Lacan in America: A Special Issue

In January 1964, soon after the International Psychoanalytical Association had marginalized him, Jacques Lacan opened his seminar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris with a question: Was he qualified to speak on the subject of psychoanalysis? A “deal” had been struck, he told his audience (1964, p. 4); members of the Société Française de Psychoanalyse (SFP) had successfully gained admission to the IPA in exchange for his being removed from their roster of training analysts. “My teaching,” Lacan explained, “has been the object of censure,” what amounted to a “major excommunication” (p. 3). A great divide was thereby established in the psychoanalytic landscape, one that has had enduring consequences for psychoanalysis in the decades that followed up to the present time.1 Though splits are not uncommon in the history of psychoanalysis, in Lacan's case a person and his “teaching”—his psychoanalytic work both clinical and theoretical—were forever congealed into one and the same thing.2

With regard to psychoanalytic education and training in the United States, these efforts at marginalization were largely successful. Even today, when American training programs typically include a course on each major school of thought, and when psychoanalytic journals ask authors to engage with an ever widening range of perspectives, many American psychoanalysts know little about the Lacanian orientation. Notably, while American clinicians have largely ignored or simply don't