I Because of the times we are living in, we have been asked to consider again what are the issues behind the Freudian invention. We know more or less clearly that it was not conceived so that it could mingle with pre-established knowledge, nor add a complete new chapter of ideas to it [un nouveau continent]. Freud did not invent a mere a body of knowledge –be it understood as a theoreti…

Summary: The perverse subject acts as an instrument of the Other’s Will, thereby escaping ethical responsibility; the religious fundamentalist takes the position of the pervert by displacing division unto the Other. The fundamentalist knows the Truth and reduces belief to knowledge, taking no account of the truth of lying or deception and admitting no mediation. Like the cynic, the fun…

Summary: The article maps Žižek’s notion of agency against the background of Foucault’s theory of power, especially as it emerged from Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. It argues that the awareness of the state of subjection is a necessary but not sufficient cause to effect social change, since any given subjection is inevitably eroticised, sustained by the disavowed …

Summary: Žižek’s great merit lies in his having recognized that Lacanian thought should be interpreted as a derivation of Hegelianism, which has dominated part of French philosophy since the 1930s. This introduction to Žižek’s work allows the author to highlight the essential nodes of Lacanian thought, and in particular the notion of the Real. He discusses in particular the dual interp…

Summary: The author examines the circoumstances that led Freud to write about Transference love (die Ubertragungsliebe): Sabina Spielrein’s analysis with Jung in which the erotic transference (die Liebesübertragung) is induced by the analyst. In this case the Interchange of signifiers emerges as a reality of thought transference on a scene of fiction. while the analytic situation, as a…

Summary: The author traces the development of the concept of countertransference in psychotherapeutic theory technique and attempts to highlight the theoretical motivations, beginning from Freud and continuing with the schools of thought that came after him, underlying the modifications and extensions suggested to “correct” the very nature of the conceptualization of countertransferenc…

Summary: The hypothesis of this work is that the psychic life is marked from the beginning by the exposure to a Real that is by definition extraneous, uncanny, undomesticated and not subjective. In some circumstances the quota of Real exceeds that which is sustainable for the subject, in such a way that contact with this Real assumes traumatic connotations. This gives rise to a primary…

Summary: Transference is the therapist’s hypothesis that the patient perceives, imagines, knows him, – the analyst, – not as he is in the actual psychoanalytic situation, but as other fictional persons were in the patient’s past history. Conversely, counter-transference is the therapist’s hypothesis that his own feelings, perceptions, imaginations do not belong to his actual self, but …

Summary: ‘Preliminary conversations’ are very important, both in private and in public settings, for in these conversations we wait for the emergence of the question that will enable us to begin therapy. My argument proceeds from this consideration. I shall describe a case, which I regard as representative of what is done in a public institution when we activate the psychoanalitic devi…

Summary: The concept of personality plays an important polemical role in Lacan’s early work, where he stresses the importance of psychological as opposed to biological determinants of mental illness. He defines personality at that point in time as a diachronic self-conception that evolves in tension with other people, it being a shorthand term in his vocabulary for the psyche. By the t…

Summary: The paper traces the history of the intellectual relation between Kojève and Lacan and develops its theoretical implications. The analysis centers on the Hegelian notion of desire, one that Kojève redevelops with and against Hegel to found human self-consciousness within a relational framework in which otherness plays an essential and ambivalent role. Together with the Kojèvia…

Summary: Among the theorists connected to the Budapest school of psychoanalysis presumably Franz Alexander and Michael Balint received the widest scientific recognition. Nevertheless they enjoyed much success and reputation in medicine, the significance of their psychoanalytic theories has not been acknowledged adequately. On the other hand, in psychoanalytic theorizing, their names ar…