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| bruce fink: Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners Bruce Fink, 2011-04-26 An introduction to psychoanalytic technique from a Lacanian perspective. What does it mean to practice psychoanalysis as Jacques Lacan did? How did Lacan translate his original theoretical insights into moment-to-moment psychoanalytic technique? And what makes a Lacanian approach to treatment different from other approaches? These are among the questions that Bruce Fink, a leading translator and expositor of Lacan's work, addresses in Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique by describing and amply exemplifying the innovative techniques (such as punctuation, scansion, and oracular interpretation) developed by Lacan to uncover unconscious desire, lift repression, and bring about change. Unlike any other writer on Lacan to date, Fink illustrates his Lacanian approach to listening, questioning, punctuating, scanding, and interpreting with dozens of actual clinical examples. He clearly outlines the fundamentals of working with dreams, daydreams, and fantasies, discussing numerous anxiety dreams, nightmares, and fantasies told to him by his own patients. By examining transference and countertransference in detail through the use of clinical vignettes, Fink lays out the major differences (regarding transference interpretation, self-disclosure, projective identification, and the therapeutic frame) between mainstream psychoanalytic practice and Lacanian practice. He critiques the ever more prevalent normalizing attitude in psychoanalysis today and presents crucial facets of Lacan's approach to the treatment of neurosis, as well as of his entirely different approach to the treatment of psychosis. Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique is an introduction to psychoanalytic technique from a Lacanian perspective that is based on Fink's many years of experience working as an analyst and supervising clinicians, including graduate students in clinical psychology, social workers, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts. Designed for a wide range of practitioners and requiring no previous knowledge of Lacan's work, this primer is accessible to therapists of many different persuasions with diverse degrees of clinical experience, from novices to seasoned analysts. Fink's goal throughout is to present the implications of Lacan's highly novel work for psychoanalytic technique across a broad spectrum of interventions. The techniques covered (all of which are designed to get at the unconscious, repression, and repetition compulsion) can be helpful to a wide variety of practitioners, often transforming their practices radically in a few short months. |
| bruce fink: A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis Bruce Fink, 1999-09-15 This is an invaluable guide to Lacanian psychoanalysis, how it’s done, and how it differs from other forms of therapy. While elucidating Lacan’s theory, the book does so from the perspective of the practitioner faced with pressing questions of diagnosis, which therapeutic stance to adopt, how to involve the patient, and how to bring about change. |
| bruce fink: Lacan to the Letter Bruce Fink, 2004 To read Lacan closely is to follow him to the letter, to take him literally, making the wager that he comes right out and says what he means in many cases, though much of his argument must be reconstructed through a line-by-line examination. And this is precisely what Bruce Fink does in this ambitious book, a fine analysis of Lacan's work on language and psychoanalytic treatment conducted on the basis of a very close reading of texts in his Icrits: A Selection. As a translator and renowned proponent of Lacan's works, Fink is an especially adept and congenial guide through the complexities of Lacanian literature and concepts. He devotes considerable space to notions that have been particularly prone to misunderstanding, notions such as the sliding of the signified under the signifier,or that have gone seemingly unnoticed, such as the ego is the metonymy of desire. Fink also pays special attention to psychoanalytic concepts, like affect, that Lacan is sometimes thought to neglect, and to controversial concepts, like the phallus. From a parsing of Lacan's claim that commenting on a text is like doing an analysis, to sustained readings of The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, The Direction of the Treatment, and Subversion of the Subject (with particular attention given to the workings of the Graph of Desire), Fink's book is a work of unmatched subtlety, depth, and detail, providing a valuable new perspective on one of the twentieth century's most important thinkers. Bruce Fink is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and professor of psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He is the author of A Clinical Introduction to LacanianPsychoanalysis (1997) and The Lacanian Subject (1995). He has coedited three volumes on Lacan's seminars and is the translator of Lacan's Seminar XX, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (1998), Icrits: A Selection (2002), and Icrits: The Complete Text (forthcoming). |
| bruce fink: Lacan, Language, and Philosophy Russell Grigg, 2009-01-01 Lacan, Language, and Philosophy explores the linguistic turn in psychoanalysis taken by Jacques Lacan. Russell Grigg provides lively and accessible readings of Lacan and Freud that are grounded in clinical experience and informed by a background in analytic philosophy. He addresses key issues in Lacanian psychoanalysis, from the clinical (how psychosis results from the foreclosure of the signifier the Name-of-the Father; the father as a symbolic function; the place of transference) to the philosophical (the logic of the pas-tout; the link between the superego and Kant's categorical imperative; a critique of Žižek's account of radical change). Grigg's expertise and knowledge of psychoanalysis produce a major contribution to contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytic debates. |
| bruce fink: Desire and its Interpretation Jacques Lacan, 2021-03-22 What does Lacan show us? He shows us that desire is not a biological function; that it is not correlated with a natural object; and that its object is fantasized. Because of this, desire is extravagant. It cannot be grasped by those who might try to master it. It plays tricks on them. Yet if it is not recognized, it produces symptoms. In psychoanalysis, the goal is to interpret—that is, to read—the message regarding desire that is harbored within the symptom. Although desire upsets us, it also inspires us to invent artifices that can serve us as a compass. An animal species has a single natural compass. Human beings, on the other hand, have multiple compasses: signifying montages and discourses. They tell you what to do: how to think, how to enjoy, and how to reproduce. Yet each person's fantasy remains irreducible to shared ideals. Up until recently, all of our compasses, no matter how varied, pointed in the same direction: toward the Father. We considered the patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline accelerated owing to increasing equality, the growth of capitalism, and the ever-greater domination of technology. We have reached the end of the Father Age. Another discourse is in the process of taking the former's place. It champions innovation over tradition; networks over hierarchies; the draw of the future over the weight of the past; femininity over virility. Where there had previously been a fixed order, transformational flows constantly push back any and all limits. Freud was a product of the Father Age. He did a great deal to save it. The Catholic Church finally realized this. Lacan followed the way paved by Freud, but it led him to posit that the father is a symptom. He demonstrates that here using Hamlet as an example. What people have latched onto about Lacan's work—his formalization of the Oedipus complex and his emphasis on the Name-of-the-Father—was merely his point of departure. Seminar VI already revises this: the Oedipus complex is not the only solution to desire, it is merely a normalized form thereof; it is, moreover, a pathogenic form; it does not exhaustively explain desire’s course. Hence the eulogy of perversion with which this seminar ends: Lacan views perversion here as a rebellion against the identifications that assure the maintenance of social routines. This Seminar predicted “the revamping of formally established conformisms and even their explosion.” We have reached that point. Lacan is talking about us. |
| bruce fink: Reading Seminar XI Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus, 1994-12-23 This book provides the first truly sustained commentary to appear in either French or English on Lacan's most important seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The 16 contributors unpack Lacan's notoriously difficult work in simple terms, and supply elegant illustrations from a variety of fields: psychoanalytic treatment, film, literature, art, and so on. Each of Lacan's fundamental concepts--the unconscious, transference, drive, and repetition--is discussed in detail, and related to other important notions such as object a cause of desire, the gaze, the Name-of-the-Father, the subject, and the Other. This volume also includes a translation of Lacan's companion piece to Seminar XI, Position of the Unconscious (an article from the French edition of the Ecrits that has never before appeared in English), by one of the foremost translators of Lacan's work, Bruce Fink. As an indication of the important of this article, Lacan considered it to be the sequel to his Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, arguably his most important paper in the 1950s. The contributors include many of the best minds in the Lacanian psychoanalytic world in Paris today. Chapters include Excommunication: Context and Concepts by Jacques-Alain Miller, The Subject and the Other I and II by Colette Soler, Alienation and Separation I and II by Eric Laurent, Science and Psychoanalysis by Bruce Fink, The Name-of-the-Father by Francois Regnault, Transference as Deception by Pierre-Gilles Gueguen, The Drive I and II by Marie-Hele`ne Brousse, The Demontage of the Drive by Maire Jaanus, The Gaze as an Object by Antonio Quinet, The Phallic Gaze of Wonderland by Richard Feldstein, The 'Evil Eye' of Painting: Jacques Lacan and Witold Gombrowicz on the Gaze by Hanjo Berressem, Art and the Position of the Analyst by Robert Samuels, The Relation between Voice and the Gaze by Ellie Ragland, The Lamella of David Lynch by Slavoj Zizek, The Real Cause of Repetition by Bruce Fink, Introductory Talk at Sainte-Anne Hospital by Jacques-Alain Miller, and The End of Analysis I and II by Anne Dunand. |
| bruce fink: Irrepressible Truth Adrian Johnston, 2017-09-19 This book offers readers a uniquely detailed engagement with the ideas of legendary French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The Freudian Thing is one of Lacan’s most important texts, wherein he explains the significance and stakes of his “return to Freud” as a passionate defence of Freud’s disturbing, epoch-making discovery of the unconscious, against misrepresentations and criticisms of it. However, Lacan is characteristically cryptic in The Freudian Thing. The combination of his writing style and vast range of references renders much of his thinking inaccessible to all but a narrow circle of scholarly specialists. Johnston’s Irrepressible Truth opens up the universe of Lacanian psychoanalysis to much wider audiences by furnishing a sentence-by-sentence interpretive unpacking of this pivotal 1955 essay. In so doing, Johnston reveals the precision, rigor, and soundness of Lacan’s teachings. |
| bruce fink: Reading Seminar XX Suzanne Barnard, Bruce Fink, 2012-02-01 This collection offers the first sustained, in-depth commentary on Seminar XX, Encore, considered the cornerstone of Lacan's work on the themes of sexual difference, knowledge, jouissance, and love. Although Seminar XX was originally popularized as Lacan's treatise on feminine sexuality, these essays, by some of today's foremost Lacanian scholars, go beyond feminine sexuality to address Lacan's significant intertwining concern with the rupture between reality and the real produced by modern science, and the implications of this rupture for subjectivity, knowledge, jouissance, and the body. The essays clarify basic concepts, but for readers already familiar with Lacan they also offer sophisticated workings-through of the more challenging and obscure arguments in Encore—both by tracing their historical development across Lacan's œuvre and by demonstrating their relation to particular philosophical, theological, mathematical, and scientific concepts. They cover much of the terrain necessary for understanding sexual difference—not in terms of chromosomes, body parts, choice of sexual partner, or varieties of sexual practice—but in terms of one's position vis-à-vis the Other and the kind of jouissance one is able to obtain. In so doing, they make significant interventions in the debates regarding sex, gender, and sexuality in feminist theory, philosophy, queer theory, and cultural studies. |
| bruce fink: Poststructuralist Agency Rae Gavin Rae, 2020-02-14 Gavin Rae shows that the problematic status of agency caused by the poststructuralist decentring of the subject is a central concern for poststructuralist thinkers. First, Rae shows how this plays out in the thinking of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault. He then demonstrates that it is with those poststructuralists associated with and influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis that this issue most clearly comes to the fore. He goes on to reveal that the conceptual schema of Cornelius Castoriadis best explains how the founded subject is capable of agency. |
| bruce fink: Ghost Words and Invisible Giants Lheisa Dustin, 2021-06-29 Lheisa Dustin describes “language of suffering” of iconic modernist authors H.D. and Djuna Barnes, tracing psychic splitting and virulent thought patterns in their creative works. She argues that this language, where word and meaning are disconnected, signals breaks in consciousness haunted by spectral objects of fear and desire. |
| bruce fink: The Adventures of Inspector Canal Bruce Fink, 2018-09-21 Psychoanalysts make the best detectives! When it comes to divining motives, deciphering ambiguous pronouncements, detecting delusions, and foiling the tricks memory plays, famed French analyst Jacques Lacan - turned self-proclaimed retired Inspector Quesjac Canal - is second to none (apologies to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin, and Umberto Eco's William of Baskerville). Reluctantly drawn into helping hapless New York City police detectives with crimes reported by luminaries like Rolland Saalem, music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and involving prominent personages like Tobias Trickler, Mayor of New York City, and Sandra Errand, Vice-President for North American sales at YVEH Distributors of Spirits, Canal solves cases that are anything but what they appear to be and mends tears of the heart and soul at the same time. |
| bruce fink: Ontology and Perversion Boštjan Nedoh, 2019-06-04 This volume represents the first over-arching assessment of perversion as a philosophical category, offering a comparative analysis of Deleuze, Agamben and Lacan’s readings of the relationship between perversion, ontology and politics. |
| bruce fink: Reading Seminars I and II Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus, 1996-02-22 In this collection of essays, Lacan's early work is first discussed systematically by focusing on his two earliest seminars: Freud's Papers on Technique and The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. These essays, by some of the finest analysts and writers in the Lacanian psychoanalytic world in Paris today, carefully lay out the background and development of Lacan's thought. In Part I, Jacques-Alain Miller spells out the philosophical and psychiatric origins of Lacan's work in great detail. In Parts II, III, and IV, Colette Soler, Eric Laurent, and others explain in the clearest of fashions the highly influential conceptualization Lacan introduces with the terms symbolic, imaginary, and real. Part V provides the first sustained account in English to date of Lacan's reformulation of psychoanalytic diagnostic categories--neurosis, perversion, psychosis, and their subcategories--their theoretical foundations, and clinical applications (ample case material is provided here.) Parts VI and VII of this collection take us well beyond Seminars I and II, relating Lacan's early work to his later views of the 1960s and 1970s. Slavoj Zizek explores the complex philosophical relations between Hegel and Lacan regarding the subject and the cause. And Lacan's article, On Freud's 'Trieb' and the Psychoanalyst's Desire--that appears here for the first time in English and is brilliantly unpacked by Jacques-Alain Miller in his Commentary on Lacan's Text--takes a giant step forward to 1965 where we see a crucial reversal in Lacan's perspective: desire is suddenly devalued, the defensive, inhibiting nature of desire coming to the fore. What then becomes essential is the drive as an activity related to the lost object that produces jouissance. |
| bruce fink: Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric Daniel Adleman, Chris Vanderwees, 2022-12-30 Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric: Freud, Burke, Lacan, and Philosophy's Other Scenes is an innovative work that places the fields of psychoanalysis and rhetoric in dynamic resonance with one another. The book operates according to a compelling interdisciplinary conceit: Adleman provocatively explores the psychoanalytic aspects of rhetoric and Vanderwees probes the rhetorical dimensions of psychoanalytic practice. This thoroughly researched text takes a closer look at the missed encounter between rhetoric and psychoanalysis. The first section of the book explores the massive, but underappreciated, influence of Freudian psychoanalysis on Kenneth Burke’s new rhetoric. The book’s second section undertakes sustained investigations into the rhetorical dimensions of psychoanalytic concepts such as transference, free association, and listening. Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric then culminates in a more comprehensive discussion of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the context of Kenneth Burke’s new rhetoric. The book therefore serves as an invaluable aperture to the fields of psychoanalysis and rhetoric, including their much overlooked disciplinary entanglement. Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric will be of great interest to scholars of psychoanalytic studies, rhetoric, language studies, semiotics, media studies, and communication studies. |
