title: Jacques Lacan

text: In 1931, after a second year at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, Lacan was awarded his "Diplôme de médecin légiste" (a medical examiner's qualification) and became a licensed forensic psychiatrist. The following year he was awarded his (roughly equivalent to an M.D. degree) for his thesis "On Paranoiac Psychosis in its Relations to the Personality" ("De la Psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité". Its publication had little immediate impact on French psychoanalysis but it did meet with acclaim amongst Lacan's circle of surrealist writers and artists. In their only recorded instance of direct communication, Lacan sent a copy of his thesis to Sigmund Freud who acknowledged its receipt with a postcard.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan's thesis was based on observations of several patients with a primary focus on one female patient whom he called Aimée. Its exhaustive reconstruction of her family history and social relations, on which he based his analysis of her paranoid state of mind, demonstrated his dissatisfaction with traditional psychiatry and the growing influence of Freud on his ideas. Also in 1932, Lacan published a translation of Freud's 1922 text, ""Über einige neurotische Mechanismen bei Eifersucht, Paranoia und Homosexualität"" ("Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality") as ""De quelques mécanismes névrotiques dans la jalousie, la paranoïa et l'homosexualité"" in the "". In Autumn 1932, Lacan began his training analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, which was to last until 1938.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In 1934 Lacan became a candidate member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). He began his private psychoanalytic practice in 1936 whilst still seeing patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, and the same year presented his first analytic report at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in Marienbad on the "Mirror Phase". The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, terminated the lecture before its conclusion, since he was unwilling to extend Lacan's stated presentation time. Insulted, Lacan left the congress to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. No copy of the original lecture remains, Lacan having decided not to hand in his text for publication in the conference proceedings.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan's attendance at Kojève's lectures on Hegel, given between 1933 and 1939, and which focused on the "Phenomenology" and the master-slave dialectic in particular, was formative for his subsequent work, initially in his formulation of his theory of the mirror phase, for which he was also indebted to the experimental work on child development of Henri Wallon.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: It was Wallon who commissioned from Lacan the last major text of his pre-war period, a contribution to the 1938 "Encyclopédie française" entitled "La Famille" (reprinted in 1984 as "Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu", Paris: Navarin). 1938 was also the year of Lacan's accession to full membership ("membre titulaire") of the SPP, notwithstanding considerable opposition from many of its senior members who were unimpressed by his recasting of Freudian theory in philosophical terms.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan married Marie-Louise Blondin in January 1934 and in January 1937 they had the first of their three children, a daughter named Caroline. A son, Thibaut, was born in August 1939 and a daughter, Sybille, in November 1940.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The SPP was disbanded due to Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1940. Lacan was called up for military service which he undertook in periods of duty at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, whilst at the same time continuing his private psychoanalytic practice. In 1942 he moved into apartments at 5 rue de Lille, which he would occupy until his death. During the war he did not publish any work, turning instead to a study of Chinese for which he obtained a degree from the École spéciale des langues orientales.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In a relationship they formed before the war, Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), the estranged wife of his friend Georges Bataille, became Lacan's mistress and, in 1953, his second wife. During the war their relationship was complicated by the threat of deportation for Sylvia, who was Jewish, since this required her to live in the unoccupied territories. Lacan intervened personally with the authorities to obtain papers detailing her family origins, which he destroyed. In 1941 they had a child, Judith. She kept the name Bataille because Lacan wished to delay the announcement of his planned separation and divorce until after the war.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: After the war, the SPP recommenced their meetings. In 1945 Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, where he met the British analysts Ernest Jones, Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. Bion's analytic work with groups influenced Lacan, contributing to his own subsequent emphasis on study groups as a structure within which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis. He published a report of his visit as 'La Psychiatrique anglaise et la guerre' ("Evolution psychiatrique" 1, 1947, pp.  293–318).


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage, 'The Mirror-Stage, as Formative of the I, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience', to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich. The same year he set out in the "Doctrine de la Commission de l’Enseignement," produced for the Training Commission of the SPP, the protocols for the training of candidates.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: With the purchase in 1951 of a country mansion at Guitrancourt, Lacan established a base for weekend retreats for work, leisure—including extravagant social occasions—and for the accommodation of his vast library. His art collection included Courbet’s L'Origine du monde, which he had concealed in his study by a removable wooden screen on which an abstract representation of the Courbet by the artist André Masson was portrayed.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris in which he inaugurated what he described as "a return to Freud," whose doctrines were to be re-articulated through a reading of Saussure’s linguistics and Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan's 27-year-long seminar was highly influential in Parisian cultural life, as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In January 1953 Lacan was elected president of the SPP. When, at a meeting the following June, a formal motion was passed against him criticising his abandonment of the standard analytic training session for the variable-length session, he immediately resigned his presidency. He and a number of colleagues then resigned from the SPP to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One consequence of this was to eventually deprive the new group of membership of the International Psychoanalytical Association.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Encouraged by the reception of "the return to Freud" and of his report "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," Lacan began to re-read Freud's works in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology, and topology. From 1953 to 1964 at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in the collection "Écrits", which was first published in 1966. In his seventh seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959–60), which according to Lewis A. Kirshner “arguably represents the most far-reaching attempt to derive a comprehensive ethical position from psychoanalysis,” Lacan defined the ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and presented his "ethics for our time"—one that would, in the words of Freud, prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the "discontent of civilization." At the roots of the ethics is desire: the only promise of analysis is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play on words between "l'entrée en je" and "l'entrée en jeu"). "I must come to the place where the id was," where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails "the purification of desire." He defended three assertions: that psychoanalysis must have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; and that the analytic field is the only place from which it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Starting in 1962, a complex negotiation took place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan's practice (with its controversial indeterminate-length sessions) and his critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy led, in August 1963, to the IPA setting the condition that registration of the SFP was dependent upon the removal of Lacan from the list of SFP analysts. With the SFP's decision to honour this request in November 1963, Lacan had effectively been stripped of the right to conduct training analyses and thus was constrained to form his own institution in order to accommodate the many candidates who desired to continue their analyses with him. This he did, on 21 June 1964, in the "Founding Act" of what became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), taking "many representatives of the third generation with him: among them were Maud and Octave Mannoni, Serge Leclaire ... and Jean Clavreul".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: With the support of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Louis Althusser, Lacan was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He started with a seminar on "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis" in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure. Lacan began to set forth his own approach to psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues that had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale's students. He divided the École Freudienne de Paris into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analyzed but have not become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who either have not started or have not yet completed analysis are welcome); and the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (concerning the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences). In 1967 he invented the procedure of the Pass, which was added to the statutes after being voted in by the members of the EFP the following year.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: 1966 saw the publication of Lacan's collected writings, the "Écrits", compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller. Printed by the prestigious publishing house Éditions du Seuil, the "Écrits" did much to establish Lacan's reputation to a wider public. The success of the publication led to a subsequent two-volume edition in 1969.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: By the 1960s, Lacan was associated, at least in the public mind, with the far left in France. In May 1968, Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary his followers set up a Department of Psychology at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). However, Lacan's unequivocal comments in 1971 on revolutionary ideals in politics draw a sharp line between the actions of some of his followers and his own style of "revolt.”


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In 1969, Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon), where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice until the dissolution of his school in 1980.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Throughout the final decade of his life, Lacan continued his widely followed seminars. During this period, he developed his concepts of masculine and feminine jouissance and placed an increased emphasis on the concept of "the Real" as a point of impossible contradiction in the "symbolic order". Lacan continued to draw widely on various disciplines, working closely on classical Chinese literature with François Cheng and on the life and work of James Joyce with Jacques Aubert.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The growing success of the "Écrits", which was translated (in abridged form) into German and English, led to invitations to lecture in Italy, Japan and the United States. He gave lectures in 1975 at Yale, Columbia and MIT.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan's failing health made it difficult for him to meet the demands of the year-long Seminars he had been delivering since the fifties, but his teaching continued into the first year of the eighties. After dissolving his School, the EFP, in January 1980, Lacan travelled to Caracas to found the Freudian Field Institute on 12 July.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The Overture to the Caracas Encounter was to be Lacan's final public address. His last texts from the spring of 1981 are brief institutional documents pertaining to the newly formed Freudian Field Institute.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan's "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud, and included a radical critique of ego psychology, whereas "Lacan's quarrel with Object Relations psychoanalysis" was a more muted affair. Here he attempted "to restore to the notion of the Object Relation... the capital of experience that legitimately belongs to it", building upon what he termed "the hesitant, but controlled work of Melanie Klein... Through her we know the function of the imaginary primordial enclosure formed by the "imago" of the mother's body", as well as upon "the notion of the transitional object, introduced by D. W. Winnicott... a key-point for the explanation of the genesis of fetishism". Nevertheless, "Lacan systematically questioned those psychoanalytic developments from the 1930s to the 1970s, which were increasingly and almost exclusively focused on the child's early relations with the mother... the pre-Oedipal or Kleinian mother"; and Lacan's rereading of Freud—"characteristically, Lacan insists that his return to Freud supplies the only valid model"—formed a basic conceptual starting-point in that oppositional strategy.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue", jokes, and the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in subjects' own constitution of themselves. In "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud," he proposes that "the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious the whole structure of language". The unconscious is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. Lacan is associated with the idea that "the unconscious is structured like a language", but the first time this sentence occurs in his work, he clarifies that he means that both the unconscious and language are structured, not that they share a single structure; and that the structure of language is such that the subject cannot necessarily be equated with the speaker. This results in the self being denied any point of reference to which to be "restored" following trauma or a crisis of identity.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: André Green objected that "when you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition doesn't work for a minute. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says is constituted by thing-presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong to the pre-conscious". Freud certainly contrasted "the presentation of the "word" and the presentation of the "thing"... the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone" in his metapsychology. Dylan Evans, however, in his "Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis," "... takes issue with those who, like André Green, question the linguistic aspect of the unconscious, emphasizing Lacan's distinction between "das Ding" and "die Sache" in Freud's account of thing-presentation". Green's criticism of Lacan also included accusations of intellectual dishonesty, he said, "[He] cheated everybody... the return to Freud was an excuse, it just meant going to Lacan."


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage, which he described as "formative of the function of the 'I' as revealed in psychoanalytic experience." By the early 1950s, he came to regard the mirror stage as more than a moment in the life of the infant; instead, it formed part of the permanent structure of subjectivity. In the "imaginary order", the subject's own image permanently catches and captivates the subject. Lacan explains that "the mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: As this concept developed further, the stress fell less on its historical value and more on its structural value. In his fourth seminar, "La relation d'objet", Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship. "


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The mirror stage describes the formation of the ego via the process of objectification, the ego being the result of a conflict between one's perceived visual appearance and one's emotional experience. This identification is what Lacan called "alienation". At six months, the baby still lacks physical co-ordination. The child is able to recognize itself in a mirror prior to the attainment of control over their bodily movements. The child sees its image as a whole and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the lack of co-ordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. The child experiences this contrast initially as a rivalry with its image, because the wholeness of the image threatens the child with fragmentation—thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the child identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart forms the ego. Lacan understood this moment of identification as a moment of jubilation, since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery; yet when the child compares its own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother, a depressive reaction may accompany the jubilation.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic", since it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth". The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of his or her body as fragmented, induces a movement from "insufficiency to anticipation". In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In the mirror stage a "misunderstanding" ("méconnaissance") constitutes the ego—the "me" ("moi") becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. The mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension, due to the presence of the figure of the adult who carries the infant. Having jubilantly assumed the image as their own, the child turns their head towards this adult, who represents the big other, as if to call on the adult to ratify this image.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: While Freud uses the term "other", referring to "der Andere" (the other person) and "das Andere" (otherness), Lacan (influenced by the seminar of Alexandre Kojève) theorizes alterity in a manner more closely resembling Hegel's philosophy.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts: the big other ("l'Autre") is designated "A", and the little other ("l'autre") is designated "a". He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: "the analyst must be imbued with the difference between "A" and "a", so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other". Dylan Evans explains that:


title: Jacques Lacan

text: For Lacan "the Other must first of all be considered a locus in which speech is constituted," so that the other as another subject is secondary to the other as symbolic order. We can speak of the other "as a subject" in a secondary sense only when a subject occupies this position and thereby embodies the other for another subject.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In arguing that speech originates in neither the ego nor in the subject but rather in the other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond the subject's conscious control. They come from another place, outside of consciousness"the unconscious is the discourse of the Other". When conceiving the other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: "It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child", Dylan Evans explains, "it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message". The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this other is not complete because there is a "lack (manque)" in the other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol "A"; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete other is the "barred other".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Feminist thinkers have both utilised and criticised Lacan's concepts of castration and the phallus. Feminists such as Avital Ronell, Jane Gallop, and Elizabeth Grosz, have interpreted Lacan's work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Some feminists have argued that Lacan's phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of understanding gender biases and imposed roles, while others, most notably Luce Irigaray, accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. For Irigaray, the phallus does not define a single axis of gender by its presence or absence; instead, gender has two positive poles. Like Irigaray, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in criticizing Lacan's concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan considered psychic functions to occur within a universal matrix. The Real, Imaginary and Symbolic are properties of this matrix, which make up part of every psychic function. This is not analogous to Freud's concept of id, ego and superego since in Freud's model certain functions takes place within components of the psyche while Lacan thought that all three orders were part of every function. Lacan refined the concept of the orders over decades, resulting in inconsistencies in his writings. He eventually added a fourth component, the sinthome.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The Imaginary is the field of images and imagination. The main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, and resemblance. Lacan thought that the relationship created within the mirror stage between the ego and the reflected image means that the ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order". This relationship is also narcissistic.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis", Lacan argues that the Symbolic order structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has symbolic and Imaginary connotations—in its Imaginary aspect, language is the "wall of language" that inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. The Imaginary, however, is rooted in the subject's relationship with his or her own body (the image of the body). In "Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real", Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order. Instead, Lacan proposes the use of the symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary—the analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic", he argued, "is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification."


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In his Seminar IV, "La relation d'objet", Lacan argues that the concepts of "Law" and "Structure" are unthinkable without language—thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. This order is not equivalent to language, however, since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper to language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier—that is, a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity—that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack ("manque") connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (in German, ""das Ding an sich"") and the death drive that goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition""the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the person undergoing psychoanalysis. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan's concept of the Real dates back to 1936 and his doctoral thesis on psychosis. It was a term that was popular at the time, particularly with Émile Meyerson, who referred to it as "an ontological absolute, a true being-in-itself". Lacan returned to the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued to develop it until his death. The Real, for Lacan, is not synonymous with reality. Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also exterior to the Symbolic. Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions (i.e. presence/absence), "there is no absence in the Real". Whereas the Symbolic opposition "presence/absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place". If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements (signifiers), the Real in itself is undifferentiatedit bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real" in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things—things originally confused in the 'here and now' of the all in the process of coming into being". The Real is that which is outside language and that resists symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as "the impossible" because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety, insofar as it lacks any possible mediation and is "the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety "par excellence"."


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The term "sinthome" () was introduced by Jacques Lacan in his seminar "Le sinthome" (1975–76). According to Lacan, "sinthome" is the Latin way (1495 Rabelais, IV,63) of spelling the Greek origin of the French word "symptôme", meaning symptom. The seminar is a continuing elaboration of his topology, extending the previous seminar's focus ("RSI") on the Borromean Knot and an exploration of the writings of James Joyce. Lacan redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of his topology of the subject.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In "Psychoanalysis and its Teachings" ("Écrits") Lacan views the symptom as inscribed in a writing process, not as ciphered message which was the traditional notion. In his seminar "L'angoisse" (1962–63) he states that the symptom does not call for interpretation: in itself it is not a call to the Other but a pure "jouissance" addressed to no-one. This is a shift from the linguistic definition of the symptomas a signifierto his assertion that "the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys ("jouit") the unconscious in so far as the unconscious determines the subject". He goes from conceiving the symptom as a message which can be deciphered by reference to the unconscious structured like a language to seeing it as the trace of the particular modality of the subject's "jouissance".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan's concept of desire is related to Hegel's "Begierde", a term that implies a continuous force, and therefore somehow differs from Freud's concept of "Wunsch". Lacan's desire refers always to unconscious desire because it is unconscious desire that forms the central concern of psychoanalysis.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The aim of psychoanalysis is to lead the analysand to recognize his/her desire and by doing so to uncover the truth about his/her desire. However this is possible only if desire is articulated in speech: "It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term." And again in "The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis": "what is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence. The subject should come to recognize and to name her/his desire. But it isn't a question of recognizing something that could be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world." The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire; whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan distinguishes desire from need and from demand. Need is a biological instinct where the subject depends on the Other to satisfy its own needs: in order to get the Other's help, "need" must be articulated in "demand". But the presence of the Other not only ensures the satisfaction of the "need", it also represents the Other's love. Consequently, "demand" acquires a double function: on the one hand, it articulates "need", and on the other, acts as a "demand for love". Even after the "need" articulated in demand is satisfied, the "demand for love" remains unsatisfied since the Other cannot provide the unconditional love that the subject seeks. "Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second." Desire is a surplus, a leftover, produced by the articulation of need in demand: "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need". Unlike need, which can be satisfied, desire can never be satisfied: it is constant in its pressure and eternal. The attainment of desire does not consist in being fulfilled but in its reproduction as such. As Slavoj Žižek puts it, "desire's "raison d'être" is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan also distinguishes between desire and the drives: desire is one and drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire. Lacan's concept of ""objet petit a"" is the object of desire, although this object is not that towards which desire tends, but rather the cause of desire. Desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack ("manque").


