Lacanian Psychoanalysis: An Introduction (1/2) 

Either less reverb, or more cowbell.

Thanks:)!

Yeah, although I've overcome my Lacanian period, I still consider him an excellent psychoanalyst.

Many reasons, but mostly because it seemed to me like a pointless battle over words. Moreover, Lacan's project to transform psychoanalysis into proper science failed miserably. After many years of reading Lacan, I decided it was time to face the facts. That being said, I still prefer Lacanian psychoanalysis over other branches of psychoanalysis.

Lacan never thought psychoanalysis was a science. Nor did he think it should be.

The following citations are from The Cambridge Companion to Lacan: "Lacan argued that the psychoanalytic delineation of the mental invariants governing the empirical diversity of the formations of the unconscious suffices to define psychoanalysis as a scientific enterprise. [...] the Structuralist project also offered Lacan the opportunity to realize Freud’s ardent wish to see psychoanalysis included among the sciences." "What mattered more than anything else to Lacan, considering the specific nature of psychoanalytic praxis, was the establishment of a science of the subject-not the self-contained subject of consciousness but the ephemeral subject of the unconscious." "References to topology abound in Lacan’s texts, and topological surfaces such as the Möbius strip, the Klein bottle, the torus, and the cross-cap emerged intermittently in his seminars from the early 1960s until the early 1970s. Yet during the last decade of his life, from 1971 to 1981, Lacan spent more time than ever studying the relevance of these surfaces for the formulation of a scientific theory of psychoanalysis." If these don't suffice, feel free to do some research. There are tons of books out there.

Lacan did frequently reference "science" in context of psychoanalysis, as did Freud, Bion, Melanie Klein and many many others, and only Freud had the ambition of grounding psychoanalysis in what we colloquially refer to as science, as Freud's background was in neurology and he was working from a rather materialist foundations at least in his beginnings (late Freud is rather different), whereas others haven't necessarily done so. Lacan was a psychiatrist but his influences were from elsewhere - Heidegger, Hegel, Plato, etc. In the spirit of Lacan's project you really ought to see what is it that he means when says science and not what you mean by it. For example, in several places in Ecrits he writes explicitly - and for Lacan to be so explicit is very rare and indeed difficult - that science in the traditional positivist sense is an incoherent and incomplete project, in fact he calls it something along the lines of "anthropomorphization of nature" (I don't recall the exact quote, but the point is there); in other places he criticizes knowledge as being paranoid in origin, etc. When actually reading Lacan (not the Cambridge Companion, geez) you must have realized that when he says "science" he does NOT refer to any positivist project, and also you must have realized that he used mathematical metaphors not because he actually thought psychic life IS set theory or knot theory, but because it provided him with a way to express himself, as he was painfully aware of his own inability to express his ideas succinctly by using written or spoken word. Using mathematical metaphors gave him a way to formalize his ideas in a more rigorous way, and that's about it. To judge the success of Lacan's intellectual project by standards of positivist science is pretty much like judging the success of biological psychiatry by the standards of psychoanalysis - just wrong.

It was recorded in a lecture room with bad acoustics. Sorry about the quality of the sound.

I'm sorry about the audio. I've made a summary of the lecture in one of the later videos. Feel free to check that out.

Oh, what a shame! Yes, a terrible lecture. I bet he doesn't even know what he's talking about!