Jacques Lacan

Horatio Gubber recruits a cult while being haunted by past memories of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. DIRECTORS NOTE: This film was born out of a broken down machine. Writing, filming, and editing, all occurring simultaneously. Self-sustaining and self-destructing.

En septembre 1972, Jacques Lacan est invité à parler devant les étudiants de l’Université catholique de Louvain. La première partie du film est une captation de sa conférence. Tout autant que le contenu des propos, ce qui impressionne ici, c’est la manière dont Lacan met en scène sa parole. Sa pensée se met en branle lentement à partir du silence, accélère soudain, trouve son rythme, jusqu’à ce que l’intervention d’un jeune situationniste interrompe le spectacle. Dans la seconde partie, Lacan répond aux questions de la réalisatrice sur les principaux concepts de la psychanalyse et sa pratique analytique. Rarement la pensée s’est aussi directement donnée à voir, dans son acte.

In "psychanalyse", a two part documentary, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan answers to questions submitted by his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller under the direction of Benoit Jacquot. The Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise (ORTF, the french public TV) broadcast this program. This documentary and its text became famous because this is the only televisual experience practiced by Lacan. A fair amount is made of the fact that Lacan was renowned for his powers of seduction and what effect this had on transference in the clinical setting. According to some of the interviewees, he could be irresistibly seductive, so much so that some thought him "monster".

A documentary about Jacques Lacan and his influence on the main tendencies of modern psychoanalysis. It begins with a series of interviews with psychoanalysts who knew Lacan, and then presents an overview of Lacanian theory and practice that explores what actually happens in psychoanalysis.

Dans le bois de Vincennes, jadis, il existait une université révolutionnaire. Là-bas, les fils de bonne famille pouvaient s'instruire aux côtés d'étudiants venus du monde entier, le bachelier studieux côtoyait des femmes et des hommes aux parcours sinueux. Mai-68 est passé par là et pendant douze ans, Vincennes vit, s'agite, dérange, attirant les meilleurs professeurs du pays, marqués (très) à gauche : Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, François Châtelet, Jean-François Lyotard, Madeleine Rebérioux, Jacques Rancière ou encore Robert Castel. "La forêt pensante" devient le lieu de référence mélangeant militantisme et apprentissage. Les luttes sont quotidiennes. La castagne aussi, entre gauchistes et communistes, étudiants et policiers, anarchistes et démocrates... Mais ce joyeux chaos se trouve notamment miné par des affaires de drogue. Le prétexte idéal pour détruire Vincennes à l'été 1980. Que reste-t-il de ces douze années bouillonnantes ?

Psychiatre et psychanalyste, héritier de Sigmund Freud et de l’école anglaise de psychanalyse, passionné autant par la science que par le mouvement des idées, Jacques Lacan fut appelé le “Freud Français”. Il fut un clinicien de la folie en général et de la folie féminine en particulier. Il forma un grand nombre de praticiens en France et sa théorie connut un retentissement mondial. Il avait un talent particulier pour inventer des formules paradoxales, parmi lesquelles : “La femme n’existe pas.” “L’amour, c’est donner ce que l’on n’a pas à quelqu’un qui n’en veut pas.” “Le désir de l’homme, c’est le désir de l’autre.” “L’inconscient est structuré comme un langage.” “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel.”

Slavoj Zizek, born in 1949 in Ljubljana, psychoanalyst and professor of philosophy, started early on a group of theoreticians who sharpened their thinking of the theses of Jacques Lacan. The Slovenian Lacan School was a spiritual resistance nest in orthodox ex-Yugoslavia, and Slavoj Zizek emerged as a globally operating philosopher-entertainer.

Do you know Lacan, which many consider as the greatest psychoanalyst since Freud? Beyond the myth, the legends and sometimes, the curses, this film by Gérard Miller allows us to discover his work and his personality, through the testimony of his patients, his students, and also his relatives. Born with the XXth century into an upper-middle-class Catholic family, a psychiatrist by training, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of culture, a friend of Picasso, Levi-Strauss and Sartre, Lacan was a great theoretician, an outstanding practitioner, and he remains the most modern, the most challenging and even the most sulphurous of psychoanalysts. The director Gerard Miller met Lacan thanks to his brother, Jacques-Alain, the most faithful of his students, who married his daughter Judith. Their close and intense relationship makes this film exceptional.

In "psychanalyse", a two part documentary, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan answers to questions submitted by his son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller under the direction of Benoit Jacquot. The Office de Radiodiffusion Television Francaise (ORTF, the french public TV) broadcast this program. This documentary and its text became famous because this is the only televisual experience practiced by Lacan. A fair amount is made of the fact that Lacan was renowned for his powers of seduction and what effect this had on transference in the clinical setting. According to some of the interviewees, he could be irresistibly seductive, so much so that some thought him "monster".