Reading Lacan reading Freud in 1953 & 1954: Seminar I
In an oral presentation delivered to her colleagues at LSP in January 2023, Dr. Yang Yu reminded us that in one of three talks Lacan gave shortly after the publication of his Écrits in 1966, he mentioned that he had set a challenge to himself in his teaching: to never say the same thing more than once. The striking evolution in the content of his Seminar bears witness to Lacan's fidelity to this self-imposed rule.
Scott McDaniel, Untitled
Book I of the Seminar is something of a far cry from the algebra and topology of his mid-career teaching, and from the late-career turn toward mathemes and homophony to which he increasingly gave preference as mediums for the transmission of psychoanalytic savoir. As a first link in the chain of his published Seminar, it offers a sounding of the thinking, the questions, the desire that would lead Lacan down the singular path he was to trace. Since Freud, beginnings and endings have held a place of special importance in psychoanalytic experience.
In this seminar, we’ll read aloud the weekly lectures Lacan gave at St. Anne Hospital from 1953-54 and converse about what we read. Between sessions, participants will be encouraged to read the texts to which Lacan makes reference. If one feels so moved, they may offer a presentation on any of this supple-mentary literature that is in fact quite essential.
Reading:
Lacan, J. and J.-A. Miller (Ed.). (1998). The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud's papers on technique 1953-1954. (J. Forrester, Trans.) New York: WW Norton & Company.
Faculty: Casey Butcher, Precandidate Scholar of the School
Dates and Times: Bi-weekly, September 2023 to May 2024, 1st and 3rd Tuesdays, 5-7 pm Pacific Time
Location: Online via Zoom, by invitation
Fee: Free, donation to the School encouraged
Contact: Casey Butcher at butcher.casey@gmail.com
Casey Butcher is a Spanish-and-English bilingual community organizer and analyst-in-training based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An alumnus of the Colegio Paulo Freire’s Program in Latin American Social Movements and Community Self-Development in Santiago de Chile and The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory in New York City, Casey also studied and organized seminars on Modern Western Philosophy and political theory at The Brecht Forum in New York and with the Coordinadora Antirracista La Champurria in Santiago. He earned a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s experimental film program. His approach to Lacanian psychoanalysis, then, is informed by sustained engagements with Latin American pedagogy, Marxisms, and literary and artistic media and practices. He is a Candidate Analyst of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis.