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Latest — Sep 25, 2023

Imaginary Demand v. Symbolic Law

From Todd McGowan's excellent chapter titled The Psychosis of Freedom: Law in Modernity in Lacan on Psychosis: From Theory to Praxis . There are also times when the social demand seems appealing, such as when it compels everyone to recycle or enjoins acceptance of racial difference. Though one must fight against

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Truth 001

Neville Symington on the truth ins psychoanalysis: Truth is real; it exists. Positivistic thinking has had such a strong influence on our basic assumptions that we tend to identify the real with what we can touch, taste, feel, see or hear. We need to ditch this preconception if we are

Remember this about the Other

In his 2000 article, Melancholy and the Act, Žižek writes: The Lacanian big Other designates not merely the explicit symbolic Rules regulating social interaction but also the intricate cobweb of unwritten, implicit rules. I think this is important to remember.

Lacan on Aristotle

In Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, Lacan says the following about reading Aristotle: There are no doubt a number of difficulties to be found at the level of the text, and it's digressions and in the order of his arguments. But skip over the passages that seem too

Debt Ceiling

Ezra Klein writes (behind NYTimes paywall): Defenders of the debt ceiling will tell you that the limit has been around a long time and has largely operated to the good. America has never defaulted on its debts, but the debt ceiling has often motivated compromise between the two parties. That

Hysteria plus cruelty

David French in his most recent NYTimes column (article is behind the paywall): Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. Well said. Reading this made me think of the concept of ordinary psychosis. I rephrased the sentence to read, ”Delusion plus certainty and cruelty is a recipe for violence.

Purpose, or the lack there of

Craig Mod keeps dropping these wonderful bits of text that are so smart and very well said. When you watch something or read something and it falls flat, it’s because (for me, at least), it’s missing a core “purpose,” may simply be going through the motions of “movie”

The Role of Reading in Analysis

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the patient’s/analysand’s speech can be “read” as if it were text. Writing about this idea Shoshana Felman says, Lacan's view is more radical than that. For the activity of reading is not just the analyst's, it is also the analysand's: interpreting is what takes

Transmitting What Happens in Psychoanalysis

Neville Symington writes: Psychoanalysis is an experience that occurs between two people. It is a deep experience and can only be very inadequately communicated to another person. It is as impossible to convey the sense of it to another person as it is to explain to an eight-year-old child what

How lunatic your life is getting

From Warren Ellis’s Orbital Operations newsletter: Rewatching some episodes of SUCCESSION the other day: there's a bit where Logan Roy tells someone to pencil in a phone call for midnight. It gave me a sudden cold shock of "that used to be me." You don't think about how lunatic