freud quotes: Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Showing posts with label Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Show all posts

Lacan's Return to Antiquity: Between nature and the gods

Lacan’s Return to Antiquity is the first book devoted to the role of classical antiquity in Lacan’s work. Oliver Harris poses a question familiar from studies of Freud: what are Ancient Greece and Rome doing in a twentieth-century theory of psychology? In Lacan’s case, the issue has an additional edge, for he employs antiquity to demonstrate what is radically new about psychoanalysis. It is a tool with which to convey the revolutionary power of Freud’s ideas by digging down to the philosophical questions beneath them. It is through these questions that Lacan allies psychoanalysis with the pioneering intellectual developments of his time in anthropology, philosophy, art and literature.

Harris begins by considering the role of Plato and Socrates in Lacan’s conflicted thoughts on teaching, writing and the process of becoming an intellectual icon. In doing so, he provides a way into considering the uniquely challenging nature of the Lacanian texts themselves, and the live performances behind them. Two central chapters explore when and why myth is drawn upon in psychoanalysis, its threat to the discipline’s scientific aspirations, and Lacan’s embrace of its expressive potential. The final chapters explore Lacan’s defence of tragedy and his return to Ovidian themes. These include the unwitting voyeurism of Actaeon, and the fate of Narcissus, a figure of tragic metamorphosis that Freud places at the heart of infantile development.

Lacan’s Return to Antiquity brings to Lacan studies the close reading and cross-disciplinary research that has proved fruitful in understanding Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and advanced students studying in the field, being of particular value to those interested in the roots of Lacanian concepts, the evolution of his thought, and the cultural context of his work. What emerges is a more nuanced, self-critical figure, a corrective to the reputation for dogmatism and obscurity that Lacan has attracted. In the process, new light is thrown on enduring controversies, from Lacan’s pronouncements on feminine sexuality to the opaque drama of the seminars themselves.

Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis

Buy Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis here.

What happens when the intellectual giant of twentieth-century literature, James Joyce, is made an object of consideration and cause of desire by the intellectual giant of modern psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan?

This is what Joyce and Lacan explores, in the three closely interrelated areas of reading, writing, and psychoanalysis, by delving into Joyce’s own relationship with psychoanalysis in his lifetime. The book concentrates primarily on his last text, Finnegans Wake, the notorious difficulty of which arises from its challenging the intellect itself, and our own processes of reading. As well as the centrality of the Wake, concepts of Joycean ontology, sanity, singularity, and sexuality are excavated from sustained analysis of his earliest writings onward.

To be ‘post-Joycean’, as Lacan describes it, means then to be in the wake not only of Joyce, but also of Lacan’s interventions on the Irish writer made in the mid-70s. It was this encounter that gave rise to concepts that have gained currency in today’s psychoanalytic theory and practice, and importance in wider critical contexts. The notions of the sinthome, lalangue, and Lacan’s use of topology and knot theory are explored within, as well as new theories being launched.

The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, literary theorists, and students and teachers of literature, theory, or the works of Joyce and Lacan.

Sex and Nothing: Bridges from Psychoanalysis to Philosophy

Buy Sex and Nothing: Bridges from Psychoanalysis to Philosophy here. - Free delivery worldwide

From its etymological roots, sex is related to a scission, Latin for sectus, secare, meaning “to divide or cut.” Therefore, regardless of the various studies applied to defining sex as inscribed by discursive acts, i.e. merely a ‘performatively enacted signification,’ there is something more to sex than just a social construction or an aprioristic substance. Sex is irreducible to meaning or knowledge.

This is why psychoanalysis cannot be formulated as an erotology nor a science of sex (scientia sexualis). Following this argumentation, in the final class of his eleventh seminar, Lacan asserts that psychoanalysis has proven to be uncreative in the realm of sexuality. Henceforth, sex does not engrave itself within the symbolic: only the failure of its inscription is marked in the symbolic. In this matter, sex escapes the symbolic restraints of language; however, it is through its failure that it manifests itself through the symbolic, e.g. symptoms or dream life. So, what is sex? Sex and Nothing embarks upon a dialogue between colleagues and friends interested in bridging psychoanalysis and philosophy, linking sex and thought, where what emerges is a greater awareness of the irreducucibility of sex to the discourse of knowledge and meaning: in other words, sex and nothing.

