RE-ISSUED WITH INDEX. 'Therapy may be mad,' declares Rob Weatherill in this outspoken volume. Therapy here means particularly psychotherapy and counselling, but should be also taken to signify the universal logic of the post-modern therapeutic culture of well-being, happiness and enjoyment. More and more people want to believe in therapy who have lost belief in anything else. Counselling and therapy increasingly inform all human interaction. The dominant ethos is a holistic one. This book aims to refute, primarily through the prism of modern psychoanalysis and key theorists like Baudrillard, Levinas, Lyotard, Paz, Steiner, Reiff as well as Žižek, the fashion for a return to a pre-Cartesian ideal of harmony and integration. On the contrary, there is something monstrous, something excessive, that Freud termed the death drive, at the heart of the Real upon which ordinary reality, so to speak, rests. Enlightenment thought, in which we in the West in particular are caught, is entirely incapable of going beyond the ideal humanist version of man – our last great illusion.

This book explores themes around the Father, His absence in modern society and the decline of mental health. The nature of this decline can be uniquely psychoanalytically theorised, in both the corresponding ferocity of the internal object and exposure to the Real.

The first part of this book underlines what psychoanalysis and psi-sciences continue to overlook: who now provides what Lacan called the “narrow footbridge” between anxiety and death? What terror(ism) must replace the father? How can reality be stabilised once more? The second part follows the atomised world as it turns towards extremism and utopian dreams: in Ireland via Hanaghan’s radical psychoanalysis; in Levinasian ethics; in Gnostic belief in an evil world; and in the clinic of the death drive. The conclusion turns finally to the God beyond God, and the overwhelming evidence for God’s presence in the world.

Lacan in the End Times will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers, and scholars in critical theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory, and theology.

This book explores themes around the Father, His absence in modern society and the decline of mental health. The nature of this decline can be uniquely psychoanalytically theorised, in both the corresponding ferocity of the internal object and exposure to the Real.

The first part of this book underlines what psychoanalysis and psi-sciences continue to overlook: who now provides what Lacan called the “narrow footbridge” between anxiety and death? What terror(ism) must replace the father? How can reality be stabilised once more? The second part follows the atomised world as it turns towards extremism and utopian dreams: in Ireland via Hanaghan’s radical psychoanalysis; in Levinasian ethics; in Gnostic belief in an evil world; and in the clinic of the death drive. The conclusion turns finally to the God beyond God, and the overwhelming evidence for God’s presence in the world.

Lacan in the End Times will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers, and scholars in critical theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory, and theology.

The Anti-Oedipus Complex critically explores the post ‘68 dramatic developments in Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and cultural theory. Beginning with the decline of patriarchy and the master, exemplified by Freud’s paean for the Father, the revolutionary path was blown wide open by anti-psychiatry, schizoanalysis and radical politics, the complex antimonies of which are traced here in detail with the help of philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Levinas, Steiner, Žižek, Badiou, Derrida and Girard, as well as theologians, analysts, writers, musicians and film makers.

In this book, Rob Weatherill, starting from the clinic, considers the end of hierarchies, the loss of the Other, new subjectivities, so-called ‘creative destruction’, the power of negative thinking, revolutionary action, divine violence and new forms of extreme control. The book raises the following questions: Does the engagement of the Radical Orthodoxy movement offer some hope? Or should we re-situate psychoanalysis within a ‘genealogy of responsibility’ (Patočka / Derrida) as it emerges out of the sacred demonic, via Plato and Christianity?

The Anti-Oedipus Complex will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers and scholars in critical theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory and theology.

The Anti-Oedipus Complex critically explores the post ‘68 dramatic developments in Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and cultural theory. Beginning with the decline of patriarchy and the master, exemplified by Freud’s paean for the Father, the revolutionary path was blown wide open by anti-psychiatry, schizoanalysis and radical politics, the complex antimonies of which are traced here in detail with the help of philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Levinas, Steiner, Žižek, Badiou, Derrida and Girard, as well as theologians, analysts, writers, musicians and film makers.

In this book, Rob Weatherill, starting from the clinic, considers the end of hierarchies, the loss of the Other, new subjectivities, so-called ‘creative destruction’, the power of negative thinking, revolutionary action, divine violence and new forms of extreme control. The book raises the following questions: Does the engagement of the Radical Orthodoxy movement offer some hope? Or should we re-situate psychoanalysis within a ‘genealogy of responsibility’ (Patočka / Derrida) as it emerges out of the sacred demonic, via Plato and Christianity?

The Anti-Oedipus Complex will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers and scholars in critical theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory and theology.

RE-ISSUED WITH INDEX. 'Therapy may be mad,' declares Rob Weatherill in this outspoken volume. Therapy here means particularly psychotherapy and counselling, but should be also taken to signify the universal logic of the post-modern therapeutic culture of well-being, happiness and enjoyment. More and more people want to believe in therapy who have lost belief in anything else. Counselling and therapy increasingly inform all human interaction. The dominant ethos is a holistic one. This book aims to refute, primarily through the prism of modern psychoanalysis and key theorists like Baudrillard, Levinas, Lyotard, Paz, Steiner, Reiff as well as Žižek, the fashion for a return to a pre-Cartesian ideal of harmony and integration. On the contrary, there is something monstrous, something excessive, that Freud termed the death drive, at the heart of the Real upon which ordinary reality, so to speak, rests. Enlightenment thought, in which we in the West in particular are caught, is entirely incapable of going beyond the ideal humanist version of man – our last great illusion.

This book explores themes around the Father, His absence in modern society and the decline of mental health. The nature of this decline can be uniquely psychoanalytically theorised, in both the corresponding ferocity of the internal object and exposure to the Real.

The first part of this book underlines what psychoanalysis and psi-sciences continue to overlook: who now provides what Lacan called the “narrow footbridge” between anxiety and death? What terror(ism) must replace the father? How can reality be stabilised once more? The second part follows the atomised world as it turns towards extremism and utopian dreams: in Ireland via Hanaghan’s radical psychoanalysis; in Levinasian ethics; in Gnostic belief in an evil world; and in the clinic of the death drive. The conclusion turns finally to the God beyond God, and the overwhelming evidence for God’s presence in the world.

Lacan in the End Times will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers, and scholars in critical theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory, and theology.

This book explores themes around the Father, His absence in modern society and the decline of mental health. The nature of this decline can be uniquely psychoanalytically theorised, in both the corresponding ferocity of the internal object and exposure to the Real.

The first part of this book underlines what psychoanalysis and psi-sciences continue to overlook: who now provides what Lacan called the “narrow footbridge” between anxiety and death? What terror(ism) must replace the father? How can reality be stabilised once more? The second part follows the atomised world as it turns towards extremism and utopian dreams: in Ireland via Hanaghan’s radical psychoanalysis; in Levinasian ethics; in Gnostic belief in an evil world; and in the clinic of the death drive. The conclusion turns finally to the God beyond God, and the overwhelming evidence for God’s presence in the world.

Lacan in the End Times will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers, and scholars in critical theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory, and theology.

The Anti-Oedipus Complex critically explores the post ‘68 dramatic developments in Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and cultural theory. Beginning with the decline of patriarchy and the master, exemplified by Freud’s paean for the Father, the revolutionary path was blown wide open by anti-psychiatry, schizoanalysis and radical politics, the complex antimonies of which are traced here in detail with the help of philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Levinas, Steiner, Žižek, Badiou, Derrida and Girard, as well as theologians, analysts, writers, musicians and film makers.

In this book, Rob Weatherill, starting from the clinic, considers the end of hierarchies, the loss of the Other, new subjectivities, so-called ‘creative destruction’, the power of negative thinking, revolutionary action, divine violence and new forms of extreme control. The book raises the following questions: Does the engagement of the Radical Orthodoxy movement offer some hope? Or should we re-situate psychoanalysis within a ‘genealogy of responsibility’ (Patočka / Derrida) as it emerges out of the sacred demonic, via Plato and Christianity?

The Anti-Oedipus Complex will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers and scholars in critical theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory and theology.

The Anti-Oedipus Complex critically explores the post ‘68 dramatic developments in Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis and cultural theory. Beginning with the decline of patriarchy and the master, exemplified by Freud’s paean for the Father, the revolutionary path was blown wide open by anti-psychiatry, schizoanalysis and radical politics, the complex antimonies of which are traced here in detail with the help of philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Levinas, Steiner, Žižek, Badiou, Derrida and Girard, as well as theologians, analysts, writers, musicians and film makers.

In this book, Rob Weatherill, starting from the clinic, considers the end of hierarchies, the loss of the Other, new subjectivities, so-called ‘creative destruction’, the power of negative thinking, revolutionary action, divine violence and new forms of extreme control. The book raises the following questions: Does the engagement of the Radical Orthodoxy movement offer some hope? Or should we re-situate psychoanalysis within a ‘genealogy of responsibility’ (Patočka / Derrida) as it emerges out of the sacred demonic, via Plato and Christianity?

The Anti-Oedipus Complex will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers and scholars in critical theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory and theology.