Lacan Versus Foucault

It was this gap between my experience as an analysand and my reading of Foucault that made me want to “respond” to him from Lacan’s point of view. Lacan had endeavored to think of the conditions of possibility of psychoanalysis as a non-normalizing discourse and as a practice outside norms. As the question of norms, and their consequences, surrounds the social and political movements of our world today, this is what I have set out to demonstrate: Lacan resolutely situated psychoanalysis on the “other side of norms.” —A.P.

Aurélie Pfauwadel is a psychoanalyst, professor, doctor of philosophy, the Director of the Department of Psychoanalysis at Paris-8 Saint-Denis University, and a member of the École de la Cause freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis.