This article endeavors to place the polemic that has developed around the person of Jacques Lacan by referring to the nature and place of his teachings in psychoanalysis and in culture. A new desire was introduced, with a new conceptualization adjusted for the sciences and culture of his time, and a renovated practice, which gives back to psychoanalysis, beyond its therapeutic success, the ethical consequences it had for its inventor. In this way he came to represent the subversive capacity of psychoanalysis in the era of the pragmatism proper to contemporary capitalism. But he took a step further: drawing on the consequences of the unconscious, which is decoded like a language, he developed a specific hypothesis, language as an order, written in the real, which transforms and models the individual subject just as well as the social tie in all its forms. A clinic and a new practice resulted from this, whether the analytical institution or the management of a course of treatment are concerned. (C) 2001 Editions scientifiques et medicales Elsevier SAS.
