LACAN / UK
Jacques Lacan, 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981, was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, a clinical and theoretical legacy that Lacan returned to and reinterpreted on his own terms. Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, many of which have been translated and published in English. Lacan’s work has had a large impact on other fields of thought including philosophy, critical theory and the arts.
Lacanian psychoanalysis deals with the impossible to bear, to know and to say. That which resists symbolisation and thus makes limit to each and every body. Across his clinical and theoretical work Lacan developed the concept of the real, as different from reality yet implicated with it, a concept that aims at capturing such point of impossibility in human life, a life defined by its mortal and desiring capability. Lacanian Psychoanalysis orients its treatment case by case without standardized assumptions or ideals of ‘normality’ but under a form of listening that aims at treating what makes limit in each person’s life. If our epoch’s demand could be epitomised by the mantra ‘impossible is nothing’, Freud and Lacan’s work duel in a completely different assumption: it is only the recognition of limit in each human life that might allow the subject to create something new.
Clinic is unavoidably bound with idiosyncrasies and the sociolegal sedimentations of a given body politics. Thus, the question of what treatments of the real are possible in the place we inhabit is crucial for any future of the transference to Freud-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan / UK is a space born out of a desire for a conversation around Lacan’s clinical and theoretical work and its (im)possibilities in the UK.
Lacanian psychoanalysis deals with the impossible to bear, to know and to say. That which resists symbolisation and thus makes limit to each and every body. Across his clinical and theoretical work Lacan developed the concept of the real, as different from reality yet implicated with it, a concept that aims at capturing such point of impossibility in human life, a life defined by its mortal and desiring capability. Lacanian Psychoanalysis orients its treatment case by case without standardized assumptions or ideals of ‘normality’ but under a form of listening that aims at treating what makes limit in each person’s life. If our epoch’s demand could be epitomised by the mantra ‘impossible is nothing’, Freud and Lacan’s work duel in a completely different assumption: it is only the recognition of limit in each human life that might allow the subject to create something new.
Clinic is unavoidably bound with idiosyncrasies and the sociolegal sedimentations of a given body politics. Thus, the question of what treatments of the real are possible in the place we inhabit is crucial for any future of the transference to Freud-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan / UK is a space born out of a desire for a conversation around Lacan’s clinical and theoretical work and its (im)possibilities in the UK.