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis" Lacan argues that "man's desire is the desire of the Other." This entails the following:


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Last but not least for Lacan, the first person who occupies the place of the Other is the mother and at first the child is at her mercy. Only when the father articulates desire with the Law by castrating the mother is the subject liberated from desire for the mother.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between drive ("Trieb") and instinct ("Instinkt"). Drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually around it. He argues that the purpose of the drive ("Triebziel") is not to reach a goal but to follow its aim, meaning "the way itself" instead of "the final destination"that is, to circle around the object. The purpose of the drive is to return to its circular path and the true source of "jouissance" is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit. Lacan posits drives as both cultural and symbolic constructs: to him, "the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial". He incorporates the four elements of drives as defined by Freud (pressure, end, object and source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and returns to the erogenous zone. Three grammatical voices structure this circuit:


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The active and reflexive voices are autoeroticthey lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears, implying that, prior to that instance, there was no subject. Despite being the "passive" voice, the drive is essentially active: "to make oneself be seen" rather than "to be seen". The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: To Freud sexuality is composed of partial drives (i.e. the oral or the anal drives) each specified by a different erotogenic zone. At first these partial drives function independently (i.e. the polymorphous perversity of children), it is only in puberty that they become organized under the aegis of the genital organs. Lacan accepts the partial nature of drives, but (1) he rejects the notion that partial drives can ever attain any complete organizationthe primacy of the genital zone, if achieved, is always precarious; and (2) he argues that drives are partial in that they represent sexuality only partially and not in the sense that they are a part of the whole. Drives do not represent the reproductive function of sexuality but only the dimension of "jouissance".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips (the partial object the breastthe verb is "to suck"), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces, "to shit"), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze, "to see") and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice, "to hear"). The first two drives relate to demand and the last two to desire.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The notion of dualism is maintained throughout Freud's various reformulations of the drive-theory. From the initial opposition between sexual drives and ego-drives (self-preservation) to the final opposition between the life drives ("Lebenstriebe") and the death drives ("Todestriebe"). Lacan retains Freud's dualism, but in terms of an opposition between the symbolic and the imaginary and not referred to different kinds of drives. For Lacan all drives are sexual drives, and every drive is a death drive ("pulsion de mort") since every drive is excessive, repetitive and destructive.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The drives are closely related to desire, since both originate in the field of the subject. But they are not to be confused: drives are the partial aspects in which desire is realizeddesire is one and undivided, whereas the drives are its partial manifestations. A drive is a demand that is not caught up in the dialectical mediation of desire; drive is a "mechanical" insistence that is not ensnared in demand's dialectical mediation.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Building on Freud's "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life", Lacan long argued that "every unsuccessful act is a successful, not to say 'well-turned', discourse", highlighting as well "sudden transformations of errors into truths, which seemed to be due to nothing more than perseverance". In a late seminar, he generalised more fully the psychoanalytic discovery of "truth—arising from misunderstanding", so as to maintain that "the subject is naturally erring... discourse structures alone give him his moorings and reference points, signs identify and orient him; if he neglects, forgets, or loses them, he is condemned to err anew".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Because of "the alienation to which speaking beings are subjected due to their being in language", to survive "one must let oneself be taken in by signs and become the dupe of a discourse... [of] fictions organized in to a discourse". For Lacan, with "masculine knowledge irredeemably an erring", the individual "must thus allow himself to be fooled by these signs to have a chance of getting his bearings amidst them; he must place and maintain himself in the wake of a discourse... become the dupe of a discourse... "les non-dupes errent"".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan comes close here to one of the points where "very occasionally he sounds like Thomas Kuhn (whom he never mentions)", with Lacan's "discourse" resembling Kuhn's "paradigm" seen as "the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: The "variable-length psychoanalytic session" was one of Lacan's crucial clinical innovations, and a key element in his conflicts with the IPA, to whom his "innovation of reducing the fifty-minute analytic hour to a Delphic seven or eight minutes (or sometimes even to a single oracular "parole" murmured in the waiting-room)" was unacceptable. Lacan's variable-length sessions lasted anywhere from a few minutes (or even, if deemed appropriate by the analyst, a few seconds) to several hours. This practice replaced the classical Freudian "fifty minute hour".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: With respect to what he called "the cutting up of the 'timing'", Lacan asked the question: "Why make an intervention impossible at this point, which is consequently privileged in this way?" By allowing the analyst's intervention on timing, the variable-length session removed the patient's—or, technically, "the analysand's"—former certainty as to the length of time that they would be on the couch. When Lacan adopted the practice, "the psychoanalytic establishment were scandalized"—and, given that "between 1979 and 1980 he saw an average of ten patients an hour", it is perhaps not hard to see why: "psychoanalysis reduced to zero", if no less lucrative.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: At the time of his original innovation, Lacan described the issue as concerning "the systematic use of shorter sessions in certain analyses, and in particular in training analyses"; and in practice it was certainly a shortening of the session around the so-called "critical moment" which took place, so that critics wrote that 'everyone is well aware what is meant by the deceptive phrase "variable length"... sessions systematically reduced to just a few minutes'. Irrespective of the theoretical merits of breaking up patients' expectations, it was clear that "the Lacanian analyst never wants to 'shake up' the routine by keeping them for more rather than less time". Lacan's shorter sessions enabled him to take many more clients than therapists using orthodox Freudian methods, and this growth continued as Lacan's students and followers adopted the same practice.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Accepting the importance of "the critical moment when insight arises", object relations theory would nonetheless quietly suggest that "if the analyst does not provide the patient with space in which nothing "needs" to happen there is no space in which something "can" happen". Julia Kristeva, if in very different language, would concur that "Lacan, alert to the scandal of the timeless intrinsic to the analytic experience, was mistaken in wanting to ritualize it as a technique of scansion (short sessions)".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: According to Jean-Michel Rabaté, Lacan in the mid-1950s classed the seminars as commentaries on Freud rather than presentations of his own doctrine (like the writings), while Lacan by 1971 placed the most value on his teaching and "the interactive space of his seminar" (in contrast to Sigmund Freud). Rabaté also argued that from 1964 onward, the seminars include original ideas. However, Rabaté also wrote that the seminars are "more problematic" because of the importance of the interactive performances, and because they were partly edited and rewritten.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Most of Lacan's psychoanalytic writings from the 1940s through to the early 1960s were compiled with an index of concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller in the 1966 collection, titled simply "Écrits". Published in French by Éditions du Seuil, they were later issued as a two-volume set (1970/1) with a new "Preface". A selection of the writings (chosen by Lacan himself) were translated by Alan Sheridan and published by Tavistock Press in 1977. The full 35-text volume appeared for the first time in English in Bruce Fink's translation published by Norton & Co. (2006). The "Écrits" were included on the list of 100 most influential books of the 20th century compiled and polled by the broadsheet "Le Monde".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan's writings from the late sixties and seventies (thus subsequent to the 1966 collection) were collected posthumously, along with some early texts from the nineteen thirties, in the Éditions du Seuil volume "Autres écrits" (2001).


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Although most of the texts in "Écrits" and "Autres écrits" are closely related to Lacan's lectures or lessons from his Seminar, more often than not the style is denser than Lacan's oral delivery, and a clear distinction between the writings and the transcriptions of the oral teaching is evident to the reader.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Jacques-Alain Miller is the sole editor of Lacan's seminars, which contain the majority of his life's work. "There has been considerable controversy over the accuracy or otherwise of the transcription and editing", as well as over "Miller's refusal to allow any critical or annotated edition to be published". Despite Lacan's status as a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, some of his seminars remain unpublished. Since 1984, Miller has been regularly conducting a series of lectures, "L'orientation lacanienne." Miller's teachings have been published in the US by the journal "Lacanian Ink."


