This coming Thursday I will be starting a reading series on Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). I will host this series via Zoom on Thursday nights starting September 24th. We will read the text closely and reference Lacan's work throughout the series. On our first night, we will consider the famous "fort-da" game that … Continue reading Announcing New Beyond the Pleasure Principle – Reading Series
Identification in Lacanian Psychoanalysis – Audio Lecture
As part of the clinical Wednesday series with the DC Lacanian Forum, I gave my third presentation to the group, this time on the theme of identification. I begin with an analysis of identification in Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and look at Borch-Jacobsen's critique of Freud in his controversial The … Continue reading Identification in Lacanian Psychoanalysis – Audio Lecture
The Evolution of Lacan’s the Name-of-the-Father
The Name of the Father is an incredibly vast and important concept in Lacan's teaching. Due to the difficulty and the immensity of the concept, I have my work cut out for me, so I have decided to approach the concept from two angles: the way that the Name-of-the-Father intersects with the three-part Oedipal dialectic developed in Seminar V, and how the transition from the Name to the Names applies to clinical settings.
Freud and Einstein Letters: How Do We End War?
In 1932 Freud and Einstein corresponded in two letters back and forth on the topic of how to end war. The topic was prompted by Einstein and both men held high aspirations, we might even say a utopian dream for the League of Nations to serve as a cosmopolitan consensus-based model for the ending of … Continue reading Freud and Einstein Letters: How Do We End War?
Trauma and the Unity of Thought
In understanding how the mind is represented through art, Freud preferred the metaphor of an abstract impressionistic piece with blotches and non-symmetrical lines. This has to do with the intellectual need to have unity. This is why we read only the whole of what we see, and we miss the small parts. It is what … Continue reading Trauma and the Unity of Thought