1st Edition
Psychoanalysis, Politics, Oppression and Resistance Lacanian Perspectives
This innovative text addresses the lack of literature regarding intersectional approaches to psychoanalysis, underscoring the importance of thinking through race, class, and gender within psychoanalytic theory and practice.
The book tackles the widespread perception of psychoanalysis today as a discipline detached from the progressive ideals of social responsibility, institutional psychotherapy, and community mental health. Bringing together a range of international contributions, the collection explores issues of class, politics, oppression, and resistance within the field of psychoanalysis in cultural, theoretical, and clinical contexts. It shows how, in contrast to this misperception, psychoanalysis has been attentive to these ideals from its origins, as well as demonstrating how it continues to be relevant today, through wide-ranging conceptual discussions of the anti-globalization, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo movements.
Written in an accessible style, Psychoanalysis, Politics, Oppression and Resistance will be essential reading for practicing psychoanalysts as well as academics and students in a range of humanities and social sciences fields.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS, PREFACE, INTRODUCTION: Psychoanalysis, Politics, Oppression and Resistance: Lacanian Perspectives, CHAPTER ONE: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Marxism: Conceptual and Practical Work, CHAPTER TWO: Capital’s Jouissance: Society and Sexual Political Economy in Lacan’s Marx, CHAPTER THREE: Can We Decolonize Lacan? Indigenous Origins of the Split Subject, CHAPTER FOUR: Dwelling on the Direction of the Treatment for the Homeless Subject, CHAPTER FIVE: Psychoanalysis is Spoken Here: Analytic Ethics and the Talking Cure in the Delivery of Community Mental Health Treatment, CHAPTER SIX: Unheard Bodies and the Challenges in the Constitution of Immigrants’ Identity and Subjectivity, CHAPTER SEVEN: A Conversation on Psychoanalytic Work with Children in the System, CHAPTER EIGHT: The College of Registered Psychotherapists in Ontario and the Controlled Act of Psychotherapy: a Lacanian Impasse, CHAPTER NINE: Groups and Communality: A Real Conundrum for the Social World, CHAPTER TEN: A Spectral Materialism to Safeguard Modernity: Tractatus Economico-Psychanalytico-Philosophicus, CHAPTER ELEVEN: Invisible Fist of the Market: Fight Club and the Therapeutic Lures of Emancipatory Violence, CHAPTER TWELVE: Trauma, Irony and Animals, Index
Biography
Chris Vanderwees, PhD, RP, is a psychoanalyst and registered psychotherapist at St. John the Compassionate in Toronto, Canada.
Kristen Hennessy, PhD, is a licensed psychologist and advanced certified trauma practitioner in Pennsylvania. Her work appears in the collection Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Babies, Children, and Adolescents (Routledge, 2017).
"This book extends the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the clinic to the symbolic and real beyond the clinic. The position of the analyst in the world is crucial for our time, and this book gathers some of the wisest, clearest voices in our field." – Annie G. Rogers, PhD, psychoanalyst, Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis; Professor Emerita of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology, Hampshire College
"An extraordinary collection, which foregrounds and advances the radical progressive impulse that has arguably always been inherent in Lacanian clinical social theory. Moving from questions of political emancipation, capitalist jouissance and Lacan’s Marx, to the pragmatic concerns of homelessness, immigrant identity, violence and community mental health – and, of course, the paramount concern of how we might effectively decolonize Lacan – this volume makes an invaluable contribution to how we might reframe and respond to the most pressing socio-political and ideological dilemmas of our times." – Derek Hook, PhD, author, Six Moments in Lacan
"These urgent and original essays by experienced clinicians and distinguished scholars reclaim the too often disavowed political power of the unconscious, thus freeing psychoanalysis as a tool for social change. This stellar collection is a work of emancipatory radicality that changes the way we think about and with psychoanalysis." – Patricia Gherovici, PhD, psychoanalyst; author, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference
