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Jacques Lacan

After World War II French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) became a cult hero, a formidable intellectual superstar whose "structural psychoanalysis," first in France and later at American elite universities, dominated much of intellectual life.

Jacques Lacan was born in Paris on April 13, 1901, the eldest child of Emilie and Alfred Lacan, a representant de commerce dealing in soap and oils. The family belonged to the prosperous middle bourgeoisie, and Lacan went to the Collège Stanislas, a well-known Jesuit establishment. Too thin to be accepted into military service, he went straight to the study of medicine and then to psychiatry. He took his clinical training at Sainte-Anne, the major psychiatric hospital in central Paris.

In 1931 he received his license as a forensic psychiatrist, and in 1932 was awarded his Doctorat d'état for his thesis, De la Psychose paranoiaque dans les rapports avec lapersonnalité. While this thesis drew considerable acclaim outside psychoanalytic circles, particularly among the surrealist artists, it seems to have been ignored by psychoanalysts. But in 1934 he became a candidate for the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. During this period he is said to have befriended the surrealists André Breton and Georges Bataille. Because Lacan, like Freud, apparently destroyed most of the records of his past, and unlike Freud did not reveal much of it later on, it is difficult to distinguish between the many myths, anecdotes, and rumors that have surrounded him. There are, for instance, many contradictory tales about his romantic life with Sylvia Bataille in southern France during World War II and of his attachment to her daughter Laurance. He married Sylvia in 1953 and had another daughter, Judith, whose husband Jacques-Alain Miller served as Lacan's literary executor.

In 1934 Lacan developed the first version of his "mirror stage," which was to become the cornerstone of his theory when presented at the meetings of the International Psychoanalytic Association two years later in Marienbad. Due to World War II and the decimation of psychoanalysis on the Continent, Lacan's ideas lay dormant until 1949. Then he presented a more complex and complete variant of his "mirror stage" theory. Extrapolating from his work with patients, he maintained that the child's first perception of itself in the mirror, how it becomes aware of itself as a biological organism, sets the stage for its future psychic development. During this stage (from about six to eighteen months) the child realizes that its parents are not totally responsive to inarticulate demands, that it has to acquire language. And what happens during this process determines psychic development.

Lacan's Freudian peers did not appreciate his contributions. In fact, the so-called American ego psychologists, who held that infantile experiences are being resolved during the oedipal period, could not accept Lacan's "rereading of Freud." They mandated different types of interactions between analyst and patient, different assumptions about human growth and about the structure of the unconscious.

Lacan and his peers in the International Psychoanalytic Association eventually split up, in 1953, because they could not agree on how best to help patients reach and then overcome early unconscious trauma. Classical psychoanalysts were agreed that, optimally, this could happen only by means of regular sessions, four to five times a week, for at least 45 minutes, and over a period of around four years. Lacan was seeing his patients once or twice a week, for five to 25 minutes, and attacking his American and Parisian adversaries as authoritarian. However, a part of these attacks was incorporated in his theories when he played on, for instance, such terms as the nom du père and the non du père to accuse the "sons of Freud" - that is, the leaders in the psychoanalytic movement - of paternalism and of domination counterproductive to the relationship between psychoanalyst and analysand.

Lacanian psychoanalytic theory differentiated itself also by underpinning it with Ferdinand de Saussure's structural linguistics - which in the 1960s was inspiring the other leading "structuralists," Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. They all set out to uncover systematically the deep universal mental structures that manifest themselves in language. And they expected to find them by unveiling the relationships between signs (concepts) and signifiers (acoustic images); between language and words; and by studying their changing meanings. Lacan concentrated on "the language of the unconscious," not only in his work with patients but in the public seminars which certainly helped make him central to Parisian intellectual life, along with psychoanalysis, from the late 1960s until long after he died in 1981.

Lacan's analysis of literary texts as well used Saussurean means of "rereading." Whereas Freud and his followers (both literary figures and psychoanalysts) in a way were "diagnosing" artists and their works, Lacan's technique introduced a new dimension. His own imagination coupled to the linguistic method allowed him to make all sorts of jumps, in both metaphoric and metonymic directions. His famous seminar on Poe's "Purloined Letter" particularly intrigued American literary critics.

Lacan always deemed the psychoanalytic relationship central to everything he did. When he stated, for instance, that psychoanalysis is "structured like a language," he referred to the interaction between the analyst's and his patient's unconscious. His American followers, however, primarily were located in universities and, for the most part, ignored the therapeutic realm. Consequently, his Parisian adherents tended to be therapists working with patients who disregarded American textual analyses.

Urbane, brilliant, and provocative, Lacan continued to influence French intellectual life even while his ideas were questioned and debated.

Further Reading

French commentaries and histories both for and against Lacanian psychoanalysis abound. Among the translations of Lacan's works are his Ecrits (1977), Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis (1973), and two volumes of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (1988) - all of them almost unintelligible to the general reader. Among the pro-Lacanian commentaries are Jacques Lacan. The Death of an Intellectual Hero (1983) by Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan (1977) by Anika Lemaire, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan (1983) by Catherine Clément, and Psychoanalytic Politics (1978) by Sherry Turkle. The most balanced and informative account of Lacan's impact on, and connections to, French intellectual life is Lacan in Context (1988) by David Macey.

Additional Sources

Bowie, Malcolm, Lacan, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Clement, Catherine, The lives and legends of Jacques Lacan, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan

(born April 13, 1901, Paris, France — died Sept. 9, 1981, Paris) French psychoanalyst. A practicing psychiatrist in Paris for much of his career, Lacan emphasized the primacy of language as the mirror of the unconscious mind and introduced the study of language into psychoanalytic theory. His major achievement was his reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud's work in terms of structural linguistics. He became a celebrity in France with Écrits (1966; The Language of the Self) and in the 1970s was a dominant figure in French cultural life as well as a strong influence on American psychoanalytic and literary theory.

For more information on Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan, visit Britannica.com.

French Literature Companion: Jacques Lacan

Lacan, Jacques (1901-81). Psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, founder of a distinctively French Freudian tradition, and author of Écrits (1966), one of the talismanic texts of Post-Structuralism.

Lacan was educated at the Collège Stanislas and the Paris Medical Faculty and came to psycho-analysis by way of an orthodox psychiatric training. His doctoral dissertation, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (1932), was both a case-study of an individual patient (‘Aimée’) and a vigorous polemic against the dominant clinical attitudes and diagnostic procedures of the day. For Lacan, the psychotic patient was not an empty site in which a predetermined mental process played itself out, but a person endowed with an emotional history, a vision of the future, intellectual aptitudes, and the power of speech. A stress on speech as the mainspring of clinical understanding was again present in the long article on the family that Lacan contributed to the Encyclopédie française (1938; repr. as Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu, 1984), and was to become central to his theory of subjectivity in such later papers as ‘Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse’ (1953), ‘L'Instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient ou la Raison depuis Freud’ (1957), and ‘Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir dans l'inconscient freudien’ (1960).

‘L'inconscient est structuré comme un langage’: this is the most quoted of Lacan's many gnomic pronouncements, and still usefully encapsulates a major dimension of his theory. The human infant, as he/she acquires speech, is inserting him/herself into a pre-existing symbolic order, and subjecting his/her passion to the controlling pressures of the verbal domain. Unconscious desire, for Lacan, is unstoppable and insatiable; its goals are perpetually in flight. The symbolic order of language through which this desire passes is one in which the human subject is endlessly divided, displaced, and reconstituted. The principal aim of Lacan's psychoanalysis is to allow the subject fully to inhabit the symbolic order, to heed the language of his/her desire, and to remain in process, uncompleted, unillusioned, and directed desiringly towards a future.

These views are at variance with one of the traditional aims of psychoanalysis: that of protecting the ego against other, disruptive, mental agencies. Analysts who set out to fortify the ego as the seat of personal identity are under constant attack from Lacan: they are trying to make a public monument from a will-o'-the-wisp. The source of this error, for Lacan, is the realm that he calls the ‘imaginary’ in contradistinction to the symbolic order. The imaginary comes into being at the ‘mirror phase’, as postulated in ‘Le Stade du miroir comme fondateur de la fonction du JE’ (1949). Between the ages of 6 months and 18 months the human individual is first able to envisage him/herself as a coherent entity, sees him/herself in a mirror, identifies with the image, and delights in the power to control its movements. An ideal notion of personal completeness is born at this phase and, with it, a tendency in the individual to seek identity in dealings with others and with the world of objects. It is at this phase that the ego is first glimpsed. The terms ‘subject’ (sujet) and ‘ego’ (moi) are antonyms for Lacan. Where the ego is the illusory product of successive imaginary identifications, or mirrorings, the subject proper is born of otherness, lack, and discord.

The dialectic between the Symbolic and the Imaginary orders is called on to perform much of the theoretical work that Freud had assigned to competing mental agencies: the unconscious and the conscious in his first main model and the id, ego, and superego in his second. The virtue of Lacan's approach is that his ‘orders’ necessarily connect the inner workings of the mind to the outer workings of society. The danger, of which he was aware, was that such an approach might become merely dualistic—yet another instance of ‘imaginary’ identification. To combat this tendency, he introduced the concept of the ‘Real’. The Real is that which constantly exceeds the imaginary and symbolic constructions of the individual and often comes close, in Lacan's usage, to meaning ‘the impossible’ or ‘the ineffable’.

