Lacunae, the journal of the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland (APPI), published its tenth edition last month. It contains contributions from analysts such as Biagi-Chai, Maleval, Carbonell and Grigg, as well as several Irish practitioners. Two of the articles from the latest edition are available online for free for a limited time: ‘The Knotting of Language and the Body in Childhood’ by Neus Carbonell, and Russell Grigg’s ‘Mourning Desire’. The journal can be bought on request and will be available to purchase from the APPI site in the near future.

Newly-announced for publication this December is Bruce Fink’s latest work Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference, published by Polity. One of the fascinating things about this Seminar is that Lacan’s major reference is not to the plentiful works on transference produced by his psychoanalytic contemporaries in the 1950s, but to Plato’s The Symposium. The website of Wiley contains a table of contents offering some indications of the topics Fink will address. These include the different modes of love which Lacan discusses in Seminar VIII and the seminars around it – from courtly love, Christian love of one’s neighbour, and love as a form of narcissism.

The New Books in Psychoanalysis site, part of the New Books network, offers some great recordings of interviews with authors in the analytic field. Amongst them is an interview from June with Manya Steinkoler and Patricia Gherovici on their book Lacan on Madness: Yes You Can’t, which as previously mentioned was published in March. Listen here. Other interviews with prominent Lacanians whose works have been published recently can be found on the site here.

The latest edition of Psychoanalytical Notebooks, the journal of the London Society of the New Lacanian School, was released last month. Number 29 tackles Sexual Orientation as its topic and features articles by Jacques-Alain Miller, Pierre-Gilles Guéguen and Hervé Castanet amongst others.

Past editions from the fantastic journal UMBR(a), from 1996-2006, are now available online for free on its site. See the left-hand margin, under ‘Online/PDF’. More recent editions up to 2013 are available immediately above that link for sale and in print.

Finally among last month’s publications, the Annual Review of Critical Psychology produced its 2015 edition on Marxism and Psychology in June. It is available online for free here. Previous editions, going back to 1999, are also available on the site here.

With most psychoanalytic groups taking a break over the summer the events calendar is much quieter. However registration is now open for The European Foundation for Psychoanalysis’ 2015 conference Perversion Now, which will be hosted in London on 18th-20th September. The conference will be conducted in both French and English and all papers will be translated prior to presentation.

French-speakers may want to watch out for a new film by Arnaud Desplechin, Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse. A review of the film by psychoanalyst Yann Diener appeared in the French paper Libération in June, following its release on DVD. Diener detects that although Lacan is not portrayed in the film as such he is “implicit” through the image of the analyst smoking the famous twisted cigars that became Lacan’s hallmark. These Davidoff cigars were made out of three twisted skins knotted together, reminiscent of the way Lacan used knot theory to weave together the registers of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary in his work on the Borromean knot. The title of Desplechin’s film – Trois souvenirs… [Three Memories…] – perhaps also evokes the same.

Finally, those wanting to enrich their study of Lacan’s work with reference to psychiatry (the field of course which Lacan began in) will be pleased to know that all back issues of one of the world’s foremost psychiatric journals, World Psychiatry, are now available for free online here.

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