Judith Hamilton, M.D.

January 2004.

INTRODUCTION TO LACAN AND HIS INFLUENCES

I would like to introduce you to Jacques Lacan and Lacanian

studies. Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who lived from 1901-
1981. Currently there are Lacanian groups all over the world,
mainly in France, Spain, Italy, South and Central America, and a
few in the U.S. and Canada - who continue to read and apply his
work. Although many students are psychoanalytically-informed
clinicians, Lacan is also studied and applied by people in a
number of academic disciplines - English, art, film, philosophy,
social and political thought, and others.

A. CHARACTERISTICS AND PROBLEMS OF LACANIAN STUDIES

Difficulties in gaining an understanding. Because he
positioned his theory as a "return to Freud", I'll use a
comparison with Freud at various points.
1. To become acquainted with Lacan it is important,
helpful, essential to know Freud. There are many reference to
Freud throughout Lacan's texts. As with Freud, it is hard to
enter a whole system, not to panic or despair. Need to reread
everything many times. Never mastered. Huge volume. Like
Freud, Lacan had early insights (up to about 1964); then spent
many years working out the implications.
2. Changes in theory over time. Both Freud and Lacan.
(As in studying Freud, the student's journey tends to require
passage through the same set of ideas in the same order.)
In this introduction, we will be dealing with the earlier topics,
the earlier Lacan, up to 1964. Also much of what he said was not
written down by him, but rather transcribed from notes taken
during the seminars. Seminars I and II (edited by J.-A. Miller)
were apparently approved by Lacan, but their style is different
from his later ones – The early ones are more controlled,
precise, "straight-forward".
3. The "right understanding" of Lacan held by various
subgroups of Lacanians versus acknowledging the difficulties in
understanding his intended meaning.

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(eg. J.-A. Miller's group centred in Paris; Colette Soler’s group
centred in Paris; Paola Mieli's group in New York City, part of
Convergencia, following Leclaire; Willy Apollon’s group GIFRIC in
Quebec City). Even the basic concepts/terms have many ambiguities
of meaning and some change over time; Lacan cultivated this.
Lacan's style of teaching was not precise or highly organized.
He used many metaphors, many images, side comments, associations
and he expressed various levels of confidence in his statements.
He sometimes seemed to be feeling his way through the ideas;
trying out things; he obviously enjoyed speaking. At the same
time, he was very demanding at the University at Vincennes, Paris
VIII, in 1972; he demanded rigorous standards for teaching. He
did not accept the tendency for classes to become "therapy" or
"consciousness-raising" groups.
Lacan said, in 1967 (p.38), “Nothing of what I say is understood.
It does not matter. What I say is not meant to be understood but
to be used."
It's difficult to teach Lacan in a didactic way; seminars are
more often a discussion. Much of the material doesn't lend
itself to definitions or complete understanding; it's sometimes
more fruitful to work by associations to the material, what it
makes us think of from our own clinical or academic experience.
"The only training an analyst can give is a style." (1967)
4. Both are translated works. This results in certain
problems of translation. Lacan read Freud in German (as well as
in French and in English); he sometimes preferred one translation
over an other. His language is in places so arcane or technical
(from various disciplines) that to study Lacan, one always needs
an English dictionary, and French and German dictionaries; also a
dictionary of Lacanian term is useful/essential.
5. As with Freud, it helps to know the origins/pre-
cursors of Lacan's thought - His work was based on his reading
of:
The philosophy being discussed in France through the first half
of the 20th century: Spinoza, Hegel (as taught by Kojeve and
Koyré), Heidegger (Being), Husserl (phenomenology,
perception), Bergson, Nietsche, Jaspers, Louis Althusser.
New art forms - dadaism, surrealism (friend of Dali) -
i.e. interest in the unconscious.
Literary figures - Romaine Rolland, Andre Breton, Pierre-Jean
Joure, Moliere, Gide, Genet, and others.

