Jacques-Marie Emile Lacan , more known under the name of Jacques Lacan , born the April 13rd 1901 and dead the September 9th 1981, is a French psychoanalyst. The thesis of doctorate in Psychiatrie which it supports in 1932 partly reflects the influence of the Surréaliste S which it attends. In analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, it integrates the psychoanalytical Société of Paris (SPP) in 1934 and is elected by it regular member in 1938. Its first communications relate to its interpretation of the test of the mirror, which give place to the invention of the Mirror stage in psychoanalysis. It is after the Second world war that its teaching of the Psychanalyse takes a considerable importance. The polemical aspect of some of its topics (the return to Freud), its ideas Structuralist S, the innovations in the technique of the cure (or, according to the point of view, distorsions with this one, as the short meetings) will bring several scissions with SPP and the international authorities. Continuing its research, Lacan teaches almost until its death: successively at the hospital Holy Anne, the National university, then with the Sorbonne. Disputed character, Lacan deeply marked the intellectual landscape French - but also international, as well by the disciples as it caused than by the rejections than it caused.

Biography

Childhood and studies

Jacques Lacan is born in 1901 with Paris. He is the first child of a family belonging to the average Bourgeoisie. He grows in a medium Catholique and conservative, his mother being very pious and his father achieving his religious obligations without pointing out itself for his enthusiasm. Described like a tyrannical child and brilliance, it integrates the Collège Stanislas in 1907 when it receives a primary and secondary education solid. In the 15 year old neighborhoods, he discovers Spinoza, which will remain one of its favorite authors. He is very impressed by the teaching of Jean Baruzi who made his thesis on Jean of the Cross, and which is also interested in Leibniz, Saint Paul and Angelus Silesius.

It is against the opinion of his/her father that it begins from the studies of medicine. At the time of its first years coeds, he attends circles as opposite as the Surréaliste S and the French Action, all being characterized by a pronounced anticonformist position and an special attention with the problem of the Langage. Because it lost the Foi during its adolescence and that it would have wished to have a certain influence on its junior, it saw like a personal failure the sacerdotal ordination of his brother to the Abbaye of Hautecombe in 1926. It chooses to specialize in Psychiatrie. It thus follows the teaching of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, of which it will affirm well later, in 1966, which he will have been his only Master in psychiatry, and this in spite of the many brilliant professors of which he will have received teaching. It is in boarding school of psychiatry that it meets Henri Ey and Pierre Mâle. It supports its thesis of doctorate at the end of 1932, and obtains its diploma for the occupation of doctor of medicine, speciality Psychiatrie.

SPP with the SFP

A few months before, it started a psychoanalysis near Rudolph Loewenstein. It is named adherent member of the psychoanalytical Société of Paris. He becomes regular member about it in 1938 with the support of Loewenstein which lays down a condition: Lacan must continue its analysis with him. Hardly become titular, Lacan stops its analysis. It is also during the years 1930 qu ' it takes part in the seminar of Alexandre Kojève on Hegel. Not only this seminar is a meeting place between very different personalities (Raymond Aron, Raymond Queneau, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille etc) but it is also a place of intellectual formation very important for Lacan, which begins again in Kojève many its designs, concerning the human desire like desire of desire, or dimension, paramount for Lacan as for Kojève, of the recognition, and even its assertions on the imaginary nature of ego. From the sentimental point of view, it is in 1933 qu ' it meets Marie-Louise Blondin, who becomes her first marries on January 29th, 1934. It introduces into 1953 of the concepts which will become fundamental in its work in the species of the triptych: Real, Symbolic system, Imaginary. It starts to work with a theory of the sign by redécouvrant Saussure and while resting on Jakobson. It is as there as it starts to quote regularly the thesis of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the elementary structures of the relationship. In 1960, Henri Ey organizes a conference with the Abbaye of Bonneval on the topic of the Inconscient: it brings together there the most brilliant psychoanalysts of the young generation, of the philosophers like Merleau-Ponty and Jean Hyppolite. Almost all the debates will refer closely or by far to the theory lacanienne of unconscious, from now on formed in its broad outlines and summarized by the watchword lacanien par excellence: “the unconscious one is structured like a language”. Dice this time, in France, the psychoanalysis is summarized with this positioning: to be with or against Lacan. It acquired a central position and crystallizes the debates.

The twelve years which will be passed between the foundation of SFP and its dissolution in 1965 are one period great changes in the French psychoanalytical landscape. From an institutional point of view, they will be ten years of negotiations so that the psychoanalysts having made scission into 1953 are recognized by IPA. The investigation of the IPA will concentrate gradually on Lacan and its meetings known as short - makes some at the time variable length, this length being always lower than the standard of the IPA. The investigation will conclude into 1963 which the SFP will be able to receive approval if it withdraws in Lacan (and Francoise Dolto) its title of didactician, i.e. it removes the right to him to train psychoanalysts and to continue its teaching. That caused the bursting of the company founded by Daniel Lagache, all those practitioner not and not supporting the technique of Lacan seeing itself condemned other than the international authorities if they continue to protect Lacan. Thus in 1964 the psychoanalytical Association will be born from France, under the auspices of Daniel Lagache, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Didier Anzieu and Jean Laplanche. For the faithful lacaniens, it will be about the French École of psychoanalysis, soon famous school freudienne of Paris.

Lacan, growing old Master or absolute master?

It is thus at sixty three years that Lacan, pushed by the circumstances, must found its clean “school”. Its success proves fulgurating. The statutes of the new school, autocratic in what Lacan governs all it, are also much more advantageous for young people because they are treated on a hierarchical basis. There is indeed only one hierarchical row strictly speaking: that which separates Lacan from the others. The decisional bodies are always composed by him and never exceed its opinions. The publication of the Écrits in 1966 brings a a long time awaited celebrity to him: it henceforth forms part of the tenors of the Structuralisme and its name is quoted beside those of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. This new celebrity brings an important surge of young people to the EFP, young people who start to imitate his style, to get dressed and speak like him.

It introduces in 1969 an experimental practice to entitle a psychoanalyst as being an analyst of the school, the master key, which will at the same time prove to be a factor of dissension and a failure according to the consent even of Lacan. Factor of dissension because the adoption of this procedure causes a scission immediately: several historical members whose François Perrier, Piera Aulagnier and Jean-Paul Valabréga resigns of the EPF and founds the Fourth group. A failure, because this procedure, made to avoid the traps of the idealization and bureaucratization will have the opposite effect of that desired. In eleven years, only seventeen people “will pass” successfully.

Shortly after the foundation of its school, Lacan operates a new turning in its teaching, which one will call the “changing logicist”. Following the interventions of the young whole Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan turns to Frege, Gödel and the Topologie. Its goal is to ensure that the reception of its teaching is not prone to the drifts which marked according to him the reception of Freud. The nodes, the impossible forms, the mathèmes from now on will invade the seminars of the Master and will make them still more difficult of access. Now that it is not related any more to any negotiation, its practice as an analyst concerns almost the unslung experimentation. It can as well ask a person to come three times for three meetings flashes a few minutes in the same day and to keep it one hour whole the week according to. It was already accustomed to rising, speaking, eating, writing during the meetings: henceforth he also plays with bands of Moebius, pieces of string and of paper. He receives with his cabinet all the day during an uninterrupted flood people. The things are at this point that often one does not even take go.

Benefitting from the reform of the University S caused by the events of May 1968, Lacan, initially assisted Serge Leclaire, tries to be established in the university by the means of a department of psychoanalysis in Vincennes (Paris VIII). In spite of the proposal of the president of the department, it will occupy no station there, but the department will be a kind of bastion lacanien. This last experiment will crystallize the already existing oppositions between various currents within the EFP. The resumption in hand of the department in the name of Lacan by Jacques-Alain Miller in 1974, marked by the replacement of several part-time lecturer, caused a sharp polemic inside and outside faculty, in the psychoanalysts and the not-psychoanalysts. A few years later, the suicide of an analyst having failed the procedure of the master key serves as revealing with the dissensions of a school of which much doubts that it is still directed by the Master and not by his close entourage. Lacan indeed has absences, is shown more and more tired and delegates more and more to his/her son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller the management of the businesses. It decides to dissolve the EFP. After a few years of perpetual crisis, the EFP, only school founded by Lacan, are dissolved.

Reached of a cancer which he refuses to look after, Lacan is locked up in an increasingly complete dumbness, he stops his activities other than the analysis. He dies of the continuation of an impaired renal function on September 9th, 1981. This sentence gives enough a general good idea of the Pensée of Lacan. She recalls, by using the concept of Inconscient, that Lacan fits in psychoanalytical Running . She indicates, with the term of Structure, the particular approach of Lacan, which is the approach Structuraliste. Lastly, it specifies its contribution, which consists mainly in the importance given to the nature of the Langage in the explanation of psychic operation .

Freud had indicated the Inconscient like major explanatory concept of psychic operation. It had tried to study it starting from its demonstrations, which they are Normale S or Pathologique S. the abandonment of the methods of Hypnose and Suggestion marked a turning in the thought freudienne, turning which transformed the psychoanalysis into medicine of (and by) the word. From this moment, Freud interprets more the psychic disease only according to the Parole of the patient. Lacan stresses that, in work of Freud, the unconscious one was let seize in two manners: when the speaker or the dreamer makes a displacement (to say a word to the place of another) or when it produces a condensation (the witty remark “famillionaire”, analyzed by Freud). He affirms that displacement and condensation, in the species of the Métaphore and the Métonymie, are the two only means of producing significance if one refers to the analyzes of Jakobson, and that thus the unconscious one has an operation comparable with that of the language.

Lacan thus wanted to renew the reception of Freud by operating a structuralist reading of its work, using for that the tools of the Linguistique. These tools, it will not make that to re-use them, it will alter them to serve its matter. It is at the same time this will of renewal of the reading of Freud and the rehandling of the theoretical tools of linguistics which are worth in Lacan its success near the ones and its rejection by the others.

Major concepts of the psychoanalysis lacanienne

The Mirror stage: ego treated like a visual effect

Situation and stakes

Object of the first communication that gave Lacan to an international symposium, the Mirror stage did not cease accompanying its reflection during all its work. Indeed, in its reflection on this stage or this phase, Lacan will rest in a completely new way a certain number of problems specific to the Psychanalyse: on the nature of the Me, on the roles - not always clearly separate at Freud - Ideal ego and Ego ideal, but also on the nature of the Narcissism, not crucial of the psychoanalytical theory.

Mirror stages

Lacan having started to work on this concept about 1936 and having altered it until approximately 1960, one will understand easily that it is impossible to reduce a reflection of more than twenty years to only one theory. There will be for example the mirror stage before and after the invention of the three orders which are the Réel, Symbolic system, and Imaginary the. There will be the mirror stage before and after the invention of the object (A). This concept will thus fit in the history of the reflection lacanienne and, in spite of its celebrity who could let accept something of simple and reusable out same of the lacanism, it is necessary to include/understand it to put in perspective it in the problems suitable for the thought of its inventor.

The mirror stage is before a a whole reflection on two concepts: that of clean body, the term (wallonien) of clean body indicating the intuition of the unit of its person by the baby, and that of representation - i.e. at the same time capacity to organize the images and to be located in the order of these images. Lacan affirms that the child anticipates on his body unit step yet physiologically accomplished - because of incomplete maturation of the nervous system - while being identified with an external image which it was able to differentiate from the others: his. To have been able to differentiate its image from that of the others, it was necessary that it includes/understands the difference between the image (within the meaning of all that is seen) and the representation - the image which is put at the place of what it appears. My own image in the mirror can be indeed only one representation, it shows me what to in no case I will not be able to see directly, without using artifice. Thus one can include/understand a first difference between the I , that which sees its image and which is identified with this one, and it me, the image to which the child is identified. That discovers the direction of the identification for Lacan: it is a tension between a I , which it will re-elect later prone the unconscious one, and an always social me , posed in the order of logic (since the distinguished body as being the clean body is because of a logical Induction) and in the social order (later Lacan will stress the importance owing to the fact that the approval of an adult is given to what is only one intuition of identification). The mirror stage, it is thus the active Aliénation subject with an image, image which can be used for this process of identification only if she is recognized at the same time like artificial by the child and is indicated like adequate representation by the adult.

It is believed sometimes that the mirror stage reveals one moment of the development of the child. However what he intends to reveal it is the dynamics even of the identification, dynamics which remains the same one throughout the existence. He describes the structure - that Lacan calls still paranoiac in 1949 - subject, divided between I, soon the subject of unconscious, and it me. Ego is redefined as an authority which concerns the image and social, pure Mirage, but mirage necessary.

Is the mirror stage a concept lacanien?

One spoke much about the loans that Lacan was accustomed to making with its contemporaries. Concerning the mirror stage, the pages of Henri Wallon in the origins of the character in the child are regularly quoted, as well as the Kojéviennes origins of the dynamic definition of the identification conceived like movement. Élizabeth Roudinesco. Nevertheless, without denying the contribution of all these thinkers, the reflection lacanienne on the mirror stage has only little to see with dialectical development which one finds at Henri Wallon, who strut of the conceptual problems concerning the identification in psychoanalysis, as it is not interested in narcissism, nor with the imaginary nature or not of ego or the object of the desire. If one can suppose a considerable importance of the hegelianism to the manner of Kojève, this one is erased dice 1954, little time after the entry concerned of the concepts of Reality, Symbolique and Imaginary. As for the contribution of Pichon concerning the Je/Moi distinction, one knows that this distinction will undergo conceptual adventures quite far away from the theoretical considerations of pleasant the grammairien. Lacan borrowed has Kojève, in Wallon, in Pichon, and even with Dali. But force is to note that the mirror stage according to Lacan does not have, with final, anything Wallonien, Kojèvien, Pichonien nor of Dalinien.

The return to Freud

The teaching of Jacques Lacan begins on a watchword from appearance simple, that of the return to Freud . The will even of a return to Freud supposes that Lacan considered that there was a need to turn over to Freud, to find it, and that it implicitly blamed the quality of the teaching of the psychoanalysts and the theorists of the psychoanalysis of his time. Indeed, Lacan was opposed dice its beginnings so that he regarded as a drift of the psychoanalysis: the Ego-psychology, represented by Anna Freud and Rudolph Loewenstein.

In addition to the different theoretical ones with its pars, which characterizes the attitude of Lacan in its return to Freud , it is a reading which does not seek to remain in orthodoxy freudienne, but rather to release what there is of original in Freud, as Jean-Michel Rabaté formulates it: “Just as Althusser wondered how to read “symptomatic” Marx of way, while separating what is authentically “Marxist” of what is purely “hégelien” in its writings, Lacan wonders where and how to locate the texts where Freud shows “freudien authentically”. ”

It is by taking into account this remark of Jean-Michel Rabaté which one can include/understand the attitude of Lacan, otherwise contradictory, which claims of Freud all while making fun openly of ideas in which the founder of the Psychanalyse believed firmly (like the possibility of reducing psychology, in last analysis, with biology). The return to Freud thus does not consist only of one critical of the teaching of the pupils of Freud, but of a Critique - with the etymological direction, to operate a choice between the good and the bad one - teaching of Freud, which also did not always know him, according to a Lacannienne optics, to remain faithful to itself or to explore the last consequences of its discoveries.

Thus engaged, could the return to Freud not lead to a theory quite different from that of Freud? It is well in any case in this very particular manner to conceive its return to Freud which one can seize the paradox of the thought lacanienne, which always turns over to Freud, which is claimed some, and which however, for sometimes historical reasons - the Linguistique did not have time of Freud the audience that it will have in the Fifties - and often theoretical, remotely considerably.

The concept of structure

One of the contributions of Lacan to the psychoanalysis is its attempt to integrate it into the structuralist prospect . Lacan affirmed on several occasions owe its structural design with Claude Lévi-Strauss. In addition, the thesis of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the elementary structures of the relationship , is the work written by a contemporary more quoted in the seminars of Lacan. It is thus appropriate, without to admit without preliminary criticism that the structure of Lacan and the structure of Lévi-Strauss are the same ones, to be interested in the definition of the term of structure that Lévi-Strauss can develop in the work in question. The definition illustrating in the most complete way the direction which the French anthropologist gives to this terle is certainly this one: “The human Institution S they also are structures of which the All, i.e. the regulating principle, perhaps given before the parts, i.e. this unit complexes made up by the Terminologie of the Institution, its consequences and its implications, the habits by which it is expressed and the beliefs to which it gives place. This regulating principle can have a rational Valeur without being conceived rationally; it can be expressed arbitrarily, without to be private of significance. ” From this long definition comes out that the “whole” of the structure is the regulating principle, independent of the parts. The structure at Lévi-Strauss is logical structure, it is a whole of relations between terms with final interchangeable. That does not have strictly anything to see with the idea of architectural structure, or any idea of construction strongly connoted by this term and often improperly used in psychology (structure fragile, solid, etc).

According to Lacan, this regulating principle, the structure of the subject, it is the intrication of three functions: reality, Symbolic system, the Imaginary one (what it will call R.S.I). It will represent in 1972 this intrication of the three functions by the Nœud borroméen (which it will call also the node-bo). It is enough that any among the three rings is broken so that all the rings are independent. This “Tripod R.S.I”, as it will be called by Lacan itself, will belong to some concepts not to be on the way abandoned or deeply altered, it is a fundamental intuition of Lacan, and it will be used to him as grid of reading to include/understand the psychic phenomena.

