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Freud Studies

Lacan as rhetorician

From The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan by Catherine Clément: Lacan was […] a skillful rhetorician capable of translating the terminology of psychoanalysis into a language, other than “Freud.” (p. 44) This statement is a good description of what Lacan was doing in Seminars I-VI. It seems to me that

Vicente Palomera on turning misery into ordinary unhappiness

From the essay What May I Expect From Psychoanalysis? by Vicente Palomera, which I posted about earlier this week. Freud has been variously paraphrased as saying that psychoanalysis could treat neurotic misery, but that it could not treat ordinary human unhappiness. [...] This is a phrase of terrible realism and pessimism,

⚯ Reading Notes | Analysis Terminable and Interminable

1. Freud starts by saying something clearly. Experience has taught us that psycho-analytic therapy —the freeing someone from his neurotic symptoms, inhibitions, and abnormalities of character— is a time-consuming business. I notice he says "psycho-analytic therapy" and not just psychoanalysis. That's interesting. Perhaps Freud does not

Freud, Lacan & the importance of linguistic analysis

On page 47 of the English edition of Seminar X: Anxiety (Amazon), Lacan says, Even from a superficial reading [of Freud], the first thing that leaps to yoru attention is the importance Freud attaches to linguistic analysis. I think psychotherapy often misses the importance of the language, the words, and

Lost Objects

I'm reading Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject: Between Language & Jouissance, and in chapter 7: Object (a): Casuse of Desire, I found this amazing paragraph. Freud does not claim here that the object is, of its very nature, lost in any absolute sense. An object is

Why People Like to Hate Freud

A while back, I did an InForm: Podcast [https://inform.transistor.fm/] about why people enjoy hating Freud so much [https://inform.transistor.fm/episodes/inform-046-why-do-people-enjoy-hating-freud-so-much] . More recently, I found this great bit of text in Janet Malcolm [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Malcolm]'s The Purloined Clinic