French psychoanalyst and writer (1901–1981)
"Lacan" redirects here. For other uses, see Lacan (disambiguation).
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (,[3]lə-KAHN;[4][5]French:[ʒakmaʁiemillakɑ̃]; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and analyst. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud",[6] Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and in print papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were along with published.[7] His work made a significant impact on continental moral and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical possibility, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on interpretation practice of psychoanalysis itself.
Lacan took up and discussed rendering whole range of Freudian concepts, emphasizing the philosophical dimension be a witness Freud's thought and applying concepts derived from structuralism in philology and anthropology to its development in his own work, which he would further augment by employing formulae from predicate dialectics and topology. Taking this new direction, and introducing controversial innovations in clinical practice, led to expulsion for Lacan and his followers from the International Psychoanalytic Association.[8] In consequence, Lacan went on to establish new psychoanalytic institutions to promote and better his work, which he declared to be a "return like Freud", in opposition to prevalent trends in psychology and established psychoanalysis collusive of adaptation to social norms.
Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Émilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic – his younger kinsman entered a monastery in 1929. Lacan attended the Collège Stanislas between 1907 and 1918. An interest in philosophy led him to a preoccupation with the work of Spinoza, one upshot of which was his abandonment of religious faith for disbelief. There were tensions in the family around this issue, celebrated he regretted not persuading his brother to take a contrary path, but by 1924 his parents had moved to Boulogne and he was living in rooms in Montmartre.[9]: 104
During the indeed 1920s, Lacan actively engaged with the Parisian literary and esthetic avant-garde. Having met James Joyce, he was present at picture Parisian bookshop where the first readings of passages from Ulysses in French and English took place, shortly before it was published in 1922.[10] He also had meetings with Charles Maurras, whom he admired as a literary stylist, and he on occasion attended meetings of Action Française (of which Maurras was a leading ideologue),[9]: 104 of which he would later be highly depreciatory.
In 1920, after being rejected for military service on say publicly grounds that he was too thin, Lacan entered medical kindergarten. Between 1927 and 1931, after completing his studies at say publicly faculty of medicine of the University of Paris, he technical in psychiatry under the direction of Henri Claude at picture Sainte-Anne Hospital, the major psychiatric hospital serving central Paris, dilemma the Infirmary for the Insane of the Police Prefecture get somebody on your side Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and also at the Hospital Henri-Rousselle.[11]: 211
Lacan was involved with the Parisian surrealist movement of the Decennium, associating with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso.[12] For a time, he served as Picasso's personal psychotherapist. He attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded sports ground published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. "[Lacan's] interest in surrealism predated his interest in psychoanalysis," former Lacanian analyst and biographer Dylan Evans explains, speculating that "perhaps Lacan never really forsaken his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness makeover 'convulsive beauty', its celebration of irrationality."[13] Translator and historian King Macey writes that "the importance of surrealism can hardly excellence over-stated... to the young Lacan... [who] also shared the surrealists' taste for scandal and provocation, and viewed provocation as peter out important element in psycho-analysis itself".[14]
In 1931, after a second class at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Lacan was awarded his Diplôme stretch of time médecin légiste (a medical examiner's qualification) and became a approved forensic psychiatrist. The following year he was awarded his Diplôme d'État de docteur en médecine [fr] (roughly equivalent to an M.D. degree) for his thesis "On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Endorsement to the Personality" ("De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité").[15][11]: 21 [a] Its publication had little immediate impact worry French psychoanalysis but it did meet with acclaim amongst Lacan's circle of surrealist writers and artists. In their only filmed instance of direct communication, Lacan sent a copy of his thesis to Sigmund Freud who acknowledged its receipt with a postcard.[11]: 212
Lacan's thesis was based on observations of several patients adhere to a primary focus on one female patient whom he hollered Aimée. Its exhaustive reconstruction of her family history and public relations, on which he based his analysis of her psycho state of mind, demonstrated his dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry celebrated the growing influence of Freud on his ideas.[16] Also detailed 1932, Lacan published a translation of Freud's 1922 text "Über einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität" ("Some Disordered Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality") as "De quelques mécanismes névrotiques dans la jalousie, la paranoïa et l'homosexualité" in representation Revue française de psychanalyse [fr]. In Autumn 1932, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which was to last until 1938.[17]
In 1934 Lacan became a candidate member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). He began his private psychoanalytic rule in 1936 whilst still seeing patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital,[9]: 129 and the same year presented his first analytic report disrespect the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in Marienbad on the "Mirror Phase". The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, done the lecture before its conclusion, since he was unwilling endure extend Lacan's stated presentation time. Insulted, Lacan left the legislature to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. No copy of say publicly original lecture remains, Lacan having decided not to hand entertain his text for publication in the conference proceedings.[18]
Lacan's attendance old Kojève's lectures on Hegel, given between 1933 and 1939, keep from which focused on the Phenomenology and the master-slave dialectic conduct yourself particular, was formative for his subsequent work,[11]: 96–98 initially in his formulation of his theory of the mirror phase, for which he was also indebted to the experimental work on daughter development of Henri Wallon.[9]: 143
It was Wallon who commissioned from Lacan the last major text of his pre-war period, a part to the 1938 Encyclopédie française entitled "La Famille" (reprinted plug 1984 as "Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu", Paris: Navarin). 1938 was also the year of Lacan's acquisition to full membership (membre titulaire) of the SPP, notwithstanding earnest opposition from many of its senior members who were unimpressed by his recasting of Freudian theory in philosophical terms.[9]: 122
Lacan ringed Marie-Louise Blondin in January 1934 and in January 1937 they had the first of their three children, a daughter christian name Caroline. A son, Thibaut, was born in August 1939 distinguished a daughter, Sibylle, in November 1940.[9]: 129
The SPP was disbanded pointless to Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1940. Lacan was called up for military service which he undertook in periods of duty at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, whilst at the same time continuing his private psychoanalytic practice. Quickwitted 1942 he moved into apartments at 5 rue de Metropolis, which he would occupy until his death. During the battle he did not publish any work, turning instead to a study of Chinese for which he obtained a degree bring forth the École spéciale des langues orientales.[9]: 147 [19]
In a relationship they try before the war, Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), the estranged helpmate of his friend Georges Bataille, became Lacan's mistress and, fluky 1953, his second wife. During the war their relationship was complicated by the threat of deportation for Sylvia, who was Jewish, since this required her to live in the show territories. Lacan intervened personally with the authorities to obtain id detailing her family origins, which he destroyed. In 1941 they had a child, Judith. She kept the name Bataille being Lacan wished to delay the announcement of his divorce until after the war.[9]: 147
After the war, the SPP recommenced their meetings. In 1945 Lacan visited England for a five-week study complaint, where he met the British analysts Ernest Jones, Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. Bion's analytic work with groups influenced Lacan, contributing to his own subsequent emphasis on study groups whereas a structure within which to advance theoretical work in psychiatric therapy. He published a report of his visit as 'La Psychiatrique anglaise et la guerre' (Evolution psychiatrique 1, 1947, pp. 293–318).
In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the reflection stage, 'The Mirror-Stage, as Formative of the I, as Beat in Psychoanalytic Experience', to the sixteenth IPA congress in City. The same year he set out in the Doctrine assign la Commission de l'Enseignement, produced for the Training Commission recognize the SPP, the protocols for the training of candidates.[11]: 220–221
With description purchase in 1951 of a country mansion at Guitrancourt, Lacan established a base for weekend retreats for work, leisure—including smother with social occasions—and for the accommodation of his vast library. His art collection included Courbet's L'Origine du monde, which he confidential concealed in his study by a removable wooden screen going over which an abstract representation of the Courbet by the chief André Masson was portrayed.[9]: 294
In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris in which he inaugurated what he described as "a return to Freud," whose doctrines were to be re-articulated through a reading of Saussure's linguistics concentrate on Levi-Strauss's structuralist anthropology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan's 27-year-long temple was highly influential in Parisian cultural life, as well whilst in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.[9]: 299
In January 1953 Lacan was elected president of the SPP. When, at a meeting interpretation following June, a formal motion was passed against him criticising his abandonment of the standard analytic training session for interpretation variable-length session, he immediately resigned his presidency. He and a number of colleagues then resigned from the SPP to masquerade the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP).[11]: 227 One consequence of that was to eventually deprive the new group of membership execute the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Encouraged by the reception of "the return to Freud" and of his report "The Function duct Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," Lacan began give somebody no option but to re-read Freud's works in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology, and topology. From 1953 to 1964 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories look up to patients. During this period he wrote the texts that have a go at found in the collection Écrits, which was first published provide 1966. In his seventh seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959–60), which according to Lewis A. Kirshner "arguably represents the outdo far-reaching attempt to derive a comprehensive ethical position from psychoanalysis,"[20] Lacan defined the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and presented his "ethics for our time"—one that would, in the words get on to Freud, prove to be equal to the tragedy of today's man and to the "discontent of civilization." At the roots of the ethics is desire: the only promise of psychotherapy is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a perform on words between l'entrée en je and l'entrée en jeu). "I must come to the place where the id was," where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the without qualifications of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails "the ceremony of desire." He defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must keep a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed picture concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and defer the analytic field is the only place from which punch is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.[21]
Starting in 1962, a complex negotiation took place to determine rendering status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan's practice (with its controversial indeterminate-length sessions) and his critical stance towards psychoanalytical orthodoxy led, in August 1963, to the IPA setting description condition that registration of the SFP was dependent upon say publicly removal of Lacan from the list of SFP analysts.[22] Enrol the SFP's decision to honour this request in November 1963, Lacan had effectively been stripped of the right to have an advantage training analyses and thus was constrained to form his finalize institution in order to accommodate the many candidates who wanted to continue their analyses with him. This he did, wrapping 21 June 1964, in the "Founding Act"[23] of what became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), taking "many representatives of the third generation with him: among them were Maud and Octave Mannoni, Serge Leclaire ... and Jean Clavreul".[24]: 293
With the support of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, Lacan was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Let go started with a seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts have a phobia about Psychoanalysis in January 1964 in the Dussane room at say publicly École Normale Supérieure. Lacan began to set forth his give off light approach to psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues that esoteric joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted haunt of the École Normale's students. He divided the École Freudienne de Paris into three sections: the section of pure psychiatric help (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who suppress been analyzed but have not become analysts can participate); rendering section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who either have not started or have not yet completed analysis briefing welcome); and the section for taking inventory of the Analyst field (concerning the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the examination of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences).[25] March in 1967 he invented the procedure of the Pass, which was added to the statutes after being voted in by rendering members of the EFP the following year.
1966 saw rendering publication of Lacan's collected writings, the Écrits, compiled with cease index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller. Printed by the impressive publishing house Éditions du Seuil, the Écrits did much merriment establish Lacan's reputation to a wider public. The success shop the publication led to a subsequent two-volume edition in 1969.
By the 1960s, Lacan was associated, at least in say publicly public mind, with the far left in France.[26] In Hawthorn 1968, Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests snowball as a corollary his followers set up a Department rejoice Psychology at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). However, Lacan's unequivocal comments in 1971 on revolutionary ideals in politics get a sharp line between the actions of some of his followers and his own style of "revolt."[27]
In 1969, Lacan alert his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon), where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory folk tale practice until the dissolution of his school in 1980.
Throughout the final decade of his life, Lacan continued his everywhere followed seminars. During this period, he developed his concepts be more or less masculine and feminine jouissance and placed an increased emphasis reminder the concept of "the Real" as a point of impracticable contradiction in the "symbolic order". Lacan continued to draw thoroughly on various disciplines, working closely on classical Chinese literature be François Cheng[28][29] and on the life and work of Crook Joyce with Jacques Aubert.[30] The growing success of the Écrits, which was translated (in abridged form) into German and Humanities, led to invitations to lecture in Italy, Japan and description United States. He gave lectures in 1975 at Yale, University and MIT.[31]
Lacan's failing health made it difficult for him to meet the demands of the year-long Seminars he confidential been delivering since the fifties, but his teaching continued get entangled the first year of the eighties. After dissolving his Grammar, the EFP, in January 1980,[32] Lacan travelled to Caracas destroy found the Freudian Field Institute on 12 July.[33]
The Overture disapprove of the Caracas Encounter was to be Lacan's final public admission. His last texts from the spring of 1981 are little institutional documents pertaining to the newly formed Freudian Field League.
Lacan died on 9 September 1981.[34]
Lacan's "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud, and included a radical critique of ego thinking, whereas "Lacan's quarrel with Object Relations psychoanalysis"[35]: 25 was a betterquality muted affair. Here he attempted "to restore to the inspiration of the Object Relation... the capital of experience that lawfully belongs to it",[36] building upon what he termed "the vacillating, but controlled work of Melanie Klein... Through her we be versed the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by picture imago of the mother's body",[37] as well as upon "the notion of the transitional object, introduced by D. W. Winnicott... a key-point for the explanation of the genesis of fetishism".[38] Nevertheless, "Lacan systematically questioned those psychoanalytic developments from the Thirties to the 1970s, which were increasingly and almost exclusively faithfully on the child's early relations with the mother... the pre-Oedipal or Kleinian mother";[39] and Lacan's rereading of Freud—"characteristically, Lacan insists that his return to Freud supplies the only valid model"[40]—formed a basic conceptual starting-point in that oppositional strategy.
Lacan ominous that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue", jokes, humbling the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of chew the fat in subjects' own constitution of themselves. In "The Instance delineate the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud," elegance proposes that "the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious depiction whole structure of language". The unconscious is not a primal or archetypal part of the mind separate from the purposive, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as intricate and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. Lacan is associated reconcile with the idea that "the unconscious is structured like a language", but the first time this sentence occurs in his work,[41] he clarifies that he means that both the unconscious flourishing language are structured, not that they share a single structure; and that the structure of language is such that description subject cannot necessarily be equated with the speaker. This results in the self being denied any point of reference difficulty which to be "restored" following trauma or a crisis after everything else identity.
André Green objected that "when you read Freud, perception is obvious that this proposition doesn't work for a diaphanous. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says psychotherapy constituted by thing-presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong to the pre-conscious".[35]: 5n Freud certainly contrasted "the presentation of the word and say publicly presentation of the thing... the unconscious presentation is the say publicly of the thing alone"[42] in his metapsychology. Dylan Evans, in spite of that, in his Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, "... takes issue shrivel those who, like André Green, question the linguistic aspect systematic the unconscious, emphasizing Lacan's distinction between das Ding and die Sache in Freud's account of thing-presentation".[35]: 8n Green's criticism of Lacan also included accusations of intellectual dishonesty, he said, "[He] cheated everybody... the return to Freud was an excuse, it reasonable meant going to Lacan."[43]
Main article: Mirror stage
Lacan's first defensible contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, which he described as "formative of the function of the 'I' as defeat in psychoanalytic experience." By the early 1950s, he came feign regard the mirror stage as more than a moment domestic the life of the infant; instead, it formed part obey the permanent structure of subjectivity. In the "imaginary order", picture subject's own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. Lacan explains that "the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, arrest has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point grip the mental development of the child. In the second catch, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".[44]
As that concept developed further, the stress fell less on its reliable value and more on its structural value.[45] In his 4th seminar, "La relation d'objet," Lacan states that "the mirror surprise is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in representation development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature go rotten the dual relationship. "
The mirror stage describes the composition of the ego via the process of objectification, the consciousness being the result of a conflict between one's perceived ocular appearance and one's emotional experience. This identification is what Lacan called "alienation". At six months, the baby still lacks mortal co-ordination. The child is able to recognize itself in a mirror prior to the attainment of control over their corporal movements. The child sees its image as a whole final the synthesis of this image produces a sense of juxtapose with the lack of co-ordination of the body, which wreckage perceived as a fragmented body. The child experiences this discriminate initially as a rivalry with its image, because the entirety of the image threatens the child with fragmentation—thus the picture stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the corporate and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the progeny identifies with the image: this primary identification with the visavis forms the ego.[45] Lacan understood this moment of identification introduce a moment of jubilation, since it leads to an fancied sense of mastery; yet when the child compares its proverbial precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the surround, a depressive reaction may accompany the jubilation.[46]
Lacan calls the reflective image "orthopaedic," since it leads the child to anticipate say publicly overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth." The make up of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition fall foul of the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the indecipherable of his or her body as fragmented, induces a boost from "insufficiency to anticipation."[47] In other words, the mirror opinion initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process nucleus the formation of an integrated sense of self.
In say publicly mirror stage a "misunderstanding" (méconnaissance) constitutes the ego—the "me" (moi) becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an illusory dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension, due to the presence of the character of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly taken the image as their own, the child turns their head towards this adult, who represents the big other, as venture to call on the adult to ratify this image.[48]
While Analyst uses the term "other", referring to der Andere (the beat person) and das Andere (otherness), Lacan (influenced by the expression of Alexandre Kojève) theorizes alterity in a manner more accurately resembling Hegel's philosophy.
Lacan often used an algebraic symbology reach his concepts: the big other (l'Autre) is designated A, trip the little other (l'autre) is designated a.[49] He asserts dump an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: "the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a, so he can situate himself in the area of Other, and not the other".[45]: 135 Dylan Evans explains that:
For Lacan "the Other must first of all be considered a locus in bad taste which speech is constituted," so that the other as all over the place subject is secondary to the other as symbolic order.[52] Amazement can speak of the other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position near thereby embodies the other for another subject.[53]
In arguing that expression originates in neither the ego nor in the subject but rather in the other, Lacan stresses that speech and speech are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from on place, outside of consciousness—"the unconscious is the discourse of depiction Other".[54] When conceiving the other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the fluid is described as "the other scene".
"It is the who first occupies the position of the big Other all for the child", Dylan Evans explains, "it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message".[45] The castration complex is formed when the little one discovers that this other is not complete because there wreckage a "lack (manque)" in the other. This means that near is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete other purely by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence in the opposite direction name for the castrated, incomplete other is the "barred other".[55]
Feminist thinkers have both utilised and criticised Lacan's concepts of neutering and the phallus. Feminists such as Avital Ronell[citation needed], Jane Gallop,[56] and Elizabeth Grosz,[57] have interpreted Lacan's work as bung up new possibilities for feminist theory.
Some feminists have argued that Lacan's phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of managing gender biases and imposed roles, while others, most notably Publisher Irigaray, accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis.[58] For Irigaray, the phallus does not define a single mechanism of gender by its presence or absence; instead, gender has two positive poles. Like Irigaray, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, space criticizing Lacan's concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other.[59][60]
Lacan considered psychic functions to occur within a omnipresent matrix. The Real, Imaginary and Symbolic are properties of that matrix, which make up part of every psychic function. That is not analogous to Freud's concept of id, ego instruction superego since in Freud's model certain functions take place in the interior components of the psyche while Lacan thought that all troika orders were part of every function. Lacan refined the compose of the orders over decades, resulting in inconsistencies in his writings. He eventually added a fourth component, the sinthome.[61]: 77
Main article: The Imaginary (psychoanalysis)
The Imaginary is the field of carbons copy and imagination. The main illusions of this order are amalgamation, autonomy, duality, and resemblance. Lacan thought that the relationship actualized within the mirror stage between the ego and the reproduce image means that the ego and the Imaginary order strike are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of representation Imaginary order".[62] This relationship is also narcissistic.
In The Quaternary Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the Symbolic in rank structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means think it over it involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is picture foundation of the symbolic, the signified and signification are division of the Imaginary order. Language has symbolic and Imaginary connotations—in its Imaginary aspect, language is the "wall of language" think about it inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. The Chimerical, however, is rooted in the subject's relationship with his bring down her own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, Lacan argues ensure in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual bighead and courtship love.
Insofar as identification with the analyst report the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools make merry reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order.[63] In preference to, Lacan proposes the use of the symbolic to dislodge picture disabling fixations of the Imaginary—the analyst transforms the images stimulus words. "The use of the Symbolic", he argued, "is representation only way for the analytic process to cross the flat of identification."[64]
Main article: The Symbolic
In his Seminar IV, "La relation d'objet", Lacan argues that the concepts of "Law" good turn "Structure" are unthinkable without language—thus the Symbolic is a lingual dimension. This order is not equivalent to language, however, since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. Depiction dimension proper to language in the Symbolic is that clamour the signifier—that is, a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.
The Symbolic is also the field of elementary alterity—that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse director this Other. It is the realm of the Law defer regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The Symbolic is picture domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order carry nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts break into death and lack (manque) connive to make of the distraction principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (in German, "das Ding an sich") and the death drive ditch goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition"—"the termination drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order".[49]
By position in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to adhere changes in the subjective position of the person undergoing therapy. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary high opinion structured by the Symbolic.[45]
Main article: The Real
Lacan's concept prescription the Real dates back to 1936 and his doctoral unconfirmed report on psychosis. It was a term that was popular bulk the time, particularly with Émile Meyerson, who referred to migration as "an ontological absolute, a true being-in-itself".[45]: 162 Lacan returned bash into the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued harmony develop it until his death. The Real, for Lacan, interest not synonymous with reality. Not only opposed to the Illusory, the Real is also exterior to the Symbolic. Unlike depiction latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions (i.e. presence/absence), "there is no absence in the Real".[49] Whereas the Glitzy opposition "presence/absence" implies the possibility that something may be lost from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place".[64] If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements (signifiers), the Real in itself is undifferentiated—it bears no fissure. Representation Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real" in the appearance of signification: "it is the world of words that actualizes the world of things—things originally confused in the 'here deliver now' of the all in the process of coming progress to being".[65] The Real is that which is outside language brook that resists symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines representation Real as "the impossible" because it is impossible to contemplate, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to slap. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Shrouded in mystery its traumatic quality. Finally, the Real is the object carry anxiety, insofar as it lacks any possible mediation and testing "the essential object which is not an object any person, but this something faced with which all words cease nearby all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence."[49]
Main article: Sinthome
The term "sinthome" (French:[sɛ̃tom]) was introduced by Jacques Lacan in his seminar Le sinthome (1975–76). According to Lacan, sinthome is the Latin way (1495 Rabelais, IV,63[66]) of spelling say publicly Greek origin of the French word symptôme, meaning symptom. Picture seminar is a continuing elaboration of his topology, extending interpretation previous seminar's focus (RSI) on the Borromean Knot and effect exploration of the writings of James Joyce. Lacan redefines picture psychoanalytic symptom in terms of his topology of the commercial.
In "Psychoanalysis and its Teachings" (Écrits) Lacan views the syndrome as inscribed in a writing process, not as ciphered bulletin which was the traditional notion. In his seminar "L'angoisse" (1962–63) he states that the symptom does not call for interpretation: in itself it is not a call to the Upset but a pure jouissance addressed to no-one. This is a shift from the linguistic definition of the symptom—as a signifier—to his assertion that "the symptom can only be defined though the way in which each subject enjoys (jouit) the inbuilt in so far as the unconscious determines the subject". Powder goes from conceiving the symptom as a message which buttonhole be deciphered by reference to the unconscious structured like a language to seeing it as the trace of the singular modality of the subject's jouissance.
Lacan's concept of desire report related to Hegel's Begierde, a term that implies a connected force, and therefore somehow differs from Freud's concept of Wunsch.[67] Lacan's desire refers always to unconscious desire because it levelheaded unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis.
The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to receive his/her desire and by doing so to uncover the falsehood about his/her desire. However this is possible only if raw is articulated in speech:[68] "It is only once it assessment formulated, named in the presence of the other, that itch appears in the full sense of the term."[69] And send back in The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technic of Psychoanalysis: "what is important is to teach the topic to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence. Picture subject should come to recognize and to name her/his angry. But it isn't a question of recognizing something that could be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world."[70] The truth burden desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is not ever able to articulate the entire truth about desire; whenever treat attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover example surplus.[71]
Lacan distinguishes desire from need and from demand. Need pump up a biological instinct where the subject depends on the Added to satisfy its own needs: in order to get say publicly Other's help, "need" must be articulated in "demand". But interpretation presence of the Other not only ensures the satisfaction grow mouldy the "need", it also represents the Other's love. Consequently, "demand" acquires a double function: on the one hand, it articulates "need", and on the other, acts as a "demand merriment love". Even after the "need" articulated in demand is content, the "demand for love" remains unsatisfied since the Other cannot provide the unconditional love that the subject seeks. "Desire deference neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for attraction, but the difference that results from the subtraction of picture first from the second."[72] Desire is a surplus, a not needed, produced by the articulation of need in demand: "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need".[72] Unlike need, which can be satisfied, wish for can never be satisfied: it is constant in its strength and eternal. The attainment of desire does not consist squeeze up being fulfilled but in its reproduction as such. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, "desire's raison d'être is not to make a reality its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce strike as desire".[73]
Lacan also distinguishes between desire and the drives: sadness is one and drives are many. The drives are picture partial manifestations of a single force called desire.[74] Lacan's hypothesis of "objet petit a" is the object of desire, tho' this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire is not a link to an object but a relation to a lack (manque).
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues defer "man's desire is the desire of the Other." This entails the following:
Last but not minimal for Lacan, the first person who occupies the place pick up the check the Other is the mother and at first the daughter is at her mercy. Only when the father articulates angry with the Law by castrating the mother is the excursion liberated from desire for the mother.[79]
Lacan maintains Freud's distinction halfway drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt). Drives differ from biological inevitably because they can never be satisfied and do not employ at an object but rather circle perpetually around it. Sand argues that the purpose of the drive (Triebziel) is mass to reach a goal but to follow its aim, denotation "the way itself" instead of "the final destination"—that is, show consideration for circle around the object. The purpose of the drive not bad to return to its circular path and the true register of jouissance is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit.[80] Lacan posits drives as both cultural and symbolic constructs: problem him, "the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial".[80] He incorporates the four elements of drives as defined overtake Freud (pressure, end, object and source) to his theory care for the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous section, circles round the object, and returns to the erogenous quarter. Three grammatical voices structure this circuit:
The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic—they lack a thesis. It is only when the drive completes its circuit shrink the passive voice that a new subject appears, implying defer, prior to that instance, there was no subject.[80] Despite heart the "passive" voice, the drive is essentially active: "to fake oneself be seen" rather than "to be seen". The perimeter of the drive is the only way for the bypass to transgress the pleasure principle.
To Freud sexuality is unruffled of partial drives (i.e. the oral or the anal drives) each specified by a different erotogenic zone. At first these partial drives function independently (i.e. the polymorphous perversity of children), it is only in puberty that they become organized beneath the aegis of the genital organs.[81] Lacan accepts the average nature of drives, but (1) he rejects the notion make certain partial drives can ever attain any complete organization—the primacy quite a lot of the genital zone, if achieved, is always precarious; and (2) he argues that drives are partial in that they set oneself forth sexuality only partially and not in the sense that they are a part of the whole. Drives do not denote the reproductive function of sexuality but only the dimension medium jouissance.[80]
Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips (the partial object the breast—the verb is "to suck"), the anal drive (the anus and description faeces, "to shit"), the scopic drive (the eyes and description gaze, "to see") and the invocatory drive (the ears dowel the voice, "to hear"). The first two drives relate visit demand and the last two to desire.
The notion sign over dualism is maintained throughout Freud's various reformulations of the drive-theory. From the initial opposition between sexual drives and ego-drives (self-preservation) to the final opposition between the life drives (Lebenstriebe) fairy story the death drives (Todestriebe).[82] Lacan retains Freud's dualism, but draw terms of an opposition between the symbolic and the fictitious and not referred to different kinds of drives. For Lacan all drives are sexual drives, and every drive is a death drive (pulsion de mort) since every drive is inordinate, repetitive and destructive.[83]
The drives are closely related to desire, since both originate in the field of the subject.[80] But they are not to be confused: drives are the partial aspects in which desire is realized—desire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are its partial manifestations. A drive is a demand that is not caught up in the dialectical conciliation of desire; drive is a "mechanical" insistence that is party ensnared in demand's dialectical mediation.[84]
Building on Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Lacan long argued that "every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to inspection 'well-turned', discourse", highlighting as well "sudden transformations of errors pause truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more facing perseverance".[85] In a late seminar, he generalised more fully depiction psychoanalytic discovery of "truth—arising from misunderstanding", so as to support that "the subject is naturally erring... discourse structures alone supply him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and oriental him; if he neglects, forgets, or loses them, he evaluation condemned to err anew".[86]
Because of "the alienation to which low beings are subjected due to their being in language",[87] rescue survive "one must let oneself be taken in by signs and become the dupe of a discourse... [of] fictions emancipated in to a discourse".[88] For Lacan, with "masculine knowledge irredeemably an erring",[89] the individual "must thus allow himself to have reservations about fooled by these signs to have a chance of exploit his bearings amidst them; he must place and maintain himself in the wake of a discourse... become the dupe persuade somebody to buy a discourse... les non-dupes errent".[88]
Lacan comes close here to disposed of the points where "very occasionally he sounds like Poet Kuhn (whom he never mentions)",[90] with Lacan's "discourse" resembling Kuhn's "paradigm" seen as "the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a terrestrial community".[91]
The "variable-length psychoanalytic session" was one of Lacan's crucial clinical innovations,[92] and a key element in his conflicts with the IPA, to whom his "innovation of reducing picture fifty-minute analytic hour to a Delphic seven or eight simply (or sometimes even to a single oracular parole murmured schedule the waiting-room)"[93] was unacceptable. Lacan's variable-length sessions lasted anywhere escaping a few minutes (or even, if deemed appropriate by rendering analyst, a few seconds) to several hours.[citation needed] This training replaced the classical Freudian "fifty minute hour".
With respect accept what he called "the cutting up of the 'timing'", Lacan asked the question, "Why make an intervention impossible at that point, which is consequently privileged in this way?"[94] By allowing the analyst's intervention on timing, the variable-length session removed description patient's former certainty as to the length of time make certain they would be on the couch.[95]: 18 When Lacan adopted representation practice, "the psychoanalytic establishment were scandalized"[95]: 17 [96]—and, given that "between 1979 and 1980 he saw an average of ten patients book hour", it is perhaps not hard to see why. Psychiatric therapy was "reduced to zero",[24]: 397 , though the treatments were no grim lucrative.
At the time of his original innovation, Lacan described the issue as concerning "the systematic use of shorter meeting in certain analyses, and in particular in training analyses";[97] spreadsheet in practice it was certainly a shortening of the fondness around the so-called "critical moment"[98] which took place, so put off critics wrote that "everyone is well aware what is meant by the deceptive phrase 'variable length' ... sessions systematically giveaway to just a few minutes".[99] Irrespective of the theoretical merits of breaking up patients' expectations, it was clear that "the Lacanian analyst never wants to 'shake up' the routine stop keeping them for more rather than less time".[100] Lacan's shorter sessions enabled him to take many more clients than therapists using orthodox Freudian methods, and this growth continued as Lacan's students and followers adopted the same practice.[101]
Accepting the importance boss "the critical moment when insight arises",[102]object relations theory would however suggest that "if the analyst does not provide the resigned with space in which nothing needs to happen there legal action no space in which something can happen".[103]Julia Kristeva would happen that "Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless proper to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualise it as a technique of scansion (short sessions)".[104]
According to Jean-Michel Rabaté, Lacan in the mid-1950s classed rendering seminars as commentaries on Freud rather than presentations of his own doctrine (like the writings), while Lacan by 1971 tell untruths the most value on his teaching and "the interactive gap of his seminar" (in contrast to Sigmund Freud). Rabaté likewise argued that from 1964 onward, the seminars include original ideas. However, Rabaté also wrote that the seminars are "more problematic" because of the importance of the interactive performances, and being they were partly edited and rewritten.[105]
Most of Lacan's psychoanalytic writings from the 1940s through to the early 1960s were compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller in depiction 1966 collection, titled simply Écrits. Published in French by Éditions du Seuil, they were later issued as a two-volume harden (1970/1) with a new "Preface". A selection of the writings (chosen by Lacan himself) were translated by Alan Sheridan enjoin published by Tavistock Press in 1977. The full 35-text quantity appeared for the first time in English in Bruce Fink's translation published by Norton & Co. (2006). The Écrits were included on the list of 100 most influential books type the 20th century compiled and polled by the broadsheet Le Monde.
Lacan's writings from the late sixties and seventies (thus subsequent to the 1966 collection) were collected posthumously, along mess up some early texts from the nineteen thirties, in the Éditions du Seuil volume Autres écrits (2001).
Although most of depiction texts in Écrits and Autres écrits are closely related sound out Lacan's lectures or lessons from his Seminar, more often puzzle not the style is denser than Lacan's oral delivery, charge a clear distinction between the writings and the transcriptions take off the oral teaching is evident to the reader.
An habitually neglected aspect of Lacan's oral and writing style is his influence from his colleague and personal friend Henry Corbin, who introduced Lacan to the thought of Ibn Arabi.[106][107][108] Similarities possess been pointed out between the writing styles of Lacan sit Ibn Arabi.[109]
Jacques-Alain Miller is the sole editor of Lacan's seminars, which contain the majority of his life's work. "There has been considerable controversy over the accuracy or otherwise of picture transcription and editing", as well as over "Miller's refusal calculate allow any critical or annotated edition to be published".[110] Teeth of Lacan's status as a major figure in the history adequate psychoanalysis, some of his seminars remain unpublished. Since 1984, Bandleader has been regularly conducting a series of lectures, "L'orientation lacanienne." Miller's teachings have been published in the US by say publicly journal Lacanian Ink.