| bruce fink: Adventures in Transcendental Materialism Adrian Johnston, 2014-03-17 Critically engaging with thinkers including Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, Jean-Claude Milner, Martin Hagglund, William Connolly and Jane Bennett, Johnston formulates a materialist and naturalist account of subjectivity that does full justice to human beings as irreducible to natural matter alone."e; |
| bruce fink: Lacanian Realism Duane Rousselle, 2018-01-25 Alain Badiou has claimed that Quentin Meillassoux's book After Finitude (Bloomsbury, 2008) “opened up a new path in the history of philosophy.” And so, whether you agree or disagree with the speculative realism movement, it has to be addressed. Lacanian Realism does just that. This book reconstructs Lacanian dogma from the ground up: first, by unearthing a new reading of the Lacanian category of the real; second, by demonstrating the political and cultural ingenuity of Lacan's concept of the real, and by positioning this against the more reductive analyses of the concept by Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Saul Newman, Todd May, Joan Copjec, Jacques Rancière, and others, and; third, by arguing that the subject exists intimately within the real. Lacanian Realism is an imaginative and timely exploration of the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and contemporary continental philosophy. |
| bruce fink: The Truths of Psychoanalysis Jasper Feyaerts, Paulo Beer, 2022-02-15 Dealing with the matter of truth Truth has always been a central philosophical category, occupying different fields of knowledge and practice. In the current moment of fake news and alternative facts, it is mandatory to revisit the various meanings of truth. Departing from various approaches to psychoanalytic theory and practice, the authors gathered in this book offer critical reflections and insights about truth and its effects. In articulations of psychoanalysis with (for instance) philosophy, ethics, and politics, the reader will find discussions about issues such as knowledge, love, and clinical practice, all marked by the matter of truth. |
| bruce fink: Psychoanalysis in Context Alvin Henry, 2020-05-15 Drawing on methods and approaches from various schools of psychoanalysis, comparative literature, and cultural studies, the contributors to Psychoanalysis in Context examine how the circulation of psychoanalysis across time and place reflects and shapes literature and literary criticism. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range while attending to the historical moment of the literature, the psychoanalysis, and the interpretations—and misinterpretations—of psychoanalysis. Adrienne Seely examines the psychoanalytic dimensions of narrative structure in light of masochistic aesthetics and of the situating of women and robots both beneath and beyond humanist ideology. Simon Porzak analyzes the reconfiguration of the father figure through poetry. Nicholas Ray examines the close historical and theoretical connections between Freud’s interpretative appeal to tragic drama and his professed abandonment of the seduction theory. Vera Profit asks how the question of evil challenges the limits of literary representation. Laura Dawkins examines the applicability of psychoanalytic paradigms to African American literature and culture. Brian Glaser questions how psychoanalysis helps to distinguish insight and wisdom from mechanism or defense in reading the poetry of modernist male subjectivity. Shirley Zisser explores unseen dimensions of psychosis and establishes the main symptom of culture. Michael Angelo Tata analyzes the transformation of Lacan’s objet a under Late Capitalism and the emergence of a new form of desire. Erica Galioto strives to produce an alliance across multiple psychoanalytic discourses by redefining Freud’s notion of transference. Hilary Thompson challenges the historical legacy of psychoanalysis in the colonial context to demonstrate the polarity yet compatibility of psychic and political models of melancholia in the postcolonial context. In the final chapter Maire Jaanus provides a definitive reading of Albert Camus’s The Stranger and traces Lacan’s shift from conceptualizing the unconscious as able to constantly register and interpret language to that of a Real Unconscious which is amorphous and formless jouissance. Jaanus analyzes the development of ordinary psychosis; she ends her reading with a stunning reply to Edward Said’s identity politics reading of the novel to reveal how a phallic reading cannot imagine a corporeal fantasy beyond the sexual. This collection of essays offers a series of fresh and critical insights into the literary history of both psychoanalysis and literature. Contributors: Laura Dawkins, Erica Galioto, Brian Glaser, Maire Jaanus, Simon Porzak, Vera Profit, Nicholas Ray, Adrienne Seely, Michael Angelo Tata, Hilary Thompson and Shirley Zisser. |
| bruce fink: Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis Dany Nobus, 2013-01-11 Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis paints a completely new picture of the man and his ideas. The book suceeds in showing how ideas can become more accessible, and re-evaluates his significance within the field of psychodynamic psychotherapy. The book is structured thematically around five key issues: diagnosis, the analyst's position during the treatment, the management of transference, the formulation of interpretations, and the organisation of analytic training. For each of these issues, Lacan's entire work both published and unpublished material, has been taken into account and theoretical principles have been illustrated with clinical examples. The book also contains the first complete bibliography of Lacan's works in English. Clear, detailed, and wide ranging, Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis will prove essential reading, not only for professionals and students within the fields of psychology and psychiatry, but for all those keen to discover a new Lacan. |
| bruce fink: Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor Charles Freeland, 2013-06-01 A study of Lacan’s engagement with the Western philosophical traditions of ethical and political thought in his seventh seminar and later work. |
| bruce fink: Queer Theory, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Sexual Politics Luiz Valle Junior, 2025-03-21 Queer Theory, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Sexual Politics is a consideration of the relationship between LGBTQIA+ politics, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and queer theory. The book argues, through readings of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Lee Edelman’s No Future, that core queer categories – such as normativity and anti-normativity – sidestep questions that are crucial not only to contemporary sexual politics but also to psychoanalytic thinking and clinical work. Luiz Valle Junior attends to the queer account of the political shortcomings of the contemporary LGBTQIA+ movement, as well as to the inadequacies of the queer reception of Lacanian psychoanalysis and makes a case for the ongoing relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to thinking through a renewed sexual politics. The book reflects on the potentiality of a Lacanian theory of sexual politics to challenge the dominance of identity in contemporary LGBTQIA+ activism and in the queer theoretical archive. Valle Junior shifts the discussion of sexual politics from the terrain of normativity and identity to the terrain of desire and enjoyment, and questions enduring heteronormative positions that contemporary Lacanians continue to espouse, against Lacan’s own position. Queer Theory, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Sexual Politics will be of great interest to academics and scholars of queer studies, psychoanalysis, and in the LGBTQIA+ movement, and more broadly in the relation of identity analytics to contemporary psychoanalytic and political thought. |
| bruce fink: The Psychosis of Race Jack Black, 2023-12-01 The Psychosis of Race offers a unique and detailed account of the psychoanalytic significance of race, and the ongoing impact of racism in contemporary society. Moving beyond the well-trodden assertion that race is a social construction, and working against demands that simply call for more representational equality, The Psychosis of Race explores how the delusions, anxieties, and paranoia that frame our race relations can afford new insights into how we see, think, and understand race’s pervasive appeal. With examples drawn from politics and popular culture—such as Candyman, Get Out, and the music of Kendrick Lamar—critical attention is given to introducing, as well as explicating on, several key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis and the study of psychosis, including foreclosure, the phallus, Name-of-the-Father, sinthome, and the objet petit a. By elaborating a cultural mode to psychosis and its understanding, an original and critical exposition of the effects of racialization, as well as our ability to discern the very limits of our capacity to think through, or even beyond, the idea of race, is provided. The Psychosis of Race speaks to an emerging area in the study of psychoanalysis and race, and will appeal to scholars and academics across the fields of psychology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and the arts and humanities. |
| bruce fink: Game Theory and Postwar American Literature Michael Wainwright, 2017-02-14 If game theory, the mathematical simulation of rational decision-making first axiomatically established by the Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann, is to prove worthy of literary hermeneutics, then critics must be able to apply its models to texts written without a working knowledge of von Neumann's discipline in mind. Reading such iconic novels as Fahrenheit 451, In Cold Blood, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye from the perspective of the four most frequently encountered coordination problems - the Stag Hunt, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, and Deadlock, Game Theory and Postwar American Literature illustrates the significant contribution of mathematical models to literary interpretation. The interdisciplinary approach of this book contributes to an understanding of the historical, political, and social contexts that surround the texts produced in the post-Cold War years, as well as providing a comprehensive model of joining game theory and literary criticism. |
| bruce fink: The Body in Theory Becky R. McLaughlin, Eric Daffron, 2021-09-06 The body has always had the potential to unsettle us with its strange exigencies and suppurations, its demands and desires, and thus throughout the ages, it has continued to be a subject of interest and obsession. This collection of twelve peer-reviewed essays on Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault interrogates the body in all of its beauty...and with all of its blights and blemishes. Written by a diverse body of scholars--art historians, cultural theorists, English professors, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and sociologists from North America and Europe--these essays bring into conversation two intellectual giants frequently seen as antagonists, and thus rarely seen together. Topics covered include: the intersections of Foucault and Lacan and how they bring to light new thoughts on the senses, the self-destructive body, ableism and disability in Guillermo del Toro's film The Shape of Water, body image and the ego, selfie-culture, and metamorphosis in Ottessa Moshfegh's novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, among others. |
| bruce fink: Infinite Greed Adrian Johnston, 2024-05-14 Selfishness is essential to capitalism—or so both advocates and opponents claim. In Infinite Greed, Adrian Johnston argues that this consensus is mistaken. Through a novel synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis, he reveals how the relentless pursuit of profits is not fundamentally animated by human acquisitiveness. Instead, capitalism’s strange “infinite greed” demands that individuals sacrifice their pleasures, their well-being, and even themselves to serve inhuman capital. Johnston traces the mechanisms that compel capitalist subjects to obey the cold imperative to accumulate in perpetuity and without limits—and also without regard for the consequences for everyone and everything else. Facing crises such as spiraling wealth inequality and the profit-driven prospect of a looming ecological apocalypse, the rational self-interest of the majority would seem to dictate putting a stop to capitalist accumulation. By bringing together the Marxian critique of political economy with psychoanalytic metapsychology, Johnston shows why and how capitalism, rather than being responsive to people’s rationally selfish interests, disregards and overrides them instead. Unlike previous syntheses of Marxism and psychoanalysis, Infinite Greed pairs Freudian and Lacanian concepts with the economic heart of Marx’s historical materialism. In so doing, Johnston brings to light the complex intertwining of political and libidinal economies keeping us invested and complicit in perpetuating capitalism and its ills. |
| bruce fink: Hollywood’s (m)Other Aperture Jaime Bihlmeyer, 2019-10-07 This study explores how mainstream movies lend themselves to the portrayal of imagery that reflects the earliest stages of human development. Filmmakers take full advantage of this rich, body-centered source of human experience. Avatar, Minority Report, and Annihilation, among the other movies explored in this book, incorporate patterns of images that (re)present pre-Oedipal (m)Others, FEMININITY, and the originary maternal authority. The book explores how mainstream movies increasingly expose mass audiences to signs and resonances from our prelingual intrauterine and extrauterine psychological experiences. In addition, it compares and contrasts how the prelingual experience as depicted in these movies relates to themes of inclusivity that encompass diverse film inquiry, including queer theory, as well as human/nonhuman animal kinship and hybridity. In sum, the text analyses how Hollywood movies depict and integrate the prelingual experience into the commercial cinematic apparatus and how this inspires new understanding of plurality, FEMININITY and originary maternal authority in culture and society. |
| bruce fink: Architecture and the Unconscious John Shannon Hendrix, Lorens Eyan Holm, 2016-06-17 There are a number of recent texts that draw on psychoanalytic theory as an interpretative approach for understanding architecture, or that use the formal and social logics of architecture for understanding the psyche. But there remains work to be done in bringing what largely amounts to a series of independent voices, into a discourse that is greater than the sum of its parts, in the way that, say, the architect Peter Eisenman was able to do with the architecture of deconstruction or that the historian Manfredo Tafuri was able to do with the Marxist critique of architecture. The discourse of the present volume focuses specifically for the first time on the subject of the unconscious in relation to the design, perception, and understanding of architecture. It brings together an international group of contributors, who provide informed and varied points of view on the role of the unconscious in architectural design and theory and, in doing so, expand architectural theory to unexplored areas, enriching architecture in relation to the humanities. The book explores how architecture engages dreams, desires, imagination, memory, and emotions, how architecture can appeal to a broader scope of human experience and identity. Beginning by examining the historical development of the engagement of the unconscious in architectural discourse, and the current and historical, theoretical and practical, intersections of architecture and psychoanalysis, the volume also analyses the city and the urban condition. |
| bruce fink: First Love Sigi Jottkandt, 2010 First Love: A Phenomenology of the One takes seriously literatureOCOs repeated attestations of a One in its stories, poems and plays entitled First Love. With this groundbreaking work, JAttkandt suspends the contemporary philosophical stricture against every idea of a whole to unmask the figure concealed behind the psychoanalytic myth of first love. |
| bruce fink: The Charmed Circle of Ideology Geoff Boucher, 2009-03 Set against the collapse of social theory into a theory of ideological discourse, Geoff Boucher sets to work a rigorous mapping of the contemporary field, targeting the relativist implications of this new form of philosophical idealism. Offering a detailed and immanent critique, Boucher concentrates his critical attention on the 'postmarxism' of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Žižek. In response Boucher points to 'intersubjectivity' as an exit from postmarxist theory's charmed circle of ideology. |
| bruce fink: Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Signification of the Phallus’ to ‘Metaphor of the Subject’ Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook, Calum Neill, 2018-10-09 The Écrits was Jacques Lacan’s single most important text, a landmark in psychoanalysis which epitomized his aim of returning to Freud via structural linguistics, philosophy and literature. Reading Lacan’s Écrits is the first extensive set of commentaries on the complete edition of Lacan’s Écrits to be published in English. An invaluable document in the history of psychoanalysis, and one of the most challenging intellectual works of the twentieth century, Lacan’s Écrits still today begs the interpretative engagement of clinicians, scholars, philosophers and cultural theorists. The three volumes of Reading Lacan’s Écrits offer just this: a series of systematic paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries – by some of the world’s most renowned Lacanian analysts and scholars – on the complete edition of the Écrits, inclusive of lesser known articles such as ‘Kant with Sade’, ‘The Youth of Gide’, ‘Science and Truth’, ‘Presentation on Transference’ and ‘Beyond the Reality Principle. The originality and importance of Lacan’s Écrits to psychoanalysis and intellectual history is matched only by the text’s notorious inaccessibility. Reading Lacan’s Écrits is an indispensable companion piece and reference-text for clinicians and scholars exploring Lacan's magnum opus. Not only does it contextualize, explain and interrogate Lacan's arguments, it provides multiple interpretative routes through this most labyrinthine of texts. Reading Lacan’s Écrits provides an incisive and accessible companion for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in training and in practice, as well as philosophers, cultural theorists and literary, social science and humanities researchers who wish to draw upon Lacan’s pivotal work. |
| bruce fink: Time Driven Adrian Johnston, 2005-07-27 Freud outlines two types of conflict; that between drives and reality; and that between the drives themselves. Adrian Johnston identifies a third; the conflict embedded within each and every drive. |
| bruce fink: Desiring Whiteness Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, 2002-11 A compelling new interpretation of how we understand race, using Lacanian analysis to explore the visual discrimation we make between races, and including close readings of literary and film texts. |
| bruce fink: Self and Emotional Life Adrian Johnston, Catherine Malabou, 2013-06-11 Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou defy theoretical humanities' deeply-entrenched resistance to engagements with the life sciences. Rather than treat biology and its branches as hopelessly reductive and politically suspect, they view recent advances in neurobiology and its adjacent scientific fields as providing crucial catalysts to a radical rethinking of subjectivity. Merging three distinct disciplines—European philosophy from Descartes to the present, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and affective neuroscience—Johnston and Malabou triangulate the emotional life of affective subjects as conceptualized in philosophy and psychoanalysis with neuroscience. Their experiments yield different outcomes. Johnston finds psychoanalysis and neurobiology have the potential to enrich each other, though affective neuroscience demands a reconsideration of whether affects can be unconscious. Investigating this vexed issue has profound implications for theoretical and practical analysis, as well as philosophical understandings of the emotions. Malabou believes scientific explorations of the brain seriously problematize established notions of affective subjectivity in Continental philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian analysis. She confronts philosophy and psychoanalysis with something neither field has seriously considered: the concept of wonder and the cold, disturbing visage of those who have been affected by disease or injury, such that they are no longer affected emotionally. At stake in this exchange are some of philosophy's most important claims concerning the relationship between the subjective mind and the objective body, the structures and dynamics of the unconscious dimensions of mental life, the role emotion plays in making us human, and the functional differences between philosophy and science. |
| bruce fink: Freud and the Problem of Sexuality Bradley Ramos, 2024-03-01 While contemporary studies have paid renewed attention to the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality and routinely reference Sigmund Freud, they seldom engage directly with his work. Freud and the Problem of Sexuality returns to Freud's writings to argue that there is still something revolutionary and novel to be found there—something that will come to challenge both philosophical and popular understandings of sexuality. In lively, accessible prose, Bradley Ramos revisits some of the most difficult, even troubling aspects of Freud's work and sheds fresh light on foundational concepts such as Trieb (drive or instinct), perversion, infantile sexuality, and the Oedipus complex. Reading Freud alongside Jean Laplanche, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida, we can begin to see why sexuality becomes for us, as it did for Freud, a problem in and by its nature. However, to take this problem of sexuality seriously, Ramos argues, we must dare to do what most refuse: renounce our persistent fantasies and assumptions about sexuality. |
| bruce fink: Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid Dany Nobus, Malcolm Quinn, 2013-02-01 Why is stupidity sublime? What is the value of a 'dialectics of ignorance' for analysts and academics? Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid draws on recent research to provide a thorough and illuminating evaluation of the status of knowledge and truth in psychoanalysis. Adopting a Lacanian framework, Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn question the basic assumption that knowledge is universally good and describe how psychoanalysis is in a position to place forms of knowledge in a dialectical relationship with non-knowledge, blindness, ignorance and stupidity. The book draws out the implications of a psychoanalytic theory of knowledge for the practices of knowledge construction, acquisition and transmission across the humanities and social sciences. The book is divided into two sections. The first section addresses the foundations of a psychoanalytic approach to knowledge as it emerges from clinical practice, whilst the second section considers the problems and issues of applied psychoanalysis, and the ambiguous position of the analyst in the public sphere. Subjects covered include: The Logic of Psychoanalytic Discovery Creative Knowledge Production and Institutionalised Doctrine The Desire to Know versus the Fall of Knowledge Epistemological Regression and the Problem of Applied Psychoanalysis This provocative discussion of the dialectics of knowing and not knowing will be welcomed by practicing psychoanalysts and students of psychoanalytic studies, but also by everyone working in the fields of social science, philosophy and cultural studies. |
| bruce fink: Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure Ellie Ragland, 2015-06-26 Lacan postulated that the psyche can be understood by means of certain structures, which control our lives and our desires, and which operate differently at different logical moments or stages of formation. Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure offers us a reading of the major concepts of Lacan in terms of his later topological theory and aims to show how this was always a concern for Lacan and not only an issue in the last seminars. Ellie Ragland discusses how various stages of formation can be uncovered topologically within language itself, and operate to place certain properties – fantasy, the drive, jouissance, discourse and ethics in language itself. In this way she explores not only how language actually works in tandem with the properties, but also gives a different idea of what knowledge actually is and what implications that may have for reimagining and reworking differential/diagnostic structures. Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure is a compelling exponent of the innovative approaches Lacan takes to rethinking what psychoanalysis is and what it can do to enlighten psychoanalysts and treat patients. It will be essential reading to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists training graduate students in the fields of film, literary, gender and cultural studies. |
| bruce fink: Language, Eros, Being Elliot R. Wolfson, 2009-08-25 This long-awaited, magisterial study-an unparalleled blend of philosophy, poetry, and philology-draws on theories of sexuality, phenomenology, comparative religion, philological writings on Kabbalah, Russian formalism, Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig, William Blake, and the very physics of the time-space continuum to establish what will surely be a highwater mark in work on Kabbalah. Not only a study of texts, Language, Eros, Being is perhaps the fullest confrontation of the body in Jewish studies, if not in religious studies as a whole. Elliot R. Wolfson explores the complex gender symbolism that permeates Kabbalistic literature. Focusing on the nexus of asceticism and eroticism, he seeks to define the role of symbolic and poetically charged language in the erotically configured visionary imagination of the medieval Kabbalists. He demonstrates that the traditional Kabbalistic view of gender was a monolithic and androcentric one, in which the feminine was conceived as being derived from the masculine. He does not shrink from the negative implications of this doctrine, but seeks to make an honest acknowledgment of it as the first step toward the redemption of an ancient wisdom. Comparisons with other mystical traditions-including those in Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam-are a remarkable feature throughout the book. They will make it important well beyond Jewish studies, indeed, a must for historians of comparative religion, in particular of comparative mysticism. Praise for Elliot R. Wolfson: Through a Speculum That Shines is an important and provocative contribution to the study of Jewish mysticism by one of the major scholars now working in this field.-Speculum |
| bruce fink: Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition Gavin Rae, 2019-04-10 Gavin Rae analyses the history of Western conceptions of evil, showing it to be remarkably complex, differentiated and contested. He traces the problem of evil from early and Medieval Christian philosophy to modern philosophy, German Idealism, post-structuralism and contemporary analytic philosophy and secularisation. |
| bruce fink: The Book of Job and the Immanent Genesis of Transcendence Davis Hankins, 2015 Recent philosophical reexaminations of sacred texts have focused almost exclusively on the Christian New Testament, and Paul in particular. The Book of Job and the Immanent Genesis of Transcendence revives the enduring philosophical relevance and political urgency of the book of Job and thus contributes to the recent turn toward religion among philosophers such as Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou. |
| bruce fink: Ethics of Contemporary Art Theo Reeves-Evison, 2020-11-26 What happens when the shock of artistic transgression wears off, when scandal dissipates, when outrage becomes a tired routine? In this original new book, Theo Reeves-Evison argues that transgressive art no longer succeeds on its own terms in societies where language, prohibition and morality have become increasingly malleable. This compels us to rethink the relationship between contemporary art and ethics, and focus our attention on the potential of artworks to propose new values rather than simply challenge pre-existing moral codes. Assembling a novel theoretical framework from the writings of Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan and others, Ethics of Contemporary Art narrates a journey away from transgression towards a new critical paradigm for the relationship between ethics and aesthetics that places questions of subjectivity centre stage. Along the way artworks by Kader Attia, Artur Zmijewski, Dora Garcia and others serve as springboards launching discussions of the varied pathways along which a renewed ethics of contemporary art might develop. |
Bruce Fink | Lacanian Psychoanalyst | Author
Bruce Fink is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. He trained as a psychoanalyst in France for seven years with and is now a member of the psychoanalytic …
Bruce Fink | Lacanian Psychoanalyst | Author
Desire and its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI Translated by Bruce Fink
Bruce Fink | Lacanian Psychoanalyst | Author
Dr. Fink can be contacted regarding psychoanalysis (in person and/or by phone) and supervision (in person and/or by phone) at: Email fink@duq.edu or at brucefinkanalyst@gmail.com
Errata to A Clinical Intro - Bruce Fink
Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique published by Harvard University Press in 1997 Errata p. 15, epigraph: change “SE XVII” to “SE XVI” p. …
Errata to Complete Ecrits - brucefink.com
Title: Microsoft Word - Errata to Complete Ecrits.doc Author: Bruce Fink de Beaufort Created Date: 5/19/2013 6:58:07 AM
Bruce Fink | Lacanian Psychoanalyst | Author
Bruce Fink is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. He trained as a psychoanalyst in France for seven years with and is now a member of the psychoanalytic …
Bruce Fink | Lacanian Psychoanalyst | Author
Desire and its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI Translated by Bruce Fink
Bruce Fink | Lacanian Psychoanalyst | Author
Dr. Fink can be contacted regarding psychoanalysis (in person and/or by phone) and supervision (in person and/or by phone) at: Email fink@duq.edu or at brucefinkanalyst@gmail.com
Errata to A Clinical Intro - Bruce Fink
Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique published by Harvard University Press in 1997 Errata p. 15, epigraph: change “SE XVII” to “SE XVI” p. …
Errata to Complete Ecrits - brucefink.com
Title: Microsoft Word - Errata to Complete Ecrits.doc Author: Bruce Fink de Beaufort Created Date: 5/19/2013 6:58:07 AM
