Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

Lacan's seminars are a treasure trove of innovative psychoanalytic explorations. In Seminar X, Anxiety , he takes up this Freudian theme and explores a number of interrelated ideas: castration, the difference between the sexes, two different forms of acting out, and what he terms his only original theoretical contribution: the object a and its "various incidences." The object a is described here in detail, especially in relation to Lacan's argument that analysts who are women have a freer relationship to their desire and the countertransferences it spawns than do men...

Lacan's effect in America was dramatic but limited following his 1975 visit. His polemic with ego psychology in Écrits radically changed the way literary critics, notably feminist critics, thought about psychoanalysis, while in those same years-the 1970s and 1980s-American psychoanalysts, taken up with their own reactions to ego psychology, paid him little attention. Yet après coup , looking back at that period, Lacan can be counted among those who contributed importantly to a major shift in our conception of psychoanalytic process: our contemporary sense of acts of reading-including clinical listening-as acts in themselves, rather than as steps toward the interpretive determination of hidden meaning...

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A number of underutilized concepts in Lacan's "Function and Field of Language and Speech in Psychoanalysis" are examined with an eye to rendering them accessible and practicable to analysts from outside the Lacanian tradition. The concepts of empty and full speech are discussed, along with the notions of the subject of the unconscious, and speaking as itself a mode of intersubjectivity. Attention is afforded the future-oriented mode of psychic temporality that Lacan argues pertains to psychoanalytic practice (that of the future anterior tense, the standpoint from which analysands situate themselves in respect of what they "will have been")...

Martin Heidegger's thought deeply influenced both Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, the catalyst they seemed to have been waiting for. For Loewald, Heidegger's ontological centrality of time to Being-in-the-World would bridge to Freud's centrality of transference to the analytic process, thereby operationalizing transference as a prism of time. In revealing the interwoven correlatives of present-past-future, how they bootstrap one another phenomenologically, Loewald also revealed a spiral of recursive meaning (in essence, après-coup) that draws us into the future, "the something more" of existence...

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This paper explores the principal reasons for the exclusion of Lacanian ideas from psychoanalytic training institutes in the United States. The history of Lacan's role in the International Psychoanalytical Association, from which essentially he was expelled, occupies a central place in this story. Significant issues arose also from his practice style and technical innovations, whose rationale remains controversial today. Another major obstacle for the reception of his work is the theoretical framework of Lacanian analysis, so different from that of other schools...

This paper is an investigation into the prominence of hysteria in Lacan's work and the enduring significance of the diagnosis for contemporary practice. Beginning with Lacan's theory of neurosis, the importance of language, and symbolic functions, we will begin to understand why the hysterical symptom is the symptomatic structure par excellence. Lacan lauds hysteria as the neurosis in direct dialogue with a given historical moment, teaching the psychoanalyst where we are in the unfolding struggle between neurosis and civilization...

Critical discourse methodology and a Black feminist lens were used to examine the discourse of contemporary psychoanalysis, specifically to investigate the relationship between language, love, and power. Findings of the analysis include the following. The discourse encourages engagement with linguistic shortcuts, wherein concepts such as oppression and bigotry are used as conduits to discuss intrapsychic experiences. The discourse frames whiteness as the center of experience and marginalizes Blackness, Indigenousness, and other nonwhite perspectives...

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Inspired by an essay by Martin Buber (1950), and then by the work of Ernest Schachtel (1959) on the idea of "embeddedness" and emergence from it, this essay is an account of the role of "distance" or "separateness" in clinical psychoanalytic work. We tend to assume that the capacity to appreciate otherness is always already present. We often lose track of the necessity to "set the other at a distance" (Buber), the prerequisite for emergence from embeddedness in the other. The entire process-i.e., setting the other at a distance and then emerging from embeddedness in the other-must take place over and over again in any treatment, and in both directions: patients must disembed from analysts, but it is just as necessary for analysts to disembed from patients...

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Frantz Fanon's reception within psychoanalysis has been hindered by an interpretive "snag" that vexes discussions of his work and relevance. This "snag" misleadingly situates Fanon's clinical approach as necessarily outside, or antithetical to, treatment as conceived and practiced in the Freudian tradition. As a result, analytic educators, students, and therapists are prone to position Fanon on one side of a conceptual boundary and "analytic neutrality" on the other. This reading is not only misguided but detrimental to the healing potential and continued development of psychoanalysis...

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