Lacanian Theory Research Articles

Fanon/Lacan: Sites of Intersection

Three questions motivate this paper's investigation of various intersections between the work of Frantz Fanon and Jacques Lacan. First, what hitherto under-explored references to Lacan's work are to be found in Fanon's earliest (recently translated) psychiatric work? Second, moving beyond the remit of explicit citation: what subtle conceptual parallels and affinities exist between the work of these two theorists? Third, what contemporary rearticulations of Fanon's thought and political agendas are made possible via Lacanian theory? Exploring Fanon's earliest work shows that a number of Lacanian postulates exercised an influence on the young Martinican, including, amongst others: ideas of imaginary misrecognition, the paranoiac ego, the role of the image, and the notion of a historically founded logic of madness. Reviewing the literature on Fanon–Lacan helps, furthermore, in foregrounding a series of often understated conceptual parallels between the two theorists, including the priority afforded language and speech, the question of sociogeny, the role of social (or symbolic) structure, the notions of fantasy (Fanon's ‘Negro myth’) and of a social (or trans-individual) unconscious (as in Fanon's ‘European collective unconscious’). A notable finding regards how contemporary theorists have applied Lacanian ideas in rearticulations of Fanon's thought concerning the predominance of the topic of racist temporality. There are thus greater possibilities for critical analysis to be found in conjoining Fanonian and Lacanian theory than has generally been acknowledged by Fanon scholars.

MANGO TREE’S DESIRE IN THE STORY OF DENGAR KELUHAN POHON MANGGA: STUDY ON PSYCHOANALYSIS OF LACAN

Dengar Keluhan Pohon Mangga (DKPM) is the story written by Maria Amin during the Japanese colonial era. The author uses the metaphor of "mango tree" to escape Japanese censorship to be published so that there are many hidden meanings in this short story. This study aimed to determine the author's unconscious condition through the language used by using Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. This study used a qualitative research method with a poststructuralism approach using Lacan's psychoanalysis. The data source of this research is a document, namely the short story DKPM by Maria Amin. The sampling technique used purposive sampling. In this study, the data were obtained through document analysis, and then the data were analyzed according to Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, which begins by describing the life of the author - in this case, is Maria Amin - to understand his work. After that, he explained the characters of the characters in the DKPM short stories. Furthermore, the analysis was focused on the short stories' language, which can be seen through the metaphor and metonymy phenomena in this short story. In this way, it will be seen how the author's subconscious is filled with a sense of lack and loss, so that the desire to cover up the deficiency appears. The results showed that the short story DKPM is a short story that reflects the writer's unconscious condition. It can be seen in the short stories he wrote that the Indonesian nation was expressed metaphorically by using the word "mango tree", the Japanese nation as "areca tree", and the Dutch nation as "the man". In this short story, the mango tree (the Indonesian nation) is on lacks condition. So that there is a desire to gain recognition for its existence as a subject.

O fora do corpo

As divergências entre fenômenos psicossomáticos e sintoma são esclarecidas na clínica a partir do conceito de holófrase, apresentado por Lacan durante o Seminário 11. Contudo, a holófrase já anunciava a ruptura com o simbólico, ao ser apresentada como significante real na condição de um S1 que não entra na cadeia. Isso nos permite dizer que a holófrase está fora do corpo simbólico. O problema se estabelece, sobretudo, na década de 1970, quando Lacan define o sintoma como letra, marcando Um que estaria fora do corpo. Seria a holófrase uma letra? A qual corpo se referia Lacan ao fazer essa constatação? Os avanços na teoria lacaniana ligados aos conceitos de corpo, de sintoma e de inconsciente implicam a necessidade de um estudo sobre os corpos e o que acomete o fenômeno psicossomático e o sintoma.

Female Identification in a Case of Paranoid Psychosis: Rethinking a Practice in the Light of Lacanian Theory

The authors present a clinical case of paranoid psychosis in which the issue of female identification plays a prevalent role. After a brief introduction on the clinical approach to psychosis in Lacan's teaching, the clinical case is exposed and commented on, highlighting in particular (1) the analyst's position; (2) the role of pousse à la femme ("push-towards-woman") in psychosis; and (3) the therapeutic effects of psychoanalytic treatment for the psychotic patient.

SUBJECTIVITY IN STEPHEN DEDALUS, THE MAIN CHARACTER IN JAMES JOYCE’S A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

Subjectivity is a philosophical concept of how one, as a subject, gains the sense of identity through the interaction with the external world. The theorization on the conception of subjectivity itself has ranged from the early modern thinkers to post-modern thinkers. This research’s objectives are to describe the struggle of Stephen Dedalus, the main character in James Joyce’s novel entitled A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man, to gain his identity as a form of subjectivity, and to describe how the model of subjectivity is reflected through the character of Stephen Dedalus. This research is a descriptive qualitative library research with philosophical approach using Descartes, Kant, Freud and Lacan theories. From the analysis, first, it is found out that Stephen Dedalus underwent a journey of figuring himself out through a series of events that profoundly shape his sense of identity. The involvement of many external factors like the field of art, religion, and nationality is important in constructing Stephen Dedalus’ subjectivity. Secondly, by taking into account the theorization on the idea of subjectivity from the early modern philosophers such as Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant, to the post-modern philosophers such as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, it can be seen that Stephen Dedalus’ stream of consciousness as the main tool in perceiving his journey of life embodies the early modern conception that subjectivity is grounded on one’s independent consciousness. Keywords: subjectivity, modernity, philosophy

Prostitution and Art. Picasso’s <i>Les Demoiselles d’Avignon</i> and the Vicissitudes of Authenticity

The paper argues against interpretations of Les Demoiselles that look for its meaning in Picasso’s state of mind and treat it as the expression of a struggle with his personal demons. Rather, it interprets both versions of the painting as a response and contrast to Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre, which is proposed as the main intertext of Les Demoiselles. Moreover, an excursus into Lacanian theory allows the author not only to explain the supposed inconsistencies of Les Demoiselles, but also to propose that in its final version it is a meta-painting which analyses the way representation comes into being.

Infatuation in Spark's 'The Notebook'

This research is conducted to analyze the infatuation that occurs to the main character, Noah Calhoun in Nicholas Sparks The Notebook. The objective of this research is to describe the main character and the conflicts in Sparks’s The Notebook. It also reveals the main character infatuation and desire based on the concept of psyche using Lacanian psychological approach. This research uses qualitative-descriptive research to answer the question about the infatuation that occurs to the main character and it explains in the form of words. The research results in several findings as follows: 1) the infatuation described in Spark’s The Notebook can be seen through its intrinsic element especially the character and the conflict. The main character, Noah Calhoun is described as a patient, kind, and faithful man. The conflict and the struggle Noah faces through Allie and her family show how Noah cannot move on from Allie. 2) The infatuation occurs to Noah Calhoun show by the concept of psyche using the Lacanian Psychology approach. Based on Noah's concept of psyche analysis tell that the main character, Noah Calhoun is feeling lacks and always looking for Allie to complete his lacks. The main character's psychological development toward his first love brings out the desire to be loved and have his relationship back. The desire tells that Allie is the one Noah needed in his life.
 Keywords: infatutation, Lacanian theory, Psychological approach, The Notebook

Breaking through Schizophrenia by Wilfried Ver Eecke

Reviewed by: Breaking through Schizophrenia by Wilfried Ver Eecke Thomas Hutchinson VER EECKE, Wilfried. Breaking through Schizophrenia. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 269 pp. Paper, $55.00 Wilfried Ver Eecke's Breaking through Schizophrenia is a fitting title. It breaks through disciplinary barriers befitting its theoretical source, Jacques Lacan. Continuing Lacan's critical project, BTS begins from a psychoanalytic dissent against mainstream psychiatry. Pushing further than Lacan, he includes a philosophical lesson in German Idealism, from which psychoanalysis originates. He demonstrates the influence of Hegelian philosophy on Lacanian psychoanalysis. The very debate that grounds BTS pushes psychoanalysis itself beyond the clinic and into a confrontation with twenty-first-century neoliberalism. In the spirit of Lacan, Ver Eecke shifts the source of mental illness from individual physiology to the linguistic environment. Externalizing sources of mental illness demands psychoanalysis confront both philosophical [End Page 631] and political problems; scrutinizing institutions as objects of analysis potentially threatens the stability of embedded neoliberal power structures. Given the destabilizing capability of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the appeal of BTS is interdisciplinary. Ver Eecke's ability to summarize Lacan's often impenetrable language makes it digestible for nonpsychiatric specialists. Meanwhile, he demonstrates the importance of German Idealism for purposes both theoretical and practical. The image of psychoanalysis illustrated in BTS warrants attention from readers across the humanities. The book as a whole should be read with an awareness of the way in which it consistently points beyond itself, firstly in its break with mainstream psychiatry, then through its movement into political society vis-a-vis philosophy. Thereby the reader remains conscious of the philosophical, social, and political dynamics at work in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Drawing parallels between and among Lacan's "mirror-stage," Hegel's master/slave dialectic, Lacan's theory of "aggressiveness" and Hegel's "Law of the Heart," Ver Eecke inherently builds psychoanalysis upon both Hegel's philosophy and Hegel's political philosophy. Perhaps the main principle in BTS is that Lacan's mirror-stage theory of ego development is philosophically linked to Hegel's master/slave dialectic. This leads to the conclusion that Lacanian self-consciousness constitutes nothing less than a philosophical anthropology. Therewithin, the development from childhood to adulthood is an incredibly complex process, and the ego develops through many stages. The main argument in BTS is that "mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, can be understood as a failure in the psychosocial and linguistic development of the person when growing up." This means that the social institutions constitutive of the subject, most recognizably family, school, church, and so on, are linguistic communities, both distinct and interwoven within a broader sociolinguistic community. By grounding the stages of self-consciousness in the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, Ver Eecke implies that ego development is an emergent function of interaction between no fewer than two individuals. More importantly, it appears inherently conflictual; it is both (1) grounded in language and (2) social and political. According to Lacan's mirror stage theory, the ego emerges from a number of interactions and tensions between self and other, even before advancing to the Oedipus complex. The family is the immediate source of consciousness and mental illness, and is consequently the first social institution implicated. This problematizes the very notion of family, something perhaps taken for granted in Freud's and even Lacan's time. Is the family not ever increasingly more subject to sociopolitical institutional pressures? Due to the dynamic nature of contemporary neoliberal reality, psychoanalysis aims at an ever developing, moving target. It thus needs to understand itself within a view of the whole, within a philosophic horizon. [End Page 632] Hegel teaches in Philosophy of Right that "the ethical life" amounts to the conscious unity of family, civil society, and state. It constitutes "the whole" of practical existence. Ethical life unites the family, civil society, and the state into a common whole, meaning that each is in contact with another in the ethical life. Ethical life at the same time transcends the particular instances of each. In the language of German Idealism, the ethical life is precisely that which is in the whole of the family, civil society, and the state more than themselves. Hegel contends that, in the family, "the mother...

Shelley and the death drive: Romanticism, politics, psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT Psychoanalysis has strong roots in Romanticism, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s writings have often been thought to prefigure aspects of psychoanalytic theory. This essay explores affinities between Shelley’s poetry and one particular concept: the ‘death drive’, or Thanatos, as Freud sometimes named it, counterpart of Eros in Freud’s metapsychology. Freud felt that this controversial dualistic idea had literary support, writing that it is ‘reinforced by our poets and playwrights’. My essay examines links between Shelley’s writings, Freud’s ideas, and their development in Lacanian theory, to ask whether Shelley provides such reinforcement for psychoanalytic metapsychology, especially in Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude (1816). Alastor, I argue, initiates a poetic probing of human psychology on Shelley’s part which takes on a vitally political significance, creating a tension in Shelley’s work between a utopianism and certain proto-psychoanalytic insights that seem to undermine it. With reference to A Philosophical View of Reform, ‘Sonnet: Political Greatness’, Prometheus Unbound, Hellas and The Triumph of Life, I conclude with some further reflections on the dialogue between Shelley and psychoanalysis, highlighting important implications of this for our understanding of Shelley’s writings, and for our thinking about the relationships between Romanticism, politics and psychoanalysis.

Fanon via Lacan, or: Decolonization by Psychoanalytic Means … ?

ABSTRACT Lacanian psychoanalysis is often considered antithetical to Frantz Fanon's decolonizing political project. This paper argues, by contrast, that by exploring hitherto under-explored aspects of the Fanon-Lacan relation we are able to re-articulate many of Fanon's most crucial political insights. The paper adopts three routes of enquiry. Firstly, it investigates Fanon's earliest citations of Lacan, noting how Fanon utilizes Lacan's ideas of historically-situated forms of madness, (mis)recognition, paranoia and psychic causality. Secondly, it highlights a series of conceptual affinities that exist between the work of the two theorists including idea of sociogeny, the importance of symbolic (or social) structure, the notion of fantasy and of a social (or transindividual) unconscious. Thirdly, it provides an instructive example of how Fanon's theorizations of colonial oppression might be supplemented by means of Lacanian social theory especially in respect of how the colonized are positioned as "non-subjects" relative to the master-signifier of whiteness.

The fantasy of healthy food: desire and anxiety in healthy food guide magazine

ABSTRACT Healthy Food Guide (HFG) has been a hugely successful magazine, both dominating the health magazine market and becoming deeply imbedded within the public health discourse, sanctioned and legitimated through a range of State apparatuses. Central to this has been an ability to differentiate itself from ‘restrictive diet programs’ and other forms of ‘misleading’ health advice, which they claim, unlike their magazine, are ungrounded in the latest scientific evidence. Through a qualitative analysis of the lead article in every issue of HFG from 2005 to 2017, we question its endorsement by New Zealand public health agencies, arguing that it acquires revenue through the intensification of health anxiety within its target readership. It does this through constructing its ideal reader as a health entrepreneur within the discourse of new public health, able to collect the right information to make the appropriate consumer choices, within a risk-saturated marketplace. A key contribution of this article is bringing a Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to the broad area of public health, which has been so far under-applied. By linking Lacanian theory to the health entrepreneur, we developed that concept by foregrounding the roles of desire and anxiety in healthism discourse. We argue that the consumer of HFG is bound to its libidinal economy in a relation of domination, whereby they are given the task of allaying anxiety through the collection of data on their bodies, information which only produces more anxiety.

You are not the father: rhetoric, settler colonial curiosity, and federal Indian law

ABSTRACT In this essay, the author uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explain the specific insistence of blood and economic/personal financial relations as organizing signifiers in federal Indian law, taking Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013) as the primary case study of the author. The author maintains that Lacanian psychoanalysis helps clarify: (1) how these signifiers organize legal rhetorics through the notion of the unconscious; and (2) how the persistence of these signifiers reveals a broad structure of settler colonial curiosity that elucidates the link between federal Indian law’s consistencies and instabilities. The author reasons that settler colonial curiosity is motivated by a curious attachment to the promises of an imaginary nation state as represented through signifiers, arguing that signifiers of blood and economic/personal financial relations function as shaky anchors in the discourse of federal Indian law. As shaky anchors, they draw upon centuries of public affective investment to feign a stability to federal Indian law while also leaving an opening for decolonial unsettling. The author concludes with some implications for psychoanalytic rhetorical criticism and Indigenous decolonial rhetorics.

Questioning the Phallus: Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler

ABSTRACTThis article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic function is the “anchor”’ from and around which the symbolic works and ties the discussion to the question of sexual difference by explaining that men and women are positioned differently in relation to it. Butler charges that Lacan’s schema is heteronormative—because it is limited to the male/female schema—and patriarchal because within that heteronormative framework it affirms the masculine perspective. Rather than follow the usual route taken by recent Lacanian scholarship on this issue and focus on Lacan’s later works, especially Seminar XX on female sexuality, I appeal to the contents of two works written in the same year (1958) as “The Signification of the Phallus”—Seminar V and “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”—to offer a qualified defense of Lacan that accepts that his early framework is heteronormative but questions the patriarchal charge by showing that within these pre-Seminar XX texts he explicitly works to undermine that logic.

Psihodinamski pristup razumevanju anoreksije nervoze

Anorexia nervosa is a diagnostic category that is more frequently found in younger women. In its basis is the difficulty of experiencing and mentalizing tension inside one's body. It occurs due to the conflicts arising from intrapsychic processes, on the one hand, and the penetration of patriarchal norms on the other. This paper relates anorexia nervosa to Lacan's jouissance or the so-called painful pleasure. Lacan's theory of understanding female sexuality is important for the feminist (psychotherapeutic) approach. How young women suffering from anorexia nervosa form a relationship with their body, and the degree to which we can speak of their capacity to achieve a pleasure principle is addressed in the second part of the paper. Finally, the paper offers a psychotherapeutic understanding of the directions that need to be followed when working with these clients.

La società paranoica: soggettivazione e radici dell’odio

The hatred speeches basically combine two elements: the language and the emotion of aggression. They are the word-decoding of one of the most characteristic feelings of the human being. Following the orientation of the Lacanian psychopedagogy, aggression traces its etiology within the relationship between the subject and his own social image, which only later is projected onto the other. In other words, there is no external object that autonomously has objective and intrinsic characteristics to arouse aggression and hate, but the latter are always the disguised consequence of a projective identification. Lacan's Theory of the Mirror, at the base of the psycho-pedagogical question of subjectivation, shows how the root of hate is, always, a paranoid root, or a displacement of something that belongs to the ego, towards an external object: the other. Hatred speeches, in this sense, constitute a structural gap in the formation of the subject: they are the significant translation of an identifying mechanism that can only be understood through the educational relationship between the subject and his family romance.

Jakub Eberle: Discourse and Affect in Foreign Policy. Germany and the Iraq War

Foreign and security policy have long been removed from the politicalpressures that influence other areas of policymaking. This has led to atendency to separate the analytical levels of the individual and thecollective. Using Lacanian theory, which views the subject as ontologicallyincomplete and desiring a perfect identity which is realised in fantasies, ornarrative scenarios, this book shows that the making of foreign policy is amuch more complex process. Emotions and affect play an important role,even where ‘hard’ security issues, such as the use of military force, areconcerned. Eberle constructs a new theoretical framework for analysingforeign policy by capturing the interweaving of both discursive and affectiveaspects in policymaking. He uses this framework to explain Germany’s oftencontradictory foreign policy towards the Iraq crisis of 2002/2003, and theemotional, even existential, public debate that accompanied it. This bookadds to ongoing theoretical debates in International Political Sociology andCritical Security Studies and will be required reading for all scholars workingin these areas.

On God in Lacan: A Response to Tina Beattie

AbstractTina Beattie has re-read Aquinas in the light of Lacanian theory and found the later Lacan's transition to what he calls the register of “the Real” to be significant for a revitalised theology beyond traditional intellectual categories. She argues for a maternal Trinity which she believes to lie hidden in Thomas and, in support of this, she contends that Lacan left behind Freud's paternal preoccupations in favour of maternity. This response to Beattie will re-examine Lacan's trajectory from “the Symbolic” register to “the Real” through the lens of what he said in his year-long seminars about Moses, whom he regarded as a representative of “the Symbolic”, and it will demonstrate that paternity remained a constant in Lacan, who even came to see “the Real” itself as a name of the father.

Metamorphosis, Refuge, and the Gaze: Non‐Binary Shorelines

Drawing on clinical material from sessions with three young trans patients, this re‐working of psychoanalysis seeks to open up new ways of analysing gender, in all its diversities. Gender is argued to function as a fetish, screen or trick, that covers over traumatic loss. This application of Lacan's theory of the gaze designates all gender expressions, whether cis or trans, as modes of creative action. Gender, as formed through societal limits and taboos, can also prove constricting in ways that trans and non‐binary people are productively challenging. Turning to Deleuze, Kafka and Butler problematizes oedipal structures, figuring potential resistances and escapes to the presumed naturalization and fixity of gender. The insistent pull of the drive is theorized by Freud as non‐binary, on the boundaries between psyche and soma and life and death; perhaps it is in relation to such a drive that any gender is precariously constituted.

Resistance and solidarity: organising for women’s human rights

Using Lacanian, feminist, and organisational theory, this article explores the problem and question of violence against women and gender justice. In it, I argue that this violence and degradation against women is a fact, while simultaneously linking the notion of gender and its uncertain historicity to the traumatic discursive and psychical nature of en/gendering and to what this might mean for an organisation whose mission is gender justice. The inevitable push to settle the meanings of women and leadership marks the impossible desire to know. I highlight the work of an established feminist international women’s rights and gender-justice organisation and its efforts to resist this push to settle meanings and the related implications and challenges this may have on their shared-leadership model.

The tech entrepreneur in Colombia: a discussion of actor-network-theory, Lacanian theory and social imaginaries

The figure of the tech entrepreneur has gained special relevance in the contemporary world. Recognized stories of success such as those of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have popularized worldwide the imagination of the young student who starts a garage company with nothing more than his own passion, intelligence and determination, and becomes a global celebrity and a billionaire in just a few years. Nevertheless, the discourses and cultural productions that shape this figure do not always adhere to empirical consequences and factual data, but in fact, are the result of some processes determined by the desires and dreams of those who construct and transmit it (entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship gurus and experts, advertisers, government agencies, etc.), as well as those who consume it (young people with entrepreneurial aspirations). In this process of analyzing the “material/empiric” dimension of the figure of the tech entrepreneur in contrast with the “symbolic/imaginary” dimension, this article proposes a theoretical discussion between the Actor-Network-Theory, the Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Social Imaginaries theory. Based on the work by Lacan, Latour and Taylor and recurring to interviews applied to tech entrepreneurs in Colombia in different stages of development, it is concluded that the symbolic/imaginary dimension plays a fundamental role in structuring the contemporary figure of the tech entrepreneur with important implications at the level of the material/empirical reality, insofar as it shapes actions and objects. Thus, the Lacanian theory and the Social Imaginaries constitute two fundamental frameworks of analysis that contribute to understanding more comprehensively how the tech sector works as well as what sort of technological objects are created.