Was Wrong-Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (Harper Collins, 1995.)
• Wilden, Anthony, ‘Jacques Lacan: A partial bibliography’, Yale French Studies, 36/37, 1966, pp. 263–268.
• Žižek, Slavoj, “Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father, or how Not to misread Lacan´s formulas of sexuation”, Lacan Dot Com, 2005.
• —————, ‘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).
• —————, “Jacques Lacan as Reader of Hegel” (New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.)

[edit] External links

[edit] Introductions

• École de la Cause Freudienne
• Jacques Lacan in English
• Links of Jacques Lacan
• Jacques Lacan at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Ecole Lacanienne

[edit] Practice

• The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. London-based Lacanian psychoanalytic training agency
• Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). In Portuguese
• Homepage of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies
• The London Society of the New Lacanian School. Site includes online library of clinical & theoretical texts
• The Freudian School of Melbourne, School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Clinical and theoretical teaching and training of psychoanalysts.

[edit] Theory

• Lacan Dot Com
• Lacan Online
• UBUweb – radio features and interviews w/ Lacan on ubu.com
• No Subject, an online encyclopedia of Lacanian psychoanalysis

[edit] Criticism

• From Lacan to Darwin (PDF)
• The Cult of Lacan

 

Persondata
NAME	Lacan, Jacques
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	French psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH	13 April 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH	Paris, France
DATE OF DEATH	9 September 1981
PLACE OF DEATH	Paris, France

Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan“

Categories: Jacques Lacan | École Normale Supérieure faculty | Psychoanalysts | French psychologists | Psychoanalytic theory | Poststructuralism | Structuralism | Philosophy of sexuality | Postmodern theory | 20th century philosophers | 1901 births | 1981 deaths

Jacques Lacan

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Jacques Lacan
Nació en: París, Francia el 13 de abril de 1901
Murió en: el 9 de septiembre de 1981
Ocupación:	Psicoanalista
Nacionalidad:	Francesa
Género:	Psicoanálisis
Movimientos:	Psicoanálisis Estructuralismo
Influencias:	Saussure, Heidegger, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Kojève

Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan (París, 13 de abril de 1901 – 9 de septiembre de 1981). Psicoanalista francés. Médico psiquiatra de profesión, es mejor conocido por su trabajo que subvirtió el campo del psicoanálisis. Es considerado uno de los analistas más influyentes después de Sigmund Freud.

Buscó reorientar el psicoanálisis hacia la obra original de Freud, de cuyo sentido consideraba que el psicoanálisis post-freudiano se había desviado cayendo en una lógica a veces biologicista, u objetivadora de la realidad. Lacan acusó a muchos de los psicoanalistas coetáneos por haber distorsionado y parcializado la teoría de Freud. Reinterpretó y amplió la práctica psicoanalítica, construyendo una lectura freudiana del estructuralismo. Incorporó además nociones de origen lingüístico, filosófico y topológico que lo llevaron a redefinir muchos de los principales términos del léxico psicoanalítico y a formular la tesis por la que se lo identifica.

“El inconsciente está estructurado ‘como’ un lenguaje“, con esta frase Lacan quiere volver a la concepción de inconsciente propuesta por Freud, ya no en la lógica de los teóricos de las relaciones objetales que intentan dar un lugar al inconsciente. Con esta frase Lacan pone al inconsciente en la imposibilidad de representar los Objetos reales de manera absoluta en el lenguaje. Lo inconsciente remitiría a lo no-dicho en el lenguaje.

Las nociones lingüísticas tomadas de Ferdinand de Saussure se hacen en su obra aplicables a la relectura de Freud. Modificando algunas de las fórmulas relativas al significante, Lacan inserta el concepto de lógica del significante para reexplicar la teoría freudiana. Su obra ha despertado interés en otros campos además del psicoanálisis, particularmente en la lingüística, la teoría crítica y en el postestructuralismo.

La importancia de lo lingüístico (si bien, en términos estrictos, Lacan denomina “lingüistería” a su concepción del lenguaje) en la reformulación lacaniana del psicoanálisis lo llevó a modificar numerosas ideas de la práctica clínica y a proponer un complejo esquema de constitución psíquica del hombre. El yo se constituye en torno a un reconocimiento en torno a la imagen del otro o en su imagen en el espejo. A esta instancia Lacan la llamó el Estadio del espejo.

