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All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Course material will be sent 1 day before the event. Time includes a tea break. All attendees will also receive access to the recording, available to watch back for 3 months.
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This course is offered as an accessible introduction to the work of one of the most creative and innovative thinkers in psychoanalysis.
Jacques Lacan (1901 – 1981) trained as a forensic psychiatrist in Paris and his early writings focus on Paranoid Psychosis. After qualifying as a psychoanalyst, he made his debut at the International Congress of Psychoanalysis of 1936 with a brilliant paper on the ‘Mirror Stage’. This paper proposed a completely new understanding of the constitution of the ‘I’, and was a devastating attack on ‘Ego Psychology’ – the version of psychoanalysis (based on Freud’s later work) then dominant in the USA. According to Ego Psychology, the aim of psychoanalytic therapy is to strengthen the ego – seen as the rational part of the personality that is in touch with reality. But Lacan’s paper argued powerfully that the ‘ego’ is nothing but a tissue of illusion, and that psychoanalysis should return to the work of the early Freud – centred on the notion of the unconscious (rather than on the ego) – to rediscover its true purpose and direction.
Accordingly, in his later work, Lacan went on to completely re-think the foundations of psychoanalysis, excising the last remnants of biology (still present in Freud), and presenting the whole of human psychology (and psychopathology) as a product of the fact that human beings are ‘speaking beings’. We become human beings, he argues, when we enter the Symbolic Order (the world of language and law), and this idea is the basis of his re-interpretation of the Freudian Oedipal phase. If his earlier work – on the ‘Mirror Stage’ and the ‘Imaginary Order’ – is a critique of Ego Psychology, then his later work – on the centrality of language in the process of psychoanalysis – can be seen as an equally radical critique of the Object Relations school.
On this six-hour course, the most important ideas underpinning Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis will be explained without jargon, in comprehensible English: the ‘Mirror Stage’ and the ‘Imaginary’; the Symbolic Order and its relation to the unconscious; The Phallus, and its role in sexuality; Lacan’s conception of the process of psychoanalysis.
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Speaker:
Keith Barrett BA PhD received his first degree in philosophy from Oxford University after having spent three years working as a nursing assistant in psychiatric hospitals. It was in this practical context that Keith first encountered existentialism and psychoanalysis. He then began postgraduate studies on both Freud and Heidegger, leading finally to a PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for a dissertation on ‘Freud’s Self-Analysis’. Keith has been a philosophy teacher for over 20 years, and has been delivering courses at the Freud Museum for over a decade, where he has developed a series of introductory lectures on Freud, psychoanalysis after Freud, and the overlap of philosophy and psychoanalysis.
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Tickets £ 45
Freud Museum Members and Patrons receive 20% off the standard ticket price on all events, courses, conferences and On Demand programming.
A limited number of £20 bursary tickets will be available for those unable to pay the full amount. Please email [email protected] to apply for a bursary.
