SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture

Examines Lacan's key seminar on sexual difference, knowledge, desire, and love.

This collection offers the first sustained, in-depth commentary on Seminar XX, Encore, considered the cornerstone of Lacan's work on the themes of sexual difference, knowledge, jouissance, and love. Although Seminar XX was originally popularized as Lacan's treatise on feminine sexuality, these essays, by some of today's foremost Lacanian scholars, go beyond feminine sexuality to address Lacan's significant intertwining concern with the rupture between reality and the real produced by modern science, and the implications of this rupture for subjectivity, knowledge, jouissance, and the body.

The essays clarify basic concepts, but for readers already familiar with Lacan they also offer sophisticated workings-through of the more challenging and obscure arguments in Encore-both by tracing their historical development across Lacan's œuvre and by demonstrating their relation to particular philosophical, theological, mathematical, and scientific concepts. They cover much of the terrain necessary for understanding sexual difference-not in terms of chromosomes, body parts, choice of sexual partner, or varieties of sexual practice-but in terms of one's position vis-à-vis the Other and the kind of jouissance one is able to obtain. In so doing, they make significant interventions in the debates regarding sex, gender, and sexuality in feminist theory, philosophy, queer theory, and cultural studies.

How modern conceptions of paranoia became associated with excessive or unregulated masculinity.

Sex, Paranoia, and Modern Masculinity explores how twentieth-century conceptions of paranoia became associated with the excessive or unregulated exercise of masculine intellectual tendencies. Through an extended analysis of Freudian metapsychology, Kenneth Paradis illustrates how paranoid ideation has been especially connected to the figure of the male body under threat of genital mutilation or emasculation. In this context, he also considers how both midcentury detective fiction (especially the work of Raymond Chandler) and contemporaneous autobiographies of male-to-female transsexuals negotiate the terms of this gendered understanding of psychopathology, thus articulating their own notions of moral value, individual autonomy, and effective agency.

An original critique of queer theory, from a psychoanalytic perspective.

In The World of Perversion, James Penney argues that antihomophobic criticism has nothing to lose-and indeed everything to gain-by reclaiming the psychoanalytic concept of perversion as psychic structure. Analyzing the antagonism between psychoanalytic approaches to perversion and those inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Penney explores how different assumptions about sexuality have determined the development of contemporary queer theory, and how the universalizing approach to homosexuality in psychoanalysis actually leads to more useful political strategies for nonheterosexual subjects. Having established this theoretical context, Penney focuses on works by Georges Bataille, Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, and Jacques Lacan, tracing the implications of various sexual and moral understandings of the term perversion, and illustrating how a psychoanalytic approach to the question of perversion enables politicized readings that are foreclosed by a Foucauldian methodology.

Explores how filmmakers and screenwriters have used comedy and science fiction to extend the boundaries of the Frankenstein narrative.

Focusing on films outside the horror genre, this book offers a unique account of the Frankenstein myth's popularity and endurance. Although the Frankenstein narrative has been a staple in horror films, it has also crossed over into other genres, particularly comedy and science fiction, resulting in such films as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Bladerunner, and the Alien and Terminator film series. In addition to addressing horror's relationship to comedy and science fiction, the book also explores the versatility and power of the Frankenstein narrative as a contemporary myth through which our deepest attitudes concerning gender (masculine versus feminine), race (Same versus Other), and technology (natural versus artificial) are both revealed and concealed. The book not only examines the films themselves, but also explores early drafts of film scripts, scenes that were cut from the final releases, publicity materials, and reviews, in order to consider more fully how and why the Frankenstein myth continues to resonate in the popular imagination.

Explores Lacan's theory of the registers through readings of a wide variety of texts.