Con todo, afirmó reiteradamente que su intención era refinar y mejorar el marco original de las obras de Freud: es famosa su boutade de que quien quiera ser lacaniano es libre de serlo, pero que él mismo se consideraba freudiano.

Su obra, lejos de haber cosechado aceptación universal, es fuente de grandes controversias (incluso dentro de la comunidad psicoanalítica). Los filósofos Slavoj Zizek y Alan Badiou han sido algunos de sus más fuertes defensores. En contrapartida, Lacan fue objeto de críticas epistemológicas de los físicos Alan Sokal y Jean Bricmont así como del lingüista Noam Chomsky, y filosóficas por parte de Jacques Derrida y de autores feministas. Aunque para aseverar esto de la posición de Derrida respecto a Lacan es indispensable revisar algunos textos del filósofo de la deconstrucción, tales como “¿Y mañana qué?” escrito en coautoría con la famosa psicoanalista e historiadora Elizabeth Roudinesco. Más allá de las críticas, resulta indiscutible su fuerte influencia en la práctica del psicoanálisis en algunos países europeos y latinoamericanos. Sus concepciones han dado pie a numerosas escuelas de orientación lacaniana en países como Brasil, Francia y Argentina.

Tabla de contenidos [ocultar] 1 Vida 1.1 Inicios 1.2 Después de la IPA 2 Ideas 2.1 Inconsciente estructurado 2.1.1 Lo Real, lo Imaginario y lo Simbólico 2.2 Estadio del espejo 2.3 El Otro 2.4 Pulsiones 2.5 Goce vs. deseo-placer 2.6 La Topología en Lacan 3 Práctica psicoanalítica 4 Controversias 4.1 Ciencias exactas y naturales 4.2 Críticas 4.3 Feminismo y post-feminismo 5 Bibliografía 5.1 Ediciones de la obra de Lacan 5.2 Bibliografía analítica 6 Referencias 7 Véase también 8 Enlaces externos 8.1 Vídeos

Vida [editar]

Inicios [editar]

Lacan emprendió el estudio de medicina en 1920 y se especializó en psiquiatría desde 1926. En esta época inició su propio análisis con Rudolph Loewenstein, que continuó hasta 1938. Lacan era muy activo en el mundo de los escritores, artistas e intelectuales parisienses de la época: fue amigo de André Breton, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí y Picasso ^{[cita requerida]}(del cual fue médico), y también participó en el mouvement Psyché fundado por Maryse Choisy. Contribuyó en numerosas publicaciones surrealistas y estuvo presente en la primera lectura pública del Ulises de James Joyce. En sus estudios mostró particular interés en el trabajo filosófico de Martin Heidegger, y participó en los seminarios sobre Hegel de Alexandre Kojève junto a muchos otros intelectuales de la época.

En 1936 presentó su primer ensayo analítico sobre ‘el estadio del espejo’ en el Congreso de la International Psychoanalitical Asociation en Marienbad. Fue enlistado para servir en el ejército francés tras la ocupación alemana de Francia y fue destacado al hospital militar Val-de-Grâce en París. Al término de la guerra Lacan visitó Inglaterra para atender un curso de cinco semanas, y ahí conoció a los analistas ingleses Wilfred Bion, John Rickman, así como entabló una fructífera correspondencia con Winnicott. El trabajo analítico de Bion en grupos contribuyó a su énfasis posterior en este tipo de trabajo (a estos grupos de estudio se les llamaba cartels en Francia) como una estructura utilizada para avanzar el trabajo teórico en el psicoanálisis.

En el otoño de 1953 inició un seminario semanal en el Hospital Sainte-Anne de París, instando lo que el describía como ‘un retorno a Freud’, en particular a la concentración de Freud en la naturaleza lingüística de la sintomatología psicológica. El seminario resultó muy influyente en la vida cultural parisina así como en la teoría y la práctica clínica psicoanalíticas, atraía grandes asistencias y continuó por casi treinta años. Fue expulsado junto a a Lagache y Françoise Dolto de la IPA (International Psychoanalitical Asociation) por haberse quejado de que ésta, pese a mantener una supuesta fidelidad a la teoría freudiana, en lo efectivo tergiversaba continuamente al psicoanálisis. Posteriormente, Lacan se constituyó como el maestro del psicoanálisis de corriente francesa. Fundó la Sociedad Francesa de Psicoanálisis junto con D.Lagache, J. Favez-Boutonier, R. Lausanne y F. Dolto.

