Jacques Lacan

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (French pronunciation: /ʒak lakɑ̃/; Paris, April 13, 1901-ibid., September 9, 1981), better known as Jacques Lacan, was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst known for the theoretical contributions he made to psychoanalysis, based on from the analytical experience and reading of Sigmund Freud, combined with elements of philosophy, structuralism, structural linguistics and mathematics.

Lacan studied medicine at the University of Paris and specialized in psychiatry. He earned his doctorate in 1932. In the 1930s he became involved with the psychoanalytic and surrealist movements. Around 1934, while he was in analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, he joined the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP), where he became a full member in 1938. At the same time, he was an active participant in Parisian intellectual life, relating to surrealist artists such as André Breton and Salvador Dalí, and was interested in the thought of Martin Heidegger and G. W. F. Hegel, whose works will be influential on his.

After World War II, his teaching of psychoanalysis became important. His demand for a "return to Freud", his opposition to other Freudian currents (especially Ego Psychology), as well as his theoretical evolution, caused a split within the SPP in 1953. Lacan continued his research and gave seminars between 1953 and 1980, almost until his death: first, at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, then at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and finally at the Faculty of Law opposite the Panthéon. Lacan also founded and directed his own psychoanalytic institution: the Freudian School of Paris (EFP), which functioned between 1964 and 1980 and was dissolved by himself after a series of internal disputes. His Writings (1966) led him to gain notoriety in France and to be a dominant figure in that country's cultural life in the 1970s.

Lacan's work explores the importance of the Freudian unconscious within analytic theory and practice, in connection with a wide range of disciplines. Particularly noteworthy is the philosophical dimension of his teaching and his distancing from biological anchorage; Unlike Freud, who had voluntarily distanced himself from philosophical thought, Lacan took up philosophical speculation and reintroduced it into psychoanalysis. His conception of the unconscious as an effect of language, as well as his structuring based on it, derive from it. Lacan also added his own conceptualization based on the investigations of his time (such as structuralism, linguistics and certain branches of mathematics such as topology). Consequently, he became one of the great interpreters of Freud and gave rise to his own psychoanalytic current: "Lacanism".

He was a controversial figure who left his mark on the French and international intellectual landscape, both through the followers he aroused and the rejections he provoked. He is largely associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements, and has had influence on linguistics, film theory and literary criticism.

Biographical information

Early Years

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was born in Paris on April 13, 1901, into a Catholic and bourgeois family of the Parisian middle class. He was the eldest of the three children of Émilie Baudry (1876-1948) and Alfred Lacan (1873-1960). His father was a commercial representative of oil and soap factories, and his mother, highly educated in Christianity and ardent mysticism, helped her husband with the business and the education of their children. In 1902, the couple had a second son, Raymond, who died two years later from hepatitis. He was followed by Madeleine, born in 1903, and Marc-François, in 1908.

The Collège Stanislas of Paris in the early twentieth century.

The family lived in good conditions on the Boulevard du Beaumarchais until they moved to the Montparnasse area. The young Lacan attended the Collège Stanislas in Paris between 1907 and 1918, and his interest in philosophy led him to delve into the work of Baruch Spinoza, especially his Ethics, one of the consequences of which was his abandonment of religious faith for atheism. There were tensions in the family around this issue and Lacan regretted not having persuaded his brother to take a different path. However, in 1924 his parents had moved to Boulogne and he lived in a garret in Montmartre; his brother dedicated himself to the monastic life and, in 1929, he entered Hautecombe Abbey.

In 1919, Lacan began studying medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris. Shortly thereafter, in 1921, he was rejected for military service because of his thinness. with the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde. He became interested in Dadaism and had contact with the first surrealism through the magazine Littérature . He met André Breton and Philippe Soupault, and bumped into James Joyce at Adrienne Monnier's bookstore, where the first readings of passages from Ulysses in French and English took place, shortly before its publication by Shakespeare and Company. In 1923 he first heard of the theories of Sigmund Freud, but his attention was directed to the ideas of Charles Maurras, whom he admired as a teacher of the language and whom he met several times while participating occasionally at Action Française meetings. His rejection of religion and his abandonment of faith were reinforced when he began to read the works of Friedrich Nietzsche in German. Around 1925, he wrote a text that praised the thought of the philosopher that was read by his brother at the banquet on Saint Charlemagne's Day, which caused an uproar with the Stanislas authorities.

In 1926, Lacan began his specialization in psychiatry and, that same year, he co-authored his first publication for the Revue Neurologique. The work stemmed from his first presentation of a patient to Théophile Alajouanine and other doctors, and dealt with the pyramidal syndrome. Between 1927 and 1928, he did his clinical residency under the direction of Henri Claude at the Hospital Sainte-Anne, the main psychiatric hospital in central Paris, at the same time as his friend Henri Ey. When he was an intern at Saint-Anne, he began an affair with Marie-Thérese Bergerot, to whom he dedicated his 1932 doctoral thesis with a line of thanks in Greek; the other dedication was to his brother. Around 1928, he was co-author, together with Maurice Trénel, of another publication for the Revue Neurologique —“Abasia en un traumatizada de guerra”— and of a text on the "hallucinatory delusion" with Jean Lévy-Valensi and M. Meignant. Between 1928 and 1929 he collaborated in five other neurological studies based on psychiatric cases, and worked in the special infirmary attached to the police prefecture directed by Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1928-1929) and then at the Henri-Rousselle Hospital (1929-1930 and 1930-1931). His love life also had changes in this period: in 1929 he fell in love with Olesia Sienkiewicz, the ex-wife of his friend Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and maintained a loving relationship with her and Marie-Thérese until he met his first wife, Marie-Louise Blondin, in 1933.

1930s

Salvador Dalí in 1936.

Lacan became involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the 1930s, associating with exponents such as André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso—for whom he served for a time as personal physician—and publishing in the surrealist magazine Minotaure. The vindication of madness, which had been adopted by Breton as a method, would also be taken up by Lacan. Breton, who in 1927 had exalted the "convulsive beauty" of Jean- Martin Charcot at the La Salpêtrière clinic, considered that "hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon and can from all points of view be considered as a supreme means of expression". This idea heralded Dalí's and Lacan's later conception of paranoia., which the former had judged "as an authentic state of man" in his article "The Rotten Donkey" of 1930. That year, Lacan visited him to speak on the subject and they noted that their points of view coincided: "We had the surprise of desc uber that our opinions were equally opposed, and for the same reasons, to the constitutionally accepted theories then almost unanimously.” The influence of surrealism was decisive for his later work; the historian and psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco observes that this frequentation «led the young Jacques Lacan to carry out, in the mid-1950s, a "return to Freud" as provocative…as the surrealist manifestations had been for French psychiatry in the 1920s. In this sense, Lacan illustrated the words of his friend Henri Ey, acknowledging that it was through surrealism, and not medical literature, as he had for his part discovered the importance of Freudianism".

At the same time, Lacan continued with the final stage of his specialization in psychiatry. In 1930, he traveled to Switzerland to do a two-month residency at the Burghölzli clinic attached to the University of Zurich. In this place Auguste Forel, Carl Gustav Jung and Eugen Bleuler had invented a new approach to madness at the beginning of the century. During his stay, Lacan worked under the direction of Hans Maïer, Bleuler's successor. The following year, back at the Henri-Rousselle Hospital, he obtained his Diplôme de médecin légiste (diploma of medical examiner).) and became a forensic psychiatrist. He published his first doctrinal text — "Structures des psychoses paranoïaques" (1931) — in the magazine Semaine des Hôpitaux de Paris , which showed the influence that the Clérambault's teaching on it. In that text, Lacan introduced a notion of the "structure" of paranoia in a phenomenological sense, and identified three types of paranoid psychoses: the paranoid constitution, the delusion of interpretation, and the delusions of passion. The notion introduced by Lacan displaced the syndrome of mental automatism as a central category in paranoia, and although Lacan acknowledged his debt to Clérambault, his "teacher" accused him of plagiarism. In his Writings , Lacan acknowledges Clérambault as his "only master of psychiatry", noting that it was his teachings that led him to the discovery of Freud's work. Upon his return to the Sainte-Anne Hospital in mid-1931, he began to examine a patient named Marguerite Pantaine-Anzieu, admitted after stabbing actress Huguette Duflos. He nicknamed her Aimée and from her case he began to write his doctoral thesis.

In 1932, Lacan published a translation of Freud's text Über einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität [On some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality] (1922) for the Revue française de psychanalyse, and titled it De quelques mécanismes névrotiques dans la jalousie, la paranoïa et l'homosexualité. In June of that year, he began his analysis training with Rudolph Loewenstein: it lasted until 1938 and ended in failure and a long disagreement between them. Lacan ended the year 1932 with the publication of his thesis De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité [On paranoid psychosis in its relations with personality], for which he was awarded his Diplôme d'État de docteur en médecine (equivalent to a Doctor of Medicine degree). Although the dissemination of the thesis attracted considerable interest in Surrealist circles and Pierre Janet made Favorable reviews of it seem to have had no immediate impact on French psychoanalysis. Lacan went so far as to send a copy to Sigmund Freud in Vienna—his only known instance of direct communication—who acknowledged receipt with a postcard without further comment. As for the Surrealists, in May 1933 René Crevel published an article praising the thesis in Le Surrealisme au service de la Revolution and Paul Éluard dedicated a poem to Aimée. Dalí also acknowledged the thesis in the first issue of the magazine Minotaure of June 1933:

We owe her for the first time a homogeneous and total idea of the homosexual phenomenon outside of the mechanistic miseries in which the current psychiatry is imbued.

The thesis was based mainly on his monitoring of the case Aimée, who Lacan had diagnosed as self-punishing paranoia. Like Freud, he placed paranoia within the psychoses and maintained the notion of "structure": it affected the entire personality of the subject without the organic origin being decisive. In this sense, Roudinesco explains that "in order to understand the coherence of this structure, one must interpret the human meaning of the phenomena that are proper to it, that is to say, define the set of characteristic elements of a psychogenesis of personality. Lacan uses this term instead of psychogenesis to show that the etiology of psychosis is expressed in terms of phenomenological mechanisms that depend exclusively on the specific history of the subject." In a 1933 text, published Under the title "Exposé général de nos travaux scientifiques", Lacan claims that the originality of his work was due to the fact that it was the first attempt in France to study paranoid delusions exhaustively on the basis of an analysis of "concrete history". that year he also published two more works on paranoia in the magazine Minotaure: "Le probleme du style et la conception psychiatrique des formes paranoïaques de l'expérience" and "Motifs du crime paranoiaque: le crime des sœurs Papin»; and he published a sonnet in Le Phare de Neuilly 3/4 under the title “Hiatus Irrationalis.” It will be his only known foray into poetry, in a style reminiscent of the work of Pierre Jean Jouve.

Cover of the 1.a edition of the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807).

In October-November 1933, Alexandre Kojève began giving his seminar on G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit at the École pratique des hautes études. Taught between 1933 and 1939, these seminars represent the starting point of Hegelian studies in France, and they came to acquire notable importance. At that time, Lacan had not yet attended the course, but had begun to become familiar with Hegelian phenomenology through articles by Alexandre Koyré, or other sources, and his influence was already visible in the article he had dedicated to the Papin sisters. His attendance at the seminary began between 1934-1935 and lasted until 1936-1937. Here he met Alexandre Koyré, Raymond Queneau and Georges Bataille, and participated in the meetings of the magazine Recherches Philosophique. Frequently in this circle allowed Lacan to initiate himself into a philosophical modernity that included Edmund Husserl, Friederich Nietzsche, Hege him and Martin Heidegger; an influence that would be fundamental to his work.Together with Kojève, he even agreed, in 1936, to write an article comparing Freud with Hegel; it was to appear in the journal Recherches Philosophique, but it was never published. They were married in January 1934 and made their wedding trip to Italy, where Lacan became fascinated with Rome. The couple had three children: Caroline, born in January 1937, Thibaut, born in August 1939, and Sybille, in November 1940.

In 1934, Lacan became a candidate member of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). He applied for full membership in October of that year while continuing his controversial analysis with Loewenstein. Meanwhile, Lacan had an active role in the SPP, regularly attending scientific meetings and conferences, and playing an instrumental role in the Évolution psychiatrique group. His private psychoanalytic practice began in 1936, while he was still treating patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital. That same year he presented his first analytical report on the "mirror stage" to the Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in Marienbad; the first cross between him and international Freudianism Ernest Jones, who chaired the conference, ended the conference after ten minutes as he was not willing to extend the presentation time established by Lacan. Insulted by this, he left the congress and went to witness the Olympic Games in Berlin.No copy of the original conference remains, since he forgot to deliver his communication; it was only preserved in notes taken by Françoise Dolto.His formulation of the mirror stage theory was based on Henri Wallon's experimental work on child development, supplemented by the teachings on Hegel that he had received from Kojève. It was Wallon and Lucien Febvre who commissioned Lacan for his last important text of the pre-war period: a contribution to the 1938 Encyclopédie française entitled "La Famille". the titular membership (Membre titulaire) of the SPP through Édouard Pichon, despite considerable opposition from many of its core members who were unimpressed by his reformulation of Freudian theory in philosophical terms.

1940s

The SPP ceased to function due to the occupation of France by Nazi Germany in 1940. This meant that many of its members, mainly Jews, fled the country; only Françoise Dolto and Jean Leuba remained. Lacan was called up for military service, serving as an assistant physician at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris while continuing his private psychoanalytic practice. It is known from his correspondence with Sylvain Blondin that his experience with military service was quite negative. During the war he did not publish any publications; he dedicated himself to studying Chinese, for which he graduated from the École spéciale des langues orientales.

His attention was directed mainly to his personal life, since prior to World War II, Lacan had begun to relate to the actress Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), who was then separated from her friend Georges Bataille, but not divorced. She became his mistress at the end of 1938 and, in 1953, his second wife. With Sylvia he found a more bohemian life than with Marie-Louise Blondin, but the relationship was complicated during the war by the threat that Sylvia would be deported for being Jewish: in 1940, while she was pregnant with Judith, she had to live in the free zone. Moved by this, Lacan personally intervened with the authorities to obtain the documents detailing his family origins and destroyed them. However, when Lacan announced to his first wife, then pregnant with Sibylle, that Sylvia was also expecting a child, she told him he filed for divorce. Consequently, in 1941 Lacan moved into an apartment at 5 rue de Lille, where he remained until his death. His first daughter with Sylvia—who she already had another daughter with Bataille named Laurence—, she was born in July of that year and named Judith; she was registered with the surname Bataille since the separation between Lacan and Marie-Louise Blondin did not take place until December 1941. from 1964 he would bear his father's surname. For a long time, at the request of his first wife, Lacan did not reveal to the children of his first marriage the existence of a second home where he raised his daughter and Bataille's, something that brought consequences for both families.

In 1945, the SPP began holding informal meetings in Paris, and resumed their conventional monthly meetings the following year. That year, Lacan visited England for a five-week study tour and inquired about the state of psychiatry. of that country; he visited the Hartfield residence, dedicated to the rehabilitation of ex-prisoners and overseas combatants, and was admired by the principles of group therapy and psychodrama.The analytical work with the groups of Wilfred Bion and John Rickman influenced Lacan; Bion, in particular, contributed to his own later emphasis on study groups as a structure within which to advance the theoretical work of psychoanalysis. Upon his return, Lacan gave a lecture on the subject before the Évolution collective. psychiatrique, which would be published in 1947 under the title La Psychiatrique anglaise et la guerre. In it, Lacan pays homage to the English and contrasts their victory in the war with the experience lived in France in 1940; he further praises the psychiatric methods used in officer selection and psychological testing, which helped produce a democratic army.

Melanie Klein about 1927.

In this period, Lacan also had a theoretical approach to Melanie Klein, in whose postulates he saw a parallel with his own position. In May 1948, he presented a report on aggressiveness to the XI Congress of French-Language Psychoanalysts, where he resumed his previous research integrating some of the Kleinian theses: especially the idea of the «paranoid position» in the constitution of the «I [moi]» and the need to grant a primary place to the « transference" in analytical training. He also came to propose to Klein the translation from German of his essay The psychoanalysis of the child (1932), but the project was cut short since he lost the translation, and this was by Françoise Girard and Jean-Baptiste Boulager.

During the 16th Congress of the IPA held in Zurich in the summer of 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage: The mirror stage as a formator of the ego function [heh] as described reveals it to us in the psychoanalytic experience. In the midst of a climate of ideological warfare between the British Kleinians and the American "Anna Freudians" —the vast majority—, the second generation of French, the followers of Marie Bonaparte, try to occupy a different place. Among them were Daniel Lagache, Sacha Nacht, and Lacan, who was often assisted by her friend Françoise Dolto. Lacan led the French group and gathered around him theorists such as Wladimir Granoff, Serge Leclaire, and François Perrier. In addition, that year the SPP had launched a request for funding for the creation of a Teaching Institute, and Lacan was in charge of largely to draw up the statutes of its Teaching Commission, known as the Reglement et doctrine de la Commission de l'enseignement. To do this, he based himself on Freud's text The question of profane analysis (1926), which states that psychoanalysis should not become a discipline dominated solely by doctors. Lacan stresses the importance of the "fertile core" of the humanities, since knowing them consciously would facilitate the analyst's access to the organization of the unconscious. It is also made clear that the SPP had to comply with French law, which did not recognize psychoanalysis as a distinct specialty; which meant that a lay analyst could only accept an analysand who had been referred to him by an analyst with a medical training.

1950s

Around 1950, Lacan presented a new paper to the XIII Congress of French-Language Psychoanalysts, co-authored with Michel Cenac: Introduction théorique aux fonctions de la psychanalyse en criminologie [Theoretical introduction to the functions of the psychoanalysis in criminology]. The work focused on criminology taking both anthropological - Marcel Mauss and Bronisław Malinowski - and psychoanalytic - Totem and taboo and superego theory - references, and suggested that psychoanalytic dialogue it could facilitate access to the imaginary world of the criminal, which would facilitate the identification of neurotic repressions and stagnations in constitutive development, without dehumanizing the criminal. In this sense, David Macey observes that "in view of Lacan's declared opposition to the "social engineering" associated with Ego Psychology, it is perhaps surprising to find him discussing the reintegration of delinquents into the community". That same year, within the framework of the First World Congress of Psychiatry, Lacan made an intervention in response to the papers by Franz Alexander, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Raymond de Saussure. Here his first references to structural linguistics appeared; Drawing on Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, he insisted that psychology cannot explain language, but rather that it is language that determines psychology. His attacks on Ego psychology continued: he maintained that the ego is the "syndic of the most mobile functions by which man adapts to reality", which has the capacity for illusion and deception, and it is the superstructure involved in social alienation.

With the purchase in 1951 of a rural mansion in Guitrancourt, Lacan established a place for weekend retreats, for work, leisure —including extravagant social events— and for housing his vast library. His art collection included Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde; work that had been hidden in his studio by a removable wooden panel that in its visible part contained an abstract representation of the painting made by André Masson. That year he also attended the IPA Congress held in Amsterdam, his last conference as a member from the institution, and participated in the symposium "Mutual Influences on the Development of the Ego and the Id", much to the exasperation of Marie Bonaparte who chaired the session. He reportedly had private discussions with both Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, but his content is unknown. Meanwhile, Lacan began to give weekly private seminars in Sylvia Bataille's apartment. infinite questioning of the status of truth, of being and of its disclosure—, the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss —from which he deduces the idea of the if symbolic, and his universalist reading of the prohibition of incest and the Oedipus complex—, and the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure —from which he extracts his conception of an unconscious organized as a language and of the signifier. The thought of G.W.F. Hegel also continues to be influential on Lacan.The seminar was made public in 1953 and moved to the Sainte-Anne Hospital, where it was held for ten years.With a total duration of twenty-seven years, the seminar became the main teaching platform for he.

Marie Bonaparte was one of the main opponents of Lacan during her membership of the SPP.

The 1950s were also marked by the controversies that arose within the SPP and which culminated in its split around 1953. Since 1951, the SPP Education Commission had been questioning the "short sessions" of Lacan in his didactic analysis. Lacan defended his technique during a meeting of the SPP held in December, and then in June 1952. There were no texts that favorably argued his practice; Although Logical Time (1945) is usually considered a preceding theorization of Lacan on the subject, it was only in Function and Field of the Word (1953) that he exposed the pragmatic argument of that his technique accelerated the analysis process. In addition, in June 1951 he wrote a text entitled La Psychanalyse, dialectique? in which he defended his use of sessions of variable duration, but it was never published. However, the center of the controversy revolved around the creation of the Institut de Psychanalyse de Paris and the issue of profane analysis. It was about a new analyst training institute proposed by Sacha Nacht—then president of the SPP— in 1952. After being appointed director for a five-year term, Nacht presented the statutes during an SPP meeting in November. The goal was that the title of analyst would only be awarded to those with medical training; This provoked great hostility, especially from Marie Bonaparte who was a lay analyst despite her biological leanings. Nacht's proposals were preceded by a quote from Constantin von Monakow and Raoul Mourgue who suggested that psychoanalysis, like psychiatry and psychology, was a subspecialty within the general discipline of neurobiology: Lacan ironically quoted this at the beginning of Function and field of the word (1953). Finally, in December 1952 the an extraordinary meeting in the SPP where Lagache and Bonaparte voted against Nacht. Following the result, Nacht resigned, but was re-elected interim president, then resigned again at the end of the month. He was eventually succeeded by Lacan, who accepted the position on a temporary basis and stated that he would try to mediate between the various factions of the SPP.

In January 1953, Lacan presented new proposals for the statutes of the institute; they largely resembled those of 1949 and were preceded by a quote from Freud's The Question of Profane Analysis (1926). That same month he was elected president of the SPP, and Bonaparte, who had Originally supported Cenac's candidacy, he began to support Nacht's group. According to Lacan, she changed her position because the statutes she had drawn up for the institute did not mention her name or her honorary functions. His personal hostility towards him was longstanding, although Lacan's comments on Freud's visit to Paris in 1938 indicate that the hostility was mutual. Following Lacan's election to the presidency of the SPP, Nacht became head of the institute and a life member of its board of directors; so its statutes were adopted. On March 4, 1953, Lacan presented an exhibition at the Philosophical College on The individual myth of the neurotic, where he carried out a structural review of the Oedipus complex and enunciated by The expression "father's name" was used for the first time. The next day, the institute began to function: students immediately objected to the curriculum, the amount of fees, and the requirement that they sign an agreement not to describe themselves as psychoanalysts and not practice analysis until authorized by the Teaching Commission. On June 2, during a meeting of the SPP, Cenac accused Lacan of instigating a student revolt and another of Nacht's supporters stated that if it were not for Lacan, there would be no problems in the SPP. The meeting was postponed to June 16 and, after it was resumed, a motion of no confidence against Lacan was approved, which was signed by Pasche, Benassy, Diatkine and Cenac. Finally, Lacan resigned from the presidency, and Lagache, Dolto and Favez-Boutonnier resigned from the SPP in protest. They immediately founded the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP), which was immediately joined by invitation by Blanche Reverchon-Jouve, Angelo Hesnard and René Laforgue; Lacan for his part resigned his membership of the SPP and also joined the SFP. The address of the new company became as follows: president: Lagache; Vice President: Favez-Boutonnier; secretary: Dolto; treasurer: Lacan.

