|
|
| Line 1: |
Line 1: |
| − | [[Image:Lacan-TV.gif|thumb|right]]
| |
| | | | |
| − | [[Image:Lacan-TV.gif|thumb|300px|right]]
| |
| | | | |
| − | [[Jacques Lacan|Jacques-Marie Émile Lacan]] (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a [[French]] [[psychiatrist]] and [[psychoanalyst]]. | + | * [[Psychoanalytic criticism|Literary theory]] |
| − | | + | * [[Film theory]] |
| − | One of the most important -- and controversial -- figures in the history of [[psychoanalysis]], [[Lacan]] is also acknowledged for his influence across a broad range of disciplines, from film and literary theory to political philosophy and cultural studies.
| + | * [[Feminist theory]] |
| − | | |
| − | ==Biography==
| |
| − | ''[[Chronology|Click here]] for a more complete chronology of [[Jacques Lacan]]'s life.''
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1927, [[Lacan]] begins his clincial training in [[psychiatry]] at the [[Sainte-Anne hospital]], where he would later teach.
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1931, [[Lacan]] becomes increasingly interest in [[surrealism]] and meets [[Salvador Dalí]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1932, [[Lacan]] publishes his doctoral disseration (''[[On paranoiac psychosis in its relations to the personality]]'').
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1933, [[Lacan]] begins to attend [[Alexandre Kojève]]'s lectures on [[Hegel]]'s ''[[Hegel|Phenomenology of Mind]]''.
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1936, [[Lacan]] presents his paper on the [[mirror stage]] to the fourteenth congress of the [[IPA]] at Marienbad on 3 August.
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1953, [[Lacan]] begins his first public [[seminar]] in [[Hôpital Sainte-Anne]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | These [[seminar]]s, which will continue for twenty-seven years, soon become the principal platform for [[Lacan]]'s teaching.
| |
| − | | |
| − | ==Works==
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1966, a selection of [[Lacan]]'s collected papers are published under the title ''[[Écrits]]''.
| |
| − | | |
| − | [[Lacan]]'s most important papers are collected in his ''[[Écrits]]'' (1966); fewer than one-third of them are included in the English ''[[Écrits: A Selection]]'' (1977).
| |
| − | | |
| − | [[Lacan]] presented his most important theoretical contributions to [[psychoanalysis]] through his [[seminar]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | ==Institutional Organizations==
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1934, [[Lacan]] begins his [[analysis]] with [[Rudolph Loewenstein]], and joins the [[Société Psychoanalytique de Paris]] ([[SPP]]) as a candidate member.
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1938, [[Lacan]] becomes a full member of the [[SPP]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | Since 1938, [[Lacan]] was a member of the [[SPP]], which was a member body of the [[International Psychoanalytical Association]] ([[IPA]]).
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1951, the [[SPP]] begins to raise the issue of [[Lacan]]'s practice of using sessions of variable duration, as opposed to the standard analytical hour.
| |
| − | | |
| − | [[Lacan]] defends his use of short sessions.
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1953, [[Lacan]] is elected president of the [[SPP]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | However, six months later he resigns from the [[SPP]] to join the [[Société Française de Psychanalyse]] ([[SFP]]) with D. Lagache, F. Dolto, J. Favez-Boutonier among others.
| |
| − | | |
| − | The [[SFP]] sought to become recognized by the [[IPA]] as a member society.
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1963, the [[SFP]] is granted affiliation to the [[IPA]] as a member society on condition that [[Lacan]] be removed from the list of training analysts.
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1963, [[Lacan]] resigns from the [[SFP]] and founds his own [[school]], the [[École Freudienne de Paris]] ([[EFP]]).
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1980, [[Lacan]] dissolves the [[EFP]] and creates in its stead the Cause freudienne.
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1981, the [[school|Cause freudienne]] is dissolved and the [[school|École de la Cause freudienne]] is created to replace it.
| |
| − | | |
| − | [[Lacan]] dies in Paris on 9 September, 1981 at the age of eighty.
