Dany Nobus

Key concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis

Jouissance, Dylan Evans the barred subject, Bruce Fink fantasy, Slavoj Zizek the desire of the analyst, Katrien Libbrecht forclosure, Russell Grigg the pass, Lieven Jonckheere the Borromean Knot, Luke Thurston the mirror stage, Dany Nobus the master signifier, Paul Verhaeghe.

Lacan’s science of the subject: between linguistics and topology

Many students of the arts and humanities probably first encounter the name of Jacques Lacan in one of the numerous studies of the French Structuralist movement, an intellectual paradigm which attained the zenith of its public success during the 1960s, and which has since occupied many an Anglo- American scholars critical spotlight, either as a fashionable esoteric creed or as an original explanatory doctrine. Invariably associated with the contributions of Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser – the central quadrivium of Structuralism – Lacans oeuvre has indeed frequently appeared as another influential instance of how Structuralist ideas managed to change the face of many research areas in the human and social sciences, in his case the field of Freudian psychoanalytic practice. Whereas his companions have been hailed or vilified for their Structuralist approaches to anthropology, literary criticism, philosophy, and politics, Lacan has entered history as the quintessential defender of the Structuralist cause in psychoanalysis, an acolyte so militant that he did not shrink from making the claim that Freud himself had always been an inveterate structuralist avant la lettre . The main reason for Lacan’s recognition, and his intermittent selfidentification as a Structuralist is situated in his allegiance to the basic principles of Structuralist linguistics, as inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure in his famous Course in General Linguistics , published posthumously in 1916, and as elaborated from the late 1920s by Roman Jakobson, founding member and chief representative of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

Fluctuat nec mergitur or what happened to Reikian psychoanalysis

The official published version can be obtained from the link below - Copyright @ 2006 American Psychological Association

the punning of reason

There is a colloquial expression in French that one can sometimes hear in the company of psychoanalysts, but with increasing frequency also amongst the so-called “educated lay-people,” and which serves to emphasize the excruciatingly awkward formulation of a spoken sentence or written statement. Faced with his complete failure to fathom the significance of a text, confronted with her radical inability even to begin to understand the meaning of a phrase, a person may be heard to say: “Eh bien, c’est vraiment du Lacan, ça!” Perhaps the éminences grises of the Académie française will one day discuss whether officially to admit a new word into their language and thus into the pages of the great French dictionaries: “lacan [lakã] m. 0.1 mot/passage difficile, impossible à comprendre; 0.2 personne qui parle ou écrit de façon difficile.” Perhaps they will one day even debate whether to give their blessing to the language system that gives birth to these difficult words and passages: “lacanien [lakanj ] m. 0.1 adhérent/praticien de la psychanalyse lacanienne, tradition développée par le psychiatre français Jacques Lacan (1901–1981); 0.2. langage parlé par les lacaniens; 0.3 langage difficile/incompréhensible; 3.2 parler lacanien fig. parler de façon difficile/incompréhensible; cf. parler chinois.” Now that “Lacan” is no longer simply recognized as a proper name, but has acquired the status of an appellative in popular parlance, perhaps we will one day indeed be entitled to use it as a synonym for “unfathomable, convoluted, twisted, inaccessible, gobbledygook.” Students whose written work falls far below common academic standards of readability might then be told that their essays are too “lacanian,” contain too many “lacanisms,” and consequently be asked to put them into “proper” language. One category of students, however, would never run the risk of their papers being criticized for “intermittent lacanianisms,” “lacanian turns of phrase,” “high Lacan-quality,” etc. In this bracket we find, of course, the boys and girls who aspire to become “adherents/practitioners of Lacanian psychoanalysis, tradition developed by the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (1901–1981).” Since the process of initiation and ordination into this tradition involves acquiring its language, a totally unique idiom with a specific grammar and vocabulary, the aforementioned criticisms would no doubt become coveted accolades and well-received tokens of intellectual achievement. Lacanian (or Lacanese, as it is sometimes called) is, after all, the language of professional exchange within the