Lacan: The Clinic

Three kinds of patient, and why the difference decides everything

A course on the thought of Jacques Lacan.

Psychology

What you will learn

Explains why reassurance is withheld, in terms of the account of the ego given in Foundations.
Distinguishes the analyst's position from the analyst's personality.
Says what the transference is for, and why the analyst's ordinariness is a working condition rather than a manner.
States the strongest objection — that this is indistinguishable from coldness and is accountable to nobody — and Lacan's answer to it.
Names the three structures and the single mechanism that defines each.
Explains what it means to call the relation constitutive rather than correlational.
States why the scheme has no category for normality, and what follows for how the word neurotic should be read.
Says precisely what perversion does and does not mean as a clinical term here.

The One Who Does Not Reassure — A patient says the worst thing they have ever said aloud and looks up for the reassurance any decent person would offer. The Lacanian analyst does not offer it — not from coldness, but because…
Three Structures, and No Fourth — Against a psychiatric manual with several hundred categories, Lacan offers three: neurosis, psychosis, perversion. Each is defined by one mechanism — repression, foreclosure, disavowal — and the…
What Was Never There — Lacan's teacher in psychiatry, de Clérambault, isolated what he called elementary phenomena: thoughts that repeat, contradict or command, and that do not arrive as the subject's own thinking. Lacan's…
The Ones Who Hide — Freud was convinced early that his obsessional patient had hated his father as a child, and no childhood memory produced a flicker of the feeling. Repression here had not removed the memory; it had…

Seminar III, The Psychoses (1955-56) — the Grigg translation (Norton 1993) — de Clérambault and the elementary phenomena, the naming of foreclosure, and the year Lacan spent on Schreber.
Écrits (1966) — the Fink translation (Norton 2006) — 'The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power' for what the analyst may and may not do, and 'On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis'.
Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1997) — Harvard UP — the secondary this tier leans on hardest, and the reason its structure is a clinic rather than a glossary.
Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1996) — Routledge — the glosses, checked term by term.

repression, foreclosure, disavowal, the paternal function, elementary phenomena

Part of the Simposeum course library.