After Lacan

Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious

By Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, Lucie Cantin
Edited by Robert Hughes, and Kareen Ror Malone

Subjects: Psychology
Series: SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture
Paperback : 9780791454800, 208 pages, October 2002
Hardcover : 9780791454794, 208 pages, October 2002

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Table of contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Dialectic of Theory and Clinic
Robert Hughes and Kareen Ror Malone

Chapter 1: The Trauma of Language
Lucie Cantin

Chapter 2: The Jouissance of the Other and the Sexual Division in Psychoanalysis
Willy Apollon

Chapter 3: The Signifier
Danielle Bergeron

Chapter 4: The Work of the Dream and Jouissance in Treatment of the Psychotic
Danielle Bergeron

Chapter 5: From Delusion to Dream
Lucie Cantin

Chapter 6: The Letter of the Body
Willy Apollon

Chapter 7: The Symptom
Willy Apollon

Chapter 8: From Symptom to Fantasy
Willy Apollon

Chapter 9: Perverse Features and the Future of the Drive in Obsessional Neurosis
Danielle Bergeron

Chapter 10: Perversion and Hysteria
Lucie Cantin

Chapter 11: The Fate of Jouissance in the Pervert-Hysteric Couple
Lucie Cantin

Chapter 12: Violence in Works of Art, or, Mishima, from the Pen to the Sword
Danielle Bergeron

List of Contributors

Index

The authors use examples from their own clinical practice to explain the development of Lacanian theory.

Description

After Lacan combines abundant case material with graceful yet sophisticated theoretical exposition in order to explore the clinical practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Focusing on the groundbreaking clinical treatment of psychosis that Gifric (Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d'Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles) has pioneered in Quebec, the authors discuss how Lacanians theorize psychosis and how Gifric has come to treat it analytically. Chapters are devoted to the general concepts and key terms that constitute the touchstones of the early phase of analytic treatment, elaborating their interrelations and their clinical relevance. The second phase of analytic treatment is also discussed, introducing a new set of terms to understand transference and the ethical act of analysis in the subject's assumption of the Other's lack. The concluding chapters broaden discussion to include the key psychic structures that describe the organization of subjectivity and thereby dictate the terms of analysis: not just psychosis, but also perversion and obsessional and hysterical neurosis.

Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin are Training Analysts at Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d'Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles (Gifric). Apollon is the coeditor (with Richard Feldstein) of Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics, also published by SUNY Press. Robert Hughes is Assistant Professor of English at Augusta State University. Kareen Ror Malone is Professor of Psychology at State University of West Georgia and coeditor (with Stephen R. Friedlander) of The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists, also published by SUNY Press.

Reviews

"Although this is a dense book, and difficult reading for one not well versed in the language of Lacanian thought, it is also a very rich clinical book, well worth the investment of wading through the language. If one is willing to immerse one's self in the language, and through this language engage with the conceptualizations, one then encounters the very rich clinical vignettes in ways that vitally enliven and illuminate this very difficult work we do." — The American Journal of Psychoanalysis

"An increasing number of clinicians find themselves interested in Lacan but do not have much clinical literature to see how the theory can be applied beyond the academy and into their own consulting rooms. This book addresses that lack. It is one of the best I have read and certainly the most complete in terms of including clinical examples of adequate length and sophistication." — Mardy S. Ireland, member of the Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association and Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California

"Case histories hold an inherent fascination, I think, and in this book they are no exception. They offer a concrete way of grasping the concepts, but they also give a sense of, and a feeling for, the suffering individual. After Lacan shows how suffering is alleviated by the treatment described. In itself, this would suffice to justify reading on. But the conceptual clarity and the elegance of the exposition equally solicit the reader's continued attention. This is a book that many have been waiting for." — Juliet Flower MacCannell, author of Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious and The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject