Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory Research Articles

A Mad Woman s Self-exploration A Lacanian Interpretation of The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar is a semi-autobiography novel written by Sylvia Plath, whose literary works are famous for pain, death, and selfexploration. Besides, Plath is a confessional writer and this novel seems to be Esther s mad self-talk, but in the depth of the madness is a profound self-exploration and self-construction. Esther s self-searching is actually the process of finding subjectivity. However, she needs to confirm herself by the existence of the other . Moreover, The Bell Jar constructed a woman s road to growth, showing her rebellion against a man-dominated society. This paper will use Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism theory to analyze The Bell Jar to understand the causes of Esther s internal struggle and the true significance of this mad woman s tragedy.

Derivative Desires and Plastic Pedagogies: Malabou, Psychoanalysis and The Big Short

This article explores Catherine Malabou’s philosophical foray into neuroscience, especially her continuing work on the topics of brain plasticity and epigenesis. I lay the groundwork for a productive intersection of Malabou’s philosophy with Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory, despite Malabou’s tendency to treat the brain’s plasticity as an issue beyond the scope of the Freudian-Lacanian conception of the unconscious. Through consideration of Todd McGowan’s development of a Lacanian ontology, and by reference to the structure of derivative finance in late capitalism, especially as depicted in The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015), the article argues in favor of an epigenesis of desire, in which attentiveness to the sedimented layers and conflicted temporalities of the brain’s synaptic connections may prove illuminating for philosophical studies of films that adopt a pedagogical stance toward recent historical or political events.

THE CATEGORY OF THE “OTHER” IN THE AXIOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY LITERARY FAIRY TALES OF KAZAKHSTAN

The article examines various aspects of the discourse of the "Other" through the lens of psychoanalytic, decolonial, and ecological theories. The leitmotif mythologem of the initiation and the accompanying archetypal dichotomy of "self/other" in the literary fairy tale implies the actualization of the discourse of the "Other." The encounter with the "Other" represents a fundamental ethical event for each individual. Understanding being begins with ethical responsibility towards the "Other." The "Other" is also essential for the self-knowledge of the subject (successful completion of the initiation stage). Moreover, the "Other" plays a key role in the formation of the human subject through the symbolic order of language and culture. The main focus is on analyzing the motif of encountering otherness, which is key to understanding the ethical and existential transformation of fairy tale characters. The study integrates multidisciplinary perspectives, including Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, decolonial literary studies, feminist literary criticism, and ecological philosophy. Lacan's theory defines the "Other" as central to subjectivity; the decolonial approach explores the suppression of marginalized voices, while feminist criticism deconstructs patriarchal norms defining women as the "Other." Ecophilosophy extends the category of the "Other" to natural phenomena, reflecting a pantheistic worldview where all living beings have value. The authors conclude that contemporary Kazakh literary fairy tales demonstrate the deconstruction of traditional negative hierarchies through integrating ecological sensitivity and anti-power discourse. These categories emphasize a shift from an object paradigm to a subject paradigm, recognizing nature and people as active subjects of being. Thus, the Kazakh literary fairy tale, by actualizing the discourse of the "Other," significantly contributes to forming a contemporary axiological worldview, promoting a critical rethinking of negative hierarchies. This allows overcoming various forms of oppression and inequality, contributing to creating a just and inclusive society.

Much ado about nothing: Applying Lacan's philosophy in work with anxious clients

AbstractExistential‐humanistic counselors attend to the deeper meanings of the anxious client's experience. The author proposes Lacan's psychoanalytic theory as an integrative, humanistic approach that connects the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and developmental aspects of anxious experience. Anxiety is discussed in terms of the client's gap, lack, nothing, or breathing room, the expectations or desires of other people, and the client's disrupted sense of self. Following an application of the approach with a case example, implications for practice and research are provided.

Burning “Between Two Fires”: The Individual under Erasure in Hassan Blasim’s “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”

This essay uses Freudian–Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to interpret Hassan Blasim’s short story “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”. Blasim’s story depicts the psychological struggles of an Iraqi emigrant relating to his embattled sense of belonging in a Dutch society due to the recurrent nightmares of his “traumatic” past. It challenges his assimilationist fantasies. I develop Lacan’s idea of ontological lack as a structural susceptibility that is exacerbated by actual experiences of trauma to underline how racialized refugees from the war-torn global South are doubly vulnerable to experiencing subjective dehiscence between their efforts to forget past war traumas and the challenges of assimilating into (white) host nations. This essay uses Blasim’s story to illustrate a serious psychological issue experienced by racialized minority subjects in white/European host countries.

Les précieuses and Liu Rushi

This article provides new insights into questions concerning femininity in psychoanalysis by drawing from comparisons made between a seventeenth-century Chinese woman of letters, Liu Rushi, and central figures of the movement of preciosity which took place at the same time in France. The premise of this study is that Liu Rushi shared similarities at least in appearance with the les précieuses in terms of their literary devices and their attitudes towards love. And it is notable that these French authors have already been the subject of discussion in Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory.

Sensuality Representation Of Guinness Dark Beer Advertising

This study examines the rhetorical meaning of "stout" dark beer advertising photos with the Guinness trademark presented with a sensuality approach. Roland Barthes' semiotics is used to reveal symbolic meaning in advertising. In addition, to explain the concept of secrecy and the psychological aspects implied in the advertisement elaborated using Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. Based on an in-depth analysis, it was concluded that the sensuality approach through bodily on Guinness dark beer advertising posters was considered in line with the spirit of the company that wanted to present an elegant, masculine impression and able to accommodate the cultural spirit of patriarchal society in Ireland and the world. In addition, the use of legs and the use of black are considered to be able to represent the history of the slave trade in Ireland and express the discourse of sensuality that developed in the country. Visualization with digital imaging techniques is a bridge to the ideological conflict between sensuality as a concept that is still considered taboo by society and advertising as a medium for commodification of Guinness products.

Treating Psychosis Today: A Lacanian Take.

This paper examines the principal ideas from Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of psychosis. According to Lacan's theory in the 1950s, the central organizing element of symbolically organized mental life, the Name-of-the-Father, is missing in psychosis. That theory changes with later conceptual developments in Lacan's work that focus on the incompleteness of symbolic functioning. This connects with how, in his works from the late 1960s and the 1970s, Lacan embraces the idea of a fundamental non-rapport and symbolic non-existence at the basis of mental life. In a second step, the paper explores what the Lacanian model of psychosis implies with regard to ethical positioning, addressing the unconscious, handling transference, and crisis and stability in psychosis. A clinical case discussion focuses on a yearlong therapeutic trajectory with a young man with Down's syndrome who suffered from psychotic experiences.

Diagnosis, Stigmatization or Legitimization? A Discussion within the Medicalization Discourse and Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory

Çok sayıda araştırma, psikolojik sıkıntılar yaşayan bireylerin genellikle çevreleri tarafından çeşitli ayrımcılık, önyargı ve damgalamaya maruz kaldıklarını ve bu nedenle sorunlarını sıklıkla gizleme eğiliminde olduklarını belirtmektedir ancak bu genellemeyle uyumsuz olarak, bazı araştırmalar bireylerin özelikle bir tanı kullanma eğilimlerine dikkat çekmektedir. Bu çalışmada değişen toplumsal yapı ve söylemler ışığında psikolojik problemlerin damgalanma nedeniyle gizlenme eğiliminde olduğu genellemesine karşı çıkarak bazı öznel süreçler için tıbbi bir sistem içinde tanı almanın öznenin tanınmasının bir aracı haline dönüştüğünü ileri sürmekteyiz. Elbette bu görüşümüz, damgalanma ve önyargının konu üzerindeki etkisini yadsıdığımız anlamına gelmemektedir. Buradaki vurgumuz, bazı semptomlar ve süreçler için bu durumun aksine de işlev görebileceği yönündedir. Bu doğrultuda öncelikle damgalanma ve önyargının ruhsal sorunların gizlenmesine yol açtığı görüşlerini inceleyecek ardından bu görüşün aksini destekleyici nitelikteki kişilerin tanı kullanma gayretlerini gösteren çalışmaları ele alacağız. Sonrasında bu argümanı teorik olarak derinleştireceğiz. Foucault, Illich, Timurturkan gibi araştırmacıların eserlerinde ele aldığı tıbbın gücü ve tıbbileştirme söylemini ve ayrıca psikanalist Lacan’ın Özne'nin oluşum sürecine dair sunduğu teorisindeki ayna evresi, tanınma anı, bildiği varsayılan özne kavramlarını bu kapsamda değerlendireceğiz. Bu çalışmanın özellikle psikoterapi alanında kişilerin kendi psikolojik durumları ile nasıl ilişkilendiklerini değerlendirmek adına önemli çıkarımları bulunmaktadır.

Intersecting Geographies/Intertextual Traces: Queered Desire and Imperilled Love in Michael Cunningham’s <i>By Nightfall</i> and Thomas Mann’s <i>Death in Venice</i>

This article explores Michael Cunningham’s 2010 novel, <i>By Nightfall</i> along with its suggestive fragments of Thomas Mann’s novella <i>Death in Venice</i> (1912). In an examination of two beautiful young men, Tadzio in <i>Death in Venice</i> and Mizzy in <i>By Nightfall</i>, the article investigates the dialectic between (queered) desire and death/self-dissolution. Through a deployment of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the article will interrogate the permeable boundaries between homoerotic love, beauty and death. Derrida’s concept of the trace is used as indicative of the paradoxical relationship between absence and presence to investigate the imbrication of the constitutive and yet also destructive and unstable relationship between Eros and Thanatos, beauty and lack, ideality and actuality. In both texts, art and the quest for ideal beauty become fatally caught up with self- deception and sexual ambiguity, played out against the respective backdrops of early twentieth-century Venice and contemporary Manhattan. In the figures of Gustav Aschenbach and Peter Harris, the article demonstrates how they embody a threatened heterosexuality and a precarious selfhood involving, not only a courting of death, but, furthermore, an exposure of the fissures within seemingly hegemonic gendered subjectivity.

Dialectics and Ideology in Dickens’ Dombey and Son: Reification of the Mental Content

The paper, relying on Marxist and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories, fosters several ways to apprehend non-mimetic characterization in Dickens’ Dombey and Son by theorizing the ways in which aesthetic, political, historical ideologies articulate themselves in means of representation. Since the influence of the visual arts on the novel is central for my argument, this paper attempts to give substantial critical consideration to Dickens’ representation of images and their double meaning that help understand social ideological relations in the bourgeois society. Visual representation, as a metaphor for the role of materiality in characterization throughout Dickens’ work and the role of fetishes, depicts the reification of the subject under capitalism. Visualization technique captures the flux of shaping characters and their function in everyday life. This aesthetic technique has led to reevaluation of Dickens’s use of visuals as a unique feature in fiction of the highest quality. Hence, representations of the inward life in fiction are merely linguistic approximations of something which cannot be wholly captured in language.

Філософія Славоя Жижека в дослідженнях китайських учених: між марксизмом та психоаналізом

The paper analyzes the history and the present state of the study of Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy in China, which mainly concerns his concept of ideology, criticism of popular culture and contemporary globalized capitalism. It is shown that the beginning of scientific researches of Žižek’s philosophy in China in the late 1990s and early 2000s was associated with the scholar seminars and the first translations of the Slovenian thinker’s works into Chinese language (Wang Fengzhen, Ji Guangmao). It is noted that at the present stage, Chinese scholars are focused on the following issues in the study of Žižek’s works: the concept of ideology; the influence of the ideas of G. Hegel, K. Marx and J. Lacan; literary and artistic theory and aesthetic thought; criticism of modern capitalism, science and society. The comparative studies were analyzed in order to determine the ideological origins of the concept of Žižek’s concept of ideology (Zhang Yibing, Zhang Xiuqin, Liu Shiheng, Tang Zhengdong, Xia Ying, Han Zhenjiang, Mo Lei, Wang Yue, Kong Ming’an, Tan Yong). The study of the influence of the late Lacanian psychoanalytic theory on the formation of Žižek’s philosophy is an important direction in the works of Wan Shuhui, Meng Xianli, Cui Zanmei, Yuan Xiaoyun. The author explores the formation of Žižek’s concept of the subject from the standpoint of psychoanalysis in the works of Mo Lei, Han Zhenjiang, Liu Xinting, Kong Ming’an and Shi Liyuan. The particular attention is paid to the study of psychoanalytic literary and artistic theory and aesthetic thought of Žižek in the works of Yu Qi, Chen Qijia, Chen Xihe, Wan Chuanfa, Liu Xinting, Hu Jihua, Han Zhenjiang, Sun Bai, Yang Hanxu, Ceng Sheng and Nan Ye. The approaches to Žižek’s criticism of modern capitalism, science and society are defined in the works of Zhang Lijun, Zhang Jian, Yu Qi, Sun Liangjie, Liu Mingming, Xia Yinping, Xin Haifeng, Lu Yufeng, Liu Yunshan. It is emphasized that, according to many Chinese scholars, Žižek’s philosophy has great theoretical and practical importance for understanding the contemporary social reality and rethinking the theory of ideology.

Community Despite Connection: Resisting the Digital Logics of Optimization and Failure

If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable. This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together by technology and instead proposes that ‘community’ is best understood as a negative and inoperative phenomenon in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalytic feminism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community. Though the two understandings of community discussed here are ultimately different, they both emphasize a structuring absence, a void at the heart of social relations, leading to a rejection of the politics of communal essence and wholeness. Together, they articulate a critique of what I see as the main danger of platform capitalism's insistence on its specific vision of community: the foreclosure of a dimension of generative antagonism and of an opening for the unexpected, for ‘the political’ (le politique). While the dimension of ‘the political’ can never be fully foreclosed, the efforts of platform capitalism nonetheless alienate us from experiences of community understood as negative presence and thus as an ongoing work-in-progress and common responsibility.This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together by technology, and instead, proposes that ‘community’ is best understood as a negative and inoperative phenomenon in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalytic feminism and theories of ‘the political’ and ‘being-in-common’ from Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community. Though the two understandings of community discussed here are ultimately different, they both emphasize a structuring absence, a void at the heart of social relations, leading to a rejection of the politics of communal essence and wholeness. Together, they articulate a critique of what I see as the main danger of platform capitalism's insistence on its specific vision of community: the foreclosure of a dimension of generative antagonism and of an opening for the unexpected, for ‘the political’ (le politique). While the dimension of ‘the political’ can never be fully foreclosed, the efforts of platform capitalism nonetheless alienate us from experiences of community understood as negative presence and thus as an ongoing work-in-progress and common responsibility.

Lady Chandos and the Humanity Function: Reading the Postscript to J. M. Coetzee’s "Elizabeth Costello" with Lacan and Badiou

Badiou has said that his entire philosophical project stems from the need to “update” the traditional philosophical categories of Truth, Being, the Infinite and the Universal in the wake of the 19th Century German mathematician Georg Cantor’s explication of transfinite set theory. In his essay, “What is Love?”, he provides an account of one of the ways in which a post-Cantorian reconfiguration of the ontological status of the category of Woman might operate. This is given in the form of a postscript subtitled “The Feminine Position and Humanity” wherein he gives Lacan’s conception of supplementary feminine jouissance “an extra turn of the screw”. This essay draws on Badiou’s reconfiguration of the philosophical category of Woman to examine the implications of another postscript, that which abruptly concludes the 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee. It reads Coetzee’s invention of the “Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos” with recourse to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and on through the ontological reconfiguration of the philosophical category of Woman demonstrated by Badiou. It argues that Coetzee assembles, through the intervention of the postscript, a situation that “makes it possible to argue”, along with Badiou, that, for the woman position, love knots together the four types of truths – Politics, Art, Science, and Love (2008, 196).

Lady Chandos and the Humanity Function: Reading the Postscript to J. M. Coetzee´s Elizabeth Costello with Lacan and Badiou

Badiou has said that his entire philosophical project stems from the need to “update” the traditional philosophical categories of Truth, Being, the Infinite and the Universal in the wake of the 19th Century German mathematician Georg Cantor’s explication of transfinite set theory. In his essay, “What is Love?”, he provides an account of one of the ways in which a post-Cantorian reconfiguration of the ontological status of the category of Woman might operate. This is given in the form of a postscript subtitled “The Feminine Position and Humanity” wherein he gives Lacan’s conception of supplementary feminine jouissance “an extra turn of the screw”. This essay draws on Badiou’s reconfiguration of the philosophical category of Woman to examine the implications of another postscript, that which abruptly concludes the 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee. It reads Coetzee’s invention of the “Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos” with recourse to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and on through the ontological reconfiguration of the philosophical category of Woman demonstrated by Badiou. It argues that Coetzee assembles, through the intervention of the postscript, a situation that “makes it possible to argue”, along with Badiou, that, for the woman position, love knots together the four types of truths – Politics, Art, Science, and Love (2008, 196).

Qualitative Study on How Social Media Addiction Relates Rules and Boundaries

Sosyal medya zaman ve mekân konularında esneklik kazandıran ve insan bedeninin doğal sınırlamalarını ortadan kaldıran araçlardan bir tanesi olarak düşünülebilir. Son yirmi yılda özellikle genç yetişkinler arasında popülerlik kazandığı söylenebilir. Sosyal medyanın yaygınlaşmasıyla birlikte araştırmacılar yönünü yeni bir bağımlılık türü olan sosyal medya bağımlılığını çalışmaya çevirmişlerdir. Bağımlılık nicel araştırmalarda genellikle yasal sorunlar ve kural ihlalleri ile ilişkilendirilse de bu konudaki nitel araştırma literatürü kısıtlıdır. Bu çalışmanın amacı sosyal medya bağımlılarının kurallarla ve sınırlarla ilişkili deneyimlerini anlamaya çalışarak literatüre katkı sağlamaktır. Bu amaçla nitel bir araştırma yöntemi olan Yorumlayıcı Fenomenolojik Analiz yönteminden faydalanılmıştır. Bu doğrultuda altı katılımcı ile yarı yapılandırılmış görüşmeler gerçekleştirilmiştir. Görüşmeler sonunda elde edilen veriler analize tabi tutulmuştur. Analiz sonucunda ortaya çıkan iki tema (1) sınırsızlık alanı olarak algılanan sosyal medya ve (2) otorite figürlerine göre konumlanma olarak isimlendirilmiştir. Bu temalar Lacanyen Psikanalitik teori çerçevesinde tartışılmıştır.

MARLINA: POLEMIK KE-SUBJEK-AN DALAM SASTRA DAN MEDIA

In a literary work , there is the desire of the character in it, and also the desire of the author which is listed and becomes the fulfillment of his desire. For Lacan , the fulfillment of desires is a process to achieve an authentic and whole subject. However, this is a complicated problem when it comes to dealing with and entering into a symbolic order. The film “Marlina The Killer of Four Acts” is one of the films that portray the problematics of the subject in a symbolic order so that it triggers the writer to understand the problem of subjectivity using Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. There are problems that the author wants to answer regarding the subject of Marlina, namely, 1) how is the image of the desire of the subject of Marlina displayed? 2) what is the desire of the film writer? and 3) what is the correlation with the media apparatus? This research uses the Lacanian psychoanalytic method to find answers to the problems of the subject in Marlina's character. The authors get results in the form of 1) how the image obtained by Marlina is identification in the mirror phase formed by language contaminated by other desires, thus making Marlina have a jouissance to get out of the symbolic order and achieve an authentic subject 2) also how the film's author's desire is a desire contained in the character of Marlina, and 3) how the media becomes a castration of the author's desire that prevents the author from achieving wholeness in his subject .

A Political Ecology of Desire

Abstract How does attention to exertion and absence of care illuminate possibilities for avoiding extinction amid global biodiversity declines? This article brings together feminist technoscience and more-than-human theory on care with Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of anxiety and desire. It does so to diagnose the threat of extinction anxieties and consider their material and political consequences for impedances to caring for nonhuman life and their flourishing. The article is developed through the empirical case of Arrojadoa marylanae, an endangered species of cactus in Bahia, Brazil, as a political ecology of desire. In bringing psychoanalytic thought into conversation with care, it considers how desire sits at the heart of more-than-human care and yet may be thwarted by anxiety. Contending with his own extinction anxieties as they became focused through an endangered cactus on a mountain destined for mining, the author excavates routes toward flourishing geographies: geographies of care-full interspecies alliances composed against Anthropocenic thinking. In concluding, the author urges for greater attention to the work of desire in studies of environmental change and the wider environmental humanities.

Gregor Samsa’s Self Alienation in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis: Lacanian Psychoanalysis

This research is focused on Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, which is described in the main character in Franz Kafka's novel The Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa is the main character of The Metamorphosis. Gregor was a traveling salesman who was the Samsa family's sole son and earner. He mysteriously transforms into a massive bug, causing him to be estranged from his family. The author finds out why Gregor’s family members do not care about him and can't perceive him as a complicated human being with his own needs. As a result, Gregor has been estranged from his family and himself. The author argues that Gregor has another alienation from his physical reality after the transformation. His family views him as a terrifying, unpleasant monster, as seen by their fear of his existence and their decision to get rid of him. Gregor, who suffers from humiliation, views himself in the same light. He and his family unwittingly reject Gregor's potential as an individual, making him feel alienated. This research aims to identify how Gregor's conditions make him feel alienated and the connection between his identity crisis and alienation, as depicted in The Metamorphosis. Although humans are free human beings, society contributes to the perspective of self-identity and the decision of their own goals.

Ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis

This paper introduces the concept of ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis. This concept was discovered in the analysis of a case study of a tech entrepreneur in Colombia and elaborated with the aid of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Specifically, we draw on Jacques Lacan’s conception of the discourse of the capitalist and his distinction between repression and foreclosure ( Verwerfung). The practice of entrepreneurship, we argue, is the most perfect instantiation of what Lacan called the discourse of the capitalist. This is a discourse without limits characterised by denial of castration and lack, a discourse that at is most radical promises liberation through a break with the symbolic order, the relation to the other, and indeed with the world as such. In this particular case study, such a break is materialised in a literal belief in magic, a specifically modern and non-occult magic of deception and misdirection that promises great results from nothing. Such magical thinking, we argue, is at the heart of the entrepreneurial fantasy. To explain this broken relation to symbolic order that is characteristic of entrepreneurship, we draw on Lacanian theory and in particular Jacques-Alain Miller’s concept of ‘ordinary psychosis’ to explain the structural homology between entrepreneurship discourse and the analytic category of psychosis. The structure of this discourse, we argue, brings with it not only magical and hallucinatory thinking, but moreover what we propose here to call ordinary entrepreneurial psychosis.