ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan was born in 1901, and trained as a psychiatrist in Paris in the 1920s; he trained as a psychoanalyst, also in Paris, in the following decade. By the mid-1930s he was devising a framework for the foundations of psychoanalysis, and already constructing a programme that he called a “return to Freud”. After the Second World War, the SPP became one of the most prolific psychoanalytical societies in Europe. As for content, the central themes that separate Lacan’s work from the forms of psychoanalysis developed in the Anglo-Saxon world can be perceived as consequences of his claim that the main function of the ego is that of misrepresentation. Throughout his life Freud would maintain that whereas a positive hallucination was an index of psychosis, negative hallucination was a structural determinant of both normality and neurosis. Psychoanalysis and the methods of the sciences are at the heart of the problem of the relations between psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic technique.
