Jacques Lacan and the Question of Psychoanalytic Training

MOUSTAPHA SAFOUAN graduated from the University of Alexandria in philosophy in 1943 and came to Paris to continue his studies at the Sorbonne immediately after the end of the war.In April 1946, he started a personal analysis which became training, with Dr M. Schlumberger, and began practising analysis under Jacques Lacan's supervision by the end of 1949. His involvement in psychoanalysis became definitive when Lacan started his teaching in 1951, introducing his famous distinction between the symbolic, the imaginary and the real.Except for five years (1953-8) spent in Nasser's Egypt, during which he translated into Arabic the Interpretation of Dreams and worked as a reader at the University of Heliopolis, he has continued to practise analysis in Paris where he also published a number of books, including Études sur l'Oedipe: L'inconscient son scribe (of which there is an unpublished English translation by Martin Thom, entitled Dream Rhetorics). JACQUELINE ROSE is Professor of English at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. She was the editor (with Juliet Mitchell) and translator of Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne; her books include Sexuality in the Field of Vision, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, and States of Fantasy.