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.

Course outline

1. 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…
2. 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…
3. 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…
4. 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…

Works read in this course

• 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.

Terms introduced

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

Part of the Simposeum course library.