Introducing Lacan's return to the meaning of Freud

Few twentieth-century thinkers have exerted such far-reaching influence on intellectual life as Jacques Lacan (1901–81). Lacan's intervention changed the face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. Lacan's seminars in the 1950s and 1960s were one of the formative environments of the poststructuralist ideas that dominated French intellectual life in subsequent decades. Yet Lacan's writings are notoriously difficult. As we shall see in Chapter 7 (when we look at Mulvey's reading of “the gaze”), many of the secondary presentations distort Lacan's ideas, or share the original's esoteric character. In this chapter, we shall provide as clear an understanding as we can of Lacan's central ideas. We take as our cue the way Lacan suggests we should read his work: as a “return to the meaning of Freud” (Lacan 2006: 415).

Three points need emphasizing from the start.

First, Lacan proposed a return to the meaning of Freud in the 1950s. Implicit in the idea that we should need to return to this meaning is Lacan's strong criticism of the way psychoanalysis had developed in the previous decades. Although Lacan's relationship with the object relations theorists (Chapter 4) is nuanced, he is uncompromisingly critical of the “ego psychology” of figures such as Hartmann and Loewenstein (who analysed Lacan), predominant in the United States by the 1950s. For reasons we shall see, Lacan is particularly critical of the ego psychologists' idea that psychoanalysis should strengthen analysands' egos, on the model of the ego of the psychoanalyst.