1st Edition
Lacan in the End Times In the Name of the Absent Father
This book explores themes around the Father, His absence in modern society and the decline of mental health. The nature of this decline can be uniquely psychoanalytically theorised, in both the corresponding ferocity of the internal object and exposure to the Real.
The first part of this book underlines what psychoanalysis and psi-sciences continue to overlook: who now provides what Lacan called the “narrow footbridge” between anxiety and death? What terror(ism) must replace the father? How can reality be stabilised once more? The second part follows the atomised world as it turns towards extremism and utopian dreams: in Ireland via Hanaghan’s radical psychoanalysis; in Levinasian ethics; in Gnostic belief in an evil world; and in the clinic of the death drive. The conclusion turns finally to the God beyond God, and the overwhelming evidence for God’s presence in the world.
Lacan in the End Times will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers, and scholars in critical theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory, and theology.
Part I 1. Do You Believe in Reality? 2. Where Have All the Fathers Gone? 3. Loving the Father into Life. 4. Being (not) in the World without a Father Part II 5. The Mystical Origins of Psychoanalysis in Ireland. 6. Hanaghan Returns. 7. Is it Righteous to Be? 8. Tired to Death in an Evil World. 9. The Irreducible Datum. Part III 10. The Evidence.
Biography
Rob Weatherill is practising and supervisory analyst in Dublin, Ireland, a member of two psychoanalytic groups (IFPP (Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy) and ICP (Irish Council for Psychotherapy)) and a founding member of APPI (Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland). He has a master’s degree in psychotherapy from St. Vincent’s University Hospital as well as a European Certificate in Psychotherapy. He taught psychoanalysis in post-graduate courses at University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin and the Milltown Institute of Philosophy and Theology. He currently convenes two supervision groups that meet fortnightly. He has published five books internationally and edited one other.
"Rob Weatherill asks questions based on his life’s work and research about contemporary culture and psychical organisation that few venture to ask. The provocations of this book will challenge, inspire and stimulate. Rob engages the reader with the most serious and consequential issues of our time. Read this and you will not emerge unmoved by Rob’s deep concerns about the state of our world."
Dr Eve Watson, Psychoanalyst, Dublin; co-editor, Critical Essays on the Drive in Lacanian Theory and Practice (Routledge)
"Through his books and lectures on psychoanalysis and the malaise of contemporary Western civilisation, Rob Weatherill has been among the key intellectual influences on my life. His books are frightening, urgent, dizzying in their range and erudition, and consistently willing to explore the bleakest, most harrowing corners of life in an atomised and apocalyptic culture. Moreover, by virtue of Weatherill’s insistence on the need for a moral and spiritual bulwark against the ravages of untrammelled capitalism on the psyche, his work is actively countercultural. There are precious few writers engaged with his themes and concerns."
Rob Doyle, author, Threshold
"I am delighted to recommend very warmly the new work of Rob Weatherill. I was very impressed with his previous work, The Anti-Oedipus, whose characteristic excellences the current work also displays. I found it illuminating in an intrepid way, courageous in an enlivening way, and wise in a discerning way. Weatherill trenchantly reminds us of ‘home-truths’ about the mess we have often made of things. That said, and not least, Weatherill, has something of the redeeming eye of the comic for our current self-incurred absurdities. Very warmly recommended."
William Desmond, David Cook Chair in Philosophy, Villanova University, USA; Thomas A.F. Kelly Visiting Chair in Philosophy, Maynooth University, Ireland; Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven Belgium
