by Jens Anthoons | Vol 33 (3) 2015
Pasolini describes himself as a “scandal of self-contradiction” (Pasolini, 1957). He brings a subject who assumes the radical split that runs through the subjective field. With his poetry of permanent dissidence he taunts power in which desire and her laws are inscribed. By postponing the exemplary symbolic suicide his subject manages to avoid the deadlock of turning a blind eye and alienation in the symbolic other. Terence Stamp embodies this subject in Teorem in the role of mysterious guest. Pasolini’s theorem seems to be that, via regression to pre-genital forms of sexuality (a pre-symbolic state), one not only escapes to a mythic (poetic) reality, but also takes possession of a weapon one can use against the oppressor. Desire emerges in disturbances that shred the symbolic order and release the Real. Filmic truth is exposed as a core of pure nonsense and sexuality appears as the root of a perverted society.
by Daniëlla Provost | Vol 25 (1) 2007
The author explores working with adolescents in three different settings: non-voluntary therapy for drug addicts; a centre for homeless men and women; and a youth information centre. With regard to each of these groups, we tend to encounter similar discourses. And within each setting different elements of these same discourses resonate.. These elements reveal a lot about the positioning of these adolescents: the young drug abuser as ‘dangerous’; the adolescent victim of violence as object of compassion; and the ‘normal’ adolescent who should enjoy him/herself but in moderation. The author uses clinical fragments to illustrate. What effects do those labels and signifiers have on work with adolescents themselves? And how can psychoanalysis prevent us from falling into the trap of disdain, compassion or indifference?
by Rudi Loontiens | Vol 21 (1) 2003
This article deals with the case-study of a psychotic subject in which jouissance and the fragmented body play a dominant role. The jouissance of an abusive mother is inscribed on the body of this subject, a subject who is compelled to mutilate his or her body in order to ensure its unity and as such to make it his or her own. It is the same mother with her same jouissance, that appears in the Real to this subject. Through discussion of elementary phenomena – which, within the Lacanian structure of psychosis, can be divided into two categories: one the symbolic, as that which is signified by the Name-of-the-Father (P°) and consequently one which concerns the body and the jouissance (?°) of the Other signified by the phallus – it is argued that this case is situated beyond the two sexes by negating sexuality as a non-sexed being.
by Tomas Geyskens | Vol 29 (1/2) 2011
In 1905 Freud published Three essays on the theory of sexuality and Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. He wrote these two works simultaneously. According to Ernest Jones, “Freud kept the manuscript of each on two adjoining tables and wrote now on one and now on the other as the mood took him” (Jones, 1964: 315). But, while Three essays has become one of the classics of psychoanalysis, Jokes has often been considered as a philosophical diversion in the margin of Freud’s serious work. Freud himself seems to have been of this opinion because, while he added new insights and revised many passages in all the later editions of Three essays and the other early classics, The interpretation of dreams (1900) and Psychopathology of everyday life (1901), there are no important additions or changes in the later editions of Jokes. These different vicissitudes have obscured the thematic affinities between Jokes and the first edition of Three essays. Therefore, a combined reading of Jokes and Three essays may shed new light on Freud’s early theory of sexuality.
