Summaries
In contemporary philosophy of mind, scholars discuss above all in order to know which psychological school would have correctly formulated the program of a study of the mental life (behaviorism, psychoanalysis, cognitivism). In France, the dominating view (phenomenology, Lacanian approach to the unconscious) remains hostile to the program of the “naturalization of the mind”. But yet these discussions presuppose that we have to maintain the traditional concept of the mental life. Certainly Wittgenstein has made a revolution in 20th century concerning our conception of the mental life: in his Philosophical Investigations he has promoted a grammatical clarification of our psychological concepts. He has shown that we cannot assimilate the mental life just to a flux of (either conscious and unconscious) representations.
The author uses Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut and Arthur Schnitzler’s Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, which the film was based on, to illustrate the difficulties inherent in the sexual non-relation. She shows the fundamental place of fantasy in creating an imaginary bridge, where the sexes only appear to meet or to miss each other. Her paper works both as an introduction to the subject of sexuation and Lacan’s graph of sexuation, as well as an example that may be helpful for readers of her latest book, The Logic of Sexuation: From Aristotle to Lacan, published in 2004
Civilization and organization require interplay between the spontaneous imaginary and the objective character of the symbolic, but these two are always in tension. Hysteria represents an attempt to end that tension through the destruction of the symbolic by the imaginary. A psychoanalytic theory of hysteria, based on the work of Lacan, Verhaeghe and Chasseguet-Smirgel is developed. The interdependence and antagonism of the imaginary and the symbolic are explored. Four aspects of this antagonism toward organization are discussed.
Aldo Carotenuto, one of Italy's foremost Jungian psychoanalysts, died on February 14th, 2005 of a heart attack. He was often considered as the psychologist of love--which he often dealt with in his writings. With his death, the Jungian panorama lost one of its historic figures. He was a member of the Editorial Board of JEP.