ÉCRITS

Until the publication of hisÉcrits (Writings), Jacques Lacan's only published book was his doctoral thesis in medicine, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (On paranoid psychosis in its relations with personality ; 1932), written from a psychiatric, rather than psychoanalytic, perspective.

In the 1960s Lacan was asked by several of his students and by his friend François Wahl, of the publishing house Seuil, to collect his writings in a single volume. The considerable success of De l'interprétation, essai sur Freud (Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation), by Paul Ricœur, in 1965 and then that of Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things), by Michel Foucault, in 1966 prompted him to prepare a collection of his articles.

He omitted all his work from before the war, notably his article "La vie mentale" (Mental life; 1938) from volume eight of the Encyclopédie française (the alternate title of which, "The Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual," only appeared on the cover of an off-print). He did, however, make an exception for a text written in 1936 for Marienbad, where he delivered his lost lecture on the mirror stage to the congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

In the collection, he slightly modified his articles, often without any indication of the changes. He introduced the book with a recollection of his medical and psychiatric origins, "De nos antécedents"(On my antecedents), and preceded "Discours de Rome" (Rome discourse) of 1953 with a brief text that indicated the consequences of this discourse for the psychoanalysis of the future, "Du sujet enfin en question" (On the subject who is finally in question).

Écrits was published in the third trimester of 1966 by Seuil. The book very quickly achieved critical acclaim and was widely reviewed and debated in the press. It included a "Classified Index of the Major Concepts" by Jacques-Alain Miller. This index introduced a logical dimension to Lacanism that was emphasized from 1975 on. In the introduction to the index Miller wrote, "According to my conception of theseÉcrits, it is to our benefit to study them as forming a system. . . . For my own part, not needing to concern myself with the efficacy of the theory in [the clinic], I will encourage the reader by proposing that there is no outer limit to the expansion of formalization in the field of discourse" (pp. 358-359).

A measure of the influence ofÉcrits is that it has been translated in to numerous languages. Moreover, it was followed by a sequel, AutresÉcrits, published in June 2001. In that volume Jacques-Alain Miller collected nearly all of Lacan's articles from before 1939, such as "Les complexes familiaux dans la vie de l'individu" (Family complexes in the formation of the individual; 1938). Also included are the version of the "Discours de Rome" (Rome discourse) circulated in the proceedings of the IPA congress (1953) and all the texts that appeared after the publication ofÉcrits up to that of "L'étourdit" (Stunned; 1972), Lacan's last published article.

Jacques SÉdat

See also: École freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris); France; Lacan, Jaques-MarieÉmile; Structuralism and psychoanalysis.

Source Citation

Lacan, Jacques. (1966).Écrits. Paris: Le Seuil. Schriften. Olten, Switzerland: Walter-Verlag, 1973-1980.Écrits: A Selection. (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: Norton, 2004.

Bibliography

Dor, Joël. (1994). Nouvelle bibliographie des travaux de Jacques Lacan. Paris:Éditions et Publications de l'École Lacanienne.

Lacan, Jacques. (1938). La vie mentale. Encyclopédie française c, Vol.8.

——. (1973). L'étourdit. Scilicet, 4, 5-52.

——. (2001). Autres écrits (Jacques-Alain Miller, Ed.). Paris:Éditions du Seuil.

Roudinesco, Elisabeth. (1990). Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985 (Jeffrey Mehlman, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.