Freud and Lacan Research Papers (original) (raw)

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.

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- Psychoanalysis, Art History, Psychotherapy and Counseling, Jungian psychology

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.

- by Lucas Pohl
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- Psychoanalysis, Political Theory, Lacan, Jacques Lacan
- by Jorge Luis Hernández Mendoza
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- Sigmund Freud, Freud and Lacan, Psicología, Psicoanálisis

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.

- by Fábio Santos Bispo
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- Violence, Lacan, Jacques Lacan, Lacanian theory

Liberalizm, otwierający drogę wolności podporządkowanej normatywności interesów społecznych, stopniowo zastępuje neoliberalizm, wymykający się prawom społecznym, pozwalający podmiotowi na ich przekraczanie w zależności od własnych interesów. Wypaczenie rozumienia i nadużywanie przez podmiot prawa do udziału w uzyskanej społecznie wolności powoduje, że zasady liberalizmu
wywołują obawy przed postępującym chaosem społecznym. Dyskusja
pomiędzy zwolennikami liberalizacji i radykalizacji życia społecznego dotyczy aspektu funkcjonowania prawa społecznego, które normalizuje dostęp do wolności. Wolność jest bowiem zagrożeniem, gdy rozwój świadomości społecznej ogranicza się jedynie do preferowania kultu podmiotu, jego indywidualizacji oraz alienacji ze struktur społecznych. Dojrzałość społeczeństwa do korzystania z zasad demokratyzmu i pluralizmu jest niezbędnym warunkiem kształcenia liberalnego, którego podstawową zasadą powinna stać się dbałość o to, co nas łączy, a nie o to, co nas dzieli. W innym wypadku efekt spontanicznej liberalizacji
zasad społecznych spowoduje uruchamianie mechanizmów niekorzystnych nie tylko w perspektywie społecznej, ale przede wszystkim stanie się zagrożeniem dla samego podmiotu.

- by Klaudia Węc
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- Psychoanalysis, Education, Critical Discourse Analysis, Freud and Lacan

ABSTRACT: With the emergence of new information and communication technologies, education is forced to adapt to cover these changes. The professional needs to re-signify this distance, developing a new perspective related to this way of teaching and learning in a virtual environment, which requires an interaction with the student, and at the same time will realize that the distance, may not interfere in their interaction, if you are able to make use of the technologies at your disposal. This research presupposes a historical reflection, demonstrating how the distance education that we know today has emerged, and starting from this framework, presents laws that legitimize this modality, the setbacks that the student finds in seeking this teaching, and in counterpoint the training of this professional who he changes from teacher to tutor, dissociating himself from his initial training oriented to traditional methods, aiming to identify the complementary adaptations that the teacher needs to pursue when performing activities in this modality of teaching, approaching the new technologies and making use of coherent methodologies.

- by Yara Zanella
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- Sigmund Freud, Althusser, Freud and Lacan, Historia

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.

- by J. P. Manoussakis
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- Plato, Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger

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.

- by Robert Thomas Kilroy
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- Psychoanalysis, Art History, Interdisciplinarity, Contemporary Art

Quand le corps se raconte, quand le geste fait sens, quand la fiction se déploie, une autre réalité se construit, une nouvelle fenêtre s'ouvre sur le monde, sur soi et sur l'autre. La scène est alors le lieu d'un autre possible...
La médiation par le théâtre offre ainsi une "scène" à des sujets porteurs d'un chaos dont ils ne savent souvent que faire. Elle peut alors aider et soutenir des personnes en souffrance.
Comment le théâtre permet-il de s'expérimenter autre que "soi" ? Comment cette expérience peut-elle être le point de départ d'un travail clinique à la fois singulier et collectif ? Qu'est-ce qu'une troupe au théâtre et pourquoi se révèle-t-elle parfois si fragile ?
En prenant comme fil rouge un atelier de théâtre organisé auprès d'adolescents "délinquants", cet ouvrage montre en quoi toute situation d'improvisation théâtrale est susceptible de renouer avec les enjeux de la "naissance de la tragédie" et développe leur portée thérapeutique.

- by Frédéric VINOT and +1
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- Improvisation, Art Therapy, Sigmund Freud, Mediation

The article addresses the concept of madness in a dialogue between psychoanalysis and other fields of knowledge, in particular British antipsychiatry and Michel Foucault's post-structuralism. The form of presentation is the essay, in the tradition of the adorniana dialectic. The central problem proposed is the underlying differentiation between the notions of psychosis and madness taking as reference the works of Freud and Lacan, in a comparison procedure with other theoretical and epistemological models. A privilege is presented to the concept of schizophrenia and its centrality in debates about psychoses in contemporary thought. The study is exclusively theoretical, comparing concepts and authors and the objective is to provide a critical look, along the lines of the Frankfurt betrayal, regarding the relationship between psychoses and society, suggesting the relevance of the concept of social experience. It is a panoramic essay, which aims to contribute to the understanding of madness in contemporary society and its related forms of social domination.

- by Sílvio Camargo
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- Psychoanalysis, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud

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.

- by Jonah Dempcy
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- Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Lacan, Jungian psychology

Review of the Polish translation of Stuart Schneiderman`s book "Jacques Lacan – the Death of an Intellectual Hero"

- by Itzhak Benyamini
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- Christianity, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Psychosis

It seems intuitive to conflate the gamic gaze with the player's act of looking. To do so, however, would be to inherit from the first wave of psychoanalytic screen theory a misleading presupposition that the gaze is synonymous with the look. Taking influence from new Lacanian film theorists such as Joan Copjec and Todd McGowan, this article contends that the gamic gaze is an object in the visual field of play that disrupts the mastery of the player's look. I develop this argument through an analysis of the 2017 videogame Gorogoa. By confronting the player with the gaze, Gorogoa reveals that the jouissance (enjoyment) of videogame play consists in the player's unconscious drive to fail rather than their conscious wish for pleasure or mastery. To borrow terminology from Copjec, the gamic gaze marks the point of the player's culpability-rather than visibility-in the visual field of play.

- by Benjamin Nicoll
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- Game studies, Video Game Theory, Freud and Lacan, Lacanian psychoanalysis
- by Concetta V Principe
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- Freud and Lacan, Trauma Theory

This paper will explore the aesthetic strategies of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (NBC, 2013-15) in the context of film-philosophy and what appears as a sort of methodological Cartesian dualism – which is to say, approaches that posit film as mind and/or film as body – in order to suggest the possibilities for (re)introducing psychoanalytic theory into such psyche-soma-screen debates. Identifying a recurring stylistic motif throughout the series – which I will designate the “shudder-image” – I will ask whether established models such as Frampton’s (2006) concept of “filmind”, on the one hand, or Sobchack’s (1992) encounter with perceiving bodies, on the other, are sufficient for understanding the audio-visual techniques of Hannibal, and what scope there might be to bring notions such as “unconscious” and “symptom” into this conversation. Where Adorno (1970) famously described the “shudder” provoked by the work of art, I will consider what is at stake when it is the image itself that convulses. This analysis will be framed in terms of the mind-body relation expressed in psychoanalysis, and developed with reference to Freud’s (1900) emphasis on the priority of form in the interpretation of dreams and Žižek’s (2019) dialectical understanding of the relationship between style and story. In short, in dialogue with phenomenology and affect theory, I ask: What contribution can Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis make to the study of aesthetics in general and Hannibal in particular?

- by Ben Tyrer
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- Psychoanalysis, Film Studies, Film Theory, Television Studies
- by Léa Silveira
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- Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Feminist Theory, Feminist Philosophy

El presente artículo se propone explorar los alcances de la apuesta atea freudiana y sus implicaciones para la ética de la clínica psicoanalítica. En el recorrido propuesto, se esbozan algunos planteamientos en torno al debate del ateísmo en la comunidad psicoanalítica. Se destaca principalmente la importancia de los desarrollos de Lacan en torno al concepto de Real para extender la necesaria radicalidad del ateísmo y su gran relevancia para el pensamiento psicoanalítico contemporáneo.

- by Miguel Gutiérrez-Peláez
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- Religion, Psychoanalysis, Atheism, Sigmund Freud
- by Stijn Vanheule
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- Criminology, Psychology, Forensic Psychology, Forensic Anthropology
- by John Hendrix
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- Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Aesthetics, Perception

