Exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan
It is often said that psychoanalysts should look at structure, not surface symptoms, in order to make a clinical diagnosis. There are two problems with this. First, the definition of a particular structure has to be rigorous enough to recognise it when you see it. The question is: what characterises this structure, and is particular […]
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Three new works in the Lacanian canon were released last month. Firstly, Mahitosh Mandal’s Jacques Lacan: From Clinic to Culture is especially interesting because it is perhaps the first work of its kind to be published on the Indian subcontinent. It presents an overview of Lacan’s theory and a detailed analysis of John Fowles’s The […]
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The year ended with the sad news of the passing of Judith Miller, President of the Foundation of the Freudian Field, wife of Jacques-Alain Miller, and daughter of Jacques Lacan himself. Tributes have been led by the World Association of Psychoanalysis, and two editions of Lacan Quotidien last month (numbers 753 and 754) carry personal […]
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A few months back I wrote a rather long article tracing the historical debate about the nature of the unconscious in psychoanalysis across three key turning points – 1915, 1928, and 1960. It was a bit wordy (material for my PhD) so here’s a video version for those who prefer watching to reading. Expect more […]
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Announced last month for publication by Wiley in June 2018 is …or Worse: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX, the English translation of Lacan’s Seminar of 1971-1972. Dealing with the impossibility of the sexual relation, the artificiality of the semblance, and the singularity of a “One-all-alone”, Seminar XIX is the gateway to Lacan’s late […]
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First, new publications, and as heralded in last month’s update October saw the release of a new collection of seminars Lacan gave in the early seventies under the title Talking to Brick Walls. Published by Polity it is a translation of the French original, Je Parle aux Murs, from 2011. The English translation is by […]
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Who is ‘allowed’ to tell your story? Are you and you alone the only one that can represent your unique experience, past, and identity? Or is it sometimes okay – perhaps even better – for someone else to do this in your place? This month marks the 50th anniversary of a radical answer to these […]
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As we enter autumn and a new academic year, plenty of new titles in the Lacanian field have started appearing. Of those published last month, Karnac released Antonio Quinet’s Lacan’s Clinical Technique: Lack(a)nian Analysis in early September. Quinet is a founding member of the EPFCL-Brazil, psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and playwright. His book is a straightforwardly clinical […]
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This is Abdoulaye Yerodia Ndombasi, helping Lacan into his car as he leaves his seminar in March, 1980. And this is Yerodia again, around the time of the international arrest warrant issued against him by Belgium, for serious violations of international humanitarian law under the Geneva Convention. This short article is about his story. But […]
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New publications first, and Derek Hook’s Six Moments in Lacan: Communication and identification in psychology and psychoanalysis was released last month by Routledge. The book introduces Lacanian psychoanalysis to an audience interested in psychology, while noting that this was a discipline Lacan was notoriously antagonistic towards. Topics such as communication, identity, otherness and inter-subjectivity are […]
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