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, working at Sainte-Anne Hospital, an experience that would prove pivotal to his work thereafter, as it informed his career-long engagement with psychosis. He then trained as a psychoanalyst, going on to establish himself as a major figure in the French psychoanalytic scene. In 1953, Lacan began teaching his famous seminar, which he would go on to teach for 27 years. Throughout his teachings, he elaborated on the legacy of Freud‘s thought, drawing on a broad set of influences from the intellectual ferment of mid-century Paris to develop a distinctive approach to psychoanalytic practice.
Central to Lacan’s early interventions was an emphasis on the fundamental nature of speech and language in psychoanalytic practice. Using the resources available to him from structural linguistics, such as the notion of signifier, Lacan built upon Freud’s work on dreams, parapraxes, and symptom formation, and, in doing so, developed a rigorous theory of the way that language shapes the psyche and how we can utilise its effects in psychoanalytic work.
Lacan’s later work moved away from concerns with language towards questions of affect, as he developed the Freudian notion of drive and his own concept of jouissance (enjoyment). Lacan was interested in how we find ourselves repeatedly drawn to symptomatic enjoyment that goes beyond simple pleasure and involves an excessive mode of satisfaction or satisfaction-in-suffering.
In such a way, Lacanian psychoanalysis presents us with a theory of subjectivity oriented around the interplay of the signifier and jouissance, alongside a sophisticated way of working with speech and language as a mode of therapeutic intervention. Today, it remains as vital and relevant an approach to psychoanalysis as it was in his day. Initially making its influence felt in the Anglophone world, via the arts and humanities, Lacan’s work has become increasingly influential as part of the new wave of interest in psychoanalysis that has swept the English-speaking world in recent years.