Lacanian Theory Research Articles

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.

SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS LACK OF NEED BY LOOSING FATHER IN PARLE A MON PERE BY CELINE DION

Language is the most important media for human’s communication. By using language, human can interact, socialize, and cooperate with others, because in essence language is a means of communication. Given the importance of language as a means of communication, in the process of conveying information to others it must be clear and easy to understand, like in literary works. Literary works can also consider as a part of communication. In every literary works, including in song lyric would contain a massage. Lyric songs usually contain experiences and ideas of the authors who are summarized in a particular theme, parsed and conveyed to listeners through language. Song lyrics are an expression of the author's feelings, thoughts and ideas which are realized in a special language. In this research, the researcher would like to research Parle A Mon Pere song, by Celine Dion. This research uses Roland Barthes' semiotic theory, which is collaborated with Jaques Lacan's psychoanalysis theory. Meanwhile, Barthes' myth theory is used to examine the hidden meanings which the songwriters want to convey. This research uses descriptive qualitative method. The researcher would carefully note data in the form of words, sentences and speech. The choice of content analysis techniques is analyzing words. The content analysis techniques are used to understand messages, seen as unstructured data. The result of this research is that researchers can find hidden meanings, that a girl will feel empty if she loses her father. This is obtained through the translation of the signifier and the signified, which is obtained from the sentence in the song Parle A Mon Pere, by Celine Dion.

L’importance du discours intérieur dans la sémiologie psychiatrique

ObjectivesEntangled in a semiology that aspires to imitate medical semiology, psychiatry does not take seriously enough the question of internal discourse, while many psychiatric phenomena relate to the articulation between internal discourse and external discourse.The intention of this article is to draw the attention of psychiatry to the issue of internal discourse, which is insufficiently addressed within the discipline. Psychiatric semiology should be more interested in and should approach this issue of internal discourse differently. For this, it could integrate the contribution of modern linguistics and rediscover Jacques Lacan's theory of language. MethodThe article first recalls the basic principles of psychiatric semiology based on the work of Lanteri-Laura, Henri Ey, and, more recently, that of Steeves Demazeux. He shows how psychiatry has moved from a classical semiology based on the body to that of mental faculties, more or less attached to bodies. The question of internal discourse does not find its place in these approaches. DiscussionHallucinations, delusions, obsessive and melancholy ruminations… All these phenomena are related to the question of inner speech. This does not mean that they are similar or should be approached in a comparable way. ConclusionHuman beings seem to be both speaking through their outwardly directed speech and partly spoken, through their internal speech. This must be taken into account not only from a semiological point of view but also when it comes to organizing care.

Is it Possible to Represent the Sexual Relation in Cinema?

This article offers a reflection on the Lacanian theory of the representation of the sexual relation in film. It draws on the Lacanian logic of sexuation and its interpretation by Joan Copjec and Slavoj Žižek, analyzing what the author calls the cinematic non-relation, taking as an example Alfonso Cuarón’s film Y tu mamá también (2011). The article begins by returning to the work of Laura Mulvey, who was one of the first theorists to use psychoanalysis as a political weapon to challenge the phallocentric portrayal of women in Hollywood cinema. The author argues that Mulvey was correct in her conclusions, however not with regard to the production of a “ male gaze”, but rather with regard to the cinematographic construction of male desire, which is a constitutive element of patriarchal society. The author argues that it is not by creating an “alternative” cinema, but rather developing critical theory, itself, as a political weapon that we are able to challenge the dominant ideology. It is the practice of theory that politicizes cinema and the spectator, rather than the reverse.

Psychoanalysis, the Sufi, and the Story

Psychoanalysis, the Sufi, and the Story

Oh Father, My Brother: Reflections on Psychoanalysis, Class and Masculinity

ABSTRACT In this paper, I begin by exploring the Freudian and Lacanian theories of masculinity and how they revalorise the role and law of the father and his patriarchal power. I perform a criticism of these theories by using Castoriadis’ emphasis on the importance of brotherly co-operation in the formation of community. I then move on to critically examine how Lacanian theorists have excluded considerations of class in their account of the origins of the Law and its application which prohibits an adequate redressing of social injustice. I conclude by providing a brief account of the life of my father as a working-class man and how I performed a similar exclusion of class oppression from my theoretical and practical considerations as a way of creating distance from him. This account is an attempt to reconnect with a man who was not only my father, but also my ‘brother in suffering’.

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.

The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels

The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels

Student Subjectivity in the Marketised University.

We present data from an exploratory qualitative interview-based pedagogical research project on the development of student agency in higher education. Our aim was to respond to Nick Zepke’s claim that what is often missing from the current neoliberal discourse of higher education ‘is students having a voice in what and how they learn and how they can action their voice in the wider community as agentic citizens.’ Informed by Lacanian discourse analysis, our project investigated the opportunities and threats facing some of our undergraduate students as they struggled to exercise agency and develop autonomy in the marketised university. Repeat interviews (n = 15) with final year students focussed on the psychosocial categories of power, affect, intersubjectivity and desire. The analysis was guided by Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, an account of the vicissitudes of agency. We found that students can move between discourses depending on the extent to which their agency (operationalised here as Lacan’s ‘object cause of desire,’ the objet petit a) was enabled or thwarted. Our critique of the metaphor of the ‘student journey’ addresses the implications for learning and teaching and the university’s mission to develop its students in light of perceived commercial pressures.

Counselling the “split subject”: a psychodynamic analysis of career dissatisfaction

ABSTRACT The objective of our research is to analyse career dissatisfaction through the psychoanalytical lens of Jacques Lacan. Taking a multiple-case study approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven male, senior managers working in the highly competitive technology industry. We found that respondents are defining satisfaction against a socially constructed career system that obliterates the concept of an agentic self. By grounding our qualitative investigation in the research fields of career and career dissatisfaction in the under-researched realm of Lacanian theory, we extend career theory to include a psychodynamic lens. We also contribute to practice by providing an alternative approach to career counselling that encourages the client to co-construct a sense of liberation and empowerment.

On Harrowing in Dead Europe

ABSTRACT Dead Europe (2005) is a book about the harrowing of Isaac. The anti-Semitic logics of the novel inflect the familial curse that proceeds in the wake of Elias’s death, and the curse that haunts Isaac offers a re-emergence of a murderous anti-Semitic past. Yet this moment also confronts the critical reader with a choice: to embrace this supernatural motif of the curse or to shun it as psychopathology. Favouring the former, this article draws on the resources of Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-Marxist theory to analyse how this curse remains an exemplary trope. The argument will trace how Isaac is harrowed by the curse and, therein, ask what it means for Isaac to be harrowed. By looking again at the construction of the curse in Dead Europe, this article will examine some of the critical ideas that are uncovered by the novel’s supernaturalism.

THE SECOND DEATH

As much as humanity has always been driven by the idea of conquering death, it is also haunted by the impossibility of dying completely; that is, by a possible persistence and recurrence of something undead and indestructible that pertains to us; not necessarily as our ally, but rather as our enemy. This paper explores this strange non-coincidence of death (and life) with itself. Following various authors (Lacan, de Sade), it develops the thesis that the difference between the “real” (empirical) and the symbolic is not sufficient to explain this irreducible surplus of life, this undeadness, which is not the same as “symbolic life.” Rather, it corresponds to a surplus of life that occurs as a by-product of the symbolic, but which is not itself symbolic or covered by it. Lacanian theory differs from the so-called “linguistic turn” in that it alerts us to the following paradox: language is not reducible (back) to language. It is because of language that another, additional non-linguistic Real exists in the universe.

Subjectivity and Revenge in Karen M. McManus’s One of Us Is Lying

The aim of this paper is to explore the issues of peer rejection and revenge among adolescents through their portrayal in young adult literature (YAL). Adopting the lens of Lacanian theory on subjectivity and desire, the paper analyses a revenge plot in Karen M. McManus’s novel One of Us Is Lying and its origins. It argues that peer rejection contributes to contradictory self-concepts; how adolescent characters view themselves clash at some point with how others regard them, leading them to seek retribution. Their attempt at revenge will be examined along the lines of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the paper argues that their revenge is driven by the impulse to fulfil the Other’s desire, which eventually fails due to the unobtainable nature of the desire itself.

Freire and Lacan: Critical pedagogy as a radical methodology of the subject

Turning to key texts of Paulo Freire and Jacques Lacan, this paper argues that the experience organized in critical pedagogy can be rearticulated on the basis of a structural-practical connection to psychoanalysis. I pay specific attention to the methodical parallels that develop between the accounts of the psychoanalytic and pedagogical encounters in Lacan and Freire, arguing that critical pedagogy can be presented in a way that embraces the Lacanian theories of subjectivity and the unconscious, while affirming its political and emancipatory commitments. This theoretical analysis unfolds in two parts. First, I develop an account of Lacan that can militate for the critical pedagogical intervention, offering a grammar for elaborating upon Freire’s claim that critical pedagogy be understood as kind of psychoanalysis. Bringing into focus a more practically oriented Lacan, I demonstrate how his work offers a rationality for organizing an intervention in the terrain of subjectivity. Second, I apply this reading of Lacan to the pedagogical experience defined by Freire in an effort to articulate in a new key the problems and possibilities structuring his intervention, linking the question of educational praxis to traumatic/unconscious knowledge as the site of operation for facilitating the political subjectivation of students.

Logiques cliniques du signifiant ; de la répétition à l’itération

ContextAlthough repetition in the psychoanalytic setting is usually associated with symptoms and the death drive, the clinically observed fact that certain repetitive processes have creative potential remains as real as it is prickly. Yet, in the end, how can we access working through without going through repetition? We review the Freudian references that allow us to understand the unconscious tendencies of recurrence, insistence to re-establish previous states and arborescent networks of association. Here, we could explore the effects of speech in their correlation to the changes within a cure while taking into account both the inertia proper to the drive and its relationship to the repetition compulsion as well as the logic of the signifier in Lacanian theory. ObjectivesGrasp the effects of speech in their correlation to observable clinical changes, all the while taking into account the logic of the signifier in its dimension, not only of insistence, but also in its potentiality for establishing variations. - Gain further insight regarding the clinical changes associated with repetition phenomena, notably the psychical processes that seem to function with a similar dynamic to those in processes of iteration. - Account for psychical processes that are linked to strongly cathected signifier fragments. MethodsWe proceed by analyzing qualitative data from the clinical material stemming from a case study of psychosis. We will focus on the speech and written events correlated to moments of change that were observed in that therapy. A brief summary of Freudian references concerning repetition and drives is put forward to better illustrate the psychical tendencies of return and redeployment that show similarities to iterative processes, and we present the essential notions to apprehend this mathematical concept. We articulate our hypotheses with elements from clinical vignettes following Lacan's conceptualization of the logic of the signifier. In order to account for psychical processes that are linked to strongly cathected signifier fragments, we take into account Bazan's hypothesis concerning the emergence of “phonemic phantoms.” Finally, we reintegrate all of these elements to exemplify the clinical changes that may have been facilitated by a repetitive process in which we identify qualities inherent to iteration. ResultsWe identify moments of clinical bifurcation that marked the exit of the subject from what seemed to be a closed loop of repetition, and we describe some underlying psychical processes that could have facilitated these changes in the realms of the signifier. Taking into account the dynamics of iteration has allowed us to rethink the repetition processes linked to working through that may bring forward possibilities of emergence within the analytic situation, as well as its usefulness in clarifying the redeployment of certain signifier fragments in the psyche. ConclusionThe repetitive processes linked to the changes described here are part of the elements necessary to reach a particular type of working through, without reducing all the phenomena of elaboration to this single determination. These considerations offer us an additional insight on the dynamics of the fusion/defusion of the drives.

Treatment is geopolitical: On Lacan’s decolonial clinic

This essay considers two Lacanian texts, namely Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis (1948) and Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969), to highlight how Lacan situated treatment amidst the geopolitical antagonism between coloniser and colonised. This is premised upon his conviction that treatment cannot be conceived without taking into account psychoanalysis’ deep historical linkages to capitalism which he often saw to be a global development. While this remains a largely unrecognized aspect of Lacanian theory, it provides a lot of insights as to how the decolonial clinic could be conceived as psychoanalysis continues to globalize alongsinde the dominant psy-disciplines.

Lacan's Theory of Desire and Its Practical Value

The word "desire" is one of the core terms in Lacan's psychoanalysis. As the famous saying of Lacan: "the desire of man is the desire of the Others", Lacan's theory of desire is based on Hegel - Koyev's theory of desire. By falsifying the subject, Lacan developed a unique theory of desire, that is, desire is the alienated subject, the fantasy formed in the pursuit of what Freud called the Das Ding which Lacan called the Objet petit A, and finally the fantasy constructs desire retrospectively. The study of Lacan's theory of desire helps to provide more sections for the study of contemporary social phenomena and social development.

Incalculably Diffusive

Incalculably Diffusive

Jouissance, Scapegoating and the Lack of the Symbolic: What Causes the Subject’s Desire and Why?

ABSTRACT The Lacanian theory describes the subject in terms of split and lack. It does so by illustrating the process by which the subject becomes constructed. In the present article, I critically engage with the version of Lacanian theory that Yannis Stavrakakis has promoted and with the shift that has marked the development of this version. I argue that the shift in question reveals Stavrakakis’ initial misreading of Jacques Lacan and sheds light on some of the implications of the Lacanian theory of subjectivity for theorizing socio-political issues of identity operations. The misconception of important and interconnected aspects of the theorization of the subject as desiring and lacking makes room for ontologizing the incrimination of an “enemy”. However, I argue, demonizing an “enemy” should not be interpreted as resulting from the fundamental desire for meaning enclosure. It is rather correlated with the jouissance that is lost in the process of the subject construction and, by implication, with the affect invested in identity (the collective identity notwithstanding). Setting the record straight allows alternative (re)conceptualizations of (collective) identity that de-naturalize the modernist assumption that the construction of a present enemy is ontologically tied with, and thus, indispensable to, (collective) identity construction.

A Lacanian understanding of the southern planning theorists’ identification under the hegemony of western philosophy

As a planning theorist who has studied and taught planning theory in the Global South and North, I grapple with the question – “What does planning theory mean in the Global South?” To answer this question, I ontologically investigate the meaning of Southern planning theory based on a Lacanian approach. Drawing on the Lacanian theory of human subjectivity, this article explains how planning theorists’ identities are constituted through their interactions within academia. Lacanian discourse theory assists in exploring how most Southern planning theorists adopt, internalise, and use hegemonic Western philosophy, ideas, and discourses as the only accepted mechanism of truth. Consequently, this process profoundly alienates Southern planning theorists from their local context, as they often devalue, overlook, and neglect non-Western beliefs, ideas, knowledge, and philosophy. I argue that although the number of Southern planning theorists has increased during the last decades, non-Western philosophy is seldom utilised as the core of their critical studies. Based on the Lacanian discourse theory, I show that they mostly remain in the hegemonic mechanism of knowledge production that is embedded in the colonial era.