Lacanian movement

The Lacanian movement comprises the various followings of the innovative and dissident French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacanianism began as a philosophical/linguistic re-interpretation of Freud's original teachings. How far it subsequently became an independent body of thought has been, and remains, a matter of debate — Lacan himself famously informing his followers, "It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish. I am a Freudian".

The wide extent of Lacan's evolving intellectual stances, and his inability to find a settled institutional framework for his work, has meant that over time the Lacanian movement has been subject to numerous schisms and continuing divisions.

Three main phases may be identified in Lacan's mature work: his Fifties exploration of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; his concern with the Real and the lost object of desire, the objet petit a, during the Sixties; and a final phase highlighting jouissance and the mathematical formulation of psychoanalytic teaching.

As the fifties Lacan developed a distinctive style of teaching based on a linguistic reading of Freud, so too he built up a substantial following within the Société Française de Psychanalyse [SFP], with Serge Leclaire only the first of many French "Lacanians". It was this phase of his teaching that was memorialised in Écrits, and which first found its way into the English-speaking world, where more Lacanians were thus to be found in English or Philosophy Departments than in clinical practice.

However the very extent of Lacan's following raised serious criticisms: he was accused both of abusing the positive transference to tie his analysands to himself, and of magnifying their numbers by the use of shortened analytic sessions. The questionable nature of his following was one of the reasons for his failure to gain recognition for his teaching from the IPA recognition for the French form of Freudianism that was "Lacanianism" — a failure that led to his founding the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) in 1964. Many of his closest and most creative followers, such as Jean Laplanche, chose the IPA over Lacan at this point, in the first of many subsequent Lacanian schisms.

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