Summary: This article asks what psychoanalysis would look like had it been conceptualized from a Tiresian, as opposed to an Oedipal, perspective.  Using Israeli feminist psychoanalytic theorist, Bracha L. Ettinger’s (2006a) work on the matrixial borderspace, I show how there is an Other axis of sexual difference that conjures-up a transgender sex specific difference of relevance to tran…

The author considers a series of artistic works-Pizarnik’s and Bassnet’s Arbol de Diana, Prokofjev’s music, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Saer’s Nobody Nothing Never, Hölderlin’s Hyperion-applying to modern art the Lacanian concepts of the Thing and the Real. Modern art aims at the Real: referring to Plato’s myth of the cavern, the author states that some art can drive us from illusion toward the real. But this Thing is not something outside in the reality, nor is it the Kantian Thing-in-itself: it is “a thing from the inner space” according to Freud’s conception. In this context, he discusses some classic commentaries on Hölderlin’s Hyperion-namely by Lukacs and Santner-in order to interpret Hölderlin’s work as both a philosophical and sociological farewell to the metaphysics of subjectivity and an attempt to mediate among the meaningless multiplicity of life.

Psychoanalysis seems to have become increasingly concerned with the question of its future. What does it mean to speculate about the future, to be anxious about it, to assess the present on the basis of anticipation of it? Jacques Lacan was someone for whom the future was a critical psychoanalytic concept. Perhaps most famously, his retranslation of Freud’s ‘wo Es war, soll Ich werden’ as ‘Where it was, there shall I become’, gives a sense of Lacan’s desire to effect a certain kind of displacement forward. In this paper I’d like to situate Lacan’s theory of desire in relation to the question of the future of psychoanalysis. Further, Lacan’s critique of the notion of progress is crucial to understanding this anxiety about the future. I will also give a reading of how Freud dealt with these themes, contrasting his 1910 paper, ‘The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy’, and his 1919 paper, ‘Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy’. My hope is that this will provide an opening in an apprehension that, above all else, burdens the next generation of psychoanalysts.

First Part of a Lecture at the Seminar: “Hysteria, Borderline, Anorexia. Discontent of Femininity?”, Rome, October 18-19, 2014

In this text the author reviews the recent history of the preoccupation with the study of consciousness within the field of the cognitive sciences. A general categorization of approaches is provided, running from the neuro-reductionist or objectivist positions to those that leave an explicit place for subjective accounts in the study of conscious experience. Positioning himself in this latter category, the author defines the task of neurophenomenology as the exploration of the modes of circulation between first- and third-person accounts of experience.

This paper treats the failure as well as the paradox of representation staged in Schönberg’s Moses and Aaron in terms of an extended commentary on the Second Commandment. For example, it shows how God is represented in the opera by the very voice that God makes impossible. In addition, it historically situates a critique of the imaginary father of fascism against both Freud and Schönberg’s Moses, with their concern with the insufficiency of the imaginary and with the stuttering occasioned by the “Real,” i.e., by an encounter with that which cannot be represented.

Some Facets of Perversion [1]

Introduction to the Japanese edition of S. Freud’s “Complete Works”

Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man was notoriously problematic, with this most famous patient resisting psychoanalytic interpretation and requiring attention from its practitioners for the duration of his long life. The case study, published in 1918, draws into its orbit the narratives of a neurotic personality and a dying class of Russian aristocracy, along with key theoretical assertions and political posturing (regarding the dissention of former colleagues) on the part of Freud. What the author locates in Freud’s text and the Wolf Man’s later memoirs and interviews is an exclusionary attitude, in both theory and personal reflections, to the very dramatic forces of world history that were to have a considerable impact on the lives of analyst and analysand.

The perspective of classical psychoanalysis is based on the theme of lacking, around which the bombast of hysteric theatre and the grand narrative of the family novel unfold. Contemporary pathologies (panic attacks, food pathologies, such as new forms of addiction, gambling and sex) are more silent, more like short stories, they shed light on a different, excessive aspect, on an anguishing, if not paniky, intrusiveness of an Other beyond measure, with no limits, no rules.