#1 The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
‘Ten times, an elderly grey-haired man gets up on the stage. Ten times puffing and sighing. Ten times slowly tracing out strange multi-coloured arabesques that interweave, curling with the meanders of his speech, by turns fluid and uneasy. A whole crowd looks on, transfixed by this enigma-made-man, absorbing the ipse dixit and anticipating some illumination that is taking its time to appear.
Non lucet. It’s shady in here, and the Théodores go hunting for their matches. Still, they say, cuicumque in sua arte perito credendum est, whosoever is expert in his art is to be lent credence. At what point is a person mad? The master himself poses the question.
That was back in the day. Those were the mysteries of Paris forty years hence.
A Dante clasping Virgil’s hand to be led through the circles of the Inferno, Lacan took the hand of James Joyce, the unreadable Irishman, and, in the wake of this slender Commander of the Faithless, made with heavy and faltering step onto the incandescent zone where symptomatic women and ravaging men burn and writhe.
An equivocal troupe was in the struggling audience: his son-in-law; a dishevelled writer, young and just as unreadable back then; two dialoguing mathematicians; and a professor from Lyon vouching for the seriousness of the whole affair. A discreet Pasiphaë was being put to work backstage.
Smirk then, my good fellows! Be my guest. Make fun of it all! That’s what our comic illusion is for. That way, you shall know nothing of what is happening right before your very eyes: the most carefully considered, the most lucid, and the most intrepid calling into question of the art that Freud invented, better known under its pseudonym: psychoanalysis’.
Jacques-Alain Miller
#2 Lalangue, Sinthome, Jouissance, and Nomination: A Reading Companion and Commentary on Lacan's Seminar XXIII on the Sinthome
This reading companion and commentary on Lacan Seminar XXIII provides detailed analyses of Lacan's seminar while maintaining an overall continuity and consistency. This book does not purport to provide an exhaustive and systematic line-by-line reading of a very complex and varied seminar. Rather it selects key themes of Lacanian theory that are found present throughout his work. In addition, the book does not try to simplify Lacan's ambiguous style, leaving the text open to different interpretations, while providing theory, commentary, and lines of analysis into some of Lacan's important insights.
Book preview: Lalangue, Sinthome, Jouissance, and Nomination
#3 The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School
Guillaume Collett questions to what extent we can locate Deleuze within the Lacanian School during the late-1960s, prior to Guattari. In so doing, he offers a new, integrated reading of Deleuze's The Logic of Sense (1969) by understanding it as a 'psychoanalysis of sense', and gives a new interpretation of Deleuze's conception of philosophy itself. The Psychoanalysis of Sense shows that Deleuze was not merely aware of the debates animating the Lacanian School during the 1960s: he sought to contribute to them. Emphasising his appropriation of the work of post-Lacanian Serge Leclaire, Collett shows how Deleuze constructed a more singular and immanent theory of the linguistic structure of the unconscious--granting the erogenous body a larger structuring role.
#4 Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences
What can psychoanalysis, a psychological approach developed more than a century ago, offer us in an age of rapidly evolving, hard-to-categorize ideas of sexuality and the self? Should we abandon Freud's theories completely or adapt them to new findings and the new relationships taking shape in modern liberal societies? In a remarkably prescient series of lectures delivered in the early 1960s, the French philosopher Louis Althusser anticipated the challenges that psychoanalytic theory would face as politics moved away from structuralist frameworks and toward the elastic possibilities of anthropological and sociological thought.
Book preview: Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences
#5 Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets
Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders-but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more. Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.
Book preview: Capitalism and Desire
#6 Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics
Linking climate justice to radical ethics by way of psychoanalysis, Donna Orange explores many relevant aspects of psychoanalytic expertise, referring to work on trauma, mourning, and the transformation of trouble into purpose. Orange makes practical suggestions for action in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic communities: reducing air travel, consolidating organizations and conferences, better use of internet communication and education. This book includes both philosophical considerations of egoism (close to psychoanalytic narcissism) as problematic, together with work on shame and envy as motivating compulsive and conspicuous consumption.
Book preview: Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics
#7 Oedipus and the Oedipus Complex: A Revision
In contemporary psychoanalytic thought, Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex is inclined to overshadow the interpretation of the myths surrounding Oedipus. The authors counter this situation by reversing it, utilizing the Oedipus myths to interpret the Oedipus complex. In so doing they expose it as a sheer cover story. They unmask the Oedipus complex, revealing it to be a drama staged not by Oedipus but by Jocasta, the mother, and Laius, the father. For neither Sophocles' drama nor the Oedipus myths give any indication that Oedipus is enamoured of Jocasta and born with the intention of killing his father Laius. What the myths do mention are Jocaste's passion for Oedipus whom she loves more than his father and Laius' desire to eliminate Oedipus as his rival from birth. Freud neglected these aspects of the Oedipal myths. In uncovering them the authors come to the conclusion that Oedipus did not have an Oedipus complex. The myths divulge that it is not the son or the daughter who precipitate rivalry with their father or mother but the parents who unconsciously compete with their child for the love of their partner.
