question: Can anyone explain me lacanian psychoanalysis in simple terms?
comment: When you're born, you do not realize you're separate from your mom. You don't have language or a concept of self, so you don't see yourself as an individual. You have access to what Lacan calls "The Real." Then you go through the mirror stage, where you look at yourself in a mirror and start to recognize yourself as a person who is separate. Then you start to get language and truly understand that you are separate because language separates things. (there's some Saussure here but we won't go there right now) You are now in the world of "the symbolic" because that is what language is, a bunch of symbols that attempt to stand in for other things. Think about the fact that the word "tree" isn't a tree itself but a string of symbols that we use for trees. So now you are a person and you'd think that this is dandy and you can feel whole now that you understand you are separate but Lacan says that now you have a "lack." In simple terms, Lacan thinks everybody wants to return to their infancy when they had access to "the real" but there's no going back because the real is pre-language and you can't just forget language. As an aside, we can't even really describe the real because we must use language to do so and it is outside of language. So, we try to fill the lack with a bunch of other stuff. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. None of it fills the lack but simply temporarily relieves the pain of the lack. Essentially, in tackling Lacan, focus on what he's saying about language because that is why English scholars still study him. He's taking discussions that Saussure and other linguists had about how language is always standing in for other things (the word "tree" VS a real tree) and marrying it to psychology and asking how living in a world of symbols on top of symbols on top of symbols makes us feel detached from unmediated reality, whatever that is.
passages: Three main phases may be identified in Lacan's mature work: his Fifties exploration of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; his concern with the Real and the lost object of desire, the objet petit a, during the Sixties; and a final phase highlighting jouissance and the mathematical formulation of psychoanalytic teaching.
   Section::::Theories.:Theoretical and Clinical Approaches.:Jacques Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
   Lacan considered the human psyche to be framed within the three orders of The Imaginary, The Symbolic and The Real (RSI). The three divisions in their varying emphases also correspond roughly to the development of Lacan's thought. As he himself put it in Seminar XXII, "I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic...and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real".
  
  Section::::Development of Lacan's thought.:Early Lacan.
   Section::::Major concepts.:Mirror stage.
   Section::::Development of Lacan's thought.:The Real: Poststructuralism.
  
  The sixties saw Lacan's attention increasingly focused on what he termed the Real—not external consensual reality, but rather that unconscious element in the personality, linked to trauma, dream and the drive, which resists signification.
  
  The Real was what was lacking or absent from every totalising structural theory; and in the form of jouissance, and the persistence of the symptom or synthome, marked Lacan's shifting of psychoanalysis from modernity to postmodernity.
   Then Real, together with the Imaginary and the Symbolic came to form a triad of "elementary registers." Lacan believed these three concepts were inseparably intertwined, and by the 1970s they were an integral part of his thought. 
  
  Section::::Lacanianisms.
   The appearance during its course of what he called 'the newly published, posthumous work of my friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Le Visible et l'invisible"" led Lacan however – "free as I am to pursue...the way that seems best to me" – into a long detour midway upon "the eye and the gaze – this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field."
   BULLET::::- Lacan's single lesson titled “Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar” delivered on 20 November 1963, the day after he learnt of his definitive stripping of the title of training analyst.
  
  BULLET::::- Lacan's 1964 “Founding Act” of the EFP.
  
  BULLET::::- Lacan's 1980 “Letter of Dissolution” of the EFP.
  
  This important document constitutes the fullest record of the circumstances of Lacan's stripping of the title of training analyst in 1963, including first-hand historical elements that point beyond the oft-cited issue of Lacan's variable-length sessions.
  
  Section::::The 1990 Norton volume.
   One of the main methods of psychoanalysis is to drain the traumatic experiences of the real into the symbolic through free association. The analyst searches the analysand's discourse for sounds, words, or images of fixation and through dialectization attempt to bring these fixations to the regular metonymic flow of the (unconscious) symbolic order, thereby integrating the subject further into their fantasy, usually referred to as "traversing the fantasy."
  
  Section::::In psychoanalysis.:Žižek.
  
  Contemporary Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has expanded on Lacan's theories and described (at least) three modalities of the Real:
   The viewing subject may be offered particular identifications (usually with a leading male character) from which to watch. The theory stresses the subject's longing for a completeness which the film may appear to offer through identification with an image, although Lacanian theory also indicates that identification with the image is never anything but an illusion and the subject is always split simply by virtue of coming into existence (aphanisis).
  
  Section::::Second wave.
   BULLET::::- "The Seminar, Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964", ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Alan Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1977, .
  
  BULLET::::- "The Seminar, Book XVII. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis", ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, transl. by Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2007, .
  
  BULLET::::- (Forthcoming) "The Seminar, Book XIX. ...or Worse", ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, Polity Press, New York, 2018, .
   Lacan talks about the censorship of his teachings and his excommunication from official psychoanalytical circles. He wants to train analysts and, at the same time, address the non-analyst by raising the following questions: Is psychoanalysis a science? If so, under what conditions? If it is – the "science of the unconscious" or a "conjectural science of the subject" – what can it teach us about science?
   A selection of these texts, together with some key institutional material relating to Lacan's École freudienne de Paris, were translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and included in the above-mentioned "October" volume.
  
  The Dossier includes:
  
  BULLET::::- Lacan's 1953 Letters to his former analyst Rudolph Loewenstein and the then President of the IPA, Heinz Hartmann.
  
  BULLET::::- Hartmann's Report to the XVIIIth Congress of the IPA.
  
  BULLET::::- Lacan's 1960 Letter to D. W. Winnicott who had served on the first committee of the IPA evaluating the situation of the SFP.
   From a different angle, the early Lacan argued that 'any "concrete psychology" must be augmented by a reference to ethnology, history and law'; and later drew on 'Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology...[for] what will be termed the Symbolic'. Post-Lacanians would continue to explore such sociological areas as 'the superego as the moment of common cultural binding', or the way 'the social bond, the Law binding us, is...a bond of the impossibility of obedience "or" disobedience'.
  
  Section::::History.:1960s and the Left.
   Section::::Biography.:1960s.
   By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.
  
  Section::::Major concepts.:Three orders.:The Real.
   BULLET::::- Practice
  
  BULLET::::- École de la Cause freudienne
  
  BULLET::::- World Association of Psychoanalysis
  
  BULLET::::- CFAR – The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. London-based Lacanian psychoanalytic training agency
  
  BULLET::::- Homepage of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and the San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies
  
  BULLET::::- The London Society of the New Lacanian School. Site includes online library of clinical & theoretical texts
  
  BULLET::::- The Freudian School of Melbourne, School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis – Clinical and theoretical teaching and training of psychoanalysts
  
  BULLET::::- Theory
  
  BULLET::::- Lacan Dot Com
  
  BULLET::::- Links about Jacques Lacan at Lacan.com
   Lacan’s 1963 break from the IPA and the founding of his School in 1964 created the conditions in which he was able to explore these issues by devising an interface between the clinical setting and the institutional frame. This interface was announced in 1967 in the "Proposition of 9 October on the Psychoanalyst of the School" which put on the table a procedure that has since been described as “an experiment that progresses by stages leading to a result; with the particularity that the experimenter takes himself as the object of experimentation".
   Three main divisions can be made in contemporary Lacanianism.
  
  BULLET::::- In one form, the academic reading of a de-clinicalised Lacan has become a pursuit in itself.
  
  BULLET::::- The (self-styled) legitimatism of the ECF, developed into an international movement with strong Spanish support as well as Latin American roots, set itself up as a rival challenge to the IPA.
  
  BULLET::::- The third form is a plural Lacanianism, best epitomised in the moderate CFRP, with its abandonment of the passe and openness to traditional psychoanalysis, and (after the 1995 dissolution) in its two successors.
   Section::::Lacanianisms.:Outside France.
  
  Lacan's 1973 "Letter to the Italians", nominated Muriel Drazien, Giacomo Contri and Armando Verdiglione to carry his teaching in Italy.
   Section::::Bibliography.
  
  AUTHORED (English)
  
  BULLET::::- "A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice", W. W. Norton, 2017
  
  BULLET::::- "Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan's Seminar VIII, Transference", Routledge, 2016
  
  BULLET::::- "The Purloined Love: An Inspector Canal Mystery", Karnac Books, 2014
  
  BULLET::::- "Odor di Murderer, Scent of a Killer: An Adventure from Inspector Canal's New York Agency", Karnac Books, 2014
  
  BULLET::::- "Death by Analysis: Another Adventure from Inspector Canal’s New York Agency", Karnac Books, 2013
  
  BULLET::::- "Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key", Routledge, 2013
   Newman focuses particularly on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
  
  Section::::Reception.
   The French edition contained Lacan's 1965 "Report" on the Seminar" and a "Postface" penned in 1973 on the occasion of the French publication. Both were omitted from the 1977 English-language translation in favour of a specially written "Preface". The original "Report" and "Postface" can be consulted in English.
  
  Section::::Editions.
  
  BULLET::::- Seminar on The Purloined Letter, "Écrits", transl. by Jeffrey Mehlman, "French Freud" in "Yale French Studies 48", 1972.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Seminars of Jacques Lacan
  
  BULLET::::- Gaze
  
  BULLET::::- Psychoanalytic theory
  
  Section::::Further reading.
   Section::::In the late Lacan.
  
  Just as the early predominance of the Imaginary was eclipsed after the Rome Report, so too by the end of the Sixties the Symbolic in turn would increasingly come to play second fiddle to the Real, as from "this point on, Lacan downplays the Oedipus complex, seen as a mythical – and so imaginarized – version of unconscious organization".
   Accepting the importance of "the critical moment when insight arises", object relations theory would nonetheless quietly suggest that "if the analyst does not provide the patient with space in which nothing "needs" to happen there is no space in which something "can" happen". Julia Kristeva, if in very different language, would concur that "Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless intrinsic to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualize it as a technique of scansion (short sessions)".
  
  Section::::Writings and writing style.
  