Scilicet (journal)

Scilicet  

ISO 4 abbreviation	Find out here
Discipline	Psychoanalysis
Language	French, Spanish
Publication details
Publisher	Éditions du Seuil/Collection rue Huysmans (France)
Publication history	1968–present
Indexing
ISSN	0582-2610
OCLC no.	785798990

Scilicet is an academic journal that was established in 1968 by Jacques Lacan as the official French-language journal of the École Freudienne de Paris. Published by Éditions du Seuil, it appeared intermittently until the double issue of 1976. The title was revived in 2006 to distribute preparatory texts for the congresses of the World Association of Psychoanalysis and is now published in both French and Spanish. The new series began with a digital volume and has since extended to four print volumes.

In the 1964 "Founding Act" of the École Freudienne de Paris, Lacan declared that "The financial holdings constituted initially by the contributions of the members of the École, by the funding it will eventually receive, indeed by the services it will render as a school, will be entirely reserved for its publishing efforts". The first issue of the Lettres de l’École freudienne de Paris appeared in early 1967 and the first issue of Scilicet followed in the spring of 1968, thereby meeting the pledge set out in the Act to create a platform by which to take inventory of the Freudian field.

In Lacan's introduction to Scilicet issue 1 he writes, "This journal is one of the means by which I expect to overcome in my École, which is distinct in its principle from the [existing] Societies, the obstacle that resisted me elsewhere".

The Latin word , a frequent term in the writings of Lucretius, literally means "thou mayst know" or "it is permitted thee to know", and the cover of the journal bore the inscription: Tu peux savoir ce qu’en pense l’École freudienne de Paris (thou mayst know what the École freudienne de Paris thinks about it). Lacan defined this "thou" as "the bachelor, in the English sense", as "one who is not married… and, above all, not wed to a psychoanalytic society".

Established at a time of considerable institutional invention, Scilicet adopted the editorial strategy of the Bourbaki group, publishing unsigned articles in an attempt to "overcome the narcissism of small differences" and to open the doors to analysts from outside the EFP whose institutional affiliations might otherwise discourage them from contributing. However, issue 2/3 did carry a list of twenty names of contributors to issue 1. The same editorial policy was later adopted by other psychoanalytic journals.