Topological Transformation of Freud's Theory

Jean-Gerard Bursztein is a psychoanalyst who practices and teaches in Paris. He has a PhD in philosophy and followed the teaching of Jean-Toussaint Desanti, a French philosopher of mathematics, and he continues to explore this field in studying the intrication of psychoanalysis and mathematics. He has published a number of books and articles based on his clinical practice, including 'Vers une mathematique de l'inconscient' (2008); 'On the Difference between Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy' (2012); and 'Sur l'espace subjectif'. Bursztein was also attached to the EPHE (Sorbonne). From his research he also published books on Yonah, Ecclesiastes, and a psychoanalytical commentary on the Hebrew Bible.

'The unconscious, according to Freud, has a structure. One can conjecture as to the relation between this structure and the structure found in mathematics. One of the strongest hypotheses that one can make is that the two structures are homological - they say the same thing. How to give sense to this hypothesis then becomes a problem in the field of the formalisation of psychoanalysis - a field that Jean-Gerard Bursztein opens up in his work. Philosophical and scientific problems of the structure of mathematics had already been raised in the French tradition by Jean Cavailles and Albert Lautman, and subsequently by Jean Toussaint Desanti. Bursztein draws on these French programmes for the foundations of mathematics, as he formulates his constructions within this important and developing field.'- Bernard Burgoyne, author of Drawing the Soul: Schemas and Models in Psychoanalysis, and co-editor of The Klein-Lacan Dialogues

• Preface , Foreword to the English Edition , Foreword , Introduction , Unconscious incestuous passion and fundamental phantasy , The continual partitioning of the subjective structure over two places—conscious and unconscious , Taking up the Freudian theory of the Ego and the Id in the hypothesis of the structure , Psychoanalyst’s knowledge and psychoanalytic clinic , The Symptom’s link to the structure of the unconscious , Conversion of death drive theory into jouissance theory , Reformulation of the concept of masochism: the concept of jouissance of the Other , The shifting of the Symptom (?) in the structure , Anxiety, anguish, and depression , Narcissism , Transference , Transformation process of the subject in treatment , Psychoanalytic science , Appendix *