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. Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Introduction PART 1 Madness manifest: encountering madness 1 The case of the baby diaper man 2 Ilse or the law of the mother 3 From psychotic illness to psychotic existence: on re-inventing the institution 4 On the suicide bomber: anatomy of a political fantasy 5 Today’s madness does not make sense PART II The method in madness: thinking psychosis 6 “You cannot choose to go crazy” 7 Treatment of the psychoses and contemporary psychoanalysis 8 Psychotic transference 9 The specificity of manic-depressive psychosis 10 Melancholia and the unabandoned object 11 Madness, subjectivity, and the mirror stage: Lacan and Merleau-Ponty 12 Narcissistic neurosis and non-sexual trauma 13 She’s raving mad: the hysteric, the woman, and the psychoanalyst PART III Madness and creation: environs of the hole 14 The open ego: Woolf, Joyce and the “mad” subject 15 Normality and segregation in Primo Levi’s Sleeping Beauty in the Fridge 16 Spell it wrong to read it right: Crashaw, psychosis, and Baroque poetics 17 Madness or mimesis: narrative impasse in the novels of Samuel Beckett 18 Reading mayhem: schizophrenic writing and the engine of madness Index