Lacanian Group Therapy

Lacanian group therapy is an approach to group analysis that differs from other group approaches in the way the group narrative is understood. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s well-known statements “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other” and “The unconscious is structured like a language” become the guiding orientation that informs the group therapist in the analytic process of Lacanian group therapy.

Sigmund Freud, unlike Lacan, was not able to make use of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics, nor did he benefit from the anthropological findings of Claude Lévi-Strauss. However, Lacan, drawing from both Saussure and Lévi-Strauss, demonstrated the importance Freud had placed on careful interpretation of a patient’s speech (e.g., the cases of the “rat man” and “Dora”) as the means by which one ...