Lacan in America: The Logic of Place

“Psychoanalysis must be reinvented by each analyst” Lacan demonstrated. We will examine the Logic of Place - or Clinical Topology - with specific regard to the case of Lacan in America. Lacan translated and transformed the Fin-de-Siecle Austrian style of Freudian psychoanalysis to the local world of post-war France and it spread widely throughout Europe and South America.

So why has Lacan received so much resistance in the United States? We will trace the development of Lacan in America as “lost in translation,” and demonstrate that the possibility of any future Lacanian analysis depends on an understanding of the conditions of the American psyche as well as the pragmatic operations of Lacan’s school as a clinic in extension. We will trace the genealogy of Lacanian analysis in America and its innovative impact on a possible science of the clinic which Freud and Lacan pursued.