Summaries
Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis by Warren S. Poland With a preface by Nancy Chodorow. Edited and introduced by William F. Cornell Routledge 2018
Wittgenstein’s Radical Ethics Hannes Nykänen Commentary to Hannes Nykanen’s paper “Wittgenstein’s Radical Ethics” Sergio Benvenuto Psycho-Analysis and the Morally Charged Nature of Personal Relations: A Response to Hannes Nykänen Hugo Strandberg
This text is the starting point for a discussion on Ethics from a philosophical – and psychoanalytical – point of view. Comments on Nykänen’s paper, as well as papers on the same topic, are welcome.
I do not wish to analyse in depth the theory put forward by Hannes Nykanen, which he exemplifies as a theory of ethics based on an I/You understanding. However, I have the impression that what he says is very close to phenomenological thinking, in particular to Husserl, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty. In all frankness, I believe that reference to these authors would have been much more appropriate, to support his own thesis, than reference to Wittgenstein.
1. There are certainly many ways of summarizing what Wittgenstein is up to in the Philosophical Investigations. One important thread running through the book is Wittgenstein’s critical discussion of two seemingly opposed conceptions of language. According to the first one, language is fundamentally a private phenomenon (cognitivism and mentalism are contemporary examples). The so-called…
Editorial Note The response by Jamieson Webster e Marcus Coelen to one of our 12 Questions– Many philosophers are particularly interested in the thought of Jacques Lacan. What value or meaning do you attribute to the Lacanian après-coup?
This conversation between Sergio Benvenuto and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis took place on 13 October 1989 in the latter’s office at Éditions Gallimard in Paris.
The European Journal of Psychoanalysis has kindly agreed to publish a reply to what Jamieson Webster and Marcus Coelen (hereafter, collectively, J&M). It is relevant to my last point that although neither Jamieson nor Marcus are among my intimates, Marcus is currently a colleague at Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and Jamieson and I have known each other for years and have been on friendly terms.
Jonathan House’s Riposte: https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/on-apres-coup-riposte/
In the interest of the integrity of scholarship, let us recall that besides Seminar 5 already discussed, Lacan addressed specifically Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit many times. Often Lacan refers to this notion using, as Jonathan House notes, the adverbial form nachträglich . Note that in 1972 this notion is not used as retroactivity or retrospective modification and very much like Laplanche, Lacan gives to this notion a foundational status in psychoanalysis.
I would like to add my observations to this ongoing debate in EJP on après-coup, particularly its relationship to other psychoanalytic concepts, especially those that seem most closely related and to occupy the same ground. My reflections, in fact, being limited here, aim to stimulate further questions rather than answers, a path to follow rather than the destination.
In her column in “Le Monde”, the historian E. Roudinesco deplores the loss of prestige suffered by the discipline, and argues in favour of returning to so-called “humanist” psychiatry. Saturday, Feb. 9, 2019, Le Monde.
The “so-called decline” of psychoanalysis is a “false diagnosis”, assert in a Forum in Le Monde Sophie Marret-Maleval and Aurélie Pfauwadel, psychoanalysts and university professors, in response to a text by Elisabeth Roudinesco published on February 9th 2019.
Summary: “The Uncanny” begins with Freud’s admission that he doesn’t know much about the subject: he is not prone to the uncanny feeling. He is also not prone, he says, to writing about art and literature, since “it is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics.” Except, all the evidence speaks to the contrary: writings on Dostoevsky, on L…