Importance of the language

Raise and analyzed of Jacques Lacan, Charles Melman affirms in a work of testimonys: “Initially, it was a question for Lacan of underlining what Freud could not or did not dare to make, namely to show how much the language is what orders our report/ratio in the world as well as with ourself. ”

The thought of Lacan could be defined like a structural Théorie of the Désir and Langage. Theory of the desire, because the gasoline of the man is the desire for the reader of Spinoza which all its life will be Lacan. Theory of the language, because it is by this one that one has access to the Inconscient. Structural theory, because the language answers internal logics that linguistic research of the twentieth century succeeded in subsuming under the term of structure. However, the structure, for Lacan, it is at the same time what produces and what is the reality of the unconscious one. Because unconscious the lacanien is not a stock of not-conscious, it is a whole of active processes.

Thus, when Lacan advances the theory of the three orders (Reality, Symbolique, Imaginaire), it does it while being based on its reflections relating to nature, not language in general, but of human, the speaking being (which it will call the parlêtre). The fact of learning the language cuts us to some extent world: thus is born Reality, which cannot be named, which does not concern the language. The language in which we are born contains values, it organizes the world in which we will live before even as we were born, this organizing dimension and of distribution of the value, Lacan calls it the symbolic system. As for the imaginary one, it indicates the way in which the subject is perceived by the means of the others and of the language in which it is.

The theory lacanienne at this point is turned towards the language which one can detect the importance dice his work on the Mirror stage. Because when the child makes the difference between the image and the representation, which is exactly what the mirror stage describes, it anything else makes only discover the Signe, i.e. what is put there for another thing, which indicates this thing and which however is not it.

DEBATEs on the design lacanienne of the bonds between language and unconscious

The psychoanalyst Alain Costes, affirms initially that the identification of the concept freudien of displacement to that, linguistic, of metaphor, and symmetrically of condensation (always within the meaning of Freud) to the metonymy, is impossible. Taking again a made criticism with Lacan with recurrence, he adds that in topics freudienne, the language raises of the level préconscient and not of the unconscious one. He affirms thus that Lacan is not at all freudien in its design of the unconscious one.

The linguist Georges Mounin affirmed as for him, in an article having done much noise, that Lacan mésusait concepts saussurien, and that its teaching with the ENS " ruined fifteen years of enseignement" linguistics in this school. Another linguist, Michel Made, while underlining the differences between the sign lacanien and signs it saussurien, does not consider them as distortions but as the adaptation which the transposition of a conceptual universe to another requires.

Scientific criticisms

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, in a common work, pins the abuses or the mésusages of scientific terms by thinkers of importance such Baudrillard, Deleuze, Serres and devotes their first chapter to Lacan.

They stress that Lacan never gives justification to its use of Surface S studied in Topologie to treat or describe the “pleasure” (regarded as a Espace with the topological direction of the term) or the “structure of the neurotic” (supposed being a Tore). They stress that the use of the Métaphore being to generally make more accessible the matter, to speak about Bouteille of Klein, Tore or cross-country race-course does not seem likely to make this one more accessible.

They pin then the use of mathematical terms resulting from the arithmetic one which, despizing of their technical standard, are claimed of their rigor, for example: The human life could be defined as a calculation in which zero would be irrational. Since zero are an integer and that all the integers are also rational numbers, i.e. can be obtained by a fraction of two integers, with difficulty the direction of such an assertion is seen. As much to write “the human life could be defined as a calculation in which zero would not be a Integer”. Lacan speaks to introduce this sentence of mathematical metaphor and, although a mathematical metaphor remains something to define, the sentence does not seem about it less not stripped of direction once translated into vulgar language.

To finish, the authors are interested in the use of the paradoxes concerning the bases of mathematics (paradoxes of Russel or Cantor). While admitting that mathematics in this field is maltreated, it underline “that no argument is given to connect these paradoxes belonging to the bases of mathematics and “the gaping which constitutes the subject” in psychoanalysis”.

Sokal and Bricmont affirm nevertheless: “We do not claim to judge the Psychanalyse of Lacan, the Philosophie of Deleuze or the concrete labors of Latour in Sociologie. We limit ourselves to the statements which refer either to physical sciences and mathematics, or with elementary problems in philosophy of sciences. ” With each one thus to judge in what the criticized assertions are repésentatives studied work.