The other Side of Desire puts Jacques Lacan's theoretical constructs to work on texts as varied as Plato's Symposium, Hamlet, Tootsie, and the journals of Sylvia Plath, making the techniques of Lacanian analysis accessible to a wide variety of readers. Moving from oppositional readings of Lacan himself, through Lacan's search for an alternative to oppositionality, to his solution in the theory of the registers, Van Pelt rereads Lacan's most significant essays on aggressivity, the mirror stage, the subversion of the subject, and the signification of the phallus, making explicit the reading practices implicit in Lacan's first seven Seminars and his Écrits. Throughout, Van Pelt demonstrates Lacanian theory's pivotal role in the intellectual transition from the poststructuralism of the mid–twentieth century to the post-humanism of the twenty-first.

Addresses ethical and aesthetic issues in three major works by Henry James.

What is the matter with the women in Henry James? In The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and his short story "The Altar of the Dead," one woman returns to a monster of a husband, another dies rather than confront the truth of her lover's engagement, while yet another stakes her all on having a candle lit for a dead lover, only to promptly reject it. Exploring these strange choices, Sigi Jöttkandt argues that the singularity of these acts lies in their ethical nature, and that the ethical principle involved cannot be divorced from the question of aesthetics. She combines close readings of James with suggestive tours through Kantian aesthetics and set theory to uncover the aesthetic underpinning of the Lacanian ethical act, which has been largely overlooked in the current drive to discover a Cartesian origin for the subject as the subject of science.

Examines the gaze in Lacanian film theory.

Winner of the 2008 Gradiva Award, Theoretical Category, presented by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

The Real Gaze develops a new theory of the cinema by rethinking the concept of the gaze, which has long been central in film theory. Historically film scholars have located the gaze on the side of the spectator; however, Todd McGowan positions it within the filmic image, where it has the radical potential to disrupt the spectator's sense of identity and challenge the foundations of ideology. This book demonstrates several distinct cinematic forms that vary in terms of how the gaze functions within the films. Through a detailed investigation of directors such as Orson Welles, Claire Denis, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Federico Fellini, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Andrei Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, and David Lynch, McGowan explores the political, cultural, and existential ramifications of these differing roles of the gaze.

Looks at the dynamics of identification, envy, and idealization in fictional narratives by Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as in nonfictional accounts of cross-race relations by white feminists and feminists of color.

Risking Difference revisions the dynamics of multicultural feminist community by exploring the ways that identification creates misrecognitions and misunderstandings between individuals and within communities. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jean Wyatt argues not only that individual psychic processes of identification influence social dynamics, but also that social discourses of race, class, and culture shape individual identifications. In addition to examining fictional narratives by Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, and others, Wyatt also looks at nonfictional accounts of cross-race relations by white feminists and feminists of color.

Explains why the American cultural obsession with enjoying ourselves actually makes it more difficult to do so.

Winner of the 2004 Gary Olson Award for best book in cultural theory presented by JAC

Exploring the emergence of a societal imperative to enjoy ourselves, Todd McGowan builds on the work of such theorists as Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zðizûek, Joan Copjec, and Theresa Brennan to argue that we are in the midst of a large-scale transformation-a shift from a society oriented around prohibition (i.e., the notion that one cannot just do as one pleases) to one oriented around enjoyment. McGowan identifies many of the social ills of American culture today as symptoms of this transformation: the sense of disconnection, the increase in aggression and violence, widespread cynicism, political apathy, incivility, and loss of meaning. Discussing these various symptoms, he examines various texts from film, literature, popular culture, and everyday life, including Toni Morrison's Paradise, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and such films as Dead Poets Society and Trigger Effect. Paradoxically, The End of Dissatisfaction? shows how the American cultural obsession with enjoying ourselves actually makes it more difficult to do so.

A noted Eliot scholar explores how we become different interpreters of literature as we undergo psychological change.

In a probing analysis that has broad implications for theories of reading, Bernard J. Paris explores how personal needs and changes in his own psychology have affected his responses to George Eliot over the years. Having lost his earlier enthusiasm for her "Religion of Humanity," he now appreciates the psychological intuitions that are embodied in her brilliant portraits of characters and relationships. Concentrating on Eliot's most impressive psychological novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, Paris focuses on her detailed portrayals of major characters in an effort to recover her intuitions and appreciate her mimetic achievement. He argues that although she intended for her characters to provide confirmation of her views, she was instead led to deeper, more enduring truths, although she did not consciously comprehend the discoveries she had made. Like her characters, Paris argues, these truths must be disengaged from her rhetoric in order to be perceived.

Explores the therapeutic uses and effects of writing in a post-Freudian age.

A deeply personal yet universal work, Signifying Pain applies the principles of therapeutic writing to such painful life experiences as mental illness, suicide, racism, domestic abuse, and even genocide. Probing deep into the bedrock of literary imagination, Judith Harris traces the odyssey of a diverse group of writers-John Keats, Derek Walcott, Jane Kenyon, Michael S. Harper, Robert Lowell, and Ai, as well as student writers-who have used their writing to work through and past such personal traumas. Drawing on her own experience as a poet and teacher, Harris shows how the process can be long and arduous, but that when exercised within the spirit of one's own personal compassion, the results can be limitless. Signifying Pain will be of interest not only to teachers of creative and therapeutic writing, but also to those with a critical interest in autobiographical or confessional writing more generally.

Examines fundamental concepts of the later Lacan.

This book includes essays by some of the finest practicing analysts and teachers of psychoanalysis in the Lacanian community today. The writings offer an essential introduction to the later teachings of Jacques Lacan, illuminate the theoretical developments introduced by the later Lacan, and explore their clinical implications with remarkable acumen.

Offers an analysis of fourteen French fairy tales, from the medieval Romance of Mélusine to Jean Cocteau's film version of Beauty and the Beast, exploring their universal and eternal nature as well as their relevance to modern readers.

Bettina L. Knapp explores the universal and eternal nature of fourteen French fairy tales, including the medieval Romance of Mélusine, Charles Perrault's seventeenth-century versions of Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard, and Jean Cocteau's film version of Beauty and the Beast. She demonstrates the relevance of these fairy tales for modern readers, both for the psychological problems they address and for the positive resolutions they offer. Through her careful examination of these tales, Knapp shows that people in past eras suffered from such supposedly "modern" problems as alienation and identity crises and went through harrowing ordeals before experiencing some sort of fulfillment. By imparting the age-old wisdom embedded in these works, French Fairy Tales triggers new insights into psychological problems and offers helpful ways of dealing with them.

Explores the contributions that psychoanalysis can make to the study of ethics, and vice versa.

Addressing the common ground between ethics and psychoanalysis, W. W. Meissner asks "Does psychoanalysis have anything to contribute to ethical understanding and reflection?" and conversely, "Does ethics have anything to offer analytic understanding of the complexities of human behavior and decision-making?" Both disciplines focus their interest and concern not only on the inner well-being of the individual, but also on questions of his or her adaptation to the outside world, including both intimate personal relations as well as broader societal and communal relations. This book explores and explicates areas of interaction and common interest between these two disciplines in the hope of opening the way to further exploration and dialogue in the understanding of the human phenomenon.

Challenges essentialist notions of gender through a detailed account of Lacan's theories of gender, sexuality, and sexual difference.

2004 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

In The Logic of Sexuation, Ellie Ragland offers a detailed account of Jacques Lacan's theories of gender, sexuality, and sexual difference. Exploring Lacan's rereading (via Aristotle) of Freud's major essays on feminine sexuality, Ragland demonstrates that Lacanian theory challenges essentialist notions of gender more effectively than do current debates in gender studies, which are typically enmeshed in an imaginary impasse of one sex versus or interchanged with the other. Although much American feminist thought on Lacan has portrayed him as anti-Woman, Ragland argues that Lacan was, in fact, pro-Woman, as he felt that no advances in analytic cure, or in thinking itself, could evolve except by embracing the feminine logic of the "not all," with its particular modes of jouissance. Ragland also aims to make sense of the terms phallus, castration, sexuation, the object a, jouissance, and so on, in relation to the question of sexual difference. In doing so, she uncovers Lacan's theory that the learning of sexual difference is what makes it possible to think dialectically at all.