This chapter, focusing on the text The Family Complexes (1938), demonstrates that already as early as the 1930s, Lacan's interests had turned to revising psychoanalytic theory. The text represents a prototypical example of the internal dilemma Lacan experienced throughout his work, a dilemma swinging between fidelity to Freud and his own longing for innovation, that is, between his desire to sustain the physical anti-metaphysical dimension in Freud's theory and his wish to transform Freud's principles into an abstract model of fatherhood. In his scheme, fatherhood was to be a symbolic principle extending beyond any concrete feature. My research indicates that Lacan's interpretation of Freud revolved around the concept of the Father, with Lacan placing the Father figure within a broad cultural context. Lacan related to the Father as Imago rather than as a biological-concrete father functioning within some family unit.
I argue here that during this period, Lacan made use of Jungian concepts as well as precepts taken from the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to construct his revision of psychoanalysis. By means of Jung's terms "imago" and "complex," Lacan was able, like Jung, to contest Freud's biologism. With the help of the Father principle as it appears in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Lacan elaborated what he perceived to be a paternalistic-Jewish attitude. This attitude, he believed, existed in contradiction to the absolute Mother principle.

- by Itzhak Benyamini
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- Psychology, Family Therapy, Psychoanalysis, Family studies

La clinica delle psicosi ci mostra a sufficienza che la sensorialità è al cuore del processo di decostruzione/ricostruzione del corpo, sia nella forma di fenomeni elementari xenopatici che richiamano l'automatismo mentale, sia tipicamente con il ricorso compulsivo a tutto un campo d'azione per riconfermare sensorialmente l'integrità del corpo. Dalla sensorialità alla sensualità si gioca il problema assolutamente centrale della costruzione di un'intimità. Se le condotte di rassicurazione sensoriale appaiono onnipresenti negli psicotici, quelle sensuali sembrano al contrario al centro della loro difficoltà a giocare con i sensi, e così investire un modo di espressione che articoli il piacere alla realtà, lasciandoli coesistere. Dopo aver descritto certi modi d'uso della sensorialità, vedremo che essi possono costituire il terreno su cui la psicosi può compensarsi, mettendo in luce una passione sensoriale che può riordinare la personalità. Infine, avremo cura di ritornare sulla questione dei rapporti tra l'intimo e la sensualità, formulando alcune ipotesi sulla genitalità nella psicosi.

- by Louis Raffinot
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- Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, Psychosis, Schizophrenia
- by Patrick Ntsime and +1
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- African History, Political Violence and Terrorism, Freud and Lacan, South Africa, TRC media hearings, apartheid

The problem of the superhero is that this figure acts takes up the position of the sovereign exception and almost always thereby functions ideologically. Christopher Nolan's superhero films are his most ideological, revealing that as a... more

- by Todd McGowan
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- Psychoanalysis, Lacan, Jacques Lacan, Lacanian theory

AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book intro in downloadable .pdf

- by Deirdre Barrett
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- Philology, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Applied Psychology

Este texto es una de las respuestas a la pregunta que esbocé hace varios años sobre la importancia y las consecuencias de las castración –como finalidad de un análisis–en la ética y la política del sujeto. Mi interés primordial era averiguar si había efectos observables en la forma de habitar los lazos que el sujeto establecía durante y después de un final de análisis, es decir, una vez que la castración había atravesado su existencia.

- by Aliber Escobar
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- Freud and Lacan, Política, Ética, Psicoanálisis

La bibliografía del curso que comenzará próximamente, "Introducción a la teoría nodal psicoanalítica", incluye textos matemáticos, de Lacan y de mi autoría. Los pondremos a trabajar para dar una introducción a qué tienen que ver los... more

- by Félix Morales Montiel
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- Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan, Freud and Lacan, Psychoanalytic Theory
- by Lucas Pohl
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- Social Theory, Psychoanalysis, Human Geography, Cultural Geography
- by Itzhak Benyamini
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- Lacan, Jacques Lacan, Lacanian theory, Freud and Lacan

En sus películas, David Lynch nos lleva a un mundo onírico en el que el deseo se desata hasta el terror. Con unas figuras habituales en su mundo, explora y muestra algo de nosotros mismos que no nos atrevemos a ver. Intentaré ver la relación que tienen esas figuras con su primer largometraje, Eraserhead (1977), en concreto con su protagonista Henry Spencer, que podría bien ser el origen de esas figuras de paternidad desbocada y exagerada hasta el ridículo

- by Ivan G
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- Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Freud and Lacan, Cinema
- by Davor Ko
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- Art History, Art, Photography, Contemporary Art

Lacan ha ragione. L’Estetica trascendentale kantiana va revisionata. Il suo spazio è immaginario, egoico, mentale. Nessun reale vi si incontra. Tuttavia, ciò non si deve imputare soltanto al ricorso che Kant fa alla geometria euclidea, l’unica disponibile ai suoi tempi. L’idealismo dell’Estetica trascendentale dipende soprattutto dall’esclusione, che vi si opera, della sensazione: il solo contatto con un fuori e un dentro trascendentali, inconsci. Il contrasto tra queste due ‘dimensioni’ si pone al livello empirico della percezione, una sensazione di cui si è coscienti, fantasmaticamente. Cosa che Freud suggerisce nel saggio su La negazione. L’archicorismia originaria della soggettività che vi descrive è una modificazione che produce un’anestesia, o insensibilità, alla luce della quale il senso del suo aforisma – psiche è estesa, ma non ne sa nulla – si chiarisce.

