The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI: From an Other to the other, 1968-1969

Le Séminaire #16

by Jacques Lacan, Cormac Gallagher (Translator)

From unedited French manuscripts.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Theory, France

Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. His yearly seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981, were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among post-structuralist thinkers.

Lacan's ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis.

Reviews

[Billie Pritchett]

I'm at a loss for what's going on in this seminar of Lacan's. After going through the whole thing, I fail to see the takeaway. Perhaps this. In Lacan's framework, every human being is born with this essential feeling of lack or deficiency, which in ordinary life we seek to satisfy through the desire of certain people and things. Matters go off the rails for folks when they find in their lives a dissatisfaction toward what they want or else they set up impossible, unachievable goals.

There are other cases but let's stick to two categories of neuroses. In the Lacanian framework, the hysteric wants someone else to tell him or her what to want, to guide him or her on the right path. The obsessive, on the other hand, wants things he or she could never have. An obsessive might buck authority, for instance, and wish that there were no authority figures, but so long as he or she makes that his or her personal goal and that goal dominates his or her life, the obsessive will naturally be frustrated because everybody's got to serve somebody.

Now the therapist's role in all this is to allow the patient (typically a neurotic, either hysterical or obsessive) to unload his or her baggage onto the therapist while the therapist works to get the patient to break out of some of his or her bad patterns.

This kind of stuff I've just put into words is better put in more summary form by Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink in his great book The Lacanian Subject . Sure, you might be able to glean several of the above points from this, Lacan's seminar From an Other to the other, but you'd best get it elsewhere.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

This translation hasn’t been published in America yet. I picked it up in England on a visit. I may be the first American to have read it, which excites me. Good seminar, but I need to know more about set theory and I want the rest of his seminars translated damn it!

[Owlseyes]