The authors use examples from their own clinical practice to explain the development of Lacanian theory.

After Lacan combines abundant case material with graceful yet sophisticated theoretical exposition in order to explore the clinical practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Focusing on the groundbreaking clinical treatment of psychosis that Gifric (Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d'Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles) has pioneered in Quebec, the authors discuss how Lacanians theorize psychosis and how Gifric has come to treat it analytically. Chapters are devoted to the general concepts and key terms that constitute the touchstones of the early phase of analytic treatment, elaborating their interrelations and their clinical relevance. The second phase of analytic treatment is also discussed, introducing a new set of terms to understand transference and the ethical act of analysis in the subject's assumption of the Other's lack. The concluding chapters broaden discussion to include the key psychic structures that describe the organization of subjectivity and thereby dictate the terms of analysis: not just psychosis, but also perversion and obsessional and hysterical neurosis.

Analyzes contemporary memoirs of terminal illness from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Writers facing death offer a rare glimpse into human mortality-they have the unusual opportunity to craft the closing chapter of their life stories. Final Acts explores memoirs of terminal illness, and shows a paradoxical pattern where the diagnosis of terminal illness evokes not despair, but a new freedom and richness in life. The memoirs analyzed-by Allon White, Harold Brodkey, Gillian Rose, and Derek Jarman-provide insight into the experience of radical contingency that an awareness of mortality brings. Tom Ratekin engages the concept of "traversing the fantasy," elaborated by Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, to argue that the new richness in life each of these memoirists' experiences arises from the abandonment of a particular fantasy that guided his or her earlier work-a fantasy that both protected and inhibited the memoirist. Freed from convention, these writers, while close to death, can reinterpret the stories presented in their earlier work, and gain new perspectives on their worlds and existence.

Brings together critical race theory and psychoanalysis to examine African American and other diasporic African cultural texts.

The American Optic charts new territory in the relationship of psychoanalysis to critical race studies. Focusing on the work of Richard Wright and Jacques Lacan, it explore the political and ethical implications of psychoanalysis for African American and other diasporic African cultural texts. Mikko Tuhkanen develops a theory of "racialization" that recasts the genealogy of the Western concept of racial difference as outlined by critical race theory, through the theory of the real, which Lacan developed in his later work. By engaging a wide array of resources-including the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Frantz Fanon, as well as nineteenth-century slave narratives and studies of blackface minstrelsy-Tuhkanen not only illuminates the unexpectedly rich connections between Lacanian psychoanalysis and black literary and cultural studies, but also demonstrates the ways in which the artistic and political traditions of the African diaspora allow us to reinvent the Lacanian ethics of becoming.

Psychoanalytic perspective on what Western philosophers from Socrates to Foucault have called "the art of living."

How are our lives meaningful? What is the relationship of loss to creativity? How can we best engage and overcome our suffering? From Socrates to Foucault, Western philosophers have sought to define "the art of living"-the complex craft of human existence that elicits our thoughtful participation, and the idea that even though death escapes our control, life is not something that simply happens to us in a passive manner but is instead a process that invites our active and lively engagement. A World of Fragile Things offers a distinctly psychoanalytic perspective on "the art of living," one that focuses on ongoing and ever-evolving processes of self-fashioning rather than defining a fixed and unitary sense of self. With a compelling blend of philosophical insight and psychoanalytic acumen, Mari Ruti asks experts and readers alike to probe the complexities of human existence, offering a contemporary outlook on some of the most enduring questions of Western thought.

Provocative exploration of a new concept of "joy" within psychoanalytic and cultural studies.

This provocative book introduces a new concept of "joy" within psychoanalytic and cultural studies that provides a different way of understanding the structures of affect produced by shifts in contemporary culture and economy. In so doing, the author offers a radically refigured Lacanianism that is developed through a critical reading of Deleuze.

Feminist and psychoanalytic analysis of spectatorship.

