The Tensions of the Brief Lacanian Psychotherapist: Further Work on the Brief Lacanian Therapy Project
Paul A. Jerry and Andrea Resnik
The Brief Lacanian Therapy Project is a collaborative venture amongst a small group of clinicians who are exploring the pragmatics of developing a brief psychodynamic psychotherapy rooted in the clinical theory of Jacques Lacan. Models of psychodynamic psychotherapy embrace psychoanalytic concepts at their core. These concepts, as well as those of Lacan are rooted in a common history. Our assumption is that for the applied clinician, a workable and common meta-narrative exists. It is in the common ground of this meta-narrative that the integration of Lacan and brief psychodynamic psychotherapy becomes possible. The modern practice of North American psychotherapy is typically symptom-focused, time-limited, and subject to forces and demands beyond the immediate interpersonal relationship between therapist and patient. Lacanian psychoanalysis is focused on the unconscious and the symbolic expression of the symptom. The role of the analyst is different from the brief therapist and the goals of therapy also differ. In spite of these differences, a brief Lacanian therapy built on the integration of the structure of brief therapy models and immersed in the clinical methods of Lacan is described.
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On the Real Father
Pierre Bruno
This paper examines Lacan’s trilogy of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real father, with a special focus on the theoretical and clinical significance of the latter. It is argued that the symbolic father is the dead father, the guardian of a jouissance that he cannot enjoy. Lacan’s concept of the imaginary father is the father as ‘jouisseur’ (the one who enjoys), whom it is necessary to kill in order for the subject to be able to envision his own jouissance. The third member of the trio, the real father, transcends both of these figures. The real father incarnates the exception that is necessary for the question of existence to be asked beyond being, in terms of the consequence for language.
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Ghosts of the Self in Ancient Theatre and the Postmodern Mind: A Combined Lacanian and Neuro-Psychoanalytic Approach
Mark Pizzato
This essay compares Neandertal burial rites, an ancient Egyptian drama, and Aeschylus’ Oresteia as examples of ritual theatre and mythic plays that offer insights about the persistence of ghosts and gods, as extensions of ego and superego--through collective dreams of Otherness and authority. It uses the psychoanalytic mapping of the brain by Mark Solms and Karen Kaplan-Solms, along with Lacan’s orders of the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, to explore how the biologically evolved structures of the mind find parallel expressions in prehistoric, ancient, and modern cultures. This suggests that the postmodern ‘end of metaphysics’ may yet involve a return of ghosts and gods in the Real, as shown in ancient rites and dramas, as well as in our current mass-media technologies.
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Zizek’s Paradox
Sheila Kunkle
Underpinning Slavoj Zizek's commentaries on contemporary culture and his philosophical discussions is the Lacanian logic of paradox. This essay follows this logic through to its conclusions in order to reveal that implicit within Zizek's arguments is the notion that the subject exists within a progressively diminishing space of void, the constitutive nothingness that makes sublimation possible. Using examples in film, literature, and popular culture, this essay further considers the place of ethics, the possibilities of love, the experiences of jouissance, and the limits of transgression in Zizek's logic of the contemporary Lacanian subject.
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On Perversions
Sergio Benvenuto
The author takes a new look at perversions and at the classical psychoanalytic theories on them, proposing an original criterion for determining them. He does not consider perversions as specific sexual behaviours, nor as a certain type of fantasy: he considers perversion as above all an ethical impasse. Thus, every sexual relationship, in which the subjectivity of the other is used as the ego’s instrument of pleasure, is perverse. This, however, is not a moral flaw, but a strategy for transforming a sufferance (especially jealousy) into an enjoyment via a manoeuvering of the other as a subject. The perverse masterpiece thus consists in transmuting the trauma of one’s own exclusion from the other’s pleasure, in an exclusive way, in order to secure sexual enjoyment. From within this perspective, the author reconstructs the ethical and subjective phenomenology of voyeurism and exhibitionism, sadism and masochism, fetishism, perverse homosexuals and perverse women.
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The Lacanian subject as breach/fixation: a contribution to the social theory of psychoanalysis
Suh-Young Catherine Kim
This paper aims at creating a viable dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and social theory. For this, it places Bruce Fink’s concept of ‘the Lacanian subject as breach’ at the centre of the discussion. Developing Fink’s application of Lacanian psychoanalysis to social theory further, this paper will attempt to enable the Lacanian subject to participate in the emancipatory project of Marxism. This is also the reason why this article separates Jacques Lacan’s 1945 paper, ‘Logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty’ from his 1947 paper, ‘British psychiatry and the war’. In short, it will be argued that Lacan’s 1945 paper can offer a radically new theory of subjectivity only insofar as it is considered to have the opposing view to his 1947 paper.
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Discourse and Jouissance: A Reply to Glynos and Stavrakakis
Ernesto Laclau
In this paper, Ernesto Laclau responds to criticisms formulated by Glynos and Stavrakakis in a previous issue of Journal for Lacanian Studies (2003, 1(1), pp. 110-128), especially their claim that he has neglected the Lacanian notion of jouissance. Laclau first of all points out that jouissance is by no means absent from his work, but actually constitutes, although not always explicitly, a constitutive axis of it. Subsequently he shows that Glynos and Stavrakakis’ criticism is based on a rather narrow interpretation of the notion of ‘discourse’. The latter must be regarded as an attempt to transcend the dualism of words/actions and therefore as a concept which encompasses the dimension of affect. To say that jouissance is not represented at the level of discourse is to reduce discursive analysis erroneously to a purely linguistic undertaking.
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