This September is the 75th anniversary of Freud’s death, and to mark the occasion the Freud Museum in London – his final home – will be dedicating this year’s Freud Memorial Lecture to the impact of his passing. Prominent Lacanian author Prof Dany Nobus will give a talk entitled ‘Yom Kippur 1939: The Last Day of Freud’s Life and its Immediate Aftermath’ on 23rd September, 75 years to the day of Freud’s death. More details and a link to book tickets are on the Freud Museum’s site here http://www.freud.org.uk/events/75664/yom-kippur-1939-the-last-day-of-freuds-life-and-its-immediate-aftermath/.

The Freud Museum will also be hosting an event to promote Lacanian author and analyst Paul Verhaeghe’s latest book, What about me? The struggle for identity in a market-based society. The talk is coming up on 1st October; here is the link to register .

A long-awaited English translation of Eric Laurent’s excellent Lost in Cognition – his critique of the new cognitive behaviourist paradigm – was published last month. Laurent is of course one of the most well-known of Lacan’s former students and analysands, former President of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, and one of those who helped craft the eight Guiding Principles for Any Psychoanalytic Act which were adopted ten years ago at the WAP Congress in Comandatuba, Brazil. The book will be available on Amazon to American readers later this month but can be bought today with free worldwide delivery direct from the publishers, Karnac Books, on their site here.

Laurent will be speaking about the book in Dublin, Ireland on 13th September at a special seminar organised by the Irish Circle of the Lacanian Orientation. Full details of his talk and a link to register are on their site here.

Audio recordings of some of Lacan’s later seminars have recently started to appear on Radio Lacan. They include the first session from Seminar XXI in 1973, Les Non-dupes Errent and Radiophonie, a response to a series of questions from Robert Georgin which Lacan recorded for Belgian radio in June 1970 . The full list, so far, is available here.

A lot of events coming up in London offering the opportunity to study Lacan’s work.

Firstly, Bogdan Wolf, Janet Hanley, and Philip Dravers will be hosting a series of nine lessons to introduce the teaching and clinic of Jacques Lacan, running from October to July next year. ‘Nine Lacanian Lessons’ will address some of the crucial problems of psychoanalysis in the Lacanian orientation today. The full programme is available here and a link to register can be found here.

Secondly, ‘Interrogating Freud & Lacan’, a series of seven seminars organised by Julia Evans and Bruno de Florence will take place in London, starting in September. Proposed topics include Freud’s Project, the death drive, the cut or the creation of zero, and the clinic. The full programme and details of how to register are on Lacanian Works.

And finally in London, a series of workshops, ‘Investigating Psychopathology: Reading Freud with Lacan’ is being organised to kick off in September. Across six sessions participants will re-examine the staple psychopathological texts from Freud and what a Lacanian reading can add. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, ‘On Narcissism’ and ‘Notes on a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ will be discussed in a series that runs until June 2015. Scroll down this page for the times and dates.

“The universe is a flower of rhetoric”, Lacan said in Seminar XX (21st November 1972), and with the publication of Michael Kaplan’s review of Christian Lundberg’s Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and Rhetoric appearing in the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric in August it’s a good excuse to revisit Lundberg’s book on a subject that Lacan devoted a large portion of his teaching to. For Lacan, the psychoanalyst is a rhetorician. In Seminar XXV, The Moment to Conclude, in 1977, he goes as far as to say that “The psychoanalyst is a rhetor (rhêteur)”. (Seminar XXV, 15th November 1977), and his use of rhetoric and rhetorical devices is something we have looked at previously on this site. Tracing the heritage of Lacan’s thoughts on rhetoric from their roots in Aristotle’s theory of stasis and Quintilian’s notion of trope, Lundberg argues in his book that “Lacan’s theory of discourse ought not to be framed as a “structuralist poetics” but as a rhetorical theory of the circulation of tropes and affects in an economy of discourse”. Well worth checking out.

A reminder that Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups will be hosting its 12th annual conference next month in Toronto, with the collaboration of the group Lacan Toronto. Following the publication of an ‘official’ version of Seminar VI, Desire and its Interpretation, the conference is titled ‘On Desire’. More details in the announcement flyer here.

The SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis has a call for papers out for its Spring conference scheduled for May 2015 in London with the topic ‘On Conflict’. A holding page for the event is up here. but abstracts for papers lasting twenty minutes can be sent to the Conference Committee via the site by 31 October 2014.

Finally, issue 28 of Psychoanalytical Notebooks, The Child, was published last month with articles by Jacques-Alain Miller, Eric Laurent and Serge Cottet among others. It is available to buy on the Karnac Books site here.

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