Cormac Gallagher – Being, Knowing and Sexual Difference
 
THE LETTER 09 (Spring 1997) pages 1-22
 
What must be known are the conditions required in order that someone may be able to say of himself: I am a psychoanalyst. 
Jacques Lacan
 
Introduction 
 
Sandwiched, bulky but almost invisible, between The Four Fundamental Concepts and Science and Truth, the 1964-1965 Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis is one of Jacques Lacan’s least known seminars. For students of Lacan this is a serious loss in the first place because it leaves them in the dark about his teaching in the year following the foundation of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris in June 1964, the point at which he had assumed his definitive exclusion from the International Psychoanalytic Association and had set about the creation of his own school. It also marks more clearly than before a certain distancing from, a going beyond of Freud. The previous eleven seminars had all featured long and detailed commentaries on Freudian texts but here this dimension is almost entirely missing. Towards the end of the year – inspired possibly by Michel Foucault’s recently published Birth of the clinic – there is a proposal to establish a new framework for psychoanalytic clinical practice which will be not so much Freudian as Lacanian: …