Law Psychoanalysis Society

'I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' we say in a court of law. 'In a court of law, the truth is precisely what we will not say', says Lacan. ‘If God is dead, everything is permitted’, writes Dostoyevsky. ‘If God is dead, everything is prohibited’, responds Lacan. ‘I think, therefore I am’, reasons Descartes. ‘I am where I do not think’, concludes Lacan. What are we to make of Lacan’s inversions of these mottos? And what are the implications for the legal system if we take them seriously? This book puts the legal subject on the couch and explores the incestuous relationship between law and desire, enjoyment and transgression, freedom and subjection, ethics and atheism. The process of analysis problematizes fundamental tenets of the legal system, leading the patient to rethink long-held beliefs: terms like ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’, ‘truth’ and ‘lies’, ‘reason’ and ‘reality’, ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’, ‘cause’ and ‘punishment’, acquire new and surprising meanings. By the end of these sessions, the patient is left wondering, along with Freud her analyst, whether ‘it is not psychology that deserves the mockery but the procedure of judicial enquiry’. A unique study on the nexus of Law and Psychoanalysis, this book will interest students and scholars of both subjects, as well as general readers looking to explore this perverse and fascinating relationship.

Psychoanalysis, Law, and Society explores the connections between psychoanalysis and law, arguing that these are required not only for conceptual or theoretical needs in both fields, but also for the vast range of practical implications and possibilities their association enables. The book is divided into four parts, each addressing a unique example of the interaction of legal and psychoanalytic work. It begins with matters that are as global as they are local: the challenge of caring for and aiding migrants, refugees, families, and individuals; the question of planetary survival; of the mistreatment and violence in military and secular conflicts; and the projects and processes of international governance. The middle two parts focus on the very wide-ranging problems of social violence as these target women and people of diversity. Then, on the penetration of law into the most intimate aspects of family life: adoption, divorce, child custody, and complex parental arrangements. In the last part, the contributions use this double vision (legal and psychoanalytic) perspective to explore basic processes in social and legal life. Psychoanalysis, Law, and Society will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as legal scholars.

'I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' we say in a court of law. 'In a court of law, the truth is precisely what we will not say', says Lacan. ‘If God is dead, everything is permitted’, writes Dostoyevsky. ‘If God is dead, everything is prohibited’, responds Lacan. ‘I think, therefore I am’, reasons Descartes. ‘I am where I do not think’, concludes Lacan. What are we to make of Lacan’s inversions of these mottos? And what are the implications for the legal system if we take them seriously? This book puts the legal subject on the couch and explores the incestuous relationship between law and desire, enjoyment and transgression, freedom and subjection, ethics and atheism. The process of analysis problematizes fundamental tenets of the legal system, leading the patient to rethink long-held beliefs: terms like ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’, ‘truth’ and ‘lies’, ‘reason’ and ‘reality’, ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’, ‘cause’ and ‘punishment’, acquire new and surprising meanings. By the end of these sessions, the patient is left wondering, along with Freud her analyst, whether ‘it is not psychology that deserves the mockery but the procedure of judicial enquiry’. A unique study on the nexus of Law and Psychoanalysis, this book will interest students and scholars of both subjects, as well as general readers looking to explore this perverse and fascinating relationship.

Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire explores the conjunction between psychoanalysis and democracy, in particular their shared commitments to free speech. In the process, it demonstrates how lawful constraints enable an embodied space or "gap" for the potentially disruptive but also liberating and novel flow of desire and its symbols. This space, intuited by the First Amendment as it is by Freud's free association, enables personal and collective sovereignty. By naming a "feminine law," we mark the primacy a space between the conceivable and the inconceivable, between knowledge and mystery. What do political free speech and psychoanalytic free association have in common, besides the word "free"? And what do Sigmund Freud and Justice Louis Brandeis share besides a world between two great wars? How is the female body a neglected key to understanding the conditions and contradictions of free discourse? Drs. Jill Gentile and Michael Macrone take up these questions, and more, in their wide-ranging, often passionate exploration of the hidden legacy of Freud and the Founding Fathers.

This book focuses the collective attention of psychotherapists, the legal community, social scientists, and ethicists on the moral, legal, and clinical problems of confidentiality in psychotherapeutic practice. By providing timely and important interdisciplinary contributions, the book opens the way to understanding, if not resolving, the conflicting interests and values at stake in the debate on confidentiality.

The distinguished contributors to Confidentiality probe the ethical, legal, and clinical implications of a deceptively simple proposition: Psychoanalytic treatment requires a confidential relationship between analyst and analysand. But how, they ask, should we understand confidentiality in a psychoanalytically meaningful way? Is confidentiality a therapeutic requisite of psychoanalysis, an ethical precept independent of psychoanalytic principles, or simply a legal accommodation with the powers that be? In wrestling with these questions, the contributors to Confidentiality are responding to a professional, ethical, and political crisis in the field of mental health. Psychotherapy - especially long-term psychotherapy in its psychoanalytic variants - has been undermined by an erosion of personal privacy that has become part of our cultural zeitgeist. The heightened demand for public transparency has forced caregivers from all walks of professional life to submit to increasing bureaucratic regulation. For the contributors to this collection, the need for confidentiality is centrally involved in the relationship of the psychotherapeutic professions both to society and to the law. No less importantly, the requirement of confidentiality brings a clarifying perspective to debates within the psychotherapeutic literature about the relationship of theory to practice. It thereby provides a framework for shaping a set of ethical principles specifically adapted to the psychotherapeutic, and especially to the psychoanalytic, relationship. Linking general issues of privacy to the intimate details of psychotherapeutic encounter, Confidentiality will serve as a basic guide to a wide range of professionals, including lawyers, social scientists, philosophers, and, of course, psychotherapists. Therapy patients, policy makers, and the wider public will also find it instructive to know more about the special protected conditions under which one can better come to "know thyself."

How do we bring the law into line with people's psychological experience? How can psychoanalysis help us understand irrational actions and bad choices? Our legal system relies on the idea that people act reasonably and of their own free will, yet some still commit crimes with a high likelihood of being caught, sign obviously one-sided contracts, or violate their own moral codes--behavior many would call fundamentally irrational. Anne Dailey shows that a psychoanalytic perspective grounded in solid clinical work can bring the law into line with the reality of psychological experience. Approaching contemporary legal debates with fresh insights, this original and powerful critique sheds new light on issues of overriding social importance, including false confessions, sexual consent, threats of violence, and criminal responsibility. By challenging basic legal assumptions with a nuanced and humane perspective, Dailey shows how psychoanalysis can further our legal system's highest ideals of individual fairness and systemic justice.

Explores the connections between psychoanalysis and law