French Psychoanalyst Research Articles

Elizabeth Bishop and the Watery Discourse: The Semiotic Chora at play

This paper theorizes the use of water imagery in Elizabeth Bishop’s selected postmodern poetry namely, “The Map”, “The Imaginary Iceberg” and “The Man-Moth”. Speaking in the language of tears, lake, bay, river, strait, sea and ocean, Bishop personifies water for culture and its language. It is on this basis that Bishop comes close to the French psychoanalyst and linguist, Julia Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora. Kristeva calls it a space of maternal discourse, where the fluid realm of mother’s body called chora celebrates the fluidity of semiotic desires and expresses them through the symbolic language of the world outside her body. Bishop revisits this bodily space, time and again, to acquire subjectivity through the mother/child bond. Bishop’s poetic language celebrates this relationship between the semiotic (maternal) and symbolic (paternal) realm of language. The symbolic enables the semiotic to express itself, and the semiotic shatters the rigidity of the symbolic meanings through an ongoing process of signification. This reciprocity, through the semiotic chora, makes Bishop’s identity fluid and always in motion towards multiplicity. This plurality brings newness to Bishop’s poetry and engages the researcher with fresh perspectives of outer vision, inner perception, structural patterns and make her poetry eventful.

The Empire of Denial

ABSTRACT By reconsidering the supposedly failed encounter between the French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni and the race critic and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, this article readdresses the Freudian concept of denial and the way it can be used as a powerful analyzer of the persistence of racism. Supporting both the libidinal fixation through the making up of a fetish, and the ego splitting between knowledge and belief, denial reveals itself to be one of the consistent means by which imperialism maintains itself after the loss of an Empire. Preventing political and subjective decolonization by sustaining jouissance (enjoyment), the paradoxical way conceived by Lacan to theorize how the subject tries to encounter and escape his/her own ontological fragility, denial is here considered itself as an Empire, insofar as it allows the subject of the unconscious to remain alienated to colonial ideals and to benefit from that, even if in ambiguous ways.

Le bovarysme

Madame Bovary is a novel written by Gustave Flaubert in 1857. After being criticized (and condemned) for “its erotism”, the novel has been widely appreciated and became à kind of best seller. Emma Bovary, the main character of the story, is an ill-married woman, whose husband is an MD in a small market town in Normandy, not far from the city of Rouen. In this small provincial town, Emma is getting bored day after day and dreams of a better life. She tries to get it through an adulterine relationship with two lovers, Rodolphe, a country gentleman and Leon, a village managing clerk. Both affairs turned out to be painful failures. In 1882, a philosopher, Jules de Gaultier, propounded to take the personality of Emma Bovary as a psychological pattern for persons who are everlastingly unsatisfied and dream their life instead of living it. Bovarism has been lately adopted by numerous psychiatrists (especially in the beginning of the XXth century) and closely related to several various mental troubles as hysteria, paranoia, even degeneration. Jacques Lacan, the well-known French psychoanalyst, keeps the Bovarism is in fact an integral part of every average personality. For the best: trying to overcome the difficulties of a boring life to get an access at something better; for the worst: despising the reality to escape into an unrealizable dreaming world (Don Quichotte syndrom).

Trauma in child psychotherapy: some thoughts around a concept

ABSTRACT This paper offers an exploration of the notion of trauma, viewing it as an ‘elastic’ concept that has changed over time within psychoanalytic theory, including in child psychotherapy. There is an argument for a multi-faceted, developmental, individual way of viewing trauma, taking into account contemporary knowledge about psychic trauma while at the same time not losing sight of some psychoanalytic ideas that were central in the formation of the term. This paper argues for the importance of reclaiming and holding onto certain Freudian elements of what trauma means, including the idea that structural/ontological trauma in the course of human life is necessary and developmentally important, and is differentiated from historical trauma, which is linked to a particular event. These different ways of thinking about trauma are explored through presenting the work of French child psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto.

COVID-19, precarity and loneliness.

In this paper I discuss Jungian psychological work of the trauma and loss experienced in reaction to COVID‐19 with a man who represents a clinical composite. The issues of precarity, a concept used by the philosopher Judith Butler, are combined with the notions of lack and absence of French psychoanalyst André Green. The psychological and societal situation of precarity aroused the man’s childhood issues that were long repressed. The loneliness, isolation and death from COVID‐19 mirrored his personal and the collective responses to the disaster from this global pandemic. He felt on the edge of collapse as what he knew of his world crashed and he found himself unable to cope. The subsequent Jungian work taking place through the virtual computer screen was taxing and restorative simultaneously for both analyst and analysand.

