Editing Jacques Lacan (section)

===1950s===
With the purchase in 1951 of a country mansion at [[Guitrancourt]], Lacan established a base for weekend retreats for work, leisure—including extravagant social occasions—and for the accommodation of his vast library. His art collection included [[Courbet]]'s [[L'Origine du monde]], which he had concealed in his study by a removable wooden screen on which an abstract representation of the Courbet by the artist [[André Masson]] was portrayed.<ref name="Jacques Lacan & Co" />{{rp|294}}

In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris in which he inaugurated what he described as "a return to Freud," whose doctrines were to be re-articulated through a reading of [[Ferdinand de Saussure|Saussure]]'s linguistics and [[Claude Lévi-Strauss|Levi-Strauss]]'s structuralist anthropology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan's 27-year-long seminar was highly influential in Parisian cultural life, as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.<ref name="Jacques Lacan & Co" />{{rp|299}}

In January 1953 Lacan was elected president of the SPP. When, at a meeting the following June, a formal motion was passed against him criticising his abandonment of the standard analytic training session for the [[#Variable-length session|variable-length session]], he immediately resigned his presidency. He and a number of colleagues then resigned from the SPP to form the [[Société Française de Psychanalyse]] (SFP).<ref name=Macey1988 />{{rp|227}} One consequence of this was to eventually deprive the new group of membership of the [[International Psychoanalytical Association]].

Encouraged by the reception of "the return to Freud" and of his report "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," Lacan began to re-read Freud's works in relation to [[contemporary philosophy]], linguistics, [[ethnology]], [[biology]], and [[topology]]. From 1953 to 1964 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in the collection ''Écrits'', which was first published in 1966. In his seventh seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959–60), which according to Lewis A. Kirshner "arguably represents the most far-reaching attempt to derive a comprehensive ethical position from psychoanalysis,"<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Kirshner|first=Lewis A.|date=1 December 2012|title=Toward an Ethics of Psychoanalysis: A Critical Reading of Lacan's Ethics|journal=Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association|language=en|volume=60|issue=6|pages=1223–1242|doi=10.1177/0003065112457876|pmid=23118239|issn=0003-0651|doi-access=free}}</ref> Lacan defined the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and presented his "ethics for our time"—one that would, in the words of Freud, prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the "discontent of civilization." At the roots of the ethics is desire: the only promise of analysis is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play on words between ''l'entrée en je'' and ''l'entrée en jeu''). "I must come to the place where the id was," where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails "the purification of desire." He defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and that the analytic field is the only place from which it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.<ref>Le séminaire, Livre VIII: Le transfert, Paris: Seuil, 1991.</ref>