Five Lessons On The Psychoanalytic Theory Of Jacques Lacan

In this first English translation of a classic text by one of the foremost commentators on Lacan's work, Nasio eloquently demonstrates the clinical and practical import of Lacan's theory, even in its most difficult or obscure moments.

Lacan developed his theory and practice of psychoanalysis on the basis of Freud's original work. In his "return to Freud" he not only elaborated and revised some of Freud's innovative ideas, but turned to important questions and problems in Freud's theory that had remained obscure and unresolved, and provided a new way of articulating these issues and their implication for psychoanalytic theory and practice. This book offers a selection of chapters about some of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. The authors aim to explore the trajectory of the development of these concepts from their original basis in Freud's work to their elaboration by Lacan. The book will be of interest to readers from different backgrounds, including the clinical and academic field, social and cultural studies and the arts, for whom psychoanalytic ideas may be a relatively new field to explore, or who are looking for new perspectives to develop their ideas about psychoanalysis.

An introduction to literary theory unlike any other, Ten Lessons in Theory engages its readers with three fundamental premises. The first premise is that a genuinely productive understanding of theory depends upon a considerably more sustained encounter with the foundational writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud than any reader is likely to get from the introductions to theory that are currently available. The second premise involves what Fredric Jameson describes as "the conviction that of all the writing called theoretical, Lacan's is the richest." Entertaining this conviction, the book pays more (and more careful) attention to the richness of Lacan's writing than does any other introduction to literary theory. The third and most distinctive premise of the book is that literary theory isn't simply theory "about" literature, but that theory fundamentally is literature, after all. Ten Lessons in Theory argues, and even demonstrates, that "theoretical writing" is nothing if not a specific genre of "creative writing," a particular way of engaging in the art of the sentence, the art of making sentences that make trouble sentences that make, or desire to make, radical changes in the very fabric of social reality. As its title indicates, the book proceeds in the form of ten "lessons," each based on an axiomatic sentence selected from the canon of theoretical writing. Each lesson works by creatively unpacking its featured sentence and exploring the sentence's conditions of possibility and most radical implications. In the course of exploring the conditions and consequences of these troubling sentences, the ten lessons work and play together to articulate the most basic assumptions and motivations supporting theoretical writing, from its earliest stirrings to its most current turbulences. Provided in each lesson is a working glossary: specific critical keywords are boldfaced on their first appearance and defined either in the text or in a footnote. But while each lesson constitutes a precise explication of the working terms and core tenets of theoretical writing, each also attempts to exemplify theory as a "practice of creativity" (Foucault) in itself.

Addresses the limits in treating pain psychoanalytically, and offers a phenomenological description of psychic pain, particularly the pain of a lost loved one.

This book is a close reading of Jacques Lacan's seminal essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud, " selected for the particular light it casts on Lacan's complex relation to linguistics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. It clarifies the way Lacan renews or transforms the psychoanalytic field, through his diversion of Saussure's theory of the sign, his radicalization of Freud's fundamental concepts, and his subversion of dominant philosophical values. The authors argue, however, that Lacan's discourse is marked by a deep ambiguity: while he invents a new "language," he nonetheless maintains the traditional metaphysical motifs of systemacity, foundation, and truth.

Arguably the most profound psychoanalytic thinker since Freud, and deeply influential in many fields, Jacques Lacan often seems opaque to those he most wanted to reach. These are the readers Bruce Fink addresses in this clear and practical account of Lacan's highly original approach to therapy. Written by a clinician for clinicians, Fink's introduction is an invaluable guide to Lacanian psychoanalysis, how it's done, and how it differs from other forms of therapy. While elucidating many of Lacan's theoretical notions, the book does so from the perspective of the practitioner faced with the pressing questions of diagnosis, which therapeutic stance to adopt, how to involve the patient, and how to bring about change.

In this delightfully readable and clearly written volume, the world renowned psychoanalyst Moustafa Safouan considers the works of Freud and Lacan. When Safouan met Lacan in 1949, he was all but ready to abandon the field due to the many contradictions and obscurities he found in Freud. Yet thanks to Lacan's early presentation of the father as real, imaginary, and symbolic, Safouan stayed on, working with Lacan until Lacan?s death in 1981. One can track the evolution of Safouan's teaching through his participation in Lacan's published seminars and his early contributions. Safouan wrote this book in English, starting with a transcript from a series of lectures he delivered to the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in San Francisco, in March of 2001. Safouan clears up many of Lacan's own obscurities, although he is quick to point out that there are no contradictions in Lacan. Readers will find the cause of desire, both through the signifier and through the 'normative' (rather than normal) development of the child. Safouan explains the three forms of lack, the root of subjectivity, the desire of the analyst, the Other as different from the other, the object cause of desire, transference, countertransference and lateral transference, and the analytic act in a narrative that brings these and other concepts together, in a 'dictionary' that could never be divided by terms.

Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy is an introduction to the emerging field of Lacanian Discourse Analysis. It includes key papers that lay the foundations for this research, and worked examples from analysts working with a range of different texts. The editors Ian Parker and David Pavón-Cuéllar begin with an introduction which reviews the key themes in discourse analysis and the problems faced by researchers in that field of work including an overview of the development of discourse analysis in different disciplines (psychology, sociology, cultural studies and political and social theory). They also set out the conceptual and methodological principles of Lacan's work insofar as it applies to the field of discourse. Ian Parker and David Pavón-Cuéllar have divided the book into three main sections. The first section comprises previously published papers, some not yet available in English, which set out the foundations for 'Lacanian Discourse Analysis'. The chapters establish the first lines of research, and illustrate how Lacanian psychoanalysis is transformed into a distinctive approach to interpreting text when it is taken out of the clinical domain. The second and third parts of the book comprise commissioned papers in which leading researchers from across the social sciences, from the English-speaking world and from continental Europe and Latin America, show how Lacanian Discourse Analysis works in practice. Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy is intended to be a definitive volume bringing together writing from the leaders in the field of Lacanian Discourse Analysis working in the English-speaking world and in countries where Lacanian psychoanalysis is part of mainstream clinical practice and social theory. It will be of particular interest to psychoanalysts of different traditions, to post-graduate and undergraduate researchers in psycho-social studies, cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology.