Early life

Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Emilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic...his younger brother went to a monastery in 1929 and Lacan attended the Jesuit Collège Stanislas. During the early 1920s, Lacan attended right-wing Action Française political meetings and met the founder, Charles Maurras. By the mid-1920s, Lacan had become dissatisfied with religion and quarrelled with his family over it.

In 1920, on being rejected as too thin for military service, he entered medical school and, in 1926, specialised in psychiatry at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris. He was especially interested in the philosophies of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger and attended the seminars about Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève. Sometime in that decade, and until 1938, Lacan sought psychoanalysis by Rudolph Loewenstein.

1930s

In 1931, Lacan became a licensed forensic psychiatrist. In 1932, he was awarded the Doctorat d'état for his thesis On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality. Psychoanalysts mostly ignored it, although it was acclaimed beyond psychoanalytic circles, especially by surrealist artists. Two years later, he was elected to the Société psychanalytique de Paris. In January 1934, he married Marie-Louise Blondin and they had their first child, a daughter called Caroline. Their second child, a son named Thibaut, was born in August 1939.

In 1936, Lacan presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad on the "Mirror Phase". The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, since he was unwilling to extend Lacan's slated presentation time. Insulted, Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. Unfortunately, no copy of the original lecture remains.

Lacan was an active intellectual of the inter-war period...he associated with André Breton, Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. He attended the mouvement Psyché that Maryse Choisy founded. He published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and attended the first public reading of James Joyce's Ulysses. "[Lacan's] interest in surrealism predated his interest in psychoanalysis," Dylan Evans explains, specultating that "perhaps Lacan never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as ‘convulsive beauty’, its celebration of irrationality, and its hostility to the scientist who murders nature by dissecting it".

1940s

The Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP) was disbanded due to Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1940. Lacan was called up to serve in the French army at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, where he spent the duration of the war. His third child, Sibylle, was born in 1940.

The following year, Lacan fathered a child, Judith (who kept the name Bataille), with Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), the estranged wife of his friend Georges Bataille. There are contradictory accounts of his romantic life with Sylvia in southern France during the war. The official record shows only that Marie-Louise requested divorce after Judith's birth and that Lacan married Sylvia in 1953.

After the war, the SPP recommenced their meetings. Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, where he met the English analysts Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. Bion’s analytic work with groups influenced Lacan, contributing to his own subsequent emphasis on study groups as a structure within which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis. In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich.

1950s

In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris, in which he urged what he described as "a return to Freud" that would concentrate on the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan's twenty-seven year long seminar was highly influential in Parisian cultural life, as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.

In 1953, after a disagreement over the variable-length session, Lacan and many of his colleagues left the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse to form a new group, the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One consequence of this was to deprive the new group of membership within the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Encouraged by the reception of "the return to Freud" and of his report "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," Lacan began to re-read Freud's works in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology, and topology. From 1953 to 1964 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in the collection Écrits, which was first published in 1966. In his seventh Seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959—60), Lacan defined the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and presented his "ethics for our time"...one that would, in the words of Freud, prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the "discontent of civilization." At the roots of the ethics is desire: analysis' only promise is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play on words between l'entrée en je and l'entrée en jeu). "I must come to the place where the id was," where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails "the purification of desire." This text formed the foundation of Lacan's work for the subsequent years. He defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must not have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and that the analytic field is the only place from which it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.

1960s

Starting in 1962, a complex negotiation took place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan’s practice (with its controversial indeterminate-length sessions) and his critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy led, in 1963, to the IPA setting the condition that registration of the SFP was dependent upon the removal of Lacan from the list of SFP analysts. Lacan left the SFP to form his own school, which became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP).

With Lévi-Strauss and Althusser's support, Lacan was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He started with a seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure. Lacan began to set forth his own approach to psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues that had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale’s students. He divided the École de la Cause freudienne into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analyzed but haven't become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who either have not started or have not yet completed analysis are welcome); and the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (concerning the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences.

By the 1960s, Lacan was associated, at least in the public mind, with the far left in France. In May 1968, Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary his followers set up a Department of Psychology at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). In 1969, Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon), where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice until the dissolution of his School in 1980.

1970s

Throughout the final decade of his life, Lacan continued his widely-followed seminars. During this period, he developed his concepts of masculine and feminine jouissance and placed an increased emphasis on the concept of "the Real" as a point of impossible contradiction in the "Symbolic order". This late work had the greatest influence on feminist thought, as well as upon the informal movement that arose in the 1970s or 1980s called post-modernism.

Return to Freud

Lacan's "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud and a radical critique of Ego psychology and Melanie Klein and Object relations theory. Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue," jokes, and the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in subjective constitution. In "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud," he argues that "the unconscious is structured like a language." The unconscious is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as complex and structurally-sophisticated as consciousness itself. One consequence of the unconscious being structured like a language is that the self is denied any point of reference to which to be "restored" following trauma or a crisis of identity.

Mirror stage

Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, which he described as "formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience." By the early 1950s, he came to regard the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the infant; instead, it formed part of the permanent structure of subjectivity. In "the Imaginary order," his or her own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. Lacan explains that "the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".

As this concept developed further, the stress fell less on its historical value and more on its structural value. In his fourth Seminar, "La relation d'objet," Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship."

The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of objectification, the Ego being the result of a conflict between one's perceived visual appearance and one's emotional experience. This identification is what Lacan called alienation. At six months, the baby still lacks physical co-ordination. The child is able to recognize himself or herself in a mirror prior to the attainment of control over his or her bodily movements. The child sees his or her image as a whole and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the lack of co-ordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. The child experiences this contrast initially as a rivalry with his or her own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens the child with fragmentation...thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the child identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart forms the Ego. Lacan understands this moment of identification as a moment of jubilation, since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery; yet when the child compares his or her own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother, a depressive reaction may accompany the jubilation.

Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic," since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth." The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of his or her body as fragmented, induces a movement from "insufficiency to anticipation." In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self.

In the mirror stage a "misunderstanding" (méconnaissance) constitutes the Ego...the "me" (moi) becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension, due to the presence of the figure of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly assumed the image as his or her own, the child turns his or her head towards this adult, who represents the big Other, as if to call on the adult to ratify this image.

Other/other

While Freud uses the term "other", referring to der Andere (the other person) and "das Andere" (otherness), under the influence of Alexandre Kojève, Lacan's use is closer to Hegel's.

Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts: the big Other is designated A (for French Autre) and the little other is designated a (italicized French autre). He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: "the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a, so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other." Dylan Evans explains that:

"1. The little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego. He [autre] is simultaneously the counterpart and the specular image. The little other is thus entirely inscribed in the imaginary order.

2. The big Other designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with language and the law, and hence the big Other is inscribed in the order of the symbolic. Indeed, the big Other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The Other is thus both another subject, in his radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness, and also the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject."

"The Other must first of all be considered a locus," Lacan writes, "the locus in which speech is constituted". We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the Other for another subject.

In arguing that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject but rather in the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from another place, outside of consciousness..."the unconscious is the discourse of the Other." When conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene".

"It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child," Dylan Evans explains, "it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message". The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this Other is not complete because there is a "Lack " in the Other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the Other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete Other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete Other is the "barred Other."

Feminists thinkers have both utilised and criticised Lacan's concepts of castration and the Phallus. Some feminists have argued that Lacan's phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of understanding gender biases and imposed roles, while other feminist critics, most notably Luce Irigaray, accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. For Irigaray, the Phallus does not define a single axis of gender by its presence/absence; instead, gender has two positive poles. Like Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, in criticising Lacan's concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other. Other feminists, such as Judith Butler, Jane Gallop, and Elizabeth Grosz, have interpreted Lacan's work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory.

The Three Orders

The Imaginary

The Imaginary is the field of images and imagination, and deception. The main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, and similarity. Lacan thought that the relationship created within the mirror stage between the Ego and the reflected image means that the Ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order." This relationship is also narcissistic.

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that the Symbolic order structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the Symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has Symbolic and Imaginary connotations...in its Imaginary aspect, language is the "wall of language" that inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. On the other hand, the Imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship with his or her own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.

Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order. Instead, Lacan proposes the use of the Symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary...the analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic," he argued, "is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification."

The Symbolic

In his Seminar IV, "La relation d'objet," Lacan argues that the concepts of "Law" and "Structure" are unthinkable without language...thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. This order is not equivalent to language, however, since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper to language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier...that is, a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.

The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity...that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing ("das Ding an sich") and the death drive that goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition"..."the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order."

By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.

The Real

Lacan's concept of the Real dates back to 1936 and his doctoral thesis on psychosis. It was a term that was popular at the time, particularly with Émile Meyerson, who referred to it as "an ontological absolute, a true being-in-itself". Lacan returned to the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued to develop it until his death. The Real, for Lacan, is not synonymous with reality. Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also exterior to the Symbolic. Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions (i.e. presence/absence), "there is no absence in the Real." Whereas the Symbolic opposition "presence/absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place." If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements (signifiers), the Real in itself is undifferentiated...it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real" in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things...things originally confused in the 'here and now' of the all in the process of coming into being." The Real is that which is outside language and that resists symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as "the impossible" because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety, insofar as it lacks any possible mediation and is "the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence."

Desire

Lacan's conception of desire is central to his theories and follows Freud's concept of Wunsch. The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to uncover the truth about his or her desire, but this is possible only if that desire is articulated. Lacan wrote that "it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term." This naming of desire "is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world." Psychoanalysis teaches the patient "to bring desire into existence." The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire...whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus.

In "The Signification of the Phallus," Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function: on the one hand, it articulates need, and on the other, acts as a demand for love. Even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied. This remainder is desire. For Lacan, "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second." Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need." Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as Slavoj ?i?ek puts it, "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."

It is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire. Lacan's concept of the "objet petit a" is the object of desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack .

Drives

Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between drive (Trieb) and instinct (Instinkt). Drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around it. The true source of jouissance is the repetition of the movement of this closed circuit. Lacan posits the drives as both cultural and symbolic constructs...to him, "the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial." He incorporates the four elements of the drives as defined by Freud (the pressure, the end, the object and the source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and returns to the erogenous zone. The three grammatical voices structure this circuit:

1. the active voice (to see)
2. the reflexive voice (to see oneself)
3. the passive voice (to be seen)

The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic...they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears. Despite being the "passive" voice, the drive is essentially active: "to make oneself be seen" rather than "to be seen." The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.

Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips, the partial object the breast), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze) and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice). The first two relate to demand and the last two to desire. If the drives are closely related to desire, they are the partial aspects in which desire is realized...desire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are its partial manifestations.

Other concepts

• Name of the Father
• Foreclosure
• Lack
• Objet petit a
• The graph of desire
• Sinthome
• The Four discourses

Variable-length session

The "variable-length session"...or, more specifically, the "variable-length psychoanalytic session"...was one of Lacan's crucial clinical innovations. Lacan's variable-length sessions last anywhere from a few minutes (or even, if deemed appropriate by the analyst, a few seconds) to several hours. This practice replaced the classical Freudian "fifty minute hour."The variable-length session removed the patient's...or, technically, "the analysand's"...former certainty as to the length of time that they would be on the couch. When Lacan adopted the practice, "the psychoanalytic establishment were scandalized." At the time, Lacan described the issue as concerning "the systematic use of shorter sessions in certain analyses, and in particular in training analyses".

Jacques-Alain Miller is the sole editor of Lacan's seminars, which contain the majority of his life's work. Despite Lacan's status as major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, some of his seminars remain unpublished. Since 1984, Miller has been regularly conducting a series of lectures, "L'orientation lacanienne." Miller's teachings have been published in the US by the journal Lacanian Ink.

Lacan claimed that his Écrits were not to be understood rationally, but would rather produce an effect in the reader similar to the sense of enlightenment one might experience while reading mystical texts. Lacan's writing is notoriously difficult, due in part to the repeated Hegelian/Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from other psychoanalytic and philosophical theory, and an obscure prose style. The broader psychotheraputic literature has little or nothing to say about the effectiveness of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Though a major influence on psychoanalysis in France and parts of Latin America, Lacan's influence on clinical psychology in the English-speaking world is negligible, where his ideas are best-known in the arts and humanities.

