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It is a pleasure to be here at the invitation of August Ruhs in order to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most scintillating but also one of the most pertinent and most enigmatic of Jacques Lacan's lectures: ‘The Freudian Thing or the meaning of the return to Freud in psychoanalysis’, which was delivered to the Vienna Neuropsychiatric Clinic directed at the time by Professor Hans Hoff, who did not have much idea who Lacan was and why he had insisted on being invited to give this lecture in this place.
In reality, Lacan owed his invitation to the French Institute and to Igor Caruso, one of the most important Viennese psychoanalysts to have distanced himself from the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), which he judged to be too medical and thus, at the time, too enmeshed in a pragmatic vision of psychoanalysis - too American. Like Lacan, he wished to give Freudian thinking a more intellectual direction. Close to the phenomenological current, he had founded the Circle of Depth Psychology.1
As always with Jacques Lacan, things are never simple. I had always supposed that he delivered this lecture in German - that is to say, in the bizarre German that stemmed from his reading of Heidegger and which