Jacques Lacan
|
|
Jacques Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was an influential French psychoanalyst as well as a structuralist who based many of his theories on the work of Sigmund Freud as well as on Ferdinand de Saussure's theories on language.
| Contents |
Life
Lacan's life is summarised in a timeline at this page (http://www.lacan.com/rolleyes.htm).
Work
Lacan reiterated and clarified Sigmund Freud's findings. In contrast to the dominant Anglo-American ego-psychologists of his time, he considered the ego as constituted in the "other", rather than an internal wholeness. After having obtained a medical degree in psychiatry he settled in Paris, where he worked as a psychoanalyst, primarily with patients suffering from various forms of psychoses.
Lacan argued that the psychoanalytic movement towards understanding the ego as an active and dominating force in the self misinterpreted its Freudian roots. Lacan stated that the self remained in eternal internal conflict and that only extensive self-deceit made the situation bearable.
Lacan also initiated the ideas of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, with which he explained the three aspects of human psychic structure. Describing the interaction of this triad, Lacan revised orthodox Freudian ideas about a stable psychic reality. Lacan's notion of the Real is a very difficult concept which he in his later years worked to present in a structured, set-theory fashion, as mathemes. The Imaginary, or non-linguistic aspect of the psyche, formulates human primitive self-knowledge while the Symbolic, his term for linguistic collaboration, generates a community-wide reflection of primitive self-knowledge and creates the very first set of rules that govern behavior.
His developmental theory of the objectified self was inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure's insights into the relationship of the signifier and the signified.
Although Lacan has joined Freud and Melanie Klein as one of the three major figures in the history of psychoanalysis, he made his most significant contributions not in the traditional form of books and journal articles, but through seminar lectures. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, conducted over a period of more than two decades, was not simply transcribed by Jacques-Alain Miller, his son-in-law; Sherry Turkle further claims that Lacan effectively contracted out all work on the seminars to Miller after reviewing his work on the first and that Miller made extensive changes to the seminars to add clarity to the material (Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, p. 254-255). The Seminars are still taken to represent the main body of his thinking. The Seminars may be taken as more intellectually accessible than his published collection of writings, entitled Écrits. Seminar XX remarks that his Écrits were not to be understood, but would produce a meaning effect in the reader similar to some mystical texts. Given the complex provenance of these texts, this remark is extremely difficult to evaluate.
Turkle and Ferdinand Dosse both claim that Lacan had a hand in the extremely contentious politics surrounding the pioneering psychoanalysis program at the University of Paris VIII at Vincennes. This was a program headed by Serge Leclaire, annexed to the philosophy department headed by Michel Foucault. At the outset all of the members of the program were also members of the Freudian School of Paris [French acronym EFP, for École Freudienne de Paris]. Lacan was not a member of the program himself, but his son-in-law was. The department suffered from a number of difficulties: one was that Lacan was not himself in charge. Leclaire became exasperated with the program's lack of autonomy, intellectual and institutional, both from Lacan and the philosophy faculty and left the University. The department was to go without a chair for three years. Second, the program had limited degree status. A degree from Vincennes was not initially a clinical qualification to practise psychoanalysis, which caused considerable objection among the students. When Lacan gave a lecture at the University in 1969, in which students interrupted to complain about their lack of qualification through the program and refused to accept his objection that psychoanalytic knowledge was distinct from other forms of knowledge taught by the university and therefore should not be credentialed equally. In addition to his concern about granting clinical authority Lacan was against granting any academic credit for work in the program. Students unhappy with the program's seeming lack of interest in clinical experience left the program to undergo analysis or simply stopped attending lectures. Miller's inclusion in the program was a problem in that his avowed Maoism was in apparent contradiction with his university position given that Maoism set the abolition of the university as a goal. Such contradictory and conflicted attitudes toward authority and education are often taken as the hallmark of Vincennes generally (ironic jokes about a Gaullist strategy to preoccupy the many factions of the French academic left by giving them a university to administer), but this problem seems unusually acute in the psychoanalysis program. Third, Lacan's subsequent involvement in the program, which began in 1974, was regarded as heavy-handed and was a further source of frustration for the clinically included. Lacan was retooling his views of psychoanalysis heavily and was determined to give it a more profoundly scientific character. He declared the previous efforts of the program a failure, appointed himself to a position in the department, and had Miller elevated to the position of chairman. In the same period Luce Irigaray proposed to offer a course on material developing in the wake of her first book on psychoanalysis and feminine sexuality and was rejected. This rejection was perceived as petty antagonism of a critic indicative of a further curtailment of intellectual freedom in a program seemingly shackled to Lacan's agenda. Later decision to grant clinical standing by degrees from the program were taken as signs of outright hypocrisy serving to assure Miller of unreasonable powers in Lacan's name.
In this period the EFP fell apart, sparked in large part by the rise of the parallel organization Confrontations, which René Major helped found with the support of Jacques Derrida. Confrontrations harnessed much of the dissent that emerged in the French psychoanalytic community in response to Lacan's insistence on mathematical aspects of his scientific conception of psychoanalysis. The clinical emphasis of Confrontations drew in those less inclined toward issues they viewed as hermetically theoretical or philosophical. In some respects Confrontations might be taken to be a necessary element of the psychoanalyic community, but the EFP went so far as to remove Denis Vasse, then serving as its vice president, from office for his participation. EFP broken down into factions, and a number of factions otherwise sympathetic to Lacan walked became restive because of what they viewed Miller's increasing hegemony as dictatorial in ambition. As questions were raised about the democratic nature of the EFP, Lacan became increasingly ill with colon cancer. A letter dissolving the EFP was circulated, affixed to a Lacanian signature whose authority was contested by allegations of a Miller forgery or dictation imposed upon a gravely ill Lacan. The matter splattered headlines everywhere. Louis Althusser showed up to denounce the proceedings of a meeting to found a new organization, the Freudian Cause. It became increasingly difficult to determine whether Lacan was speaking with his own voice or if Miller were appropriating his authority in a bid to consolidate power. Turkle has suggested that many who wished to think themselves loyal to Lacan expressed this in imagining that they were only defying the machinations of a scheming son-in-law.
Lacan died in hospital after a hemorrhage left him in a coma.
Criticism
(See Criticisms of Jacques Lacan.)
Key concepts
- Mirror stage
- The Other
- The Name of the Father
- Unconscious as the language of the Other
- Oedipal drama and the Oedipal signification
- Objet Petit a
- Signifier/Signified
- Desire
- The Drive
- Jouissance
- The Phallus
- Das Ding
- The Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic
Bibliography
Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan Dot Com (http://www.lacan.com/bibliographies.htm) or Peter Krapp's page (http://www.hydra.umn.edu/lacan/gaze.html)
- 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.
- 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, edited 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, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Dennis Porter, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1992.
- 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.
- 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.
- Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1990.
*referenced above
Works about Lacan's Work and Theory
- Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, 2nd edition, Guilford Press, New York, 1992
- Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 1996.
- Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely, University of Minnesoty, 2004.
- Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan Press; and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
- Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
External links
- An overview at the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/jacques_lacan.html)
- Introduction to Lacan and his reputation (http://www.haberarts.com/lacan.htm)
- Explanatory English lecture on Lacan (http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/lacan.html)
- Lacan Dot Com (http://www.lacan.com/lacan1.htm)
- Lacan Online (http://www.hydra.umn.edu/lacan/index.html)
- Homepage of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies (http://www.lacan.org/)
- Other Voices special issue on Psychoanalysis and Culture (http://www.othervoices.org/1.3/index.html)
- Article on Lacan at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/lacweb.htm)af:Jacques Lacan
de:Jacques Lacan es:jacques lacan fr:Jacques Lacan nl:Jacques Lacan ja:ジャック・ラカン pl:Jacques Lacan pt:Jacques Lacan he:ז'אק לאקאן