Lacan on Depression and Melancholia

Description

Lacan on Depression and Melancholia considers how clinical, cultural, and personal understandings of depression can be broken down and revisited to properly facilitate psychoanalytical clinical practice. The contributors to this book highlight the role of neurotic conflicts underlying depressive affects, the distinction between neurotic and psychotic structure, the nature of melancholia, and the clinical value of Freudian and Lacanian concepts – such as object a, the Other, desire, the superego, sublimation – as demonstrated via a variety of clinical and historical cases. The book includes discussions of bereavement and mourning, transference in melancholia, suicidality and the death drive, excessive creativity, melancholic identification, neurotic inhibition, and manic-depressive psychosis. Lacan on Depression and Melancholia will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in practice and training, Lacanian clinicians, and scholars of Lacanian theory. Cover Endorsement Page Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of contributors Introduction: The failings of depression – A Lacanian orientation Chapter 1 Depression reconsidered: The well-spoken, neurotic conflicts, and desire Chapter 2 In between the signifier and the Real: On depressive experiences Chapter 3 Forgetting and remembering Chapter 4 Some thoughts on Mourning and Melancholia Chapter 5 Conceptualizing and treating (manic-depressive) psychosis: A Lacanian perspective Chapter 6 Maneuvers of transference in psychosis: A case study of melancholia from a Lacanian perspective Chapter 7 The complex of melancholia Chapter 8 Susan Stern: Sham Chapter 9 Excessive creativity in melancholia Chapter 10 Dressing up the death drive: Mourning as a defense against melancholia Chapter 11 The specificity of manic-depressive psychosis Chapter 12 Depression screening as the latest avatar of moralism in American public mental health Index