Affect is a high-stakes topic in psychoanalysis, but there has long been a misperception that Lacan neglected affect in his writings. We encounter affect at the beginning of any analysis in the form of subjective suffering that the patient hopes to alleviate. How can psychoanalysis alleviate such suffering when analytic practice itself gives rise to a wide range of affects in the patient’s relationship to the analyst? Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work, is the first book to (...) explore Lacan’s theory of affect and its implications for contemporary psychoanalytic practice. In it, Colette Soler discusses affects as diverse as the pain of existence, hatred, ignorance, mourning, sadness, "joyful knowledge," boredom, moroseness, anger, shame, and enthusiasm. Soler’s discussion culminates in a highlighting of so-called enigmatic affects: anguish, love, and the satisfaction related to the end of an analysis. Lacanian Affects provides a unique and compelling account of affect that will prove to be an essential text for psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists, and social workers. (shrink)

Unquenched desire, the dividing up of the drives, repetition, and symptom are the keywords for the effects that the unconscious, as deciphered by Freud, has on the body. Harmony is not on the agenda, but rather the discordance, unlinking, and arrogance of cynical jouissances. It seems that the discourse of capitalism is today increasing their deleterious consequences - with all of these demonstrative suicides, but also suicides as diverse as those of terrorists, Tibetan monks, those beleaguered by the capitalist enterprise, (...) and all the hopeless of our time. Hence the question that Lacan posed concerning the possible "humanisation" of this denatured animal, about whom Freud did not hesitate to say that he is a wolf to man, even though he has always made community. What will the psychoanalyst say about possible solutions, he whose act excludes the call to norms of any kind? Humanisation? is the 2013-2014 volume of the annual seminar held by the author at the Clinical College of the Lacanian Field in Paris. (shrink)

L’antiphilosophie de Lacan y est examinée, notamment comme l’interprétation analytique du discours universitaire, dans lequel le philosophe qui s’avance sous la bannière de la quête rationnelle de la vérité, ment sur ses fins, qui ne sont pas de vérité, mais qui touchent à la jouissance. Il s’agit de faire valoir, à partir des indications de Freud et de Lacan, une affinité de l’antiphilosophie avec la dévalorisation de la pensée. La deuxième partie de l’article interroge la critique lacanienne des théories philosophiques (...) de la perception. Suivant en cela la thèse de Lacan, l’auteur montre que le rapport à la réalité en général, et à la perception en particulier, tombe sous l’incidence de l’inconscient. (shrink)

Has Jacques Lacan's impact on psychoanalysis really been assessed? His formulation that the Freudian unconscious is "structured like a language" is well-known, but this was only the beginning. There was then the radically new thesis of the "real unconscious". Why this step? Searching for the Ariadne's thread that runs throughout Lacan's ever-evolving teaching, this book illuminates the questions implicit in each step, and sheds new light on his revisions and renewals of psychoanalytic concepts. In tracing these, the author brings out (...) their consequences for the clinic, and in particular, for the subject, for symptoms, for affects, and for the aims of treatment itself. The last section of the book examines the political import of these developments. If many analysts since Freud have dreamt of reinventing psychoanalysis, the author shows the ways in which Lacan succeeded in this reinvention. (shrink)

Jouissance commands as it induces differentiated subjective effects, and its characteristics on the man's and woman's sides have repercussions, especially at the level of the differential clinic of love.

The author recounts her experiences in the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne's (ECF) cartel of the pass. She describes the two crises of 1990 and 1996 with respect to the discourse of the pass that involved analysts' interpretation of Lacan's views on transference.

Towards Identity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter addresses the theme of identification and identity in the psychoanalytic clinic as elaborated by Jacques Lacan over the course of his teaching. In psychoanalysis the subject who is summoned "to speak himself", is by definition lacking in identity. His question is "What am I?" but, as he is only represented by his words, his being is "always elsewhere", within other words that are yet to come. Thus a paradox: one seeks via speech the identity (...) of a being who, through his speech, is not identifiable. Yet the fact remains, he has a body, and he is riveted to sufferings that psychoanalysis, from Freud to Lacan, identified, which are not accidental, which we call repetition and symptom, and which shift the question of identity, because a One, real, is at play in them. Towards Identity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter will be key reading for the study and research of Lacanian psychoanalysis and all practitioners interested in Lacan's teaching, as well as other discourses such as philosophy, art, literature and history. (shrink)