Reviews
Feature

2023

Book Review Essay: Born to Sacrifice: Our Unfailing Preoccupation with Being Good, on “The Analyst’s Vulnerability” by Karen Maroda

Adriano Bugliani

Review of The Analyst’s Vulnerability: Impact on Theory and Practice, by Karen Maroda, Routledge , 2022, 226 pp.

2023

Book Review Essay: The Limits and Gifts of Psychoanalysis, on “On Freud” by Elvio Fachinelli

Holden Rasmussen

Review of On Freud, by Elvio Fachinelli, The MIT Press, 2022, 152 pp.

2023

Book Review Essay: “Growing Through the Erotic Transference: An Analysand’s Journey” by Frances H. Moore

Nicolle Zapien

Review of Growing Through the Erotic Transference: An Analysand’s Journey, Frances H. Moore, Routledge, 2023 84 pp.  

2023

Book Review Essay: “Disorganisation and Sex” by Jamieson Webster

Isabel Millar

Review of Disorganization and Sex by Jamieson Webster, Divided Publishing , 2022, 240 pp.

2023

Book Review Essay: Reason in Revolt: Freud Reopens the Radical Enlightenment, on “Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism” by Léon Rozitchner

Daniel Tutt

Review of Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism, by Léon Rozitchner, BRILL , 2022, 524 pp.

2022

Book Review Essay: Shuffling with Wittgenstein, on “Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy – Thinking Through His Philosophical Investigations” by Rupert Read

Hannes Nykänen

Review of Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy – Thinking Through His Philosophical Investigations by Rupert Read, Routledge, 2020 404 pp.   

2022

Book Review Essay: “Real Love: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Religion, Society” by Duane Rousselle

Mark Gerard Murphy

Review of Real Love: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Religion, Society by Duane Rousselle, Atropos Press, 2021 154 pp.   

2022

Book Review Essay: The Ecstasies of Deconstruction, on “The Deconstruction of Sex” by Jean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh

Benedetta Todaro

Review of Deconstruction of Sex by Jean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh, Duke University Press 2021 120 pp.

2022

Book Review Essay: Through the Looking-Glass Darkly, on “Jouissance: Sexuality, Suffering, and Satisfaction” by Darian Leader

David Lichtenstein

Review of Jouissance: Sexuality, Suffering, and Satisfaction by Darian Leader, Routledge, 2021 138 pp.

2022

Book Review Essay: “Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations” by Richard Frankel and Victor J. Krebs

Nicolle Zapien

Review of  Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations by Richard Frankel and Victor Krebs, Routledge, 2021 286 pp.

2021

Book Review Essay: “A Search for Clarity: Science and Philosophy in Lacan’s Oeuvre” by Jean-Claude Milner

Frank Ruda

Review of Milner, Jean-Claude. A Search for Clarity: Science and Philosophy in Lacan’s Oeuvre (Translated by Ed Pluth). Northwestern University Press, 2020. Pp. 160

2021

Book Review Essay: “Discourse Ontology: Body and the Construction of a World, from Heidegger through Lacan” by Christos Tombras

Ed Pluth

Review of Tombras, Christos. Discourse Ontology: Body and the Construction of a World, from Heidegger through Lacan. Palgrave, 2021. Pp. 232.

2021

Response to Ed Pluth’s Review of “Discourse Ontology: Body and the Construction of a World from Heidegger”

Christos Tombras

Dear Sir, I was honoured to see my Discourse Ontology (2019) reviewed in the pages of your Journal (Pluth, 2021). As Pluth notes, Lacan was keen to avoid any kind of idealinguisterie, and I would find it very difficult to disagree on this. In fact, I also say so myself, for instance when I speak of Lacan’s “increasingly intense polemic against traditional metaphysics and ontology … [and…

2021

Book Review Essay: “Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan” by Sergio Benvenuto

Emma Lieber

Review of Benvenuto, Sergio. Conversations with Lacan: Seven Lectures for Understanding Lacan. New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 198

2021

Book Review Essay: “The Writing Cure” by Emma Lieber

Calum Neil

Review of Lieber, Emma. The Writing Cure. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. 160.

2021

A Response to Calum Neill’s Review of “The Writing Cure”

Emma Lieber

Dear Calum Neill, Thank you for reading my book, even though, as you point out, you don’t know me, or know why I wrote it. Given that premise of non-knowledge, what we have at our disposal is writing, and reading. And so I would like to respond to your review as a reader, to attempt to point to some of the assumptions and ideologies undergirding your writing (and reading), and as a way …

2020

Book Review Essay: “Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context – Subjectivity, History and Autobiography” by Ian Parker

Néstor Braunstein

Psychoanalysis, Clinic and Context – Subjectivity, History and Autobiography by Ian Parker London and New York, 2020, 208pp.

2020

Book Review Essay: “Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis” by Jamieson Webster

Ricky Varghese

Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis Jamieson Webster (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018) 312 pp., £32.00 (hardcover), £32.00 (e-book)

2019

Book Review Essay: “Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis” by Warren Poland

René Major

Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis by Warren S. Poland With a preface by Nancy Chodorow. Edited and introduced by William F. Cornell Routledge 2018

2018

Book Review Essay: Para-Ontology and the Truth of Incompleteness, on “The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan” by Lorenzo Chiesa

Paul Livingston

Review of Lorenzo Chiesa: The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan (MIT Press, 2016, 251+xxiii pp.)

2017

Book Review Essay: “On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners” by Robert Pfaller

Jennifer Friedlander

As the contemporary moment witnesses unprecedented levels of neoliberal horrors, Robert Pfaller makes the utterly compelling and refreshing argument that pleasure may be our strongest weapon of opposition. With uncompromising philosophical rigor, Pfaller brilliantly elucidates how under-appreciated psychoanalytic insights pave a path for combatting the hegemony of asceticism, in which societies zestfully pursue prohibitions and limitations to their pleasures. Such passionate concessions not only limit our capacity for experiencing pleasure, but also interfere with our ability to resist the increasingly repressive encroachments that threaten our social and political wellbeing.

2014

Book Review Essay: “Waiting for the Barbarians” by J. M. Coetzee

Janet Thormann

Since its inception political theory, insofar as it has been concerned with the subject in democracy, has treated the subject as citizen. The subject of citizenship in democracy is an abstraction: the legal identity conferred by belonging to a political community ascribing rights and status, a symbolic fiction. Citizenship coincides with belonging to a nation governed by state institutions, the nation itself a symbolic fiction. Yet even as a symbolic inscription that occludes the body that is its ground, citizenship is bolstered by imaginary fantasies and real dynamics: by identification with race, tribe, or ethnicity and with speakers of a common language and believers in a common religion; by being born in a territory and by inheriting a history. Participation in “the body politic” implicates an extra-political, extra-symbolic content to citizenship.

European Journal of Psychoanalysis