Book preview: Oedipus and the Oedipus Complex
#8 Corresponding Lives: Mabel Dodge Luhan, A. A. Brill, and the Psychoanalytic Adventure in America
An influential New York salon host and perpetual seeker of meaning, Mabel Dodge entered psychoanalysis in 1916 with A.A. Brill, the first American psychoanalyst, continuing until she moved to New Mexico in December 1917. In Taos, she met Antonio Luhan, the Pueblo Indian who became her fourth husband in 1923, a radical union that forever altered her turbulent life.
From the beginning of her analysis until 1944, Mabel wrote to Brill and he replied, yielding 122 letters. No other such extensive, elaborate written conversations exist between patient and analyst. This book presents a narrative organized around these letters, featuring the turmoil in Mabel's relationships with others, most notably D. H. Lawrence, as well as her extraordinarily candid memoirs, both published and unpublished, inspired by Brill's fierce insistence upon constructive outlets. In her correspondence, as in life, Mabel was despairing, insightful, insecure, and talented, reporting to Brill her emotional states, seeking his advice. With warmth and frankness, he offered opinions, affection, and interpretations.
Book preview: Corresponding Lives
#9 Talking about Evil: Psychoanalytic, Social, and Cultural Perspectives
How can we talk about evil? How can we make sense of its presence all around us? How can we come to terms with the sad fact that our involvement in doing or enabling evil is an interminable aspect of our lives in the world? This book is an attempt to engage these questions in a new way.
Written from within the complicated reality of Israel, the contributors to this book forge a collective effort to think about evil from multiple perspectives. A necessary effort, since psychoanalysis has been slow to account for the existence of evil, while philosophy and the social sciences have tended to neglect its psychological aspects.
The essays collected here join to form a wide canvas on which a portrait of evil gradually emerges, from the Bible, through the enlightenment to the Holocaust; from Kant, through Freud, Klein, Bromberg and Stein to Arendt, Agamben and Bauman; using literature, history, cinema, social theory and psychoanalysis.
Book preview: Talking about Evil
#10 The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond: Matricide and Maternal Subjectivity
The question of what it means to be a mother is a very contentious topic in psychoanalysis and in wider society. The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond explores our relationship to the maternal through psychoanalysis, philosophy, art and political and gender studies.
Book preview: The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond
#11 The Status of Women: Violence, Identity, and Activism
This book examines the current status of women. It consists of a collection of papers that focus on the political, economic, biologic, cultural, academic and psychological challenges that confront women worldwide. The contributors, from the International Psychoanalytical Association's United Nations Committee and from a variety of disciplines, draw on their experience to consider how women are symbolized in society today.
Book preview: The Status of Women
#12 Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Modern Jewish Philosophy: Two Languages of Love
Relational psychoanalysis and modern Jewish philosophy have much to say about the dynamics of human relationships, but there has been no detailed, thorough, and constructive examination that brings together these two incisive discourses. Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Modern Jewish Philosophy: Two Languages of Love explores the critical similarities and differences between the two disciplines, casting new light on both the analytic and philosophical understandings of how relationships develop, flourish, and fail.
#13 Everyday Evils: A psychoanalytic view of evil and morality
Everyday Evils takes a psychoanalytic look at the evils committed by "ordinary" people in different contexts – from the Nazi concentration camps to Stockholm Syndrome to the atrocities publicized by Islamic State – and presents new perspectives on how such evil deeds come about as well as the extreme ways in which we deny the existence of evil.
#14 Psychoanalysis, Identity, and the Internet: Explorations into Cyberspace
Every day we seek information from the internet, buy something, play videogames, chat, work, and so on. But what exactly is the nature of the space we surf in and through? Is it virtual or real? What is the actual relation between the virtual reality we inhabit more or less in a videogame, or a film, or a common experience on the Internet, and the psychic reality that is one of the main focus of psychoanalysis? What happens to the sense of corporeality, time, and space that we are accustomed to, considered as the vital component of subjective experience? And what happens to the real relationships between people?
Book preview: Psychoanalysis, Identity, and the Internet
#15 The Origins and Organization of Unconscious Conflict: The Selected Works of Martin S. Bergmann
The Origins and Organization of Unconscious Conflict provides a comprehensive set of contributions by Martin S. Bergmann to psychoanalytic theory, technique, and its applications. Following a general approach, Bergmann synthesizes Freud’s major contributions, the development of his thinking, the ramifications to present day psychoanalytic theory and practice and finally, discusses unresolved problems requiring further work.
Book preview: The Origins and Organization of Unconscious Conflict
#16 Metapsychology and the Foundations of Psychoanalysis: Attachment, neuropsychoanalysis and integration
Metapsychology and the Foundations of Psychoanalysis redresses faults in Freud’s original conception to develop a coherent theoretical basis for psychodynamic theory. Simon Boag demonstrates that Freud’s much maligned ‘metapsychology’, once revised, can provide a foundation for evaluating and integrating the plethora of psychodynamic perspectives, by developing a philosophically-informed position that addresses the embodied, interconnected relationship between motivation, cognition and affects.
#17 The Purloined Self: Interpersonal Perspectives in Psychoanalysis
The Purloined Self: Interpersonal Perspectives in Psychoanalysis brings together nineteen essays in updated form, still as relevant, witty and informative today as when the book originally published.
Edgar Levenson is a key figure in the development of Interpersonal psychoanalysis and his ideas remain influential. This book covers his seminal writing on theoretical topics such as models of psychoanalysis, Harry Stack Sullivan’s theories, and the nature of change, as well as his more familiar focus on practical analytic topics such as transference, supervision, and the use of the self in psychoanalytic clinical work.
#18 Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China: Volume 2
This peer-reviewed journal proposes to explore the introduction of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic therapy, and the wider application of psychoanalytic ideas into China. It aims to have articles authored by Chinese and Western contributors, to explore ideas that apply to the Chinese clinical population, cultural issues relevant to the practice of analysis and psychotherapy, and to the cultural interface between Western ideas underpinning psychoanalysis, and the richness of Chinese intellectual and philosophical ideas that analysis must encounter in the process of its introduction.
#19 Psychoanalysis in Hong Kong: The Absent, the Present, and the Reinvented
How is it possible that a phenomenon like psychoanalysis, which has dominated the cultural and intellectual life of the last century in Europe, North and South America, has seemingly had little-to-no resonance in Hong Kong? This book attempts to explain this phenomenon. Addressing the subject from an East to West approach, this book proposes an experience of displacement, as it is argued that the opportunity for psychoanalysis today is not just to be exported to the East, but rather to be re-invented after an encounter with a radically different culture. This encounter allows the Western practitioner to question their experience and highlights the assumptions of Western thought and knowledge. Following this, what remains of psychoanalysis as we know it? How can psychoanalysis be re-thought and re-formed today in a format independent of different theoretical orientations and schools?
Book preview: Psychoanalysis in Hong Kong
#20 Supervision in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: A Case Study and Clinical Guide
Supervision in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy demonstrates why supervision is an essential component of any psychoanalytic or therapeutic work. Drawing on Winnicott and rich clinical material, and featuring work with Patrick Casement, this book provides new guidance on psychodynamic supervision and explores how its skilful use can have a significant effect on the outcome of such work, enabling the practitioner to rethink their theoretical approach, and thereby view issues differently in the clinical setting
#21 Letters to a Young Psychoanalyst: Lessons on Psyche, Human Existence, and Psychoanalysis
Written in the form of letters from an experienced analyst to a young colleague, Letters to a Young Psychoanalyst expands the psychoanalytic frame to include South American, French, and British theory, and examine a wide variety of theoretical and clinical topics.
Letters to a Young Psychoanalyst is ground-breaking in more than one respect. It re-examines major psychoanalytic theories in the light of rich clinical practice, and in the light of the practice of friendship, whilst portraying the practice of analysis as the choice of a personal code of ethics. Covering such core issues as transference, trauma, hysteria, the influence of the mother, and love and hate, and drawing on the work of notable analysts such as Winnicott, McDougall, Pankow and Ferenczi, the book explores the many facets of healing function of psychoanalysis in practice and discloses the workings of the psyche in human existence.
Book preview: Letters to a Young Psychoanalyst
#22 Love the Wild Swan: The selected works of Judith Edwards
Love the Wild Swan is the culmination of thirty years of clinical and teaching experience, undertaken by child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist Judith Edwards. Along with new material, the book consists of previously published papers spanning Edwards’s entire career, which have been carefully selected to chart the journey that every clinician and human being makes, from babyhood to adult life.
Book preview: Love the Wild Swan
#23 Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable: From culture to the clinic
Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable opens a space for meaningful debate about translating psychoanalytic concepts from the work of clinicians to that of academics and back again. Focusing on the idea of the unrepresentable, this collection of essays by psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, artists and film and literary scholars attempts to think through those things that are impossible to be thought through completely.
Book preview: Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable
#24 Attachment Across Clinical and Cultural Perspectives: A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach
Attachment Across Clinical and Cultural Perspectives brings together leading thinkers in attachment theory to explore its importance across cultural, clinical and social contexts and the application of attachment relationship principles to intervention with diverse groups of children and families. These contributions collectively illustrate the robustness of attachment research in the contexts of culture, early extreme deprivation, trauma and the developing brain, providing great inspiration for anyone embracing the idea of evidence-based practice.
