Lacan in the End Times

Abstract

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.