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New Publications
On the Theory and Clinic of Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Speaking of Lacan by Chris Vanderwees has just been published by Routledge. A series of conversations with clinicians about their experiences of analytic practice, their formation, and their current research interests, the participants discuss topics ranging from transference, trauma, sexuality, desire, dreams and poverty. Analysts in conversation include Bruce Fink, Annie G. Rogers, and Patricia Gherovici. The companion to 2023’s On the History and Transmission of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, this new book showcases the diversity of thinking and practice in the Lacanian tradition.
Lacanian Perspectives on Jealousy, edited by Carmen Wright, was published last month as part of the CFAR Library series from Routledge. Examining its various contemporary guises and forms, contributors explore the concept of jealousy from clinical, social and political perspectives, with the relationship to adjacent psychoanalytic ideas such as identification, envy and ambivalence brought into focus. Authors contributing to this volume include Anouchka Grose, Darian Leader, and Genèieve Morel.
Seduction, Drive and Repetition: Freud’s Metaphysics of Trauma, by Herman Westerink and Philippe Van Haute was released last month by Leuven University Press and puts forward the argument that it is through the concept of trauma that we can understand the development of Freud’s thought and psychoanalytic theory more widely. Proffering the idea that Freud never truly abandoned his early seduction theory of trauma from the 1890s, Van Haute and Westerink propose instead that we can observe a progressive enriching of the concept of trauma throughout his work. They revisit the Dora case, the Rat Man case, and the Wolf Man case before a reconsideration of the pivotal Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Freud’s last great work, on Moses.
Dress, Dreams, and Desire: A History of Fashion and Psychoanalysis by Valerie Steele has just been published by Bloomsbury. Using Lacan’s work on the mirror stage and object a as part of her exploration of psychoanalytic treatments of fashion (which also includes Anzieu’s concept of the skin ego and Freud’s paper on fetishism), Steele draws examples from the work of designers such as Elsa Schiaparelli, Gianni Versace, and Alexander McQueen to wrest fashion from the realm of the superficial and elevate it to an exemplar of the “deep surface.” An exhibition at New York’s FIT Museum parallels this new publication and is open till January. Check out the interview with Steele on the always-excellent podcast Ordinary Unhappiness from last month as well.
Post-Weird: Fragmentation, Community, and the Decline of the Mainstream by Calum Lister Matheson will be published by Rutgers University Press on 11th November and is now available for pre-order via the publisher and Amazon. Inspired by Lacanian ideas, Matheson’s look at rhetoric and psychosis explores how communities form when society collapses. Examining groups that have departed the mainstream – Sandy Hook deniers, Appalachian serpent handlers, pro-anorexia bloggers, incels, transvestigators, pseudoscientific reactionaries, and more – he finds unexpected similarities among their many differences. Key among their parallels is the insistence that the symbols shared by each community represent a hidden truth that cannot be questioned or interpreted but is revealed through signs – words, images, videos, and texts. By documenting American fringe cultures, extremism, and the social functions of language, this book rethinks concepts like irony, psychosis, propriety, and what it means to be normal in weird times.
Upcoming Events
On 8th November, the London Workshop of the Freudian Field will begin its new series for 2025-2026 on the theme ‘The Word ‘Unconscious’: What does it Mean in Freud?’ Attendance is offered in-person or via Zoom for international attendees. Susana Huler will present the first seminar on Freud’s ‘Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ in a series that will continue to June. Registration is open here.
Also on 8th November, Lacanian Compass will be holding a Knotting Seminar under the title ‘Faire Ecole’, in New York, with NLS President Patricia Bosquin-Caroz. The conversation will be based on the text ‘The Pass of Psychoanalysis towards Science: The Desire for Knowledge’ by Jacques-Alain Miller, and include contributions from Cristina Rose Moro and Brian Kloppenberg. Bosquin-Caroz has penned the orientation text for next year’s NLS Congress, on the theme of Varity, which will take place in Paris in June.
On 14th November in London, Lacan/UK is organising a talk and book launch by Juan Pablo Lucchelli to mark the publication of his Understanding Lacan’s Objet a which was released by Routledge in August. Lucchelli is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, a member of the École de la Cause Freudienne, and has published numerous other works in French, including most recently Lacan et la sexualité post-moderne with Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupančič. Register via Eventbrite.
