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This essay represents the culmination of research that I began fifteen years ago into the relationship between the thought of Jacques Lacan and that of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The importance of Lévi-Strauss for Lacan's structuralist return to Freud had been acknowledged in the literature at that time but to my mind only in an abstract way. Instead, I set out to investigate the specific form of the debt as it appeared in two talks given by Lacan during a three-year span. An examination of those talks and of Lacan's relationship to Lévi-Strauss when they were presented led me to conclude that Lacan developed his theory of repetition on the basis of his encounter with his friend's analysis of myth. The initial results of my investigation appeared in the psychiatric journal L'information Psychiatrique (2006) and in Les Temps Modernes (2010). Drawing upon archival documentation in the Claude Lévi-Strauss collection at the Bibliothéque Nationale de France, the following essay now completes this project. It does not aim to demonstrate all that Lacan owes to Lévi-Strauss, but rather points to the timing of Lacan's first structuralist readings of Freud and their link to Lévi-Strauss’ conception of myth.
On March 4, 1953, at the invitation of Jean Wahl, Jacques Lacan gave a talk at the Collége Philosophique titled “The Neurotic's Individual Myth, or Poetry and Truth in Neurosis” (“Le mythe individuel du névrosé ou poésie et vérité dans la névrose”).1 At this time in his intellectual career, Lacan had begun to present