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Lacan's writing is notoriously difficult, due in part to the repeated Hegelian/Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from other psychoanalytic and philosophical theory, and an obscure prose style. For some, "the impenetrability of Lacan's prose... [is] too often regarded as profundity precisely because it cannot be understood". Arguably at least, "the imitation of his style by other 'Lacanian' commentators" has resulted in "an obscurantist antisystematic tradition in Lacanian literature".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Although Lacan is a major influence on psychoanalysis in France and parts of Latin America, in the English-speaking world his influence on clinical psychology has been far less and his ideas are best known in the arts and humanities. However, there are Lacanian psychoanalytic societies in both North America and the United Kingdom that carry on his work.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: One example of Lacan's work being practiced in the United States is found in the works of Annie G. Rogers ("A Shining Affliction"; "The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma"), which credit Lacanian theory for many therapeutic insights in successfully treating sexually abused young women. Lacan's work has also reached Quebec, where The Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research and Clinical and Cultural Interventions (GIFRIC) claims that it has used a modified form of Lacanian psychoanalysis in successfully treating psychosis in many of its patients, a task once thought to be unsuited for psychoanalysis, even by psychoanalysts themselves.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In his introduction to the 1994 Penguin edition of Lacan's "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis", translator and historian David Macey describes Lacan as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory, and clinical psychoanalysis. In 2003, Rabaté described "The Freudian Thing" (1956) as one of his "most important and programmatic essays".


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In "Fashionable Nonsense" (1997), Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticize Lacan's use of terms from mathematical fields such as topology, accusing him of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts that he does not understand, accusing him of producing statements that are not even wrong. However, they note that they do not want to enter into the debate over the purely psychoanalytic part of Lacan's work.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Other critics have dismissed Lacan's work wholesale. called it an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish", and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan". The former Lacanian analyst Dylan Evans (who published a dictionary of Lacanian terms in 1996) eventually dismissed Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and as harming rather than helping patients, and has criticized Lacan's followers for treating his writings as "holy writ". Richard Webster has decried what he sees as Lacan's obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant "Cult of Lacan". Others have been more forceful still, describing him as "The Shrink from Hell" and listing the many associates—from lovers and family to colleagues, patients, and editors—left damaged in his wake. Roger Scruton included Lacan in his book "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left", and named him as the only 'fool' included in the book—his other targets merely being misguided or frauds.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: His type of charismatic authority has been linked to the many conflicts among his followers and in the analytic schools he was involved with. His intellectual style has also come in for much criticism. Eclectic in his use of sources, Lacan has been seen as concealing his own thought behind the apparent explication of that of others. Thus his "return to Freud" was called by Malcolm Bowie "a complete pattern of dissenting assent to the ideas of Freud Lacan's argument is conducted on Freud's behalf and, at the same time, against him". Bowie has also suggested that Lacan suffered from both a love of system and a deep-seated opposition to all forms of system.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Many feminist thinkers have criticised Lacan's thought. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray accuses Lacan of perpetuating phallocentric mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse. Others have echoed this accusation, seeing Lacan as trapped in the very phallocentric mastery his language ostensibly sought to undermine. The result—Castoriadis would maintain—was to make all thought depend upon himself, and thus to stifle the capacity for independent thought among all those around him.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: Their difficulties were only reinforced by what Didier Anzieu described as a kind of teasing lure in Lacan's discourse; "fundamental truths to be revealed but always at some further point". This was perhaps an aspect of the sadistic narcissism that feminists especially accused Lacan of. Claims surrounding misogynistic tendencies were further fueled when his wife Sylvia Lacan referred to her late husband as a "domestic tyrant" during a series of interviews conducted by anthropologist Jamer Hunt.


title: Jacques Lacan

text: In a 2012 interview with "Veterans Unplugged", Noam Chomsky said: "quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential."


title: The Prisoner

text: The Prisoner is a 1967 British television series about an unnamed British intelligence agent who is abducted and imprisoned in a mysterious coastal village, where his captors designate him as Number Six and try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job. Patrick McGoohan played the lead role as Number Six. The series was created by McGoohan with possible contributions from George Markstein. Episode plots have elements of science fiction, allegory, and psychological drama, as well as spy fiction. It was produced by Everyman Films for distribution by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment.


title: The Prisoner

text: A single series of 17 episodes was filmed between September 1966 and January 1968, with exterior location filming in Portmeirion, Wales. Interior scenes were filmed at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood, north of London. The series was first broadcast in Canada beginning on 5 September 1967, in the UK on 29 September 1967, and in the US on 1 June 1968. Although the show was sold as a thriller in the mould of the previous series starring McGoohan, "Danger Man", its combination of 1960s countercultural themes and surrealistic setting had a far-reaching influence on science fiction and fantasy TV programming, and on narrative popular culture in general. Since its initial screening, the series has developed a cult following.


title: The Prisoner

text: A six-part TV miniseries remake aired on the US cable channel AMC in November 2009. In 2016, Big Finish Productions reinterpreted the series as an audio drama.


title: The Prisoner

text: The series follows an unnamed British man (McGoohan) who, after abruptly and angrily resigning from his high-ranking government job – apparently a secret service post – prepares to make a hurried departure from the country. The most he will later reveal about his resignation is that it was a "matter of conscience".


title: The Prisoner

text: While packing his luggage, he is rendered unconscious by knockout gas piped into his London home. When he wakes, he finds himself in a re-creation of the interior of his home, located in a mysterious coastal "village" within which he is held captive, isolated from the mainland by mountains and sea.


title: The Prisoner

text: Although internal physical movement of residents around the Village is unconstrained, the premises are secured by numerous high-tech monitoring systems and security forces, including a balloon-like automaton called Rover, that recaptures or kills those who attempt escape. The man encounters the Village's population, hundreds of people from all walks of life and cultures, all seeming to be peacefully and mostly enjoyably living out their lives. They do not use names, but have been assigned numbers which, aside from designations such as Two, Three, and Six, give no clue as to any person's status within the Village, whether as prisoners or guards. Potential escapees, therefore, have no idea whom they can and cannot trust. The protagonist is assigned Number Six, but he repeatedly refuses the pretence of his new identity.


title: The Prisoner

text: Number Six is monitored heavily by the constantly-changing Number Two, the Village administrator, who acts as an agent for the unseen Number One. Several techniques are used by Number Two to try to extract information from Number Six, including hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation and forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion. All of these are employed not only to find out why Number Six resigned as an agent, but also to elicit other information he gained as a spy. The position of Number Two is assigned to a different person in each episode, with two making repeat appearances. This is assumed to be part of a larger plan to disorient Number Six, but sometimes the change of personnel seems to be the result of the failure of the previous incumbent, whose fate is unknown.


title: The Prisoner

text: Number Six, distrustful of everyone in the Village, refuses to co-operate or provide the answers they seek. He struggles, usually alone, with various goals, such as determining for which side of the Iron Curtain the Village functions, if either; remaining defiant to its imposed authority; concocting his own plans for escape; learning all he can about the Village; and subverting its operation.


title: The Prisoner

text: His schemes lead to the dismissals of the incumbent Number Two on several occasions (including one, played by Patrick Cargill, who is driven to paranoia and a near nervous breakdown). Despite foiling the system, however, Number Six never manages to escape successfully.


title: The Prisoner

text: By the end of the series, the administration, becoming desperate for Number Six's knowledge, as well as fearful of his growing influence in the Village, takes drastic measures that threaten the lives of Number Six, Number Two, and, indeed, the entire Village.


title: The Prisoner

text: A major theme of the series is individualism, as represented by Number Six, versus collectivism, as represented by Number Two and the others in the Village. McGoohan stated that the series aimed to demonstrate a balance between the two points.


title: The Prisoner

text: Number Six wakes up in the mysterious coastal location known to "residents" as the Village. Most of the "residents" are prisoners, with others embedded as spies or guards. The Village is surrounded by mountains on three sides and the sea on the other. Would-be escapees who make it to sea are tracked by CCTV and perimeter alerts, which trigger the arrival of Rover, a seemingly intelligent capture pod resembling a huge translucent white balloon. Rover repatriates escapees who make it to sea and occasionally kills (by absorbing and asphyxiating) whomever it is instructed to by Number Two and/or other high-ranking Village officials.


