Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who, during the post war period worked alongside other notable post-Freudians such as Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and others, to develop the pioneering insights of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

Lacan’s early background was in psychiatry, working with patients in Sainte-Anne Hospital, an experience that would prove pivotal to his work thereafter. Moving into practicing as a psychoanalyst Lacan would draw on a broad set of influences from the intellectual ferment of mid century Paris, to develop his own distinctive approach to psychoanalytic practice.

Central to Lacan’s early interventions was to emphasise the fundamental nature of speech and language to psychoanalytic practice. Using the resources available to him from the structuralist linguistic of his day, such as the notion of signifier, Lacan re-read Freud’s work, and in doing so elaborated a rigorous theory of the way that language shapes subjectivity and how we can utilise it in psychoanalytic work.

Lacan’s later work would move away from the concerns with language, to focus more on on questions of affect as he developed the Freudian notion of drive and his own concept of jouissance (or enjoyment). Here, Lacan was interested in the ways that we find ourselves drawn to experiences that go beyond simple pleasure, and involve an excess of satisfaction or satisfaction-in-suffering.

In such a way, Lacanian psychoanalysis presents us with a theory of subjectivity orientated around the interplay of language and the enjoying body, and a sophisticated way of working with the signifier as a mode of therapeutic intervention. Today, it remains as vital and a relevant an approach to psychoanalysis as it did in his day, and has become increasingly central to the new wave of interest in psychoanalysis that in recent years has swept the English speaking world.