Lacanian psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century

Document Type

Article

Department

Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Abstract

Abstract

Jacques Alain Miller, in his presentation on the theme for the 10th Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP), noted that “psychoanalysis is changing […] and this change is so obvious […] that [the last two Congresses] have each carried in their title the same temporal mention: ‘in the twenty-first century.’” (Miller, 2014). The first thing we should notice in this passage is that the words “change” and “twenty-first century” seem to be roughly synonymous. The fact that psychoanalysis is changing brings with it the implication that this has something to do with a shift from the twentieth century toward that of the twenty-first century. It is within the context of these remarks that I have read Thomas Svolos’ (2017) newest book as an attempt to raise this emergent reality once again to the dignity of a title: Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis. I shall add to the aforementioned two signifiers a third: “situation.” The change of the twenty-first century seems to have something to with the fact that the psychoanalytic situation of the United States has for a long time been viewed as “defunct, bankrupt, in decline” (Svolos, 2017, p. 222). We might conclude from this that it is not at all “twenty-first century,” properly speaking, and that its fate had already been settled, therefore, as “a twentieth century aberration” (Svolos, 2017, p. 222).

Comments

This work was published before the author joined Aga Khan University.

Publication (Name of Journal)

Psychoanalytic Discourse

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