title: The Prisoner

text: Everyone uses numbers for identification, although names are infrequently used. Most of the villagers wear a standard outfit consisting of coloured blazers with piping, multicoloured capes, striped sweaters, plimsolls, and a variety of headwear, with straw boaters being prominent.


title: The Prisoner

text: Several facilities are listed on a local map of the Village, including the labour exchange, hospital, palace of fun (which is never seen), old people's home, and the green dome where Number Two resides. A taxi service operates around the village's buildings. The village of Portmeirion in north Wales was used extensively for exterior scenes of the Village.


title: The Prisoner

text: Rover has the capacity to subdivide, which is seen on one occasion. A robotic device was initially created as the prop for the series but it was replaced by meteorological balloons by the time filming began.


title: The Prisoner

text: The episodes featured guest stars in the role of Number Two. Of those listed below, only Leo McKern and Colin Gordon reprised the role.


title: The Prisoner

text: "The Prisoner" consists of 17 episodes, which were first broadcast from 29 September 1967 to 1 February 1968 in the United Kingdom. While the show was presented as a serialised work, with a clear beginning and end, the ordering of the intermediate episodes is unclear, as the production and original broadcast order were different. Several attempts have been made to create an episode ordering based on script and production notes, and interpretations of the larger narrative of Number Six's time in the Village.


title: The Prisoner

text: The opening and closing sequences of "The Prisoner" have become iconic and cited as "one of the great set-ups of genre drama", by establishing the Orwellian and postmodern themes of the series. The high production values of the opening sequence have been described as more like a feature film than a television programme.


title: The Prisoner

text: The show was created while Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein were working on "Danger Man" (known as "Secret Agent" in the US), an espionage show produced by Incorporated Television Company (also called ITC Entertainment). The exact details of who created which aspects of the show are disputed; majority opinion credits McGoohan as the sole creator of the series, but a disputed co-creator status was later ascribed to Markstein after a series of fan interviews were published in the 1980s. The show itself bears no "created by" credit.


title: The Prisoner

text: Some sources indicate McGoohan was the sole or primary creator of the show. McGoohan stated in a 1977 interview broadcast as part of a Canadian documentary about "The Prisoner" called "The Prisoner Puzzle" that, during the filming of the third series of "Danger Man", he told Lew Grade, managing director of ITC Entertainment, that he wanted to quit working on "Danger Man" after the filming of the proposed fourth series. Grade was unhappy with the decision, but when McGoohan insisted upon quitting, Grade asked if McGoohan had any other possible projects; McGoohan later pitched "The Prisoner". In a 1988 article from British Telefantasy magazine "Time Screen", though, McGoohan indicated that he had planned to pitch "The Prisoner" before speaking with Grade. In both accounts, McGoohan pitched the idea orally, rather than having Grade read the proposal in detail, and the two made an oral agreement for the show to be produced by Everyman Films, the production company formed by McGoohan and David Tomblin. In the 1977 account, McGoohan said that Grade approved of the show despite not understanding it; whereas, in the 1988 account, Grade expressed clear support for the concept.


title: The Prisoner

text: Other sources, however, credit Markstein, then a script editor for "Danger Man", with a significant or even primary portion of the development of the show. For example, Dave Rogers, in the book "The Prisoner and Danger Man", said that Markstein claimed to have created the concept first and McGoohan later attempted to take credit for it, although Rogers himself doubted that McGoohan would have wanted or needed to do that. A four-page document, generally agreed to have been written by Markstein, setting out an overview of the themes of the series, was published as part of an ITC/ATV press book in 1967. It has usually been accepted that this text originated earlier as a guide for the series writers. Further doubt has been cast on Markstein's version of events by author Rupert Booth in his biography of McGoohan, entitled "Not a Number". Booth points out that McGoohan had outlined the themes of "The Prisoner" in a 1965 interview, long before Markstein's tenure as script editor on the brief fourth series of "Danger Man".


title: The Prisoner

text: At any rate, part of Markstein's inspiration came from his research into the Second World War, where he found that some people had been incarcerated in a resort-like prison called Inverlair Lodge. Markstein suggested that "Danger Man"s main character John Drake (played by McGoohan) could suddenly resign and be kidnapped and sent to such a location. McGoohan added Markstein's suggestion to material he had been working on, which later became "The Prisoner". Furthermore, a 1960 episode of "Danger Man" entitled "View from the Villa" had exteriors filmed in Portmeirion, a Welsh resort village that struck McGoohan as a good location for future projects.


title: The Prisoner

text: According to "Fantasy or Reality" — a chapter of "The Prisoner of Portmeirion" — the Village is based, in part, on "a strange place in Scotland" operated by the Inter Services Research Bureau, wherein "people" with "valuable knowledge of one sort or another" were held prisoners on extended "holidays" in a "luxury prison camp". "The Prisoner"s story editor, George Markstein, this source contends, knows of "the existence of this 'secure establishment'". However, this "Scottish prison camp, in reality, was not, of course, a holiday-type village full of people wearing colourful" clothing.


title: The Prisoner

text: Further inspiration came from a "Danger Man" episode called "Colony Three", in which Drake infiltrates a spy school in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The school, in the middle of nowhere, is set up to look like a normal English town in which pupils and instructors mix as in any other normal city, but the instructors are virtual prisoners with little hope of ever leaving. McGoohan also stated that he was influenced by his experience from theatre, including his work in the Orson Welles play "Moby Dick—Rehearsed" (1955) and in a BBC television play, "The Prisoner" by Bridget Boland. McGoohan wrote a forty-page show Bible, which included a "history of the Village, the sort of telephones they used, the sewerage system, what they ate, the transport, the boundaries, a description of the Village, every aspect of it." McGoohan wrote and directed several episodes, often using pseudonyms. Specifically, McGoohan wrote "Free for All" under the pen name 'Paddy Fitz' (Paddy being the Irish diminutive for Patrick and Fitzpatrick being his mother's maiden name) and directed the episodes "Many Happy Returns" and "A Change of Mind" using the stage name 'Joseph Serf', the surname being ironically a word meaning a peasant who is under the control of a feudal master. Using his own name, McGoohan wrote and directed the last two episodes—"Once Upon a Time" and "Fall Out"—and directed "Free for All".


title: The Prisoner

text: In a 1966 interview for the "Los Angeles Times" by reporter Robert Musel, McGoohan stated: "John Drake of "Secret Agent" is gone." Furthermore, McGoohan stated in a 1985 interview that Number Six is not the same character as John Drake, adding that he had originally wanted another actor to portray the character. However, other sources indicate that several of the crew members who continued on from "Danger Man" to work on "The Prisoner" mistakenly considered it to be a continuation, and that McGoohan was continuing to play the character of John Drake. Author, Dave Rogers claims that Markstein had wanted the character to be a continuation of Drake, but by doing so would have meant paying royalties to Ralph Smart, the creator of "Danger Man". The second officially licensed though non-canonical novel based on "The Prisoner", published in 1969, refers to Number Six as "Drake" from its very first sentence: "Drake woke."


title: The Prisoner

text: The issue has been debated by fans and TV critics, with some stating the two characters are the same, based on the two characters appearing to share the same occupation. This fails to take into account that McGoohan played many spies over the course of his career, on stage in movies and film, and it is doubtful that they were all intended to be the same man.


title: The Prisoner

text: McGoohan had originally wanted to produce only seven episodes of "The Prisoner", but Grade argued that more shows were necessary in order for him to successfully sell the series to CBS. The exact number that was agreed to and how the series was to end are disputed by different sources.


title: The Prisoner

text: In an August 1967 article, Dorothy Manners reported that CBS had asked McGoohan to produce 36 segments, but he would agree to produce only 17. According to a 1977 interview, Lew Grade requested 26 episodes; McGoohan thought this would spread the show too thin, but was able to come up with 17 episodes. According to "The Prisoner: The Official Companion to the Classic TV Series", the series was originally supposed to run longer, but was cancelled, forcing McGoohan to write the final episode in only a few days.


title: The Prisoner

text: "The Prisoner" had its British premiere on 29 September 1967 on ATV Midlands, and the last episode first aired on 1 February 1968 on Scottish Television. The world broadcast premiere was on the CTV Television Network in Canada on 5 September 1967.


title: The Prisoner

text: Filming began with the shooting of the series' opening sequence in London on 28 August 1966, with location work beginning on 5 September 1966, primarily in Portmeirion village near Porthmadog, North Wales. This location partially inspired the show. At the request of Portmeirion's architect Clough Williams-Ellis, the main location for the series was not disclosed until the opening credits of the final episode, where it was described as "The Hotel Portmeirion, Penrhyndeudraeth, North Wales". Many local residents were recruited as extras. The Village setting was further augmented by the use of the backlot facilities at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood.


