How Does Analysis Work?

Berjanet Jazani is a medical doctor and practicing psychoanalyst based in London, UK. She is the president of the College of Psychoanalysts (UK), clinical member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR), and the author of Lacanian Psychoanalysis from Clinic to Culture; Lacan, Mortality, Life and Language: Clinical and Cultural Explorations; and The Perfume of Soul from Freud to Lacan: A Critical Reading of Smelling, Breathing and Subjectivity (all Routledge).

“For those of us who, scholars or not, are interested in the complex engagements of psychoanalysis, it can be frustrating how poorly psychoanalysis has been understood in terms of both its theories and practices. Then, too, there's the brutally reductive matter of its popular cultural representations. These simplistic ideas are not only harmful to those who would like to grasp psychoanalysis intellectually, but to analysands' experience of psychoanalysis in the consulting room. A book that describes the wide range of heterogeneous possibilities that have emerged from this form of encounter would therefore be a welcome intervention - one that can deepen and expand our sense of psychoanalytic practice in ways that work to enrich its theoretical underpinnings as well.” - Dr Devorah Baum, Associate Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory, University of Southampton, UK “There has been a distinct lack of suitable academic literature offering tangible clinical examples of the unique features of a Lacanian analysis. Hence I am confident this book would be well received and read with great interest by academics in the social sciences and humanities alike, as well as the wide range of clinicians working in the mental health field. Over the decades a number of myths have emerged around the image of the Lacanian analyst, playing on a cliched stereotype of the Lacanian style of interpretation. These myths are quite misleading and urgently in need of challenge; there is no doubt that they have negatively influenced the reception of Lacanian analysis more broadly across the UK. This volume would address these misconceptions in a way that should, I hope, make the key precepts of contemporary Lacanian technique accessible to a wider audience.” - Dr Gwion Jones, Assistant Professor in Psychology, Coventry University, UK

• List of ContributorsAcknowledgements A Question That Put Me to Work110 My Teddy Collection Playing Games Queer Dead Uncles La Cough Motherhood Why Hypothesize? A Thread of Interpretation Analysis, Moments of Concluding Love as an Effect of Truth We Have a Date! The Place of the ObjectFathers and Daughters Lateness The Fruit, the Vagina and the Pyjamas Hidden in Plain Sight Reunion Second Analysis Speak! Dreams in an Analysis My Desk Is Next to My Bed Random Act A Knock on the Door Betrayal Grampy ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, Thirty Years OnLess than Zero A Love Letter Gay Shame, Phantasy and Recovering Myself The Goodbye Samson and Delilah What’s in a Name? The Choice of Exile A Cut Off “Mmms” Hell Is Other People! A Pair of Converse Trainers My First Wish to Be an Analyst An Excerpt from a Didactic Analysis: Death in Other WordsImage of a Telephone A StoryEat What You Want, Drink What You Want A Sewing Machine and an Umbrella The Hidden Letter Scrambled EggsThe Eye of the Storm Swift and Fragmentary Notes on Interpretation Scansion Only You Would Dream of Such a Thing! My PINConjunctions of Embarrassment and Suffering Unconscious and Drive Being Cut 1982