Después de la IPA [editar]

En 1953, tras ser expulsado junto a Lagache y Françoise Dolto de la SPP (Sociedad Psicoanalítica Parisina) y de la Sociedad Psicoanalítica Internacional, Lagache y Lacan fundaron la Sociedad Francesa de Psicoanálisis. Lacan se convirtió en el maestro de la corriente francesa del psicoanálisis. Como vehículo de expresión fundó la revista Scilicet y participó de Anthologie.

El Seminario, que ofreció en público entre 1953 y 1979, se constituye como uno de sus más importantes legados, aunque está compuesto básicamente por las transcripciones de las grabaciones magnetofónicas obtenidas de su propia voz, lo que, junto con un estilo sumamente barroco y eventualmente complicado, ha generado la impresión de una dificultad suma por entender de lo que se trata su obra. Algunos de los veinticinco volúmenes del seminario han sido “establecidos” por Jaques-Alain Miller, fundador de la Asociación Mundial de Psicoanálisis y de quien Lacan decía sabía interrogarle . El vigesimosexto ha sido llamado el “silencioso” debido a la imposibilidad de hablar que padeció Lacan desde 1978.

Otro de sus grandes compendios lo constituyen los “Escritos”, reunidos y editados en 1966 por Françoise Wahl.

A partir de 1974, siendo Director del Departamento de Psicoanálisis de la Universidad de París VIII, comenzó a trabajar en la preservación de la importancia de la teoría de Freud en el movimiento psicoanalítico, basando progresivamente su teoría en los matemas, que constituyen una formalización de la lógica de lo inconsciente.

A menudo se considera que Lacan trabajó también como psicólogo experimental, aunque esto es incorrecto. Las observaciones experimentales comentadas en sus obras fueron tomas de investigaciones en chimpancés y humanos de Henri Wallon en 1931.^[1] Lacan reinterpreta estas experiencias, al punto que las conclusiones de Lacan difieren notablemente de las conclusiones originales.

A edad avanzada sufrió trastornos cerebrales, afasia parcial y cáncer de colon. Pero de igual manera seguía trabajando.

Ideas [editar]

Lacan retoma la teoría psicoanalítica de Freud para desarrollarla incorporando elementos del estructuralismo, la lingüística (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson), de la filosofía (Kojève, Sartre), de la fenomenología (Husserl), de corrientes existencialistas diversas a las sartreanas (Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty), de la antropología (Lévi-Strauss) así como elementos de las matemáticas, por ejemplo la topología combinatoria (banda de Moebius y el toro), la teoría de los nudos, la geometría, la teoría de juegos y la teoría de números.

Inconsciente estructurado [editar]

Una de las primeras hipótesis fuertes de Lacan es que lo inconsciente está estructurado como un lenguaje y opera combinatoriamente por los mismos procesos que generan la metonimia y la metáfora. Entiéndase bien: no quiere decir que se reduzca a un lenguaje. Un ejemplo “simple” de lo antedicho son los ensueños (imágenes oníricas); éstos son como metáforas de deseos reprimidos. Explica que la materialidad del pensar está dada por la materialidad de los significantes, y las actividades mentales de la combinatoria de significantes que configuran al pensar.

Banda de Möbius

Lacan, con Freud, considera que el ser humano, además de estar regido por los instintos, también lo está por las pulsiones. A diferencia de los instintos, las pulsiones carecen de objetos predeterminados; esto hace que el ser humano no quede encerrado en esquemas o estereotipos simples de conducta; el ser humano, al ser pulsional, supera el mero sistema de “estímulo respuesta” que caracteriza a los otros animales (en los primates superiores -chimpancés etc-, ya se observan primordios de pulsiones).

Refuerza la idea freudiana de que lo inconsciente, lejos de ser algo subconsciente, es algo que se da en un plano que no es subyacente a la consciencia y demuestra esta relación entre los planos de lo consciente y lo inconsciente con la incorporación del objeto topológico denominado banda de Möbius.