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Social and political theorists: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault.
Structural linguistics: Saussure, Jacobson,
Anthropology: Levi-Strauss.
Psychology - perception: William James, Gestaltism, von
Ehrenfels, Henri Wallon (1931)
Psychiatry: de Clerambeau, Pichon, Male, Henri Ey.
Psychoanalysis: Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Balint, Jung, Deutsch,
Jones, Glover, Bonapart, Riviere.
6. "Return to Freud" - Lacan attempted to analyze Freud's
work using other categories, plus additional insights within the
Freudian system. He developed categories himself, and introduced
others suggested by contemporary thought.
He said he was not criticizing Freud, nor setting Freud up to
knock him down. He continuously admired Freud ("the one who
knows about the unconscious"; "They are Lacanians; I am a
Freudian.") He was trying to describe what underlay the texts,
what Freud "would have said" if he had had modern linguistics
available to him. He critiqued other standard psychoanalytic
texts and authors using his own theories.

For example: he said, the unconscious is not a place (as pictured

in the topographic theory), not a structure (id), not a
container. (It is not primordial, not instinctual, not made up
of symbols.) The unconscious is a process, something we have
because we have language. We do not just communicate by signs,
which symbolize meanings; we do more than signal. A
characteristic of the use of language is that words means more
than what they say. Language is made up of signifiers, operating
independently of the things they represent. The structure
(algorithm) of a signifier is S.
s
Thought is made up of signifying chains. Each word has a
penumbra of associations (meanings). Certain of these signifiers
are/have been repressed, that is, part of the unconscious, not
able to be called to awareness, because of their association to
something unpleasant; they are kept out of awareness until
suddenly something unexpected occurs/emerges in the discourse.

B. HIS LIFE AND CONTEXT (and how these contrast with Freud)

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Lacan - born April 3, 1901, 1st child, middle class French
Catholic family in Paris. 2nd boy, born when Jacques was 1, died
when Jacques was 3. Sister born when Jacques was 2. Another
brother born when Jacques was 7, Marc Francois - became a
Benedictine monk. Lacan wrote in French. (Only a couple of
papers in English.) Jesuit College in Paris. Lost his religious
faith as teenager.
2 marriages, many affairs, 4 children including Judith and step-
daughter, Laurence Bataille.
Freud born 1856, 1st of second group of children born to
father, first to very young mother, in Freiburg, Austria;
(lapsed) Jewish. Wrote in German. One marriage, no
affairs, ?six children including Anna. Cases represented
bourgeois conformism in Vienna, relatively well-off.
By 1900 - Interpretation of Dreams
1901 - Psychopathology of Everyday Life
1905 - Three Essays on Sexuality; Dora;
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious.
Influenced by Kant; positivism in philosophy; embryology,
Darwinism, evolutionary biology; psychiatrists in Paris -
hysteria; hypnosis; child psychology, sexology,
mythology, especially German and classical literature;

Period in France when Lacan worked - post-war France - The

citizens did not want to talk about the war, and especially the
collaboration with the Nazis. There was a new search for heroes.
Wanted something French, not German; Catholic, not Jewish.
French psychiatry and psychoanalysis addressed the
interests/needs of the alienated working-class of the thirties.
The new metaphysics (away from humanism) - structuralism, in
philosophy, linguistics, anthropology; Surrealism in art; new
developments in mathematics (topology, set theory, logic, knots).
Psychology - Gestaltism, characteristics of perception;
Psychiatry - dynamics, developmental and environmental
contributions; Psychoanalysis - moving beyond Freud in various
directions (wider range of diagnoses and circumstances of
patients). French literature - Gide, Moliere, Genet.
Topics:
Freud started with hysteria, following on medicine in
Vienna, neurology, brain studies, neuroanatomy,
neurophysiology, patients with cognitive defects.

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Lacan started with psychosis, following becoming a psychiatrist,
working in a mental hospital in Paris. First major paper on
paranoia - patient as a person; illness due to environmental
influences. Training in forensic psychiatry.

