Lacanian psychoanalysis

This volume offers a rich tapestry of psychoanalytic thought. The authors demonstrate bold creativity in their use of psychoanalytic concepts to think about a wide range of problems in philosophy, art and the clinic. The collection grew out of ‘Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society,’ a conference for postgraduate students and research fellows organised by the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University, London, in June 2014. The range of themes addressed at the conference demonstrates the interdisciplinary character of psychoanalytic studies.

This paper engages centrally with the political impotence of much of critical theory today and suggests how a Lacanian-inflected perspective may offer a possible way out of the present intellectual and political deadlock. Lacanian thought has been central to many post-foundational theorizations of the political, yet the radical implications of a Lacanian-inflected reading of the political remain largely unexplored. Our prime objective is to demonstrate that a Lacanian theorization of ‘the political’ can help to open up a space for articulating the current deadlock that locks the Left in a state of melancholy, anxiety, depression, and/ or impotent acting out. After a brief conceptual introduction to the notion of ‘the political’, the paper mobilizes and develops the Lacanian theory of the subject. This permits opening up the terrain of psychoanalyisis to the question of the political as that what does not work in the world. The key insights of a Lacanian- inflected political theory are then explored through the work of some of the key critical political theorists: Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou.

In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser proposed a complete rethinking of the category of the Subject. Despite the many critiques of Subjectivity that proliferated in France at the time, Althusser intended to salvage the concept of the Subject in order to address how a given ideology maintains its stranglehold on an individual in the absence of any external repressive apparatus (e.g. a police officer). This paper will assess Althusser’s achievement by way of immanent critique; rather than dispensing with Althusser’s theoretical framework, I will update it by adding two components that attempt to remedy its deficiencies. Those components reside in between the Subject and the ideological apparatuses that “capture” it. This mediating region is itself split into two concepts: 1) the Freudian death drive, or repetition automatism, which pertains to the composition of the Subject’s interior border, and 2) the phenomenological experience of that border, designated by the phrase “wounds in the sensorium”.  In order to approach the latter phenomenological dimension of ideological interpellation, I will take a seemingly roundabout, but necessary journey through the work of Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Franz Kafka.

Lacan’s concept jouissance marks the both painful and joyful disturbance of a mind’s libidinal equilibrium which also gives coherence to the basic structure of reality from the point of view of the individual. Because someone can live a fulfilling life and be happy at all levels of what modern society has to offer, and yet may not resist a very specific form of jouissance – to risk all in favor of a small and obscene deviation from the ordinary: through a WhatsApp message to a minor showing oneself half naked, through cocaine use or a photo of a preteen Thai girl which is hidden in a drawer. The life of the individual becomes condensed as symbolic in confrontation with this minor and sinful deviation from the conventional (the nude photo from Thailand, the drugs, etc.) which, paradoxically, is effective only by being potentially capable of destroying the symbolic universe of the individual. The seemingly ‘slight deviation’ (Epicurus) may influence as traumatic and overly intense encounter with an other the subject’s ability to accept the full ontological weight of her or his world experience. Lacan’s notion of jouissance helps us understand this kind of transgression, which an individual mind might have to risk as a reenactment of what Lacan calls the “forced choice” of subjectivity.

This thesis explores Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the “limit-experience” through a close reading of Thomas the Obscure. I examine Blanchot’s notion of the limit-experience through Thomas’ symptoms of psychosis and melancholia. These symptoms are important for understanding the “limit-experience” because they show the corrosive force of language on identity. Blanchot emphasizes the limits to thought and knowledge that is outside of the lived experience. I argue that Thomas’ “limit-experience” depicts a missed experience that includes both self and the other relations. Further, I suggest that Blanchot provides a unique account of what it is to put being into question but that he does so in literature. His récit will be examined here accordingly in terms of the way it enacts a questioning of the “limit-experience”.

