Darian Leader - Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide

I REFERRED TO LACANS WORK IN THE FIRST ISSUE OF THE SURREALIST REVIEW, MINOTAURE, IN 1993.(SALVAD OR DALI)

I often contributed to MINOTAURE.

I CHAMPIONED THE POETRY OF THE PATIENT, AIME, THAT LACAN DESCRIBED IN HIS 1932 THESIS.(PAUL ELUARD)

The thesis contains a detailed analysis of a woman, named Aime after the heroine of one of her unpublished novels, who had attempted to stab a well-known Parisian actress, Huguette Duflos. The case was widely reported in the press at the time, and Lacan tried gradually to piece together the logic behind her apparently irrational act. His thesis introduced a new concept into the psychiatric milieu, that of self-punishment paranoia. Lacan argued that, in striking the actress, Aime was in fact striking herself: Duflos represented a woman with freedom and social prestige, exactly the sort of woman that Aime aspired to become.

In her ideas of persecution, it was this figure that she saw as the source of threats to her and her young son. The ideal image was thus both the object of her hate and of her aspiration. Lacan was especially interested here in this complex relation to images and the ideas of identity to be found in paranoia. In her subsequent arrest and confinement, she found the punishment which was a real source of the act itself. She understood, at a certain level, that she was herself the object of punishment.

Lacans analysis of the case shows many of the features which would later become central to his work: narcissism, the image, the ideal, and how the personality could extend beyond the limits of the body and be constituted within a complex social network. The actress represented a part of Aime herself, indicating how the identity of a human being could include elements well outside the biological boundaries of the body. In a sense, Aimes identity was literally outside herself.

Around the same time that Lacan completed his thesis, he began his analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which continued until 1938. Loewenstein had been analysed by Freuds student Hans Sachs.

FREUD
SACHS
LOEWENSTEIN
I LATER EMIGRATED TO THE USA WHERE I BECAME WELL KNOWN FOR MY WORK IN ESTABLISHING THE PROGRAMME OF EGO PSYCHOLOGY.

Studies in Philosophy

Instead of confining himself to the standard texts in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Lacan read widely, with a special interest in the philosophic work of Karl Jaspers, G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. He attended the seminars on Hegel given by Alexandre Kojve together with many of the thinkers who would leave their mark on French intellectual life, Georges Bataille, Raymond Aron, Pierre Klossowski and Raymond Queneau.