After resigning from the SPP, Lacan was informed by a letter from Ruth Eissler, then the IPA's honorary secretary, that his resignation implied the loss of his IPA membership. Thus, in July 1953 the new group began to seek support for the SFP to be recognized by the IPA; Lacan wrote to Perrotti —president of the Italian Society of Psychoanalysis—, to Balint, to Loewenstein, and later to Hartman. The inaugural meeting of the SFP was opened by Lacan in July with the conference The symbolic, the imaginary and the real, where he exposed a new topic and spoke explicitly of a "return to Freudian texts", noting that said return dated back to the year 1951. That month also held the XVIII Congress of the IPA in London, and a committee was appointed to examine the SFP's application for recognition. The committee consisted of Kurt Eissler, Phyllis Greenacre, W. Hoffer, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, and D.W. Winnicott. Lacan, meanwhile, was working on the establishment of a structural theory of the cure that would be embodied in the essay Function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis, presented at the XVI Congress of Psychoanalysts of Romance Languages held in Rome on September 27, 1953. It was continued in seminars I, Freud's technical writings (1953-1954), II, The self in Freud's theory and psychoanalytic technique (1954-1955), and concluded in a lecture delivered in Vienna in November 1955, under the title The Freudian thing or the meaning of a return to Freud. That year he also published Variantes de la cura-tipo, a text in which he declared his marked opposition to Ego Psychology. The committee's resolution was given before the IPA Congress held in Geneva in 1955: Hartmann announced that it had been concluded that "the Lagache group" should not be recognized as a competent society, since its abilities to The training and teaching were not adequate. The following year, the SFP launched its magazine La Psychanalyse and its first issue was dedicated to Lacan. Among its prominent articles are the Rome Report and a translation of Heidegger's article Logos (1951) by Lacan; he had met the philosopher in Freiburg the previous year and he had been authorized to publish it.In 1959, the SFP renewed its request for affiliation with the IPA and a new committee headed by Pierre Turquet was appointed to investigate the matter.

1960s

Although Lacan had controversies with several members of the IPA, he also cultivated good relations with some of them. One example was his fluid bond with D.W. Winnicott; the letter dated August 1960 is known in which Lacan tells the Englishman his pride in his stepdaughter Laurence Bataille —arrested during the Algerian war for her political connections— and about a nephew who had been sentenced to two months prison for anti-war activities. At the institutional level, the negotiation for the integration of the SFP into the IPA was still underway. By 1961, the Turquet committee's report was presented to the IPA Central Executive, but the resolution was not made public. The document was also made available to the SFP delegation that traveled to Edinburgh to attend the XXII Congress. Finally, in August of that year, the possibility of a progressive reintegration of the SFP into the IPA was determined, but with the condition that Françoise Dolto and Lacan cease to carry out didactic analysis. Lacan's practice —with its controversial sessions of indeterminate duration— and his critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy led to the fact that, in August 1963, the IPA established the condition of that affiliation was contingent on Lacan's exclusion from its list of analysts. Thus, in November of that year, following the SFP's decision to honor the request, Lacan was effectively stripped of the right to conduct didactic analysis and had to He had to interrupt his seminar at the Sainte-Anne Hospital; which forced him to create his own institution to accommodate the many candidates who wished to continue his analysis c on him. He carried it out on June 21, 1964 in the "Foundation Act" of what became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), taking "with him a good number of representatives of the third generation, including Maud and Octave Mannoni, Serge Leclaire, François Perrier, Moustapha Safouan, Jenny Aubry, Piera Aulagnier, Solange Faladé, Jean Clavreul, etc."

Lacan's contact with the works of Gödel and Frege was key to the first recast of his doctrine.

Through the intervention of Fernand Braudel and Louis Althusser, Lacan obtained a lecturing position at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and, in January 1964, began to give his XI seminar on The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, in the Dussane room of the École Normale Supérieure. He began to present his own approach to psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues from the SFP and his lectures also attracted some students from the École Normale: among them Jacques-Alain Miller, who in 1966 would marry Judith Lacan and would become the editor of his father-in-law's seminars. The support that Lacan obtained at the École Normale encouraged him to formalize his theory between 1964 and 1965 in order to avoid that it was the object of "revisions", in the style of those that Freud's work had. This recasting of his doctrine from a "scientization" perspective, arose from his discovery of the work of Gottlob Frege and from his of this with the works published in the magazine Cahiers pour A & # 39; analyze .For this, he relied on the proposals of Alexandre Koyré and Kurt Gödel. From the first he adopted the idea that modern science, founder of the cogito , had dramatically devalued the notion of being; from the second he took his second theorem of incompleteness, referring to the fact that the notion of truth escapes integral formalization. For Lacan, this failure referred to the general failure of science "always in search of sutures". He then considered that it was through logic that psychoanalysis could escape from the status of human science: but a "logic of incompleteness, science of the fallen subject, science of the unsutured correlate". In this way, by aiming for an ideal Of universalist scientificity, Lacan intended to combat any psychologicalist recasting of psychoanalysis in terms of human science, trying to assign psychoanalysis the task of taking the subject of science as its object, in turn the effect of the signifier.

Lacan also remained active in other spheres. In 1965, he arranged a meeting with Marguerite Duras after the publication of her novel Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein [The Outburst of Lol V. Stein] (1964), which described a psychosis in terms similar to hers. When they met one night in a bar, Lacan enthusiastically congratulated her, saying: "You don't know what you're saying!" That same year he created his collection Le champ freudien [ The Freudian Field] after signing a contract with Éditions du Seuil, promoted by François Wahl. Between February and March 1966 he gave a series of lectures at six American universities, including Columbia, Harvard and MIT. In October, he returned to United States to attend the symposium "The languages of criticism and the sciences of man" organized by René Girard and Eugenio Donato at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Several exponents from different spheres of knowledge were present, such as Jean Hyppolite, Lucien Goldmann, Georges Poulet, Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Nicolas Ruwet and Jacques Derrida. Lacan, for his part, actively participated in the debate on structuralism and presented his communication «About the structure as a mixture of an Otherness, a sine qua non condition of absolutely any subject»: a speech where he quotes Frege and Bertrand Russell and, among other things, explains that his conception of the unconscious «structured as a language» is a tautology, since "structured" and "like a language" are synonymous. Additionally, he states: "The best image that summarizes the unconscious is Baltimore at dawn." Lacan ended the year 1966 with the publication of his most important work: the Escritos. The work was compiled with an index of concepts made by Jacques-Alain Miller and was marked by its slow elaboration; there was rewriting by Lacan, various corrections by Wahl, and comments by Miller. The Ecrits were also printed by Éditions du Seuil and did much to cement Lacan's reputation with a wider audience. The success of the publication led to the production of a two-volume edition in 1969. The work was read and commented on by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

Regarding the events that occurred in May 1968, Lacan respected the strike call of the National Higher Education Union and did not officially give seminars; instead he held informal discussions.Although he was highly critical of the revolutionary action, some held him partially responsible for the events that occurred at the protests. As a consequence, he had to leave the École Normale Supérieure; on May 9 he had signed a manifesto in support of the student movement and during the same period he signed a petition for the release of Régis Debray, who was imprisoned in Bolivia. However, in December 1969 he declared the following before hundreds of students:

Revolutionary aspirations have only one possibility: to always end the master's discourse. The experience proves it. To what they aspire as revolutionaries is a master. They will!

In 1969, the EFP began to apply a new procedure for access to the title of analyst for simple members who had carried out an analysis. Designated in 1967 with the name of "pass", the procedure basically consisted of an institutional framework which allowed the trainee to testify to the end of his analysis. Its application had the intention of solving the training problems derived from the massification of the VET, but it caused the departure of three important disciples of Lacan who opposed him: François Perrier, Piera Aulagnier and Jean-Paul Valabrega. That same year, Serge Leclaire founded a department of psychoanalysis at the recently created University of Paris VIll in Vincennes —it was the first with that name in France—, and Lacan, for his part, transferred his public seminars from the École Normale to the Faculty of Law in front of the Pantheon; where he continued to present his expositions of analytical theory and practice until the dissolution of the EFP in 1980.

1970s

The Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921) by Ludwig Wittgenstein will be a fundamental work for the second recast of the Lacanian doctrine.

In the Pantheon, Lacan began to elaborate a final recasting of his doctrine that allowed him to partially leave structuralism, and go from a rejection of university teaching to its opposite. His reading of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921) by Ludwig Wittgenstein was essential for this second recasting. The work was extensively commented on by Lacan in his first seminar at the Faculty of Law taught between 1969-1970, under the title The reverse of psychoanalysis (XVII). Based on that text, he simultaneously conceived the « matema" and the "Borromean knot", with the effort to make psychoanalysis an exact science. It was not his first encounter with the world of mathematics; since 1950 Lacan's teaching had contact with them with its constant recurrence to topological figures. For this, his meeting, in 1951, with the mathematician Georges-Théodule Guilbaud was key in a context where both Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Émile Benveniste sought to establish a bridge between the human sciences and mathematics, and he met with Guilbaud to begin that journey. Throughout his work, Lacan made illustrative use of various representative topological figures (Möbius band, bull or inner tube, cross-cap or crossed cap, Klein bottle)., but it was from his reading of Wittgenstein, combined with his recurrence to mathematical knowledge —now influenced by a new generation of young mathematicians, including Pierre Soury—, that he created a new terminology destined to make psychoanalytic knowledge transmittable; a passage from saying to showing The introduction of the "matheme" meant a change in Lacan's position with regard to university discourse —which in 1969 he had considered incompatible with psychoanalysis—; therefore, in 1974 he endorsed supporters of introducing psychoanalysis at the university, especially Jacques-Alain Miller.

Meanwhile, Lacan drew extensively from various disciplines; he worked closely on classical Chinese literature with François Cheng, and the growing success of the Escrits led to further invitations to lecture in Japan and Italy. In 1973, Éditions du Seuil first published once a compiled transcript of a seminar by Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964). That same year, the growing number of feminists attending his seminar prompted him to introduce the "formulas of sexuation" in an attempt to demonstrate that sexuality is not determined by biology: the "feminine" position - not determined by the phallus - also appears in all speaking subjects along with the phallic law. he reorganized the department of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII and renamed it "Le Champ freudien." Lacan was named director and Jacques-Alain Miller, president. Here, the matheme became an essential element in the work of the EFP and, indeed, the basis of the work in Paris VIII-Vincennes. Additionally, in 1974 French television broadcast an interview filmed by Benoît Jacquot in which Miller acted as Lacan's interlocutor. It was titled Télévision and the text had been published by Le Seuil prior to the broadcast. Although Lacan then insisted on the linguistic nature of the unconscious, in that broadcast and in his seminar XX (1972 -1973) began to use the neologism "linguistry" to distinguish himself from academic linguists; many topics from that seminar and related texts were laid out schematically in the interview.

In early 1975, Lacan began working on the life and work of James Joyce with Jacques Aubert. The young student, a good reader of the Writings, had proposed to Lacan to participate in the V international symposium on Joyce to be held in Paris, in June of that year. Lacan accepted and from then on he came into contact with a large number of works dedicated to the writer. He also consulted works by writers from Tel quel and Change magazines, including Philippe Sollers and Jean-Pierre Faye. During the symposium, in the Sorbonne amphitheatre, Lacan gave a speech entitled "Joyce le symptome" [Joyce the symptom], recalling his contact with the writer during his youth. He also dedicated his 1975-1976 seminar entitled "Le sinthome" to Joyce. Between November and December 1975, Lacan traveled again to the United States to give a series of lectures at Yale, Columbia, and MIT, where he also had the opportunity to occasion to debate Willard Van Orman Quine and Noam Chomsky. After suffering a minor car accident in the autumn of 1978, Lacan began to look tired and to remain silent for long periods of time, even in his seminars. His speech tended to be replaced by silent demonstrations and new twists on Borromean knots.In 1979 he co-founded the Fondation du Champ Freudienne with his daughter Judith Miller, and she was left to direct it.

Last years

In January 1980, Lacan announced the unilateral dissolution of the École Freudienne de Paris, by means of a "Letter of Dissolution" dated the 5th of that month. At that time, the school was experiencing a series of internal disputes. The letter immediately had repercussions in the press and was published in Le Monde on January 9. In the letter, Lacan invited all members of the school who wished to continue working with him to they made their intentions known to him in writing —the term used is ecrit de candidature— and, among other things, he spoke of the «cost of having allowed the psychoanalytic group to take precedence over the discourse, and become in Church". He received more than a thousand letters in a week, but the dissolution of the school had to wait until September 27 of that year, since the regulations required a two-thirds majority in a specially called general assembly, which it was only obtained on that date. In his place he founded, on February 21, the school of La Cause freudienne and, in October, the École de la cause freudienne. As a consequence, the Lacanian movement dispersed into around twenty associations.

In July 1980, Lacan traveled to Caracas for the inaugural congress of the Fondation du Champ Freudienne, co-founded with his daughter Judith in 1979. Fatigued by his trip on Concorde, Lacan called his followers to gather around to him to express:

I come here to boost my Freudian cause. As you see, I'm interested in this adjective. It is your business to be lacanians if you wish. I'm a Freudian.

His health problems made it difficult for him to meet the demands of his annual seminars, given since the 1950s; but his teaching continued until 1981. Late in his life, Lacan began to be affected by brain disorders and partial aphasia. He died on September 9, 1981, at the Hartmann clinic in Neuilly-sur-Seine, from the ablation of a malignant colon tumor. His last words were: "I am obstinate... I disappear". Before dying, Lacan appointed Jacques-Alain Miller as his executor, who was left in charge of all his published and unpublished work.

Main concepts

Return to Freud

Lacan's «return to Freud» takes place within the framework of his training as an analyst at the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP), an institution that was then affiliated with the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and which presented itself as the only genuine heir to the Freudian legacy. In the first instance, Lacan radically criticizes the approach by which most IPA analysts had interpreted Freud. But later, after his departure from the SPP in 1953, he extended his critique to the three main schools of the IPA: Ego Psychology , Kleinian psychoanalysis and object relations theory. The "return to Freud" then arises as a response to what Lacan considered a "betrayed" reading of Freud's work by the IPA.

Sigmund Freud photographed by Max Halberstadt in 1921.

In his Preparatory Notes in German for the conference on the Freudian Thing (1955), Lacan states that the return «consists in resuming the reading of Freud and reworking of it everything that up to now a very myopic interpretation did not apprehend, put aside or forgot". In addition, he speaks of the "need for a return to the original practice of psychoanalysis, but in the sense that the return means at the same time a renewal from the foundation He suggests that the original psychoanalytic practice combined "with its own depth a certain ingenuity", but that eventually the technique tended to turn towards its opposite. For this reason, he will insist on returning to that first technique "as a technique particularly apprehended and experienced in its essence and its foundation."

Dylan Evans notes that it was by reading Freud's texts in German that Lacan found elements that had "been obscured by poor translation and ignored by other commentators". Hence his work is "associated with detailed commentary of specific texts by Freud and full of numerous references to other analysts, whose ideas Lacan refutes" from his rereading. On the other hand, Élisabeth Roudinesco comments that Lacan's confrontation with the great currents of Freudianism occurs after his revaluation of the unconscious and the id to the detriment of the ego, while supporting the beginning of his teaching in Heideggerian philosophy, Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics, and Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology. Lacan begins by approaching Freudian texts "from a system of language conceived as a structure and made up of signs, defined in turn according to their value, through the symbolic relationship of a meaning with a sign significant.... Lacan reconsiders the position of the subject in the cure based on the function of the word." Slavoj Žižek, on the other hand, argues that the difference between Lacan's theory and that of the other schools and that of Freud himself, lies in its "philosophical tenor". According to Žižek, Lacan does not conceive of psychoanalysis as "a theory and a technique for the treatment of psychic disturbances, but a theory and a practice that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence".

Lacan tried to "restore to the notion of Object Relation... the capital of experience that is legitimately linked to it", based on what he called "the hesitant but guided work of Mrs. Melanie Klein...". He points out that "by it we know the function of the primordial imaginary enclosure formed by the imago of the maternal body", as well as "the notion of the transitional object, introduced by D.W. Winnicott, key point for the explanation of the genesis of fetishism". mother … the pre-oedipal or Kleinian mother".

Although Lacan returns to Freud's original texts, he takes up certain specific aspects of his work, "he chooses and elaborates certain themes, and neglects or reinterprets others". So, as Evans points out, his approach could be described as " as a "post-Freudian" of psychoanalysis, along with ego psychology, Kleinian psychoanalysis, and object relations theory." However, Lacan argued that a deeper logic was at work in Freud's texts "that makes them coherent despite apparent contradictions." ", and for this reason he insisted that "his reading of Freud, and his alone, brings this logic to light". true, a rhetorical-political function, in terms of presenting it as "more Freudian" that no one allowed him to challenge the effective monopoly of the Freudian legacy that the IPA still enjoyed in the 1950s".

Mirror Stadium

Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was that of the mirror stage. The expression appears for the first time during a conference of the SPP that took place on June 16, 1936. For this, Lacan takes as a basis the "proof of the mirror" elaborated by Henri Wallon in 1931, and proposes the stage of the mirror as "a combination of position, in the Kleinian sense, and stage, in the Freudian sense". Thus, the notion of stage is no longer linked to the idea of stadium proposed by Wallon, and acquires a dimension of "psychic operation, even ontological, through which the human being is constituted in identification with his fellow man". In 1936, Lacan presented the concept for the second time before the XIV Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) held in Marienbad; the work was never published, but in 1949, Lacan exposed the theme again at the IPA Congress held in Zurich, under the title The stage of the mirror as a formator of the function of the self [heh] as it is revealed to us in the psychoanalytic experience.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Lacan stopped considering the mirror stage as just a moment in the life of the infant: it became part of a permanent structure of subjectivity and a paradigm of the «imaginary» register, where the The subject is permanently captured and captivated by the image itself. In reference to his exhibition on the mirror stadium held at the Zurich Congress in 1949, Lacan would comment that:

The theory I proposed there... refers to a phenomenon that I attribute a double value to. First, I give it a historical value, as it marks a turning point in the mental development of the child. And secondly, it defines an essential libidinal relationship with body image. For these two reasons, the phenomenon clearly demonstrates the entry of the individual into a stage in which the earliest formation of the self can be observed.

Final version of the mirror stadium scheme according to Lacan. S barrada: the divided subject. M: Mirror. A: The Great Other. C: the body itself. a: the object of desire. i (a): the self (Moiideal. S: subject of the imaginary. I: ideal of self.

As this concept developed, the emphasis became less on its historical value and more on its structural value. In his seminar IV, The Object Relationship (1956-1957), Lacan states that «the stage of the mirror is by no means limited to connoting a phenomenon that occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual character of the dual relationship."

In the mirror stage, the constitution of the self occurs through the process of identification resulting from the identification with one's own mirror image. This identification of the self with the similar results in what Lacan calls the "alienation" of the subject: it is an essential constitutive feature where the subject is alienated from himself; suffers from a fundamental 'split'. Said alienation is also constitutive of the imaginary register. The phenomenon develops due to the prematurity of the human being at birth: at six months of age, the baby still lacks physical coordination, but is capable of recognizing itself in a mirror before be able to achieve control of their body movements, since their visual system is relatively advanced. The child sees his image as a whole and the synthesis of that image produces an impression of contrast with the lack of coordination of the body, which is perceived as a "fragmented body". Initially, the child experiences this contrast as a rivalry with his own image, since the totality of the image threatens him with fragmentation. In this way, the stadium gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the child identifies with the image, and this primary identification with the similar constitutes the self. Lacan describes this instance of identification as a moment of joy, since it leads the child to an imaginary sensation of mastery.; however, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of dominance with the mother's omnipotence, the elation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction.

Lacan defines the mirror image as «orthopedic», since it leads the child to anticipate overcoming his «specific prematurity of birth». The vision of the integrated and armed body in opposition to the actual experience of the child's motor incapacity and the sensation of the fragmented body, induces a movement of "insufficiency of anticipation". In other words, the mirror image initiates and then helps, as support, to the process of formation of the integrated sense of oneself. It should be noted that the mirror stage implies a «unknowing» (méconnaissance) in the constitution of the self: the «I» (moi) alienates itself from itself through the introduction of the subject in the imaginary order. It also has a significant symbolic dimension that falls on the figure of the adult carrying or holding the baby. On the other hand, when the child joyfully assumes the image as his own, he turns his head towards the adult —who represents the big Other— as to ask him to ratify this image.

Other/other

While Freud used the term «other» to refer to der Andere (the other person) and das Andere (otherness), Lacan —influenced by the teachings by Alexandre Kojève—theorizes otherness in a way that is more like the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. In his seminar III, Psychoses (1955-1956), Lacan points out that:

There is always commitment of the subject and virtual struggle in which the organism is always latent, in everything that is of the order of testimony.... For a simple reason: as the starting point of this dialectic is my alienation in the other, there is a time when I can be in a position to be at my own time annulled because the other one disagrees. The dialectic of the unconscious always implies as one of its possibilities the struggle, the impossibility of coexistence with the other. Here comes the dialectics of the master and the slave. The Phenomenology of the Spirit It probably does not exhaust everything at stake in it, but we certainly cannot ignore its psychological and psychogenic value. The constitution of the human world as such occurs in an essential rivalry, in a first and essential death struggle. With the caveat that we attended at the end the reopening of the bets.

Élisabeth Roudinesco observes that Lacan takes from Hegel «… the idea of a dialectic of negativity, according to which all recognition of the other passes through a fight to the death. From this point of view, the other has no existence, since man's desire is defined above all as the desire of each individual to have his desire recognized in an absolute way, even if he has to annul the other (the neighbor) in the process. course of a process of annihilation". With his reading of The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Lacan theorizes the notion of the symbolic and modifies his conception of alterity, which leads to the creation of the term "big Other." In this way, it separates itself from all the post-Freudian conceptions of the object relation in force until then. Between the years 1950 and 1965, Lacan will revise Freudian theory by virtue of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics and will establish a link between desire, the subject, the signifier and the question of the Other.

