Bailly Lionel - Lacan : a beginners guide

Lacan

A Beginners Guide

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A Oneworld Paperback Original

Published by Oneworld Publications 2009
This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications 2012

Copyright Lionel Bailly 2009

The right of Lionel Bailly to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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ISBN 978-1-85168-637-7
ebook ISBN 978-1-78074-162-8

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When I asked Sham Ambiavagar to edit this book, it was still in the form of an early draft and much of what I had intended for it was drawn from my years of lecturing on the subject, from my own analysis, and from my clinical practice. Shams questions highlighted occasional weaknesses in the Lacanian edifice or in my understanding of it; however, as a non-clinician, her research was book-based and her understandings derived by a mixture of insight and logic, rather than clinical experience. Her argumentative approach forced me to account for what my years of Lacanian practice revealed of the theory and it seems to me that many of Lacans greatest insights were intuitive and clinically derived, and not logical philosophical constructs. Shams insistence upon attempting a unified theory, whether or not one may indeed be arrived at, has also contributed to the readability of the final product, although I would not wish to pretend that there are no holes in it, which hopefully will continue to attract constructive contributions. In addition, my mother tongue is French and I speak English, while hers is English and she can speak French. We had to negotiate over the meaning of words and the impossibility or unhelpfulness of direct translation. This led us sometimes to unusual ways of translating concepts or fragments of texts, which I think are useful as they preserve the French meaning better than exact translations, which do not work in the spirit of English. Overall, the process of working with Sham was unexpectedly rich and complex and without it this book would not exist.

Jacques Lacan was first of all a psychiatrist, and as a clinician, he was more concerned with what he did not know or understand than what he did. His inability to make do with a poor explanation led him to consider and explore all models available to psychiatrists in the first part of the twentieth century. After having worked with some of the most brilliant proponents of organic psychiatry, he found in psychoanalysis the most helpful theoretical model to understand and treat the complex patients he was dealing with. However, Lacan was to become more than just a disciple of Freud: he believed that Freudian theory was not a perfect edifice but a work in progress, and wanted to contribute towards what he saw as a developing model. His attitude towards the development of theory was modern in that he was willing to examine any body of science that could clarify or shed new light on the phenomena he was trying to explain, and consequently, he drew inspiration from biological psychiatry, genetic psychology, and philosophy; later, structural linguistics, anthropology, and even mathematics joined the range of theoretical models he used.

The result was extraordinary, and its richness has attracted students in fields far from psychoanalysis or psychiatry; indeed, although Lacans model is not a philosophical one, it has become most fashionable among students of philosophy: one could go so far as to say that in the English-speaking world, it is largely philosophers and academics in English and Critical Studies departments who have kept Lacanian thought alive. Certainly, in the field from which Lacan himself came that of psychiatry his work is mostly ignored. This may be because philosophers and academics in the humanities are, in one respect, better equipped to deal with his writings than students of psychiatry or psychology: they are better prepared to try to understand a thinker whose productions are sometimes irritatingly obscure. There are three reasons behind the obscurity, which arise mostly from the manner in which Lacanian theory was formulated.

Most Lacanian theory has been gathered from Lacans spoken teachings; his technique was that of the philosophers of the classical world, who expounded and developed their ideas in a discourse with their pupils; he wrote very little for publication. In even the most lucid speaker, transcriptions from speech are often problematic; the speech of a man who engaged his audience by many means other than pure logical exposition becomes quite obscure when written down. In order to make his points, Lacan often relied on dramatic devices (the well-timed pause, the leaving of a half-finished thought hanging in the air ), the impact of his own personality, and perhaps most of all, on the ability of his audience to arrive of their own accord at the desired conclusion (by making the final mental connections themselves, as one should in analysis) and this mode of expression makes frustrating reading. The only writings Lacan can be held responsible for are his