Feminine Look shows how the Lacanian concept of sexuation makes possible a new account of the relationship among feminism, psychoanalysis, and spectatorship. Whereas previous studies have tended to ask how spectatorship may be influenced by sexual difference, Jennifer Friedlander asks how particular spectatorial encounters may engender different "sexuated" responses. In so doing, she traces a fresh path through Freud's account of the relationship between visual perception and sexual difference and rereads Freud's fable of castration anxiety, suggesting that sexual identity arises as a response to the symbolic order's indifference to the subject's need for a solid identity. She examines provocative and controversial artistic images by Jamie Wagg, Marcus Harvey, and Sally Mann to demonstrate how images not only create and embody social practices but also precipitate viewer anxieties and pleasures.

Explores the radical political potential of close reading to make the case for a new and invigorated psychoanalytic cultural studies.

Winner of the 2009 Gradiva Award, Theoretical Category, presented by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

Esther Rashkin argues that psychoanalysis galvanizes, as no other discipline can, an understanding of texts in their social, historical, and political contexts. Demonstrating that close reading can be a radical political practice, she exposes heretofore unseen ideologies concealed in works of film and literature, from Last Tango in Paris to The Picture of Dorian Gray, from Barthes's Mythologies and Balzac's Sarrasine to Babette's Feast. Psychoanalytic concepts such as identification with the aggressor, the crypt, cryptonymy, illness of mourning, and the phantom allow Rashkin to reveal how shameful and unspeakable secrets propel the narratives she examines. In the process, she convincingly makes the case for a new practice of psychoanalytic cultural studies, a practice that fully engages with the politicized discourses-anti-Semitism, racism, colonialism, censorship-that mark a text's location in history.

Contributors explore the significance of literature and psychoanalysis for medical education and practice.

In this pioneering volume, Peter L. Rudnytsky and Rita Charon bring together distinguished contributors from medicine, psychoanalysis, and literature to explore the multiple intersections between their respective fields and the emerging discipline of narrative medicine, which seeks to introduce the values and methods of literary study into clinical education and practice. Organized into four sections-contextualizing narrative medicine, psychoanalytic interventions, the patient's voice, and acts of reading-the essays take the reader into the emergency room, the consulting room, and the classroom. They range from the panoramas of intellectual history to the close-ups of literary and clinical analysis, and they speak with the voice of the patient as well as the physician or professor, reminding us that these are often the same.

Explores psychoanalytic approaches to cultural studies.

Why do we continue to desire psychoanalysis? What can this desire contribute to a vital cultural criticism? In Desire of the Analysts, these and other questions are addressed by leading contributors from a variety of fields, including Sharon Nell, Deneen Senasi, Kaja Silverman, Henry Sussman, Domietta Torlasco, Pierre Zoberman, and Slavoj Zðizûek. They argue for the urgency of a psychoanalytic criticism that is at once intellectually vibrant, politically engaged, and uniquely able to illuminate the psychic motivations and gratifications underlying a range of contemporary cultural phenomena. These phenomena include nationalistic violence, the formation of normative masculinity, the psychic appeal of domination and submission, and the place of the "queer" desire in counterhegemonic practices. The contributors explore the role of psychoanalysis in shaping the future of cultural criticism; elaborate on innovative ways to approach group dynamics from a psychoanalytic perspective; rethink psychoanalytic understandings of authorship; and offer original interpretations of the intersections between gender, sexuality, and domination. Desire of the Analysts demonstrates that psychoanalysis remains an indispensable resource for critiquing our contemporary condition.

Provides insight into the ritual lures and effects of mass media spectatorship, especially regarding the pleasures, risks, and purposes of violent display.

Contemporary debates about mass media violence tend to ignore the long history of staged violence in the theatres and rituals of many cultures. In Theatres of Human Sacrifice, Mark Pizzato relates the appeal and possible effects of screen violence todayin sports, movies, and television newsto specific sacrificial rites and performance conventions in ancient Greek, Aztec, and Roman culture. Using the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan, Kristeva, and Zðizûek, as well as the theatrical theories of Artaud and Brecht, the book offers insights into the ritual lures and effects of current mass media spectatorship, especially regarding the pleasures, purposes, and risks of violent display. Updating Aristotle's notion of catharsis, Pizzato identifies a sacrificial imperative within the human mind, structured by various patriarchal cultures and manifested in distinctive rites and dramas, with both positive and negative potential effects on their audiences.

Examines the manifestations of racism, sexism, and homophobia in the literary works of Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, and Toni Morrison.

Writing Prejudices addresses critical attempts to undermine prejudice through education in general, and literary studies in particular. Robert Samuels argues that these attempts often fail because they do not take into account the different forms of prejudice, the role played by homophobia in racism and sexism, the structure of what Lacan calls symbolic castration, and the unconscious foundations of cultural formations. Addressing these deficiencies, Samuels uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the manifestations of racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia in the works of Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, and Toni Morrison, showing how these distinct modes of oppression feed off of each other and the diverse ways that cultural critics can work to undermine them.

Attempts to comprehend the traumatic significance of Hiroshima in order to construct a new theory of history.

Through a critique of history-as a reality, a discipline, and a way of writing-Deracination challenges the basic theoretical tenets of both humanism and postmodernism. As a discipline, history is currently undergoing what Heidegger would call a productive "crisis," and a number of thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and Stephen Greenblatt, have begun to reexamine the cognitive assumptions and narrative paradigms that inform the discipline. This book radicalizes such developments in order to construct both a new theory of history as well as a new concept of how histories should be written. To make the interrogation concrete, the book focuses on Hiroshima and the ways in which the trauma of that event has been repressed by the discourses that historians have fashioned in order to "explain" what happened on August 6, 1945.

Attempts to understand recent changes in the canon of American literature through the aid of psychoanalytic theory.

The Feminine "No!" sheds new light on the recent culture wars and debates about changes to the literary canon. Todd McGowan argues that the dynamics of canon change, rather than being the isolated concern of literary critics, actually offer concrete insights into the source of social change. Through a deployment of psychoanalytic theory, McGowan conceives the rediscovery and subsequent canonization of previously forgotten literary works as recoveries of past traumas. As such, these rediscoveries call into question and disrupt not only the canon itself, but also the mechanisms of ideology, precisely because trauma is shown to be the key to radical social change. The book focuses on four of the most prominent rediscoveries in the canon of American literature: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Examines representations of political, psychological, and sexual violence in seven novels by American women.

This book examines portrayals of political and psychological trauma, particularly sexual trauma, in the work of seven American women writers. Concentrating on novels by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Hopkins, Gayl Jones, Leslie Marmon Silko, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood, Horvitz investigates whether memories of violent and oppressive trauma can be preserved, even transformed into art, without reproducing that violence. The book encompasses a wide range of personal and political traumas, including domestic abuse, incest, rape, imprisonment, and slavery, and argues that an analysis of sadomasochistic violence is our best protection against cyclical, intergenerational violence, a particularly timely and important subject as we think about how to stop "hate" crimes and other forms of political and psychic oppression.

Uses recent psychoanalytic theory to analyze the work of three contemporary scholars—Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Sacvan Bercovitch—while viewing their work as expressing Jewish immigrant desires for integration into American culture.

This book primarily concerns the work of three prominent literary scholars, Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Sacvan Bercovitch, treating them as second-generation immigrant Jewish Americans. With at least two meanings of "transferring" in mind, the title alludes both to the historical, socio-cultural actualities of immigrancy, and to the psychoanalytic model used to describe the relations between these readers and the American texts they interpret. The central claim is that the theories and critical practices of Bercovitch, Bloom, and Cavell can be considered as the tools and tactics of an ambivalent, not yet fully realized desire for integration into America. Their cultural identity as members of the Jewish minority in America can thus still be seen to operate as a compelling source of anxiety and motivation.