Lo Real, lo Imaginario y lo Simbólico [editar]

Nudo borromeo

Explica la constitución subjetiva como una estructura dinámica organizada en tres registros. Lacan formuló los conceptos de lo real, lo imaginario y lo simbólico para describir estos tres nudos de la constitución del sujeto. Estos tres registros se hallan imbricados según la forma de un nudo borromeo, (o, nudo Borromi): El desanudamiento de cualquiera de los tres provoca el desanudamiento de los otros dos. Se trata de otra herramienta conceptual típica de la topología combinatoria, como lo es la ya referida Banda de Möbius.

Registro de lo real

Lo real es aquello que no se puede expresar como lenguaje, lo que no se puede decir, no se puede representar, porque al re-presentarlo se pierde la esencia de éste, es decir, el objeto mismo. Por ello, lo Real está siempre presente pero continuamente mediado mediante lo imaginario y lo simbólico.

Registro de lo imaginario

Lo imaginario está constituído en un proceso que requiere una cierta enajenación estructural, es el reino de la identificación espacial que inicia en el estadio del espejo y es instrumental en el desarrollo de la agencia psíquica. Es en este proceso de formación que el sujeto puede identificar su imagen como el ‘yo’, diferenciado del otro y en relación con el objeto a. Lo que se designa como ‘yo’ es formado a través de lo que es el otro —en otras palabras, de la imagen en el espejo. Es la forma primitiva de pensamiento simbólico.

Registro de lo simbólico

Lo imaginario, o aspecto no-lingüístico de la psique, formula el conocimiento primitivo del yo, en tanto lo simbólico, término que utilizaba para la colaboración lingüística (lenguaje verbal coherente), genera una reflexión a nivel comunitario del conocimiento primitivo del yo y crea el primer conjunto de reglas que gobiernan el comportamiento e integran a cada sujeto en la cultura. Constituye el registro más evolucionado y es el que tipifica al ser humano adulto. Lacan considera que el lenguaje construye al sujeto y el humano padece este lenguaje porque le es necesario y le aporta a cada sujeto una calidad heurística (con el lenguaje simbólico se piensa, con este lenguaje se razona, con tal lenguaje existe comunicación -simbólica- entre los humanos).

Lo que se convierte en el Sujeto propiamente se desarrolla mediante su incepción en el orden Simbólico, momento en el cual el infante adquiere la habilidad de utilizar el lenguaje —es decir-, de materializar su deseo mediante el discurso.

Estadio del espejo [editar]

Lacan descubre (casi paralelamente a Wallon) que la percepción que cada ser humano tiene de sí, su sí-mismo (Selbst en la terminología de C.G.Jung) es congruente con la noción de su ego y que esta imagen de sí, esta noción que cada ser humano tiene de sí, o ego, noción de su apariencia corporal completa y de su personalidad… sólo se logra a temprana edad viéndose reflejado en un semejante, a este momento se le llama estadio del espejo. El yo (o, ego) es (inicialmente) un otro, con tal descubrimiento puede decir Lacan: el sujeto se constituye en y por un otro semejante. El estadio del espejo está predeterminado genéticamente en los humanos y es perfectamente corroborable en condiciones científicas de experimentación (semeja en muchos aspectos al imprinting (grabación, troquelado) que en etología ha descubierto Konrad Lorentz).

El estadio del espejo es descrito en el ensayo de Lacan “El estadio del espejo como formador de función del yo”, el primero de sus Escritos, considerado uno de sus trabajos más importantes.

Algunos lo ponen crudamente como el momento en el que el niño se ‘reconoce’ a sí mismo(a) en la imagen del espejo, pero esto no se apega a la idea de Lacan y hace confusa la terminología. El énfasis de Lacan se concentra en la identificación con una imagen o entidad exterior inducida mediante, como él lo pone, “insuficiencia de anticipación –y que crea para el sujeto, atrapado en la atracción de la identificación espacial, la sucesión de fantasías que se extienden a partir de una imagen-cuerpo fragmentada a una forma en su totalidad que llamaré ortopédica– y, por último, a la suposición de la armadura en la entidad alienante, que marcará con su estructura rígida todo el desarrollo mental del sujeto”. Es la Función Paterna lo que permite que el infante sea un sujeto, lo más libre posible, con un pensar coherente lo más propio posible… y al mismo tiempo, por ser de pensar coherente, que le permita relacionarse positivamente mediante símbolos con el otro. La imposición de La Ley, ha descubierto Freud y lo corrobora Lacan, permite además la exogamia, y, así, la persistencia de la especie humana.

Es significativo que este proceso de identificación es el primer paso para la constitución del sujeto porque todo lo que le sigue -la transición hacia el orden imaginario y el orden simbólico- está basado en este reconocimiento equivocado (méconnaissance): este es el proceso que Lacan detecta en cada identificación posterior con otra persona, la identidad o mecanismos parecidos a lo largo de la vida del sujeto. Es el inicio de un proceso que dura toda la vida y que consiste en la identificación de uno mismo en términos del otro. Más aún: para que el ego plasmado o constituido durante el estadio del espejo pueda devenir sujeto se hace necesario luego el clivaje impuesto desde la función paterna, desde una de las instancias del Otro.

Los estudios de Wallon y los de Lacan en cuanto a la autopercepción humana a través de la imagen reflejada se anticiparon más de treinta años a los de la psicología evolutiva al respecto, recién en en 1964 el estadounidense Gordon Gallup efectuó el llamado test del espejo, aunque significativamente omitió hacer cita de los trabajos precedentes realizados por Wallon y Lacan.

El Otro [editar]

En contraste con los ego-psicólogos angloamericanos de la época, tal cual se ha visto Lacan considera al yo como algo constituido en el campo del “Otro“, es decir, en la concepción de lo externo. Lacan argumenta que pensar el yo como una fuerza coherente con control sobre la psique de una persona difiere de lo planteado por Freud. Para Lacan, el yo permanece en conflicto interno permanente, sólo soportable mediante el autoengaño.

Su teoría del yo objetificado estaba inspirada en el pensamiento de Ferdinand de Saussure respecto a la relación entre el significado y el significante -el papel del lenguaje y las referencias en el pensamiento eran centrales a sus formulaciones, en especial la de lo Simbólico.

Pulsiones [editar]

Como Freud, considera que el comportamiento humano está regido por pulsiones, que se relacionan con el pensamiento heurístico y lo diferencian del resto de las especies. Es por esto que el humano no queda encerrado en el esquema de “estímulo respuesta” que caracteriza a los otros animales. La articulación de la pulsión en el registro simbólico constituye lo que Lacan denomina deseo.

El sujeto deseante se adscribe a la cultura, en la medida que exista un objeto “ideal” perdido, al que llama objeto a. Esta instancia mítica, es la que Lacan denomina como S1 (significante del deseo de la madre), la que se relaciona con los postulados psicoanalíticos de la lógica de la castración.

El sujeto en la medida que se adscribe la interdicción de la ley paterna, entra a la mediatez de la cultura. El objeto a se pierde, cuando intenta dar cuenta de éste, ya que al hacerlo sabe que esa instancia mítica de S1 está perdida. En ese proceso, el sujeto entra a la lógica de la castración, al dar cuenta que “existe alguien, o algo” que permite “volver” a la instancia mítica de inmediatez y de goce. Por ende, S2 sería lo que Lacan llama la Metáfora del nombre-del-padre. Un representante que permite al sujeto entrar a lo simbólico y a la cadena significante. Que intenta de por si dar sentido a ese S1 que no puede presentarse. Ese ideal perdido y causal de deseo llamado objeto a.

Goce vs. deseo-placer [editar]

Otro de los aportes de Lacan es la distinción que realiza entre los términos goce y deseo-placer. Aunque ambos parecen semejantes, son radicalmente distintos y tienen consecuencias muy diferentes: el término goce se refiere a las actitudes en las cuales el sujeto pierde su cuota de libertad; el término deseo asociado con el placer, en cambio, se refiere a las conductas que dejan de estar apegadas cerradamente a un objeto determinado, permitiendo al sujeto ejercer su libertad.

La Topología en Lacan [editar]

Lacan para dar cuenta del inconsciente, en parte, se apoya en una rama de la matemática y la geometría, llamada Topología; la cual estudia el fenómeno de transformación de ciertos cuerpos geométricos (tal como la Esfera, el “Toro”, el “Cross-Cap”, y la “Botella de Klein”, Banda de Moebius; y el “NUDO”), y es una geometría que se apoya en la cualidad (y no en la mensurabilidad). Y como una manera de transmitir algo de lo que no se puede transmitir a través de la matemática, lo que él llama “matema” A partir de esto puede dar cuenta de una geometría del sujeto, al jugarse lo que es la superficie, la línea, el agujero y el punto; en relación a lo que él llamó el “parletre”(parlaser o parlaestar), es decir, a lo que dice el sujeto, a los cortes que se producen en la linealidad de lo que dice, agujereandolo, en relación a su “cuerpo”, a ese “yo”(Je) que es otro. Encontrando como mejor objeto para esto el nudo borromeo, cuya principal carácteristica es que al cortarse uno los otros se separan. Como una manera en como se anudan los tres registro real, simbólico e imaginario (R.S.I.).

Práctica psicoanalítica [editar]

Lacan extiende el campo del psicoanálisis en el tratamiento de distintas configuraciones del padecimiento psíquico (originalmente creado para tratar las distintas formas de neurosis) al tratamiento de las distintas formas de psicosis. Aunque el mismo Lacan pone énfasis en que, para el psicoanálisis, psicosis, neurosis y perversión son estructuras subjetivas, no enfermedades mentales que una terapéutica pueda “normalizar” ni “curar”. Lacan explica la génesis de las psicosis durante la infancia a partir del recurso a un mecanismo de defensa que llama forclusión del nombre del padre: en una determinada relación entre los padres y el infante por la cual se instaura una legalidad simbólica distinta a la que define la neurosis, quedando atrapado en el estadio del espejo que se manifiesta en distintas formas de psicosis. Sin embargo, la psicología cognitiva y la psiquiatría común rechazan la explicación psicoanalítica de estas enfermedades así como el psicoanálisis rechaza gran parte de las explicaciones que dan los de la llamada psicología cognitiva y los de la psiquiatría común.

También Lacan ha sido uno de los primeros en estudiar la patología conocida como caso límite (borderline), entendiéndola como una forma de psicosis en la cual el afectado mantiene un anclaje con el principio de realidad mediante un proceso llamado synthome. Obviamente esta explicación psicoanálitica también es rechazada por la psiquiatría común.

Lacan rechaza la denominación de “paciente” para quien sufre de problemas psíquicos, sosteniendo que el supuesto paciente es protagonista durante la terapia y debe adoptar un rol activo respecto a sí mismo, convirtiéndose en “analizante” de su propio pensamiento. El método psicoanalítico lacaniano se aproxima a la mayéutica de Sócrates: el psicoanalista reflexiona con el analizante el discurso para que éste llegue a replantearlo y logre acceder a la abreacción mediante a un procesamiento, reconocimiento y verbalización de afectos traumáticos que durante la dolencia se han encontrado reprimidos en lo inconsciente, quedando así curado como resultado de su propia acción.^{[cita requerida]}. Para Lacan el tiempo de duración de una sesión no está fijado de antemano, ya que la finalización de la misma es considerada una intervención del analista que es preciso evitar. La sesión puede durar 20 o 30 minutos o apenas algunos minutos, hasta que se hace presente el objeto a, esto es: cuando durante la sesión aparece un signo importante -por ejemplo una palabra importante, clave-, en tales oportunidades se interrumpe la sesión para que el analizante pueda considerar aquello que ha expresado.

Controversias [editar]

Ciencias exactas y naturales [editar]

La psicología cognitiva critica a Lacan por haber retomado ideas de Sigmund Freud previamente refutadas por la investigación experimental ^[2] y por reinterpretarlas a partir de las teorías de la lingüística de Saussure, que también habían sido refutadas con anterioridad por la lingüística moderna^[3] (ver Noam Chomsky).