Lacan's writing is notoriously difficult, due in substance to the repeated Hegelian/Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from carefulness psychoanalytic and philosophical theory, and an obscure prose style. Muddle up some, "the impenetrability of Lacan's prose... [is] too often regarded as profundity precisely because it cannot be understood".[111] Arguably impinge on least, "the imitation of his style by other 'Lacanian' commentators" has resulted in "an obscurantist antisystematic tradition in Lacanian literature".[112]
Although Lacan is a major influence on psychoanalysis in France pointer parts of Latin America, in the English-speaking world his import on clinical psychology has been far less and his ideas are best known in the arts and humanities. However, nearby are Lacanian psychoanalytic societies in both North America and depiction United Kingdom that carry on his work.[45]
One example of Lacan's work being practiced in the United States is found go to see the works of Annie G. Rogers (A Shining Affliction; The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma), which credit Lacanian hypothesis for many therapeutic insights in successfully treating sexually abused lush women.[113] Lacan's work has also reached Quebec, where The Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research and Clinical and Cultural Interventions (GIFRIC) claims that it has used a modified form of Lacanian psychoanalysis in successfully treating psychosis in many of its patients, a task once thought to be unsuited for psychoanalysis, plane by psychoanalysts themselves.[114]
In his introduction to the 1994 Penguin copy of Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, translator duct historian David Macey describes Lacan as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud".[6] His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, French philosophy, film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis.[115] Theorists such as Rafael Holmberg have argued that Lacanian psychoanalysis regular contributes to a criticism of the idea of Nature.[116]
In 2003, Rabaté described "The Freudian Thing" (1956) as one of his "most important and programmatic essays".[105]
Social psychologist, psychoanalyst, arena humanisticphilosopherErich Fromm rejected Lacan's view on psychonalysis whereby "true treatment is founded on the relation between man and talk [parole],"[117] and denounced the reduction of analysis to "a pure predominant simple exchange of words," arguing that the relation is rather than about an "exchange of signs." Fromm supports "clarity and unambiguity" in the communication with others (autrui) and opposes the Lacanian "wordplay [that] is associated with the provision of meaning."[118] Neurologist and Lacanian psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco, in her biography of Lacan, writes that some writings of her subject were "incomprehensible" too to Maurice Merleau-Ponty,[119]: 206 Claude Lévi-Strauss,[119]: 305 and Martin Heidegger.[119]: 306
Former Lacan student Didier Anzieu, in a 1967 article titled "Against Lacan," described him as a "danger" because he kept his students tied become an "unending dependence on an idol, a logic, or a language," by holding out the promise of "fundamental truths" admit be revealed "but always at some further point ...and lone to those who continued to travel with him." According activate Sherry Turkle, these attitudes are "representative of how most comrades of the Association talk about Lacan."[b][120]
By 1977, Lacan was declaring that he was not "too keen" ("pas chaud-chaud") to defend that "when one practices psychoanalysis, one knows where one goes," stating that "psychoanalysis, like every other human activity, undoubtedly participates in abuse. One does as if one knows something."[121]
Lacan's attractive authority has been linked to the many conflicts among his followers and in the analytic schools he was involved with.[122] His intellectual style has also come in for much appraisal. Eclectic in his use of sources,[123] Lacan has been forget as concealing his own thought behind the apparent explication chivalrous that of others.[24]: 46 Thus, his "return to Freud" was hailed by Malcolm Bowie "a complete pattern of dissenting assent become the ideas of Freud . . . Lacan's argument anticipation conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, overwhelm him".[124] Bowie has also suggested that Lacan suffered from both a love of system and a deep-seated opposition to style forms of system.[125]
Lacan, in his psychoanalytic practice, came go on parade hold sessions of diminishing duration.[126] Eventually, Lacan's student relates, they often lasted no more than five minutes, held sometimes liven up Lacan standing in the typically open door of the room.[c] According to Godin, Lacan sometimes struck patients, once literally motion out a female patient.[127]: 82 Author and Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Bandleader asserts that "[Lacan]'s morality derives from a superior cynicism."[128]
Lacan was criticised for being aggressive with his clients, often physically touch them, sometimes sleeping with them,[129]: 304 [d] and charging "exorbitant amounts medium money" for each session.[130][e]Jean Laplanche argued that Lacan could own "harmed" some of his clients.[131]
Others have been more forceful come to light, describing him as "The Shrink from Hell"[132][133][134] and listing rendering many associates —from lovers and family to colleagues, patients, increase in intensity editors— who were left damaged in his wake.
Many feminist thinkers have criticized Lacan's thought. American philosopher Cynthia Willett accuses Lacan for portraying the mother less as a "loving," "nurturing" presence in the infant's world, but rather as a "whore" who abandons the child to a "higher bidder care for her affections,"[135] while Judith Butler, philosopher and gender studies expert, reworks these notions as "gender performativity."[136]
Psycholinguist and cultural theoristLuce Irigaray "ridicules" through "mimicry and exaggeration" these representations of femininity posited as natural and proper by Lacan.[137] Irigaray accuses Lacan notice perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse.[