Lacan and Levi-Strauss are often mentioned together in reviews of French structuralist thought, but what really links their distinct projects? In this important study, Markos Zafiropoulos shows how Lacan's famous 'return to Freud' was only made possible through Lacan's reading of Levi-Strauss. Via a careful and illuminating comparison of the work of the psychoanalyst and that of the anthropologist, Zafiropoulos shows how Lacan's theories of the symbolic function, of the power of language, of the role of the father and even of the unconscious itself owe a major debt to Levi-Strauss. Lacan and Levi-Strauss is much more than an academic study of the relations between these two thinkers: it is also a superb introduction to the work of Lacan, setting out with detail and lucidity the major concepts of his work in the 1950s. Contents: NOTE TO THE READER AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
• The young Lacan
CHAPTER ONE
• The transcendence of the imaginary by the symbolic or the mirror stage and the symbolic function
• Freud’s technique, transference from Lacan to Freud, and the post-Freudians’ resistance to Freud
• The effectiveness of symbols: From Anna Freud to Claude Lévi-Strauss
• From the mirror stage to the inverted bouquet
CHAPTER TWO
• The subject receives from the Other his own message in an inverted form: An investigation
• Presentation on Transference (1951)
• “The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis”
• 1953
• The Rome Report: “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” or testifying to a pass (September 1953)
CHAPTER THREE
• The name of the father, psychosis and phobia
• From the Rat Man to little Hans: The question of the Name-of-the-Father
• The institutional forms of the zero value
• Object Relations: Book IV of the Seminar, 1956–1957
CONCLUSION
• The doxa: Its ideals and the repression of Lévi-Strauss
• Louis Althusser’s point of view
• The essential: Lacan’s point of view
• Thanks to Lévi-Strauss
POSTLUDE
• Making the world incomplete
• The lack in the other
• Lacan as a critic of Lévi-Strauss
• The sublime excommunicant
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX About the Author:
Markos Zafiropoulos is a psychoanalyst and a sociologist. He is Director of Studies at the CNRS Centre for Research in Psychoanalysis and Social Practises in Paris and author of several acclaimed books, including Tristesse dans la Modernite and Lacan et les Sciences Sociales: le Declin du Pere.
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