Throughout Lacan's career as a theorist, two distinct tendencies are visible. On the one hand, he is a simplifier and a systematist: Saussure's signifiant and signifié are called on to introduce a new principle of economy into the Freudian lexicon, and the triad comprising Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real is manipulated as a grand key to the mysteries of mind and society. On the other hand, he is restless and acquisitive: his concept of the ‘Other’ is derived from Kojève's reading of Hegel, his temporality from Heidegger, and many of his incidental modelling devices from mathematics and symbolic logic. This eclecticism goes hand in hand with a famously ‘difficult’ literary manner, a cult of ambiguity, and an insistent ironic playfulness. Lacan is the author, therefore, both of a system and of a style, and ‘Lacanians’, correspondingly, are of two broad kinds: those who single-mindedly apply his theory to cultural products and those who imitate his literary manner.

Lacan's achievement lay not simply in redramatizing Freud's doctrine but in making it mappable onto a wide variety of other social discourses. His unremitting stress on lack and self-division in the lives of speaking creatures has given Lacan an exemplary status for observers in neighbouring intellectual disciplines: he is a theorist for whom ‘theory’ is an impossible calling. [For the feminist critique of Lacan, see Feminism, 4.]

[Malcolm Bowie]

Bibliography

M. Marini, Jacques Lacan (1986)
S. Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (1987)

Philosophy Dictionary: Jacques Lacan

Lacan, Jacques (1901-81) French psychoanalyst and intellectual. Lacan was director of the École Freudienne de Paris from 1963, but his influence rested more on the series of seminars that he gave at the university of Paris from 1953, and which decisively influenced French thought of the time. His endeavour was to reinterpret Freud in the light of the structural approach to linguistics inaugurated by Saussure. Language becomes a manifestation of the structures present in the unconscious. The central theme is that the growing child must give up the narcissistic stage of absorption in the mother, and becomes aware of loss and difference as it begins to take its place in a network of linguistic and social roles. The repressions involved in this procedure open up a world of insatiable desires. Lacan's work is notoriously obscure, repeating the same shifting nature of dreams and, presumably, the unconscious; like that of Derrida after him it is also replete with wordplays, puns, and reason-defying leaps. His lectures, in transcript, are collected in the two-volume Écrits (1966, 1971, trs. under the same title, 1977).

Columbia Encyclopedia: Lacan, Jacques

(zhäk läkäN') , 1901–81, French psychoanalyst. After receiving a medical degree, he became a psychoanalyst in Paris. Lacan was infamous for his unorthodox methods of treatment, such as the truncated therapy session, which often lasted only several minutes. A staunch critic of modern (particularly American) revisions of psychoanalytic theory, Lacan supported the traditional model of psychoanalysis espoused by Sigmund Freud. He argued that contemporary psychoanalytic theories had strayed too far from their roots in Freudian psychoanalysis, which held that there was constant conflict between the ego and the unconscious mind. Lacan argued that this conflict could not be resolved—the ego could not be “healed”—and pointed out that the true intention of psychoanalysis was analysis and not cure. His collection of papers, Ecrits (1966, tr. 1977), though notoriously difficult reading, has been influential in linguistics, film theory, and literary criticism.

Bibliography

See C. Clement, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan (tr. 1983); D. Macey, Lacan in Contexts (1988); biography by E. Roudinesco (1993, tr. 1997).

Psychoanalysis: Jacques-Marieémile Lacan

1901-1981

French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan was born in Paris on April 12, 1901, and died on September 9, 1981, in the suburb of Neuilly.

He was born the eldest child of a bourgeois Catholic family of wealthy vinegar merchants from Orléans. Three other children followed: a boy who died young; Madeleine, born in 1903; and Marc, born in 1907, who would later become a Benedictine monk at Hautecombe. Lacan was close to his brother, both emotionally and intellectually, and owed his theological knowledge at least in part to him. Lacan completed his secondary studies at a well-regarded Catholic school, Stanislas College, where he was taught philosophy by Jean Baruzi, a specialist in Leibniz and the history of religion, especially St. John of the Cross.

At the beginning of the 1920s, Lacan began his medical studies while also frequenting the literary centers of the avant-garde. Along with his friends Henri Ey and Pierre Mâle, he specialized in psychiatry and interned at Sainte-Anne Hospital under Henri Clude; Gaëtan Georges de Clérambault, his "only teacher in psychiatry" (Lacan, 1966, p. 65); and Georges Heuyer. He also served a stint at the Burghölzli Clinic from August to September 1929. In 1932, he defended his thesis, On Paranoid Psychosis in its Relation to Personality. The centerpiece of the thesis was the case of Aimée (whose name, he would later learn, was Marguerite Anzieu), a criminal psychotic whom he observed at Sainte-Anne. When it was published, the thesis caused a bit of a sensation and was praised by René Crevel and Salvador Dalí. In December 1933, Lacan published his article, "Motives of Paranoiac Crime," in the journal Minotaure. The article was about the Papin sisters, whose crimes were then in the news and of great interest to the surrealists.

He entered analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, probably in 1933 after completing his thesis. In 1934, he married Marie-Louise Blondin, the sister of his friend from medical school, Sylvain Blondin. The couple had three children, Caroline, Thibaut, and Sibylle. In the same year, he became a candidate member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP the Paris Psychoanalytic Society).

In 1936, at the fourteenth congress of the I.P.A. in Marienbad, Lacan presented what he called "the first linchpin of my contributions in psychoanalytic theory," the text of which he claimed to have "neglected to deliver" for publication in the proceedings of the congress (Lacan, 1966, p. 67). The paper was called, "The Mirror State: The Theory of a Structural and Developmental Moment in the Construction of Reality, Conceived in Relation to Psychoanalytic Experience and Teaching," a title that is known only from Lacan's biography, written by Anatole de Monzie, in the Encyclopédie française. He delivered another version of the talk at the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich in 1949: "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," an experience that was "at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito" (Lacan, 2002, p. 3). The ego, from Lacan's point of view, was not the entire subject, nor the subject of consciousness, but the primary narcissistic imago. The ego was evidence of a "mad passion—specific to man, stamping his image on reality" (Lacan, 2002, p. 23), and it "represents the center of all resistances to the treatment of symptoms" (Lacan, 2002, p. 118). Thus in Lacan's earliest formulations, the ego, far from being formed by reality, is opposed to it. Out of this early text came the opposition between psychical reality, external reality, and the real.

In December 1938, Lacan was elected a full member of the SPP In the same year, he wrote an article on "The Family" for volume VIII of the Encyclopédie française c , which was edited by Henri Wallon and devoted to "mental life." It was published the following March. The formulations in this article, which was a reworking of Freudian theory, were already quite Lacanian.

During the war, two of his daughters were born. His first wife, who finally obtained a divorce in 1941, had Sybille in 1940. And in 1941, his companion Sylvia Bataille had his daughter Judith, who would marry Jacques-Alain Miller in 1966.

With his first post-war writing in 1945, "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty," Lacan continued with the investigation of the imaginary that he had begun in 1936, now focusing on "logical time" (as opposed to Eugène Minkowski's "experienced time," which Lacan had recently criticized in a review). Lacan argued that logical time manifested itself at the limit of the subject's "time for comprehending," when the subject was assured of an anticipated certainty in a "moment of concluding," in other words, in an act (cf. Lacan, 1945/1988, p. 10). This text foreshadowed Lacan's manipulation of time by varying the length of analytic sessions, which would become a source of controversy within the SPP and the IPA in the 1950s.

Lacan's post-war years were also marked by an ongoing debate with psychiatry, starting with "On Psychic Causality," a critique of his friend Henry Ey's organo-dynamism written in 1946 for a conference at Bonneval on the problem of the origins of neurosis and psychosis. This was followed in 1947 by a lecture on "English Psychiatry and the War," and in 1950 by a contribution to the first world conference on psychiatry, "A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology," written with Michel Cénac.

At the same time, Lacan participated actively in the post-war rejuvenation of the SPP, and in 1949, he collaborated on the "Policies and Tenets of the SPP's Committee on Teaching."

In 1953, during his presidency of the Society, conflicts between medical analysts (Sacha Nacht) and more liberal academic analysts (Daniel Lagache, Juliette Favez-Boutonier) led to the resignations of Françoise Dolto, Juliette Favez-Boutonier, Daniel Lagache, and Blanche Reverchon-Louve on June 16. Lacan quickly followed, and the group founded the Société française de psychanalyse (SFP, French Psychoanalytic Society) on June 18. On July 8, Lacan inaugurated the new society with a lecture "The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real" (SIR), which began a new phase in his thought, marked by the prevalence of language and the symbolic over the imaginary, a concept that dated back to his elaboration of the imago and the mirror stage in 1936. He launched his return to Freud with this triad, which allowed him to differentiate between (symbolic) castration, (imaginary) frustration, and (real) privation, and also the symbolic father, the imaginary father, and the real father.

Nine days later, he married Sylvia Maklès, who had divorced Georges Bataille in 1946. In August he wrote "The Function of Speech in Psychoanalytic Experience and the Relation of Language to the Psychoanalytic Field," the original title of the lecture that he had given in Rome on September 26, 1953. Each institutional stage in Lacan's career, each crisis, served as the occasion for a significant crystallization of his thought and a theoretical advance that apparently helped him to define the moment. After the mirror stage, the "Rome Report" marked the second stage in his work.

The lecture on "The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real" showed the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The "Rome Report," with its opposition between language and speech and its attention to ahistorical speech that goes beyond the intentions of its subject, coincided with some of the conceptions of Heidegger, whose article "Logos" Lacan had just translated. From his thesis in 1932 until 1953, Lacan read Freud's texts in a nonsystematic way, and he differed from Freud in separating the ego from the perception-consciousness system in order to situate it in the imaginary, in accordance with his original conception of the mirror stage and the new elaboration he gave it in a 1951 lecture to the British Psychoanalytic Society, "Some Reflections on the Ego" (I.J.P., 1953).

In the fall of 1953, his public seminar at the Sainte-Anne Hospital began a reevaluation of Freud's work, much of which was only available in German or English: "This kind of teaching is a refusal of any system. . . . Freud's thought is the most perennially open to revision" (Lacan, 1953-54, p. 1). He began this revision with Freud's writings on technique. Already in the still unpublished lectures that he held from 1950 to 1953, Lacan had approached psychoanalytic technique from own perspective of varying session length. His public seminar began with the question of resistance, which he attributed to an "organization of the ego" (1953-54, p. 23), while for Freud, resistance had to do with remembering.

The ongoing seminar at Sainte-Anne was ended on November 20, 1963, with a single session on what was to be his topic for 1963-64, The Names-of-the-Father. He gave this lecture the day after his "major excommunication," the IPA's refusal to grant him the status of training analyst, and it testified to the subjective and intellectual crisis that this rejection provoked in him. To consider the father, Lacan turned towards "religion, and [what] I, for my part, call the Church" (Lacan, 1963, p. 84). More specifically, he turned to De Trinitate, by St. Augustine.

The Seminar's relocation to theÉcole normale supérieure (ENS) in the rue d'Ulm in January 1964 brought about a noticeable change in its style and content. The audience was larger and more intellectual, and Lacan addressed himself particularly to the "Normaliens," the students of the ENS until June 1969, when he was forced to leave the ENS. At the ENS, Lacan abandoned the "return to Freud" in order to develop his own thought and the foundations of psychoanalysis in his seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (the unconscious, repetition, transference, and the drive). During these years he formalized his own concepts: the barred subject, /S; object a; and the Other, which was both the Other of language and the Other scene, the scene of the dream and of the unconscious, a term that Freud borrowed from Fechner (cf. Freud, 1900a, pp. 48, 536).

On June 20, 1964, in the aftermath of his rejection by the IPA, Lacan "alone" founded theÉcole française de psychanalyse (EFP, the French School of Psychoanalysis), which was soon renamed theÉcole freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris). The School saw a rapid increase in membership over its fifteen years of existence, growing from about 100 to more than 600 members.

In October 1966, Lacan made his first trip to the United States to attend a conference in Baltimore on structuralism. This conference took place shortly before the publication of hisÉcrits, a voluminous book of 924 pages in which all of his essential writings were collected. Écrits allowed Lacan to win over the general public just as he had the Normaliens and the philosophers.

On November 26, 1969, Lacan began his seminar entitled The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, which was influenced by the student protests of May 1968, by introducing his "four discourses": the discourses of the master, of the university, of the hysteric, and of the analyst. Each one was constructed out of four terms: S1, the master signifier; S2, knowledge; a, surplus enjoyment; and /S, the subject. The four discourses, or the "quadripode," anticipated the matheme that Lacan introduced in December 1971, at a series of lectures given at Sainte-Anne Hospital on the "Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst." He returned to this matheme in 1972 in his seminar Encore when he developed his graph of sexuation. According to Lacan, an algebraic mode of writing allowed for the transmission of psychoanalysis and removed the incompatibility between the discourse of analysis and the discourse of the university that was apparent in the four discourses. This argument gave Lacan grounds to sanction the expansion of psychoanalysis in the university.

His final orientation maintained the equivalence of the three coordinates. In the twenty-second year of his seminar, entitled R.S.I. (1973-1974), the symbolic, imaginary, and real were represented topologically by the Borromean knot, three rings connected in such a way that each held the two others in a circular reciprocity.

The end of Lacan's life was sad, marked as it was by political and theoretical conflicts within the EFP and by rivalry between the School and the Department of Psychoanalysis at Vincennes, directed by his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller.

During the seminar on Topology and Time (1978-1979), Lacan was practically mute. Finally, in a moment of lucidity, he announced the dissolution of the School that he alone had founded in a signed letter dated January 5, 1980. In February, while awaiting the legal dissolution of the EFP (which eventually took place in September), he founded the Cause freudienne (the Freudian Cause), and then in October, he "adopted" the EFP as the newÉcole de la Cause freudienne (School of the Freudian Cause).

Following the letter of dissolution, what Lacan called his "seminar" of January 15, 1980, was actually a series of sentences addressed to the newspaper Le Monde on January 26. "If it should happen that I go away, tell yourselves that it is in order—to be Other at last. One can be satisfied with being Other like everyone else, after a lifetime spent being it in spite of the Law" (Lacan, 1980, p. 135). In fact, he was hospitalized under the name of his personal physician, and died of colon cancer at the Henri-Harmann Surgical Center in Neuilly on September 9, 1981. His will, dated November 13, 1980, named Judith Miller his sole heir and his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller as his literary executor.

Throughout the century, Lacan met and spent time with the greatest minds of his era—Joyce, Kojève, Koyré, Dalí, Picasso, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and more. He had to endure the fact that no one really understood his work. His primary endeavor throughout his career was to find a theoretical basis for the speech of the analysand that leads to the transference and thus constitutes the analyst as Other. To try to find the basis for speech in anything other than itself is certainly a Faustian project, but it indicates his passion for analysis. Mallarmé's assessment of Rimbaud suits Lacan as well: he was "a considerable passer-by."

Bibliography

Dor, Joël. (1994). Nouvelle Bibliographie des travaux de Jacques Lacan. Paris: E.P.E.L.

Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4-5.

Julien, Philippe. (1990). Pour lire Jacques Lacan. Paris: Seuil.

Lacan, Jacques. (1966).Écrits. Paris: Seuil.

——. (1988, Fall). Logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty: A new sophism (Bruce Fink, Trans.). Newsletter of the Freudian Field 2, 4-22. (Original work published 1945) ——. (1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud's Papers on Technique (1953-54) (John Forrester, Trans.). New York: Norton.

——. (1990). Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father. In John Copjec (Ed.), Television: A challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment. New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1963) ——. (1990). The other is missing. In John Copjec (Ed.). Television: A challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment. New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1963) ——. (2001). AutresÉcrits. Paris: Seuil.

——. (2002).Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.

Milner, Jean-Claude. (1995). L'Œuvre Claire. Paris: Seuil.

Jacques Lacan
Born	April 13 1901(1901--) Paris, France
Died	September 09 1981 (aged 80) Paris, France
Citizenship	France
Field	Psychology
Influences	Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alexandre Kojève, Ferdinand de Saussure
Influenced	Jacques-Alain Miller, Ernesto Laclau, Luce Irigaray, Felix Guattari, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler

Biography

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

Early life

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

Too thin to be accepted into military service, Lacan went directly into medical school in 1920, specializing in psychiatry from 1926. He took his clinical training at Sainte-Anne, the major psychiatric hospital in central Paris. In his studies he had a particular interest in the philosophic work of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger and, alongside many other Parisian intellectuals of the time, he attended the famous seminars on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève.

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

1930s

In 1931 Lacan received his license as a forensic psychiatrist, and in 1932 was awarded the Doctorat d'état for his thesis, De la Psychose paranoiaque dans les rapports avec la personnalité. While this thesis drew considerable acclaim outside psychoanalytic circles, particularly among the surrealist artists, it was largely ignored by psychoanalysts. In 1934 Lacan became a candidate for the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. During this period he befriended Georges Bataille and surrealist André Breton.

He presented his first analytic paper on the "Mirror Phase" at the 1936 Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad. He was called up to serve in the French army after the German occupation of France and was posted to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. After the war, Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, meeting English analysts Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. He was influenced by Bion’s analytic work with groups and this contributed to his own later emphasis on study groups as a structure with which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis.

Lacan was very active in the world of Parisian writers, artists and intellectuals during the inter-war period. In addition to André Breton and Georges Bataille, he was also associated with Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. He attended the mouvement Psyché founded by Maryse Choisy. Several of his early articles were published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and he was present at the first public reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Dylan Evans has speculated that Lacan was a surrealist at heart, "his interest in surrealism predates his interest in psychoanalysis. Perhaps Lacan never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as ‘convulsive beauty’, its celebration of irrationality, and its hostility to the scientist who murders nature by dissecting it."^[3]

1940s

There are contradictory stories about his romantic life with Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès) in southern France during World War II. After divorcing his first wife, he married Sylvia in 1953 and had a daughter, Judith; Lacan had three children from his prior marriage, Sylvia one with Georges Bataille.

1950s

In 1951 Lacan started to hold a weekly seminar at the St-Anne Hospital, in Paris, urging what he described as "a return to Freud" concentrating upon the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology. Very influential in Parisian cultural life as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, the seminars continued for nearly thirty years.

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

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

1960s

Starting in 1962 a complex negotiation took place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan’s practice—with his controversial indeterminate-length sessions in which he charged a full fee for truncated sessions, had his hair cut during sessions,^[4] and Lacan's critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy—led, in 1963, to a condition being set by the IPA that registration of the SFP was dependent upon removing Lacan from the list of SFP training analysts. Lacan left the SFP to form his own school which became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP)

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

By the 1960s, Lacan was associated—at least in the public mind—with the far left in France.^[5] In May 1968 Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary a Department of Psychology was set up by his followers at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). Echoing this sentiment, "Shortly after the tumultuous events of May 1968, Lacan was accused by the authorities of being a subversive, and directly influencing the events that transpired."^[6]

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

1970s

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

Major concepts

The 'Return to Freud'

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

The mirror stage (le stade du miroir)

Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage which he described "... as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience". By the early fifties, he no longer considers the mirror stage as only a moment in the life of the infant, but as the permanent structure of subjectivity. In the paradigm of The Imaginary order, the subject is permanently caught and captivated by his own image. Lacan writes, "[T]he mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".^[7]

As he further develops the concept, the stress falls less on its historical value and ever more on its structural value.^[3] In his fourth Seminar, La relation d'objet, Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship".

The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of identification, the Ego being the result of identifying with one own's specular image. At six months the baby still lacks coordination, however, he can recognize himself in the mirror before attaining control over his bodily movements. He sees his image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. This contrast is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with his own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens him with fragmentation, and thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego.^[3] The moment of identification is to Lacan a moment of jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery, yet the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother.^[8] This identification also involves the ideal ego which functions as a promise of future wholeness sustaining the Ego in anticipation.

The mirror stage shows that the Ego is the product of misunderstanding - "méconnaissance" - and the lieu where the subject becomes alienated from himself. It introduces the subject to into the Imaginary order. It must be said that the mirror stage has also a significant symbolic dimension. The Symbolic order is present in the figure of the adult who is carrying the infant: the moment after the subject has jubilantly assumed his image as his own, he turns his head towards this adult who represents the big Other, as if to call on him to ratify this image.^[9]

Other/other

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

Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts:^[10] the big Other is designated A (for French Autre) and the little other is designated a (italicized French 'autre'). He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: 'the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a,^[11] so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other'.^[12]

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

'The Other must first of all be considered a locus, the locus in which speech is constituted'.^[13] We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense, only when a subject may occupy this position and thereby embody the Other for another subject.^[14]

When he argues that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject, but in the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond one's conscious control; they come from another place, outside consciousness, and then 'the unconscious is the discourse of the Other'.^[15] When conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of physical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene".

"It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child, it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message".^[3] The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this Other is not complete, that there is a Lack (manque) in the Other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the Other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete Other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete Other is the 'barred Other'.^[16]^[17]

The Three Orders

The Imaginary

Lacan thought the relationship between the Ego and the reflected image means that the Ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order".^[13] This relationship is also narcissistic. So the Imaginary is the field of images and imagination, and deception: the main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, similarity.

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

Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order by making identification with the analyst the objective of analysis (see Écrits, "The Directions of the Treatment"). He proposes the use of the Symbolic as the way to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary: the analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification."^[18]

The Symbolic

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

The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity, that is the Other: the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. Besides it is the realm of the Law which regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. We may add that the Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (das ding an sich) and the death drive which goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition"—"the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order."^[10]

It is by working in the Symbolic order that the analyst can produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand; these changes will produce imaginary effects since the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.^[3] Thus, it is the Symbolic which is determinant of subjectivity, and the Imaginary, made of images and appearances, is the effect of the Symbolic.

The Real

Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also located outside the Symbolic. Unlike the latter which is constituted in terms of oppositions, i.e. presence/absence, "there is no absence in the Real."^[10] Whereas the Symbolic opposition presence/absence implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place."^[18] If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements, signifiers, the Real in itself is undifferentiated, it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real", in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things - things originally confused in the "here and now" of the all in the process of coming into being.^[19]

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

Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety in that it lacks any possible mediation, and is "the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence."^[10]

Desire

Lacan's désir follows Freud's concept of wunsch and it is central to Lacanain theories. For the aim of the talking cure - psychoanalysis - is precisely to lead the analysand to uncover the truth about their desire, but this is only possible if that desire is articulated, or spoken.^[20] Lacan said that "it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term."^[21] "That the subject should come to recognize and to name his/her desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world."^[10] "[W]hat is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence." Now, although the truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, discourse can never articulate the whole truth about desire: whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover, a surplus.^[20]

In The Signification of the Phallus Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function, on one hand it articulates need and on the other acts as a demand for love. So, even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied and this leftover is desire.^[22] For Lacan "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second" (article cited). Desire then is the surplus produced by the articulation of need in demand (Dylan Evans). Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need" (article cited). Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as Slavoj Žižek puts it "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."