Alan Sokal y Jean Bricmont en su trabajo sobre filosofía de la ciencia califican la obra de Lacan como pseudocientíficas por usar el lenguaje matemático en su teoría del psicoanálisis de forma incorrecta y totalmente fuera de contexto para aparentar carácter científico.^[4]

Críticas [editar]

Aunque Lacan es considerado con frecuencia parte del campo posmoderno, dentro del mismo ha encontrado también cuestionamiento: Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze y Jacques Derrida. Éste último (considerado una estrella posmoderna aunque el mismo no se asociaba con el término) elaboró una crítica concienzuda de los escritos analíticos de Lacan, desarmando su aproximación estructuralista al psicoanálisis. En particular, Derrida critica la teoría lacaniana por el falocentrismo heredado de Freud, ejemplificado primordialmente en su concepción del falo como el ’significante primario’ que determina el orden social de los significantes. Se puede decir que gran parte de la crítica de Derrida a Lacan lo es en realidad de los elementos freudianos presentes en su obra; por ejemplo, Derrida deconstruye la concepción freudiana de la ‘envidia del pene’, de la que se desprende la subjetividad femenina, para mostrar que la primacía del falo masculino implica una jerarquía entre la presencia y la ausencia fálica que en última instancia se colapsa en sí misma.

Feminismo y post-feminismo [editar]

Sin embargo, se puede decir que Lacan mantenía una relación complicada con el feminismo y el post-feminismo en cuanto que, aun cuando es criticado por heredar de Freud una supuesta posición falocéntrica en sus teorías psicoanalíticas, también se considera que presentó un retrato cabal de los prejuicios de género en la sociedad.

Lacan utiliza una controvertida frase; “La mujer no existe” (tachando la palabra La). Esta formulación en Lacan apunta al derrumbe de la mítica concepción cultural de la mujer como entregadora de goce. Jacqueline Rose Feminista y Lacaniana nos dice que “la mujer” como categoría absoluta y garantizadora de fantasías es falsa.

Así como Rose, existen representantes cercanas al psicoanálisis lacaniano ([Kristeva, Irigaray] que sostienen afirmaciones similares, no obstante, realizan gestos para derrocar los sistemas falocéntricos, en este sentido no se trata de negar lo lacaniano o acusarle de misógino, sino que pensar lo femenino desde otro lugar.

Bibliografía [editar]

Ediciones de la obra de Lacan [editar]

• Escritos
  • Escritos 1, Siglo XXI, Buenos Aires, 1985.
  • Escritos 2, Siglo XXI, México, 1984.
• El seminario, Paidós, Buenos Aires. ISBN 978-84-7509-088-7
  • Libro 1: “Los escritos técnicos de Freud”, 1981. ISBN 978-950-12-3971-3
  • Libro 2: “El yo en la teoría de Freud y en la técnica psicoanalítica”, 1983. ISBN 978-950-12-3972-0
  • Libro 3: “Las Psicosis”, 1984. ISBN 978-950-12-3970-6
  • Libro 4: “La relación de objeto”, 1995. ISBN 978-950-12-3904-1
  • Libro 5: “Las formaciones del inconsciente”, 1999. ISBN 978-950-12-3975-1
  • Libro 6: “El deseo y su interpretación”, inédito.
  • Libro 7: “La ética del psicoanálisis”, 1989. ISBN 978-950-12-3977-5
  • Libro 8: “La transferencia”, 2003. ISBN 978-950-12-3976-8
  • Libro 9: “La identificación”, inédito.
  • Libro 10: “La angustia”, 2005. ISBN 978-950-12-3978-2
  • Libro 11: “Cuatro conceptos fundamentales del Psicoanálisis”, 1987. ISBN 978-84-7509-432-8
  • Libro 12: “Problemas cruciales para el psicoanálisis”, inédito.
  • Libro 13: “El objeto del psicoanálisis”, inédito.
  • Libro 14: “La lógica del fantasma”, inédito.
  • Libro 15: “El acto psicoanalítico”, inédito.
  • Libro 16: “De un otro al Otro”, inédito.
  • Libro 17: “El reverso del Psicoanálisis”, 1992. ISBN 978-950-12-3987-4
  • Libro 18: “De un discurso que no fuese semblante”, inédito.
  • Libro 19: “… o peor”, inédito.
  • Libro 20: “Aun”, 1982. ISBN 978-950-12-3990-4
  • Libro 21: “Los desengañados se engañan o los nombres del padre”, inédito.
  • Libro 22: “R.S.I.”, inédito.
  • Libro 23: “El sinthome”, 2007. ISBN 978-950-12-3979-9
  • Libro 24: “Lo no sabido que sabe de la una-equivocación se ampara en la morra”, inédito.
  • Libro 25: “Momento de concluir”, inédito.
  • Libro 26: “La topología y el tiempo”, inédito.
  • Libro 27: “Disolución”, inédito.
• El triunfo de la religión, Paidos, 2005.
• De los nombres del padre, Paidos, 2005.
• Mi enseñanza, Paidos, 2006.
• La familia, Argonauta.
• De la psicosis paranoica en sus relaciones con la personalidad, Siglo XXI, Buenos Aires, 1976.
• Momentos cruciales de la experiencia analítica, Manantial, Buenos Aires, 1987.
• Intervenciones y textos 1, Manantial, Buenos Aires, 1999.
• Intervenciones y textos 2, Manantial, Buenos Aires, 1988.
• Ornicar, 3, Petrel, 1981.