title: The Prisoner

text: Additionally, filming of a key sequence of the opening credits—and of exterior location filming for three episodes—took place at 1 Buckingham Place in London, which at the time was a private residence; it doubled as Number Six's home. The building is now a highlight of "Prisoner" location tours, and currently houses the headquarters of the Royal Warrant Holders Association. The episodes "Many Happy Returns", "The Girl Who Was Death" (the cricket match for which was filmed at four locations, with the main sequences filmed at Eltisley in Cambridgeshire) and "Fall Out" also made use of extensive location shooting in London and other locations.


title: The Prisoner

text: At the time, most British television was broadcast in black and white, but to reach the critical American audience, the show was filmed in colour.


title: The Prisoner

text: In his book about George Markstein, script editor of "The Prisoner" before he quit part way through the making of the series, author James Follett presented a more mundane alternative explanation for the existence of The Village that he and Markstein had cooked up many years after the series had ended. In Markstein's mind, a young John Drake, the lead character in the television series "Danger Man", might once have submitted a proposal for how to deal with retired secret agents who pose a security risk. Drake's idea was to create a comfortable retirement home where former agents could live out their final years, enduring firm but unobtrusive surveillance. Years later, Drake discovers that his idea has been put into practice, not as a benign means of retirement, but as an interrogation centre and prison camp. Outraged, Drake stages his own resignation, knowing he will be brought to The Village. He hopes to learn everything he can of how his idea has been implemented and find a way to destroy it. However, due to the range of nationalities and agents present in The Village, Drake realises he is not sure whose Village he is in one established by his own people, or by the other side. Drake's conception of the Village would have been the basis for declaring himself to be "Number One". Such an explanation would, of course, take away from Number Six's everyman status and does not chime with McGoohan's allegorical vision for the series.


title: The Prisoner

text: According to Markstein: "'Who is Number Six?' is no mystery he was a secret agent called Drake who quit."


title: The Prisoner

text: Markstein added:The prisoner was going to leave the Village and he was going to have adventures in many parts of the world, but ultimately he would always be a prisoner. By that I don't mean he would always go back to the Village. He would always be a prisoner of his circumstances, his situation, his secret, his background... and 'they' would always be there to ensure that his captivity continues.


title: The Prisoner

text: The finale of "The Prisoner" left open-ended questions, generating controversy and letters of outrage. Following the final episode, McGoohan "claimed he had to go into hiding for a while".


title: The Prisoner

text: Numerous editions of "The Prisoner" were released in the UK by companies such as Carlton, the copyright holder of the TV series. The first VHS and Betamax releases were through Precision Video in 1982 from 16mm original prints. They released four tapes, each with two episodes edited together; these were "The Arrival"/"The Schizoid Man", "Many Happy Returns"/"A. B. and C.", "Checkmate"/"Free For All" and "The General"/"The Chimes of Big Ben", thus omitting the final storyline. In 1986 Channel 5 Video (a now-defunct home video brand owned by Universal Pictures) released a series of all 17 episodes on VHS and LaserDisc. In 1993 PolyGram Video released the entire series plus a special feature called "The Best of The Prisoner" on five VHS cassette tapes.


title: The Prisoner

text: In North America, MPI Home Video released a total of 20 VHS videotapes in 1984 encompassing the entire series: one tape for each of the 17 episodes plus three more containing "The Alternate Version of 'The Chimes of Big Ben'", a documentary, and a "best of" retrospective. MPI also released editions of nine LaserDiscs in 1988 and 1998, the last disc of which comprised the final Episode 17, "Fall Out", plus "The Prisoner Video Companion" on side two.


title: The Prisoner

text: In 2000, the first DVD release in the UK was issued by Carlton International Entertainment, with A&E Home Video releasing the same DVDs in North America/Region 1 (in four-episode sets as well as a comprehensive 10-disc "mega-box" edition). A&E subsequently reissued the mega-box in a 40th anniversary edition in 2007. The A&E issue included an alternative version of "The Chimes of Big Ben" and the MPI-produced documentary (but not the redundant "best of" retrospective) among its limited special features. In Australia, Umbrella Entertainment released a DVD set in 2003. In 2005 DeAgostini in the UK released all 17 episodes in a fortnightly partwork series.


title: The Prisoner

text: "The Prisoner: 40th Anniversary Special Edition" DVD box-set released in 2007 featured standard-definition versions from high-definition masters created by Network. It also included a production guide to the series by Andrew Pixley.


title: The Prisoner

text: "The Prisoner: The Complete Series" was released on Blu-ray Disc in the United Kingdom on 28 September 2009, following in North America on 27 October 2009. The episodes were restored by Network to create new high-definition masters. The box-set features all 17 remastered episodes plus extensive special features, including the feature-length documentary "Don't Knock Yourself Out", a restored original edit of "Arrival" and extensive archive photos and production stills.


title: The Prisoner

text: "The Prisoner: 50th Anniversary Set" was released in the United Kingdom on 29 July 2019. It featured a six-disc Blu-ray collection with none of the extra material found on the DVD box-set released for the 40th anniversary included. The first half of Andrew Pixley's production book was now illustrated and presented in hardback, and text commentaries for every episode detailing the production story of the series were included for the first time. A six-CD set of remastered music was also included. Some additional extras were included such as an interview with McGoohan's daughter, Catherine. Missing from the set was the "Don't Knock Yourself Out" documentary, the script PDFs and some episode commentaries.


title: The Prisoner

text: In the late 1960s, the TV series quickly spawned three novels tied into the series. In the 1970s and into the 1980s, as the series gained cult status a large amount of fan produced material began to appear, with the official appreciation society forming in 1977. In 1988, the first officially sanctioned guide – "The Prisoner Companion" – was released. It was not well received by fans or Patrick McGoohan. In 1989, Oswald and Carraze released "The Prisoner" in France with a translated version appearing shortly after. From the 1990s, numerous other books about the TV series and Patrick McGoohan have been produced. Robert Fairclough's books - including two volumes of original scripts - are considered some of the best researched books available. For the 40th anniversary, Andrew Pixley wrote a well-received and in depth account of the series' production. There are guides to shooting locations in Portmeirion and also a biography of co-creator George Markstein. Some members of the production crew have released books about their time working on the series including Eric Mival and Ian Rakoff. Roger Langley the organiser of the "Six of One" "The Prisoner" appreciation society has published several books, guides and novels inspired by the TV series (including "Patrick McGoohan: Danger Man or Prisoner?" first published in 2007 and revised and updated in 2017 with input from Catherine McGoohan).


title: The Prisoner

text: In the early 1980s, Edu-Ware produced two computer games based upon the series for the Apple II computer. The first, titled simply, "The Prisoner", was released in 1980, followed by a remake, "Prisoner 2" in 1982.


title: The Prisoner

text: Steve Jackson Games' popular role-playing game system "GURPS" released a (now out of print) world book for "The Prisoner." It included maps, episode synopses, details of the Village and its inhabitants, and much other material. For instance, it has suggestions for game scenarios with the premise reinterpreted for outer space, heroic fantasy, horror, and even complete inversion into something akin to "Hogan's Heroes".


title: The Prisoner

text: In 1988, DC Comics released , the first part of a four-part series of comics based on the characters in the TV series. In 2018 Titan Comics re-issued "Shattered Visage" as well as releasing "The Prisoner: The Uncertainty Machine", another four-part series of comics about another spy returning to the Village. Although Patrick McGoohan's Number Six is depicted on covers of the 2018 series, the character plays no direct role in the story.


title: The Prisoner

text: In 2009, the show was remade as a miniseries, also titled "The Prisoner", which aired in the U.S. on AMC. The miniseries stars Jim Caviezel as Number 6, and Ian McKellen as Number 2, and was shot on location in Namibia and South Africa. The new series received mainly unfavourable reviews, with a 45/100 rating by 21 critics and 3.6/10 by 82 users as of July 2018.


title: The Prisoner

text: Christopher Nolan was reported to be considering a film version in 2009, but later dropped out of the project. The producer Barry Mendel said a decision to continue with the project depended on the success of the television mini-series. In 2016, Ridley Scott was in talks to direct the screen version.