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

Drives

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

the active voice (to see)
the reflexive voice (to see oneself)
the passive voice (to be seen)

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

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

Other important concepts

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

Writings and seminars

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

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

Criticism

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

While he has been criticized for adopting a Freudian phallocentric stance in his psychoanalytic theories, many feminists believe Lacan provides a useful analysis of gender biases and imposed roles. Some feminist critics, such as Luce Irigaray,^[23] accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. Others feminists, such as Judith Butler,^[24] Jane Gallop,^[25] and Elizabeth Grosz^[6] have interpreted Lacan's work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory, such as Lacan's theorization of the reduction of feminity to a status of deficiency.

Other critics have often dismissed Lacan and his work in a more-or-less wholesale fashion. François Roustang^[26] called Lacan's output "extravagant" and an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish." Noam Chomsky described Lacan as "an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan." In Fashionable Nonsense, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Lacan of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts he does not understand.

Defenders of Lacanian thinking dispute most external criticism, stating that these critics' misunderstand—or often simply have not read—Lacan's texts. Bruce Fink has dismissed Sokal and Bricmont, claiming they have "no idea whatsoever what Lacan is up to," and accuses them of elevating a distaste for Lacan's writing style into an attack on his thought as a whole.^[27] Similarly, Arkady Plotnitsky claims that Lacan uses the mathematical concepts more accurately than do Sokal and Bricmont.^[28]

Sources

References

^ Roudinesco, Elisabeth Jacques Lacan & Co.: a history of psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, 1990, Chicago University Press
^ Perry Meisel (April 13, 1997). The Unanalyzable. New York Times.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Evans, Dylan "From Lacan to Darwin", in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005
^ Review of Bruce Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique
^ French Communist Party "official philosopher" Louis Althusser did much to advance this association in the 1960s. Zoltán Tar and Judith Marcus in Frankfurt school of sociology. ISBN 0878559639 (p.276) write, for example, Althusser's call to Marxists that the Lacanian enterprise might ... help further revolutionary ends, endorsed Lacan's work even further.
^ ^a ^b Elizabeth A. Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction
^ Lacan, J., Some reflections on the Ego in Écrits
^ Lacan, J., La relation d'objet in Écrits
^ Lacan, Tenth Seminar, L'angoisse, 1962-1963
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e
^ Lacan, J., The Freudian Thing in Écrits
^ Lacan, J., Psychoanalysis and its Teaching in Écrits
^ ^a ^b Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses
^ Lacan, Seminar VIII: Le transfert
^ Lacan, J., Seminar on "The Purloined Letter" in Écrits
^ Lacan, J., The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious in Écrits
^ Lacan, Seminar V: Les formations de l'inconscient
^ ^a ^b Lacan, J. Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
^ Lacan, J., The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis in Écrits
^ ^a ^b Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton University Press, 1996), ISBN 9780691015897
^ Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I : Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954 "...what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence" (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), ISBN 9780393306972
^ Lacan, J., 'The Signification of the Phallus' in Écrits
^ Irigary, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One 1977, (Eng. trans. 1985)
^ Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)
^ Gallop, Jane, Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
^ Roustang, François, The Lacanian Delusion
^ Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter
^ Arkady Plotnitsky, The Knowable and the Unknowable

Bibliography

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

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

*referenced above

Works about Lacan's Work and Theory

Badiou, Alain, "The Formulas of L'Etourdit" (New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.)
—————, "Lacan and the Pre-Socratics", Lacan Dot Com, 2006.
Benvenuto, Bice; Kennedy, Roger, The Works of Jacques Lacan (London, 1986, Free Association Books.)
Bowie, Malcolm, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991). (An introduction.)
Dor, Joel, The Clinical Lacan (New York: Other Press, 1999)
Dor, Joel, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language (New York: Other Press, 2001)
Elliott, Anthony and Stephen Frosh(eds.), Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). (A recent overview.)
Evans, Dylan, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 1996.
Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
—————, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely, University of Minnesota, 2004.
Forrester, John, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1985).
Fryer, David Ross, The Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2004)
Gallop, Jane, Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
—————, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
Gherovici, Patricia, The Puerto Rican Syndrome (New York: Other Press, 2003)
Harari, Roberto, Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2004)
Harari, Roberto, Lacan's Seminar on "Anxiety": An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2005)
Homer, Sean, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge, 2005)
Lander, Romulo, Subjective Experience and the Logic of the Other (New York: Other Press, 2006)
Leupin, Alexandre, Lacan Today (New York: Other Press, 2004)
Mathelin, Catherine, Lacanian Psychotherpay with Children: The Broken Piano (New York: Other Press, 1999)
McGowan, Todd and Sheila Kunkle Eds., Lacan and Contemporary Film (New York: Other Press, 2004)

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