The poetry of parallax between daughters and fathers

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the father absence and/or misattachment with depleting effects psychologically, personally and collectively on the daughter. The concept unfolds through a series of a woman’s dreams along with the poetry and dreams of Sylvia Plath, an American poetess from the mid-twentieth century. The perspective of Jungian analytical psychology is complimented by that of French psychoanalyst Andre Green. The cross-currents of these thinkers bring forth the interweaving of poetry and analytical psychology. Both examine the lack of attention to the detrimental effects of absent fathers and how this contributes to the well-being and creative expression of daughters – or not.

“He dwells alone:” The Image of Completeness in the Self in Cowper’s “The Snail”

Abstract Following the critical lines of Psychoanalysis and Existentialism, the present study aims at conveying how William Cowper, the much acclaimed English poet of the 18th century, presents in his 1799 poem “The Snail” the image of an individual possessing completeness in the self. Not only is Cowper’s snail content with life in seclusion, but also abhors the intrusion of an outsider in its private domain. The article aims at investigating how the snail’s world of completeness bears both the somatic and the psychic dimensions and also how the creature exists in that world narcissistically. Concomitantly, the article would probe into the association between the world of the snail and the poet’s longing to attain sufficiency in the self at a time he is left alone. It would be conveyed how the snail of the poem embodies the poet’s projected self in its idealised form, something which following the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan can be called the poet’s “ideal ego,” than an insignificant creature engrossed merely in nourishment on vegetation. Keywords: Cowper, completeness, private world, self, The Snail.

Anamorphosis as colonial encounter: the case of Augustus Earle

ABSTRACT Perspective dominates the writing on colonial art. Conceptualized as a way of seeing that inherently supports the processes of colonial conquest and control, its use in colonial art is routinely linked to an overseeing and all-powerful ‘colonial gaze’. It is surprising, then, that upon return to the supposed source of this idea, the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, you will find that he continually associates the ‘gaze’ not with perspective but anamorphosis. Undertaking a close study of several inter-related Australian works by the British travel artist, Augustus Earle, in this article I seek to look again at colonial art by placing perspective to one side. In shifting the focus from perspective to anamorphosis, I will be arguing for the need to consider another, often neglected and overlooked aspect to the ideology of the colonial encounter, one based on what Slavoj Žižek paradoxically refers to as a ‘pre-ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy’.

The waning of vision’s hegemony: A phenomenological perspective on mother-daughter discord in patriarchal societies

ABSTRACT If phenomenology is a research methodology uniquely positioned to enable us to learn from others, I aim to demonstrate the idea that cinema is a privileged site from which to investigate the notion of virtuality (sight and reality), even in an age where vision’s predominance is waning. In order to do so, I consider the painfully disruptive mother-daughter relationship found cross-culturally and discourse-analytically in contemporary patriarchal societies. This bond is arguably of central concern to feminists (and women in general) since previous research has found that the fractious nature of this dynamic points to a very specific psychological deformation of the female psyche under conditions of sexist oppression. The views of French psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva and other feminist contributors to the debate on this psychological construct are considered. The possibility of a cultural remedy inspired by a secularised trend of Chinese Buddhism in post-Maoist China, a society very different from that of the West, is investigated. This will involve the analysis of the film Curse of the Golden Flower (Chinese Mandarin soundtrack and English subtitles). I subsequently explore whether or not a valuable model for the compromised mother/daughter relationship is available within the context of the notion of a “slave economy” in the comparatively healthier mother/son relationship of (contemporary) Han Chinese culture. By means of cross-cultural analysis as research tool, this article finds confirmation for the proposition of a positive mother/daughter dynamic in the French novelist Colette’s relationship with her mother, Sido. In conclusion, I find that cinema (as an art form serving the eye, i.e. virtuality) is particularly well suited as a site to investigate psychological phenomena by way of interpretative phenomenology as a research methodology, even as vision – as the human sense of choice – has begun to wane amid a global crisis in masculinity.

Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real by Arka Chattopadhyay

Reviewed by: Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real by Arka Chattopadhyay Fernanda Negrete Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real. Arka Chattopadhyay. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 224. $135.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper); $35.95 (eBook). How might the writings of Samuel Beckett and Jacques Lacan respond to each other? Arka Chattopadhyay pursues this question in a cogent project that foregrounds mathematics as a common terrain for these two contemporary authors, whose work developed in separate fields despite various relevant points of intersection. Beckett, Lacan, and the Mathematical Writing of the Real begins by acknowledging the missed encounters between Beckett and Lacan, given their shared context in postwar Paris among avant-garde writers, their awareness of each other, and even the coincidence of their birthday. The book demonstrates a psychoanalytic sensibility in remarking on the missed encounters, and above all in allowing them to promptly place the investigation on the path of the textual unconscious in terms of the mathematical letter. The author offers an attentive ear to only seemingly passing comments the writers in question made about each other: Beckett mentions that Lacan's "later work tends to become unreadable" (4), and Lacan in his 1970 text "Lituraterre" invokes Beckett's "dustbins" (5), while discussing the materiality of the letter and the litter of the unconscious. Chattopadhyay follows these traces to reveal the uniqueness of what he calls mathematical writing, which is crucial to both Beckett and Lacan's creativity. Through the term mathematical writing, Chattopadhyay brings into focus the two authors' use of concepts from mathematics as well as a formal dimension of writing that is concerned with a kind of transmission that leaves behind the interest in sharing meaning. Chattopadhyay reminds us that as long as writing is understood as a technology subordinated to speech and meaning, the relation between literature and psychoanalysis remains unidirectional. In this relation, psychoanalysis is an interpretive device applied to literature. There are many critical works that establish such relations between the fields, through applied psychoanalysis that attempts to interpret—that is to say, to explain away—literary texts, or even more often, their authors. But it is fair to say that Beckett's texts refuse this sort of treatment. Attempts at enforcing it can only yield a partial grasp of what Beckett's texts put to work. While his writing stands beyond Oedipal concerns, its modes and gestures remain highly relevant to analytic thinking, especially the kind that also ventures out beyond Oedipus, as it did in Lacan's teaching. Chattopadhyay's book introduces the Lacanian register of the Real in order to approach writing from a perspective suitable to Beckett's experiments. From the perspective of the Real, Chattopadhyay demonstrates that Beckett's texts in fact contribute to better understanding the [End Page 806] relevance of the Real. The latter operates outside realist ideals and norms in literature, especially. The Real also places the psychoanalytic clinic outside normative and adaptive goals; this aspect, however, is only discussed to the extent that Lacan presents it as a logical process that seeks the end of analysis with the construction of a sinthome and the analysand's becoming analyst. In an exposition of existing commentaries on the role of mathematics in Beckett's work, Chattopadhyay declares his interest in adding to this investigation psychoanalysis, whose function he describes "as a bridge of Real inscription between mathematics and literature" (17). In his foreword to the book, Anthony Ullman instead sees the mathematical as the original bridging element between Beckett and Lacan (ix). In fact, mathematics, psychoanalysis, and literature are each set forth in chapter one to operate as bridges that enable a discussion between the two other terms, in a triad the author extracts from multiple texts by Beckett and Lacan throughout the book's other chapters. Contributing to this ambitious bridging or knotting of fields are the admirable breadth and depth with which both figures' work is embraced in the book. Its engagement with Beckett offers to Lacanian readers useful examples of the logical implications of the French psychoanalyst's related concepts of the letter, sinthome, jouissance, lalangue, the One, and above all the Real, or of...

Em um corpo para Stela do Patrocínio, o "eu era gases puro"

O presente trabalho busca realizar uma leitura em torno de um dos poemas da poeta carioca Stela do Patrocínio, presente na obra Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome (2001). A obra, por sua vez, se configura enquanto uma antologia elaborada a partir de uma transposição das falas da autora, quando esta vivia em uma instituição manicomial. O “falatório” de Stela nos permite tentar compreender, a partir da articulação com a psicanálise, o funcionamento e estruturação do inconsciente de um sujeito psicótico, além de tecer considerações acerca do corpo psíquico e somático, e da relação entre o conceito da foraclusão junto à linguagem. Nesse sentido, nos basearemos, predominantemente, nos ensinos do psicanalista Jacques Lacan.

« L’affect », d'André Green

Le rapport de 1970 de Green sur l’affect marque sans doute un tournant dans la métapsychologie française, non seulement par une réévaluation de la place de l’affect dans le fonctionnement psychique, mais par l’impact que cette question implique sur l’ensemble de la pensée psychanalytique. Ma réflexion souligne d’une part les aspects novateurs des propositions de Green dans son rapport, mais aussi comment elles contiennent les prémisses de l’évolution des questions pour toute une partie des psychanalystes français et, au-delà, pour la psychanalyse dans son ensemble.

Students of the Imaginary

This article applies the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to interpret the experiences and struggles of students who attend Xinjiang classes, a Chinese government-funded ethnic minority boarding school program. The psychoanalytic domains theorized by Lacan are used in this article to argue that the decisions made by Xinjiang class students are subject to the desire of parents and ethnic community customs as much as they are to government policies. Students want to take advantage of their newfound opportunities in Eastern China, but they also want to please their parents and respect ethnic traditions. They oscillate between the desires of others and what they want for themselves, both of which cause them endless uncertainty and anxiety.

Lacan on Trauma and Causality: A Psychoanalytic Critique of Post-Traumatic Stress/Growth

This article makes the case for the largely unacknowledged relevance of the thought of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, for the emerging field of the medical and/or health humanities. From the 1930s all the way through to the late 1970s, Lacan was deeply concerned with the ethical and political consequences of then-dominant conceptions of the human in the ‘psy’ disciplines. His attempt to ‘humanise’ these disciplines involved an emphasis on humans as symbolic beings, inevitably entangled in the structures of speech and the ‘logic of the signifier.’ This article explores the implications of Lacan’s linguistic framework for his understanding of trauma. It argues that the Lacanian concept of trauma offers a timely antidote to dominant psychiatric notions of trauma today, linked as they are to the questionable politics of ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ and, more recently, of ‘Post-Traumatic Growth.’

Jouissance and death drive in Lacan’s teaching

ABSTRACT: This article aims to analyze the Lacanian notion of jouissance and its connection to the notion of death drive. Our purpose is to highlight the evolution of the articulation between these two notions across Lacan’s teaching. When Lacan first gives a theoretical basis to the notion of jouissance, he criticizes the validity of death drive as a concept. Ten years later, death drive is rehabilitated and partially assimilated to jouissance. Between these two moments, jouissance plays a central role in the French psychoanalyst’s teaching.

From neurotic citizen to hysteric security expert: a Lacanian reading of the perpetual demand for US cyber defence

ABSTRACTWithin the emerging body of critical security research on expertise, most contributions have focused on reconstructing the risk governance regime that the expert professionals embody, including the anxious, neurotic subject that expert security practices reproduce. Through French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan’s Hysteric Discourse, the article advances the study of the neurotic subject to include the security policy expert. By introducing and applying a ‘hysteric reading strategy’ to the processes through which US cyber defence experts identify as policy experts, the article suggests that the constantly changing demands for policy change produced by these experts suggest a desire not simply for new policies that promise cyber defence but for desire itself. From this, the article argues that these experts occupy a social position in which desire is perpetually sliding from one object to the next, always placing cyber defence out of reach, and hence, reproducing ‘cyber’ as an insecurity in the present. The article sees this dynamic play out both in the evolving cache of policy recommendations on cyber deterrence produced by the cyber policy experts, and in the revolving doors between government and this expert community.

Poetic Mirrors and the Violence of the Self-Reflexive in Post-Colonial Poetry

Poetic Mirrors and the Violence of the Self-Reflexive in Post-Colonial Poetry Noureddine Fekir (bio) This paper investigates some aspects and implications of self-reflexivity in the verse of modern African poets, poets of African descent, and others such as Pablo Neruda and Mahmoud Darwish, who are associated with resistance to different forms of oppression. Many modern African writers, such as Odia Ofeimun, Syl Cheney-Coker, and Frank Chipasula, wrote poems that were self-reflexive even Cheney-Coker as these poems criticized the political status quo. A pressing question is whether self-reflexivity is a fundamental feature of poetic writing, necessarily born from the inner desire of any poet, to explore the potentials of language while in the process of expressing their thoughts or feelings. This work investigates the use of such a strategy of writing in African poems and then undertakes to construct a genealogy of self-reflexivity to come up with an understanding of the psychological, phenomenological, and political motives behind the frequent resort of poets to this process of mirroring the very being of the text while they proclaim or advocate resistance, to the point of transforming the text into a verbal form of violence against the established political order around them. In this paper, I argue that self-reflexivity, as deployed in the resistance verse written by modern African poets and poets who share the same plight of oppression, is viewed as an integral and organic part of the project of resistance. Such a strategy inescapably springs from the political and intellectual engagement of the poets who see in the aesthetics of poetry a durable and transgressive nature, a perennial tool for warding off and resisting, at times violently, all forms of cultural and physical oppression. Self-reflexivity is defined in this paper as a moment that marks the poem’s recursive nature, where poets may contemplate the medium that they use in a gesture that seems at odds with the dominant tradition of poetic writing, which still persists today and which has generally been intent upon using verse to reflect one’s emotions or describe a specific worldly or metaphysical issue that is of concern to the speaker. However, when poets interrupt the process of representing the world around them or their feelings and veer toward describing the act of writing itself, this can only be viewed as a rhetorical act that counters the signifying nature of [End Page 67] language and offers a moment of reflection that is more akin to the process of contemplating one’s identity as if looking at a mirror. This moment where the poem mirrors itself that speaks about the creative act is one where the poet attempts to construct his identity as a creator of verse which may be viewed metaphorically as a process that is akin to what Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, calls the “Mirror stage.” For Lacan, this stage takes place when the individual, the infant, for instance, looks at a mirror and recognizes himself by contemplating a looking glass. In Ecrits, he states that “we have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (2–3). The individual recognizes his identity as coherent when he contemplates himself in a mirror or in a face that refracts the gaze. The self-reflexive moment in poetry is similar to this act, where the poet contemplates his creative process in order to make sense of his identity as a poet. Such a process is necessary to acquire a certain sense of presence, albeit a fake one, because identity construction is always imaginary for Lacan. What is noteworthy is that Lacan articulates such a desire to construct one’s own image within a social framework. In “The Mirror Stage as Formative,” he states that it is “the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one and in the anxiety of the individual confronting the “concentrational” form of the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effort...

At the Queen’s Hall with E.M. Forster and Jean Laplanche

In E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End, we are introduced to the way in which the characters in the story listen to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In this article, I draw on the work of the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche to suggest that music constitutes an enigmatic cultural message that returns us to the ‘scene of primal seduction’; a myth of human origins that takes the encounter with an enigmatic other as constitutive of human subjectivity. Reading Howards End through the lens of Laplanche, I discuss how Forster’s characters respond to Beethoven’s message and conclude with a brief discussion about issues of inheritance and alterity.

Maud Mannoni and Piera Aulagnier on Mental Illness and Disability: Parents at the Boundary between Society and Childhood (France, 1960–80)

This article reads Maud Mannoni's The Retarded Child and the Mother (1973) and L'éducation impossible (1973) in the context of French ‘institutional analysis’ in order to nuance criticism of Mannoni's work, particularly the criticism that Mannoni blamed mothers for the conditions of their children. Institutional analysis emerged in France after World War II. Institutional analysts drew from psychotherapy, sociology, and education in order to question power dynamics and the consequences of bureaucracy in their areas of research. Although often overlooked, this movement influenced Mannoni just as much as commonly acknowledged influences like Jacques Lacan and the anti-psychiatry movement. Moreover, connecting the preoccupations of institutional analysis with a more Lacanian approach, the thought of the understudied yet brilliant French psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier (1923–90) offers crucial insights into the way political and social structures shape individual psyches. Retrieving these influences, we argue that Mannoni did not blame individual mothers for their children's pathologies. Instead, she identified the social and political dimensions of psychopathologies and suggested tackling the roots of psychic diseases in social institutions.

El objeto del deseo: producción deseante en el esquizoanálisis de Deleuze y Guattari o falta en la teoría psicoanalítica de Jacques Lacan

El psicoanalista francés Jacques Lacan piensa el objeto del deseo como un objeto que falta y que no puede ser representado. Por su parte, Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari rechazan en El Antiedipo (1972) cualquier concepción que relacione el deseo con la carencia y sostienen que el deseo es un proceso de producción de un objeto real presente. En su opinión el psicoanálisis lacaniano maldice al sujeto deseante condenándolo a una melancolía y a una insatisfacción perpetuas. El objetivo principal de este artículo es rechazar esta crítica basándose en tres argumentos: una distinción entre la falta y la carencia, la consideración de la falta como no necesariamente negativa y la defensa de que un deseo limitado y parcialmente insatisfecho es más liberador que un deseo masivamente colmado.