Among new books released last month was the collection Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious, edited by Patricia Gherovici and Christopher Christian. Refuting the accusation that psychoanalysis is an expensive luxury only for the wealthy, it shows how psychoanalytic principles are applied successfully to disenfranchised Latino populations. This published collection follows the 2014 documentary Psychoanalysis in El Barrio in which Christian and Gherovici present the experience of Latino psychoanalysts in the US bringing psychoanalysis to Latino communities through featured interviews with ten Latino analysts as well as their students. In itself the documentary builds from two important conferences on the same theme held in New York in 2013, co-sponsored by IPTAR and The New School.

The latest release from the Palgrave Lacan Series, newly-announced last month, will be Christos Tombras’ Discourse Ontology: Body and the Construction of a World, from Heidegger through Lacan. Due out in May, Tombras’ work opens up a dialogue between Heidegger’s philosophy of being and Lacan’s post-Freudian metapsychology. It reveals Lacan’s rupture with traditional philosophy and how it builds on Heidegger’s critique, describing “the ontological recursive construction of a shared ontic world”. Informed by the work of both thinkers, Tombras discusses time and the body in jouissance; the emergence of the divided subject and signifierness; truth, agency and the event; and being and mathematical formalisation. It’s available to pre-order from the publishers Palgrave Macmillan here. For those in the area, Tombras will also be speaking in Bristol, UK on 16th February in a public seminar conducted by CFAR and Bristol University on ‘Constructing an Ego – Inhabiting an Identity’.

Also newly-announced for publication in June is Boštjan Nedoh’s Ontology and Perversion: Deleuze, Agamben, Lacan. The book examines perversion as it emerges within contemporary thought, politics and culture, asking whether it is possible to think about an aesthetics – or even an ontology – of perversion. Lacan is one of three key thinkers from contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis whose work is employed, alongside Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, to suggest answers to this question. Nedoh himself is a Research Assistant at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana.

Shanna de la Torre’s excellent book Sex for Structuralists: The Non-Oedipal Logics of Femininity and Psychosis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) is the subject of the latest New Books in Psychoanalysis podcast in which the author chats to Jordan Osserman. The conversation ranges across the legacy of structuralism, Lacan’s use of Levi-Strauss and his influential text ‘The Effectiveness of Symbols’, and her experience of the GIFRIC and its 388 clinic in Quebec, which has been working with psychotic patients using a Lacanian approach since 1982.

The latest volume of the Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, on the Écrits, is now available and contains keynotes and papers from the 2018 Écrits Conference which took place in Gent last September. The University of Gent will also be hosting an upcoming Summer School on Seminar XXIII, providing an intensive study of Lacan’s Seminar on Joyce & The Sinthome and its relevance for today’s clinic and culture. Taking place across four days from 15th-17th July full details of the programme and registration can be found on the event’s site.

Additionally, Dries Dulsster and Stijn Vanheule at the University of Gent have co-authored a new theoretical paper on Lacanian supervision, which was published last month by Wiley and is available in full online. ‘On Lacan and Supervision: A Matter of Super-Audition’ discusses two principal ideas about supervision from Lacan’s work: the importance of the analyst’s sensitivity to the symbolic component of the unconscious, and the interrelation between language and jouissance.

Lacanian Compass released the January 2019 edition of its journal LCExpress last month. With the aim of publishing relevant texts for clinical use ahead of its study days and conferences, issue 4 of the fourth volume focuses on ‘The Clinical Case, is Interpretation and Transmission’ with a paper by María Josefina Sota Fuentes. Previous editions of the journal can also be read on the group’s site.

The Lacan Circle of Australia, an associate group of the New Lacanian School of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, has announced an exciting calendar of upcoming events for the next few months. Ahead of the next NLS Congress – Urgent! – which will be held in Tel Aviv at the start of June, the LCA will hold a Knotting Seminar on Fri 15th February chaired by Russell Grigg, with an introduction by Bernard Seynhaeve, and with clinical case presentations by Pamela King and Kate Briggs. The following day, Seynhaeve – current President of the NLS – will give the keynote of a Colloquium entitled ‘Urgent Questions! Urgent Cases!’ examining the recent new translations of Lacan’s last written work, the ‘Preface to the English Edition of Seminar XI’ and four previously untranslated sessions from Jacques-Alain Miller’s Course. The LCA also plans an international conference on The Real Unconscious taking place 13th-14th July, with the keynote presentation by Alexandre Stevens. Full details of all events are on the LCA’s site and remote access is available through Zoom for many, for those not based in Melbourne.

Ahead of the NLS Congress in June, the NLS is publishing several short interviews with analysts of the School discussing the theme, Urgent!, alongside short written contributions from the NLS’s key figures in the form of ‘Tidbits’ such as Bernard Seynhaeve’s on Freud’s “vital needs”. Registration is open now on the Congress’s new blog, which went live last month, and the Call for Papers is still open until 15th March.

A reminder also that the Call for Contributions deadline for the Clinical Study Day of PIPOL 9 is fast approaching with the closing date of 25th March. The conference itself – on the theme ‘The Unconscious and the Brain: Nothing in Common’ will take place in Brussels on 13th-14th July. The event also has a blog and registration is now open.

On the same theme, Lacanian Compass will be welcoming special guest Yves Vanderveken for a three-part event in New York from Fri 15th-Sun 17th March, ahead of PIPOL 9. The itinerary for ‘The Lacanian Unconscious – a No-Brainer’ will involve a free evening public lecture on the Friday, an all-day conference on Saturday, and Questions of the School on the Sunday.

The SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis is organising a talk with Jane Haynes – a founding member of the SITE who originally trained as an actor at the Royal Court Theatre; and Christopher Predergast, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and Fellow of the British Academy – on ‘Proust & Psychoanalysis’ at the October Gallery in London on 11th April. Tickets are available via Eventbrite.

Lastly, the Cyprus Society of the School of the Freudian Letter will be holding a seminar presented by Dr. Dimitra Gorgoli, Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst from Athens, on 2nd March, discussing ‘Clinical Structures: Obsessional Neurosis’. Full details and links to register are on the Society’s site.

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