Ethics Of Psychoanalysis Research Articles

Naming Argentina: The Subject of Torture and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Abstract: The concurrent diffusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Argentina and the state’s deployment of torture and disappearance during the most recent military dictatorship have led many critics to interpret the turn to Lacan as a cerebral substitute for political protest after the coup d’état. This essay examines how the ruling junta’s specific forms of violence provoked a crisis in the relationship between psychoanalysis and humanism, erupting in the literary field through the figure of the desaparecida . In tension with human rights discourses prevailing in the 1980s, Luisa Valenzuela’s experimental fiction explores the subject’s fragmentation under conditions of state terror and the ethical ambivalence of humanitarian efforts to repair the ego in the wake of torture.

상상력, 무로부터의 창조

This essay attempts to read three scenes of The Prelude by William Wordsworth, using as guiding thread what Kir Kuiken articulates with regard to the concept of imagination in his book, Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism. In order to bring Kuiken’s articulation of imagination to bear on the psychoanalytic concept of the void of the Thing, the essay will make a detour through the notion of creation ex nihilo that Jacques Lacan introduces in his book, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The notion of creation ex nihilo should not be taken to imply the process in which something is created from nothing. At stake here is nothing less than the simultaneity between the construction of the symbolic meaning and the introduction of a void. What Lacan elaborates regarding the creation ex nihilo is worth dwelling upon in that it allows us to problematize the opposition of subject and nature, past and present, whole and part which has functioned as the basic theme in the previous readings of The Prelude. The analysis of Wordsworth’s recounting of his passage across the Alps in book six of the Prelude is centered primarily on the way in which the missed crossing of the Alps is (re-)constructed in the ode to the imagination that follows. The episode of the blind beggar in book seven is especially important for grasping the logic that makes the ‘whole’ and the ‘part’ inextricable from but at the same time irreducible to each other. The reading of book eight begins with a consideration of the two “nows” in the passage of Wordsworth’s entrance into London. This leads us to formulate the singular way in which the first “now” is intermingled with the second “now,” instead of trying to figure out the extent to which the significance of the first “now” can be restored through the second “now.”

Social Justice Activism as Interpretation in a Loewaldian World.

At a time when many questions are arising about the nexus between psychoanalysis and social justice, the writings of Hans Loewald open an avenue for broadened conceptualizations of psychoanalytic activity and the role of interpretation within it. The pursuit of social justice, it is argued, is integral to psychoanalytic ethics, and the relation between activists and society can be formulated in Loewaldian terms. Using Loewald, and considering case examples from social justice informed advocacy, direct action, and protest speech in AIDS activism, social justice activism can be understood as a spontaneously emergent psychoanalytic interpretation delivered by activists to their social surround, effectively accomplishing multiple forms of therapeutic action. The therapeutic action includes a working through in two phases of the negative social transference, a concept proposed here to elaborate a mechanism for the transformation, through the interpretive aspects of activism, of psychic material directed toward marginalized subjects and those expressing marginalized subjective positions. Resistance to social justice activism is examined using the forms of resistance identified by Freud.

The Disintegration of Traditional Image: On Antigone’s Free Will and Action

In the great tragedy Antigone, for a long time, it seems that the study of female image, Antigone, is imprisoned in the Oedipus family and ancient Greek city-state, family ethics and city-state law, feminism and masculinity. However, based on deconstructionism, American scholar Judith Butler advocated breaking the binary opposition of gender category. In the paper, the image formula of Antigone is broken based on Butler’s revelation of the gender category and the construction of kinship, and combined with the “desire” doctrines of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic ethics. It highlights Antigone’s free will and action, which is of great significance to clarify Antigone’s spirit of freedom and enrich her image.

The Claim of Ethics: Language and the Other(ness) of the Subject in Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan

ABSTRACT This essay performs a comparative reading of the themes of language, otherness and subjectivity in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan. Their focuses on the place and role of an ethical subjectivity who is profoundly affected and displaced by the (non)presence of the absolute Other provide apt philosophical material for comparison and contrast. Through a close analysis of the important philosophical and psychoanalytic themes in Levinas’ early work Totality and Infinity and Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, I demonstrate how the different articulations of alterity in both influence their separate conceptions of the possibility of ethics in relation to decentered notions of subjectivity. In reading both, I argue that Lacan’s treatment of otherness and the eccentric nature of language provides a reimaging of certain gaps in Levinas. In return, I position Levinas as being able to provide a notion of ethical community that Lacan leaves out.

