by Rishab Nathan | Vol 43 (1/2) 2025
Abstract: This paper reflects on the complex interplay between societal crises, practical solutions, and philosophical thought, questioning the prevailing approaches to addressing systemic issues. Engaging with thinkers of continental philosophy and the psychoanalytic tradition, this text critiques the endless pursuit of solutions, arguing that this practical drive may contribute to the persistence of societal problems. Instead, the essay advocates for a shift in focus: understanding the importance of theory, but paradoxically, only as a form of practice. By exploring the theory/practice divide, this paper attempts to reframe the duality into something new.
by Paul Verhaeghe | Vol 30 (4) 2012
This contribution originates with a number of problems in the current psychodiagnostic and therapeutic field which give rise to important ethical, clinical and scientific questions: questions that, from a broader social perspective, are interrelated. The criteria for psychopathology depend on socially decided norms and values (ethics), which coincide with the societal context. Current neoliberal discourse dictates a medical model that determines the manner in which scientific research is conducted, resulting in so-called evidence-based DSM-based diagnostics. In the clinic, this psychiatric handbook is used to identify individuals that deviate from the proposed criteria, with the goal of treatment to ‘normalise’ them. This is little more than a form of social standardization and patients are becoming increasingly aware of this. However, what little protest has occurred has had correspondingly little impact. Psychotherapy is hence at a tipping point. To protect our discipline, it is necessary to explicitly see the sea in which we all swim and to question our own role in determining the general perspective.
by Mark Adriaensen | Vol 19 (4) 2001
This article is in three parts. The first part follows J.-A. Miller’s thinking on the unconscious as a subject, as a want-to-be, which gives it an ethical, rather than an ontological, status. This way of thinking is not only in opposition to, but in my opinion also in addition to, a classical mechanical way of thinking about the unconscious. The second part presents the concept of “logical time” and comments briefly on Lacan’s article “Le temps logique et l’assertion de certitude anticipée”. Both in this theoretical part and in the third part, a case study, we find arguments for the position that the unconscious, and psychoanalysis itself, should be approached from an ethical perspective, especially at the point where we meet the S(A/ ).