The notion of the “limit-experience” hinges upon the idea that language is a counter-world to the real. Language is portrayed as an absence and presence that conceals and reveals being. I trace this thought through the narration of Thomas’ presence that is pushed to the extreme limits of experience and knowledge. I approach Thomas’ series of “limit-experiences” through a twofold perspective as I investigate his relationship with “the image” and “the symbol”. I argue that these two relationships with the anterior link Thomas’ being-in and for-itself (consciousness) to culture/ presence/ “I”.

Leadership is everywhere: it has a dominant and privileged place in our society; it is constantly in our news, politics, businesses, films, books and magazines. Leadership is part of our social narrative, predominantly as a mythological force of goodness and success.
A key aim of this book is to deconstruct leadership, to challenge over-simplified accounts of leadership that may be desirable and offer us the comfort of ‘messiahs’ who can save us, but that actually distort leadership in unhelpful ways. Another aim is to reconstruct leadership, to offer new accounts of leadership for new times.
The  book identifies four dominant leadership discourses that have developed through socio-political and economic forces. The first 3 are Controller Leadership , Therapist Leadership, Messiah Leadership  reveal how leadership has developed in relation to changing contexts the past century. The final emergent discourse outlined is Eco-Leadership, and this chapter points to the need for new leadership for new times.

Esta tese buscou compreender como a morte violenta se apresenta na relação do sujeito com o laço social, considerando-se as dimensões imaginária, simbólica e real por meio das quais Lacan aborda a experiência freudiana. A partir de questões sobre a morte violenta de jovens envolvidos com a criminalidade, propusemos uma investigação teórica acerca das contribuições da psicanálise para esse problema. Apresentamos a tese de que a morte violenta tem sempre um duplo aspecto: comporta efeitos destrutivos, mas também constitutivos para a
cultura e para a subjetividade. Ao mesmo tempo em que a civilização interdita a morte violenta, Freud assevera que essa proibição se fundamenta em um desejo de morte recalcado. Além disso, ele utiliza a noção de pulsão de morte para situar a impossibilidade de se eliminar
os impulsos destrutivos das relações entre os homens. Se a princípio, Lacan propõe uma lógica na qual o Simbólico funciona como a instância reguladora, que limita a agressividade presente na relação intersubjetiva, posteriormente, com o nó borromeano, será possível reorganizar as relações entre os registros. Dessa forma, utilizamos a topologia borromeana para circunscrever três diferentes modos de apresentação da morte violenta no laço social: a) um modo imaginário, que foca aspectos intersubjetivos, como a rivalidade e o reconhecimento; b) um modo simbólico, que contempla as determinações discursivas, como a
interdição e a própria violência da lei; e c) um modo real, que foca aquilo que escapa às significações imaginárias e ao ordenamento propiciado pela linguagem. Concluímos que a morte violenta, tomada em cada uma das consistências do RSI, coloca em relação elementos paradoxais – o direito e o avesso das respostas subjetivas e sociais –, como a agressividade e o reconhecimento, a pulsão de vida e a pulsão de morte, a pacificação e a violência, a catástrofe máxima de uma destruição absoluta e uma abertura criadora entrevista por uma diferença mínima. Para além da dimensão clínica, a elucidação pela psicanálise dos diferentes modos de apresentação da morte violenta possibilita uma subversão do discurso social sobre a criminalidade e sobre o criminoso. Ao apontarmos a violência sistêmica que ex-siste à violência visível no cotidiano dos jovens envolvidos com o tráfico, temos uma chance de
fazer vacilar a lógica que penaliza e mata os jovens da periferia, perpetuando o ciclo da violência.

The Corona virus epidemic started in late 2019 in Wuhan, China and spread rapidly throughout most of the countries in the world. Due to this, the World Health Organization declared it as a pandemic. With the increasing number of cases and increasing prevalence, many people, including healthcare professionals, started to face psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, and stress. Racist Danger Waiting For The World.  The racism, xenophobia and stigmatizing of Chinese people is spreading just like the virus is.Humanity is transformed by those who take the highest lessons from tragedy. We’re going through times of disaster. However, these disasters will not only concern one country or region in the world; they will be universal in terms of their impact.

This article takes us into the heart of the complexities of the concept of narcissism, which has been deployed by psychoanalysts, film theorists and cultural critics to various and often contradictory ends. I begin by considering the use of narcissism as a diagnostic category used to examine the ills of modern society, especially in the work of writers like Christopher Lasch. This discussions leads me to the theorisation of narcissism in the work of Sigmund Freud, and I suggest that the concept is much more contradictory and complex in Freud's work, which makes its usage an act of interpretation—an interpretation, I will suggest, with crucial consequences for how we conceptualise the modern subject's relationship to new media technologies, as well as the politics of representation. The Lacanian concept of the 'mirror phase' is an important intervention in the theorisation of narcissism and is discussed in this chapter in order to understand the smartphone screen as a field of representation and identification. By extending the problematic of the mirror to the screen, and by taking into account Joan Copjec's critique of psychoanalytic readings of the cinematic screen, we will examine the specificities of the mobile screen in relation to ego formation. This account makes a break with Foucauldian theories of the subject, and I offer a psychoanalytic critique of panopticist theories of subjectivity, which I suggest, lead to an impasse in how we think about the screen—whether in the cinema or as the surface of a modern day mobile phone.

In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), we watch the film’s protagonist, Theodore, as he struggles with the end of his marriage and a growing attachment to his artificially intelligent operating system, Samantha. While the film remains unique in its ability to cinematically portray the Lacanian contention that “there is no sexual relationship,” this article explores how our digital non-relationships can be re-approached through the medium of comedy. Specifically, when looked at through a comic lens, notable scenes from Her are examined for the potential they provide in affording a self-decentrement which allows us to traverse the fantasies that structure our non-relations.

This essay analyzes the origin of sexuality and its relationship with the institution. The issue is addressed from the perspective of psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss) and philosophy (Foucault, Butler, Zupančič, Žižek). From the analysis of sexual difference as “real/impossible” a perspective comes to light: sex it is not a symbolic construct and not even an extra-symbolic reference, but what marks the irreducible (contradiction) limit of the symbolic order.

The book is the first monograph which examines the correspondences between the oeuvre of Jack Kerouac and the thought of Jacques Lacan, the two apparently incompatible worlds which prove to be complementary when taking a closer look. The study demonstrates a number of points. Firstly, with Jacques Lacan as a silent partner, it helps to better understand why psychoanalysis won Kerouac’s enmity in the mid-1950s. It also delves into Lacan’s reflections on spontaneous free-association to prove their convergence with Beats’ literary tactics. In its final part, by employing Lacanian theory, the book offers an extensive insight into Kerouac’s oeuvre to excavate the problematic status of the father figure, a crucial matter not yet given a rigorous critical attention.

Lacan m’aidera ici à remettre en cause la Chose, qui n’est jamais hors de cause, mais qui reste hors-signifié, car elle est le signifiant même : vide comme le sujet, subliminal, s’abaissant au symptôme ; donc sans autre plénitude que celle, apparente, de l’objet sublime qui s’élève dans le sinthome.

PRESENTATION @ the 2021 Situations Conference for Graduate Students, held @ Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea), on 8 February 2021, on Zoom.

Details: (1) http://situations.yonsei.ac.kr/bbs/board.php?tbl=bbs71&mode=VIEW&num=31&category=&findType=&findWord=&sort1=&sort2=&it_id=&shop_flag=&mobile_flag=&page=1 + (2) http://situations.yonsei.ac.kr/bbs/board.php?tbl=bbs51&mode=VIEW&num=76.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: To thank (1) Lee Seungyeon for her encouragement, reassurance, and patient guidance on conference presentations; and to thank (2) Dr Khoo Gaik Cheng and (3) Dr Ahmad Fuad Rahmat for their highly helpful technical advice on Malaysian film materials, Malaysian film scholarship, and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Vocês notam claramente no filme – que ali reflete o que encontramos na clínica e, em observação mais atenta, na vida social – o quanto é difícil para um homem, esse ser enfatuado e estúpido, estruturalmente adormecido na ilusão do semblante fálico, aperceber-se do que significa estar diante de uma vraie femme. Assim como Jasão pensava poder pacificar a revolta de Medeia, cedendo-lhe, como limite, as vantagens de suas posses, o pobre Hal acredita poder negociar a separação com Jasmine, desconhecendo que não há negociação com a mulher de verdade, tragicamente emancipada dos limites negociáveis do semblante. Se me apraz, portanto, afirmar, como dizia no início, que Blue Jasmine é o filme de um Woody Allen lacaniano, é justamente porque ali assistimos aos efeitos do desencadeamento do que Lacan chama de uma vraie femme.

This dissertation explores personal experiences of change occurring in two psychotherapy modalities—Psychoanalysis (PSA)/Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (PDT) and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—from a theoretically informed qualitative research perspective.  It seeks to reframe the longstanding debate between Specific Factors and Common Factors as the “active ingredients” involved in bringing about beneficial change in psychotherapy.

Leaders all around the world, especially those at the helm of organizations, are known to be enthusiastic art collectors. Nonetheless, little research has been done on the impact of the leaders' art collecting pursuits on the development of their leadership approaches, This study sought to investigate the extent to which art collecting enahled 10 Brazilian leaders-cum-art collectors to attain leadership singularity through a close study of their speech in one-on-one, semi-structured, and online interviews. It examined the extent to which the interviewees' "signifiers" words whose meanings depend on context revealed the impact of art collecting on their attainment of leadership "singularity" - the uniqueness of an individual's style characterized by an absolute in différence to social conventions. The interviewees' use of polarizing signifiers to describe the business world as harsh and calculated in stark contrant to the warmth they associated with art showed how they used art collecting as a buffer to shield them against unpleasant leadership realities. Moreover, their employment of signifiers and meanings, which recurred in both their business and art worlds, also illustrated how art collecting served as a transitional object for them to define their singular selves and their leadership approaches. Finally, the interviewees' connecting signifiers revealed how art collecting challenged them to build an inclusive work environment or society by promoting openness to diverse perspectives. What this research study has affirmed is that something as seemingly trivial as words can surface the power of art in sustaining ambiguities and ambivalences for the cultivation of individuel and leadership singularities with ripple effccts on people around us

Iran sends inconsistent messages to the world. Vehement factionalism and widespread disagreement in nearly everything from religion and politics to lifestyle and sexuality are evident inside the country. Drawing from the Freudian concept of the economics of libido as well as from Lacanian discourses, this article analyzes the historical experience of the decades following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. I focus on how the enforcement of moral puritanism and the symbolic decline of father figures have resulted in an imbalance of the economics of libido among Iranian subjects, as well as the absence of a master signifier capable of representing the discourse of the Master in a way that libidinal resources can be integrated into Iranian culture. Consequentially, a subversive discourse of the hysteric with an insatiable desire transformed into eternal, unanswerable questions has arisen, and this discourse predominates in the relationship between various factions in the country.
(Full-text access to a view-only version: https://rdcu.be/bPC1O )

Рассматриваются детско-родительские отношения в контексте гаджетизации, интернетизации с позиций теории информационного общества М. Кастельса и фрейдо-лакановского психоанализа. По результатам проведенной авторами фокус-группы с родителями детей, являющимися активными пользователями смартфонов, планшетов, компьютеров, прочих девайсов и медиаконтента, выявлены позитивная роль и негативные последствия подобной активности для детей и развития, функционирования детско-родительского взаимодействия в целом. Выделены типы детско-родительских отношений, опосредованных использованием гаджетов в воспитании и социализации детей.

Resumen

En los Estados Unidos, el psicoanálisis se considera un lujo solo al alcance de quienes pueden permitírselo. Cuestionando esta suposición, la autora comparte su experiencia haciendo psicoanálisis con pacientes latinx en el “barrio” de Filadelfia para abordar problemáticas de clase y raza en la clínica. Este artículo sostiene que vale la pena disputar los supuestos comunes sobre el psicoanálisis, que a menudo es presentado como un tratamiento que solo se puede practicar exitosamente con pacientes de clase media y media alta. Con esta presunción, el psicoanálisis en los Estados Unidos se ha encerrado en un gueto. La desigualdad en el acceso al tratamiento psicoanalítico tiene implicaciones ideológicas y políticas. Examinando de cerca en una viñeta clínica las fuerzas psíquicas que subyacen al racismo, este ensayo busca reabrir una discusión para romper las fronteras invisibles que rodean los guetos en los que se encuentra el psicoanálisis. Contrariamente a la creencia común de que los pobres están tan consumidos por las presiones de la vida cotidiana que solo pueden beneficiarse de intervenciones concretas y centradas en los síntomas, este artículo demuestra que el psicoanálisis facilita la exploración de la dimensión inconsciente que sustenta comportamientos sintomáticos cruciales como el racismo, desatando un potencial emancipatorio

Abstract

In the United States, psychoanalysis is considered a luxury only available to those who can afford it. Challenging this assumption, the author shares her experience doing psychoanalysis with Latinx patients in Philadelphia’s “barrio” in order to address issues of class and race in the clinical practice. This essay argues that it is worth disputing common assumptions about psychoanalysis, often presented as a treatment that can only be successfully practiced with middle and upper-middle class patients. With this supposition, psychoanalysis in the United States has itself been ghettoized. The current inequality in access to psychoanalytic treatment has ideological and political implications. Examining closely in a clinical vignette the psychic forces underlying racism, this essay seeks to reopen a discussion so as to break the invisible borders surrounding the ghettos in which psychoanalysis finds itself. Contrary to the common belief that poor people are so consumed with the pressures of everyday life that they can only benefit from symptom-focused and concrete interventions, this paper demonstrates that psychoanalysis facilitates the exploration of the unconscious realm that underpins crucial symptomatic behavior such as racism unleashing an emancipatory potential.

2017 marks the centenary of an artwork judged to be the single most influential of the twentieth century: Marcel Duchamp’s famous “readymade” entitled Fountain. The final verdict on Fountain has been widely accepted, despite the fact that the circumstances surrounding “Mr. Richard Mutt” have never resembled an open-and-shut case. On the contrary, since Fountain’s appearance in 1917, when it was rejected as “a plain piece of plumbing” only to be subsequently celebrated as a work of conceptual art, numerous questions remain unanswered, several facts remain unexplained.
Now, one hundred years later, Robert Kilroy attempts to answer these questions by examining the evidence with fresh eyes. Central to the investigation is the primary witness – Duchamp himself – whose statements are forensically analyzed. The facts themselves are interrogated using the methodology of a detective: precisely speaking, an art historical approach with a critical edge sharpened by a new interpretation of psychoanalytic theory.
In weaving an alternative narrative, Kilroy shows us that, not only has Fountain been fundamentally misunderstood, this very misunderstanding is central to the work’s significance. The final verdict, he argues, was strategically stage-managed by Duchamp in order to expose the apparatus underpinning Fountain’s reception, what he terms “The Creative Act.” By suggesting that a specific aesthetic “crime” has gone unnoticed, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later asks the reader to radically reassess his/her precise contribution to “the creation of art.” This urgent, if somewhat troubling question, could have far-reaching implications for the field of scholarship, the course of contemporary art and the discipline of Art history.

In the following essay I propose some thoughts concerning stability (percepts and affects) and modification (desire). The two works written by Deleuze and Guattari that I consider are What is Philosophy? and the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia – Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. I make reference to Joyce’s literature, although mention of Joyce in Deleuze and Guattari is rare. The reason for using Joyce is that the Irish writer seems to have more than one affinity with the texts produced in the intersecting lives (Dosse, 2011) of the two French writers.
At the same time, Spinoza, among the philosophers who influenced Deleuze, is the benchmark of my essay for understanding the distinction between stability, concerning the work of art, and the work of the unconscious. The distinction between the philosophical mainstream (particularly Aquinas) in regards to “desire” and the importance of body in Spinoza’s philosophy is the path I follow for demonstrating that Schizoanalysis is a breaking point for philosophy, for psychology and for psychoanalysis.
In continuing the line traced out by Spinoza, and followed by Nietzsche and Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari break with the psychoanalytical vision of desire as a negative instance (the missing of something to be endlessly fulfilled) and foster the positive instance of desire as a production of the unconscious. Finally I note that the distinction between the stability of the work of art and the modification of desire – in connection with the distinction made by Spinoza – permits Deleuze to entirely regain the issue concerning: “what a body can do”.

We are a binary consciousness. Perhaps the most striking outcome of psychoanalysis is the formalization of this fact in the notion of the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. Whether we follow orthodox Freudian readings of the unconscious as the repressed remainder of all that is rejected from consciousness, or the Jungian line of thought which sees the unconscious as the primary ground from which the conscious sense of self we call the ego emerges, we are left with the simple fact of a bifurcation between what we consider us, and what is not us, but nevertheless lives within and through us. Descartes was not yet psychological. His famous formula for the supremacy of the ego, ​ cogito, ergo sum​ , is to be understood as the declaration of our sense of self-regard as being correct — there is nothing else, besides what we know of ourselves. Nietzsche was perhaps the first depth psychologist, and from his time to ours, we have entered into a decidely psychological era. We might distinguish between pre-psychological and psychological views of self and world: ​ pre-psychological​ asserting that it is what we know of ourselves which is ultimately true, and ​psychological asserting that our vastness, or depths, to use the popular metaphor, can only be known in glimpses. It is not simply that the unconscious remains repressed. The bar of repression is a swinging door. Psychic contents emerge from unconsciousness into consciousness, as if through this door, or, to use the metaphor Jacques Siboni, a student of Jacques Lacan's, provides: a conveyor belt. This conveyor belt from the "other half" of our consciousness can get stuck. It can move too quickly, or too slowly, or not at all. When it moves too quickly, we may suffer from an inflation of consciousness — by identifying with affect-laden psychic contents being delivered up into consciousness, we may lose our reasonableness — that same reasonableness which is the hallmark of the ego.

Written in 1974, the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed revolves around the central character Shevek's self-appointed mission to improve the relationship between two planets, Anarres and Urras, by breaking down the walls that are separating these ideological enemies. The novel, in that sense, can be read as one man's search for an ideal state, rather than a description of a utopian/anti-utopian state. Literary scholars generally focus on various aspects of The Dispossessed in terms of its anarchist politics, ecological politics, and revolutionary politics. This article; however, aims to approach the novel from a Lacanian perspective by addressing the protagonist's psyche and his relation to the socio-symbolic orders in the novel. By focusing on the characterization of the relations between the subject and the other in an anarchist (as well as a capitalist culture) in The Dispossessed, this article aims to analyze how the novel provides a path towards an ideal state.

This essay takes a psychoanalytic perspective to reflect on Covid-19 as master signifier of contagion.  It explores our relation with nature and control.  Covid19 is an intrusion of a traumatic Real  into our lifeworlds.  The Real enunciates a particular truth to us;  that we live in a precarious, inter-dependent connected world,  undoing the hegemony and fantasy of Capitalism-Science.  The essay concludes by introducing some theory and practice for leaders to address the truth revealed.