Jacques Lacan's return to Freud

by Philippe Julien

From 1953 to 1980, Jacques Lacan sought to accomplish a return to Freud beyond post-Freudianism. He defined this return as "a new covenant with the meaning of the Freudian discovery." Each year through his teaching, he brought about this return. What was at stake in this renewal? Philippe Julien, who joined Lacan's Ecole Freudienne de Paris in 1968, here attempts to answer this question. Situated in the period "after-Lacan," Julien shows that Lacan's return to Freud was neither a closing of the Freudian text that responded to questions left unanswered nor a reopening of the text that gave endless new interpretations. Neither dogmatic nor hermeneutic, Lacan's return to Freud was the return of an inevitable discordance between our experience of the unconscious and any attempt to give an account of it. For the unconscious, by its very nature, disappears at the same moment as it is discovered. It is in this sense that the author can claim that Lacan's return to Freud has been Freudian. . C