With contributions by Joan Copjec, Mladen Dolar, Sigi Jöttkandt, Cristina Soto van der Plas, Jelica Šumic, Samo Tomšic, Gabriel Tupinambá, Daniel Tutt, Slavoj Žižek, and Alenka Zupancic.

“Don't expect anything more subversive in my discourse than that I do not claim to have a solution.”

“Don't expect anything more subversive in my discourse than that I do not claim to have a solution.”

― Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

Against Adaptation: Lacan's Subversion of the Subject

Buy Against Adaptation here.

A close reading of Lacan’s most difficult and famous essay on the subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire.

Philippw Van Haute picks up the challenge of explaining to us, line by line, the most difficult and intriguing text of Lacan’s Écrits. All that is required is to open Écrits to page 292 and follow the lucid and pedagogical instruction provided by Van Haute. Leaving to stone unturned, he moves with amazing mastery between all of Lacan’s texts and gives coherence to Lacan’s often elliptic developments.

Catastrophe and Survival: Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis

Buy Catastrophe and Survival here.

Catastrophe and Survival addresses a blind spot in Benjamin scholarship: namely the way that Benjamin s thoughts regarding mental space, the mind-body problem, and the individual s experience of the material object world make significant contact with post-Freudian psychoanalytic confrontations with similar issues. Recent work on Benjamin s representations of the individual subjected to modern shock draws basic correlations between Benjamin and Freud. Still lacking is a discussion of a possible dialogue between Benjamin and Lacan and an account of the historical connections between Benjamin s work and contemporaneous post-Freudian psychoanalytic trends. This book supplies both. Elizabeth Stewart shows that all of these theories were deeply preoccupied with the mutual embeddedness of subject and object, with materiality, and with power. At stake are new ways of envisioning the ethical and political subject in and for the twenty-first century.

Zizek on The Relevance of Psychoanalysis

"The only way to happiness is first: 'no! I don't want to be happy!,' and then it [happiness] comes ..."

GET Ｉ　ＷＯＵＬＤ　ＰＲＥＦＥＲ　ＮＯＴ　ＴＯ． T-Shirt HERE >>

Reading Žižek – Where to Start?

~~ZIZEK BOOKS~~

Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language

Buy Incandescent Alphabets here. - Free delivery worldwide

Psychosis, an invasion of mind and body from without, creates an enigma about what is happening and thrusts the individual into radical isolation. What are the subjective details of such experiences? This book explores psychosis as knowledge cut off from history, truth that cannot be articulated in any other form.

Delusion is a new language made of 'incandescent alphabets' that the psychotic adopts from imposed voices. The psychotic uses language in a singular way to found and explain a strange experience that he or she cannot exit. Through the exegesis of language in psychosis based on first person accounts, the book orients readers to an enigmatic Other, pervasive and inescapable, that will come to inhabit every aspect of the psychotic's being, thought and bodily experience. The book deploys a poetics as a form of inquiry to give a nuanced picture of delusion as a repair of language itself, following Freud and Lacan - in historic and contemporary forms of psychotic art, writing and speech. Drawing on the author's own experience of psychosis and psychoanalysis, as well as conversations with analyst colleagues, Dr Rogers offers ways to listen to language in delusion, and argues for the promise of a modified psychoanalytic treatment with psychosis.

Lacan's life and ideas introduced in short animated video

Jacques Lacan was France’s most famous psychoanalyst, who came up with the intriguing concept of the ‘mirror phase.’

― Jacques Lacan, the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud

Brief Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

by Jorge Alemán

Ten concepts for debate. Ten proposals to understand, explain and update the legacy of a revolution and its impact on language. Psychoanalyst Jorge Alemán chose ten ideas on Freud, ten threads from which to pull and unravel the most burning topics in current psychoanalysis. From the “response” of Love to the “split” of the Subject.

LOVE. Love is not the common ground that reunites two beings. It is the response built -between two beings- to veil the impossible relation which, at the level of the drive, remains. By concealing the impossible, true love reveals it.

SCIENCE. Psychoanalysis is not a science, but not because of an epistemological deficit whatsoever, since it deals with that which science must exclude in order to constitute itself as such. It is a reform of the limits of reason, “a frontier reason” open to what escapes meaning: the unconscious, slips, dreams, the subjective symtpm, the phantasy.

TREATMENT. In the analytic cure it is not about adaptation, or about re-establishing a balance, or increasing “self-esteem”. Freud would have conceived of these as narcissistic operations and therefore impoverishing of subjective experience. It is rather, once morbid symptoms and inhibitions have been dealt with, about “knowing-how” to do with the incurable that inhabits each one of us. It is elevating the incurable symptom to the dignity of a style of life.

DISCOURSE. Rather than saying it all, a push the market knows well how to realise, psychoanalysis is the invitation to realise, via speech, the experience of the impossible to say. The analytic cure is the discovery of a different silence.

OEDIPUS. The Oedipus is not the “blah, blah” that narrates the love and misfortunes of the child and his or her parents. It is the singular myth that in each one of us narrates the impact of language (which always precedes us) on this life emerging in the world. It is the torrent of statements, proper names, wishes, promises, expectations, grievances, debts, guilt, ideals, awaiting the living being even before s/he is born. Thanks to the Oedipus, the speaking being will not feel the product of an anonymous desire, but neither will s/he find, in the auspices of his or her birth, a foundation able to give meaning, to make sense of his or her existence.

THE REAL. Whereas reality puts us to sleep, the real, which lacks a name, wakes us up. It may erupt at any instant as a figure of trauma, anxiety or the uncanny, and the subject defends itself against it through rituals, fantasies of control, obsessions, delusions. However, the subject may face the real with a different kind of dignity, if s/he assumes his or her relation with the unconscious.

MODERNITY. A man of science, Freud was a modern enlightened. But it was in the experience of the cure called psychoanalytic, that he encountered a series of problems which questioned the ideals of his time. Thus, to the ideals of progress and improvement he opposed the idea of a “drive residue” to which we remain fixated and which is never overcome; the idea of a “repetition compulsion”, which returns at different stages in various disguises. Likewise, to the utopias of realisation and fulfilment, he opposed the irreducible discontent in Civilization.

WOMAN. It was through women that Freud got news about unconscious truth, that truth emerging by surprise, which is half-said and which objects any universal definition. Psychoanalysis is the attempt to theorise the way in which “it speaks” in the feminine voice. From there, “phallocentrism” was de-centred and sexuality was “de-hierarchized”; heterosexuality became one practice among others, and no longer the ultimate value of sexuality.

DRIVE. Drive is not instinct. It is the “accursed part of the instinct”, the one made ill by language and forever altered by it. While instinct knows what its object is (hunger-food), the drive aims at erratic and contingent objects, which confirm its autistic and headless satisfaction.

SUBJECT. The subject is neither consciousness, nor reflection, nor the ego. It is an incurable split, an originary and structural fracture which must choose itself through its desires. Consciousness, reflection, the ego, are fictions attempting to suture an inaugural wound, that of the subject of the unconscious. Attacked as “Jewish science” by the Nazis, as “bourgeois science” among the Stalinists, maligned by the Anglo-Saxon schools, the duty to think about this split subject returns to Europe and Latin America thanks to Jacques Lacan.

Published originally in Spanish (terms in alphabetical order) in EL CULTURAL. Revista de Actualidad Cultural, on 04/05/2006

Translated by Florencia F.C. Shanahan.

via Irish Circle Lacanian Orientation

Trauma, Ethics and the Political Beyond PTSD: The Dislocations of the Real

Buy Trauma, Ethics and the Political Beyond PTSD here. - Free delivery worldwide

This book deals with a series of problems associated with the contemporary psychiatric approach to trauma, encapsulated in the diagnostic category of PTSD, by means of a philosophical analysis inspired by the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.

On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics

Buy On Being Normal and Other Disorders here. - Free delivery worldwide

The central argument of On Being Normal and Other Disorders is that psychic identity is acquired through one’s primary intersubjective relationships. Thus, the diagnosis of potential pathologies must also be founded on this relation. Given that the efficacy of all forms of treatment depends upon the therapeutic relation, a diagnostic of this sort has wide-ranging applications.

Paul Verhaeghe’s critical evaluation of the contemporary DSM-diagnostic shows that the lack of reference to an updated governing metapsychology impinges on the therapeutic value of the DSM categories. In response to this problem, the author sketches out the foundations of such a metapsychology by combining a Freudo-Lacanian approach with contemporary empirical research. Close attention is paid to the processes of identity acquisition to show how the self and the Other are not two separate entities. Rather, subject formation is seen as a process in which both the subject’s and the Other’s identity, as well as the relationship between them, comes into being.

By engaging this new theoretical approach in a constant dialogue with the findings of contemporary research, this book provides a compass for the practical applications of such a differential diagnostic. Post-modern categories of anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorders are approached both through the well-known neurotic, psychotic, and perverse structures, as well as through the less familiar distinction between an actual pathology and a psychopathology. These two outlooks, which involve the role of language and the subject’s relation to the Other, are spelled out to show their implications for treatment at every turn.

See also

What About Me?: the struggle for identity in a market-based society

Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drive and Desire

Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drive and Desire

Buy Love in a Time of Loneliness here. - Free delivery worldwide

Noted Belgian psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe shows us what it is about sex that both keeps us moving and inhibits us at the same time.

The first essay, 'The Impossible Couple', is both a humorous and razor-sharp analysis of the contemporary relationship between man and woman. In the second essay, 'Fleeing Fathers', the author demonstrates that today the Freudian Oedipus complex has disappeared, with a resulting shattering of classic gender roles. Post-modern morals are strange compared to previous morality, because they convey an obligation to enjoy. Things become even stranger when one finds that the expected enjoyment fails to come and, instead of that, we are faced with boredom, anxiety, and anger. The reasons for this are discussed in the third essay, 'The Drive'. Today, sexual abuse is omnipresent, with the male in the role of offender, women and children reduced to his victims. Paul Verhaeghe reconsiders the opposition between Eros and Thanatos as an opposition between two forms of sexual pleasure. The fact that this opposition is ever present in heterosexual love demonstrates that gender differentiation goes beyond temporal cultural forms.

Accessibly written and provocatively argued, Love in a Time of Loneliness is a polemic whose very informality belies its serious intent. In these three fascinating essays, Professor Verhaeghe leaves the ordinary paths of thinking and sets out to discover what drives us in sex and love.

Buy Love in a Time of Loneliness here. - Free delivery worldwide

Does the Woman Exist?: From Freud's Hysteric to Lacan's Feminine

Buy Does the Woman Exist? here.

This book describes how Freud attempted to chart hysteria, yet came to a standstill at the problem of woman and her desire, and of how Lacan continued along this road by creating new conceptual tools. The difficulties and upsets encountered by both men are examined.

This lucid presentation of the dialectical process that carries Lacan through the evolution of Freud’s thought offers profound insights into the place of the “feminine mystique” in our social fabric. Patiently and carefully, Verhaeghe applies the Lacanian grid to Freud’s text and succeeds in explaining Lacan’s formulations without merely recapitulating his theories. The reader is informed, along the way, not only of Lacan’s take on Freudian ideas, but also of the array of interpretations emerging from other trends in post-Freudian literature, including feminist revisionism.

Past and Future of Psychoanalysis in Psychiatry

“I wish to speak today not about the "how" of psychoanalysis, but rather the "why" of psychoanalysis. To put this differently, I do not wish to speak today about the techniques or the various practices which constitute psychoanalysis, about the various indications for different approaches which we use in psychoanalysis, or even necessarily about the theory which informs those techniques and practices; but, today, I wish to speak about the history of psychoanalysis, about the context for Freud's discovery of psychoanalysis, about some of the changes that psychoanalysis has undergone in its more American forms and in the form which is identified today as Lacanian psychoanalysis, and - most importantly - to speak about all of this in the context in which all of this is important to the general psychiatrist.

I would like to start with a discussion of Freud and his discovery of psychoanalysis. And already, in the beginning of this discussion, I find myself adjusting the language I use. For in fact, it is probably misleading to speak of psychoanalysis has something that was discovered by Freud, but it is better spoken of as something created by Freud. In other words, psychoanalysis represents a unique form of discourse--a specific combination of theory and practice which is independent in its own right and not best understood as "part" of another discourse, such as medicine or science. In this context, psychoanalysis must be examined at the level of any other discourse, such as the discourse of religion or science. This is in contrast to the view of psychoanalysis as just another treatment modality that is used in psychiatric practice. ”

― Thomas Svolos, Past and Future of Psychoanalysis in Psychiatry

Jacques Lacan, the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981), known simply as Jacques Lacan, was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud".

Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced many leading French intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially those associated with post-structuralism. His ideas had a significant impact on post-structuralism, critical theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis.

A Story from Lacan’s Practice

This is a wonderful story from Lacan's clinic as told by Suzanne Hommel, in analysis with Lacan in 1974. The excerpt is from Gérard Miller's film 'Rendez-vous chez Lacan'.

Here you can watch Gerard Miller's documentary online: 'Rendez-vous chez Lacan'

How, then, do Lacan’s ideas differ from the mainstream psychoanalytical schools of thought and from Freud himself?

"With regard to other schools, the first thing that strikes the eye is the philosophical tenor of Lacan’s theory. For Lacan, psychoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice which confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence. It does not show an individual the way to accommodate him- or herself to the demands of social reality; it explains how something like “reality” constitutes itself in the first place. It does not merely enable a human being to accept the repressed truth about him – or herself; it explains how the dimension of truth emerges in human reality. In Lacan’s view, pathological formations like neuroses, psychoses and perversions, have the dignity of fundamental philosophical attitudes towards reality. When I suffer obsessional neurosis, this ‘illness’ colours my entire relationship to reality and defines the global structure of my personality. Lacan’s main critique of other psychoanalytic orientations concerns their clinical orientation: for Lacan, the goal of psychoanalytic treatment is not the patient’s well-being or successful social life or personal self-fulfilment, but to bring the patient to confront the elementary coordinates and deadlocks of his or her desire."

Excerpted from How to Read Lacan by Slavoj Žižek

Here you can read Žižek's introductory book online: How to Read Lacan. (A list of introductory books on Lacan can be found below in the book section of the post.)

“The Single Most ‘French’ Moment in all of 1972: Jacques Lacan Accosted, But No One Stops Smoking.”

The 71-year-old Lacan never loses his composure. (His cigar appears bent out of shape, but it was that way from the beginning.) The audience, too, retains a certain Gallic nonchalance. The scene is from Jacques Lacan Speaks, a one-hour documentary by Belgian filmmaker Françoise Wolff.

You can watch the complete film, which includes Lacan’s extended and rather cryptic response to the incident and other excerpts from the lecture, followed by Wolff’s interview with Lacan the following day, in our post: Jacques Lacan’s Lecture at Louvain (1972)

‘There can be no crisis of psychoanalysis’ Jacques Lacan interviewed in 1974

In this interview given in 1974, Jacques Lacan prophetically warned of the dangers of the return of religion and of scientism. For him, psychoanalysis is the only conceivable rampart against contemporary anxieties. These are arguments of surprising present-day relevance.

Libération: “Tout fou Lacan”, September 11, 1981. (Image source: La République des livres)

In her book Jacques Lacan & Co: a history of psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, Élisabeth Roudinesco offers further explanation about the historical and political context in which Lacan’s death was received in France:

"While the newspaper of the PCF offered grandiose praise of this man who had never been favorable to their politics, Libération composed an explosive special issue. The headline was Lacanian to order, admirable in its humor and dash of journalistic genius: “Tout fou Lacan”. Beneath that slogan adapted to the 1980s, a photograph showed the master in profile, his chin encased in the palm of his hand. He seemed to be pondering with some curiosity the commotion of a major demonstration. On the inside, numerous chroniclers recalled the Surrealist adventure, the splits, Vincennes, and May1968. A series of puns punctuated the coverage: “Lacan nest plus, que Lacan même… Lacan nest plus, sue Lacan m’aime… Lacan nest plus, sue là quad même.” [Lacan is no longer, anything but himself… may he love me… anywhere but right here.] There was mention of Gloria Gonzales, psychoanalysis, and Pierre Goldmann. Libération was far and away the only newspaper to offer an account of the baroque character of the man, his doctrine and his unique school in French intellectual life. In 1981, the extreme Left emerging from the barricades was thus Lacanian: in its language, its style, its puns, and a certain uncontrolled way of seizing the signifiers of media-transmitted events. The children of Maoism recognized themselves in the figure of the master so intractable to the illusions of revolution."

Selected Books by Jacques Lacan

Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English

Seminars

Freud's Papers on Technique

The Ego in Freud's Theory

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Here you can download Unofficial Seminar Translations by Cormac Gallagher

Žižek's reading advice:

So what and how to read? Écrits or seminars? The only proper answer is a variation on the old “tea or coffee” joke: yes, please! One should read both. If you go directly to the Écrits, you will not get anything, so you should start – but not stop – with seminars, since, if you read only seminars, you will also not get it. The impression that the seminars are clearer and more transparent than the Écrits is deeply misleading: they often oscillate, experiment with different approaches. The proper way is to read a seminar and then go on to read the corresponding écrit to “get the point” of the seminar. We are dealing here with a temporality of Nachtraeglichkeit (clumsily translated as “deferred action”) which is proper to the analytic treatment itself: the Écrits are clear, they provide precise formulas, but we can only understand them after reading seminars which provide their background. Two outstanding cases are the Seminar VII on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and the corresponding écrit “Kant avec Sade,” as well as the Seminar XI on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis and “The Position of the Unconscious.” Also significant is Lacan’s opening essay in Écrits, “The Seminar on The Purloined Letter.”

Introductory Books on Lacan

Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide

How to Read Lacan - Free online

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance

A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique

Yale Video Lecture on Jacques Lacan and Literary Criticism

In this lecture on psychoanalytic criticism, Professor Paul Fry explores the work of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's interest in Freud and distaste for post-Freudian "ego psychologists" are briefly mentioned, and his clinical work on "the mirror stage" is discussed in depth.

The relationship in Lacanian thought, between metaphor and metonymy is explored through the image of the point de capiton. The correlation between language and the unconscious, and the distinction between desire and need, are also explained, with reference to Hugo's "Boaz Asleep."

Peter Brooks and Lacan [00:00:00]
Lacan and Freudian Scholarship [00:09:03]
The Mirror Stage [00:15:51]
Language and the Unconscious [00:22:18]
Metonymy, Metaphor, and Desire [00:30:25]
What Is Desire? [00:37:03]
Slavoj Zizek [00:46:50]

Jacques Lacan: Unofficial Seminar Translations by Cormac Gallagher

Jacques Lacan’s seminars translated from unpublished French manuscripts by Cormac Gallagher.

Download Unofficial Seminar Translations:

Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis

Buy Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis here.

Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis paints a completely new picture of the man and his ideas. The book suceeds in showing how ideas can become more accessible, and re-evaluates his significance within the field of psychodynamic psychotherapy.

The book is structured thematically around five key issues: diagnosis, the analyst's position during the treatment, the management of transference, the formulation of interpretations, and the organisation of analytic training. For each of these issues, Lacan's entire work both published and unpublished material, has been taken into account and theoretical principles have been illustrated with clinical examples. The book also contains the first complete bibliography of Lacan's works in English.

Clear, detailed, and wide ranging, Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis will prove essential reading, not only for professionals and students within the fields of psychology and psychiatry, but for all those keen to discover a new Lacan.

Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne

Buy Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne here.

Psychoanalysis is certainly one of the most contested areas of debate within feminism. This book presents articles on feminine sexuality by Lacan and members of the ecole freudienne, the school of psychoanalysis that Lacan directed in Paris from 1964 to 1980. The question of feminine sexuality has divided the psychoanalytic movement since the 1920s. Despite their opposition to each other, contemporary psychoanalysis and feminism both reject Freud's phallocentrism. This book forcefully reasserts the importance of the castration complex in Freud's work and of the phallus in the work of Lacan, offering them not as a reflection of a theory based on male supremacy and privilege but as the terms through which any such privilege is exposed as a fraud. Lacan's rereading of Freud is seen here to reveal, in a way that no other account has been able to do, the arbitrary and fictional nature of both male and female sexual identity and, specifically, the fantasy behind the category "woman" as the dominant fetish of our culture. These texts reveal that women constantly exceed the barriers of the definition to which they are confined."

Pages