Sigmund Freud

Freud invented the practice of psychoanalysis at the turn of the last century. His most important discovery was the unconscious. The unconscious can be thought of as all that is excluded and repressed from our conscious thought, namely inadmissible ideas, desires, wishes and hatreds. The return of the repressed can manifest itself in bodily symptoms, mental illness and inexplicable and unwelcome repetitions which we find ourselves reproducing despite our best efforts. Freud discovered that access to unconscious material was possible through ‘free association’: asking the patient to say aloud what came into their minds without censorship and to follow a train of thought paying attention to any associations.

Jacques Lacan

Lacan developed and transformed Freud’s theories in the latter half of the last century in important ways:

Firstly, through his insistence on the absolute importance and materiality of speech. From birth, even in utero, we are bombarded by language. We are born into a bath of language with the emphasis, the emotion, and whom is speaking impacting upon us long before we ‘understand’ what is being said. We could say that language is foisted upon us and we are forced to submit to using words to attempt to describe and name our experience and our bodies. Lacanian psychoanalysis is mindful that there will be certain spoken words/phrases (signifiers) that are uniquely significant to an individual.

Secondly, Lacan introduced the concept of jouissance as that of transgressive and/or excessive enjoyment, experienced as suffering, particularly from one’s symptoms. The draining and emptying out of this energy can form a large part of any psychoanalytic work.