Read Freud (by 1932), philosophy (by 1934), and very widely -
early - image-based, Imaginary
mirror stage - ego - narcissism - 1936
family complex - Oedipal complex -"complex" instead of "instinct"
aggressivity
1953 - privileged the Symbolic; importance of language and speech
in psychoanalysis; agency of the letter (1957) - signifier,
signifying chains, (Saussure linguistics, Jacobson metaphor and
metonymy, Levi-Strauss - structure (laws) of social relations,
exchange (women, money, words), relation of language to the
unconscious.
subject, subject of the unconscious; "return to Freud".

increasingly commented on Freud; used his texts, cases. Also

other psychoanalytic authors.

Seminars I (1953-54) - Freud's Technical Papers - resistance,

"Negation".
II (1954-55) - The ego in Freud's theory - Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, the Project, Interpretation of Dreams, the
dream of Irma's Injection.
III - Psychoses - Schreber

C. LLACAN'S NEW CONCEPTS AND WAYS OF UNDERSTANDING

Basic insights - quite different concepts

- different way of dividing up the subject's experience in
psychoanalysis - according to the use of language.

1. How do humans experience the world? - Registers of experience

Freud: conscious, preconscious, unconscious, representations
of words and things; structure of the mind

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 id (drives) - ego (mediate) - superego (ego ideal) - (behave
towards the self as though to an object)
Lacan: Imaginary (words - signifieds - used to describe
perception-based experiences; imagistic, inertial, fantasies).
Symbolic (signifiers, signifieds, meanings, linguistic-based
- image falls away); learned later; transitive, effects of
signifiers on the subject; metaphor and metonymy.
"These images (dream images) are further and further away from
the qualitative level on which perception occurs, more and more
denuded, they take on a more and more associative character, they
belong more and more in the symbolic knot of resemblance, of
identity and of difference, so beyond what properly speaking
belongs to the associationist level."(II,163)
Real (source of trauma); produces anxiety; without and
within the person; unsymbolizable, unrepresentable.

Both the Imaginary and the Symbolic can be Conscious and/or

Unconscious.

2. Importance of language and speech -

Freud - In his earlier works, language was stressed as an
important characteristic and function of the unconscious and
its interpretation: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
Jokes and their relation to the unconscious; The
Interpretation of dreams.
Lacan - follow the signifiers along signifying chains, to the
unconscious signifiers that determine the person's life.
Metaphor, metonymy.
"The name is the time of the object." (II,169)

3. Different developmental nodal experiences which structure the

mind.
Freud: psychosexual stages; ego development; superego and
ego ideal development
Lacan: Start with fragmented body of experience, no language.
Mirror stage - specular image, appearance of unity,
coherence; results in idea of unified ego; imaginary;
narcissism; aggression, becomes ideal ego images.
Gradual acquisition of language and speech; first used for
the imaginary, then the symbolic.
The weaning complex (intrusion complex).

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 The Oedipus complex - 3 moments - limitations introduced:

use language to express need -> demands; a residue

that cannot be put into language, introduces a "gap";
castration; gendered; subjected to language; powerless;
ego ideal.

4. "Who is in analysis?"
In Freud: the person with an id, ego, superego (ego ideal),
with a conscious, preconscious and unconscious aspects of
mind; person with a developmental history of psychosexual
stages evolving id and ego and superego
functions/structures.
In Lacan, the subject (and the Other); the ego as an imaginary
structure, which develops through the mirror phase; the ego as
"other"; others as other; the subject of the unconscious, the
subject of desire, the authentic, the ethical subject. "…the
essence of the Freudian discovery, the decentring of the subject
in relation to the ego." (II,148) The superego (ego ideal) first
in the imaginary, then in the symbolic. "…the ego is the sum of
the identifications of the subject, with all that that implies as
to its radical contingency."(II,155)
Id  real
Unconscious is a process, structured like a language, has
repressed contents (primally repressed, secondary [signifiers]
repression).
Desire ≠ drives. Drives are imaginary; the libido builds up, the
death drive breaks down. Represented by the formula: $ ◊ D.
Desire is in/of the symbolic; expressed in signifiers; a want-to-
be; represents lack; a subject is always in search of more
signifiers to represent itself. If a signifier of desire is
repressed, it cannot be retrieved by attention alone, because of
an anticathexis (strong visual image, eg. trimethylamine in
Irma's injection dream)
Freud - does not work explicitly with the concept of
subject, or of the Big Other. He was against anything that
sounded not scientific.
"Subject" - philosophical (Being, Dasein); also, everyday
language in French for individual, patient, etc. Can be
authentic or inauthentic; true or distorted, obscured; in Lacan -
disappearing; the subject of desire, subject enunciating versus

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subject of the enunciation; the acephalic subject (without egos)
(II,167); the subject who speaks.
Reason makes of the subject no more than a pawn.(II,168)
In Lacan, subject has to do with being human, using language,
which is different from animals. What is important to humans is
our position, identity, status, significance; important to us
that our desire be acknowledged, recognized; not about need and
demand. "Our desire is to be recognized; what we want recognized
is our desire." (ie. signifiers that represent us).

5. Aim of psychoanalysis
Freud - "Where id was, there shall ego be."
Make the unconscious conscious.
Lacan - "Where it was, there shall I become."

6. Style
Freud: beautiful, clear, following a line of thought; does
not always deal with earlier contradictions.
Lacan: his style changed in 1933, after he read philosophy; full
of puns, asides, circumlocutions; many images, jokes, sarcasm,
metaphors. Compelling, suspenseful, while to some, off-putting,
impossible.
Different audiences, requiring some adaptation; Open to questions
which would be taken up for discussion in the form of
associations, multiple meanings, pique.
"Rubber logic"
Models - diagrams of relationships, optics, math: mathemes,
algorithms, figures from topology.

7. Sequences of topics:
Freud: hysteria; the unconscious in relation to dreams,
jokes, parapraxes; sexuality and libido theory, etc.

Lacan:
Paranoiac psychosis, forms of experience, crime 1932-33.
The mirror stage 1936
Beyond the reality principle 1936
The family complex 1938
From impulsion to complex 1938
Logical time - game theory 1945
aggressivity in psychoanalysis 1948

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The mirror stage as formator of the function of the I as
revealed in psychoanalytic experience. 1949
Intervention on transference - Dora 1951
Some reflections on the ego 1951
Individual myth of the neurotic or poetry and truth in
neurosis - The Ratman 1953
The symbolic, the imaginary, and the real 1953
The function and field of speech and language in psycho-
analysis 1953 - Dora, Wolfman, Ratman, Little Hans
I Freud's Technique papers 1953-54 - resistance, Margaret
Little, negation, imaginary (optics - constitution of
the subject at the imaginary level), little Dick
(Klein) ego, narcissism, desire, libido, Balint, speech
in the transference - Wolfman, R. Lefort case, E. Kris
case
II The Ego 1954-55 - knowledge, truth, the Imaginary, Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, the Project, Interpretation of
Dreams, Irma's Injection dream, Group psychology and
the analysis of the ego (consider ego as a group of
identifications) (II,155), the symbolic, beyond
intersubjectivity, from the little other to the big
Other, regression. Anna Freud's The Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defense.
III The psychoses 1955-56 - Schreber, V. Hugo, booz endormi,
Saussure and Jacobson, "Wo Es war…"
The Freudian thing or the meaning of the return to Freud
1955
Seminar on The Purloined Letter 1956
IV Object relations 1956-57 - the Symbolic, phobia, Little
Hans; subject based on structure: foreclosure for
psychosis, repression for neurosis; disavowal for
perversion; the three possible divisions of the subject
required for the construction of a subjective
organization - the unconscious - Feminine
homosexuality; M. Klein; Winnicott; Anna Freud case of
a little girl
Psychoanalysis and its teaching: "The only training the
analyst can transmit is a style." 1957
The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since
Freud 1957 V. Hugo, Little Hans; Saussure and Jacobson

