The shift in the interpretations of Jacques Lacan's theoretical legacy promoted by the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) has increasingly incorporated the social into its clinical formulations and proposals for therapeutic intervention beyond the classical setting. The main such proposal, dubbed 'applied psychoanalysis,' consolidates this shift and provides the theoretical means for the diagnostic unification of individual symptoms and cultural phenomena, notably by reducing the influence of structuralism on the conceptual framework of Lacan's work. The resulting displacement of the 'symbolic' in favour of a 'clinical practice of the real,' as applied to the social, expresses an intensification in the process of converting Lacanian theory into a discourse and device for social control, the latter being the true significance of the emergence of political and cultural issues relating to society at the core of hegemonic Lacanianism.
Device; Psychoanalysis; Lacan; Discourse; Social suffering