1-2 books to get a good grasp on this guy's thought? familiar with freud and jung if that helps

1-2 books to get a good grasp on this guy's thought? familiar with freud and jung if that helps

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files.eshkolot.ru/lacan1.pdf
youtube.com/watch?v=6aqGYYBwKbQ
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yo i know some of you fuck with lacan, help a nigga out

I found Lionel Bailey's introduction guide a pretty comprehensive start.
The entire book is on YouTube on tape

thanks ill do that - any books he wrote that are more generalized or give a good sense

Lacan is much work and no prize

i want to learn about this two people in one person thing though

Didn't get you the objet a eh?

It doesn't matter all that much on how you start, but more importantly you'll have to give it time and address Lacan from multiple sources. Sometimes there are incomprehensible parts that you won't get no matter how hard you think about them, that's not because they are meaningless, but because you'll have to read or experience the same thing from a different point. Then you get back to it and it's clear as day.

To get into Lacan is much different from to get into the work of a philosopher or artist. Lacan is an analyst and what he says is interwoven with his method and with an uncommon way to listen to what is being said. That is to say, it's not about what he "thinks", as if he was just giving his shot on how people and the world works, he does not write of that in the usual way. His work is on language and to what happends to our positioning with one another and to ourselves when we engage on it. Whatever is said, there is a way to listen to it.

What I'm saying is that to try to understand his theory is not even the best way to experience Lacan, to go to analysis yourself is. (But of course, you don't go to it to experience or understand Lacan)

Read articles along with the books and don't be afraid to "change the subject" because it is in reading something else (on politics, a self-help book, fiction, philosophy, theater, etc) that you'll be able to get back to reading about Lacan's ideas with new "ears".

I recommend Zizek's How to Read Lacan. His book Less Than Nothing also has a good part that's more about Lacan than Hegel or anything else.

lol fuck Less than Nothing. It's a huge book about nothing.

But How to Read Lacan is small and has examples etc.

The most famous essay by Lacan that I think is the only thing most people have read is "The Mirror stage as formative of function of the I" or something of the like.

Its quite a heavy text to decipher but I guess if you take your time and look up things as you're reading it you'll understand a lot.

A friend was recently working on a Lacanian reading of something and after months of effort still had a lot of things she didn't understand and could not find many people to explain. Good luck anyhow x

Lacan for Beginners by Phillip Hill and David Leach, even though it is a bit on the humanistic side, I think it is the easiest introduction to Lacan in print.

also I think you're referring to the person being constitutively split by this? I thought all this meant was the division between the imaginary and the symbolic, or in Freudian lingo, the split between id and superego.

zizek is probably the most famous explicator of lacan today. "how to read lacan", "looking awry", tons of essays. hope you know your classic cinema though, zizek loves explaining shit using hitchcock or casablanca or whatever.

thanks for the into - good post - have you seen an analyst? ive been interested in doing it since reading adam phillips, but it seems (1) expensive, (2) pretentious to do as a learning activity - not that im against being pretentious, (3) like it requires an enormous time commitment, and (4) would completely depend on the intelligence of the person you randomly select who could be horrible, unless you're willing to commit to switching around until you get the right fit, but already that seems like a lot

Best introduction in my opinion is Lacan's "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud." Read it with a red pen, that coming from a guy who autistically hates people that mark in their books. It will help, trust me. I would also recommend "Course in General Linguistics" by Ferdinand de Saussure. It will provide some important context. Once you're done with that, if you can stomach more of this type of psychoanalysis, go in for a full copy of Ecrits and start from the beginning. Be careful, it's a doorstopper. I haven't gotten around to my copy of ecrits yet mostly because reading this much Lacan and Saussure just set me on the track to Wittgenstein and I get very tired of Lacan assigning godlike powers to poetry whenever his prose calls for a magic trick. He does write with a bit of tongue in cheek humor that is often buried a bit deep, watch out for that and keep it in mind otherwise it can make the reading unnecessarily arcane and difficult. If you wonder if Lacan is making a funny he probably is.

Here is the full text of Instance:
>files.eshkolot.ru/lacan1.pdf

>all this meant
that seems like a pretty big split to me

word, ive never read zizek so maybe itll be a good intro to him too. was into movies before books, so i know that shit through and through - perfect. is one of those two more movie focused? going to pick up how to read lacan either way

Less than Nothing is an awesome book user, I had a great time.

But what you said goes against what I was advising. It's a very difficult thing (perhaps impossible sometimes) to just go after that one essay which is more famous and try to break its code no matter how, it's even not a productive way to approach it.

If you don't understand it at first, move to the next text. You don't understand about the mirror stage just by reading about the mirror stage, you read about how transference works, then you read Freud, then some political essay, then about the four discourses, then you go back to the mirror stage text and it will make more sense.

>is one of those two more movie focused?

hard to say, zizek uses movie analogies all the time. i remember looking awry having a chapter on hitchcock, and how to read lacan has a lot about casablanca, alien, kubrick... this is pretty much how the dude talks about things.

Work your way through this. pay atttention and take notes.

> have you seen an analyst?
Yes, I've been going to a lacanian analyst for the past few years.

Your impressions of how it would be like are very telling, user, because they are not all misunderstandings, just how you take them which is kind of weird to hear.