Book preview: Attachment Across Clinical and Cultural Perspectives
#25 Advances in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory: Concept and Future Development
Advances in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory represents the work developed for the first international meeting of the International Field Theory Association. Founded in 2015 to offer a community for those interested in psychoanalytic field theory and promote its understanding and further development, IFTA recognizes all models of psychoanalytic field theory and seeks to foster communication amongst psychoanalysts working in different models, languages and parts of the world.
Book preview: Advances in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Field Theory
#26 The Unconscious: A bridge between psychoanalysis and cognitive neuroscience
The Unconscious explores the critical interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis and contemporary cognitive neuroscience. Characterised by Freud as ‘the science of the unconscious mind’, psychoanalysis has traditionally been viewed as a solely psychological discipline. However recent developments in neuroscience, such as the use of neuroimaging techniques to investigate the working brain, have stimulated and intensified the dialogue between psychoanalysis and these related mental sciences. This book explores the relevance of these discussions for our understanding of unconscious mental processes.
Book preview: The Unconscious
#27 Mistrust: Developmental, Cultural, and Clinical Realms
Humans are weak. Lacking the claws and thick skins of other animals, we are forced to rely on members of our own species to survive and flourish in the world. The fact that the human infant is born in an utterly helpless state also makes others' protective care necessary. Attachment, bonding, concern, and mutuality thus become cornerstones of human existence. Trust also enters this equation. Originating in the early mother-child relationship, trust continues to grow, get contextually refined tempered by reality testing, and gain nuances throughout the subsequent adult life. Its absence (mistrust) or malformation (distrust) contributes to psychopathology and is responsible for much intrapsychic distress and interpersonal strife.
Book preview: Mistrust
#28 Trauma and Countertrauma, Resilience and Counterresilience: Insights from Psychoanalysts and Trauma Experts
Trauma and Countertrauma, Resilience and Counterresilience brings together a distinguished group of seasoned clinicians, both trauma specialists and psychoanalysts. Their personal reflections show what clinicians all too rarely dare to reveal: their personal traumatic material. They then discuss how they develop models for acknowledging, articulating, and synthesizing the countertrauma that arises from long-term exposure to patients’ often-harrowing trauma. Writing openly, using viscerally affecting language, the contributors to this exceptional collection share subjective and sometimes intimate material, shedding light on the inner lives of people who work to heal the wounds of psychic trauma.
#29 Celebrating the Wounded Healer Psychotherapist: Pain, Post-Traumatic Growth and Self-Disclosure
Why would someone decide to become a psychotherapist? It is well-known within the field that psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are often drawn to their future professions as a result of early traumatic experiences and being helped by their own psychoanalytic treatment. While dedicating their lives to relieving emotional suffering without being judgmental, they fear compromising their reputations if they publicly acknowledge such suffering in themselves. This phenomenon is nearly universal among those in the helping professions, yet there are few books dedicated to the issue.
Book preview: Celebrating the Wounded Healer Psychotherapist
#30 Great Psychologists as Parents: Does knowing the theory make you an expert?
Does it make you a better parent if you have pioneered scientific theories of child development? In a unique study, David Cohen compares what great psychologists have said about raising children and the way they did it themselves. Did the experts practice what they preached?
Using an eclectic variety of sources, from letters, diaries, autobiographies, biographies, as well as material from interviews, each chapter focuses on a key figure in historical context. There are many surprises. Was Piaget, the greatest child psychologist of the 20th century, the only man to try to psychoanalyse his mother? How many sons of great gurus have had to rescue their father from a police station as R.D Laing's son did? And why did Melanie Klein's daughter wear red shoes they day her mother died?
The book covers early scientists such as Darwin, psychoanalysists such as Freud and Jung, to founders of developmental psychology including Piaget and Bowlby as well as Dr Spock. It gives a vivid, dramatic and often entertaining insight into the family lives of these great psychologists.
Book preview: Great Psychologists as Parents
#31 Sanity, Madness and the Family
In the late 1950s the psychiatrist R.D.Laing and psychoanalyst Aaron Esterson spent five years interviewing eleven families of female patients diagnosed as 'schizophrenic'. Sanity, Madness and the Family is the result of their work. Eleven vivid case studies, often dramatic and disturbing, reveal patterns of affection and fear, manipulation and indifference within the family. But it was the conclusions they drew from their research that caused such controversy: they suggest that some forms of mental disorder are only comprehensible within their social and family contexts; their symptoms the manifestations of people struggling to live in untenable situations.
Book preview: Sanity, Madness and the Family
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