The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I
Lacan teaching rather than writing, and much the easier way in.
The ego is structured exactly like a symptom.
Transcribed from Lacan's first public seminar of 1953 and 1954, this volume works through Freud's technical papers line by line, turning them into a running argument about the analytic relation. Lacan treats resistance not as the patient's obstruction but as an effect of the discourse itself, and reframes the handling of transference around the analyst's position. The imaginary comes to the fore: the ego is presented as a formation, built through the mirror stage read in a clinical register rather than as a developmental milestone. From here Lacan mounts his case against ego psychology, and closes by setting out the schema of the two mirrors, his optical model of how image, body and ego hold together. For the practising clinician it offers a way of hearing sessions differently, and the spoken form makes it a far more approachable entry to Lacan than the written work. First published in French in 1975 and in English in 1988, in John Forrester's translation.
About the author
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan (1901 to 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist whose reading calls for a return to Freud. From 1953 he led a weekly seminar in Paris that shaped a generation. His work holds that the unconscious is structured like a language, traces the mirror stage in the forming of the ego, and distinguishes three registers: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. Object a names the cause of desire. He broke with the IPA and founded the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, later the Ecole de la Cause freudienne.
Details
- 1975
- 1988
- French
- John Forrester
- W. W. Norton
- W. W. Norton, 1975
- 326
- 9780393306972