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The final volume of the Reading Lacan’s Écrits series from Routledge, edited by Calum Neill, Derek Hook and Stijn Vanheule, is available for pre-order now ahead of its release in February. This volume covers the first eight chapters of the Écrits and encompasses extensive, paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries on the papers from ‘Overture to this Collection’ to ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’. It is the fourth volume in this series – the previous three are available here, here, and here covering the rest of the full Écrits. You can also get 20% off by ordering from the publishers directly, once it is available for pre-order with Routledge from 2nd February. Use the link and discount code at the top of this page to do so.

Released last month was Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis by Itzhak Benyamini, part of the Palgrave Lacan Series. Informed by Foucauldian discourse analysis, Benyamini argues how Lacan’s work was built from Judeo-Christian foundations, following Lacan’s work of the 1930s through to the 1950s with close readings that connect the concepts of the ‘Father’ and the ‘Other’ with themes from the Judeo-Christian traditions. Lacan attempted, he argues, to create a clinical ethic that would reflect neither a single worldview nor an ideology but be guided instead by the analysand’s desire alone.

Colette Soler’s Towards Identity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: A Lacanian Perspective is out now from Routledge, addressing the theme of identification and identity in the psychoanalytic clinic, and Lacan’s contribution to the topic over the course of his work. Soler highlights the paradox by which the subject is required to ‘speak themselves’ in analysis, yet finds their being is always elsewhere, “within other words that are yet to come.” Soler was a student of Lacan’s, a former Director of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne, and was at the forefront of the movement of the International School of Psychoanalysis and its Forums. She practices in Paris.

Also just published is Megan Sherritt’s Dancing an Embodied Sinthome: Beyond the Phallic Jouissance. This is the first book-length study of dance from a Lacanian perspective. Using the concept of the sinthome, Sherritt draws a comparison between how dance works and how Lacan believed writing operated for Joyce. Dance is “a process that likewise allows one to play with the real” but goes further in that “it teaches someone how to play if one doesn’t already know how.” Sherritt is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and completed her PhD at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, Canada.

Looking at newly-announced titles that will be coming out further ahead in the year, Stijn Vanheule’s Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy: The Story Behind Hope and Recovery is due out in September from Other Press and is available for pre-order now. Bruce Fink will also bring us Miss-ing: Psychoanalysis 2.0 in May, a new collection of essays which explore the idea of lack under multiple themes. And as we move into summer a new collection edited by Dan Collins and Eve Watson, Critical Essays on the Drive: Lacanian Theory and Practice, is due for release by Routledge in June, promising to explore clinical, theoretical, historical and cultural aspects of this key psychoanalytic concept.

The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association has just published a special issue on Lacan in America. Volume 71, Issue 5 is available with free access online and features papers by the likes of Derek Hook, Mitchell Wilson, Darian Leader, Jamieson Webster, and Stijn Vanheule. The journal is open to submissions from a Lacanian orientation, and this special issue attempts to bridge the divide between psychoanalytic thought in the US and Lacanian ideas across the rest of the world.

The European Journal of Psychoanalysis’ latest issue (Vol 10, No 1) is also now available online with free access, and contains several papers using Lacan’s work to explore topics such as AI, hate, the family, and perversion. Submissions are welcome throughout the year and past issues of the Journal – going back to 1995 – are available here.

The NLS Cartels newsletter, 4+1, (no. 19) is available now and features presentations from French and English NLS cartel events. The text has side-by-side bilingual translations and can be downloaded here. Laure Naveau, Dossia Avdelidi, Jeff Erbe, Clementine Benard, and Linda Clarke contribute.

Turning to events, a new series of Lectures on Lacan begins on 26th January, with Prof Dr Samuel McCormick taking us through Lacan’s Seminar XIX, …or Worse. In addition to sharing weekly recorded lectures on Seminar XIX with all registered participants, Prof McCormick will be hosting live Zoom discussions throughout the series, which runs until the beginning of May. Sign up here.

Starting in April, Adam Schneider PhD will be teaching a course on ‘Desire, Guild, and the Ethics of Speech: A Close Reading of Lacan’, in-person in Seattle, and via Zoom. The 6-session course will be a close reading of Lacan’s Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.

On 20th January, Jed Wilson will be speaking on ‘A Choreography of Desire: On Discerning the Fundamental Fantasy in Psychoanalytic Treatment’ for the Minnesota Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. The event is on Zoom and open to all. Full details and registration via the link above.

The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, and the Association for Psychosocial Studies, have issued a call for papers for a joint conference in London on 17th-18th June on ‘Learning or not learning from experience: Psychosocial approaches to researching and experiential learnings’. Submissions are open till 15th February for individual papers, as well as symposium, roundtables, film or working session proposals. The organisers welcome submissions from clinicians and practitioners as well as academics from different fields (the arts, humanities, social sciences) who are working on psychosocial problems using psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas.

The 2024 Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, ‘Everyone Is Mad’, will take place 22nd-25th February and will be broadcast online, with simultaneous translations in English throughout the duration of the Congress (for both parallel and plenary sessions). The parallel sessions will take place 22nd and 23rd Feb between 1pm and 7pm, and the plenary sessions between 1pm and 7:30pm on 24th and 25th. Registration is open to all and further resources such as orientation texts, the programme, Scilicet are available on https://congresamp2024.world. 

The NLS Congress 2024 will take place 11th-12th May in Dublin on the ‘Clinic of the Gaze’, and a call for papers for the Clinical Parallel Sessions on the first day has been issued. Contributions are being accepted until 16th March, with details on the Congress blog. Registration for the Congress is open here.

New translations of Lacan’s work this month, courtesy of Richard G. Klein whose site Freud2Lacan.com continues to be a treasure trove for Lacanian scholars. This month’s Lacan page updates include a revised translation of Écrits « inspirés » : Schizographie, from 1931 (number 9 on the list); a previously unknown dedication by Lacan of his doctoral thesis to a young tutor from 1933 (no. 22); some comments Lacan made about science fiction in February 1976 (no 126); and updates to the bibliographies of Lacan’s doctoral thesis, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (numbers 20 and 21).

Finally, congratulations to 2023’s Gradiva Award winners, just announced, which include Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler for their edited collection Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Sexualities: From Feminism to Trans*, and Vanessa Sinclair for her podcast Rendering Unconscious, which over the years has featured many Lacanian (and non-Lacanian) guests for thought-provoking discussions on psychoanalysis and creativity.

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