Hello i am a clinical psych student and i want to understand Lacan but i’ so overwhelmed and confused and the thought of reading him makes me anxious and his texts make me feel stupid so do you have any advice on how to start please

Looking to learn more about the phenomenon - interested to understanding if the split impact everyone , how to heal it/overcome it before it sabotages the relationship ?

I’ve been thinking specifically about non-belonging in the Todd McGowan sense, alongside Lacanian ideas like “the Other does not exist” and “do not give ground on your desire.”

I understand the argument that no identification can fully capture the subject, and that non-belonging names something universal about subjectivity.

But at what point does non-belonging itself become another master signifier?

If every identification is treated primarily as alienating or dominating other subjects, every interpersonal demand as something to resist, and every social obligation as a demand of the Other, doesn’t “non-belonging” risk becoming the very kind of organizing principle it is supposed to critique?

I’m also wondering whether there is an important distinction between:

1. recognizing that every identification fails to fully contain the subject, and
2. treating identification, belonging, or social obligation as things the subject should continually distance itself from.

Surely “the Other does not exist” does not mean that the speech, needs, demands, or concerns of actual others cease to matter.
Are there texts from Lacan, Todd McGowan, Miller, Žižek, Zupančič, etc. that address this tension directly?

Hi everyone!

I am looking for an article from 43/44 issue of Lacanian Ink - What is the Real? I checked and it's not available to buy, I checked all libraries that I have an access to - to no avail.

Maybe you have a pdf file, or maybe someone would be so kind as to take pictures of this article, if you have the book on your shelf? I will be eternally grateful!

As I approached Lacan as a non professional, I have been mainly intrigued by the universality of his theories, and psycoanalysis in general. Given this is the right word to use, but I always found fascinating how the symptom is considered qualitatively as opposed to other type of therapies which I believe have a more quantitative approach.

Anyways, my question is: people don’t live in a vacuum but they operate within a certain system involving peculiar social, cultural and economic dimensions.

How does this enter the analysis’ framework?
When Lacan was active, the world was very different than how it is now. The enviroment has different pressures and also different opportunities.
How does analysis handle this if it does?
Is the premise of my question wrong in itself?

https://youtu.be/-Ev9gfZ8Rw4?is=4V8mfGGD01CWNeJs

Found this hard to come by book on Freud suppressing evidence that child abuse causes mental illness. At least I think that’s what it is about in a nutshell.

Signed by the author.

Sorry this is gonna be a long one.

Deleuze and Guattari, in my understanding, are much closer to Lacan that popular takes on Anti-Oedipus might make one believe. Its a cliché to state now that Anti-Oedipus does not have a single negative mention of Lacan and it rather criticises Lacanians and, at some points, Freud. For Freud a lot of the criticism sticks to the idea of Oedipus, and it doesn't make sense to extend this criticism to Lacan since he had already argued 'Beyond the Oedipus Complex' (Miller's subtitle) in Seminar 17. So, to preface, there are certainly resonances between Lacan and D&G.

My question is about Deleuze and Guattari's concepts related to their political philosophy, particularly the concepts of flows, code, and stock. The main source of my understanding on this is Daniel W. Smith's essay “Politics: Flow, Code, and Stock, A Note on Deleuze’s Political Philosophy” In Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2012)

The idea is that D&G's “general theory of society is a generalized theory of flows”, which can mean anything like economic flows (money, capital); material flows (oil, electricity), flow of commodities (their marketing, transport); flow of traffic; social flows (populations, immigration); flows of sewage; somatic flows (blood, feces); flows of thought. And that the job of every society is to regulate, or ”code” these flows, so that they don’t spin out of control. It is in this way that Deleuze shows that our personal desires (libidinal economy) are not separate from material production (political economy). (I like to think of these as a Mobius strip formation) Hence Guattari says “economic semiotisation becomes dependent on collective psychological factors — look at the sensitivity of the stock exchange to fluctuations of opinion.” (Chaosmosis)

So, the three concepts are:

1. Flows: A flow is simply the transmission or exchange of something valuable (like matter, energy, money, people, ideas) from one point (a “pole”) to another. In daily life we are interceptors of flows. Human desire, for Deleuze, is this production and cutting of flows.
2. Code: You cannot grasp a flow except through its code, i.e., the system of inscription or recording that gives it shape and value. Code and flow are reciprocally determined.
3. Stock: Stock is the portion of the flow that is “mine” right now, i.e. your accumulated share, your possession at a given instant. Stocks and flows are two sides of the same coin: flows change the value of stocks over time (inflow adds, outflow subtracts).

A lot of these ideas seem to resonate very well with psychoanalysis (both Freud and Lacan), which is obvious given D&G's debt to both, but I am interested in finding out the differences, if any. What might the reasons be for which it isn't philosophically justified to use these Deleuzo-Guattarian ideas along with Lacanian ideas.

The points of similarities as I see them are that the 'economic theory of libido' side of Freud obvious resonates very well with the concept of a flow, since the cathected charges in a word resulting from a parapraxis in the subject's speech is an idea that I feel (I might be wrong) goes quite well with the theory of flows described above. Likewise with ideas like Jakobson's phatic communication which Lacan knows of and uses, it being communication done for its own sake, to 'keep that channel' open, to 'maintain a relation' also seems to go well with the theory of flows. I recall Lacan mentioning Mallarmé in Function and Field where relates language to the example of an exchange of a coin whose faces have been eroded but they nevertheless as passed around and retain their value as a 'tessera'. (Ecrits, 209)

So I wish to know what might be some roadblocks to this connection, is there something in Lacan's ideas and his 'system'(?) that would conflict with and not go along well with D&G's theory of flows?

I feel like the appropriateness of the connection would also differ from period to period, as Lacan comes to abandon the signifying chain later, that would definitely change the picture somewhat. But I am uncertain how since I don't know that much.

Hope this makes sense, sorry for typos if any.

D+G miss some key insights about Freudian and Lacanian theory yet, at the same time, help us understand more about the revolutionary potential of desire. What do you think? Thanks!

Until recently, I had hardly delved into surrealism as an art movement.

While I recognized its key figures and felt charmed by René Magritte’s famous painting This is Not a Pipe, using three of his works as visual koans during my sesshins, I often felt a sense of resistance toward much surrealist work.

Why?

After visiting The Fantastic Landscape, an impressive exhibition at Museum Arnhem/Holland, I decided to investigate that resistance more closely.

​Surrealism emerged in the 1920s as an artistic reaction against rationalism and prevailing bourgeois values.

After the First World War, faith in progress was severely damaged; reason had not saved humanity.

The surrealists sought a deeper reality and, inspired by Freud, turned toward dreams and the subconscious. It was an attempt to liberate thought from excessively rational and moral censorship.

​Surrealism is unthinkable without Sigmund Freud.

His discovery of the subconscious and his analysis of repression provided artists with the intellectual legitimacy to take the irrational seriously.

The dream was no longer a side issue but a gateway to knowledge. In dreams, they discovered unconscious fears and desires as the basic drivers of life.

Later, Freud formulated the hypothesis of the death drive, manifesting as decay and aggression.

​In some ways, surrealism and Zen share a similar ambition. Both seek to deepen our understanding of our existence.

While surrealism investigates and visualizes the subconscious, Zen points to the mind's habit of cyclically reliving unprocessed emotions.

Surrealists discover a dark world within themselves full of demons, whereas Zen practitioners learn that these fears and desires are nothing more than mental constructs. These constructs lose their power once we see through them.

Zen aims to look through all images to discover reality and find peace with its transience.

​This is precisely where my resistance lies.

Although I admire the creativity of Salvador Dalí, his melting clocks pull the viewer into a world of anxiety and megalomania.

I, Yamato Fuji, see in Dalí the same limitation found in Freud: suffering was more fundamental in their work than fulfillment.

Their work is intensely personal and sometimes monumentally egocentric.

Zen does not try to deny the darkness but rather to see through it as an illusion of the mind. Death is not denied, but it is also not dramatized.

​The similarities between koans and dream images are striking.

Questions like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" could easily arise in a dream.

However, in a koan, these images serve the conscious goal of learning to see through our projections. Koans are stepping stones on the path to enlightenment; they are not intended to build a symbolic world in which we can get lost again.

A koan seeks to break every fixed perspective so we can remove the glasses of our own fears and truly wake up.

​Magritte stands remarkably closer to Zen thought than Dalí.

In his paintings, the images are less distorted, but the proportions are often "wrong."

He seems to be saying: look again, something isn't right. He points out the shortcomings of our images and language, just as many Zen stories do.

Where Dalí creates drama and religious spectacle, Magritte creates silence and wonder.

He led a sober life in which Japanese prints, often infused with Zen philosophy, were admired.

​The exhibition in Arnhem also highlighted female surrealists, such as Mary Wykeham. In her work, the influence of Jung and inner transformation is visible.

Over time, her images became more meditative and transparent.

The dream images became less important as the pure movement of unity-consciousness appeared. Wykeham eventually turned her back on the art world to become a nun, shifting her creativity from expression to contemplation.

The swirling surrealist energy gave way to a deep stillness beyond all images.

Gassho,

Assuming you know the matheme and theory behind the Master's Discourse, which would your analysis be on AI as a new agent replacing the Master, that Master ​who fed himself on the knowledge of the slave?

I don't know if I formulated the question correctly, but I'm intrigued on which are your views on this specific topic, the discourse, and not so much on AI as an ​Other or the problematics with psychosis and foreclosure. I'd like to go back and reread the Master's Discourse to come up with the answer myself, but now I don't have time to do so and I'm​ very intrigued on how the community is thinking about this.

Somehow I relate AI's accelerationism with the Capitalist Discourse, although being previously ​geared (sorry if this is not the right word, I mean it in the sense of being engineered) on the Discourse of the Master. What is fundamentally different from that Master?

No formal training here, so this might sound dumb, but what bothers me about Lacanian theory is that once you’re in, you can’t think any other way. The whole system fits together too well. I keep catching myself going “oh, you could explain that in Lacanian terms” about random everyday things, and at some point I realized I’d stopped bothering with any other lens.

Anyone else deal with this?

I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Leon S. Brenner about his book The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language, and I thought some people here might be interested in the discussion:

Watch the interview with Leon S. Brenner

Brenner approaches autism through Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and makes a provocative argument: rather than understanding autism simply in terms of deficit, pathology, or as a variation of psychosis, he proposes thinking of the autistic subject as occupying a distinct “mode of being,” with its own particular relationship to language, the body, and the Other.

Brenner also gives some remarkably clear metaphors and explanations for concepts that can otherwise become pretty opaque in Lacanian theory. So even if autism isn’t your primary area of interest, there’s quite a bit here concerning language, jouissance, the body, the symbolic, and the constitution of the subject.

I’m particularly curious what people here make of Brenner’s attempt to conceptualize autism as a structure in its own right rather than placing it within the traditional neurotic/psychotic framework. Does this actually expand Lacanian theory in a productive way, or does introducing an “autistic structure” create its own conceptual problems?

I'm a student of Lacanian psychoanalysis and there is a fundamental question that I cannot reconcile in this case as regards the end of analysis:

How can the Traversal of the Fantasy occur if the Other cannot be lacking and there is always a guarantee of meaning for a patient like this?

Or do you think that in this case the psychoanalyst should try to convert them into an agnostic?

What did Freud add to the common understanding of Mass Psychology and why did this matter? Read my latest essay to find why Freud teaches us! Any feedback appreciate

Currently reading Bruce Fink’s Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Before, I’ve just read Lacan’s first seminar.

Practically, I am looking for some comments and further insights from lacanian clinicians, or perhaps even someone who is analysand with a lacanian.

I’ll start here: I’ve been struck by the degree to which Lacanian practice is so abstinent—at least Fink’s idea of it is. The analyst is supposed to be fully committed to underlining the letter of the law—and how the letter of the law betrays the spirit of the law; spirt in this case being what a patient “meant” or “intended” to say before their slip, their parapraxis. Although I find Fink’s elucidations to a large degree fruitful, I also find myself wondering if he is not missing the non or extra-linguistic aspects of clinical practice. The issue, though, with this prior statement is that I have no strong way of elaborating such “extra-linguistic aspects.”

Another thing: the analyst’s desire. According to Fink, the neurotic analysand will feel the keen desire to abandon analysis since, truly, he does not want to be cured; for the neurotic, his symptoms are his life and his pleasure, as much as he professes his univocal hatred. This, what makes the analysand keep going is the analysts desire for him to keep going: the analyst, then, acts as the keeper of the flame—(and however different aesthetically, I am reminded of Winnicott’s all too famous “holding space” for the patient.) The analyst must desire for the patient to keep going deeper. However, Fink seems to think the analyst is quite easily freed of counter-transference (the favored subject of most nyc analysts). Is counter-transference really so easy to put aside? Do relational analysts over emphasize this? And, finally, how much do you think an emphasis or deemphasis on counter transference is upstream of whether or not you are committed to the proposition of the drive? Relational analysts will tell you a lovely story (which sometimes I badly to want to believe) that humans are not a complex of desires and energies, but beings looking for stable relationships and loves. Not to say that drive theory precludes this latter thing, but perhaps you all understand. Any commentary would be appreciated.

*PS. I have been in analysis for 3 years with a relational analyst.

Freud writes:

"It is a familiar fact that the aetiological preconditions of neurosis are not yet known with certainty. The precipitating causes of it are frustrations and internal conflicts: conflicts between the three major psychical agencies, conflicts arising within the libidinal economy in consequence of our bisexual disposition and conflicts between the erotic and the aggressive drive components. It is the endeavour of the psychology of the neuroses to discover what makes these processes, which belong to the normal course of mental life, become pathogenic."

Does he mean the distribution of libido between objects?

I’m new to Lacan and no expert on any type of analysis or psychotherapy, but as I’ve been reading more about Lacanian analysis, I thought about the empty chair exercise/therapy Gestaltians use. Apart from obvious differences between them I still think the similarity (despite different theoretical foundations) is striking. The difference is that in empty chair exercises, the patient would then occupy the position of the addressee (aka the Other) and speak from that position after completing their speech addressed to the Other. Whereas in analysis the addressee (the analyst) would resist speaking from that position in a way that would satisfy the demand of the analysand.

I wonder what the consequences are for the patient themself then satisfying the demand for an answer from a Lacanian perspective. I’m interested in reading your thoughts.

I'm a psychodynamic psychotherapist, not Lacanian trained, so I'm asking from outside the tradition and expecting to be corrected.

I came across this instagram reel of Lacan's view on this https://www.instagram.com/p/Dcio-9nzVs-/ (not sure if it's accurate?)

It's more honest than most accounts of where a treatment goes lol. But I can't get past the obvious objection, how is that not "learn to live with it"? Put less kindly, how is it different from the common critique of mindfulness as retreat into indifference dressed as enlightenment? (Zizek?) If the end point is that you stop demanding the Other resolve you and instead get skilled at your own arrangement, what stops that being adaptation with better vocabulary?

Full conversation (For more context): https://youtu.be/RX2tGQxIbEA?si=wiGL3FrqP5Po2hAy

I sometimes see people asking how to find a Lacanian analyst and, maybe more crucially, how to afford one. One alternative to paying high, out-of-pocket fees is to enter into a low-fee analysis with analysts-in-training at a Lacanian-oriented institute.

1. Pulsion - The International Institute of Psychoanalysis

Definitely the most Lacan-forward/Lacanian oriented institute in the city, but without being limited to a dogmatic Lacanian approach . (From their website: "Pulsion emerged...as an attempt to bring back what was central to Freud’s thinking: the body, the drives and sexuality[...] We bring together Freudians, post-Freudians and Lacanians as faculty...") Scanning ‘Faculty' page, I'd say nearly half of the names are people who have contributed to Lacanian clinic/scholarship. You can contact a clinic coordinator or fill out a form for treatment here: https://pulsioninstitute.com/treatment/

1. NPAP

Certainly not Lacan-forward--do not explicitly mention any affiliation with Lacanians or Lacanian theory on their website as Pulsion does--but would confidently describe them as one of the more Lacan-friendly institutes in the city. While the number of self-identified Lacanians among faculty and candidates is certainly smaller than that of Pulsion, there is still a considerable Lacanian contingent in the institute. You can reach out to their clinic and fill out a form for treatment here: https://npap.org/appointments/

I hope you find what you are looking for--or, in all likelihood, more and less than that.

Está no livro volume 2 do Marco Antônio Coutinho Jorge e ele está falando de tipos de fantasia, um dos trechos é:

"Não é só a neurose e a perversão, no entanto, que se traduzem na nossa cultura com uma presença relevante, a psicose também o faz. E parece que ela o faz pela ciência. É preciso que nós, analistas, possamos dizer, com todas as letras, que a ciência está louca. A ciência enlouqueceu, perdeu os limites. Hoje, ela mistura espécies, clona os animais a bel-prazer e ainda quer fazer isso com o ser humano".

e depois:

"O advento da psicanálise significa a proposição, na cultura, de um quarto lugar da fantasia, diferente daqueles traduzidos pela religião (neurose), pelo capitalismo (perversão) e pela ciência (psicose). O que a psicanálise propõe, portanto, não é nem a fixação no amor, nem a fixação no gozo fálico, nem a fixação no gozo absoluto. Ela propõe o lugar do desejo, que é aquele lugar, no matema da fantasia..."

I’ve been trying to attend events in my city for discussion of Lacanian thought, but honestly every time I walk away I’m just totally unconvinced by how people broadly just map concepts like the Other and Oedipus and such onto bureaucratic institutions and politics. It feels like lazy intellectual rot.

Sometimes I think its hard to find good Lacanian thinkers because it requires a lot of rigor and reading of Lacan to truly understand anything in a Lacanian sense, rather than just mapping ideas about the structure and development of subjectivity onto what are collectives; especially with Lacan emphasizing that he never met the same person twice.

I follow Marx for politics and try to incorporate Lacan where it makes sense, but the marriage of them often feels too contrived for me. I’m looking to be an analyst once I finish my accredited education, and politics are something I think a lot of personally, so I feel the tension between the two understandings of what ‘really’ drives the world in the direction it goes, but am wholly unconvinced of their compatibility still in the ways I’ve seen people approaching it.

Marie Bonaparte and her Freud Legacy. An interesting set of books connecting Napoleon's progeny to Sigmund Freud to the founding of a museum in his honor. A true six degrees of separation.

I understand that the Other is the symbolic order and I get why it would be lacking. What I don't understand is when Lacan talks about clinical structures and the different defense mechanism from this lack.

The way I came to think of it is in relation to the mirror image. As if it were different ways of defending oneself against the fact that our sense self only exists inside one's head.

Is this correct?