Joseph H. Smith – författare

To assimilate a writer as allusive as Lacan is to enter into an entire culture.  However firm their grounding in Freud, readers of Lacan must learn to rethink psychoanalysis with a speculative breadth sometimes exceeding that of Freud himself.  This book, designed to clarify the works of a controversial and influential figure, is the first collection of critical essays to appear in English since Lacan’s own writings began to be widely distributed in translation. Drawing on psychology, philosophy, literary criticism, and clinical and theoretical psychiatry, this volume explores the full range of Lacan’s thought.  An introduction by Kerrigan is followed by three papers by Stanley Laeavy, John Muller, and Julia Kristeva centered on the application of Lacan to the work of therapy.  The second section clarifies Lacan’s Hegelian and Heideggerian roots, with contributions by William Richardson, Edward Casey and J. Melvin Woody, Wilfried Ver Eecke, André Green, and Antoine Vergote.  The final article is a Lacanian interpretation of Bleak Houseby Christine van Boheemen-Saaf indicating the potential of this approach for applied psychoanalysis.

A challenging and multisided meditation on the importance of Derrida to current developments in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical interpretations of literature.

"The World of Samuel Beckett" brings together a distinguished group of authorities, among them Beckett's longtime associates and colleagues Herbert Blau and Martin Esslin. In a chapter on Beckett's "Enough", Blau concedes that parts of the playwright's work can be lyrical and beguiling, but "it's still an appalling vision". Esslin (who coined the term "theater of the absurd") challenges the notion that Beckett is difficult or depressing, arguing instead that he is basically a comic writer, gallows humor thought it be. Angela Moorjani sees Beckett's writing as the product of a cryptic text inscribed within. Bennett Simon, a psychiatrist who has written extensively on Beckett, examines the self in current art and psychoanalysis. Joseph H. Smith emphasizes that Beckett, like Freud and Lacan, challenges any notions of "cure" as the easy achievement of happiness.