Jacques Lacan is an enigma to most Americans who study psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychology. He is a hugely influential figure in France (and Europe), someone whose sphere of influence included literature, philosophy, politics, film, sociology, and of course psychology.
Some of us have been exposed to his ideas mostly second hand, from people like Slavoj Zizek or Julia Kristeva. What follows is a brief overview (from a much longer entry) on Lacan from the The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
It would be fair to say that there are few twentieth century thinkers who have had such a far-reaching influence on subsequent intellectual life in the humanities as Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s “return to the meaning of Freud” profoundly changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. His seminars in the 1950s were one of the formative environments of the currency of philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960s and’70s, and which has come to be known in the Anglophone world as “post-structuralism.”This week's episode of The Philosopher's Zone focuses on Jacques Lacan.
Both inside and outside of France, Lacan’s work has also been profoundly important in the fields of aesthetics, literary criticism and film theory. Through the work of Louis Pierre Althusser (and more lately Ernesto Laclau, Jannis Stavrokakis and Slavoj Zizek), Lacanian theory has also left its mark on political theory, and particularly the analysis of ideology and institutional reproduction.
This article seeks to outline something of the philosophical heritage and importance of Lacan’s theoretical work. After introducing Lacan, it focuses primarily on Lacan’s philosophical anthropology, philosophy of language, psychoanalysis and philosophy of ethics.
The Mind of Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Emile Lacan, who died in 1981, was a French psychoanalyst and follower of Freud, but his influence has extended far beyond the boundaries of psychiatry: to philosophy, critical theory, literary theory, sociology, feminist theory, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis. And all this despite a literary style of forbidding complexity. This week, we take courage and try to penetrate his thought.Guests
Ehsan Azari Stanizai
Adjunct Fellow
Writing & Society Research Group
University of Western SydneyFurther Information
Presenter
Alan Saunders
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