Bibliografía analítica [editar]

• Chemama, Roland & Vandermersch, Bernard (2004), Diccionario del psicoanálisis, Segunda edición revisada y ampliada. Buenos Aires & Madrid: Amorrortu editores. ISBN 950-518-105-1.

Referencias [editar]

1. ↑ Dylan Evans. From Lacan to Darwin. University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.
2. ↑ Adolf Grünbaum (1986). Precis of The foundations of psychoanalysis: A philosophical critique. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 9.
   David S. Holmes (1990), The evidence for repression: An examination of sixty years of research. Publicado en Repression and Dissociation.
   John Bulevich, Henry Roeidger, David Balota (2003). Can episodic memories be suppressed? Psychonomic Society. Vancouver, Canada.
   Daniel Schacter (2001). Suppression of unwanted memories: repression revisited? The Lancet 357.
   McNally, R.J., Susan A. Clancy, and Daniel L. Schacter (2001). Directed forgetting of trauma cues in adults reporting repressed or recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 110.
   Maryanne Garry, Elizabeth Loftus (2004). I am Freud’s brain. Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
3. ↑ Noam Chomsky (1968). Language and Mind.
   Noam Chomsky (1972). Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar.
4. ↑ Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont (1999). Imposturas intelectuales. Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós Ibérica, S.A.

Véase también [editar]

Deconstrucción Estadio del espejo Falo Forclusión Sigmund Freud Historia del psicoanálisis La Ley (psicoanálisis) Matema Nombres del Padre

Objeto a El Otro (psicoanálisis) Postestructuralismo Psicoanálisis Psicoterapia Pulsión Lo real, lo imaginario y lo simbólico Slavoj Zizek

Enlaces externos [editar]

Wikiquote

• Wikiquote alberga frases célebres de o sobre Jacques Lacan.

Web de la ELP Ecole Lacanienne de Psychanalyse http://www.ecole-lacanienne.net

• El sitio web de Jacques Lacan (vida y obra)
• Entrevista a Jacques Lacan en Antroposmoderno.com Por Madeleine Chapsal
• Vida de Jacques Lacan en Antroposmoderno.com Por el director de Antroposmoderno, Lic. Arturo Blanco.
• Artículos sobre Lacan, buscador, articulaciones lacanianas de psicoanalistas
• Capítulo estadounidense de la AMP con articulos de Jaques Alain Miller, Alan Badiou y Slavoj Zizek (inglés)
• La enseñanza de Lacan. Seminarios, artículos, traducciones
• Web de la Asociación Mundial de Psicoanálisis/ Escuela de Lacan
• Web de la Escuela Lacaniana de Psicoanálisis
• Blog oficial de la Escuela Lacaniana de Psicoanálisis
• Lectura del Seminario 10, La Angustia, de Jacques Lacan

Vídeos [editar]

• Jacques Lacan 1
• Jacques Lacan 2
• Jacques Lacan 3
• Jacques Lacan 4. Lo Real se pierde en la relación sexual

 

Obtenido de “http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan“

Categorías: Filósofos de Francia | Críticos de la Modernidad | Nacidos en 1901 | Fallecidos en 1981 | Psicoanalistas