Lacan often used algebraic symbology to represent his concepts: the big Other (Autre) is designated with a capital A, and the little other (autre) with a lowercase. For Lacan it is essential to take this distinction into account in analytic practice: «the analyst must be "totally imbued" of the difference between A and a, in order to be able to situate oneself in the place of the Other, and not in that of the other». In this sense, Evans explains that:

Scheme L.

1. "The little one is the other who is not really another, but a reflection and a projection of the self." Add that for this reason the symbol a can represent both the little one and the me (Moi) in the "Esquema L", is at the same time the "similar" and the "imagining speculation". Therefore, the little other is fully registered in the imaginary record.
2. "The Great Other designates radical alteration, the otrity that transcends the illusory otrity of the imaginary, because it cannot be assimilated through identification." The great Other (A) is inscribed in the symbolic order, as Lacan equates that radical alteration to language and law. Evans also notes that "the Great Other That's it. the symbolic to the extent that it is particularized for each subject. The Other is then another subject, in his radical alterity and insimilable singularity, and also the symbolic order that mediates the relationship with that other subject."

For Lacan, «the Other must be considered first as a place, the place where the word is constituted»: the Other as another subject is secondary to the Other as a symbolic order. We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense when a subject occupies this position and thus "incarnates" the Other for another subject. By holding that the word originates neither in the self nor in the subject, but rather in the Other, Lacan emphasizes that speech and language are beyond the conscious control of the subject. They come from somewhere else, outside of consciousness, so that "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other". Evans notes that when Lacan conceives of the Other as a place, he is referring to Freud's concept of "psychic locality", where the unconscious is described as "the other scene".

Since "it is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child", and "it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and cries, and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message", the complex of castration is formed when the child discovers that this Other is not complete, since there is a "lack" (manque) in the Other. This means that a signifier is always missing in the treasury of signifiers constituted for the other. Lacan graphically illustrates this incomplete Other by crossing out the symbol A with a bar; thus an additional name for the emasculated or incomplete Other is the "Barred Other".

In his seminar XX, Still (1972-1973), Lacan also defines the Other as «the Other sex»:

The Other, on the one hand, must be crushed again, rinsed, so that its full meaning, its complete resonance, can be gained. On the other hand, it should be presented as the term underlying that I am the one who speaks, that I cannot speak but where I am, identified to a pure signifier. The man, a woman, I said last time, are only significant. From there, from saying as a different incarnation of sex, they take their function. The Other, in my language, cannot be then but the Other sex.

In this regard, Roudinesco notes that this is a moment where Lacan links his theory to female sexuality «as a "supplement" impossible to symbolize, and the question of the ecstatic relationship with the Other». Thus, man and woman, in their signifying function, "are only sexually different with reference to a signifier of the difference: between the phallic function and feminine jouissance." In this way, "the Other sex" is "the place from which a difference is enunciated for each subject".

Phallus

The term "phallus" is rarely used in Freud's work and is often used synonymously with "penis". Freud rather more frequently used the adjective "phallic" or "phallic", as the case of the expression "phallic phase" - without making a rigorous distinction between "phallus" and "penis" -. The term is also present in his theory of libido -essentially masculine-, and in the doctrine of feminine and difference of the sexes. Lacan, on the other hand, usually uses the term "phallus", and not "penis", to emphasize that psychoanalytic theory is not interested in the male genital organ in its biological reality, but in the role it plays the organ plays in the "phantom". Hence the term "phallus" is reserved for the imaginary and symbolic functions, and "penis" for the biological organ.

The phallus here is cleared by its function. The phallus in the Freudian doctrine is not a fantasy, if one must understand for it an imaginary effect. It is not as such an object (partial, internal, good, bad, etc...) to the extent that this term tends to appreciate the reality interested in a relationship. Less is still the organ, penis or clitoris, which symbolizes. And not without reason Freud took his reference to the drill that was for the ancients. For the falo is a significant, a significant whose function, in the intrasubjective economy of analysis, perhaps lifts the veil of which it had in the mysteries. For it is the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of meaning, as the signatory conditiones them by their presence of signifier.... Falo is the privileged sign of that brand in which the part of the logos joins the advent of desire.

In Lacan's theory, the term «phallus» acquired an important place from the mid-1950s. According to Roudinesco, it became «the very signifier of desire», which is why in his seminar III, Psychosis (1955-1956), will be evoked in the first instance as the "imaginary phallus", then as the "mother's phallus", and finally with the idea of the "symbolic phallus". The phallus also has a fundamental role in the Oedipus complex and in the theory of "sexual difference". of being: to be or not to be the phallus, to have it or not to have it".

Feminist thinkers have used and criticized Lacan's concepts of castration and phallus. Authors such as Elizabeth Grosz have commented that the privilege that Lacan grants to the phallus is a repetition of Freud's patriarchal gestures. On the other hand, authors such as Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose have defended Lacan arguing that the distinction between phallus and penis provides a way of explaining sexual difference, irreducible to biology. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has also been a leading critic of the Lacanian notion of the phallus, and his critique has influenced other authors. Derrida believes that despite Lacanian anti-transcendentalism, the phallus emerges as a transcendental element and as an ideal guarantee of meaning. He argues that the phallus reintroduces the metaphysics of presence, which he calls "logocentrism," and that Lacan, in his articulation of logocentrism with "phallogocentrism," created a phallogocentric system of thought.

Unconscious

Lacan uses the topological figure of the Möbius band to represent his notion of the conscious-unconscious system: as in the band the inner face becomes external and again internal, at some point the unconscious can become conscious and vice versa.

When Lacan begins his «return to Freud» in the 1950s, he begins to use the term «unconscious» as a noun and to emphasize that it is not just something opposed to consciousness: «... A large number of psychic effects that the term "unconscious", by virtue of excluding the character of consciousness, legitimately designates, nonetheless, do not cease to be without any relation by nature to the unconscious in the Freudian sense". He also stresses that the unconscious does not it can hardly be equated to "what is repressed".

Lacan questioned and attacked the idea that reduced the unconscious to a «seat of instincts», and maintained that «the unconscious is not primordial, nor is it instinctual, and the only elemental thing it knows are the elements of the signifier». For Lacan, the unconscious is primarily linguistic, an idea that he summarizes in his locution: "the unconscious is structured like a language". His analysis of the unconscious as a synchronous structure is complemented by his notion of the unconscious that "opens to return to close in a temporal pulsation". of words".

Another characteristic of the unconscious in Lacan is that it is defined as being «the discourse of the Other». In this sense, «the unconscious is the effects that the word exerts on the subject, it is the dimension where the subject is determined in the development of the effects of the word". According to Dylan Evans, this means that "the unconscious is the effect of the signifier on the subject insofar as the signifier is the repressed and what returns in the formations of the unconscious (symptoms, jokes, parapraxias, dreams, etc.).

The unconscious, moreover, is located in the order of the symbolic because it refers to the word, language and signifiers: "the unconscious is structured according to the symbolic". interior entity but rather that "it is that part of the concrete discourse as transindividual that is missing from the subject's disposition to reestablish the continuity of his conscious discourse." The unconscious is then, according to Lacan, external to the subject: "This exteriority of the symbolic in relation to man is the very notion of the unconscious". Lacan says that "the unconscious does not leave any of our actions outside its field", which is why its laws (repetition and desire) are all-encompassing. Therefore, since it cannot be reduced, the goal of analysis cannot be based on making the unconscious conscious.

Three records

The blurry knot illustrates the link between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary in the sense proposed by Lacan.

The terms «real», «symbolic» and «imaginary» are used by Lacan from the beginning of his work; However, from 1953 he began to speak of three "orders" or "registers" that would make up the main classification system on which all his theory would be developed. They are three very heterogeneous concepts and each one of them refers to different aspects of the psychoanalytic experience; it is difficult to trace what they have in common. Even so, the denomination of "orders" or "records" supposes that they share some property: when defining one of them, it must be done in reference to the other two. This structural interdependence will be illustrated by means of the "Borromean knot" topology, where the cutting of any one of the three rings causes the other two to separate as well. Lacan will deepen this theme in his seminar XXII, R.S.I. (1974-1975).

On the other hand, the three registers are not mental forces like the three instances raised by Freud in his model, although, as Dylan Evans points out, "they are primarily linked to mental functioning, and together they cover the entire field of psychoanalysis." This trilogy is also designated by the name of topic, and was represented in two successive organizations: from 1953-1970, where the symbolic record prevails over the other two (S.I.R.), and from 1970-1978, where the record of what appears. real as primordial (R.S.I).

The imaginary

The term «imaginary» has been used by Lacan as a noun since 1936, and from the beginning, it was mainly associated with the dual relationship established between the self and the mirror image. Incorporated since 1953 into the Lacanian topic of the three records, the imaginary order is based on the formation of the self that takes place in the mirror stage. It is defined as the seat of the self, and is characterized by the phenomena of illusion, capture, and lure. Since the self is formed through identification with the similar or the mirror image, identification is an important feature of this record, since a prototypical dual relationship and interchangeability is established between the self and the similar. This relationship —which constitutes the self through identification with the little other— indicates that the self and the imaginary order are sites of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive in the imaginary order." The dual relationship between the self and the Such is characterized by being narcissistic, so that narcissism forms another aspect of the imaginary order, always accompanied by a certain aggressiveness.

The imaginary order is related to the image, with its captivating power, and with its consequences for narcissistic identification and the constitution of the self. This order implies a lack of knowledge, but not in the sense of not knowing, but of knowing and recognizing. The function of not knowing defines the insertion of the self in the structure (in a constitutive and relational sense), and especially the "formative" character of identifications. In his seminar I, Freud's Technical Writings (1953-1954), Lacan argues that the imaginary function refers «first, to the relationship of the subject with its formative identifications, the latter it is the full sense of the term image under analysis; second, to the relationship of the subject with the real, whose characteristic is that of being illusory: this is the most frequently highlighted aspect of the imaginary function».

Philippe Julien observes that the imaginary refers to the body, as an image of the human body, and not as an object of biological study. It is a meaning that refers to the Latin imago, which designated the statues of divinities, and that with the libidinal cathetization proposed by Freud, narcissism will come into play. This author also notes:

The body of the speaking being does not subsist for him but forming images, that is, all imaginary integers. How can this imaginary take the consistency of one? Not as a "bolsa", despite Freud's metaphor, but the reverse, by a hole in the body image. The imaginary has consistency to the extent that castration operates, and where there is less imaginary phallus (-φ). Boy or girl, it doesn't matter. For each one the phallus is cast into the image. From this impossible visual, the various objects of the pulsion — called pregenital, but which are not — become the usual support of human behaviors.

The imaginary is structured by the symbolic order: in his study on the mirror stage of 1949, Lacan defines the process where the child assumes his own image as «the symbolic matrix in which the I [je] rushes into a primordial form, before objectifying itself in the dialectic of identification with the other and before language restores its function as subject in the universal.” Dylan Evans indicates that in The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (1964), Lacan means that the symbolic order structures the visual field of the imaginary through symbolic laws, and that the imaginary order implies a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the basis of the symbolic, signified and signification are part of the imaginary order. Language has symbolic and imaginary connotations: in its imaginary aspect, language is the "language wall" that inverts and distorts discourse. of the other. On the other hand, the imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship with her own body (the image of her own body). In Fetishism: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real (1956), Lacan argues that it is above all on the sexual plane that the imaginary manifests itself, such as in sexual display and courtship rituals..

