The Later Lacan: Approaching the Borromean Clinic

Lacan famously presented his early teaching as a ‘return to Freud’: a critical rereading of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis through his structuralist-inspired theory of the signifier. Even at its most innovative, this work remained explicitly organised around Freud and around the task of recovering what Lacan regarded as the radical implications of the Freudian discovery.

By his later teaching, however, much has changed. Lacan increasingly moves beyond the vocabulary and conceptual architecture through which he had reformulated Freud, developing an approach that is more distinctly his own—and considerably stranger. The Real, Symbolic and Imaginary are reconceived through knotting; topology takes on an increasingly central role; questions of writing, the body, and the symptom come to the fore; and the primacy previously accorded to meaning and the signifier is progressively complicated through a focus on drive and jouissance.

Lacan’s mode of teaching changes as well. The later seminars are notoriously difficult to decipher. His arguments become less linear, his demonstrations more experimental, and drawings, knots, wordplay and acts of construction increasingly become part of his exposition. At moments, his seminar begins to resemble something closer to a piece of performance art than a conventional lecture. The form of his teaching increasingly participates in the conceptual problems he is trying to address.

This eight-session course will provide a clear, accessible orientation to this later period, with particular attention to the Borromean knot and its clinical implications. Rather than treating topology as an abstract supplement to psychoanalysis, we will consider how it allows Lacan to reformulate fundamental questions concerning language, the body, jouissance, meaning, symptom and subjective consistency.

Particular attention will be given to the reworking of the earlier structural clinic through Lacan’s later Borromean orientation. How does a subject establish and maintain a workable relation between the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary? What happens when these relations become unstable? What functions can symptoms, identifications and other subjective inventions perform? What becomes of interpretation once analytic work can no longer be understood simply as the deciphering or production of meaning? And should the later Lacan be understood as extending the structural clinic, substantially transforming it, or opening onto a different way of conceptualising psychoanalytic diagnosis and treatment?

Course Outline

• Session 1: Circles

• Session 2: Bodies

• Session 3: Symbols

• Session 4: Meanings

• Session 5: Writings

• Session 6: Signifiers

• Session 7: Drawings

• Session 8: Tubes 

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Situate Lacan’s later teaching in relation to his earlier ‘return to Freud’.

• Understand the basic logic of the Borromean knot and its place in Lacan’s later work as an innovative way of thinking the relations between the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary.

• Understand why topology, diagrams and acts of construction become increasingly important to Lacan’s mode of thinking and teaching.

• Situate questions of the body, jouissance, symptom, writing, signifier and meaning within the Borromean orientation.

• Explain the continuities and tensions between the structural clinic and the later Borromean clinic, and grasp the consequences of Lacan’s later thought for questions of diagnosis and subjective structure, including the distinction between neurosis and psychosis.

• Understand how symptoms and other subjective inventions may function to stabilise or organise a subject’s experience.

Practical Information

• This course will run for 8 sessions / 90 mins per session.

• This course will run on Saturdays at 10.30am Los Angeles (1.30pm New York / 6.30pm London / 7.30pm Paris).

• Session dates: April 3, 10, 17, 24; May 1, 8, 15, 22, 2027.

• This course will be delivered online via Zoom. Live attendance is strongly encouraged, but lectures will be recorded and available to participants who cannot attend.

• Enrolment is open to all. Prior knowledge of Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts and some relevant literature may be helpful.

• This course does not result in an official certification. However, a letter of acknowledgment signed by The Analytic Forum’s directors will be available upon completion of the course.

Instructor

Samuel McCormick is Professor of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University and the founder of Lectures on Lacan. He previously served as EURIAS & Marie-Curie Research Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in Denmark. He is the award-winning author of several books, including Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals; The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk; and, most recently, Origins of Desire & Ethics of the Drive in Lacanian Psychoanalysis: A Reading Companion to Seminar XI. He is the Series Editor for Routledge’s new Guides to Lacan series.

Early Bird Discount available until January 31, 2027. Full price after this will be €349.