The aim of this class is to explore in depth Lacan’s entire corpus, a body of work that can be understood both as a coherent discourse and constituting an open-ended system. Lacan referred (often elusively) to a number of authors whose gathering constitutes an ideal psychoanalytic library. Thus, we will foreground Lacan’s readings of Freud as the main founder of discursivity. We will tackle a few important literary authors Lacan discussed so as to assess how they helped him modify Freud’s concepts. We will survey philosophers whose insights were needed to reach a temporary synthesis. By recreating Lacan’s library, one gains a deeper insight into his teaching, his methods, his clinical strategies, and his particular use of writing.

• January 17: Translations and systemic irritations—the concept of translation in psychoanalysis, and the critical conversation with Derrida.
• January 24: How Lacan reads Freud: Hamlet, The Dream of Irma, The Project’s Thing, Freud on jokes.
• January 31: How Lacan reads Freud’s cases: the critique of Dora, the Young Homosexual Woman, President Schreber, and the Wolfman.
• February 7: Lacan reads literature to the letter, from Poe to Joyce via Sade and Gide.
• February 28: How Lacan reads philosophy: Plato’s Symposium, Sartre on affects, Merleau-Ponty on the gaze, and Aristotle on the soul and sexuation.

Fee: $50 per session/$250 total

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will be able to survey two key theories and name four major concepts of Jacques Lacan’s revision of psychoanalytic theory.
2. Participants will become familiar with concepts that can be applied when interpreting canonical case studies.
3. Participants will be able to identify specific links between the main tenets of Lacanian theory and their own clinical practice.