Abstract

From the second half of the twentieth century to the end, the blossoming interest of the Mental health professionals on the phenomenon of boredom increased to unimagined levels. Particularly, the psychoanalysts riddled the journals’ pages with titles such as those by well-known psychoanalyst Martin Wangh “Boredom in psychoanalytic perspective”, and “Some psychoanalytic observation on boredom”. However, many psychoanalysts were heirs of the father of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. This was also the case of the French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The present chapter aims to develop the notion of boredom and its relationship with psychoanalysis by taking into account many of its roots in the past century. Particularly, we consider boredom is a symptom of other conditions. Therefore, to work on this concept from a psychoanalytical perspective, we will mainly follow parts of Lacan and Freud’s works, who tackled the complex question, and some clinical vignettes.