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New Publications
A Psychoanalysis for a Reemergent Humanity: The Metapsychology of Willy Apollon edited by Lucie Cantin, Jeffrey S. Librett, and Tracy Mcnulty, has just been published by State University of New York Press and engages with the work of the Haitian-Quebecois Lacanian psychoanalyst. As well as including a new foundational text by Apollon and an interview with him, original essays by his long-time collaborators Lucie Cantin and Danielle Bergeron are included on the overall theme of the situation of the human subject today. Apollon’s work may be familiar to those who follow the activities of GIFRIC in Quebec, which he co-founded, and the city’s 388 Centre for treating psychosis in young adults.
Psychoanalysing Horror Cinema by Mary Wild was released by Routledge at the end of November. 50 films are analysed through a Lacanian, Freudian, and sometimes Jungian lens, each approached as projective tests to uncover unconscious truths through the horror genre. The book builds from the author’s ‘Wild About Horror’ segments on the Evolution of Horror podcast.
Psychoanalytic Film Theory: A Contemporary Introduction by Ben Tyrer will be published by Routledge on 8th December. It presents an overview of how screen media has been approached using psychoanalysis, and how some key psychoanalytic concepts – including dream, identification, difference, object, and ideology – have developed through the impact of film theory. Contemporary thinking on cinema in the work of Joan Copjec, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, and Todd McGowan is explored as part of the intellectual life of psychoanalysis outside the clinic.
False Negatives: Tilted Takes on a World in Flux by Lacanian psychoanalyst Christos Tombras was published last month and offers a thought-provoking collection of vignettes exploring truth, evidence, and meaning in the post-truth era. Written between 2019 and 2021, these essays illuminate how we interpret a world increasingly mediated by technology, belief, and desire. The essays touch on subjects such as DeepFake technology and the crisis of evidence, the limits of quantification in science, and the human meaning that escapes artificial intelligence.
From the journals, the latest edition of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society includes Kyle Sossamon’s open access paper From anamorphosis to the distance point: Lacan’s logical revision of the subject as split in the visual field looking at the strange disappearance of the notion of anamorphosis following Lacan’s discussion of perspective and the visual field in Seminar XI.
Lacanians may also be interested to know that Slavoj Žižek’s latest, Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy, was published last month by Bloomsbury.
Upcoming Events
Registration is now open for the NLS Congress which will take place in Paris between 27th and 28th June next year. The theme is ‘Varity’, exploring variations of truth in psychoanalysis. The Congress blog opened last month with a number of orientation texts now available. NLS societies globally are running seminar series over the coming months on the topic, working towards the Congress. On 6th December the London Society of the NLS, the Irish Circle of the NLS, and the Krakow Circle will each hold their respective seminars on the theme, followed by the Societies in Greece (11th Dec), Denmark (13th Dec), and Austria (19th Dec).
On 25th January, the Forum of London will launch the first International Seminar of the School of the Lacanian Field in English, with Colette Soler presenting in London on ‘The Analytic Act: Conditions and Consequences’. Darian Leader will be the discussant. The event is hybrid, taking place at University College London and online via Zoom, and is free. This is the first of six monthly presentations by AMEs from the School of Psychoanalysis of the International of the Forums of the Lacanian Field (IF-SPLF) which will run between January and June 2026. Future dates and speakers for the series are available on the Forum of London’s site.
On 31st January, Lacan/UK will present Salon Psychanalytique, an evening of conversation on the Effectiveness of Psychoanalysis, at the Freud Museum, London. A variety of therapeutic proposals are available to treat the subject’s discontent – what is the proposition of psychoanalysis, and what is its effectiveness? Talks from Dr Luis Izcovich and Tamara Dellutri will be followed by drinks & canapés. Register via the link above.
New Videos, Podcasts, and Recordings
Last month, on 16th November, an amendment to a social security financing bill in the French Senate was tabled which sought to end the reimbursement of healthcare “claiming to adhere to psychoanalysis, or based on psychoanalytic foundations” from 2026 onwards. The Lacanian psychoanalytic movement in France mobilised quickly against the amendment, and on 20th November the Ecole de la Cause freudienne (ECF) convened a Forum contre l’amendement liberticide (Forum against the liberticidal amendment) which was livestreamed on YouTube for several hours. Thankfully, on 23rd November the amendment was withdrawn. You can hear a short interview with ECF President Anaëlle Lebovits-Quenehen on French radio station France Culture, recorded before the amendment was withdrawn, here (in French but with subtitles available). At the end of November the ECF established the commission Psychanalyse et vie publique (PVP) – commission for psychoanalysis and public life – to ensure vigilance against future threats to the freedom of choice of patients and clinicians for psychoanalysis. A timeline of the dramatic events of November is available here (in French).
On YouTube, Derek Hook offers a new three-part series on how Lacan thinks about obsessional neurosis, exploring its symptomatology, the obsessional’s relation to the master, and the experience of jouissance in obsession. Hook has also just begun a new series on hysteria, beginning with Lacan’s focus on the hysterical triangle of desire. A short video on the formulas for fantasy that Lacan presents for obsession and hysteria is also among last month’s uploads.
From the Ordinary Unhappiness podcast last month, Lucie Fielding joins the hosts to discuss Polymorphous Perversity and Gender Pleasure since Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and the changes in how we think about sexuation and sexual identity since then, including in the light of Lacan and Lacanian thinking.
New Translations and Resources
Some more new translations of Lacan over on Freud2Lacan.com were added in the past month. Surprisingly, we have a report that Lacan wrote at age 16 on anti-alcoholism propaganda (number 1 on the Lacan page, courtesy of translation by Richard G. Klein). Readers may not be surprised to find the teenage Lacan writing with the same gusto that his more mature work exhibits, as here he quotes St Paul and jokes about the “mysticism of neophytes” that his more juniors classmates displayed. From 1933 we then have a case report of early-onset dementia that Lacan co-authored with two other medics, translated by Anthony Chadwick (number 44). And finally, the transcript of what Lacan really said at the famous 1960 Bonneval conference (from which the Ecrits paper ‘Position of the Unconscious’ was drawn). This translation by Richard Klein, and edited by Anthony Chadwick, is based on the typed transcript shared by Dany Nobus from the original tape recording (number 152).
Thanks to the excellent translation work of Quinn Foerch we now have an English translation of Charles Melman’s Clinique Psychanalytique et Lien Social. Foerch has also translated Melman’s major work L’homme sans gravité, and Melman’s multi-year seminar on obsessional neurosis, a close reading of Freud’s Rat Man case. All are available on his site https://quinnfoerch.com/. Melman, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst analysed by Lacan, became one of the giants of Lacanian psychoanalysis following Lacan’s death and co-founded the organisation today known as l’Association lacanienne internationale (ALI). From 1983 he held his own seminar, very little from which has until now been available to the English-speaking audience.
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Quinn is BRILLIANT.