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | ==Bibliography==
| |
| − | ''[[Work of Jacques Lacan|Click here]] for a more complete bibliography of [[Jacques Lacan]]'s work.''
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | {{LA}}pp. 5–6, 21, 28–29, 33–39, 65, 75, 88, 90–91, 95–96, 98, 103, 108–110, 118–119, 125–126, 128–132, 135–139, 151–153, 158, 161–169
| |
| − | | |
| − | ==References==
| |
| − | <references/>
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | __NOTOC__
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | ---
| |
| − | | |
| − | A dramatic personage with enormous intellectual energy, Lacan maintained friendships and theoretical engagements with a wide variety of people, from the artists André Breton and Salvador Dali, to the philosophers Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and such historians of thought as Alexandre Kojève and Alexandre Koyré who transformed the intellectual landscape in France in the 1930s.
| |
| − | | |
| − | In the years following the war, from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, Lacan taught a yearly seminar in Paris that was attended by many of France’s most prominent intellectuals.
| |
| − | | |
| − | This work not only established Lacan as a major figure in psychoanalysis, but served as the platform by which psychoanalytic theory both absorbed and challenged major intellectual movements in structuralism, anthropology, linguistics, phenomenology, and disciplines such as anthropology and mathematics, with which Lacan sustained serious and extended dialogue.
| |
| − | | |
| − | Lacan is arguably the leading figure, after Freud, in the effort to bring psychoanalytic thought into dialogue with other disciplines, and he is largely responsible for the place occupied by psychoanalysis today in literary and cultural theory.
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | ==Biography==
| |
| − | | |
| − | Born in 1901 to an upper-middle class family of successful merchants from Orleans with strict Catholic roots, Lacan attended the prestigious Collège Stanislaus where he received a rigorous classical education in Latin, poetry, philosophy and theology.
| |
| − | | |
| − | The protected environment of the institution was disrupted in 1915 when part of the Collège was transformed into a hospital for wounded soldiers. In 1919, Lacan started his medical training in Paris, where he became friends with Breton, Aragon, Dali, and other members of the Surrealist movement.
| |
| − | | |
| − | By 1927, he had entered clinical training in psychiatry at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, where he would later teach (and where Foucault would also work), and he began to publish a series of neurological papers on paralysis, mental automatism, war trauma, and hallucinatory mechanisms, based on clinical case studies.
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1932 he finished his doctoral thesis on paranoia, translated Freud’s paper on jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality into French, and started his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein.
| |
| − | | |
| − | ==Edit==
| |
| − | [[Lacan]]'s original training was in medicine and psychiatry, and his prepsychoanalytic work was on [[paranoia]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | The publication of his doctoral thesis, which dealt mainly with a woman patient suffering from a [[psychosis]] that led her to attempt to murder an actress (1932), won him the admiration of [[Breton]] and the [[surrealism|surrealist group]], with which he was birefly associated.
| |
| − | | |
| − | [[Lacan]]'s writings are steeped in allusions to [[surrealism]], and it is probable that surrealist experiments with [[language]] and speculations about the relationship between forms of [[language]] and different psychical states had a long-term influence on his famous contention that the [[unconscious]] was structured like a [[language]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | His notion of the [[fragmented body]] is one of the clearest indications of his debt to [[surrealism]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | The association with surrealim is les surprising htna it might seem; the surrealists, to Freud's irration, wer much more sympathetic to his ideas than the French medical establishment.
| |
| − | | |
| − | ==Edit==
| |
| − | [[Lacan]]s began his [[analysis]] with [[Rudolph Loewenstein]] in 1934, and was elected to the [[SPP]] in the same year.
| |
| − | | |
| − | Ironically, [[Loewenstein]] was one of the pioneers of the [[ego-psychology]] that [[Lacan]] came to loathe so much.