One of the controversies that Lacan had with the psychoanalytic schools of his time was that of having accused them of reducing analysis to the imaginary register: identification with the analyst was the goal of analysis, so that the cure was reduced to a dual relationship; something that for Lacan only generated a growing alienation of the subject. Lacan proposes, instead, the use of the symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the imaginary, and affirms that this is the essence of psychoanalysis. relies on the imaginary to transform images into words: "The imaginary is only decipherable if it is translated into symbols." In this way, it is through the use of the symbolic that the analytic process can "go beyond the plane of identification".

The symbolic

Lacan began to use the term «symbolic» as an adjective in 1936, then associating it with symbolic logic and the equations used in mathematical physics. Around 1948 he mentioned that symptoms have a «symbolic sense». The following year, the term takes on a meaning associated with anthropology: it appears in expressions such as "symbolic efficacy" or in his references to Marcel Mauss for formulating that "the structures of society are symbolic". Lacan will use the word "symbolic" as a noun in 1953, when using it to define one of the three registers of his topic. This designates a system of representation based on language: on the signs and meanings that determine the subject without him knowing it, and on whose system can be sent consciously or unconsciously through the faculty of symbolization. It has a fundamental role for psychoanalysis, and for this reason Lacan will go so far as to say that psychoanalysts are "practitioners of the symbolic function". ica". His use of that concept is based on the application that Claude Lévi-Strauss gave it in anthropology; de Lévi-Strauss also adopted the notion of a social world structured according to certain laws, regulating kinship relations and the exchange of gifts. This last concept, along with that of the exchange circuit, will be fundamental in his conception of the symbolic.

The gift implies the entire cycle of exchange in which the subject is introduced as primitively as you may suppose. If there is a gift, it is only because there is an immense circulation of gifts that covers the whole intersubjective set. The gift arises from one beyond the objective relationship, because it implies the whole order of exchange in which the child has already entered, and can only arise from this beyond with the character that constitutes him as properly symbolic.

Given that «the word is above all that object of exchange by which we recognize ourselves», as a basic form of exchange, be it of words or gifts of speech — «the typical gift is precisely the gift of speech »—, and that the concepts of «Law» and «Structure» are unthinkable without language, the symbolic is essentially a linguistic dimension; everything related to the analytic experience that has a linguistic structure corresponds to the symbolic order. However, this order is not equivalent to language, since language also involves the imaginary and the real. The dimension proper to language in the symbolic is that of the signifier, that is, a dimension in which the elements do not have a positive existence, but are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences. On the other hand, the symbolic is tied to a series composed of three other concepts: the signifier, the foreclosure, and the name of the father.

The symbolic register is also the field of radical alterity, that is, the Other: the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is the scope of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex, and of the domain of culture in opposition to the imaginary order of nature. Unlike the imaginary order, where relationships are characterized by being dual, the symbolic is characterized by triadic structures, since the intersubjective relationship is mediated by a third party; that is, the big Other. The concepts of death, absence, and lack (manque) are also part of the symbolic, as well as the pleasure principle that regulates the distance from the «Thing» (das Ding an sich), and the death instinct that goes "beyond the pleasure principle" through repetition. Indeed, "the death instinct is nothing but the mask of the symbolic order". It is also distinguished by being a superstructure that is not determined by biology or genetics, and is completely contingent on reality. In his seminar II, The self in Freud's theory and in psychoanalytic technique (1954-1955), Lacan observes: «There is no biological reason, and in particular genetic, that explains exogamy, … the human order confronts us with the total emergence, which encompasses the entirety of this order. human, of a new function". I give you the real".

Lacan will speak of the symbolic as a universe based on its totalizing and all-encompassing effect: «The totality in the symbolic order is called a universe. The symbolic order occurs first of all in its universal character. It is not that it is gradually being established. When the symbol appears, there is a universe of symbols." Dylan Evans explains that it is not a gradual and continuous transition from the imaginary to the symbolic, since they are completely heterogeneous registers. When there is an emergence of the symbolic, it is it creates the sense of what has always been there, but, as Lacan says, "it is absolutely impossible to speculate about what preceded it if we do not do it through symbols that have always been able to be applied". Hence, according to Evans, "it is impossible to conceive the origin of language, much less the above, which is why what concerns development is outside the field of psychoanalysis.

According to Lacan, it is only through the symbolic order that the analyst can produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand, which in turn will generate imaginary effects. This is because the imaginary is structured by the symbolic: the symbolic is the determinant of subjectivity, and the imaginary, as a place of images and appearances, is an effect of the symbolic. For this reason, from this conception, psychoanalysis must aspire to penetrate beyond the imaginary and work in the symbolic order. On the other hand, the concept of the symbolic elaborated by Lacan has a different meaning from the term "symbolism" used by Freud. For Freud, the symbol had to do with a relatively fixed one-to-one relationship between meaning and form, so it corresponds more to Lacan's concept of "index", for whom the symbolic is characterized by an absence of any fixed relationship. between signifier and signified.

The real thing

The term "real" appears concurrently with the terms "imaginary" and "symbolic" in Lacan's early work. Used from the beginning as a noun, it was a popular concept among some philosophers at the time, particularly Émile Meyerson, who referred to it as "an ontological absolute, a true thing-in-itself". Lacan's use of it in Beyond the Reality Principle (1936) is associated with the Meyerson's conception, who also spoke of the existence of "a similarity between the objects created by science and those whose existence is established by perception". Lacan resumed the use of the term "real" at the beginning of the 1950s, and connects it with the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, when speaking of that "everything that is real is rational (and inversely)". But it is from 1953 that the concept takes its known form. Élisabeth Roudinesco indicates that Lacan, in addition to taking the science of the real as a starting point in his formulation, also based himself on the Freudian notion of «psychic reality» and the concept of «heterology» created by his friend Georges Bataille, in the mid-1950s. the 1930s. Bataille used this term to define a science of the irretrievable, which had as its object "the unproductive", as waste, excrement or remains, and which was connected with the normative expulsion derived from madness or delirium. Within the framework of his topic of the three registers, the real "designates the reality proper to psychosis (delusion, hallucination), inasmuch as it is composed of the foreclosed (rejected) signifiers of the symbolic".

Unlike the symbolic register, which is constituted in terms of oppositions (presence/absence), "there is no absence in the real". Although the symbolic opposition between presence and absence implies the possibility that something is missing in the real, symbolic, Lacan says that the real "is always and in any case in its place, it wears it glued to the sole, knowing nothing that could exile it from it". If the symbolic is a set of differentiated (signifying) elements, the real is in itself undifferentiated: "The real has absolutely no fissure." The symbolic then introduces "a cut in the real" in the process of signification: "It is the world of words that creates the world of things, firstly confused in the hic et nunc of the whole in becoming". In the 1950s, Lacan defined the real as that which is outside of language and cannot be symbolized: "the real or what is perceived as such is what absolutely resists symbolization"; "it is the domain of what subsists outside of symbolization". Throughout his work, the real will also be linked to the concept of impossibility, designating "the real as the impossible". This has to do with the fact that the real is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic and impossible to achieve in any way. It is this impossibility and resistance to symbolization that gives the real its traumatic quality.

Lacan will also use his notion of the real to identify some clinical phenomena; among them, anxiety, which has the real as its object to the extent that it lacks any possible mediation and is the "essential object that is no longer an object but something before which all words stop and all categories fail," the object of anguish par excellence". The real is also the paradigm of madness, while the foreclosed signifiers of the symbolic return to the real without being integrated into the unconscious of the subject. In this way, the real is confused with "another place" of the subject, when expressed through "gestures, hallucinations or desires that the subject does not control".

In the 1970s, an attempt to resolve the indeterminacy of the real appeared in Lacan's work. He will make a distinction between the real and "reality": the first term is defined as the domain of the unknowable or unassimilable; the second as the subjective representations produced by symbolic and imaginary articulations—Freud's "psychic reality." This opposition will not be sustained by Lacan in a systematic way, since in some moments he will return to interchange the terms "real" and "reality".

Wish

The Lacanian concept of desire (désir) is related to the German term Begierde, developed by the philosophical tradition from G.W.F. Hegel. It is distinguished from the notion of desire (Wunsch) elaborated by Freud within the framework of his theory of the unconscious, which designates the tendency and the realization of the tendency, as realization of an unconscious wish or wish. Lacan theorizes desire as an expression of a greed or an appetite that tends to be satisfied in the absolute, outside of any realization of a desire or tendency.

For Lacan, the goal of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to recognize his desire and to discover the truth about his desire. However, this is only possible if the desire is articulated in the word:

Only when it is formulated, when it is appointed before the other, desire, whatever, is recognized in the full meaning of the word. It's not about the satisfaction of desire, or I don't know what primary love but, exactly, the recognition of desire.

In his seminar II, The self in Freud's theory and in the psychoanalytic technique (1954-1955), Lacan points out that «… what is it is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to allow the existence of that desire that, literally, is on this side of existence, and that is why it insists". When the analysand articulates the desire in words, he brings it to existence, for this reason «... the effective action of the analysis consists in the fact that the subject comes to recognize and name his desire. But it is not about recognizing something that would be there, fully given, ready to be coapted. By naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world". However, this articulation of desire in the word is limited by an "incompatibility of desire with the word", since the unconscious cannot be reduced. The truth about desire is present to some extent in all discourse, but discourse is never capable of articulating the whole truth about desire; since whenever he tries to articulate the desire, there are remains or surpluses that exceed the word.

Lacan distinguishes desire from «need» and from «demand». The need is a biological instinct that arises from the requirements of the organism, for which the subject depends on the Other to satisfy them: the subject is born in a state of helplessness, and to obtain the help of the Other, the "need" must be articulated as "demand". ». But the presence of the Other not only ensures the satisfaction of the "need", it also symbolizes the love of the Other. The "demand" then acquires a double function: on the one hand, it articulates the "need", and on the other, it acts as a "demand for love". Even after the "need" articulated in the demand is satisfied, the "demand for love" remains unsatisfied, since the Other cannot provide the unconditional love that the subject longs for. Therefore, Lacan says that "...the desire it 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". Desire is then a surplus, a surplus, produced by the articulation of the need in the demand: "Desire is outlined at the margin where demand is torn from need." Unlike need, which can be satisfied, desire can never be satisfied: it is constant and continuous. The realization of desire does not consist in its fulfillment but in its reproduction. As Slavoj Žižek points out: "the raison d'être of desire... is not to reach its goal, to achieve full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as I wish".

Lacan also distinguishes desire from drives: desire is one and drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire, although there may be desires that are not manifested in the drives. The objet petit a is the only object of desire represented by a variety of partial objects in different partial drives; but it is not the object towards which the desire tends, but rather the cause of the desire. In this way, desire is not a relationship with an object, but a relationship with a lack (manque).

