Lacanian psychoanalysis

Typical responses to a confrontation with failures in authority, or what Lacanians term 'the lack in the Other', involve attempts to shore it up. A patient undergoing psychoanalysis eventually faces the impossibility of doing this successfully; the Other will always be lacking. This creates a space through which she can reimagine how she might intervene in her suffering. Similarly, when coronavirus forces us to confront the brute fact of the lack in the Other at the socio-political level, we have the opportunity to discover a space for acting rather than continuing symptomatic behaviour that increasingly fails to work...

The aim of this systematic review is to provide a narrative synthesis of the peer-reviewed literature regarding the role of psychodynamics in community psychology. The authors screened 301 records on the topic, found in major citation databases (Scopus and Web of Science) without time or language restrictions. Ten articles addressing the review question were identified, showing the contributions of interpersonal psychoanalysis, Adlerian psychology, the Tavistock psychodynamic model, and Lacanian psychoanalysis...

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Current psychological research on contemporary medicine, and in particular genetics, often targets the underpinnings of patients' attitudes and behaviors with respect to biomedical knowledge and healthcare practices. But few studies approach these underpinnings as manifestations of the unconscious, while so doing could (in particular) help understand patients' apparent difficulties to understand information, and to subsequently act accordingly (e.g., in making therapeutic decisions, etc.). We hypothesize that Lacan's (1966) remarks ("The place of psychoanalysis in medicine") on the transferential nature of the demand addressed by the patient (or his family) to the doctor can help account for these issues: demand filters medical information received from the practitioner, and thereby motivates subsequent decisions...

Auditory verbal hallucinations have traditionally especially been researched from a form-based approach, with content getting much less attention. In this article, we argue for the importance of looking at content to get a fuller understanding of the hallucinatory experience. Guided by Lacanian psychoanalysis, we conducted a thematic and a narrative analysis on interviews with 10 schizophrenic patients about their hallucinations. We discerned five themes in the data, which were based on Lacanian theory and had to do with existential questions: parenthood and authority, sexuality and relationships, gender identity, life in the light of death , and what does the other want? Furthermore, we added a theme for unclassified content...

The hegemonic place acquired by psychoanalysis in the Argentinean psychotherapeutic field is recognized by friend and foe alike. Nevertheless, the historical process leading to this situation is less well known. In this article, I focus on 2 periods crucial to understanding the unusual scope of Freudian ideas and practices in that country. The first one (1955-1966) corresponds to the professionalization of psychology and was marked by projects such as those of Bleger and Pichon-Rivière. Their ideas involved an alliance between psychology and psychoanalysis within a larger synthesis whose philosophical framework was French existential phenomenology...

The author uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to conceptualize transgender embodiment, focusing on the Lacanian concept "objet a" to analyze how transpeople may be uniquely attuned to a fundamental lack in being endemic to all subjects of language. Objet a is central to the Imaginary register where body images and sex morphology intermingle. The author discusses objet a in relation to the mirror (and the Other's cisgender gaze), anxiety, postsurgical scars, linguistics, and Thing-like feelings of monstrosity (born of transphobia)...

From the 1980s onwards, discourses of risk have continued to grow, almost in ubiquity. Ideas and practices of risk and risk aversion have extended to UK mental health care where services are expected to assess and manage risks, and high-quality clinical assessment has been revised to incorporate risk assessment. This article problematises practices of risk assessment in mental health provision, focussing on the base-rate problem. It presents an analysis of audio recordings of risk assessments completed within a primary care mental health service...

Multiple studies have analyzed the aims, resources, and approaches to undergraduate and graduate history of psychology education in several countries. Argentina is one of the countries with the highest historiographical production in Latin America. However, to date, there are no published studies on the collective debates among professionals, institutions, and associations that were instrumental in the development of the historiography of science becoming a mandatory part of the curriculum in Argentinian psychology programs...

This article studies the links between psychoanalysis and the transition to democracy in Spain. It examines the major changes that characterized the spread of psychoanalysis in the years after Franco's death, in particular the rise of the Lacanian movement, the impact of this phenomenon on the sociocultural sphere and, in broader terms, its role in the re-emergence of psychoanalysis as a cultural object in the country. The article also analyzes factors linked to the history of psychoanalysis during the Franco dictatorship; factors that, together with the arrival of Oscar Masotta and numerous Argentinian analysts in Spain, help explain the new vision of the field that emerged during the transition...

According to Lacan's theory of schizophrenia (as well as other delirious forms of psychosis), under certain conditions the signifying function breaks down, thus turning the schizophrenic individual's world into one in which a number of events become enigmatic and signal him or her. The schizophrenic individual tries to deal with these signs that besiege him or her either by means of an interpretative attitude (a stable delusional mood) or by apathy. These two types of responses correspond with the stereotypical (and mood) processes by which the schizophrenic individual attempts to avoid the distress provoked by the enigmatic desire of the Other, while simultaneously corresponding with psychosomatic processes of the brain organ...

OBJECTIVE: To understand mental health nursing care based on the concept of the subject of the unconscious proposed by Lacan. METHOD: A narrative study was carried out with 19 nurses, chosen based on their theoretical approach or referral by other participants, through the snowball sampling technique. The interviews were carried out in person or digitally, and were recorded and fully transcribed. RESULTS: The analysis was carried out based on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, approaching nursing care as it acts on the body, secretions, and excretions, to distinguish it from the spirit of fineness...

Experience leaves a trace in the nervous system through plasticity. However, the exact meaning of the mnesic trace is poorly defined in current literature. This article provides a historical review of the term trace in neuroscience and psychoanalysis literature, to highlight two relevant aspects: the diachronic and the semantic dimensions. There has been a general interest in diachrony, or a form of evolution of the trace, but its indissociable semantic dimension remains partially disregarded. Although frequently implied, the diachronic and semantic dimensions of the trace are rarely clearly articulated...

This paper explores subjective processes of "Agents of Law" - individuals who the state grants the authority to use violence - and the dissonance stemming from the contradictory demands posed on them as legitimate users of violence despite the societal taboo against violence. A conceptual model will be offered based on two theoretical legs, Lacanian psychoanalysis and political theories of legitimacy. Specifically, psychoanalytic ideas would serve to examine unconscious processes, subject position and various identifications related to the question of "self-legitimacy" of Agents of Law...

This paper studies how subjectivity in capitalist culture can be characterized. Building on Lacan's later seminars XVI, XVII, XVIII, and XIX, the author first outlines Lacan's general discourse theory, which includes four characteristic discourses: the discourse of the master, the discourse of the university, the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of the analyst. Next, the author explores the subjectivity and the mode of dealing with jouissance and semblance, which is entailed in a fifth type of discourse, the capitalist discourse, discussed by Lacan (1972)...

My article takes Robert Burt's piece as a starting point to highlight how a lacanian analysis of law differs from the one Robert Burt (rightly) rejected and from the alternative psychotherapeutic scenario Burt develops. I focus on what I consider to be the novel characteristics of a lacanian analysis, particularly its insistence on the castration of the human subject by language, a castration that problematizes our understanding of "freedom" and "free speech", and, in turn, on Law's own castration...

This article aims to develop a Lacanian approach to bioethics. Point of departure is the fact that both psychoanalysis and bioethics are practices of language, combining diagnostics with therapy. Subsequently, I will point out how Lacanian linguistics may help us to elucidate the dynamics of both psychoanalytical and bioethical discourse, using the movie One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sophocles' tragedy Antigone as key examples. Next, I will explain the 'topology' of the bioethical landscape with the help of Lacan's three dimensions: the imaginary, the symbolical and the real...

This paper questions the function and subsequent affect of the trick within everyday life, emphasizing its dependence on visuality and misrecognition. It pays specific attention to the psychoanalytic implications of trickery and identity of 'trickster' in terms of environment, emphasizing the theories of transition and transformation indicative of the methodologies pertaining to the Object Relations School of psychoanalytic theory and the ocular theories of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The event of the trick is considered with regard to visuality, appetite and satisfaction, leading to a discussion of what the trick represents within the Winnicottian frame of transitional phenomena, of expectation referencing Bollas's transformative experience, and of Lacanian méconnaisance...

The article explores the political derivations of psychoanalytical discourse on femininity, starting from the impact of Lacanian positions on feminist thought. The consideration of a dimension of absolute otherness of female sexuality, irreducible to masculinity and to a phallic domain--not-all phallic--theorized by Lacan in the 1970s, opens up many complex issues for the politics of women's liberation. It is a matter of living the absolute difference without either radically excluding it from the speakable or letting it be part of a romantic imagery of the otherness that perpetuates sexual hierarchy and, consequently, female subordination...

The notion of structure is found to be used in a great number of theories, scientific research programs and world views. However, its uses and definitions are as diverse as the objects of the scientific disciplines where it can be found. Without trying to recreate the structuralist aspiration from the mid XX century, which believed to have found in this notion a common transdisciplinary language, I discuss a specific aspect of this concept that could be considered a constant in different perspectives. This aspect refers to the location of the notions of structure as boundaries in the different scientific theories...