the background and the form. “Mixed technique on canvas”, by Freda (2023).
“I personally met Jacques Lacan at a dinner in Paris,” Francisco Hugo Freda reminds this newspaper. “At that time I was setting up a publishing house in Barcelona, and I told him that I wanted to talk to him. He made an appointment for me the next day, at his office, 5 Rue de Lille. I arrived half an hour early, anxious. I went up to the waiting room, a small place, very ordinary; Gloria, his Spanish secretary, opened the door for me and she asked me what she was doing there. ‘Doctor Lacan told me to come see him at this time’ “Today?” she was astonished. “It’s the day of his seminar, and these days he doesn’t see anyone.” And suddenly, in a robe de chambre, Lacan appeared. “Bonjour,” she greeted dryly. I thanked him for his presence and I began to develop my proposal, the things I wanted to publish about him, including editing the magazine ‘Ornicar’ in Spanish, but he stopped me with a phrase that would resonate with me until now:. ‘You are free to do what you want. Au revoir’, he turned and walked away.”
Journalist: And why didn’t you tell him that at dinner instead of quoting him the next day?
FHF: It was, for me, one of his lessons. The word “freedom” was very important. It is not a very psychoanalytic word to say. He confronted me with the limits of my freedom, he convinced me of the need to be serious in what I was going to do. Years later I myself did a seminar on freedom: not in a political sense, but in terms of the freedom of the subject beyond his determinisms.
Q.: Was that your first contact with Lacan?
FHF: No, it was the first personal and private one. When I arrived in Paris, I attended his “Encore” seminar. I thought I was going to talk about Freud, the Oedipus complex, but I ran into a person who was talking about logic. It was a large amphitheater, he used to walk among the students, prying into what they wrote, especially the students. From the encounter that I related before there were other, more frequent ones. I followed all of his seminars, my schedule was arranged according to those seminars. I didn’t work if there was a seminar that day.
P.: Lacan was interested in art.
FHF: He was interested above all in writing and photography. But he looked at everything from psychoanalysis. The analyst was his essential concern throughout his teaching. He was addressing psychoanalysts, not philosophers, not artists. I do not doubt that he took elements of philosophy and art to teach him, but always with the aim of training the analyst. He generated a break with what he had been doing until then, he gave importance to language, he changed the way he listened to the patient.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