La formation aux médiations thérapeutiques par le désart : une éthique psychanalytique

AimsThis article discusses the place and function of psychoanalytic ethics in therapeutic mediation through art and in the training of therapists in the use of these tools. MethodStarting from a difference between two French translations by P. Lacoue-Labarthe of Adorno's term Entkunstung (désartification and désart), it will be shown that Entkunstung as “disart” introduces a particular dimension that all improvisation summons and aims at: a practice without an object, art without a work. Yet, improvisation specifically concerns therapeutic mediation practices when they are oriented by psychoanalysis. So how can we think about Entkunstung in clinical practices that use art as a therapeutic mediation, and how can we train for it? To answer these questions, we explore psychic and transferential processes in university training workshops. ResultsIn the training workshops for therapeutic mediation (here through music), we observe the deployment of several dimensions of Entkunstung: a dimension of Entkunstung in the Imaginary (the ruin of group idealization), in the Real (the impossible relationship with the instrument), and, finally, a symbolic dimension of Entkunstung (the insistence on the desire of the clinician-artist-trainer). These three dimensions appear as the Borromean coordinates of an orientation through Entkunstung. DiscussionThese training systems transmit much more than an approach to aesthetics or the application of leadership techniques referring to existing protocols. They represent a privileged stage for identifying and establishing the specificity of psychoanalytic ethics in mediation through art. ConclusionThe notion of Entkunstung highlights the articulation of two positions that might at first appear contradictory but which can be reconciled: that of the clinician and that of the artist.

Object lessons and the desire of psychoanalysis

In this article, “Object Lessons and the Desire of Psychoanalysis,” I meditate on the significance of Robyn Wiegman‘s 2012 monograph Object Lessons by examining the psychoanalytic significance of the concept of “transferential idealism” that Wiegman first introduced there. In doing so, I read Wiegman‘s Object Lessons through the lens of the book‘s psychoanalytic ethics and argue that the desire of Object Lessons is the desire of psychoanalysis: an enigmatic desire, borne from lack, which aims toward the proliferation of difference. By foregrounding the psychoanalytic desire of Object Lessons, I also consider my own inheritances of the desire of Object Lessons as the desire of psychoanalysis, and argue for its urgent importance for the field of Trans Studies today.

Desire and its rule: Gender Trouble, the phallus and the ethics of psychoanalysis

Queer theory, despite its reliance on psychoanalysis, has had remarkably little to say about Lacan. One reason for this is that Lacan’s name came to the fore in queer theory already associated with Judith Butler’s critique of The Signification of the Phallus in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. This article revisits this critique and argues that Butler’s objections to Lacan do not hold up to scrutiny, because they disregard the goal of Lacan’s intervention, fail to account for the progression of Lacan’s thinking in the corresponding Seminars and misconstrue Lacan’s theory of desire more generally. It then briefly scrutinises the immediately subsequent Seminars VI and VII and argues that psychoanalysis’ ethical concerns do not map easily onto gender and sexuality as queer theorists understand them; the desire presumed to awaken in the analytic itinerary is not subject to extrinsic, normative regulation, but comes into being as its own law.

Желание как критерий поступка в теории Ж. Лакана

This article presents the research results of Jaque Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis. Lacan suggested both the new theory of desire and the new ethics which is motivated by a desire as a criterion of an action. In this article the author reconstructs the Lacan’s system of arguments, which proves the fact, that desire can be considered as a criterion of an action, not its motive. This paper shows that the ethics of desire, that was originally developed in relation to the problem of the criterion of an analytical act, is also important for the ethical position of the patient, and therefore can be presented as a universal ethic. The article also provides evidence that psychoanalytic work can be considered as an ethical practice, since there is a transformation of the ethical position of the patient in it. Initially, the patient takes an ethical position that can be defined as the desire to achieve the good, it would lead the subject to satisfaction, comfort and tranquility. On the other hand, psychoanalysis reveals a different ethical perspective to the patient, where the desire defines how the patient chooses the path. First of all, this is about the analyst’s desire. This term means a special formation that was resulted by the analyst’s own analysis. Lacan believed that a psychoanalyst is the result of his/her own analysis, one of the main effects of which is the analyst’s desire. The analyst’s desire serves as a criterion for the analyst to perform analytical acts in his/her psychoanalytic practice. But the ethics of desire is important not only for the psychoanalyst. The author’s task is to show that a patient who came to the analysis for the sake of therapy also performs the transformation of an ethical position in the process of analysis. This is the basic condition of psychoanalytic therapy. The main purpose of psychoanalysis is the study of unconscious desire, as a result of which the patient becomes an analysand and gets the opportunity to face his/her desire and follow it. To follow the desire means to decide to abandon the perspective of satisfaction and to bet on what is opposed to peace and completeness, and what can be defined as life.

방탄소년단 앨범 시리즈에 표현된 순수 욕망을 찾는 과정 - 「LOVE YOURSELF」 시리즈를 중심으로 -

This paper is studied for the purpose of exploring how to interpret popular music from a new perspective. For this purpose, this paper analyzes the lyrics and video expressions in BTS’s「LOVE YOURSELF」series based on the theory of pure desire in Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Pure desire refers to the inherent desire embodied in the form of life that exists to deviate from being equal to others, which is what Lacan says in the ethics of desire. The ethics of desire is a theory that informs the imperfections inherent in the universality or rationality based on our lives. The research method is to conduct a qualitative study to analyze the music video of 「LOVE YOURSELF」 based on the theory of pure desire shown in Lacan’s 『Seminar 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis』. Through the meaning inherent in the song lyrics of 「LOVE YOURSELF」, this paper figures out the correlation between the album trilogy and Lacan’s Imaginary Stage, Symbolic Order, and Real Order and analyzes the meaning of pure desire. The necessity of this study is to show that a certain area of popular music aims for pure desire, and suggest that popular music researchers pay more attention to pure desire.

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Ethics of schizoanalysis

In this essay I read Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia from an ethical point of view. My main question refers to a claim that Michel Foucault made in his preface to Anti-Oedipus: “Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics”. I try to elaborate on this suggestion in conversation with Jacques Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis, a 1959-1960 seminar published under the same title. This essay responds to Lacan’s formulation of an unconscious desire by way of Deleuze and Guattari’s social-machinic perspective. In my interpretation Anti-Oedipus accounts for an ontological ethics in terms of an unconscious desire that is exteriority. I take the notion of socius as the key element of this exterior desire and therefore as the true site of ethics.

In the Margins of One Health: Interspecies Solidarity, Care, and Inequality

This article is an attempt to frontally pose a question queer theory gravitates around, yet never effectively spells out: what is a togetherness of those who have nothing in common but their desire to undo group ties? First, I consider the take-up of Lacan’s ethical experiment in Seminar VII, the Ethics of Psychoanalysis by queer theorists. I contend that queer theory has not given Lacan’s interpretation of Antigone its full import, which demands its placement in the philosophical tradition of the West brought to its highest fruition in Kant. I further contend, however, that to do so does not quite offer a solution to the queer problem, for, as contemporary debate on the political import of Antigone shows, the purity of her desire does not immediately translate into a sustainable politics. Lacan himself was faced with the problem of translating his ethics into a politics after his "excommunication" from the psychoanalytic establishment, and came to falter before it. Nevertheless, Lacan’s efforts allow us to pose the undoubtedly queer question of how to group together those whose only attribute is to undo group ties. Responding to the unanswerable demands of a theory and a practice that allows us to answer that question, I propose the figure of the smoker’s communism, as elaborated upon by Mladen Dolar, as a preliminary queer suggestion as to how we might go about mitigating the gap between Lacan’s ethical brilliance and his admitted political failure..

Reading Marguerite de Navarre with Psychoanalysis

Abstract: This article pays homage to Robert D. Cottrell’s significant contributions to Marguerite de Navarre studies, particularly his use of structuralist psychoanalysis, in interpreting both her spiritual and secular texts. While such an approach might seem anachronistic, Marguerite herself has been described as a fine psychologist avant la lettre . Her writings even had an influence on the seminars of Jacques Lacan, who confessed that the Heptaméron inspired him throughout his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis. One of the striking aspects of Cottrell’s body of work is that, for him, reading with psychoanalysis never means reading biographically: unlike some other critics, he always focuses on analyzing texts rather than the lives of their authors. Thus, we explore some of the rhetorical strategies he underscores, such as Marguerite’s use of anaphora and chiasmus, which appear to have a kind of mimetic function in her devotional mirror-poems, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse and Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié . We also analyze Cottrell’s use of Lacan’s three registers—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real—to illuminate the desire for union between human subject and divine Object in these spiritual mirrors. Finally, we consider promising avenues opened up by Cottrell’s readings, namely the theatricality and performativity of Marguerite’s works, some of which he likens to spiritual exercises. Without a doubt, one of Cottrell’s greatest contributions is to have treated all of the queen’s writings not only as equally important, but also as flowing from a deeply spiritual source.

Trieb and the ethics of Psychoanalysis

Trieb and the ethics of Psychoanalysis

A Portrait of Desire: On Jacques-Alain Miller's Life of Lacan and the Anti-biographical Imperative

This essay examines Jacques-Alain Miller's avoidance and refashioning of various conventions of biography in Life of Lacan in his attempt to adequately represent not a "Great Man" but a "man of desire"—the embodiment of a psychoanalytic ethics of desire. In doing so, comparisons are made to other biographies and memoirs such as Élisabeth Roudinesco's Jacques Lacan, Catherine Millot's Life with Lacan, and Sibylle Lacan's A Father: Puzzle. A discussion of Lacan's own resistance to biography and the mixed regard in which he held the biographies he read is followed by an explanation of the anti-biographical imperative established by Lacan and adopted by Miller as an unrealizable ideal of the psychoanalytic doctrine's transmission without reference to the person of Lacan. The third section is a reading of Miller's experiment in psychoanalytic life writing as an effort to represent, without resolving, the enigma of desire that Lacan is said to exemplify.

“Be Bold” or “Be Not Too Bold”: A Renaissance Dialectic of Jouissance in the House of Busirane

This paper analyzes the silenced tropes of desire in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Ⅲ (1590) as a twisted allegory of feminist jouissance in the Renaissance era. Notably, it sheds new light on Britomart’s education in the House of Busirane, revealing how Britomart succeeds in subjectifying her fate based on the ethics of psychoanalysis. In the process, this paper refers to William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) and Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598) as part of Britomart’s intertextual learning for the following three reasons. First, these two contemporary poetries formulate Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett’s ‘relativity of literature’ regarding the politics of erotic taboos in the Renaissance era. Second, their original myths derive from Cupid’s mischief and thus must have appeared in Busirane’s tapestries. Third, Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s narratives serve as a dialectic pair that corresponds to the aporic imperatives of Busirane’s castle: “Be bold” and “Be not too bold.” Thus, this paper investigates their rhetorics to delve into the Renaissance ethos of desire and locate Britomart’s growth within Spencer’s sociohistorical context. Such a line of discussion clarifies that Britomart is eventually reborn as an authentic subject of self-determined desire, not a passively chaste woman.

Prosthetics of the Soul: Disability, Christianity, and Transitional Experience in Uganda

AbstractThis article reflects on the religious narratives and psychological processes of transformation in the life of a disabled man in Uganda. It calls attention to the work of Christian genre conventions that privilege decisive breaks as well as to the ways that this man's subjectivity is irreducible to such breaks. Here, the article takes inspiration from psychodynamic approaches and a psychoanalytic ethics of close listening. The analysis draws particularly on the work of D. W. Winnicott to think about transformation as “transition” or a mode of personal development that is partial, uneven, and reliant on enabling objects and relations. It conceives of these objects and relations as “prosthetics of the soul” that scaffold people's material and psychic lives, allowing change that is meaningful yet rarely seamless or straightforward.

Psychoanalytic ethics, maintaining psychic reality in the intermediate space

ABSTRACT The author reflects on the ethical status of psychoanalysis. He argues that the ethical specificity of psychoanalysis is determined by its method. He distinguishes between concepts tied to the analytic frame – the protocol, technique and method. The method is the main guarantee of the ethical engagement between analyst and patient – in particular through the transference. The conditions of opening up the transference are maintained by a particular aspect of the analytic method, namely stating the fundamental rule of free association, which turns the setting into a process. The author illustrates his remarks by discussing Sophie’s psychoanalytic treatment in which a passionate transference emerges. A chance external event brings about a rupture in the transitional space of the session’s psychic reality, and thereby makes the specific status of the transference fall away and compromises the analytic work. Consequently, the analyst is deprived of his ethical status as object of the patient’s psychic reality, and as the recipient of the transference, and becomes an ordinary object in the field of everyday objectality. He simply becomes the person he is in external reality, with his various physical attributes.

Dream and Fantasy in Shutter Island: Trauma, Historical Guilt, and Ethics

ABSTRACT This article proposes an historical reading of Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010) that weaves a complex and puzzling narrative, swaying between the protagonist's dreams and memories (his involvement as an American soldier in the liberation of Dachau and the reprisals carried out there) and his concocted fantasy of revenge and heroism as a US Marshal. The purpose of this fantasy is to veil the enormity of the trauma he suffered while encountering the dead victims of Dachau and the guilty conscience that stemmed from it. Through dreams, the film renders its protagonist's personal tragedy—a chain of events involving the death of his family, for which he feels guilty—and exploits his subjectivity to disquiet public consciousness regarding the United States' resistance to saving the Jews from their horrific and tragic fate under the Nazi regime. The protagonist's dreams and recollections of the Dachau reprisals are rendered as a sort of going back in time to remember, reflect, and wish that the US had acted differently, that US soldiers had arrived in time to save those who needed saving. This going back in time, employing every possible visual and aural device analogous to the dream work, or to a distorted memory, establishes an ethics that resonates with the Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis according to which the subject must acknowledge her or his own desire to be able to make a free choice, and with the ethics of resentment à la resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry, which opposes any kind of reconciliation, forgiveness, atonement, or even revenge. By criticizing historical and social indifference to the horrors of the Holocaust, the film also resists every ploy of narrative war films that center on themes of heroism, salvation, and redemption.