title: The Prisoner

text: On 5 January 2015, Big Finish Productions, best known for its long-running series of BBC-licensed audio dramas based upon "Doctor Who", announced that it would be producing licensed audio dramas based on "The Prisoner", with the first scheduled for release in 2016, and that Mark Elstob would play Number Six. The first series, containing new reimaginings of three original series scripts, "Arrival", "The Schizoid Man" and "The Chimes of Big Ben", and one new story, "Your Beautiful Village", written and directed by Nicholas Briggs, was released in January 2016 and was well received. The first series also featured John Standing, Celia Imrie, Ramon Tikaram and Michael Cochrane as Number Two and Helen Goldwyn as The Village Voice/Operations Controller.


title: The Prisoner

text: A second series was released in August 2017, comprising four stories; "I Met a Man Today" (adapted from "Many Happy Returns"), "Project Six" (adapted from "A, B and C"), an adaptation of "Hammer into Anvil", and new story "Living in Harmony" (not adapted from the TV episode of the same title).


title: The Prisoner

text: A third series was released in November 2019, comprising four stories; an adaptation of "Free For All", and new stories "The Girl Who Was Death" (using story elements, but not directly adapted, from the TV episode of the same title), "The Seltzman Connection", and "No One Will Know".


title: The Prisoner

text: These audio dramas have been broadcast by BBC Radio 4 Extra as part of its The 7th Dimension programming.


title: Alchemical symbol

text: Alchemical symbols, originally devised as part of alchemy, were used to denote some elements and some compounds until the 18th century. Although notation like this was mostly standardized, style and symbol varied between alchemists, so this page mainly lists the most common ones.


title: Alchemical symbol

text: According to Paracelsus (1493–1541), the three primes or "tria prima" – of which material substances are immediately composed – are:


title: Alchemical symbol

text: The seven metals known since Classical times in Europe were associated with the seven classical planets; this figured heavily in alchemical symbolism. The exact correlation varied over time, and in early centuries bronze or electrum were sometimes found instead of mercury, or copper for Mars instead of iron; however, gold, silver, and lead had always been associated with the Sun, Moon, and Saturn.


title: Alchemical symbol

text: The associations below are attested from the 7th century and had stabilized by the 15th. They started breaking down with the discovery of antimony, bismuth, and zinc in the 16th century. Alchemists would typically call the metals by their planetary names, e.g. "Saturn" for lead, "Mars" for iron; compounds of tin, iron, and silver continued to be called "jovial", "martial", and "lunar"; or "of Jupiter", "of Mars", and "of the moon", through the 17th century. The tradition remains today with the name of the element mercury, where chemists decided the planetary name was preferable to common names like "quicksilver", and in a few archaic terms such as lunar caustic (silver nitrate) and saturnism (lead poisoning).


title: Alchemical symbol

text: The alchemical magnum opus was sometimes expressed as a series of chemical operations. In cases where these numbered twelve, each could be assigned one of the Zodiac signs as a form of cryptography. The following example can be found in Pernety's "Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique" (1758):


title: Alchemical symbol

text: The Alchemical Symbols block was added to Unicode in 2010 as part of Unicode 6.0. Many of the symbols are duplicates or redundant with previous characters.


title: Alchemical symbol

text: Few fonts support more than a few characters in this block as of 2021. One that does and is free for personal use is "Symbola" 14.0.


title: Alchemical symbol

text: The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Alchemical Symbols block:


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) maintains foreign relations with many non-member countries across the globe. NATO runs a number of programs which provide a framework for the partnerships between itself and these non-member nations, typically based on that country's location. These include the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and the Partnership for Peace.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Six EU member states, all who have declared their non-alignment with military alliances, are not NATO members: Austria, Cyprus, Finland, Ireland, Malta, and Sweden. Additionally, Switzerland, which is surrounded by the EU, has also maintained their neutrality by remaining a non-EU-member. All these countries except Cyprus have joined the Partnership for Peace programme, while Sweden and Finland signed a specific host country support agreement with NATO in 2014. NATO also reportedly has diplomatic relations with the 5 European microstates: Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, and Vatican City. These microstates (who are neutral, surrounded by NATO members, and have only nominal militaries) are part of the OSCE but do not participate in NATO's PfP.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Armenia has maintained positive relations with NATO members and has signed up for the Partnership for Peace programme, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and the Individual Partnership Action Plan. However, Armenia is unlikely to join NATO as its policies often align it closer with Russia, and it remains a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Armenia pulled out of its participation in NATO military exercises in Georgia on 8 May 2009, because of NATO's Secretary-General's alleged support of Azerbaijan, possibly making it even less likely that Armenia would eventually join NATO. Armenia does however participate in certain NATO peacekeeping operations. Armenia deploys approximately 130 soldiers in Afghanistan, as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). They are serving under German command protecting an airport in Konduz.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Azerbaijan was originally a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, but has since committed to a policy of neutrality in 1999. While President Ilham Aliyev has generally supported non-belligerency (though not neutrality due to the unresolved conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh) since his rise to power in 2003, Azerbaijan has hosted NATO military exercises and high-profile meetings in 2009. Azerbaijan made its policy of not being aligned with a geopolitical/military structure official when it became a full member of the Non-Aligned Movement in 2011.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: The unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict would present a major roadblock to Azerbaijani membership of NATO, with concerns that this would lead to stronger Russian support of Armenia in the dispute.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Cyprus is the only EU member state that is neither a NATO member state nor a member of the PfP program. The Parliament of Cyprus voted in February 2011 to apply for membership in the program, but President Demetris Christofias vetoed the decision as it would hamper his attempts to negotiate an end to the Cyprus dispute and demilitarize the island. Turkey, a full member of NATO, is likely to veto any attempt by Cyprus to engage with NATO until the dispute is resolved. The winner of Cyprus' presidential election in February 2013, Nicos Anastasiades, stated that he intended to apply for membership in the PfP program soon after taking over. Foreign minister Nicos Christodoulides dismissed Cypriot membership of NATO or Partnership for Peace, preferring to keep Cyprus’ foreign and defence affairs within the framework of the European Union.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Finland participates in nearly all sub-areas of the Partnership for Peace programme, and has provided peacekeeping forces to both the Afghanistan and Kosovo missions. However, a 2005 poll indicated that the public was strongly against NATO membership. The possibility of Finland's membership in NATO was one of the most important issues debated in relation to the Finnish presidential election of 2006.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: The main opposition candidate in the 2006 election, current president Sauli Niinistö of the National Coalition Party, supported Finland joining a "more European" NATO. Fellow right-winger Henrik Lax of the Swedish People's Party likewise supported the concept. On the other side, president Tarja Halonen of the Social Democratic Party opposed changing the status quo, as did most other candidates in the election. Her victory and re-election to the post of president put the issue of a NATO membership for Finland on hold for the duration of her term. Finland could however change its official position on NATO membership after the new EU treaty clarifies if there will be any new EU-level defence deal, but in the meantime Finnish Defence Forces are making technical preparations for membership, stating that it would increase Finland's security.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Other political figures of Finland who have weighed in with opinions include former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari who has argued that Finland should join all the organizations supported by other Western democracies in order "to shrug off once and for all the burden of Finlandization". Another ex-president, Mauno Koivisto, opposed the idea, arguing that NATO membership would ruin Finland's relations with Russia. Finland has received some very critical feedback from Russia for even considering the possibility of joining NATO, with a 2009 study suggesting this could have repercussions for Russia's relations with the EU and NATO as a whole. In October 2009, Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen reiterated that Finland had no plans to join NATO, and stated that the main lesson of the 2008 South Ossetia war was the need for closer ties to Russia. In September 2014, Finland signed an agreement with NATO that allows NATO and Finland to hold joint exercises on Finnish soil and permits assistance from NATO members in situations such as "disasters, disruptions, and threats to security." As such, Finland (and Sweden) participated in the 2015 NATO-led Arctic Challenge Exercise.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Polling conducted following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, 53% of respondents were in favour of Finnish membership of the Alliance, with 28% against and 19% undecided. If Sweden were also to join NATO, the figure goes up to 66% in favor and the opposition drops to 20%.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Following talks between NATO's foreign ministers which Finland and Sweden attended in April 2022, US officials estimated that Finland would apply for NATO membership in June. On 12 May 2022, Finnish president Sauli Niinistö and prime minister Sanna Marin announced in a joint press conference that Finland would seek NATO membership "without delay". Both Finland and Sweden submitted their applications to join NATO on 18 May 2022.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Ireland has been a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) programme since 1999, and is a member of the alliance's Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), but has never officially applied to join as a full NATO member due to its traditional policy of military neutrality. Ireland participates in the PfP Planning and Review Process (PARP), which aims to increase the interoperability of the Irish military, the Defence Forces, with other NATO member states and bring them into line with accepted international standards so as to successfully deploy with other professional military forces on peacekeeping operations overseas.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Irish government policy for the deployment of troops to NATO-led missions requires that the missions be mandated by the United Nations (UN Security Council resolution or UN General Assembly resolution), cabinet-backed and approved by Dáil Éireann (the Irish parliament). This is known as Ireland's "triple lock". Ireland supplied a limited number of troops to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan (2001-2014) and supports the ongoing NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR), as these were sanctioned by UNSC resolutions.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Public opinion in Ireland continues to favour a policy of neutrality in armed conflicts, and currently no major political party fully supports ascension into NATO. There has been, and continues to be, a number of politicians who support Ireland joining NATO, mainly within the centre-right Fine Gael party, but the majority of politicians still do not. It is widely understood that a referendum would have to be held before any changes could be made to neutrality or to joining NATO. Former Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen said during a visit to the country in 2013 that the "door is open" for Ireland to join NATO at any time.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Kosovo submitted an application to join the PfP program in July 2012, though its lack of recognition by four NATO member states could impede its accession.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Moldova does not currently have plans to join NATO. It has participated in the Partnership for Peace programme and the Individual Partnership Action Plan. The former communist government was seen as more allied with Russia and is already a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States. In April 2009 Moldova announced it would not participate in the June NATO military exercises. The new ruling party, the Alliance for European Integration, elected in the July 2009 Moldovan parliamentary election, declined to take any action to either move it toward membership, or withdraw from the Commonwealth of Independent States, and denied plans to do either. Moldova also has an ongoing internal conflict with the territory of Transnistria.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: In April 2009, the Polish Foreign Minister, Radosław Sikorski, suggested including Russia in NATO. In March 2010 this suggestion was repeated in an open letter co-written by German defense experts General Klaus Naumann, Frank Elbe, Ulrich Weisser, and former German Defense Minister Volker Rühe. In the letter it was suggested that Russia was needed in the wake of an emerging multi-polar world in order for NATO to counterbalance emerging Asian powers. However Russian leadership has made it clear that Russia does not plan to join the alliance, preferring to keep cooperation on a lower level. The Russian envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, is quoted as saying "Great powers don't join coalitions, they create coalitions. Russia considers itself a great power," although he said that Russia did not rule out membership at some point in the future.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: NATO historically fought Bosnian-Serbian forces during the Bosnia war and intervened in 1999 in the Kosovo War by bombing targets in Serbia (then part of FR Yugoslavia). After the overthrow of President Slobodan Milošević, Serbia wanted to improve its relations with NATO. However, a future membership in the military alliance remained highly controversial, because among political parties and large sections of society there were still resentments due to NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. In the years under Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić the country (then Serbia and Montenegro) did not rule out joining NATO. But after Đinđić's assassination in 2003, Belgrade increasingly started preferring a course of military neutrality (officially declared in 2007).


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: The subsequent independence of Montenegro and Kosovo have strained relations between Serbia and NATO. Serbia however joined the Partnership for Peace programme during the 2006 Riga Summit. While this programme is sometimes the first step towards full NATO membership, it is uncertain whether Serbia perceives it as signaling an intent to join the alliance.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Following NATO's open support to Kosovo's declaration of independence in January 2008, support for NATO integration greatly dropped. An earlier poll in September 2007 had showed that 28% of Serbian citizens supported NATO membership, with 58% supporting the Partnership for Peace. The Democratic Party abandoned its pro-NATO attitude, claiming the Partnership for Peace is enough.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Although current Serbian priorities do not include NATO membership, the Alliance has offered Serbia an invitation to enter the intensified dialogue programme whenever the country is ready. On 1 October 2008, Serbian Defence Minister Dragan Šutanovac signed the Information Exchange Agreement with the NATO, one of the prerequisites for fuller membership in the Partnership for Peace programme.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: In 2015, Serbia implemented its first Individual Partnership Action Plan with NATO, regularly participates in its military maneuvers and hosted a joint civil protection exercise with NATO in 2018.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: In 1949 Sweden chose not to join NATO and declared a security policy aiming for non-alignment in peace and neutrality in war. Sweden joined Partnership for Peace in 1994. These ideological divides were visible again in November 2006 when Sweden could either buy two new transport planes or join NATO's plane pool, and in December 2006, when Sweden was invited to join the NATO Response Force. While the governing parties in Sweden have opposed membership, they have participated in NATO-led missions in Bosnia (IFOR and SFOR), Kosovo (KFOR), Afghanistan (ISAF) and Libya (Operation Unified Protector).


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: The Swedish left wing, including the Social Democratic party, the Green party and the Left party have historically remained in favor of non-alignment, along with the nationalist Sweden Democrats. The right wing, including the Moderate Party, the Centre party, the conservative Christian Democrats and the Liberal party make up the Swedish parties with representation in the parliament today that are in favor of NATO membership. Former Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt stated on 18 September 2007 that a Swedish membership in NATO would require a "very wide" majority in Parliament, including the Social Democrats, and coordination with Finland. Sweden signed in 2014, and ratified in 2016, a host country agreement with NATO allowing for NATO forces to conduct joint training exercises on Swedish soil and for NATO member states' forces to be deployed in Sweden in response to threats to Sweden's national security. In October 2014, an opinion poll found for the first time more Swedes in favor of NATO membership (37%) than opposed (36%).


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: If the situation in and around the Baltic countries were to escalate, Swedish NATO membership, possibly together with Finland, would reduce barriers to NATO intervention in the region. NATO reported in 2015 that Russia simulated a nuclear attack on Sweden in 2013. The Swedish government questioned Sweden's neutral status after the Russian intervention in Ukraine. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov threatened in 2016 to "take necessary measures" to prevent Swedish NATO membership. According to a poll conducted by Sifo in June 2016, more Swedes are against a Swedish NATO membership than in favour of one. A government-sponsored report on the future of Sweden's NATO membership was released in September 2016. The nationalist Sweden Democrats revised their stance in April 2022 and announced that they would support Swedish membership in NATO if Finland also joins. Around the same time, the Social Democrats announced that they would be "initiating a dialogue" internally to discuss NATO membership for a second time in 6 months. The first time, the party decided to oppose membership.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: Following talks between NATO's foreign ministers which Finland and Sweden attended in April 2022, US officials estimated that Sweden would follow Finland in filing a membership application. Both Sweden and Finland submitted their applications to join NATO on 18 May 2022.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: At the beginning of 2008, the Ukrainian President, Prime Minister and head of parliament sent an official letter to apply for the Membership Action Plan. The idea of Ukrainian membership in NATO has gained support from a number of NATO leaders. At the 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer declared in a press conference that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually join NATO. Within the NATO-Ukraine working commission, NATO officials reassured Ukraine officials that they are willing to invite their country to join the Alliance. The Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia, Alexander Grushko, announced that NATO membership for Ukraine was not in Russia's best interests and wouldn't help the relations of the two countries.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: According to numerous independent polls conducted between 2002 and the events of 2014, Ukrainian public opinion on NATO membership was split, with the majority of those polled against joining the military alliance and many identifying it as a threat. According to the FOM-Ukraine pollster, as of April 2009, 57% of Ukrainians polled were against joining the alliance, while 21% were in favor. A Gallup poll conducted in October 2008 showed that 45% associated NATO as a threat to their country, while only 15% associated it with protection. Ukrainian politicians such as Yuriy Yekhanurov and Yulia Tymoshenko stated Ukraine would not join NATO as long as the public continued opposing the move. In 2008 the Ukrainian government started an information campaign, aimed at informing the Ukrainian people about the consequences of membership.


title: Foreign relations of NATO

text: The 2010 election returned Viktor Yanukovych as Ukrainian President and marked a turnaround in Ukraine's relations with NATO. In February 2010, he stated that Ukraine's relations with NATO were currently "well-defined", and that there was "no question of Ukraine joining NATO". He said the issue of Ukrainian membership of NATO might "emerge at some point, but we will not see it in the immediate future." While visiting Brussels in March 2010, he further stated that there would be no change to Ukraine's status as a member of the alliance's outreach program. He later reiterated during a trip to Moscow that Ukraine would remain a "European, non-aligned state." Then, on 3 June 2010 the Ukrainian parliament voted to exclude the goal of "integration into Euro-Atlantic security and NATO membership" from the country's national security strategy in a bill drafted by Yanukovych himself.