Exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan
1. The Absent Father Case in point: Man of Steel I start this short series with what is perhaps the most consistently ubiquitous and easily noticeable of all cinematic clichés to harbour Lacanian overtones. To name just a few of the biggest films of the past 12 months, Man of Steel, World War Z, Skyfall, […]
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As previewed on this site a few months ago, PIPOL 6, the European Congress of Psychoanalysis, was held in Brussels on 6th and 7th July. The theme was ‘After Oedipus – Diversity of the psychoanalytic practice in Europe’. For those that weren’t able to attend, shortly after the Congress finished Jean-Daniel Matet wrote up this […]
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About half way through his fifteenth Seminar on The Psychoanalytic Act, Lacan suggests to his audience that Freud’s contribution to a psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity can be summed up in the latter’s idea of castration. Rather than getting hung up on the old Freudian term ‘castration’, for Lacan this simply means that the subject does […]
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In an attempt to separate subjectivity from identity in the last article, one of the questions we were left with was whether the subject simply exchanges an imaginary alienation (in the rivalrous world of semblables and imagos) for a symbolic alienation (in the Other of the signifying network). We noted how the shift in Lacan’s […]
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This is the second of four article on the subject of subjectivity (the first is here). Just as in the last article we opposed subjectivity to objectivity, so here we can oppose subjectivity to identity, both in ordinary parlance and in psychoanalytic terminology. Subjectivity is not reducible to identity. Identity is a purely […]
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This is the first of four articles on subjectivity. Or more precisely, the first on four ‘shades’ of subjectivity because, with so much Lacanian ink having already been spilt on this topic, attempting a comprehensive treatment of subjectivity would cover too much familiar ground and present too little that is new. The aim of […]
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The inaugural edition of a new journal, Culture/Clinic, published by University of Minnesota Press and edited by Maire Jaanus and Jacques Alain Miller, is now available. As mentioned in last month’s News update, the release of the new journal was timed to coincide with the Miami Symposium which also took place in June (more on […]
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May marked the publication of the official publication of Lacan’s Seminar VI, Desire and its Interpretation, under the editorship of Jacques-Alain Miller. Since Miller’s split from Seuil, the previous publishers of Lacan’s work, in 2011, Seminar VI is the first of Lacan’s seminars to appear under the new publishers, Editions de la Martinière. Although the work […]
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With the DSM-V, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, due to be published on 22nd May, opposition and concern has been expressed throughout April from all corners of the psy- field (summary here). Whilst Lacanian opposition to the DSM is well-known and well-documented, many other high-profile professionals and institutions have lined up […]
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Suture is a Lacanian concept, but not a concept of Lacan’s. According to Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller’s paper, ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’ was “the first great Lacanian text not to be written by Lacan himself” (Badiou, ‘A Contemporary Use of Frege’, in Number and Numbers, p.25). In simple terms, the achievement […]
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