In his seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), Lacan argues that "man's desire is the desire of the Other". the following:

1. Desire is the "desire of the desire of the Other"; that is, the desire to be the object of the desire of another and the desire for recognition for another. Here Lacan rests on the reading by Alexandre Kojève de Hegel: for Kojève, the subject must risk his own life in a struggle of pure prestige if he wants to achieve the desired recognition. This desire to be the object of the desire of another is exemplified at the first moment of the complex of Edipo, when the subject wishes to be the phallus for the mother.
2. Lacan maintains that “it is as much as the subject desires”; that is, he desires from another’s point of view. Therefore, Lacan says: “The object of man’s desire... is essentially an object desired by another”. The object is then desirable to the extent that it is desirable for another, and that is what makes the objects equivalent and interchangeable. On the other hand, this universal aspect of desire is characteristic of hysteria, since the hysterical is someone who converts the desire of another into his own. What matters in the analysis of the hysterical is not to discover the object of his desire, but to discover the place from which he wishes: the subject with which he identifies.
3. Désir de l'Autretranslated as "the desire of the Other": the desire is the desire of the Other. Elementary desire is the incestuous desire of the mother, the other primordial.
4. Desire is always “desir of something else”, since it is impossible to desire what is already in place. The object of desire is continually postponed, and therefore desire is a metonymy.
5. Desire arises in the field of the Other, that is, in the unconscious.

Last but not least, for Lacan desire is a social product that is constituted in a dialectical relationship with the desire of other subjects. In this relationship, the first person to occupy the place of the Other is the mother; so at first the child is at the mercy of her desire. Only when the Father articulates the desire with the law castrating the mother, the subject frees himself from his subjection to the desire of the mother.

Drive

Lacan maintains the Freudian distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt). The drives differ from the pre-linguistic biological needs designated by instinct, because they can never be satisfied and they do not aim at an object, but perpetually surround it. He maintains that the purpose of the drive ( Triebziel ) is not to reach a goal ( goal ), but to follow the path itself ( aim ); that is, rotate around the object. The purpose of the drive is to return to its circular path and the true source of jouissance is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit. Lacan defines the drives as cultural and symbolic constructions: it is not "a primal datum, something archaic and primordial ». He incorporates the four elements of the drives delimited by Freud (the drive, the end, the object and the source) to his theory of the drive «circuit», and strips the concept of its continuous references to energy and hydraulics. In his conceptualization, the drive originates in an erogenous zone, revolves around the object, and returns to the erogenous zone. Three grammatical voices structure this circuit:

1. the active voice (e.g. see)
2. the reflective voice (e.g. seeing oneself)
3. passive voice (e.g. to be seen)

Active and reflective voices are autoerotic: they lack a subject. Only when the drive completes its circuit in the third beat (the passive voice) does "a new subject" appear; this implies that before that instance, there is no subject. Although the third tense is that of the passive voice, it is an essentially active drive: "to be seen" instead of "to be seen". The drive circuit is the only way in which the subject can transgress the pleasure principle.

For Freud, sexuality is made up of partial drives (for example, oral or anal drives), and each one is specified by a different erogenous zone. At first, these partial drives function independently (the "polymorphous perversion" of children), and only at puberty are they organized under the primacy of the genital organs. Lacan, on the other hand, emphasizes the partial nature of the drives, but rejects, on the other hand, the notion that partial drives can achieve some fusion or complete organization: the primacy of the genital zone, if it is achieved, it is always precarious. He also argues that the drives are partial in that they only represent sexuality partially, not in the sense that they are part of a whole (a "genital drive"). The drives do not represent the reproductive function of sexuality, but only the dimension of jouissance.

Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral (erogenous zone: lips; partial object: breast; verb: «to suck»), the anal (erogenous zone: anus, feces, «poop»), the scopic (erogenous zone: eyes; partial object: gaze; verb: "to see") and the invoker (erogenous zone: ears; partial object: voice; verb: "to hear"). The first two drives are related to demand and the last two to desire. The formula of the drive is elaborated by Lacan in 1957 —in the context of the graph of desire— with the matheme: $ ◊ D. In this the barred subject appears in relation to the unconscious demand.

Throughout the various reformulations that Freud makes of his theory of the drive, he always maintained a notion of dualism: from the initial opposition between the sexual drives and the drives of the ego (self-preservation), to his final conception where he opposes the life instincts (Lebenstriebe) to the death instincts (Todestriebe). Lacan preserves Freudian dualism, but in terms of an opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary, and not between different types of drives. For Lacan, all the drives are sexual and each drive is a death drive (pulsion de mort), since each of them is excessive, repetitive and destructive. Through the drives, sexuality participates of psychic life by constituting the "gap" of the unconscious.

The drives are closely linked to desire, since both originate in the field of the subject. But they should not be confused: the drives are the partial aspects in which the desire is realized. Desire is one and undivided, while the drives are its partial manifestations.

Other concepts

• Name of father
• Conclusion
• Lack (manage)
• Objet petit a
• Mathematics
• Sinthome
• The four speeches

Ethical foundations

Lacan works extensively on the question of ethics in psychoanalysis in his seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-1960). He postulates that ethical thought "is at the center of our work », and that the foundation of his analytical ethics lies in linking action with desire. Lacan sums it up in the question: "Have you acted in accordance with the desire that inhabits you?" He contrasts his ethics in several respects with the "traditional ethics" of moral philosophers such as Aristotle and Immanuel Kant and highlights three main aspects.:

1. An opposition to the traditional ethics that revolves around the concept of the Good—where the goods compete with each other to occupy the position of the Supreme Good—as it represents an obstacle on the path of desire: "...a radical repudiation of a certain ideal of good is necessary to get only to grasp on what path our experience develops." This implies a rejection of all kinds of ideals, such as "happiness" or "health".
2. Since traditional ethics has tended to link good with pleasure and that moral thinking has developed "in the path of an essentially hedonistic problem", that approach as such cannot be adopted. This is because the psychoanalytic experience reveals the duplicity of pleasure: pleasure has a limit, and when it is overcome, it becomes pain (goce).
3. Unlike the traditional ethic that revolves around "the service of goods", seeking to put up the work and a safe existence before the desire, the ethics proposed by Lacan seeks that the subject face the link between his actions and his desire in the present. In this sense, Lacan says: "The only thing that can be blamed for is to have yielded in his desire."

Paradoxically, this ethics, addressed both to the psychoanalyst and to the analysand, is not an invitation to the debauchery of the senses but to duty; a duty dictated by a categorical imperative in which the postulate of Kantian practical reason, universally denounced by the Sadian subversion, it turns out to be a fatal, even tragic, structure of desire:... the good intention... promoted [by] Abelardo... certainly does not protect us from neurosis and its consequences". desire, being, even in its unconscious determinations —for example, homosexuality, rejected Judaism or any other singularity linked to the history of the subject that makes it become what it is—, and not divest itself, like a Tartuffe, of the guilt that this desire and its denials generate behind a mask of morality.

Subsequently, Lacan formulated other ethical questions. In his XI seminar, The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (1964), he argues that the status of the unconscious is not ontological but ethical. Later, during the 1970s, the ethical question about the act according to the desire towards the question of the word; so that it becomes an ethics of “saying well.” But this does not represent an opposition to his previous approach, since for Lacan saying well is itself an act.

Writing and writing style

Lacan's prose style is marked by the philosophical and literary context in which his work developed. In this sense, the influence of Georges Bataille, James Joyce and Martin Heidegger seem to be the most notorious. He often enunciated his teaching in a baroque and refined language, something that Lacan himself would confirm in his seminar XX, Even (1972-1973): «As someone recently warned, I get high — who gets me high? he or I? subtlety of lalengua — I rather place myself on the side of the baroque ».According to Louis Althusser, Lacan's baroque style was linked to his pedagogy:

... having to teach the theory of the unconscious to doctors, analysts or analyzers, Lacan gives them, in the rhetoric of his speech, the mimic equivalent of the language of the unconscious, which, as everyone knows, is ultimately "Witz", word play, metaphor, either failed or successful, the equivalent of what they experience in their practices either as analysts or as patients.

In contrast, some observe that "the impenetrability of Lacan's prose...is very often considered profound because it cannot be understood". the scientific community and greater acceptance among philosophers, writers and literary critics; the best known were Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and the Tel Quel magazine group.However, it can also be argued that "the imitation of his style by other Lacanian commentators" & # 3. 4;" has resulted in "an obscurantist antisystematic tradition in Lacanian literature". Even so, Lacan had no objection to being described as "the Góngora of psychoanalysis", but he also stated, in more pragmatic terms, that his style was intended to be a barrier against "aberrant interpretations" and that his texts were organized in this way to avoid superficial reading., deformed or merged known words. He also used signs, pictures, diagrams, scientific jargon and, in his last phase, Fregean logic, mathematical models, algebraic structures, topologies of knots or mathematics. This latter use of the formal language of the sciences would shock scientists.

For twenty years, Lacan refused to allow the publication of his seminars. By 1973 he agreed to allow Jacques-Alain Miller to establish the text on the basis of stenographic transcriptions and recordings, which resulted in legal co-authorship. Miller's involvement in editing the seminars has been the subject of considerable controversy and even litigation. In this regard, historian David Macey criticizes the fact that "no "originals" for a comparative study", and that there is also "no critical apparatus, since the text is already unwieldy and will become more so as new volumes appear".

Conception of the cure

The term «cure» has a different meaning in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory than the one traditionally attributed in the field of medicine. According to Lacan, the goal of analysis is not "to cure" or "to heal", in the sense of an ideal of sanity, since the clinical structures (neurosis, psychosis and perversion) are essentially "incurable"; the proposal of the analytic treatment is to lead the analysand to articulate his truth.The cure is a logical process that has an end, although not all analyzes are carried to their conclusion. This final instance is designated by Lacan with the expression «end of analysis» [fin d’analyse], which consists in knowing if the cure has reached its logical end point.

Throughout his psychoanalytic practice, Lacan conceives that final instance in different ways:

1. In the 1950s, Lacan describes the end of analysis as "the advent of a true word and the realization by the subject of his history in his relationship to a future"; "The subject... begins his analysis by speaking of himself without talking to you, or by speaking to you without talking about him. When I can tell you of yourself, the analysis will be finished." The purpose of analysis is also described as a conciliation with one's own mortal condition.
2. By 1960, he conceived the end of analysis as a state of anguish and abandonment, comparing it with child helplessness.
3. In 1964 he describes it as the moment when the analyst "has crossed the radical ghost".
4. In the 1970s, it conceives the end of analysis as “identification with sinthome» and know what to do with it.

The central issue in all the conceptions of the cure formulated by Lacan is that they imply a change in the subjective position of the analysand: a «subjective destitution». This also entails the fall of the analyst from the position of "subject supposed to know"; Therefore, the end of analysis supposes that the analyst is reduced to a remainder, an objet petit a, cause of the analysand's desire. In addition, he says that "the completion of the analysis, the true one" is what "prepares one to become an analyst", since the end of analysis is the necessary condition for the passage from the condition of analysand to that of analyst.

Legacy and influence

Lacan made several contributions to psychoanalytic theory. His work in terminology led to further translations by Jean Laplanche, André Bourguignon, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The mirror dimension of narcissism is, according to Gilbert Diatkine, the most widely accepted by non-Lacanian psychoanalysts and Didier Anzieu's work on the «I-skin» derives to a great extent from it; the opposition between the ego ideal and the ego ideal is criticized by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, but taken up again by Pierre Marty. D.W. Winnicott took up the concept of the mirror stage in the infant's relationship with the mother, and his concept of the "true self" is associated with the emergence of the subject in Lacan as the objective of analysis.

