Lacan: Foundations

Five scenes that explain a difficult man

A course on the thought of Jacques Lacan.

Psychology

What you will learn

States what Lacan was removed from in 1963 and what the removal cost him.
Explains the mechanism: his exclusion was traded for the French society's international affiliation.
Describes the variable-length session concretely, and the standard practice it broke with.
Explains retroaction — that a sentence's sense is not settled until it ends — and why it makes the analyst's cut part of what was said.
Gives the strongest objection: that the practice served the analyst.
Describes the mirror observation accurately, including the age range and the comparison with the chimpanzee.
Explains the insufficiency-to-anticipation claim in ordinary words.
Says why Lacan calls the resulting identity alienating, and what he means by calling the ego a misrecognition.

The Man Who Was Traded — In 1963 an international body struck Lacan from its register of training analysts, and his removal was the price his own society paid for international affiliation. What he was removed for was a…
The Child in the Mirror — An infant between six and eighteen months, too young to stand unaided, sees itself in a mirror and is delighted. Lacan asks why a picture should please a creature that cannot yet do anything, and…
The Name That Would Not Come — In 1898 Freud, in a carriage in Herzegovina, could not recall the name of the painter of the Orvieto frescoes. Two wrong names arrived instead and would not go away. Reconstructing what he had been…
What You Ask For Is Not What You Want — A human infant cannot meet its own needs, so it must route them through somebody else — and the moment a need has to be spoken, it becomes a demand, which always asks for two things: the object, and…
The Part That Won't Go Into Words — A father falls asleep beside the room where his dead child lies. He dreams the child stands by his bed and says: Father, don't you see that I am burning? He wakes to find a candle has fallen. Lacan…

Écrits (1966) — the Fink translation (Norton 2006) — the mirror-stage paper of 1949, the 1953 Rome discourse, The Direction of the Treatment, and The Signification of the Phallus.
Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964) — the Sheridan translation (Norton 1978) — ch. 1 on the excommunication, ch. 2 for the formula about the unconscious, ch. 5 for the real and the dream of the burning child.
Seminar I, Freud's Papers on Technique (1953-54) — the Forrester translation (Norton 1988) — where the desire formula is credited outright to Hegel, by way of Kojève's seminar.
Television (1973) — the Hollier, Krauss and Michelson translation (October 40, 1987) — the opening page on the impossibility of saying it all, and his remark about being asked to speak so as to be understood.
My Teaching (1967-68) — the Macey translation (Verso 2008) — three public lectures, and where he answers for the difficulty of the Écrits in his own words.

the imaginary, the symbolic, the real, desire

Part of the Simposeum course library.