“At the root of any request to begin an analysis, there is always affective suffering that is hard to bear and that is looking for a cure.”

“Affects are a high-stakes topic in psychoanalysis. Isn’t it owing to disturbing symptoms that people call upon analysts, so that the latter may help them explore and assuage those symptoms? And who would want to get well if their symptoms – whether hysterical, obsessional, or involving impotence or some more vague malaise – were not accompanied by painful affects such as sorrow, discouragement, dejection, or even a distaste for life? At the root of any request to begin an analysis, there is always affective suffering that is hard to bear and that is looking for a cure.”

― Colette Soler, Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan's Work 

Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan's Work

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Affect is a high-stakes topic in psychoanalysis, but there has long been a misperception that Lacan neglected affect in his writings. We encounter affect at the beginning of any analysis in the form of subjective suffering that the patient hopes to alleviate. How can psychoanalysis alleviate such suffering when analytic practice itself gives rise to a wide range of affects in the patient’s relationship to the analyst?

Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work, is the first book to explore Lacan’s theory of affect and its implications for contemporary psychoanalytic practice. In it, Colette Soler discusses affects as diverse as the pain of existence, hatred, ignorance, mourning, sadness, "joyful knowledge," boredom, moroseness, anger, shame, and enthusiasm. Soler’s discussion culminates in a highlighting of so-called enigmatic affects: anguish, love, and the satisfaction related to the end of an analysis.

Lacanian Affects provides a unique and compelling account of affect that will prove to be an essential text for psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists, and social workers.

“Affects are a high-stakes topic in psychoanalysis. Isn’t it owing to disturbing symptoms that people call upon analysts, so that the latter may help them explore and assuage those symptoms? And who would want to get well if their symptoms – whether hysterical, obsessional, or involving impotence or some more vague malaise – were not accompanied by painful affects such as sorrow, discouragement, dejection, or even a distaste for life? At the root of any request to begin an analysis, there is always affective suffering that is hard to bear and that is looking for a cure.”

― Colette Soler, Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan's Work

See also:

Lacan: The Unconscious Reinvented by Colette Soler

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Lacan: The Unconscious Reinvented by Colette Soler

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Has Jacques Lacan's impact on psychoanalysis really been assessed? His formulation that the Freudian unconscious is 'structured like a language' is well-known, but this was only the beginning. There was then the radically new thesis of the 'real unconscious'. Why this step? Searching for the Ariadne's thread that runs throughout Lacan's ever-evolving teaching, this book illuminates the questions implicit in each step, and sheds new light on his revisions and renewals of psychoanalytic concepts. In tracing these, Colette Soler brings out their consequences for the clinic, and in particular, for the subject, for symptoms, for affects, and for the aims of treatment itself. The last section of the book examines the political import of these developments. If many analysts since Freud have dreamt of reinventing psychoanalysis, Colette Soler shows the ways in which Lacan succeeded in this reinvention.

Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Return to Freud

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In this collection of essays, Lacan's early work is first discussed systematically by focusing on his two earliest seminars: Freud's Papers on Technique and The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. These essays, by some of the finest analysts and writers in the Lacanian psychoanalytic world in Paris today, carefully lay out the background and development of Lacan's thought. In Part I, Jacques-Alain Miller spells out the philosophical and psychiatric origins of Lacan's work in great detail. In Parts II, III, and IV, Colette Soler, Eric Laurent, and others explain in the clearest of fashions the highly influential conceptualization Lacan introduces with the terms "symbolic" "imaginary" and "real" Part V provides the first sustained account in English to date of Lacan's reformulation of psychoanalytic diagnostic categories-neurosis, perversion, psychosis, and their subcategories-their theoretical foundations, and clinical applications (ample case material is provided here)