Lacanian psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who developed the pioneering insights of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.

Lacan began his career as a psychiatrist at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, an experience that proved pivotal to his later work, shaping his lifelong engagement with questions of psychosis. He subsequently trained as a psychoanalyst and soon established himself as a major figure in the French psychoanalytic movement. In 1953, he began teaching his celebrated seminar, which he continued for the next twenty-seven years. Across these seminars, Lacan elaborated Freud’s legacy through a wide range of influences drawn from the intellectual ferment of mid-century Paris, developing a distinctive and rigorous approach to psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Central to Lacan’s early teaching was an emphasis on the fundamental role of speech and language in psychoanalysis. Drawing on concepts from structural linguistics (most notably the notion of the signifier), he expanded Freud’s insights into dreams, slips, and symptom formation, formulating a precise account of how language structures the psyche and how its effects can be worked with in analysis.

In his later work, Lacan shifted his focus from language toward questions of affect, elaborating Freud’s theory of the drives and developing his own concept of jouissance (enjoyment). He was interested in how we find ourselves repeatedly drawn to forms of suffering that also give a paradoxical satisfaction — what he called satisfaction-in-suffering or symptomatic enjoyment.

Lacanian psychoanalysis thus offers a theory of subjectivity centred on the interplay between signifier and jouissance, and a sophisticated practice that works with speech and language as the privileged mode of analytic intervention. Today, it remains a vital and relevant orientation within psychoanalysis. Having first entered the Anglophone world through the arts and humanities, Lacan’s influence has continued to grow, shaping contemporary clinical practice and contributing to the renewed interest in psychoanalysis across the English-speaking world.