1st Edition

Negativity in Psychoanalysis Theory and Clinic

Edited By Duane Rousselle, Mark Gerard Murphy Copyright 2024
242 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

242 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

242 Pages 6 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Negativity in Psychoanalysis examines the role of negativity in psychoanalytic theory and its application in clinical settings. While theories around negativity and death drive have become routinized within philosophical interpretations of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, they often mask an inherent positivity. This volume assembles highly esteemed psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians... Read more

Editor Biographies

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

DUANE ROUSSELLE

SECTION 1 Foundations

1 Who Is Transferring What to Whom? Resistance to Lacan

ELLIE RAGLAND

2 On Sigmund Freud’s “Negation”

SERGIO BENVENUTO

SECTION 2 Drive and Desire

3 Turning Opportunities into Crises: The Lacanian Antidote to Toxic Positivity

COLIN WRIGHT

4 The Ethics of the Death Drive

TODD MCGOWAN

5 Humility and Humiliation of the Drive: Comedy and Tragedy in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

SIMONE A. MEDINA POLO

6 Apophatic Psychoanalysis: The Plenitude of the Negative

MARK GERARD MURPHY

SECTION 3 Clinical Implications

7 Negation beyond Neurosis

LEON S. BRENNER

8 Spiraling

CYRUS SAINT AMAND POLIAKOFF

9 What Is Non-Negativisable Jouissance?: From Negation to a Singular Norm

AINO-MARJATTA MÄKI

10 Badbeing: What’s So Bad about Resistance in the Clinic?

IAN PARKER

11 Singularity and the Real that Cannot Be Written: On Lacan’s Use of Frege in His Later Work

STIJN VANHEULE

SECTION 4 Spare Parts

12 To Create, Perform, Produce Psychology from Scratch: Negativity in the Work of Wolfgang Giegerich

NICHOLAS BALAISIS

13 (Un)Mourning the End of History

MARK FEATHERSTONE

14 Trauma, Negativity, and Death Drive in Spielrein, Heidegger, and Buddhist Thought

WANYOUNG KIM

15 Why Positive Thought Must Be Negated in the Analytic Session: Negative Dialectics as Therapeutic Technique

JOEL MICHAEL CROMBEZ

16 The Hau Must Be Returned: The Exile of the Dead and Its Effects on the Western Imaginary

JULIETTE TOCINO-SMITH

Biography

Duane Rousselle, PhD, is a Canadian sociological theorist and practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst. He is a visiting associate professor of sociology at the University Colleges of Dublin and Cork.

Mark Gerard Murphy is an editor for the political journal and blog Taiwan Insight and a lecturer at St. Mary’s University, Scotland, Gillis Centre, where he convenes courses on ethics, philosophy, and mystical theology and spirituality. His research interests include the relationship between psychoanalysis and mystical theology. He has published in the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

"The use of the notion of negativity in psychoanalysis is double-edged: while it definitely remains the philosophical concept which provides the key to what Freud called death-drive, it simultaneously opens up the path to the philosophical colonization of psychoanalysis - psychoanalytic theory is de facto reduced to another version of "philosophy of negativity" with no links to clinical experience. Here the volume edited by Murphy and Rousselle sets the record straight: it articulates negativity as a concept immanent to psychoanalytic experience and practice, as well as in our social reality. For this reason alone, it deserves to be read by thousands!" - Slavoj Žižek, Professor, European Graduate School; International Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London; senior researcher, Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia