LACAN, MORTALITY, LIFE AND LANGUAGE

CLINICAL & CULTURAL EXPLORATIONS

This book takes examples from the psychoanalytic clinic as well as cultural references ranging from ancient Persia to London’s Theatreland in order to elaborate the question of subjectivity, reality and truth from a psychoanalytic perspective. In the era of hyperreality, the agency of branding and marketing strategies have overshadowed the reality of a human being, his true nature and agency. The book explores the question of the reality and mortality of a subject through a Lacanian prism, from the theorising of analytical subjectivity that starts with the Freudian Oedipal myth more than a century ago to the futurist aspiration to fabricate human beings according to some ideal model.

Lacanian Psychoanalysis from Clinic to Culture

Using examples from cinema, artificial intelligence, and clinical and cultural references, the book covers major topics within the field, including dreams, the mirror phase, psychosis, hysteria, the position of the analyst, the drive, supervision and the symptom. Each is set within the context of our technologically oriented, market-based society and complemented with empirical vignettes. The book’s final section examines contemporary society and radicalization.

Analytic Agora (Issue 1)

The Analytic Agora is a peer-reviewed psychoanalytic journal, published annually, which aims at promoting awareness of psychoanalysis – as a placeholder – in social bonds, with the view to setting up an open but critical space for debates between different schools of psychoanalytic thought, outside the dogmatism of regulatory bodies and partisan training organisations. The Editor Advisory Group consists of Berjanet Jazani, Ian Parker, Gwion Jones, Carol Owens, Stefan Marianski, Nicholas Bayley and Daniel Bristow.

JCFAR ISSUE 31

‘Thoughts on the 2020-21 Covid-19 Pandemic: A Moment of Interruption’ is a piece that has appeared in JCFAR 31. In this paper, the effect of the pandemic on the clinic of psychoanalysis has been explored. Using clinical examples as well as a reference to the work of cinema, we have asked whether working remotely during this period has treated the narratives around pain, loss, and grief at the level of the subject of the unconscious, whose reality and subjectivity are invested in a mortal body. While 2020 was the year of ‘nobody knows’, or perhaps the year of ‘no, body knows’, we hope that psychoanalysis continued to speak to the real body which was physically absent from the consulting rooms.

JCFAR ISSUE 29

‘A Resident of the World’ is a piece that appeared in JCFAR 29. In this paper, the question of “history” is approached from two different perspectives: the history as every individual’s description of life and the subjective history as the history of the speaking being (parlêtre) (Lacan, 1975). The former concerns any individual(s) in singular or collective form, while the latter focuses on the particularity of each subject’s self-created history. How certain life events can mark a subjective interpretation, leading to/not to a symptom formation.