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V Formations of the unconscious 1957-58 - Jokes,
Psychopathology, Interpretation of dreams, hysteric,
obsessional, perverse, Dora, butcher's beautiful wife,
Little Hans, obsessional female, Klein, Jones, Oedipus
complex, Paternal metaphor, the phallus, masochism,
identifications, graph of desire, schemas L and R.
A question preliminary to any possible treatment of
psychosis. 1957-58 - Schreber
Gide's youth or the letter of desire 1958
The signification of the phallus. 1958
The direction of the treatment and the principles of its
power 1958 - Ratman, dream of beautiful butcher's wife
VI Desire and its interpretation 1958-59 - Hamlet
In memory of Ernest Jones: on the theory of symbolism 1959
VII Ethics of psychoanalysis 1959-60 - Antigone, trauma,
Totem and taboo
Subversion of the subject and dialectic of desire in the
Freudian unconscious 1960 - "Wo Es war …"
VIII Transference in its subjective disparity 1960-61
IX Identification 1961-62
Kant avec Sade 1962
X Anxiety 1962-63 - Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety;
Wolfman; Feminine homosexuality; E. Kris case; Balint
On Freud's Trieb and on the desire of the psychoanalyst 1964
XI Four Fundamental concepts 1963-64 - the unconscious,
repetition, the gaze and objet petit a, transference,
the drive, the subject, the subject supposed to know.
Holbein's The Ambassadors; dream - "Father can't you
see…"
The position of the unconscious 1966 - answer to Laplanche;
“It is language that is the condition of the
unconscious."
XII Crucial problems 1964-65
XIII The object of psychoanalysis 1965-66 - Little Hans,
Velasquez - Las Meninas
Ecrits 1966
XIV The logic of fantasy (the fantasme) 1966-67 Jacobson
XV The psychoanalytic act 1967-68
The subject-supposed-to-know 1967
XVI From One Other to the Other 1968-69 "Wo Es war, soll Ich
werden."

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 XVII The Netherside of psychoanalysis 1968-69 - the four
discourses, the student revolution in France, Totem and
taboo, Dora, the beautiful butcher's wife.
Radiophonie 1970 - Jacobson
XVIII Of a discourse that would not be semblance 1970-71 -
Totem and taboo; dream of "Father can't you see.."
Lituraterre 1971
XIX Or worse 1971-72
The psychoanalyst's knowledge 1971-72
XX Femininity/Encore 1972-73
XXI The non-fools wander 1973-74 - Totem and taboo
Television 1973
The third 1974 - The symptom is "that which comes from the
Real".
XXII Real, Symbolic, Imaginary 1974-75
Lectures in the United States 1975 - Jacobson
XXIII The sinthome 1975-76 - James Joyce, Noam Chomsky
XXIV L'Insu que sait de l'une beve S'Aile a mourre 1976-77 -
The non-known that knows, that one knows from the
blunder; constitutes the new formula for the
unconscious.
XXV Time to conclude 1977-78
XXVI Topology and time 1978-79
XXVII Dissolution 1979-80
seminar in Caracas 1980

D. TERMS AND THEIR USES

(Marini p.195)"The unconscious is a concept forged on the trace

of that which works to constitute the subject." "The subject is
not the cause of himself, he carries in him the worm of the cause
which splits him," and this cause is language, or rather the
primordial signifier that divides him and "represents him for
another signifier." "Without this signifier there would be no
subject in the real." Such are the effects of language that give
birth to the subject in an originary alienation. These are the
themes in The agency of the letter, Identification, The metaphor
of the subject, The position of the unconscious.

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Regarding the effects of speech, in speech the subject alienates
himself in his demand made to the Other and in his demand of the
Other; includes the terms of the pact; the exchange of
signifiers, the metaphors of the Father; the ideals that govern
what one must do as a man or as a woman, the subject to be
located at the level of the enunciation of all discourse, etc.

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