>(1) expensive,
It is! And it's an important point. Expensive not only in terms of money(but that too, they are interchangeable), but in terms of an experience that costs you, you give away. It's not somewhere you go to just gain something without losing it, it's not like you go to yoga and come back feeling fresh and worth your money. The feeling of paying a bit more than what you got is sometimes necessary for you to value what you have to give.

It ties to:
>(3) like it requires an enormous time commitment
Which is also true, there is a commitment. Again, the same thing, it's not easy, it's costs you. What perhaps is worth considering is that there is also an untying of certain commitments you have with your self.

> (4) would completely depend on the intelligence of the person you randomly select who could be horrible
Yes, of course it depends on the analyst, but not "completely". It depends on you too. It depends on how you handle, for example, the dissapointment you have with an analyst in some session, which might be actually a good sign sometimes.

But I'd like to end with:
>, (2) pretentious to do as a learning activity - not that im against being pretentious
Because here there is something way off. Analysis is not a learning activity, the point is not to acquire knowledge, Lacan puts it himself that you don't go to analysis to "know yourself". This is a very common idea of analysis, but a wrong one. And it explains why it is so weird to go to analysis if it is expensive, requires commitment, you are always unsure if it is working out with that person and so on. Because analysis is something you go to when you are suffering, when you need help, when you are lost and want to ask someone out about it. What analysis offers is a place for you to be listened and to listen to yourself, it is a completely different relationship than asking a friend for help, or asking a specialist (doctors, gurus, priests), because the analyst takes the position of a listener and does not identify him or herself with the one you project onto him or her. You talk to the analyst and you begin listening to your own words. A great part of analysis happends when you are not there, when you are out talking to people or talking to yourself and what you say in analysis reappear. This activity rearranges your relationships, it puts them to move around, you find new ways to negotiate your place in the world. You do so not by "listening to what someone has to say", but by listening to yourself. Go to analysis if you are in trouble, otherwise, why would you?

I can't stay in thread, but perhaps I'll check upon it later.

Yeah I guess you're right. I did it the way I recommended the first time but I've been reading it a few times a year for the past 3 years, I've read a little more Lacan here and there but not nearly as much as I've been reading Freud and other almost totally irrelevant stuff and it does get easier each time.
I dunno man it's pretty simple.

Thing about Zizek is that you're never too sure how much of it is him and how much of it is Hegel/Lacan.
One thing he shares with Lacan though is that they both use literature/fiction to illustrate a point they are trying to make, as opposed to Freud who would actually try to psyhcoanalyse the author.

If you're familiar with Freud, reading the seminars in sequence from the first one isn't a bad idea

i never said it was to learn about yourself. but then you go on to describe learning about yourself. made me think

wtf when I came here to ask about a philosopher and how I should tackle him I got shit on to no end by some hyper aggressive autist.

Why are you such fugs? Leaving this community again and I just came in a minute ago.

who were you asking about

Gramsci

>political "philosophy"

>tired
>"meme"

but now that i had depression, some bad relationships and shit I understand this community better

if old me met me now, i'd also hit him over the head like that

i know i still sound like a fag

take your materialist whining back to r/his/

Bruce Fink writes for analysts, but his books are very layman friendly.

Books is white people, nigguh

The offer some good raps about Lacan. Contribute, nigger!

what is his distinction between desire and drive?

This just sounds like a cult. Pay money and get nothing. Shouldn't I just join Scientology if the scientific basis is equally invalid

less prestigious senpai

where you from?
where I live there's a natural relationship with analysts and all the lacan and freudian bourgeois way of life

are you argentinian

I'm unable to talk about this, but there are huge things on this subject in the 11th Seminar : The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis if you're interested

awesome - thanks

You're welcome

youtube.com/watch?v=6aqGYYBwKbQ

who was in the wrong here

why would you put so much effort and money into something which has been discredited decades ago?

different user but psychoanalytical therapy has roughly the same effectiveness as modern therapeutic approaches like cbt, despite one being supposedly scientifically discredited and the other supposedly having a scientific basis. who cares if something's "discredited" if it works? if it makes you function better then it's good. notice that the idea of modern psychology being a science at all is currently crumbling as it turns out literally half the papers are bogus. the average modern psychologist is not more of a scientist that freud was.

i would certainly rather talk to a lacanian analyst than let some quack stuff me full of prozac.

No you must have misheard, you don't need to be familiar with FREUD to understand Lacan, you need to be familiar with FRAUD

I could never take Lacan seriously after I was shown some youthful letters of his to Charles Maurras (or Leon Daudet, I forget) in which he promised to go to Africa and Christianise and convert the Africans to the cause of French Imperialism.

Naturally in exchange for money, a job, references, whatever it was that he needed at that point in time, the horrid little opportunist.

and do you suppose anyone will take you seriously when some sjw at the nsa leaks all your pepe posts on /pol/?

>non sequitur much?

he was famously an asshole, but who cares? if anything it shows some degree of psychological insight

yes, he did manage to make a couple of generations of Veeky Forums types his niggers, indeed.

>durr lacan wrote a bunch of dumb shit when he was young and thought no one was looking
>shitpost bullshit on Veeky Forums for hours on end

ok

Everyone in this thread

Lacan is shit and you should all feel like shit

dude, my apple watch just said i burned 32 calories shitposting since 12:00AM