Summaries
This paper gives the wider background to the references in Lacan’s work to the life of Angelus Silesius, the pseudonym of Johann Scheffler [1624-1677], and his principle mystical text, the Cherubinische Wandersmann. A text almost certainly written between 1651 and 1653, a period of deeply personal transition and transformation which culminated in his reception into the Catholic Church and his decision to become a Jesuit. It includes a summary of the development of Christian mysticism in the West and the immediate context in which Lacan’s interest in the mystical emerged. This latter included a study of Silesius by Jean Baruzi. While Derrida and others have considered Silesius’ work not truly mystical, this paper argues that this is to over subscribe to a view in which the mystical is reduced to subjective, individual experience. A reading that only became common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Summary: The model of an “axis of psychosomatic totality” is proposed in order to understand psychosomatic symptoms. Basically, the axis runs between the symbolic and the asymbolic poles I and II: symptoms which represent an unconscious fantasy can be assigned to the symbolic pole. Bodily symptoms resulting from a regressive or reversible somatization are located on the asymbolic pole I…
What does a signifier have to do with a body? Having watched Lacanian psychoanalysis—or rather the stereotypes of it that manifest both in the opposition and the rank and file practitioners—swing from an over-emphasis on the signifier and language back to the body and jouissance, which is now said to be untouchable by language, the question couldn’t be more pertinent, especially when one considers questions of analytic technique. This was one important reason that Conversion Disorder as a theme seemed important to take up (see Webster, 2018).
This text is the last chapter of Sexualité féminine (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) by Françoise Dolto. We thank Catherine Dolto-Tolitch for having allowed us to publish this text in English.
“Dolto, Foucault, Matzneff: no distinction is made anymore between paedophiles and thinkers” Interview by Eric Favereau
I received this email at the beginning of 2020: Dear Dr Sergio, Let me introduce myself I am Matt Wolf, Drama and Literature critic at the Guardian U.K. We are celebrating this month Introducing Lacan: Key Concepts. May I ask you for an online interview? I verified that Matt Wolf really is a critic who writes for The Guardian. I associated the request to the fact that a book I wr…
Fake Matt Wolf – What generated your interest in psychoanalysis and Lacan in particular? Real Domenico Cosenza – My interest in psychoanalysis started when I was a student of the Italian Liceo Classico, and my first encounter with the Lacan’s text happened in my first degree in the University of Milan, my city, where I studied philosophy. In this period I wanted to do the university ca…
Fake Matt Wolf – What generated your interest in psychoanalysis and Freud and Lacan in particular? Real Sergio Benvenuto – My interest in psychoanalysis – as usually happens with young people – started during my adolescence, and not just because it deals heavily with sex. I started to read Freud as a teen, because psychoanalysis essentially questions the consistency and the specificity …
Fake Matt Wolf – What generated your interest in Lacan? Real Lorenzo Chiesa – As a philosophy undergraduate student in the mid-late 1990s I was vaguely aware of Lacan. The name circulated but more fashionable thinkers (especially Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze) eclipsed it. I got really hooked on him while reading and researching the poet Antonin Artaud. Allegedly, as a y…
During the evening of February 2, 2020, as I was laboring over a text, I receive an email directed to my private psychoanalytic practice account with the following missive: Dear Dr. Fernando, Let me introduce myself I am Matt Wolf, Drama and literature critic at the Guardian U.K. We are celebrating this month Introducing Lacan: Key Conecpts. May I ask you for an online interview?…
One day in January 2020 I got a letter from a certain Matt Wolf. I felt that something was wrong, from the way it was written. I had questions: is this man who wrote me really a journalist? From The Guardian? A Literary critic? In the end I decided, perhaps it was my Soviet lack of trust in people making me suspicious. Perhaps this man really was a journalist, but with some kind of a Ru…
The power of the unconscious accepted as a wise window on life, and poetic intelligence; creative thought and psychoanalysis as an anthropological look at cultural worlds and our everyday life against the backdrop of the cosmos, the intimacy of the self and of an immemorial time run in all possible directions through Olga Tokarczuk’s work.
