Psychoanalysis

My experience of working on Freud’s Three Essays was like being Alice down the Rabbit Hole: things seem to make sense, then make too much sense before sense melting away. The text itself is circular; beginning and ending on the same topic, namely a discussion of inversion, the sexual aberration which for Freud isn’t an aberration. It doesn’t follow a temporal structure: the Essay on Infantile Sexuality begins with amnesia, not being able to remember sexual matters, and the period of latency when infantile sexuality is suppressed. Freud’s method is to present a slice of sexual theory, work over it using his concepts and let it fall where it will, resulting in a fragmentary and multi-layered text. The book we have is the result of new sections and footnotes being added over the nineteen...

“If analysis has made any positive discovery about libidinal development, it is that the child is a pervert, even a polymorphous pervert.”2

Lacan reminds us that Freud’s contention that the germs of perversion inhere in all subjects remains one of the most important, if widely refuted discoveries of psychoanalysis. This paper aims to interrogate in more detail the oft-quoted phrase ‘neuroses are the negative of perversions’3. An in-depth examination of the analytic perspective allows us to understand this statement more fully and to grasp how the development of sexuality relates to the emergence of a neurotic position.

Imago is a word in Latin: image in English, or, to be more precise; form. Lacan’s reading of the term, particularly in his Seminar on Identification (1961-1962) leads him to ask: why have we allowed the imagos of Freud and Lacan to be trivialised? Why have we permitted these ’imperceptible traces’ to serve for our amusement, even our derision? Lacan reminds us that their use is revelatory as a means of understanding structure. This paper aims to examine this issue. Brendan Behan, a Dublin playwright once said... 

The title for our study day, thankfully, leaves no room for compromise when speaking about Freud’s discovery and the practice of psychoanalysis - “There is no subject if there is no signifier to ground him.”[1] With the affirmation of Lacan’s ceaseless advocacy of this, we return to the field of our origins, placing speech as the vital function for the subject; but what does this mean? The title “Is the Name-of-the-Father a necessity for the subject or does the object offer an alternative” clearly makes manifest the choice available as an option for the infant, for the child, for the subject of language. Is there, however, a pressing, latent and urgently coded message? As Lacan says in Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual “Psychoanalysis explains these very diverse...