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    Lacan For Beginners
    Lacan For Beginners
    Lacan For Beginners
    Ebook240 pages2 hours

    Lacan For Beginners

    By Philip Hill and David Leach

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    About this ebook

    Jacques Lacan is probably the most influential psychoanalyst since Freud (of the roughly 20,000 psychoanalysts in the world, about half are ‘Lacanians’) yet most people know nothing about him. The 10,000 analysts who use Lacan’s ideas work mostly in France, Spain, Italy, and South America. To the rest of the world, including England and America, Lacan is a genius-in-waiting, due to be ‘discovered’ any day now.

    Despite or because of his brilliance, Lacan is difficult to understand. He wrote with an obscure, style that casually refers to philosophy, linguistics, biology, mathematics, etc.—and to make matters worse, his ideas changed over the years.

    Lacan For Beginners by Philip Hill introduces the reader to Lacan’s theories and their relation to clinical practice in twelve elegantly structured chapters, designed around tantalizing questions that clarify Lacan’s ideas.

    Lacan For Beginners     is written with insight and wit and illustrated with examples from popular culture and cinema. The artwork is humorous and informative, and works with the text. So don’t you think it is about time you become familiar with his work? 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFor Beginners
    Release dateAug 25, 2009
    ISBN9781939994134
    Lacan For Beginners

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      Book preview

      Lacan For Beginners - Philip Hill

      For Beginners LLC

      155 Main Street, Suite 211

      Danbury, CT 06810 USA

      www.forbeginnersbooks.com

      Text: © 1997, 1999 Philip Hill

      Illustrations: © 1997, 1999 Philip Hill

      Cover Art: © 1997, 1999 David Leach

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

      A For Beginners® Documentary Comic Book

      Originally published by Writers and Readers, Inc.

      Copyright © 1999

      Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the Library of Congress.

      eISBN: 978-1-939994-13-4

      For Beginners® and Beginners Documentary Comic Books® are published by For Beginners LLC.

      v3.1

      Chapter 1 Introduction. What is psychoanalysis? What have images got to do with it? What does the ego do?

      Chapter 2 What has language got to do with psychoanalysis? What did Lacan mean when he said that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’?

      Chapter 3 Lacan’s theory of ‘the real’ as the ‘impossible to soy’ that always returns.

      Chapter 4 ‘Jouissance’ or sexual enjoyment and desire. Is sexual enjoyment something that only happens in intercourse? How are ‘need’, ‘demand’ and ‘desire’ differentiated?

      Chapter 5 Objects and their subject.

      Chapter 6 The Four Discourses: four ways of speaking and being.

      Chapter 7 Overview of psychopathology: focus on perversion, hysteria and obsessional neurosis.

      Chapter 8 What is psychosis?

      Chapter 9 What is feminine sexuality? What does it mean to be a woman?

      Chapter 10 What is topology? and: What does it have to do with time? Why do Lacanians use variable length sessions?

      Chapter 11 What is the good of psychoanalysis? and: What is the meaning of life?

      Chapter 12 Review.

      GLOSSARY

      BIBLIOGRAPHY by chapter with suggestions for further reading

      INDEX

      Psychoanalysis has many links with other disciplines. While a close study of Lacan's theories demands a study of logic, science, philosophy, literature and other disciplines, Lacan's ideas were inspired above all by the clinic, by his work and experience with his clients. His theories, which some claim are overly intellectual, are only attempts to make sense of what he witnessed in his clinic, working with clients.

      DIVISIONS AND FACTIONS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

      Lacan has probably been the most important and influential psychoanalyst since Freud. Worldwide there are some 20,000 psychoanalysts, that is people who work broadly in the Freudian tradition (this excludes followers of Jung). Roughly speaking psychoanalysts are equally divided into two camps: those influenced by Lacan's work, and those more or less loyal to the ideas of Ego Psychology and the International Psycho-Analytic Association.

      The 10,000 psychoanalysts working with Lacan's ideas are mostly in France, Spain, Italy and South America. The other 10,000 influenced by the International Psychoanalytic Association are dominant in England and North America, where Lacan's influence has been felt least.

      CHAPTER 1

      WHO WAS LACAN?

      He became a skinny but handsome intellectual and a dandy. He was exempted from military service because of his physique.

      Lacan underwent medical and psychiatric training, a personal psychoanalysis and became a man of charisma,

      Jacques Lacan was born to a middle class French Catholic family in 1901, seven years after Freud’s work was first published. Lacan would usually have his nose in a book while other boys were playing football.

      the lover of many women,

      and an atheist.

      Lacan’s difficult lectures were attended by many leading psychoanalysts and intellectuals. There would often be lengthy silences, in between Lacan writing obscure symbols and formulae on a blackboard. Listeners were often baffled by his complicated word plays and enigmatic puns, and by his use of German, Hebrew, Chinese and Ancient Greek. Even French speakers attending his talks were not sure if he was speaking French or not. Now there is a cult following of Lacan, with some thirty different camps of bickering followers, each claiming loyalty to the master.

      Most of Lacan’s work was not published or otherwise written down; he simply spoke it at his weekly seminars and lectures.

      Some of Lacan’s tape-recorded talks have been published and translated, but much of his work remains unpublished or untranslated; it circulates only in ‘samizdat’ form, as unofficial transcripts of the seminars. Lacan scorned publication, pronouncing it as ‘poubellication’, from the French ‘poubelle’, for garbage can.

      The clinical and theoretical innovations introduced by Lacan (such as his infamous clinical sessions of variable length that could last any time between five minutes and an hour, instead of the conventional fifty minutes) produced splits in the psychoanalytic movement, and finally led to his being expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1953, and to the formation of his own psychoanalytic school.

      Lacan’s work is difficult to study; not only because he lectured and wrote with a very complicated style, but also because he introduced many new ideas and concepts that are dependent on one another. Studying his work is made more difficult because many of these ideas changed during the course of his lifetime.

      Lacan was also an intellectual magpie—he took and adapted for his own ends many ideas from other fields, including linguistics, mathematics, literature, philosophy and science.

      One of the main influences on the early Lacan, in the 1920s and 1930s were the Surrealists, then in their heyday. Many Surrealists were interested in psychoanalysis, including Salvador Dali, who met both Freud and Lacan.

      Lacan had noticed that the meanings patients attach to words are often fluid and seem to be attached to images, while meaning in Surrealist art is also attached to images.

      How might images play a role in the clinic? Here is an example of someone whose life had been dominated by an image: a woman had a phobia of open and public spaces, so she stayed at home. She had a fear of being seen lying down in the street. In the course of her psychoanalysis it transpired that she was ashamed of her past sexual conduct, and of her sexual desires, and that above all, she did not want to be seen by others as a ‘fallen woman’. The image or idea of the fallen woman dominated her life, via the idiom ‘fallen woman’. It was around these words that her phobic symptom operated, not only by ‘speaking the truth’ about her past ‘shame’, but protecting her from further sexual encounters that she desired.

      Here ‘fallen woman’ is ambiguous, with two meanings, just as Dali’s picture on page nine is ambiguous, between a face and women.

      In this first phase of his work Lacan stressed the role of images and the imaginary in the workings of the human mind. He had been particularly struck by Lorenz’s famous experiment with ducks. Lorenz had put his Wellington boots next to duck eggs. As the ducklings hatched out and saw the boot, they became ‘imprinted’ with its image; wherever that boot went, the little ducks would follow. They mistook Lorenz’s boot for their mummy. When Lorenz wore his Wellingtons he was slavishly followed by a

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