Lacan and philosophy

The question of the relationship between the work of Lacan and the Philosophie can arise various manners. One can initially question oneself on the influence of philosophy in the intellectual course of Lacan and on what this one could borrow from the various thinkers of which it made the reading. But one can also wonder about the importance of the work of Lacan for philosophy, even, with Jean-Pierre Cléro, wonder whether there exists a philosophy of Jacques Lacan.

Importance of the philosophical references in the work of Jacques Lacan

The problem of the importance and the possible influence of the Philosophie in the work of Lacan is complex. It is undeniable that the philosophy of Hegel (re-examined and corrected by Kojève) had a considerable importance in the intellectual advance of Lacan. Its meetings with Heidegger, and its Co-translation of the Logos article with a friend Germanist shows the interest which it will have carried has a philosophy which one finds the traces in his seminars. It is not doubtful that its relations with Merleau-Ponty were of considerable importance, would be this only because this last will have encouraged a redécouverte Saussure, but its influence as a philosopher remains to be shown. Jean-Pierre Cléro stressed the importance of the theory of the fictions of Bentham in the development of the thought lacanienne (which one remembers the sentence of Lacan on this subject: " The truth has structure of fiction."). The concept of Reality would as have been forged by thinking of the use as in fact Georges Bataille in her works, as in the absence of category where to make enter this last, one can classify like philosopher.

In spite of its many friendships with philosophers, in spite of a philosophical culture some and the many references made in its seminars to philosophers and with their concepts, Lacan will post with persistence a mistrust, even a distrust - that it divides besides with Freud - towards the discipline founded by Socrate. Lacan acted more towards philosophy as if it were a toolbox where it could go to pick of the concepts which it would recycle with the mode of unconscious the lacanien.

Importance of the work of Lacan for philosophy

Lacan having died in 1981, it is still difficult to determine the importance of its thought in fields which are external for him. It is necessary for all to in general make the share of the objective importance of a thought for the philosophical reflection of that of the philosophical posterity that an author can have indeed. It is possible to discuss only second item. Alain Juranville, by affirming that Lacan revolutionizes the concept even of truth by introducing the idea that the truth would be necessarily partial, is the only one to advance on an assumption on the objective importance of the work of Lacan for philosophy. Concerning the influence of Lacan on the philosophers in general, one could not say that it was important of alive sound. Nevertheless, its work is resumed more and more in the United States in the field of farming the studies, partly because Judith Butler, after Juliet Mitchel, used concepts lacaniens for its work of philosophical criticism of the processes of socialization and the power struggles in the contemporary company. From a more European point of view, Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben are the two most known philosophers to claim itself openly of Lacan in their philosophical reflection.

Lacan and feminism

The assertion of the primacy of the phallus among the others meaning made consider with some and some that its approach phallo-was centered. Lacan of this fact always suffered from a bad reputation in the feminist movements and from sexual release. He was criticized on this point by Luce Irigaray. This opinion is however not divided unanimously. Juliet Mitchell, in a work of 1975, considers that the theory lacanienne and feminism are not incompatible. More recently, work of Lacan was used by Judith Butler. As for the idea of a supposed phallo-centrism of the theory lacanienne, it is enough to remember that Lacan, to define the difference between the sexes, affirms that the men believe to have the phallus when the women believe to miss some, whereas nobody has it and that all wish it. Lacan thus defines the masculinity as the fact of believing to have the phallus, and femininity, not by the lack of phallus, but by the belief in the lack of phallus, which it is necessary to distinguish from the penis. Because the phallus lacanien is only one meaning, meaning it of the complétude.

the black Book of the psychoanalysis

This work devotes only two chapters to Lacan, of which one with the criticism of the arguments of the commentators who “defend” the style of Lacan. Thus only one chapter deals with Lacan directly, under the title of Lacan Ventriloque . The whole chapter comprises only one reference, returning to the work of Borch-Jacobsen on Lacan. According to this one, Lacan would not be at all freudien, its teaching would allot to Freud the last theses large contemporary thinkers of Lacan (Sartre, Bataille, Heidegger, Kojève, Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty…). Lacan is presented like a Philosophe which is made pass for Psychanalyste and whose theory does not have any relationship with that of Freud.

Although the claims of Lacan to being the guard of the spirit or the letter of Freud were largely criticized in various psychoanalytical mediums, the opinion of Borch-Jacobsen remains more minority in the psychoanalysts, even not lacaniens. The matter of the author, who makes of Lacan a philosopher plagiarist, also leaves the philosophers them in a circumspect doubt.

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