| |
| − | | |
| − | [[Lacan]]'s first contribution to [[psychoanalysis]] was made in 1936, when he presented his paper on the [[mirror stage]] to the Marienbad Conference of the [[IPA]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | For reasons that have never been clearly explained, it has never been published; the version included in ''[[Écrits]]'' was written thirteen years latter (1949).
| |
| − | | |
| − | In the late 1940s [[Lacan]] began to use the idea of the [[mirror stage]] to elaborate a theory of subjectivity that views the [[ego]] a a largely [[imaginary]] construct based upon an [[alienation|alienating]] [[identification]] with the mirror-image of the [[subject]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | At the [[intersubjective]] level, the [[subject]] is dran at a very early age into a [[dialectic]] of [[identification]] with an [[aggression]] towards the [[Other]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | Originally based upon the findings of child psychology and primate ethology (from which [[Lacan]] adopts th thesis that a child, unlike a young chimpanzee, recognizes its own image in a mirror), the theory of subjectivity is subsequently recast in terms of a [[dialectic]] of [[desire]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | The influence of [[Kojève]]'s seminar on [[Hegel]]'s ''[[Phenomenology of Spirit]]'' (1947) is crucial here; [[Lacan]] was an assiduous attender, and all his numerous allusions to [[Hegel]] should in fact be read as allusions to [[Kojève]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | ==Edit==
| |
| − | | |
| − | The paper of [[language]] and [[speech]] in [[psychoanalysis]] (1953) read to the founding congress of the [[SFP]] in Rome in 1953 (and therefore often referred to as the "Rome Discourse") is the first great manifesto of [[Lacanian psychoanalysis]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | [[Lacan]] calls for a "[[return to Freud]]," stressing the pressing need to read [[Freud]] in detail (and preferably in German) and enouncing the dominant tendencies within contemporary [[psychoanalysis]] ([[ego-psychology]], [[Kleinian psychoanalysis]] and [[object-relations theory]]) as so many forms of revisionism.
| |
| − | | |
| − | At the same time he elaborates an immensely broad synthetic vision in which [[psychoanalysis]] appropriates the findings of [[philosophy]] (notably [[Kojève]] and [[Heidegger]]), the [[structuralism|structural]] [[anthropology]] of [[Lèvi-Strauss]] and the [[linguistics]] of [[Saussure]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | This vision is consistent with the thesis that [[psychoanalysis]] is indeed a "[[talking cure]]", with [[speech]] and [[language]] as its only media, but it also allows [[Lacan]] to devlop a universalist theory of the origins of human subjectivity.
| |
| − | | |
| − | [[Lèvi-Strauss]]'s accounts of the non-conscious structures of kinship and alliance, and of the crucial transition from [[nature]] to [[culture]], allow [[Lacan]] to describe the [[Oedipus complex]] as a structural moment that integrates the [[child]] into a preexisting [[symbolic order]] by obliging it to recognize the [[Name-of-the-Father]] and to abandon its claim to being the sole object of the [[mother]]'s [[desire]] ([[phallus]]).
| |
| − | | |
| − | ==Edit==
| |
| − | | |
| − | Although the 1953 paper abounds in reference to [[language]] and [[linguistics]], it is only in his paper on the aency of the letter (1957) that [[Lacan]] truly begins to explore and appropriate the legacy of [[Saussure]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | At the same time he also relies heavily on [[Jakobson]]'s work of [[phoneme]] analysis and on [[metaphor]]/[[metonymy]], which are likened to the mechanisms of [[condensation]] and [[displacement]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | [[Language]] is now defined as a [[synchronic]] system of [[sign]]s which generate meaning through their interaction; meaning insists in and throuhg a [[chain]] of [[signifier]]s, and does not reside in nay one element.
| |
| − | | |
| − | The structural isomorphism between the workings of [[language]] and the [[unconscious]] mechanisms of [[dream-work]] allows [[Lacan]] to conclude that the [[unconscious]] is structured like a [[language]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | For [[Lacan]] there is never any direct correspondence between [[signifier]] and [[signified]], and meaning is therefore always in danger of sliding of [[slip]]ping out of control.
| |
| − | | |
| − | An element of stability is, he argues, provided by privileged signifiers such as the [[phallus]] and the [[Name-of-the-Father]], and it is this claim that exposes him to [[Derrida]]'s accusations of [[logocentrism]] and [[phallogocentrism]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | ==Edit==
| |
| − | | |
| − | [[Lacan]]'s early use of [[linguistics]] anticipates a distinctive feature of his later work in that he makes use of quasi-mathematical formulae to illustrate the workings of [[metaphor]] and [[metonymy]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | The initial formulae are no doubt little more than pedagogic devises, but they gradually develop into a so-called [[Lacanian]] [[algebra]] and a set of [[amthemes]] designed to ensure that [[psychoanalytic theory]] can be subjected to a [[formalization]] and to guarantee its integral transmission.
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | ==Career==
| |
| − | | |
| − | Lacan's career was dogged by controversy and regularly punctuated by conflicts with the psychoanalytic establishment, most of them focusing on his refusal to follow the conventions of the 'analytic hour' and his insistence on using short sessions of varying length during training analyses.
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | In 1953 [[Lacan]] and others resigned from the [[Société Psychanalytique de Paris]] [[Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse]] ([[SPP]]) to found the [[Société Française de Psychanalyse|Société Psychanalytique de France]] [[Société Française de Psychanalyse]] ([[SFP]]).
| |
| − | | |
| − | [[Lacan]]'s continued use of short sessions ensured that the latter was never recognized as a competent society by the [[International Psycho-Analytical Association]] ([[IPA]]).
| |
| − | | |
| − | In 1963, similar issues led to a split in the new association and to the foundation of the [[École Freudienne de Paris]] (Psychoanalytic School of Paris), which was unilaterally dissolved by [[Lacan]] himself in 1980.
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | [[Lacan]] considered his work to be an authentic "[[return to Freud]]" -- in opposition to [[ego-psychology]].
| |
| − | | |
| − | This entailed a renewed concentration upon the Freudian concepts of the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego conceptualised as a mosaic of identifications, and the centrality of language to any psychoanalytic work.
| |
| − | | |
| − | His work has a strong interdisciplinary focus, drawing particularly on linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics, and he has become an important figure in many fields beyond psychoanalysis, particularly within critical theory.
| |
| − | | |
| − | 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.
| |
| − | | |
| − | 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 influential collection of papers, Ecrits (1966, trans. 1977), though notoriously difficult reading, has been highly influential in disciplines such as linguistics, film theory, and literary criticism.
| |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | | |
| − | ---
| |
| − | | |
| − | ==Bibliography==
| |
| − | ''[[Work of Jacques Lacan|Click here]] for a more complete bibliography of [[Jacques Lacan]]'s work.''
| |
| − | | |
| − | * ''[[Works of Jacques Lacan|The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis]]'', Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968 | |
| − | * ''[[Écrits: A Selection]]'', transl. by Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977, and revised version, 2002, transl. by Bruce Fink | |
| − | * ''[[Works of Jacques Lacan|Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English]]'', transl. by Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
| |
| − | * ''[[Works of Jacques Lacan|The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis]]''
| |
| − | * ''[[Works of Jacques Lacan|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
| |
| − | * ''[[Works of Jacques Lacan|The Seminar, Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955]]'', edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Sylvana Tomaselli, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1988.
| |
| − | * ''[[Works of Jacques Lacan|The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses]]'', edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1993.
| |
| − | * ''[[Works of Jacques Lacan|Works of Jacques Lacan|The Seminar, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960]]'', edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Dennis Porter, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1992.
| |
| − | *''[[Works of Jacques Lacan|Works of Jacques Lacan|The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis]]'', edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Alan Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1977.
| |
| − | *''[[Works of Jacques Lacan|The Seminar XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge]]'', edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998.
| |
| − | *''[[Works of Jacques Lacan|Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment]]'', ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1990.
| |
