Body and Demand in “Psychoanalysis and Medicine” by Jacques Lacan

Abstract

This work presents a reading of Jacques Lacan’s participation in the round table on February 16th 1966 entitled “Psychoanalysis and Medicine” in which he interrogates concepts that cross medical practice and are opposed to the discourse of psychoanalysis. Body, demand, enjoyment, and science are questioned and put at the service of psychoanalytic practice as fundamental sources of it and emphasizing on a double function: on the one hand, to tighten the discourse of medicine that supports a radical hegemony, and on the other, to provoke the practitioners of psychoanalysis to get out of that extraterritoriality in which they find themselves before that hegemonic discourse.