Lacan1

Jacques Lacan belonged to the second generation of French psychoanalysts which, thanks to the arrival in France of Rudolf Loewenstein, was the first to benefit from a training analysis of sufficient quality and duration. Lacan left the Société Psychanalytique de Paris and the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1953, following a controversy over the short sessions he gave his patients. For Lacan, the anxiety of being absorbed by the object is the principal anxiety from which the anxieties of separation, castration or fragmentation are derived, which may explain why he did not keep his patients for a sufficient length of time. Lacan transformed his difficulty into an advocated technique, which he justified by making a critique of the classical technique. He founded his own international psychoanalytic association, in which selection only occurs when the analyst is already at a very advanced stage in his career (‘the authorization of an analyst can only come from himself’). We are indebted to Lacan for having drawn the attention of analysts to the role of language, and especially of words with a double meaning, in the genesis of interpretation, but his theory of language, founded on the assimilation of psychoanalysis to structural linguistics and anthropology, has collapsed. Many of Lacan's other theoretical contributions, such as the renewed interest in the après-coup, the place of mirror relations in narcissism, the distinction between what he calls jouissance and the orgasm, or between the ‘real’ and reality, have been gradually integrated by analysts who accept neither his technique nor his laxity in training.