Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who, during the post-war period, worked to develop the pioneering insights of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.

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

Central to Lacan’s early interventions was emphasising 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 re-read Freud’s work and, in doing so, elaborated a rigorous theory of the way that language shapes subjectivity and how we can work with its effects in psychoanalytic work.

Lacan’s later work moved away from concerns with language to focus more on questions of effect as he developed the Freudian notion of drive and his own concept of jouissance (or enjoyment). Lacan was interested in how we find ourselves drawn to experiences, often symptomatic ones, 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 jouissance and a sophisticated way of working with the signifier as a mode of therapeutic intervention. Today, it remains as vital and 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.