- by Alessandra Campo
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- Freud and Lacan, Immanuel Kant, Transcendental Aesthetic
- by Paulo Sérgio de Souza Jr.
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- Languages, History, Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis

This paper is a play on the Moebius: the Real of/in Marx, i.e. the work of the (Lacanian) Real in Marx and the real Marx. It could also have been titled the Moebius between 'The Other of Marx' and 'The Other Marx'. In 2001-2002, I had titled an assignment I was writing for Anjanda (late Anjan Ghosh) in terms of the Other (question), wherein I focused on the 'non-West' and how it featured in the late Marx. It was Anjanda who had directed my attention - then wedded uncritically to historical materialism - to the 'non-West' in Marx, and how it inaugurated the question of non-capital (not necessarily pre-capital), and what could be called 'non-wage' or 'non-capitalist' labour practices within the womb of capitalism, practices that do not feature in 'Classes' (Chapter 52 of Capital, Volume III) - but which also bring Marx' s work and reflection on class and 'what makes classes', as he asks in the chapter, to a seeming halt; the text breaks off at this point. It is interesting to note that the text of Capital breaks off the moment Marx engages with the theorisation of class or classes. Is class then the Real of Capital? Does Capital, the 'book' , hit Lacan' s inassimilable Real once it hits the question of class? Or is non-West (as also non-capital) the inassimilable Real in the Marxian schema? Is it the non-West (as also non-capital) that is taking (the late) Marx beyond the merely objective historical trend, fashionably called historical materialism? Or is it class that is inaugurating a principled break with the way things are? It is almost as if Marx comes to face ‘a moment of pure surprise’, as if there is a crisis of some kind (in his theory) to which he cannot as such react, something he cannot easily re-present. This moment seems to come at least twice in Marx: first, with and through the question of class; then, with and through the question of non-West (as also non-capital). It is the experience of the non-West that takes Marx to non-capital, as a condition for post-capitalist praxis. It is as if the experience of the (post)colonial takes Marx to the post-capitalist condition. The post-colonial and the post-capitalist are thus in a mutually constitutive relation—one ushers in the other. This paper argues that while the West (Britain and Germany to be precise) was for Marx the archive of the present, that is, of capital, the non-West (Russia and Asia, including India and the Bengal village [Marx 1974: 245–284]) was for Marx the archive of the future, that is, of post-capital.

- by Anup Dhar
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- Indigenous Studies, Marxism, Postcolonial Studies, Jacques Lacan

Representations of death both articulate an anxiety about and a desire for death. In so doing, they function like a symptom, which psychoanalytic discourse defines as a repression that fails. In the same displaced manner in which art enacts the reality of death we wish to disavow, any symptom articulates something that is so dangerous to the health of the psyche that it must be repressed. At the same time, it is so strong in its desire for articulation that it cannot be repressed. In a gesture of compromise, the psychic apparatus represents this dangerous and fascinating thing by virtue of a substitution, just as the aesthetic enactment represents death, but at the body of another person and at another site; namely in the realm of art. A symptom hides the dangerous thing even as it points precisely to it. Fundamentally duplicitous by nature, a symptom tries to maintain a balance of sorts. Yet it does so by obliquely pointing to that which threatens to disturb the order. In respect to death, one could say, it names one thing ('I am the spectator/survivor of someone's else's death, therefore I can tell myself there is no death for me'). Yet it means something else ('someone else is dead, therefore I know there is death,). In short, representations as well as symptoms articulate unconscious knowledge and unconscious desires in a displaced, recoded and translated manner. At stake in the following discussion is precisely this strategy of double articulation in respect to representations of feminine death, and the implications this has for our culture's attitude towards death.

- by Elisabeth Bronfen
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- Feminist Theory, Jacques Lacan, Lacanian theory, Freud and Lacan