A notable exception is the works of Dr. Annie G. Rogers (A Shining Affliction; The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma), which credit Lacanian theory for many therapeutic insights in successfully treating sexually abused young women.

Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont have criticised Lacan's use of terms from mathematical fields such as topology, accusing him of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand. Other critics have dismissed Lacan's work wholesale. François Roustang called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish," and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan". Dylan Evans, formerly a Lacanian analyst, eventually dismissed Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and for harming rather than helping patients, and has criticized Lacan's followers for treating his writings as "holy writ." Richard Webster has decried what he sees as Lacan's obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant "The Cult of Lacan".

One of the ironies of the linguistic criticism of Lacan in the '70s and '80s is that Cybernetics and Artificial Life models in the 21st century have reprised his theories, particularly the linguistic basis of the conscious - unconscious interface. Eco hinted at these connections when Artificial Intelligence was in its infancy in the '80s, and theorists like Johnston have proposed that Lacanian models are an excellent fit with very recent Artificial Life models.

Selected works published in English listed below. More complete listings can be found at Lacan Dot Com.

• The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis*, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968
• Écrits: A Selection*, transl. by Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977, and revised version, 2002, transl. by Bruce Fink
• Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, transl. by Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006
• The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
• The Seminar, Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953—1954,, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by J. Forrester, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1988
• The Seminar, Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954—1955, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Sylvana Tomaselli, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1988.
• The Seminar, Book III. The Psychoses, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1993.
• The Seminar, Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959—1960, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Dennis Porter, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1992.
• The Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Alan Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1977.
• The Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2007.
• The Seminar XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998.
• A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1990.

