Lacan On Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t

Description

This new collection of essays by distinguished international scholars and clinicians will revolutionize your understanding of madness. Essential for those on both sides of the couch eager to make sense of the plethora of theories about madness available today, Lacan on Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t provides compelling and original perspectives following the work of Jacques Lacan. Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler suggest new ways of working with phenomena often considered impermeable to clinical intervention or discarded as meaningless. This book offers a fresh view on a wide variety of manifestations and presentations of madness, featuring clinical case studies, new theoretical developments in psychosis, and critical appraisal of artistic expressions of insanity. Lacan on Madness uncovers the logics of insanity while opening new possibilities of treatment and cure. Intervening in current debates about normalcy and pathology, causation and prognosis, the authors propose effective modalities of treatment, and challenge popular ideas of what constitutes a cure offering a reassessment of the positive and creative potential of madness. Gherovici and Steinkoler’s book makes Lacanian ideas accessible by showing how they are both clinically and critically useful. It is invaluable reading for psychoanalysts, clinicians, academics, graduate students, and lay persons. Cover......Page 1 Title Page......Page 4 Copyright Page......Page 5 Table of Contents......Page 6 Notes on contributors......Page 8 Acknowledgements......Page 13 Introduction......Page 14 PART I Madness manifest: encountering madness......Page 30 1 The case of the baby diaper man......Page 32 2 Ilse or the law of the mother......Page 46 3 From psychotic illness to psychotic existence: on re-inventing the institution......Page 60 4 On the suicide bomber: anatomy of a political fantasy......Page 69 5 Today’s madness does not make sense......Page 81 PART II The method in madness: thinking psychosis......Page 96 6 “You cannot choose to go crazy”......Page 98 7 Treatment of the psychoses and contemporary psychoanalysis......Page 112 8 Psychotic transference......Page 125 9 The specificity of manic-depressive psychosis......Page 140 10 Melancholia and the unabandoned object......Page 152 11 Madness, subjectivity, and the mirror stage: Lacan and Merleau-Ponty......Page 172 12 Narcissistic neurosis and non-sexual trauma......Page 186 13 She’s raving mad: the hysteric, the woman, and the psychoanalyst......Page 200 PART III Madness and creation: environs of the hole......Page 216 14 The open ego: Woolf, Joyce and the “mad” subject......Page 218 15 Normality and segregation in Primo Levi’s Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge......Page 232 16 Spell it wrong to read it right: Crashaw, psychosis, and Baroque poetics......Page 247 17 Madness or mimesis: narrative impasse in the novels of Samuel Beckett......Page 258 18 Reading mayhem: schizophrenic writing and the engine of madness......Page 267 Index......Page 281