• With Lacan Quotidien, the daily Lacanian newsletter, taking a break for the summer to resume in September, news from France has been somewhat scattered. This hiatus does however present the opportunity to catch-up on some recent translations into English of the service’s output. Amongst those worth checking out are two from former World Association of Psychoanalysis president Eric Laurent, ‘DSM Madness through the American Press’ on the forthcoming publication of the DSM-V diagnostic manual; and another intervention in the ongoing autism debate, ‘Autism: Epidemic or Ordinary State of the Subject?’

 

  • Israeli newspaper Haaretz also published an interview with Laurent in July, available here. He talks about his latest book, Lost in Cognition (which despite the English title is as yet only available in French) and why he is suspicious of the aim of unifying psychoanalysis and neuroscience, as figures like Kandel and Fonagy have made their project.


  • Julia Evans’ site LacanianWorks is emerging as a great source of material. In the past month a translation of Lacan’s 1947 article ‘British Psychiatry and the War’, published in French in the Autre Écrits but difficult to find in English, has been made available on this site. Certainly a resource worth keeping an eye on as updates are published frequently.

 

  • On a related note, Julia Evans and Bruno de Florence are organising a reading group beginning in London this September on Lacan’s Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. More details and how to participate here

 

  • You can now find a full English version of Françoise Wolff’s documentary Lacan parle (Lacan Speaks), featuring Lacan’s conference at the Louvain, and an interview with him the following day (in which he appears to be either very bored, tired or hungover), on YouTube here. Thanks to InternationalPsychoanalysis.net for the tip-off.

 

  • Those interested in Lacan’s formulas of sexuation from Seminar XX, Encore (reproduced in the image above) should find this talk by Levi S. Bryant, recorded recently at Dublin’s Independent College, on Lacan and Posthumanism very illuminating. The formulas are one of the most studied aspects of Lacan’s later work and Bryant offers some new perspectives in relation to the political and, his brain-child, object-oriented ontology.

 

  • Finally, the BBC’s Radio 4 archives has made available some of its output on psychoanalysis going back over 10 years. Here are links to shows looking at psychoanalysis and literature,  hysteria, and an excellent debate on the nature of psychoanalysis between Adam Phillips and Juliet Mitchell.