News – March 2023

News

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Starting with news of new books recently announced for the year ahead (in addition to the schedule featured in last month’s news update).

Firstly, Lacan, Jouissance and the Social Sciences: The One and the Many is the latest by Raul Moncayo and will be published by Routledge in early July. Using Lacan’s idea of surplus jouissance to understand four types of socio-economic value (productive value, exchange value, surplus value, and profit), Moncayo will locate different levels of “jouissance-value” as drivers of the movement of capital and organisation, and argue for the importance of the place of subjectivity in the study of leadership in cultural and political theory. Later in the year, Moncayo’s Lacanian Psychoanalysis and American Literature: Metaphoric Truth, Imaginary Fiction, Letter Jouissance, and Nomination will also be published by Routledge. Three classic works of nineteenth century literature are given a psychoanalytic treatment. Wuthering Heights, The Turn of the Screw, and The Purloined Letter are considered from the perspective of Lacan’s Seminar on the Logic of Fantasy, the object a, and the idea of the passage à l’acte. It is due for release in September.

Timothy Appleton’s A Lacanian Conception of Populism: Society Does Not Exist has been announced for publication by Routledge in September. Rather than equating hegemony with populism, Appleton views them as the result of different and even incompatible logics separated by competing perspectives on the social totality. Where “hegemony absolutises it, populism eviscerates it.” Appleton goes on to argue for a “populism of singularities”, a concept pertinent to the question of whether politics is ‘left’ or ‘right’, ‘truth’ or ‘post-truth’, among other things. As well as Lacan, his references include the work of Laclau, Badiou, Zizek, and Rancière.

A ‘Lacanian Clinic of Intersectional Humanity’ is the topic of Ricardo Espinoza Lolas’ Psychoanalysis for Intersectional Humanity: Sade Reloaded, also due out from Routledge in September. Combining aspects of feminism, critical theory, and the arts, his ambitious-sounding work attempts a “disarticulation of the categories of neurosis, psychosis and perversion of psychoanalysis and the suggestion of a new clinic and a new politics.”

Clinical Encounters and the Lacanian Analyst: Who’s Your Dora? by Dries Dulsster presents a collection of interviews with nine leading Lacanian psychoanalysts in which they offer accounts of the formative effects on their practice of work with those analysands who have most influenced their professional development. By asking the provocative question ‘Who’s your Dora?’, Dulsster gets frank testimony about the changes in the work that shaped these analysts as clinicians and thinkers. Bookended by two contexualising reflections, it is due for release in October by Routledge.

Announced for release in early Oct is On the History and Transmission of Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Speaking of Lacan by Chris Vanderwees, which brings together a series of conversations with experienced psychoanalysts discussing the history and transmission of Lacan’s work in North America. Practitioners from French and English-speaking Canada, the United States, and Mexico give an oral narrative which Vanderwees has then transcribed in a way that preserves the conversational tone of the encounters.

From the Palgrave Lacan Series will come Mohamed Tal’s The End of Analysis: The Dialectics of Symbolic and Real in October. What happens at the ‘end’ of a psychoanalysis? Tracing the theories from Freud to Lacan, Tal argues that “notions of mourning, renunciation, liquidation of transference, and traversal of fantasy cannot serve as a settlement for the castration complex (i.e., central to neurosis) but are rather prey to the castration complex itself.” Furthermore, he draws attention to the fantasies that analytic ideology sustains, arguing that in order for the analytic procedure to be complete psychoanalysis must leave these behind.

Finally, Betty Milan’s memoir of her analysis with Lacan in the 1970s and her play Goodbye Doctor, inspired by this experience, will be published in English in November under the title Analyzed by Lacan: A Personal Account. Milan herself provides an introduction, followed by a new interview with Mari Ruti. Milan’s story, and in particular the play, have recently been adapted into the movie Adieu Lacan by Richard C. Ledes. An interview with Ledes, by psychoanalyst Chris Vanderwees, was published in the latest issue of the journal ‘Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society’ and can be read online for free here.

Among new texts and resources, Richard G. Klein’s site at Freud2Lacan.com continues to be an invaluable treasure trove of rare materials and translations. In the past month he has provided several updates, including new translations on his Lacan page to help researchers, a revised version of the exhaustive list of who analysed whom, and a widened chronological biography of Freud.

An English translation of the interview that Jacques-Alain Miller gave in early March to French newspaper Libération marking the publication of Lacan’s Seminar on The Logic of Fantasy in France is now available thanks to translators Peggy Papada and Philip Dravers of the NLS. Miller’s comments mostly herald the new Seminar, but he also ends the interview by commenting on the recent trans debate, from which comes the new publication La Solution Trans, a collection of five case commentaries by Lacanian analysts of work with trans individuals.

Turning to events, the Center for the Clinical Arts will be hosting Gabriel Tupinambá on Thursday, April 6th at 6pm CST / 7pm EST / 8pm Brasília for an online event, ‘Some Remarks On the Theory of the Passe in Lacanian Psychoanalysis’. The presentation and discussion will take place on Zoom and simultaneous translations between English and Portuguese will be available. Register via Eventbrite through the link above.

The Cyprus Society of the SFL is organising a seminar event in Ispra, Italy on 12th of April responding to the question of ‘What is Psychoanalysis?’ The event will consist of two seminars presented by psychoanalysts of the School of the Freudian Letter, Petros Patounas and Penny Georgiou.

The Lacan Circle of Australia will be running a workshop on ‘Negativity in Psychoanalysis’, presented by David Ferraro, over four sessions from Monday 24th April in person in Melbourne and on Zoom. Full details and a link to register here.

The XXIst NLS Congress on ‘Discontent and Anxiety in the Clinic and in Civilisation’ will be on 20th-21st May, via Zoom. Registration is still open with an early bird rate now extended till 9th April. Clinical parallel sessions in English or in French (no translation) will be on the Saturday and plenary sessions will be held on the Sunday.

‘Class in the Clinic: History, Theory, Practice’ is an online conference which will take place on Fri 5th May. Organised by the Red Clinic, a UK-based project to provide free and low-cost psychoanalytic therapy to those without the means to access it otherwise, the event will attempt to think through the question of psychoanalysis and social class. Chaired by Cat Moir, speakers will be Elizabeth Ann Danto – whose seminal book Freud’s Free Clinics won both the Gradiva and Goethe awards; Lynne Layton, co-editor of the collection Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting; and Lacanian analyst Ian Parker, author of Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity.

Lastly, a special mention for a new collection of the late John Forrester’s lectures on psychoanalysis – Freud and Psychoanalysis: Six Introductory Lectures, edited by Lisa Appignanesi. Forrester’s books on psychoanalysis, including Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis and The Seductions of Psychoanalysis remain among the most rigorous and thought-provoking work in the field. This book of lectures – intended for undergraduates – promises to be a similarly precise and brilliant condensation. The Freud Museum London will be hosting an in-person book launch and drinks reception on 19th May.

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