Jacques Lacan

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Jacques Lacan : biography

13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981

Accepting the importance of "the critical moment when insight arises",R. Horacio Etchegoyen, The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique (London 2005) p. 677 object relations theory would nonetheless quietly suggest that "if the analyst does not provide the patient with space in which nothing needs to happen there is no space in which something can happen".Michael Parsons, The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes (London 2000) pp. 16–17 Julia Kristeva, if in very different language, would concur that "Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless intrinsic to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualize it as a technique of scansion (short sessions)".Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt (New York 2002) p. 42

Works

Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at .

  • 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
  • Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, transl. by Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006.
  • The Seminar, Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by John 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, ed. 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, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Dennis Porter, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1992.
  • The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Alan Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1977.
  • The Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2007.
  • The Seminar XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. 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. Rosalind Krauss, Jeffrey Mehlman, et al., W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1990.

Sources

  • Johns Hopkins University – 1966
  • , further discussions by Žižek on Desire in the Lacanian conceptual edifice

"Les Non-dupes errent": Lacan on error and knowledge

Building on Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Lacan long argued that "every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say ‘well-turned’, discourse", highlighting as well "sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more than perseverance".Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London 1997) p. 58 and p. 121 In a late seminar, he generalised more fully the psychoanalytic discovery of "truth—arising from misunderstanding", so as to maintain that "the subject is naturally erring… discourse structures alone give him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and orient him; if he neglects, forgets, or loses them, he is condemned to err anew".Jacques=Alain Miller, "Microscopia", in Jacques Lacan, Television (London 1990) p. xxvii

Because of "the alienation to which speaking beings are subjected due to their being in language",Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton 1997) p. 173 to survive "one must let oneself be taken in by signs and become the dupe of a discourse… [of] fictions organized in to a discourse".Miller, p. xxvii For Lacan, with "masculine knowledge irredeemably an erring",Seminar XXI, quoted in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose eds., Feminine Sexuality (New York 1982) p. 51 the individual "must thus allow himself to be fooled by these signs to have a chance of getting his bearings amidst them; he must place and maintain himself in the wake of a discourse… become the dupe of a discourse… les Non-dupes errent".