Psychology After Lacan

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area. Psychology After Lacan is the sixth volume in the series and addresses three central questions: Why is Lacanian psychoanalysis re-emerging in mainstream contemporary psychology? What is original in this account of the human subject? What implications does Lacanian psychoanalysis have for psychology? This book introduces Lacan’s influential ideas about clinical psychoanalysis and contemporary global culture to a new generation of psychologists. The chapters cover a number of key themes including conceptions of the human subject within psychology, the uses of psychoanalysis in qualitative research, different conceptions of ethics within psychology, and the impact of cyberspace on human subjectivity. The book also explores key debates currently occurring in Lacanian psychoanalysis, with discussion of culture, discourse, identification, sexuality and the challenge to mainstream notions of normality and abnormality. Psychology After Lacan is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, psycho-social studies, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and to psychoanalysts of different traditions engaged in academic research. It will also introduce key ideas and debates within critical psychology to undergraduates and postgraduate students across the social sciences.

After Lacan combines abundant case material with graceful yet sophisticated theoretical exposition in order to explore the clinical practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Focusing on the groundbreaking clinical treatment of psychosis that Gifric (Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d'Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles) has pioneered in Quebec, the authors discuss how Lacanians theorize psychosis and how Gifric has come to treat it analytically. Chapters are devoted to the general concepts and key terms that constitute the touchstones of the early phase of analytic treatment, elaborating their interrelations and their clinical relevance. The second phase of analytic treatment is also discussed, introducing a new set of terms to understand transference and the ethical act of analysis in the subject's assumption of the Other's lack. The concluding chapters broaden discussion to include the key psychic structures that describe the organization of subjectivity and thereby dictate the terms of analysis: not just psychosis, but also perversion and obsessional and hysterical neurosis.

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area. Psychology After the Unconscious is the fifth volume in the series and addresses three central questions: Why is Freud’s concept of the unconscious important today? Does language itself play a role in the creation of the unconscious? How does Lacan radicalize Freud’s notion of the unconscious in relation to cultural research? The book provides a clear explanation of Freudian and Lacanian accounts of the unconscious. It also highlights their role in offering a new way of describing, understanding and working with the human subject in clinical settings and in cultural research. Part One shows how the unconscious is elaborated in Freud’s early case studies in Studies on Hysteria, while Part Two focuses on Lacan’s re-working of the unconscious and its relationship to language and culture in his influential public seminars. The book also provides access to key debates currently occurring in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, exploring both the clinical dimension and the consequences for psychological and cultural research. Psychology After the Unconscious is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, psychosocial studies, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and to psychoanalysts of different traditions engaged in academic research. It will also introduce key ideas and debates within critical psychology to undergraduates and postgraduate students across the social sciences.

Using Jacques Lacan's work as a key, Boothby reassesses Freud's most ambitious-and misunderstood-attempt at a general theory of mental functioning: metapsychology

Ian Parker has been a leading light in the fields of critical and discursive psychology for over 25 years. The Psychology After Critique series brings together for the first time his most important papers. Each volume in the series has been prepared by Ian Parker and presents a newly written introduction and focused overview of a key topic area. Psychology After Lacan is the sixth volume in the series and addresses three central questions: Why is Lacanian psychoanalysis re-emerging in mainstream contemporary psychology? What is original in this account of the human subject? What implications does Lacanian psychoanalysis have for psychology? This book introduces Lacan’s influential ideas about clinical psychoanalysis and contemporary global culture to a new generation of psychologists. The chapters cover a number of key themes including conceptions of the human subject within psychology, the uses of psychoanalysis in qualitative research, different conceptions of ethics within psychology, and the impact of cyberspace on human subjectivity. The book also explores key debates currently occurring in Lacanian psychoanalysis, with discussion of culture, discourse, identification, sexuality and the challenge to mainstream notions of normality and abnormality. Psychology After Lacan is essential reading for students and researchers in psychology, psycho-social studies, sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies, and to psychoanalysts of different traditions engaged in academic research. It will also introduce key ideas and debates within critical psychology to undergraduates and postgraduate students across the social sciences.

Lacan was not an ahistorical post-structuralist. Starting from this controversial premiss, Teresa Brennan tells the story of a social psychosis. She begins by recovering Lacan's neglected theory of history which argued that we are in the grip of a psychotic's era which began in the seventeenth century and climaxes in the present. By extending and elaborating Lacan's theory, Brennan develops a general theory of modernity. Contrary to postmodern assumptions, she argues, we need general historical explanation. An understanding of historical dynamics is essential if we are to make the connections between the outstanding facts of modernity - ethnocentrism, the relationship between the sexes and ecological catastrophe.

Written with the American psychological community in mind, The Subject of Lacan provides an accessible introduction to the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. The contributors address issues and theories that define the field of psychology for its practitioners, researchers, and theorists. Focusing on a wide range of topics, including cognitive science, family therapy, psychoanalytic technique, psychotherapy versus psychopharmacology, gender and sexuality, psychology of religion, psycholinguistics, and cultural diversity, this book makes an important contribution to the understanding of the radically innovative character and complexity of Lacanian theory. Contributors include Willy Apollon, Suzanne Barnard, Mario L. Beira, Donna Bentolila, Danielle Bergeron, Mark Bracher, Daniel L. Buccino, Lucie Cantin, David S. Caudill, Bruce Fink, Stephen R. Friedlander, Patricia Gherovici, Kareen Ror Malone, David Metzger, Paola Mieli, John Muller, Ian Parker, Andre Patsalides, Ellie Ragland, Robert Samuels, Lucia Villela, Valerie Walkerdine, and Slavoj Zoizuek.

What is it about "having a life"- which is to say, about having a sense of separate existence as a subject or self - that is usually taken for granted but is so fragilely maintained in certain patients and, indeed, in most of us at especially difficult times? In Having A Life: Self Pathology After Lacan, Lewis Kirshner takes this Lacanian question as the point of departure for a thoughtful meditation on the conceptual problems and clinical manifestations of pathologies of the self. Beginning with the case of Margaret Little, analyzed by D. W. Winnicott, and proceeding to extended case presentations from his own practice, Kirshner weaves together an avowedly American reading of Lacan with the approaches to self pathology of an influential coterie of theorists. By drawing out common threads in their respective discourses on the self, Kirshner achieves an original integration of Lacanian theory with other contemporary approaches to self pathology. Of special note is his ability to sustain a dialogue between Lacan and Kohut, whose shared clinical object, discernible through divergent vocabularies and conceptions, is the struggle of the subject to avoid fragmentation that would obliterate a sense of aliveness and preclude active engagement with the world. Kirshner's opening chapter on the gifted, troubled Margaret Little and his concluding chapter on the eminent political philosopher Louis Althusser, whose self pathology culminated in his strangling of his wife, Hélène Rytman, in 1980, frame a study that is brilliantly successful in bringing "self" issues down to the messy actualities of lived experience. Analytic therapists no less than students of the human sciences will be edified by this cogent, readable attempt to infuse Lacanian concepts with the conceptual rigor and clinical pragmatism of American psychoanalysis and to apply the resulting model of therapeutic action to a fascinating range of case material.