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New Publications
The past month saw the publication in English of two collections of Lacan’s teaching. Firstly, Lacan’s Seminar XVIII, On a Discourse that Might Not be a Semblance, which he gave over the academic year 1970-1971 was published by Polity, with Bruce Fink as its translator. In this Seminar Lacan begins his later-life project of re-thinking the sexual relation, attempting to ascribe to it a logic. The ‘semblance’ of the title is what the sexualised being displays, in signifying exhibitions, manifesting and marking the real of jouissance. This ‘semblance’ is the also the one involved in analytic work. The analyst’s interventions have a “cutting edge” insofar as they bring about truth through semblance, akin to the role of the oracle in the Oedipus myth: “Interpretation is not put to the test of a truth that can be settled by a yes or a no, it unleashes truth as such.” (Session of 13th January 1971, my translation).
Secondly, Lacan’s Premier Ecrits was also released in English by Polity in October, with translation by Russell Grigg. This short collection brings together some of Lacan’s early papers from his time as a psychiatrist, including his contributions on the infamous crimes of the Papin sisters, the structure of paranoid psychosis, and schizophrenic writing. Lacan’s early interest in the specificity of each case is very apparent in these works, which show an attentiveness to the singularity of the subject’s suffering, the value of creative practices in the functioning of symptoms, and Lacan’s appeal to structure when describing psychical organisation.
Gérard Pommier’s What Does It Mean to ‘Make’ Love?: A Psychoanalytic Study of Sexuality and Phantasy was published by Routledge last month. This translation from the 2010 French original is thanks to Ben Hooson, and is part of the CFAR Library series. Pommier considers how the ‘sexual machinery’ of fantasy, desire, and perversion operate and the role of orgasm, personally and politically. Pommier, who died last year, was a very influential French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He worked with Lacan as a supervisor at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, as well as with Dolto and Aulagnier, and directed the journal La Clinique lacanienne.
Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique in Freud and Lacan: What Does a Psychoanalyst Do?, by Bruno Bonoris, has just been published by Routledge. With its title recalling Fenichel’s 1941 book of the same name, here Bonoris approaches the question of clinical practice by structuring his book under a series of single-word chapter headings: dreaming, conjecturing, opening, othering, loving, causing, interpreting, and cutting. Under these headings key concepts like free association, transference, and construction are considered. Bonoris is a psychoanalyst based in Bueno Aires, Argentina and Professor of Psychology at the University of Buenos Aires.
Youth Mental Health Crises and the Broken Social Link: A Freudian-Lacanian Perspective by Carl Waitz was published by Routledge last month. It approaches this contemporary challenge by examining rites of initiation and their place in the broader social link, using Freud and Lacan’s thinking on the function of myth to comment on what Waitz sees as the destabilisation of common civic identifications in the US. The deterioration of this means by which symbolic identification is used to bind libido has, Waitz argues, resulted in an upsurge of adolescent psychogenic illness and suicidality.
Anxiety and the Contradictions of Culture: A Lacanian Approach to Gaze, Sex, Race, and Social Change, by Stephen Felder, explores the experience of anxiety through the writings of the existentialist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytical traditions. Beginning from Lacan’s assertion that there is a correspondence between the structure of fantasy and the structure of anxiety, Felder argues that anxiety is a signal of the Real, with implications for what cultural theorist Stuart Hall calls the “contradictions of culture.” It is published by Lexington Books and is out now.
Extimacy, edited by Nadia Bou Ali and Surti Singh, draws its title from Lacan’s 1960 portmanteau, combining the intimate with the external. Published last month by Northwestern University Press the contributors to this collection approach the topic from the perspectives of race, violence and authority among others.
Newly published on Freud2Lacan.com are two texts from Lacan in English translation. Firstly, Mise en question du psychanalyste [Questioning the Psychoanalyst] (number 95 on the Lacan page) is a 67 page article written by Lacan in 1963, especially interesting because it is one of only two instances where Lacan writes about Pearl King and comments on one of her cases, though without mentioning her by name (see the last 5 pages). For more on Pearl King’s case, see the documents at numbers 96 and 97 on the Lacan page. Secondly, Lettre à un jeune ethnologue [Letter to a young ethnologist] from 1975 (number 175 on the Lacan page) is Lacan’s response to a question he was asked by a student during his visit to the Maison Française in Oxford, and looks ahead to Lacan’s forthcoming lecture at Yale in November that year. A side-by-side translation of Lacan’s ‘Subversion of the Subject’ paper from the Écrits, with notes by Muller and Richardson, is also available on the Lacan page (number 88).
New Recordings
On YouTube, Evi Verbeke’s talk for Lacan in Scotland ‘Unexpected Encounters: Lacanian Psychoanalysis Beyond the Couch’, is now online. Dr Verbeke speaks about Lacanian practice in unconventional settings, making some very apt comments about how institutions react to human suffering, and how therapists working within those institutional settings are trained to approach such appeals. Her talk concludes with a consideration of the four discourses, and a discussion how the analyst’s discourse operates outside the consulting room.
Ellie Ragland’s talk on hysteria for Psychoanalysis Pakistan, inaugurating its lecture series for Sept-Jan of 2024, is now on YouTube. Ragland traces hysteria in Freud, through to Lacan, and Miller. The group’s guest lecture series will feature Dr. Todd McGowan, Dr. Arka Chattopadhyay, Dr. Leon Brenner, Dr. Alenka Zupancic, Dr. Daniel Tutt, Dr. Duane Rousselle, and Dr. Stijn Vanheule.
John Dall’Aglio’s talk on a Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic approach to the problem of dual-aspect monism and the free energy principle, which was held last Friday for the Active Inference Institute, is now on YouTube. Dall’Aglio presents his thesis that consciousness is not simply irreducible to free energy minimization; instead, consciousness is reducible to the point where the laws of free energy minimization conflict. Such antagonism-in-nature, he argues, is the basis for non-determinate subjectivity arising from nature alone. Mark Solms, Karl Friston, and Evert Boonstra join as discussants. Dall’Aglio’s book, A Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis: Consciousness Enjoying Uncertainty, was published by Palgrave last month.
Derek Hook interviews Stijn Vanheule about his new book, Why Psychosis is Not So Crazy in a three-part series on YouTube. The talk explores psychosis as a limit-experience of human freedom, hallucinations and delusions as a response to a nascent feeling of alienation, and how to work clinically with psychosis.
Upcoming Events
In date order, on Fri 8th November Jamieson Webster will be giving a talk entitled ‘Four Lessons on Breathing: Rank, Winnicott, Reich, Lacan.’ The event is free and will be streamed live on Zoom at 6pm EST, as well as in person at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA. Full details and a link to the Zoom on the flyer downloadable here.
For those in Melbourne, Australia, Russell Grigg will be running a short series of classes at the Lacan Circle of Australia, starting Sat 9th November, on Lacan and love. ‘Four Lessons on Love’ will run for four Saturdays in November. Attendance is in-person only. Everyone is welcome and there is no charge.
The Centre for Lacanian Analysis in New Zealand will host Bruce Fink for two events at the end of November. The first, a public lecture ‘On the Value of the Lacanian Approach to Psychoanalytic Practice’ on Fri 29th November, can be attended on Zoom. The second is a two-day clinical workshop in-person only, orientated around Lacan’s Seminar VI, Desire and its Interpretation.
Finally, Lacan Toronto’s teaching sessions calendar for 2024-2025 has been circulated, and the full program can be downloaded here. This year’s Lacan Toronto teaching roster includes: Levi R. Bryant, Eve Watson, Macario Giraldo, Daniel Tutt, Michael J. Miller, Daphne Tamarin, Alireza Taheri, Donald Kunze, Samo Tomšič, Leon S. Brenner, Sergio Benvenuto, Samuel McCormick, Russell Grigg, Calum Neill, Sanem Güvenç, Ona Nierenberg, Dany Nobus, Kareen Malone, Will Greenshields, Domenico Cosenza in conversation with Penny Georgiou, Daniel José Gaztambide, John Dall’Aglio, and Angelo Villa.
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