Vol 30 (1) 2012
Time for the Unconscious: On the Organization of the Psychic Apparatus – Boris Demarest
Kant’s Essay “Beantwortung der Frage: was ist Aufklärung?” in Light of Lacan’s Big Other – Elisabeth Van Dam
Freud contra Laplanche: On Sadism and Masochism in “Instincts and their Viscissitudes” – Jens De Vleminck
Introducing Lacan into Moral Philosophy via Antigone – Paul Moyaert
On Frege’s Sinn, Bedeutung and Vorstellung in Lacan’s Work: A Reading of Seminars XVIII, XIX and XX – Stijn Vanheule
“I don’t stop; I start again.” The position of the analyst in ‘long term care’
From a lacanian orientation, the relation between 'treatment', 'coaching' and 'care' is questioned in case of what one calls 'long term care'. This question is approached from the perspective of a case study. A young man accuses himself constantly of not adapting...
Vampires, Viruses and Verbalisation: Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a genealogical window into fin-de-siècle science
This paper analyses Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula as a literary document which reflects important scientific and technological developments of the fin-the-siècle era, ranging from blood transfusion and virology via psychotherapy and psychoanalysis up to brain research...
Psychoanalysis: a symptomatic problem
In this article the author explores why psychoanalysts are often seen as troublesome people and why they give so much critique. Foucault stated that in modernity the epistèmè changed: ‘man’ came in the thinking frame and human sciences were born. In his opinion...
The Violence of Right: Rereading ‘Why War?’
In this contribution, the often neglected correspondence ‘Why War?’ (Freud, 1933b) is presented as the locus classicus of Freud’s account of ‘Right and Violence’. In the discussion with Freud, Einstein’s position appears in the light of Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace....
On Frege’s Sinn, Bedeutung and Vorstellung in Lacan’s Work: A Reading of Seminars XVIII, XIX and XX
In the early 1970s Lacan regularly referred to Gottlob Frege's concepts Sinn and Bedeutung. Using these concepts he defined two elements of the symptom and two dimensions of analytic discourse. In this paper the author discusses how Lacan uses both concepts, and he...
Introducing Lacan into Moral Philosophy via Antigone
According to Lacan, moral sensibility revolves around the tension between the social necessity to symbolize and resistance against this necessity. This article introduces Lacan's moral view via Goethe's understanding of a perplexing passage in Antigone. In a...
Freud contra Laplanche: On Sadism and Masochism in “Instincts and their Viscissitudes”
This contribution focuses on Freud's elaboration of the genesis of sadism and masochism in "Instincts and their Vicissitudes" (1915c). We first briefly recap the standard reading of this text by Jean Laplanche which relies on Freud's concept of "anaclisis". In our...
Kant’s Essay “Beantwortung der Frage: was ist Aufklärung?” in Light of Lacan’s Big Other
Where the Enlightenment has claimed the space to answer its own questions, something new appears. In the German Republic of Letters between 1780-1790 a strident movement of thought advanced towards the borders of a true critique of Enlightenment. Mendelssohn,...
Time for the Unconscious: On the Organization of the Psychic Apparatus
Freud's characterization of the psychic apparatus is profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand, it tends towards a reductionist framework that explains psychic phenomena largely in terms of mechanical processes in the energetic economy of the psyche. On the other, it...