History of this site

My name is Dr. Jacques Siboni and I work mainly as a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst in Paris 18. But my works with psychoanalysis and my knowledge of computer sciences led me to create the Lutecium.org site, whose first object was to promote psychoanalysis as taught by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

This adventure started in the middle of the 90s.

• First, I started a discussion group called Freud-Lacan, dedicated to the discussion of both Freud and Lacan's theories and praxes, in both French and English. An expected side effect was the promotion of French among those who were not fluent in this language, but who were interested in Jacques Lacan's teaching.

• Then hundreds of people from more than 60 countries joined this group.

• Having access to a small number of audio recordings of the lectures done by Jacques Lacan in the 70s, I decided to record them digitally and transfer them to an Internet compatible format, in order to make these recordings available to our working group.

• The membership reacted very enthusiastically to being able to access those audio recordings. Formerly, only text transcriptions were available. A more complete working tool was therefore accessible to hundreds of students, scientists, and psychoanalysts.

• This prompted me to look for other existing recordings made by members of the public who had attended the lectures. I was fortunate enough as I was able to find 10 years worth of Lacan's seminars. Not all of them are yet available in MP3. But I am working on it. I have a particular debt of gratitude to l'École lacanienne de psychanalyse, in particular to its librarian Roland Léthier, who made 180 cassettes available to us.

• A new discussion group was created, Le Groupe de Travail Lutecium. This group is very active as it currently has more than 600 subscribers.

• Traffic on a site with such a specialised object as Lacanian psychoanalysis is very high. Between one and two GB of data are downloaded everyday.

• For Jacques Lacan's seminars, utterance is as important as the uttered text. Many people whose mother tongue is not French but who wish to work on Lacan can have access to these works.

• Data stored on tape deteriorate with time. I digitally transfer the tapes on CD. If properly looked after, they can last forever. I record them in WAV format, doing an initial exact duplicate, with no alterations or corrections. I plan to give a copy of these CDs to a French National Library, for safe keeping for future generations.

• The tapes are more than 25 years old, and have been copied many times. Therefore quality varies a lot from recording to recording. Each transfer needs a lot of signal processing, cleaning, filtering, normalizing, compressing and so on. The result is sometimes very good, sometimes hardly audible.

• Many contributions are available. They can be in the form of uploads to Lutecium, links pointing to other sites, or mirrors of other sites hosted on Lutecium.

• But Lutecium is not a one man adventure, it is a joint one. The major contributors are here. They deserve our deep gratitude, as do the hundreds who participate read, comment, or download our common production.

Jacques Siboni