Person
Jacques Lacan
French analyst who reread Freud through linguistics and structuralism.
Read more- Born
- 1901
- Died
- 1981
- Known for
- Influenced
introduced
- Name-of-the-Father 1953 In the Rome discourse of 1953, Lacan names the father's name as the support of the symbolic function, which identifies the father with the law. In 1958 he develops it as the paternal metaphor.
- Metaphor 1957 In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” (1957, collected in Écrits), Lacan defines metaphor as one signifier taking another's place in the chain, the hidden one remaining linked to the rest, and makes it the structure of condensation and of the symptom.
- Metonymy 1957 In "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious" (1957, collected in Écrits), Lacan turns Jakobson's metonymic pole into a psychoanalytic concept. Metonymy becomes the word-to-word connection along the signifying chain, and he sets it beside metaphor: the symptom is a metaphor and desire is a metonymy.
reworked
- Condensation 1957 Reads condensation as the superimposition of signifiers in which metaphor has its field, and displacement as metonymy (‘L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient’, 1957). In Seminar XI (1964) he restates condensation as a signifying operation with the effect of metaphor and refers back to that article.
- Resistance 1958 Against an analysis of resistances aimed at the patient's ego, Lacan locates resistance on the analyst's side: it is produced by the analyst's own pressure and demand, while the subject's resistance to suggestion is read as the wish to keep desire alive.
- Sublimation 1960 In the seminar of 1959–1960 Lacan moves sublimation away from a change of the drive's aim toward the place of the object. Sublimation raises an ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing, the lost and inaccessible das Ding, and art is organised around the void the Thing leaves.
broke with
- Jean Laplanche 1963 When the Société Française de Psychanalyse split in 1963 over the IPA's condition that Lacan be removed as a training analyst, Laplanche sided with the majority and helped found the Association Psychanalytique de France. He had already set out metapsychological differences with Lacan in 1960 and remained opposed to his short sessions.
- Jean-Bertrand Pontalis 1963 Pontalis left Lacan in the 1963 split of the Société Française de Psychanalyse, together with Laplanche, Anzieu and Widlöcher, and joined the Association Psychanalytique de France.
- André Green 1967 After several years at Lacan's seminar, Green parted from him in 1967. Green recalled that the break followed a long paper of his on narcissism that did not cite Lacan; a 2012 account ties it to his rejection of Lacan's thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language.