The Lacan Tradition

The Lacanian tradition is unique among psychoanalytic schools in its influence upon academic fields such as literature, philosophy, and cultural and critical studies. This book aims to make Lacan’s ideas accessible and relevant to mainstream psychoanalysts and to showcase developments in Lacanian thinking since his death in 1981.

This volume highlights the clinical usefulness of such concepts as the paternal metaphor, the formula of fantasy, the psychic structure, the central role of desire, and the interlinking of the individual subject in the matrix of the Other. While these themes are woven through all the papers, each is a highly individual reflection upon some aspect of Lacanian theory, practice, or history.

Bernard Burgoyne’s close study of the sources of Lacan’s academic inspirations clarifies many of his ideas; Sara Flanders’ remarkable overview of the field of French psychoanalysis situates Lacan firmly at its center; and Lionel Bailly’s exposition of Lacan’s version of the Oedipus Complex reclaims a currently fashionable area of psychoanalysis for the man who alone in the 1950s made the case for the necessity of the tripartite structure of object-relations in the psyche. Berges and Balbo’s work shows Lacanian thinking presaging recent evidence-based ideas of how mother-baby interactions bring into being the ability to mentalize and the development of subjectivity itself. Nobus’ paper encapsulates the trajectory and aim of a Lacanian analysis.

It is the editor’s hope that these pages will open the reader’s eyes to the fertility and importance of the Lacan tradition and bring it closer into the fold of psychoanalytic thought.

Lionel Bailly is a psychoanalyst and a child and adolescent psychiatrist. He is a practicing analyst of the Association Lacanienne Internationale and an Academic Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is Honorary Senior Lecturer at University College London Psychoanalysis Unit where he is particularly involved in the doctoral school. He trained in medicine and psychiatry at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. After a long collaboration with Jean Berges he became head of Sainte-Anne's Biopsychopathology Unit, which he led until moving to London in 2000. He is the author of two books, one on psychotrauma in children (in French) and Lacan: A Beginner's Guide (in English).

David Lichtenstein is a psychoanalyst in New York, Editor of DIVISION/Review, a quarterly psychoanalytic forum; faculty at CUNY Graduate Center, New School University; and founding member of Apres-Coup Psychoanalytic Association. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters. He is a member of the faculty at New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

Sharmini Bailly is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in the NHS and in private practice in the UK, and a member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation. She worked for eighteen years in radio and television journalism and had extensive experience in producing and presenting international news, arts features and documentaries before turning to psychoanalysis. Her first psychoanalytic writing was her contribution to the 2009 book, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide.