Palgrave Lacan Series – serie

This book presents a theory of autistic subjectivity from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. Dr. Brenner describes autism as a singular mode of being that is fundamentally linked to one’s identity and basic practices of existence, offering a rigorous alternative to treating autism as a mental or physical disorder. Drawing on Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytic understanding of the subject, Brenner outlines the unique features of the autistic subjective structure and provides a comprehensive synthesis of contemporary work on the psychoanalysis of autism. The book examines research by theorists including Jean-Claude Maleval, Éric Laurent, Rosine and Robert Lefort that has been largely unavailable to Anglophone audiences until now. In this book autism is posited to be a singular subjective structure not reducible to neurosis or psychosis. In accordance with the Lacanian approach, autism is examined with detailed attention to the subject’s use of language, culminating in Brenner’s “autistic linguistic spectrum.” A compelling read for students and scholars of psychoanalysis and autism researchers and clinicians.

This book explores how Jacques Lacan has influenced Black Studies from the 1950s to the present day, and in turn how a Black Studies framework challenges the topographies of Lacanianism in its understanding of race. David Marriott examines how a contemporary Black Studies perspective might respond to the psychoanalysis of race by taking advantage of the recent revitalization of Lacanianism in its speculative, metaphysical form. While the philosophical side of the debate makes a plea for a new universalism, this book proposes a Lacanian reassessment of the notion of race, a notion distinct from culture, language, religion, and identity. It argues that it is possible to re-establish the theoretical relation between capitalism, anti-blackness, and colonialism, by reassessing the links between Lacanian psychoanalysis and three main domains of black inquiry: mastery, knowledge, and embodiment. The book offers a strikingly original rereading of the place of Lacan in both Fanon Studies and Afro-pessimism. It will appeal to students and scholars of Black Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory and Philosophy.

What is love for Sartre and Lacan? In Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan, Sinan Richards examines Sartre’s and Lacan’s writings on love to draw out a distinctly Lacanian conception of love and subjectivity. Richards begins by demonstrating how Sartre’s in itself for itself is a convincing shorthand for Lacan’s central object of study, before presenting and explaining the various aspects of Lacan’s psychophilosophical project to show how, for Lacan, the subject is marked by various pathologies. He argues that, for Lacan, as for Sartre and Schelling before him, the subject is ontologically sick, and, by its very structure, the Oedipus complex produces subjects that are prey to a mental collapse at any moment. As a result, for Lacan, the subject has no choice but to identify with their potential madness, a constitutive aspect of their subjectivity. He concludes by making a compelling case that love in the Lacanian schema is the subject’s mad wish to reunite in itself with for itself, which is an always impossible yet necessary aspect of subjectivity. The book presents fresh insights on Lacan and Sartre that will appeal to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, comparative literature and critical theory.

This book sets out to determine the validity of an accusation made against Jacques Lacan by Noam Chomsky in an interview in 1989. He stated that Lacan was a “charlatan” – not that his ideas were flawed or wrong, but that his entire discourse was fraudulent, an accusation that has since been repeated by many other critics. Examining the arguments of key anti-Lacanian critics, Mathews weighs and contextualizes the legitimacy of Lacan’s engagements with structural linguistics, mathematical formalization, science, ethics, Hegelian dialectics, and psychoanalysis. The guiding thread is Lacan’s own recurrent interrogation of authority, which inhabits an ambiguous zone between mastery and charlatanry. This book offers a novel contribution to the field for students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, critical and literary theory.

What is love for Sartre and Lacan? In Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan, Sinan Richards examines Sartre’s and Lacan’s writings on love to draw out a distinctly Lacanian conception of love and subjectivity. Richards begins by demonstrating how Sartre’s in itself for itself is a convincing shorthand for Lacan’s central object of study, before presenting and explaining the various aspects of Lacan’s psychophilosophical project to show how, for Lacan, the subject is marked by various pathologies. He argues that, for Lacan, as for Sartre and Schelling before him, the subject is ontologically sick, and, by its very structure, the Oedipus complex produces subjects that are prey to a mental collapse at any moment. As a result, for Lacan, the subject has no choice but to identify with their potential madness, a constitutive aspect of their subjectivity. He concludes by making a compelling case that love in the Lacanian schema is the subject’s mad wish to reunite in itself with for itself, which is an always impossible yet necessary aspect of subjectivity. The book presents fresh insights on Lacan and Sartre that will appeal to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, comparative literature and critical theory.

Drawing on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this book intervenes into debates concerning the relation between jealousy and envy on the one hand, and sexual difference on the other. The author presents an original distinction between what is termed “feminine” and “phallic” forms of jealousy while mapping and theorizing other types of jealousy that she finds in the writings of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The discussion performs literary-critical readings of texts by Olivia Shakespear and Marguerite Duras as a means of shedding light on the topic and the distinction. Further, it discusses the challenge posed by jealousy’s particular mode of jouissance and its possible vicissitudes. Though the experience of jealousy can be ravaging, the author claims, it also provides the subject an opportunity to reorient its relation to jouissance and thereby experience significant psychical change. In doing so, it provides a new outlook on jealousy as being connected to both femininity and desire, unveiling its complex character, features, and vitality within a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework. It will appeal in particular to those with an interest in psychoanalysis, literary theory and critical theory.

This book explores the practice and transmission of Lacanian and Freudian theory. It discusses the pure versus applied analysis of Lacanian and Freudian theory in practice; and the hierarchical versus circular transmissions within psychoanalytic organizations.Underpinned by extensive practical knowledge of the clinic, this work examines the differences between Freud and Lacan in their understanding of the subject and the unconscious and pushes them in new directions. The book also offers an analysis and commentary of several key Lacanian texts including an accessible study of the notoriously challenging text L'etourdit. Offering both divergent and reinforcing takes on Lacan, the author explores the traits that separate out the psychoanalyst from other twentieth-century thinkers and theorists. This book offers a clear clinical picture of where Lacanian psychoanalysis is today, both in the US and internationally.

When Posthumanism displaces the traditional human subject, what does psychoanalysis add to contemporary conversations about subject/object relations, systems, perspectives, and values? This book discusses whether Posthumanism itself is a cultural indication of a shift in thinking that is moving from language to matter, from a politics focused on social relations to one organized according to a broader sense of object in environments. Together the authors question what is at stake in this shift and what psychoanalysis can say about it. Promoting psychoanalysis’ focus on the cybernetic relationships among subjects, language, social organizations, desire, drive, and other human motivations, this book demonstrates the continued relevance of Lacan’s work not only to continued understandings of the human subject, but to the broader cultural impasses we now face. Why Posthumanism? Why now? In what ways is Posthumanist thought linked to the emergence of digital technologies? Exploring Posthumanism from the insights of Lacan’s psychoanalysis, chapters expose and elucidate not only the conditions within which Posthumanist thought arises, but also reveal symptoms of its flaws: the blindness to anthropomorphization, projection, and unrecognized shifts in scale and perspective, as well as its mode of transcendental thought that enables many Posthumanist declarations. This book explains how Lacanian notions of the subject inform current discussions about human complicity with, and resistance to, algorithmic governing regimes, which themselves more wholly produce a “post”- humanism than any philosophical displacement of human centrality could.

This book explores the themes within, and limits of, a dialogue between Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of being and Jacques Lacan’s post-Freudian metapsychology. It argues that a conceptual bridging between the two is possible, and lays the foundations of that bridge, starting with Heidegger and proceeding through the work of Lacan. After presenting basic aspects of Heidegger’s ontology, Tombras focuses on his incisive critique of modern science and psychoanalysis, and argues that psychoanalytic theory is vulnerable to this critique. The response comes from Lacan’s re-reading and recasting of fundamental Freudian insights, and his robust post-Freudian metapsychology. A broad discussion of Lacan’s work follows, to reveal its rupture with traditional philosophy, and show how it builds on and then reaches beyond Heidegger’s critique. This book is informed by the terminology, insights, concepts, hypotheses, and conclusions of both thinkers. It discusses time and the body in jouissance; the emergence of the divided subject and signifierness; truth, agency and the event; and being and mathematical formalisation. Tombras describes the ontological recursive construction of a shared ontic world and discusses the limits and historicity of this world.

This book explores the themes within, and limits of, a dialogue between Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of being and Jacques Lacan’s post-Freudian metapsychology. It argues that a conceptual bridging between the two is possible, and lays the foundations of that bridge, starting with Heidegger and proceeding through the work of Lacan. After presenting basic aspects of Heidegger’s ontology, Tombras focuses on his incisive critique of modern science and psychoanalysis, and argues that psychoanalytic theory is vulnerable to this critique. The response comes from Lacan’s re-reading and recasting of fundamental Freudian insights, and his robust post-Freudian metapsychology. A broad discussion of Lacan’s work follows, to reveal its rupture with traditional philosophy, and show how it builds on and then reaches beyond Heidegger’s critique. This book is informed by the terminology, insights, concepts, hypotheses, and conclusions of both thinkers. It discusses time and the body in jouissance; the emergence of the divided subject and signifierness; truth, agency and the event; and being and mathematical formalisation. Tombras describes the ontological recursive construction of a shared ontic world and discusses the limits and historicity of this world.

This book explores how philosophical realisms relate to psychoanalytical conceptions of the Real, and in turn how the Lacanian framework challenges basic philosophical notions of object and reality. The author examines how contemporary psychoanalysis might respond to the question of ontology by taking advantage of the recent revitalization of realism in its speculative form. While the philosophical side of the debate makes a plea for an independent ontological consistency of the Real, this book proposes a Lacanian reassessment of the definition of the Real as ‘what is foreign to subjectivity itself’. In doing so, it reframes the question of the Real in terms of what is already there beneath the supposedly linguistic constitution of subjectivity. The book then goes on to engage the problem of cognition in the realm of Nature qua materiality, focusing on the centrality of the body as a linguistic-material hybrid. It argues that it is possible to re-establish the theoretical dignity of Ricoeur’s notion of ‘suspicion’, by building a dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and three main domains of inquiry: desire, objects and bodily enjoyment. Borrowing from Piera Aulagnier’s theory of the Other as a word-bearer, it considers the genesis of desire and sense of reality both explainable through a hybrid framework which comprises psychoanalytical insights and material dynamics in a comprehensive account. This created theoretical space is an opportunity for both philosophers and psychoanalysts to rethink key Lacanian insights in light of the problem of the Real.

This book explores how philosophical realisms relate to psychoanalytical conceptions of the Real, and in turn how the Lacanian framework challenges basic philosophical notions of object and reality. The author examines how contemporary psychoanalysis might respond to the question of ontology by taking advantage of the recent revitalization of realism in its speculative form. While the philosophical side of the debate makes a plea for an independent ontological consistency of the Real, this book proposes a Lacanian reassessment of the definition of the Real as ‘what is foreign to subjectivity itself’. In doing so, it reframes the question of the Real in terms of what is already there beneath the supposedly linguistic constitution of subjectivity. The book then goes on to engage the problem of cognition in the realm of Nature qua materiality, focusing on the centrality of the body as a linguistic-material hybrid. It argues that it is possible to re-establish the theoretical dignity of Ricoeur’s notion of ‘suspicion’, by building a dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and three main domains of inquiry: desire, objects and bodily enjoyment. Borrowing from Piera Aulagnier’s theory of the Other as a word-bearer, it considers the genesis of desire and sense of reality both explainable through a hybrid framework which comprises psychoanalytical insights and material dynamics in a comprehensive account. This created theoretical space is an opportunity for both philosophers and psychoanalysts to rethink key Lacanian insights in light of the problem of the Real.

In this Palgrave Pivot, Duane Rousselle aims to disrupt the hold that pragmatist ideology has had over American sociology by demonstrating that the social bond has always been founded upon a fundamental and primordial bankruptcy. Using the Lacanian theory of “capitalist discourse,” Rousselle demonstrates that most of early American sociology suffered from an inadequate account of the “symbolic” within the mental and social lives of the individual subject. The psychoanalytic aspect of the social bond remained theoretically undeveloped in the American context. Instead it is the “image,” a product of the imaginary, which takes charge over any symbolic function. This intervention into pragmatic sociology seeks to recover the tradition of “grand theory” by bringing psychoanalytical and sociological discourse into fruitful communication with one another.

This book is the first to systematically investigate how the notion of time is conceptualised in Jacques Lacan’s work. Through a careful examination of Lacan’s various presentations of time, Chenyang Wang argues that this notion is key to a comprehension of Lacan’s psychoanalytic thinking, and in particular to the way in which he theorises subjectivity. This book demonstrates that time is approached by Lacan not only as consciously experienced, but also as pre-reflectively embodied and symbolically generated. In an analysis that begins with Lacan’s “Logical Time” essay, Chenyang Wang articulates three temporal registers that correspond to Lacan's Real-Symbolic-Imaginary triad and also demonstrates how Lacan’s elaboration of other major themes including consciousness, body, language, desire and sexuality is informed by his original perspectives on time. Filling a significant gap in contemporary Lacanian studies, this book will provide essential reading for students and scholars ofpsychoanalytic theory, continental philosophy and critical theory.

This book is the first to systematically investigate how the notion of time is conceptualised in Jacques Lacan’s work. Through a careful examination of Lacan’s various presentations of time, Chenyang Wang argues that this notion is key to a comprehension of Lacan’s psychoanalytic thinking, and in particular to the way in which he theorises subjectivity. This book demonstrates that time is approached by Lacan not only as consciously experienced, but also as pre-reflectively embodied and symbolically generated. In an analysis that begins with Lacan’s “Logical Time” essay, Chenyang Wang articulates three temporal registers that correspond to Lacan's Real-Symbolic-Imaginary triad and also demonstrates how Lacan’s elaboration of other major themes including consciousness, body, language, desire and sexuality is informed by his original perspectives on time. Filling a significant gap in contemporary Lacanian studies, this book will provide essential reading for students and scholars ofpsychoanalytic theory, continental philosophy and critical theory.

This book promotes a Lacanian approach to silence, arguing that Lacanian psychoanalysis is distinctive for putting a high value on both silence and language. Unlike other disciplines and discourses the authors do not treat silence as a mystical-impossible beyond, at the cost of demoting the value of language and thought. Rather than treating silence with awe and wonder, this book puts silence to work, and it does so in order to deal with the inevitable alienation that comes with becoming speaking-beings. This illuminating book will be of great interest to scholars of Lacan and the psychosocial, as well as more broadly to philosophers and linguists alike.

This book provides 18 lively commentaries on Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference (1960-61) that explore its theoretical and philosophical consequences in the clinic, the classroom, and society. Including contributions from clinicians as well as scholars working in philosophy, literature, and culture studies, the commentaries presented here represent a wide-range of disciplinary perspectives on the concept of transference. Some chapters closely follow the structure of the seminar’s sessions, while others take up thematic concerns or related sessions such as the commentary on sessions 19 to 22 which deal with Lacan’s discussion of Claudel’s Coûfontaine trilogy. This book is not a compendium to Lacan’s seminar. Instead it attempts to capture through shorter contributions a spectrum of voices debating, deliberating, and learning with Lacan’s concept. In doing so it can be seen to engage with transference conceptually in a manner that matches the spirit of Lacan’s seminar itself.The book will provide an invaluable new resource for Lacan scholars working across the fields of psychoanalytic theory, clinical psychology, philosophy and cultural studies.

This book provides 18 lively commentaries on Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference (1960-61) that explore its theoretical and philosophical consequences in the clinic, the classroom, and society. Including contributions from clinicians as well as scholars working in philosophy, literature, and culture studies, the commentaries presented here represent a wide-range of disciplinary perspectives on the concept of transference. Some chapters closely follow the structure of the seminar’s sessions, while others take up thematic concerns or related sessions such as the commentary on sessions 19 to 22 which deal with Lacan’s discussion of Claudel’s Coûfontaine trilogy. This book is not a compendium to Lacan’s seminar. Instead it attempts to capture through shorter contributions a spectrum of voices debating, deliberating, and learning with Lacan’s concept. In doing so it can be seen to engage with transference conceptually in a manner that matches the spirit of Lacan’s seminar itself.The book will provide an invaluable new resource for Lacan scholars working across the fields of psychoanalytic theory, clinical psychology, philosophy and cultural studies.

This book sets out to determine the validity of an accusation made against Jacques Lacan by Noam Chomsky in an interview in 1989. He stated that Lacan was a “charlatan” – not that his ideas were flawed or wrong, but that his entire discourse was fraudulent, an accusation that has since been repeated by many other critics. Examining the arguments of key anti-Lacanian critics, Mathews weighs and contextualizes the legitimacy of Lacan’s engagements with structural linguistics, mathematical formalization, science, ethics, Hegelian dialectics, and psychoanalysis. The guiding thread is Lacan’s own recurrent interrogation of authority, which inhabits an ambiguous zone between mastery and charlatanry. This book offers a novel contribution to the field for students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, critical and literary theory.

This book presents a theory of autistic subjectivity from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. Dr. Brenner describes autism as a singular mode of being that is fundamentally linked to one’s identity and basic practices of existence, offering a rigorous alternative to treating autism as a mental or physical disorder. Drawing on Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytic understanding of the subject, Brenner outlines the unique features of the autistic subjective structure and provides a comprehensive synthesis of contemporary work on the psychoanalysis of autism. The book examines research by theorists including Jean-Claude Maleval, Éric Laurent, Rosine and Robert Lefort that has been largely unavailable to Anglophone audiences until now. In this book autism is posited to be a singular subjective structure not reducible to neurosis or psychosis. In accordance with the Lacanian approach, autism is examined with detailed attention to the subject’s use of language, culminating in Brenner’s “autistic linguistic spectrum.” A compelling read for students and scholars of psychoanalysis and autism researchers and clinicians.

This book provides a collection of Lacanian responses to Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 from leading theorists in the field. Like Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner film, its sequel is now poised to provoke philosophical and psychoanalytic arguments, and to provide illustrations and inspiration for questions of being and the self, for belief and knowledge, the human and the post-human, amongst others. This volume forms the vanguard of responses from a Lacanian perspective, satisfying the hunger to extend the theoretical considerations of the first film in the various new directions the second film invites. Here, the contributors revisit the implications of the human-replicant relationship but move beyond this to consider issues of ideology, politics, and spectatorship. This exciting collection will appeal to an educated film going public, in addition to students and scholars of Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, film theory, philosophy and applied psychoanalysis.

This book provides a collection of Lacanian responses to Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 from leading theorists in the field. Like Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner film, its sequel is now poised to provoke philosophical and psychoanalytic arguments, and to provide illustrations and inspiration for questions of being and the self, for belief and knowledge, the human and the post-human, amongst others. This volume forms the vanguard of responses from a Lacanian perspective, satisfying the hunger to extend the theoretical considerations of the first film in the various new directions the second film invites. Here, the contributors revisit the implications of the human-replicant relationship but move beyond this to consider issues of ideology, politics, and spectatorship. This exciting collection will appeal to an educated film going public, in addition to students and scholars of Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, film theory, philosophy and applied psychoanalysis.

In this exciting new collection, leading and emerging Lacanian scholars seek to understand what psychoanalysis brings to debates about the environment and the climate crisis. They argue that we cannot understand climate change and all of its multifarious ramifications without first understanding how our terrifying proximity to the real undergirds our relation to the environment, how we mistake lack for loss and mourning for melancholy, and how we seek to destroy the same world we seek to protect. The book traces Lacan’s contribution through a consideration of topics including doomsday preppers, forest suicides, Indigenous resistance, post-apocalyptic films, the mathematics of climate science, and the relevance of Kant. They ask: What can you do if your neighbour is a climate change denier? What would Bartleby do? Does the animal desire? Who is cleaning up all the garbage on the internet? Why is the sudden greening of the planet under COVID-19 no help whatsoever? It offers a timely intervention into Lacanian theory, environmental studies, geography, philosophy, and literary studies that illustrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to current social and environmental concerns.

In this exciting new collection, leading and emerging Lacanian scholars seek to understand what psychoanalysis brings to debates about the environment and the climate crisis. They argue that we cannot understand climate change and all of its multifarious ramifications without first understanding how our terrifying proximity to the real undergirds our relation to the environment, how we mistake lack for loss and mourning for melancholy, and how we seek to destroy the same world we seek to protect. The book traces Lacan’s contribution through a consideration of topics including doomsday preppers, forest suicides, Indigenous resistance, post-apocalyptic films, the mathematics of climate science, and the relevance of Kant. They ask: What can you do if your neighbour is a climate change denier? What would Bartleby do? Does the animal desire? Who is cleaning up all the garbage on the internet? Why is the sudden greening of the planet under COVID-19 no help whatsoever? It offers a timely intervention into Lacanian theory, environmental studies, geography, philosophy, and literary studies that illustrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to current social and environmental concerns.

This book examines the crucial role of psychoanalysis in understanding what AI means for us as speaking, sexed subjects. Drawing on Lacanian theory and recent clinical developments it explores what philosophy and critical theory of AI has hitherto neglected: enjoyment. Through the reconceptualization of Intelligence, the Artificial Object and the Sexual Abyss the book outlines the Sexbot as a figure who exists on the boundary of psychoanalysis and AI. Through this figure and the medium of film, the author subverts Kant’s three Enlightenment questions and guides readers to transition from asking 'Does it think?' to 'Can it enjoy?' The book will appeal in particular to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, film and media studies, critical theory, feminist theory and AI research.

This book examines the crucial role of psychoanalysis in understanding what AI means for us as speaking, sexed subjects. Drawing on Lacanian theory and recent clinical developments it explores what philosophy and critical theory of AI has hitherto neglected: enjoyment. Through the reconceptualization of Intelligence, the Artificial Object and the Sexual Abyss the book outlines the Sexbot as a figure who exists on the boundary of psychoanalysis and AI. Through this figure and the medium of film, the author subverts Kant’s three Enlightenment questions and guides readers to transition from asking 'Does it think?' to 'Can it enjoy?' The book will appeal in particular to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, film and media studies, critical theory, feminist theory and AI research.

“This brilliant and beautifully written book invokes a radical reorientation of the treatment of psychosis” Juliet Flower MacCannell, Author of Figuring Lacan and The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject. “Bret Fimiani's book offers an illuminating presentation of the Lacanian  approach to psychosis thanks to his clear style which presents Lacanian concepts with a wonderful accuracy, illustrated by examples from his psychoanalytic practice. The dynamic of his investigation challenges the fear of psychosis with testimonies of  lived experiences,  the Hearing Voices Network, and analysts who claim the unclaimed intelligence at work in psychosis."Francoise Davoine, co-author of History Beyond Trauma This book advances a theory of transference-in-psychosis with the aim of provoking a change in the way the experience of psychosis is understood and thus, clinically treated. It examines the function of ‘ethics’ in the ‘installation’ of transference in the treatment of psychosis and contends that the aim of the psychoanalytic experience is the creation of a new ethic for the analysand and for the treatment. Beginning from the premise that the body of the psychotic is a site of social contestation, the author draws upon the work of Freud, Lacan, Deleuze & Guattari and Apollon to reframe the problem of the ‘body’ (as an effect of language) and its relation to transference, and ethics, in treating psychosis. It argues that psychosis still has much to teach psychoanalysis about how psychoanalysis must continue to change in order to create/offer an approach that is effective for psychosis (versus neurosis) and provides a comprehensive psychoanalytic theory of psychosis that derives, at its core, from the experience of psychosis itself. The book’s synthesis of clinical and ‘peer model’ principles will provide readerswith a way to understand and navigate potential transference impasses often encountered with purely clinical approaches. In doing so it provides a valuable new framework for practitioners and scholars working in clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, critical theory, psychiatry and social work.

“This brilliant and beautifully written book invokes a radical reorientation of the treatment of psychosis” Juliet Flower MacCannell, Author of Figuring Lacan and The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject. “Bret Fimiani's book offers an illuminating presentation of the Lacanian  approach to psychosis thanks to his clear style which presents Lacanian concepts with a wonderful accuracy, illustrated by examples from his psychoanalytic practice. The dynamic of his investigation challenges the fear of psychosis with testimonies of  lived experiences,  the Hearing Voices Network, and analysts who claim the unclaimed intelligence at work in psychosis."Francoise Davoine, co-author of History Beyond Trauma This book advances a theory of transference-in-psychosis with the aim of provoking a change in the way the experience of psychosis is understood and thus, clinically treated. It examines the function of ‘ethics’ in the ‘installation’ of transference in the treatment of psychosis and contends that the aim of the psychoanalytic experience is the creation of a new ethic for the analysand and for the treatment. Beginning from the premise that the body of the psychotic is a site of social contestation, the author draws upon the work of Freud, Lacan, Deleuze & Guattari and Apollon to reframe the problem of the ‘body’ (as an effect of language) and its relation to transference, and ethics, in treating psychosis. It argues that psychosis still has much to teach psychoanalysis about how psychoanalysis must continue to change in order to create/offer an approach that is effective for psychosis (versus neurosis) and provides a comprehensive psychoanalytic theory of psychosis that derives, at its core, from the experience of psychosis itself. The book’s synthesis of clinical and ‘peer model’ principles will provide readerswith a way to understand and navigate potential transference impasses often encountered with purely clinical approaches. In doing so it provides a valuable new framework for practitioners and scholars working in clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, critical theory, psychiatry and social work.

This book provides an in-depth examination of Lacanian oriented psychotherapy and supervision, drawing on a wide range of Lacanian texts and rich interview data.Beginning with a comprehensive overview of the Lacanian psychoanalytic therapeutic process, it next considers this in relation to Lacanian texts – including, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, ‘Direction of the Treatment’, ‘Lacanian Discourses’ and ‘Seminar XXIII’ – and interview data from ex-analysants and psychoanalysts.The second part of the book offers the first systematic discussion of Lacanian supervision. Through a sophisticated theoretical analysis and unique research material, Dries Dulsster has created an important reference point for students, scholars and clinicians that will appeal to those new to Lacanian practice, and those already deeply involved in it.