Plate in tribute to Lacan located in the rue 5, Paris.

The Lacanian conception of the symbolic influenced Jean Laplanche's theory of generalized seduction and, according to Diatkine, it is thanks to Lacan that in France there is more interest in the Oedipus complex than in Anglo-Saxon countries; the works of Michel Fain and Denise Braunschweig, as well as that of Claude Le Guen derive from it; Piera Aulagnier and Guy Rosolato developed their own theories from Lacan, and their influence on André Green was considerable. Diatkine also notes that Lacan's rereading of Freud contributed to understanding the specificities of psychotic projection, ego splitting, foreclosure and, if it fails to explain the psychoses, it has made it possible to sensitize all French psychoanalysts to the foundations of psychopathology. Élisabeth Roudinesco suggests that Lacanism, like Kleinism, extended the clinic of the neuroses to a clinic of the psychosis and deepened the question about the archaic relationship with the mother posed in classical Freudianism, since it began to place madness at the center of human subjectivity. He also gave continuity to the analysis of the place of the father and attributed the origin of psychosis to his symbolic weakening. With Lacan there was a recasting of Freudian metapsychology in which a philosophy of the subject and being was introduced, and a change in the conception of the unconscious (thought from a linguistic model instead of a biological one).

In the institutional sphere, Lacan influenced the debates on the practice of healing at the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP), particularly in 1974 thanks to the work of Serge Viderman; from this many psychoanalysts recognized their practice as a work on the signifier. Lacan's critique of the training system also had a great influence there, especially in the works of Jean Favreau, Jean-Luc Donnet or Robert Barande, although many The reforms came mainly from the influence of Sacha Nacht. Lacanism has been implemented in a massive way by exporting the French institutional model to other countries, such as Argentina and Brazil in Latin America, and has had an influence on the Canadian French-speaking part. In Europe it has had a variable development, but it is in France where it has the most influence. Forums of the Lacanian Field (IF, founded in 1999) and the Lacanian Convergence of Psychoanalysis (CLF, founded in 1997). However, it has spread little in English-speaking countries and its influence has been more considerable in the university environment; for example in the philosophy and literature departments of some North American universities, where Lacan's work is discussed and taught independently of any psychoanalytic training. In this sense, in the 1980s, Lacan influenced the creation of the called a "psychoanalytic literary branch" based on his approach to literary texts. Some of these authors are John P. Muller and William J. Richardson —The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida & Psychoanalytic Reading (1988)—, and Elizabeth Wright —Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (1984)—.

The Lacanian concept of the «gaze» influenced theorists of psychoanalytic film criticism such as Christian Metz —Le signifiant imaginaire, psychanalyse et cinéma (1977)—, and exponents of feminist film criticism as Laura Mulvey —Visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1975)— and Jacqueline Rose —Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986)—. Many of these critics would merge Lacan's concept with that of Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault's observations on the panopticon. According to Dylan Evans, the so-called "Lacanian film theory" is the subject of great conceptual confusion. Lacan's work was also read and commented on by numerous philosophers, including Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Feminist thinkers such as Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell were also influenced by his work: their joint edition of Lacan's essays on female sexuality helped to balance his alleged "phallocentrism" and his contention with American feminism. In the realm of queer theory, theorists such as Judith Butler have used Lacanian concepts in his work of philosophical criticism of the processes of socialization and power relations in contemporary society. Lacan is part of the reflection of various philosophers such as Julia Kristeva, François Regnault, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean- Luc Nancy, Barbara Cassin, Catherine Clément, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou.

Criticism

Although Lacan is usually associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements, he was not exempt from criticism from the main figures of these currents. Since the 1970s he has been questioned by the new generation. In The Anti-Oedipus (1972), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari accused him of remaining rooted in the “more conservative and "familiarist” aspects of the city. of Freudism», as did Jean François Lyotard —Libidinal Economics (1974)—, with a similar position. Jacques Derrida, in his book On Grammatology (1967), implicitly criticized him for his rereading of Freud adhering to "a primacy of the felt signifier as "telos of the full word"" and, according to Yannis Stavrakakis, Derrida attributed to him a " series of transcendental and idealistic truth claims, guilty of phonocentrism".

Former student François Roustang —Un destin si funeste (1976)— accused Lacanism of «becoming a religion». Some time later —Lacan, from the misunderstanding to the dead end (1986)—argued that Lacan's work "progresses with an indisputable rigor, but it is a rigor that is paradoxically maintained thanks to a systematization of equivocations." Former Lacanian analyst Dylan Evans —author of the Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis (1996)—eventually dismissed Lacanism after concluding that Lacan's ideas "are based on a false theory of human nature", and because "clinical reality did not agree with Lacan's theory Evans has also criticized Lacan's followers for treating his writings as a "sacred text". Roger Scruton included Lacan in his book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, naming him as the only "fool" included in the book: he accuses him of being a fraud and "a chap." crazy rlatan".

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont —Intellectual Impostures (1997)— criticize Lacan's use of terms from mathematics, especially topology. They argue that "the "mathematics" Lacan's are so fanciful that they cannot play any useful role in serious psychological analysis". They further accuse him of wanting to impress with "superficial erudition", of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand, and of producing statements that he does not even understand. they are false. However, they make it clear that they do not intend to enter into the debate on the purely psychoanalytic part of Lacan's work. Noam Chomsky has also been another prominent critic of Lacan. In his book The architecture of language (2000) he stated the following:

I met Lacan personally and I never understood a single word of everything I was saying... In fact, I have rather the intense feeling that Lacan used to jokes on a straight and sinister one, that he tried to calibrate to where his own madness came, despite what he got—and wanted—that he would take it very seriously.

Many feminist thinkers have criticized Lacan's thinking. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray accuses Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric dominance in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse. Others have echoed this accusation, noting that Lacan was trapped in the very phallocentric dominance that his language was apparently intended to undermine. The result, according to Cornelius Castoriadis, it was making all thought dependent on itself, which stifled the capacity for independent thought among everyone around him. These difficulties were only reinforced by what Didier Anzieu described as a kind of provocative lure in Lacan's discourse: "fundamental truths to be revealed..., but always at some later point".

Published Works

The following is a selection of Lacan's main works published in Spanish:

Of various editions

• From paranoid psychosis in its personality relationships. Twenty-first century. 1998 [First publication 1932]. ISBN 968-23-0538-1. OCLC 44743026.
• The family. Argonauta. 1978 [First publication 1938]. ISBN 950-9282-10-3. OCLC 55145487.
• Written. Twenty-first century. 2009 [First publication 1966]. ISBN 978-607-03-0057-8. OCLC 471471348.
• Significant and suture in psychoanalysis. 20th century Argentina. 1973. OCLC 919545052.
• Psychoanalysis, radiophony & television. Editorial Anagrama. 1977. ISBN 84-339-0045-5. OCLC 4511446.
• Ornicar?: regular publication of the Champ Freudien. 1981. ISBN 84-85746-06-6. OCLC 1009095898.
• Interventions and texts. Manantial Editions. 1985. ISBN 950-9515-06-X. OCLC 778162062.
• Teaching reviews. Manantial Editions. 1988. ISBN 950-9515-23-X. OCLC 55398428.
• Sex and its de-generation: interview with Jacques Lacan (1957). Grupo de Estudios Psicoanaliticos Israel-Europa. 1993. OCLC 233977662.
• The triumph of religion: preceded by speech to Catholics. Paidós. 2005. ISBN 950-12-3652-8. OCLC 62260358.
• Lacan, the writing, the image. Editions of the Figure. 2003. ISBN 978-987-95837-9-1. OCLC 741248925.
• Of the father's names. Paidós. 2005. ISBN 950-12-3651-X. OCLC 318361600.
• My teaching. Paidós. 2007. ISBN 978-950-12-3653-8. OCLC 174152294.
• Un-desliz's failure is love: in the manner of Jacques Lacan's oral seminary, 1976-1977. Ortega and Ortiz. 2008. ISBN 978-968-7995-17-5. OCLC 457814039.
• Other writings. Paidós. 2012. ISBN 978-950-12-3998-0. OCLC 815838173.

Seminars

• The Seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 1: the technical writings of Freud, 1953-1954. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 1981. ISBN 950-12-3971-5. OCLC 915947506.
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 2: the me in Freud theory and psychoanalytic technique, 1954-1955. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 1983. ISBN 978-950-12-3972-0. OCLC 318393556.
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 3: the psychosis, 1955-1956. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 1984. ISBN 978-950-12-3973-7. OCLC 634232159.
• The Seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 4: the relation of object, 1956-1957. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 1994. ISBN 978-950-12-3904-1. OCLC 753480833.
• Jacques Lacan's seminar: book 5: the formations of the unconscious, 1957-1958. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 1999. ISBN 950-12-3975-6. OCLC 912225040.
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 6: the desire and his interpretation, 1958-1959. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 2014. ISBN 978-950-12-0165-9. OCLC 949693093.
• The seminar of Jacques Lacan: book 7: the ethics of psychoanalysis, 1959-1960. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 1988. ISBN 978-950-12-3977-5. OCLC 634232199.
• The Seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 8: the transfer, 1960-1961. Buenos Aires. 2003. ISBN 978-950-12-3976-8. OCLC 434090615.
• Jacques Lacan's seminar: book 9: identification, 1961-1962. (audience)
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 10: anguish, 1962-1963. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 2006. ISBN 978-950-12-3978-2. OCLC 700782.
• The Seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 11: the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, 1964. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 1987. ISBN 950-12-3981-0. OCLC 55976569.
• Jacques Lacan's seminar: book 12: critical problems for psychoanalysis, 1964-1965. (audience)
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 13: the object of psychoanalysis, 1965-1966. (audience)
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 14: the logic of the ghost, 1966-1967. (audience)
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 15: the psychoanalytic act, 1967-1968. (audience)
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 16: from one another to another, 1968-1969. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 2008. ISBN 978-950-12-3980-5. OCLC 317147660.
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 17: the reverse of psychoanalysis, 1969-1970. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 1992. ISBN 84-7509-759-6. OCLC 803097278.
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 18: of a speech that was not of the countenance, 1971. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 2009. ISBN 978-950-12-3988-1. OCLC 476764173.
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 19:...or worse, 1971-1972. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 2012. ISBN 978-950-12-3919-5. OCLC 932731792.
• The Seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 20: Still, 1972-1973. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 1975. ISBN 978-950-12-3990-4. OCLC 893558911.
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 21: the deluded are deceived or the names of the father, 1973-1974. (audience)
• The seminar of Jacques Lacan: book 22: R.S.I., 1974-1975. (audience)
• The Seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 23: the Sinthome. Buenos Aires: Paidós. 2006. ISBN 950-12-3979-9. OCLC 123942963.
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 24: what is not known to know of the un-equivocation is protected in the Moor, 1976-1977. (audience)
• The seminar of Jacques Lacan: book 25: closing time, 1977-1978. (audience)
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 26: topology and time, 1978-1979. (audience)
• The seminary of Jacques Lacan: book 27: dissolution, 1980. (audience)

Documentaries

• Jacques Lacan Parle (from Françoise Wolff, 1972)
• Jacques Lacan: Télévision (from Benoît Jacquot, 1974)
• Jacques Lacan, la psychanalyse réinventée (from Elisabeth Kapnist, 2001)
• Quartier Lacan (from Emil Weiss, 2001)