October 5, 2017, by criticalmoment
The Lacan Study Group Returns!
Last year, the Lacan Study Group worked on Lacan’s 23rd seminar on The Sinthome, which focussed on James Joyce and the hypothesis of his psychotic structure. This year, so that new members can start with a different text but also so that former members can continue exploring some of the same questions, we will go all the way back to Lacan’s most sustained theorisation of psychosis prior to the Joyce seminar: Seminar III, entitled, simply, The Psychoses, which dates from 1955-1956.
The Seminar consists in a very close – and at the same time conceptually innovative – reading both of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber (the German judge who suffered several psychotic breaks), and of Freud’s subsequent psychoanalytic interpretation of what has become the ‘Schreber case’. Drawing on these texts, Lacan develops a structuralist theory of psychotic experience, including crucial clinical concepts such as ‘foreclosure’ and ‘the Name of the Father’ which continue to inform Lacanian psychoanalysis today. We will go through the seminar at our own pace, adding some other texts along the way whenever it seems helpful.
Anyone with an interest in psychoanalysis, or psychiatry, or indeed psychosis, as well as the relevance of Lacan’s thought for critical theory, is very welcome to join us!
Time: We will meet on Mondays, 11am-1pm. The first meeting will be held on the 9th of October.
Location: Room B4 of the Trent Building.
Readings: Purchase a copy of the seminar if you are able, but pdfs of the readings from it will be provided as we go along.
Contact: If you would like to get involved, please email Colin Wright (a practing Lacanian analyst) at Colin.Wright@nottingham.ac.uk
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