Interview with Samuel McCormick, Ph.D (The host of Lectures on Lacan)

Show Notes:
In this episode of The Speaking Body, Neil speaks with Sam McCormick, professor of communication studies at San Francisco State University and host of Lectures on Lacan. What begins as an interview quickly becomes a wide-ranging conversation about Lacan, teaching, fatherhood, clinical practice, and psychoanalysis as a lived experience.Neil and Sam discuss what it means to read Lacan seriously without turning Lacanian language into empty jargon; the difference between knowing how to do something and knowing how to deal with what cannot be mastered; the place of the real, the end of analysis, the role of the analyst, and the importance of uncertainty in clinical work. They also touch on the question of making psychoanalysis more accessible, the meaning of payment and the body in analytic treatment, and the possibility of bringing Lacanian work into broader conversations beyond the clinic and the classroom.

Table of Contents: 

00:00 Welcome and Setup

01:02 Why Sam McCormick

01:57 Scheduling and Ditching the Plan

04:25 Neil Leaves Academia

07:42 Live vs Asynchronous Teaching

10:51 Fatherhood Leads to Lacan

16:25 Knowing How to Deal

18:57 Sam Introduces Lectures

21:37 Building a Global Community

28:13 Seeing Suffering Everywhere

31:45 Psychoanalysis as Experience

33:39 Certainty and Repetition Loops

36:19 Discourse Theory and Mastery

42:45 Neurosis Psychosis and Not Knowing

46:33 Analyst as Little a

48:13 Trash and Sainthood

49:52 When Analysis Ends

50:45 Draining Jouissance

52:57 From Knowing to Desire

55:43 Hysteric Trap of Insight

57:50 Threshold of the Real

01:03:20 Why Teach Lacan

01:05:19 Access and Affordability

01:07:17 Psychoanalysis in Streets

01:09:00 Why the Fee Matters

01:14:56 Teleanalysis and the Body

01:19:37 Being Versus Having

01:22:31 Miller on Existence

01:29:22 Littoral Zone and Borders

01:32:20 Closing and Next Steps