Secondary works

• Badiou, Alain, "The Formulas of L'Etourdit" (New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.)
• ..............., "Lacan and the Pre-Socratics", Lacan Dot Com, 2006.
• Benvenuto, Bice; Kennedy, Roger, The Works of Jacques Lacan (London, 1986, Free Association Books.)
• Bowie, Malcolm, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991). (An introduction.)
• Dor, Joel, The Clinical Lacan (New York: Other Press, 1999)
• ..............., Introduction to the Reading of Lacan: The Unconscious Structured Like a Language (New York: Other Press, 2001)
• Elliott, Anthony and Stephen Frosh(eds.), Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). (A recent overview.)
• ..............., "Matrixial Gaze and Screen: Other than Phallic and Beyond the Late Lacan." In: Laura Doyle (ed.) Bodies of Resistance. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001.
• ..............., "Weaving Trans-Subjective Texture or The Matrixial Sinthome." In: Thurston, Luke (ed.), Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the final Lacan. NY: The Other Press, 2002.
• Evans, Dylan, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
• ..............., Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely, University of Minnesota, 2004.
• Forrester, John, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1985).
• Fryer, David Ross, The Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2004)
• Gallop, Jane, Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
• ..............., The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
• Gherovici, Patricia, The Puerto Rican Syndrome (New York: Other Press, 2003)
• Glynos, Jason and Yannis Stravrakakis, ED, Lacan and Science. London:Karnac Books, May 2002.
• Harari, Roberto, Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2004)
• ..............., Lacan's Seminar on "Anxiety": An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2005)
• Homer, Sean, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge, 2005)
• Johnston, Adrian, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005)
• Lander, Romulo, Subjective Experience and the Logic of the Other (New York: Other Press, 2006)
• Lee, Jonathan Scott, Jacques Lacan (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press,1991)
• Leupin, Alexandre, Lacan Today (New York: Other Press, 2004)
• Mathelin, Catherine, Lacanian Psychotherpay with Children: The Broken Piano (New York: Other Press, 1999)
• McGowan, Todd and Sheila Kunkle Eds., Lacan and Contemporary Film (New York: Other Press, 2004)
• Miller, Jacques-Alain, "Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety I " (New York: Lacanian Ink 26, 2005.)
• ..............., "Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety II" (New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.)
• ..............., "Jacques Lacan's Later Teachings" (New York: Lacanian Ink 21, 2003.)
• ..............., "The Paradigms of Jouissance" (New York, Lacanian Ink 17, 2000.)
• ..............., "Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier", Lacan Dot Com, 2006.
• ..............., "Religion, Psychoanalysis", Lacanian Ink 23 (Spring 2004)
• ..............., "Pure Psychoanalysis, Applied Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy", Lacanian Ink 20 (Spring 2002)
• Moustafa, Safouan, Four Lessons of Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 2004)
• Nasio, Juan-David, Book of Love and Pain: The Thinking at the Limit with Freud and Lacan. Translated by David Pettigrew and Francois Raffoul (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003)
• ..............., Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan. Translated by David Pettigrew and Francois Raffoul (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998)
• ..............., Hysteria: The Splendid Child of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 1998)
• Nobus, Dany (ed.), Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. (New York: Other Press, 1999)
• Pettigrew, David and François Raffoul (eds.), Disseminating Lacan (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996)
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• Rose, Jacqueline, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986)
• Élisabeth Roudinesco, Lucien Febvre à la rencontre de Jacques Lacan, Paris 1937. with Peter Schöttler, Genèses, Année 1993,Vol.13, n°1.
• ..............., "Jacques Lacan: His Life and Work". Translated by Bray B. New York, Columbia University Press, 1997
• ..............., Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925—1985, University of Chicago Press, 1990.
• ............... and Michel Plon, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, Fayard, 2000.
• ..............., Généalogies, Fayard, 1994.
• ..............., L'histoire de la psychanalyse en France — Jacques Lacan, new edition, La Pochothèque, 2009, p. 2018.
• ..............., "Lacan, The Plague", Psychoanalysis and History, ed. John Forrester,Teddington, Artesian Books, 2008.
• Turkle, Sherry, Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, 2nd edition, Guildford Press, New York, 1992
• ............... and Wollheim, Richard, ‘Lacan: an exchange’, New York Review of Books, 26 (9), 1979, p. 44.
• Sokal, Alan and Bricmont, Jean, "Fashinable Nonsense, Postmodernist Intellectuals' Abuse of Science", New York, 1998.
• Soler, Colette, What Lacan Said About Women Translated by John Holland (New York: Other Press, 2006)
• Thurston, Luke (ed.), "Re-inventing the Symptom", NY: Other Press, 2002.
• Van Haute, Philippe, Against Adaptation: Lacan's "Subversion" of the Subject (New York: Other Press, 2002)
• Van Haute, Philippe and Tomas Geyskens, Confusion of Tongues: The Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Ferenczi, and Laplanche (New York: Other Press, 2004)
• Verhaeghe, Paul, On Being Normal and Other Disorders (New York: Other Press, 2004)
• Wilden, Anthony, ‘Jacques Lacan: A partial bibliography’, Yale French Studies, 36/37, 1966, pp. 263—268.
• ?i?ek, Slavoj, "Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses", Lacan Dot Com, 2008.
• ..............., "Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father, or how Not to misread Lacan´s formulas of sexuation", Lacan Dot Com, 2005.
• ..............., ‘The object as a limit of discourse: approaches to the Lacanian real’, Prose Studies, 11 (3), 1988, pp. 94—120.
• ..............., Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London and New York: Continuum, 2005).
• ..............., "Jacques Lacan as Reader of Hegel" (New York: Lacanian Ink 27, 2006.)
• ..............., How to Read Lacan (London: Granta Books, 2006)
• ?i?ek, Slavoj; Salecl, Renata (eds.), Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham: Durham University Press, 1996)

Practice

• Ecole de la Cause freudienne
• World Association of Psychoanalysis
• CFAR — The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. London-based Lacanian psychoanalytic training agency
• Homepage of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies
• The London Society of the New Lacanian School. Site includes online library of clinical & theoretical texts
• The Freudian School of Melbourne, School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Clinical and theoretical teaching and training of psychoanalysts.

Theory

• Lacan Dot Com
• "How to Read Lacan" by Slavoj Zizek — full version
• Jacques Lacan at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Links of Jacques Lacan
• UBUweb — radio features and interviews w/ Lacan on ubu.com
• LacanOnline.com — articles exploring Lacan's concepts and selected readings of his Seminars

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