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New Publications
How Does Analysis Work?: Examples of Lacanian Interpretation, edited by Berjanet Jazani, has just been published by Routledge. It is a collection of short, personal testimonies from those in analysis about how their analysts’ interpretations or interventions brought about moments of change. Showcasing the use of humour and theatre in the analytic process, these often entertaining vignettes help challenge the caricature that Lacanian analysts’ interventions are limited to the occasional pun or quip. What is valuable about these testimonies is how the analysands themselves put them into context, explaining what place they held in the analytic work as a whole and the particular significance they carried for them at that moment.
Genius After Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan by K. Daniel Cho has just been published by Bloomsbury and develops a new psychoanalytic theory of genius resting on a renewed understanding of sublimation. Through a re-examination of how genius has been studied since Freud’s meditation on Leonardo da Vinci, Cho argues that genius is not an elite attribute depending on innate ability or inborn talent but is the sublimation of the drive, “a particular relation of the drive… that finds satisfaction in our inevitable dissatisfaction, a relation that transforms this discontentment into its own form of contentment.”
The Queerness of Psychoanalysis: From Freud and Lacan to Laplanche and Beyond is a new collection just published by Routledge, edited by Vanessa Sinclair, Elisabeth Punzi, and Myriam Sauer. With contributions authored almost exclusively by analysts, scholars, and activists who identify as trans and/or queer, the papers in this collection examine the relationship of psychoanalysis to queerness in its history, present and future, and from clinical, metapsychological, and literary perspectives among others.
Ornette Coleman, Psychoanalysis, Discourse: Movements in Harmolodic Space by A. L. James is a psychoanalytic, philosophical and musical meditation on what it means to follow, presenting an approach to the analysis of discourse that is a kind of “listening for listening”. The work of the American jazz trumpeter and saxophonist, famous as the founder of the ‘free jazz’ genre, is the keystone on which James attempts to discern new ways to listen using Lacan’s work. The reference in the subtitle to harmoldics is Coleman’s portmanteau combining harmony, melody, and movement. This might remind readers of Lacan’s approach to listening, itself inspired heavily by Levi-Strauss’ theory in ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, that to understand a myth we have to read it as we read a musical score: not just left to right (melodic) but up and down (harmonic). See Lacan’s application of this to the case of the Rat Man and obsession in his ‘The Neurotic’s Individual Myth’.
A Reading of Anxiety: Lacan’s Seminar X by Christian Fierens tracks step-by-step the presentation of anxiety in Lacan’s pivotal Seminar from 1962-1963. As Lacan begins to make his first sustained elaborations of object a in this Seminar, Fierens’ commentary follows it carefully in relation to the category of the real, the nature of nothingness, desire, and jouissance. The book is out now from Routledge, with this English translation by Patricia McCarthy.
Lacan + Architecture, edited by John Shannon Hendrix and Francesco Proto, is the latest release from the Palgrave Lacan Series. Using psychoanalysis to revive and revise a theory of building and the built environment, the authors address crises in architecture in relation to perceived crises in society as a whole – economic instability, political fracture – and their connections to questions of mental health and so-called well-being.
The latest edition of the journal Psychoanalytical Notebooks from the London Society of the NLS is out now. Issue 42/43, Winter 2024, is titled ‘The Point of Anxiety’ and includes papers in English by Éric Laurent, Sophie Maret-Maleval, and Clotilde Leguil among others on the different forms in which anxiety manifests in the clinic and contemporary culture.
Upcoming Events
Lacan Toronto continues its lively events programme, offering reading groups and teaching sessions biweekly on Sundays via Zoom, with no registration or fee to participate. Speakers lined up for December and January are Donald Kunze (‘Is There a Possibility for a New Lacanian Topology?’) on 15th Dec, Samo Tomšič (‘The Symbolic-Machine: Extraction, Production, Destruction’) on 5th Jan, and Leon S. Brenner (‘The Skin as the Source of the Dermic Drive: Modes of Dermic Punctuation in the Containment of Meaning’) on 19th Jan.
On 17th-18th January an international conference on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark. ‘Reawakening Freud’ will mark the 125th anniversary of its publication and feature Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar as keynote speakers. Registration is open now.
On 18th January the New Lacanian School’s ‘Questions of the School’ event, which addresses questions of analytic training and the experience of the School, will be held online in English and French. This event will begin with a testimony of the pass by Neus Carbonell, followed by a study of the theme ‘In Supervision.’ Registration is open now.
The NLS Congress, which will take place in Paris 17th-18th May 2025 on the theme of Painful Loves, is also now open for registration. Its newsletter, Eros, has just been launched, with the invitation to contribute short papers to the blog of the Congress.
The Lectures on Lacan series from Prof. Dr. Samuel McCormick begins its winter programme with an in-depth study of Lacan’s Television, the 1973 broadcast interview subsequently published as a text. The series begins on 10th January. Weekly recorded lectures will be shared with all registered participants, in addition to two online discussions during the series. Registration is open now.
New Recordings
Video of Renata Salecl’s discussion, which took place at Columbia University last month, on Lacan’s Seminar V The Formations of the Unconscious (1958) with Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 is now available. Marx’s Paris manuscripts are concerned with alienation, and here Salecl uses Lacan’s text – in particular Lacan’s analysis of Freud’s dream of the butcher’s wife – in dialogue with Marx on the topic of alienation, and the role of anxiety, desire, and jouissance at play in the current political trend towards populist authoritarianism. Read more and view the whole series of videos on Columbia’s site.
Scholarly Resources
Several new updates over the past month on Freud2Lacan.com, thanks to Richard G. Klein and team. These include new translations of rare texts by Lacan, the earliest being a 1926 medical report on hypertonia (stiffness in the neck) (number 3 on the Lacan page – Fixité du regard par hypertonie, predominant dans le sens vertical avec conservation des mouvements automatico-reflexes), and a 1929 clinical presentation by Lacan and two medical colleagues on comito-parkinsonian encephalitis syndrome (number 6 on the Lacan page, Syndrome comitio-parkinsonien encephalitique). From Lacan’s later work, there is a new translation of his comments at the Study Days of the École freudienne de Paris on 9th November 1975 (number 157), which was later published in the Lettres de l’École freudienne, 1978, no 24. There are also three new translations of Lacan’s ‘Direction of the Treatment’ paper (number 80), one of ‘The Instance of the Letter’ (number 68), and one of ‘Subversion of the Subject’ (number 91), all from the Écrits.
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