Introduction

In this chapter, the author mentions the gaps between Jacques Lacan's and Sigmund Freud's texts precisely in order to throw light on the paths by which he returned to Freud and to avoid any direct use of the notion that Lacan, in rejecting some of Freud's ideas, repressed them. Concerning the notion of the father, the central idea of psychoanalysis, he shows briefly in his earlier work what Lacan's invention of the Name-of-the-Father owed to Claude Levi-Strauss. By failing to recognize Lacan's Durkheimian stage, readers have not been able to see the logic that made his return to Freud necessary in 1951, especially in relation to the crucial question of the father. The author re-examines, not every element of Lacan's work that is influenced by Levi-Strauss, but the aspects of the return to Freud that cannot be understood without seeing the transference of knowledge from anthropology to psychoanalysis.