On 29th November, Lacan in Scotland will be welcoming Marguerite Gleeson as its guest speaker to present at an in-person only event on ‘Desire in the Age of AI: What “Her” Reveals about Contemporary Discontent.’ Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and other contemporary thinkers, the talk will consider what happens when human lack and desire encounter artificial intelligence and explore what this tells us about being human today. It is planned for the event to be recorded and shared on the Lacan in Scotland YouTube channel for those who are not able to attend.
On 6th December, CFAR and the University of Bristol are organising a talk with Darian Leader on ASD, ADHD and Neurodiversity as part of their 2025/26 programme of psychoanalytic seminars. With rising diagnoses of ASD and ADHD in most countries around the world, can psychoanalysis contribute anything to the understanding of both social and clinical aspects of this changing landscape? These seminars will examine the place of ASD and ADHD in contemporary discourse and discuss psychoanalytic conceptualisations, showing their relevance to both clinical work and to research on themes such as attention, sensory sensitivity and communication. The event takes place in Bristol, UK.
New Videos and Podcasts
Now available to view in full online is the documentary In the Real made by psychoanalyst Conor McCormack (CFAR). In the Real was filmed over three years with members of the Hearing Voices Network in the UK. The film challenges taken-for-granted received wisdom about psychosis and allows the viewer a compassionate entry into an often hidden subjective experience.
On YouTube, Derek Hook introduces Lacan’s ideas on the voice as object in a new series of videos released last month. Contrasting it with the gaze in Lacan’s thinking, and with the other instances of what are called ‘objects’ in psychoanalytic traditions, Hook explains how the voice operates as an instantiation of object a, the object-cause of both desire and anxiety.
Donald Kunze’s excellent YouTube channel offers a number of new videos from the past month focussed on how topology can be understood using Lacan’s work. The End of Historicism in Psychoanalytical Topology, as an example, proposes that we could think of topology in psychoanalysis as beginning in 1905, an idea Kunze develops from having noticed a small but suggestive image on the cover of the German edition of Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious which was published that year. Each video provides a short and intriguing demonstration of the application of topology to psychoanalysis (or vice versa).
Roger Litten’s recent presentation ‘Why Lacan?’ for the Pakistan Psychoanalytic Circle is also now available on YouTube. Litten is a psychoanalyst of the Lacanian orientation practicing in Spain, a member of the Escuela Lacaniana de Psicoanálisis del Campo Freudiano (ELP) and of the World Association of Psychoanalysis.
Also on YouTube, Lacanian psychoanalyst Eve Watson is interviewed by the Psychoanalytic Quarterly about the themes of Lacan’s Seminar XVI, ‘From an Other to the other’, which she reviewed for the journal earlier this year. Watson’s review of Seminar XVI is available to access for free until 30th November.
Podcast Ordinary Unhappiness last month interviewed Nick Stock and Nick Peim, authors of the new book The Lacanian Teacher: Education, Pedagogy and Enjoyment, which was published by Palgrave in June. The pair discuss the stories teachers often tell about their motivations for choosing to enter the profession, and the fantasies, anxieties and satisfactions that come with it. Questions of knowledge, lack, and transmission are brought up, as well as the question of what it is that people find so alluring about Lacan in thinking about, and practicing, pedagogy.
New Resources
Thanks to the dedicated efforts of Quinn Foerch an English translation of Charles Melman’s seminar Le névrose obsessionelle (1987-1988 & 1988-1989) is now available. This translation includes all three years of the seminar, numbering close to 500 pages. Many more translations are available on Foerch’s site, of work by Melman and others. For those not aware, Melman was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, analysed by Lacan, who at the latter’s request became the director of the journal Scilicet. After Lacan’s death, in 1982 he founded l’Association freudienne with Jean Bergès, Marcel Czermak, and Claude Dorgeuille, which would become l’Association freudienne internationale and later l’Association lacanienne internationale (ALI). From 1983 he held his own seminar, very little from which has hitherto been available to the English-speaking audience. Melman died in Paris in 2022.
Over on Freud2Lacan.com the latest new translations of Lacan’s work released over the past month include Anthony Chadwick’s translation of Lacan’s comments at a 1975 Study Days event for the cartels. After an introduction by Solange Falade, Lacan offers wide-ranging remarks on topological knots, the place of the School, dialectics, the body, jouissance and much more. It is number 192 on the Lacan page. Also, thanks to Richard G. Klein’s careful compiling, there is now an updated version of the ‘Names of the Analysts’ index, a list of who analysed whom in psychoanalytic history, available at the bottom of the Home page.
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