Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy

Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy
Author: Patricia Gherovici
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2016-08-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107086175

Download Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Cutting-edge philosophers, psychoanalysts, literary theorists, and scholars use Freud and Lacan to shed light on laughter, humor, and the comic. Bringing together clinic, theory, and scholarship this compilation of essays offers an original mix with powerful interpretive implications.

In the Event of Laughter

In the Event of Laughter
Author: Alfie Bown
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2018-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501342630

Download In the Event of Laughter Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as its pre-history and afterlives, In the Event of Laughter argues for a new framework for discussing laughter. Responding to a tradition of 'comedy studies' that has been interested only in the causes of laughter (in why we laugh), it proposes a different relationship between laughter and causality. Ultimately it argues that laughter is both cause and effect, troubling chronological time and asking for a more nuanced way of conceiving the relationship between subjects and their laughter than existing theories have accounted for. Making this visible via psychoanalytic ideas of retroactivity, Alfie Bown explores how laughter – far from being a mere response to a stimulus – changes the relationship between the present, the past and the future. Bown investigates this hypothesis in relation to a range of comic texts from the 'history of laughter,' discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, Kafka and Chaplin, as well as lesser-known but vital figures from the comic genre.

The Odd One In

The Odd One In
Author: Alenka Zupancic
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2008-02-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0262740311

Download The Odd One In Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

A Lacanian look at how comedy might come to philosophy's rescue, with examples ranging from Hegel and Molière to George W. Bush and Borat. Why philosophize about comedy? What is the use of investigating the comical from philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives? In The Odd One In, Alenka Zupančič considers how philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us understand the movement and the logic involved in the practice of comedy, and how comedy can help philosophy and psychoanalysis recognize some of the crucial mechanisms and vicissitudes of what is called humanity. Comedy by its nature is difficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice comedy is a mode of tarrying with a foreign object—of including the exception. Philosophy's relationship to comedy, Zupančič writes, is not exactly a simple story (and indeed includes some elements of comedy). It could begin with the lost book of Aristotle's Poetics, which discussed comedy and laughter (and was made famous by Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose). But Zupančič draws on a whole range of philosophers and exemplars of comedy, from Aristophanes, Molière, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan to George W. Bush and Borat. She distinguishes incisively between comedy and ideologically imposed, “naturalized” cheerfulness. Real, subversive comedy thrives on the short circuits that establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous orders. Zupančič examines the mechanisms and processes by which comedy lets the odd one in.

Transgender Psychoanalysis

Transgender Psychoanalysis
Author: Patricia Gherovici
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2017-07-14
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317594177

Download Transgender Psychoanalysis Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Drawing on the author’s clinical work with gender-variant patients, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference argues for a depathologizing of the transgender experience, while offering an original analysis of sexual difference. We are living in a "trans" moment that has become the next civil rights frontier. By unfixing our notions of gender, sex, and sexual identity, challenging normativity and essentialisms, trans modalities of embodiment can help reorient psychoanalytic practice. This book addresses sexual identity and sexuality by articulating new ideas on the complex relationship of the body to the psyche, the precariousness of gender, the instability of the male/female opposition, identity construction, uncertainties about sexual choice—in short, the conundrum of sexual difference. Transgender Psychoanalysis features explications of Lacanian psychoanalysis along with considerations on sex and gender in the form of clinical vignettes from Patricia Gherovici's practice as a psychoanalyst. The book engages with popular culture and psychoanalytic literature (including Jacques Lacan’s treatments of two transgender patients), and implements close readings uncovering a new ethics of sexual difference. These explorations have important implications not just for clinicians in psychoanalysis and mental health practitioners but also for transgender theorists and activists, transgender people, and professionals in the trans field. Transgender Psychoanalysis promises to enrich ongoing discourses on gender, sexuality, and identity.

In the Event of Laughter

In the Event of Laughter
Author: Alfie Bown
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2018-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501342649

Download In the Event of Laughter Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Using Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as its pre-history and afterlives, In the Event of Laughter argues for a new framework for discussing laughter. Responding to a tradition of 'comedy studies' that has been interested only in the causes of laughter (in why we laugh), it proposes a different relationship between laughter and causality. Ultimately it argues that laughter is both cause and effect, troubling chronological time and asking for a more nuanced way of conceiving the relationship between subjects and their laughter than existing theories have accounted for. Making this visible via psychoanalytic ideas of retroactivity, Alfie Bown explores how laughter – far from being a mere response to a stimulus – changes the relationship between the present, the past and the future. Bown investigates this hypothesis in relation to a range of comic texts from the 'history of laughter,' discussing Chaucer, Shakespeare, Kafka and Chaplin, as well as lesser-known but vital figures from the comic genre.

After Lacan

After Lacan
Author: Ankhi Mukherjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2018-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1316512185

Download After Lacan Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book explores the phases of Jacques Lacan's career and examines the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis.

The Seductions of Psychoanalysis

The Seductions of Psychoanalysis
Author: John Forrester
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 1991-10-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521424660

Download The Seductions of Psychoanalysis Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Reflection on the history of psychoanalysis, its conceptual foundations and its relation to other disciplines.

Lacan on Madness

Lacan on Madness
Author: Patricia Gherovici
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2015-02-11
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317587065

Download Lacan on Madness Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

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.

Lacan in Contexts

Lacan in Contexts
Author: David Macey
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1789607396

Download Lacan in Contexts Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In the most comprehensive study of Jacques Lacan yet to be published in English, David Macey challenges many of the assumptions that have come to surround Lacan's work. He shows that key elements of Lacanian thought relate not to structuralism, as is often claimed, but to surrealism, Bataille and the early French phenomenologists. The famous "return to Freud" is shown to mask Lacan's adherence to a psychiatric tradition and to trends within French psychoanalysis which were opposed by Freud himself. A detailed and challenging reading of work by Lacan and his associates on femininity reveals its reliance upon a virulently sexist discourse and upon an iconography derived from surrealism. The view that Lacanian psychoanalysis has a positive contribution to make to feminism and to theories of gender and sexual difference is contested. As well as providing a new and provocative reading of Lacan's work, Lacan in Contexts is an important contribution to psychoanalytic history and to the history of French intellectual life.

Only a Joke Can Save Us

Only a Joke Can Save Us
Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2017-09-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0810135825

Download Only a Joke Can Save Us Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Only a Joke Can Save Us presents an innovative and comprehensive theory of comedy. Using a wealth of examples from high and popular culture and with careful attention to the treatment of humor in philosophy, Todd McGowan locates the universal source of comedy in the interplay of the opposing concepts lack and excess. After reviewing the treatment of comedy in the work of philosophers as varied as Aristotle, G. W. F. Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, and Alenka Zupancic, McGowan, working in a psychoanalytic framework, demonstrates that comedy results from the deployment of lack and excess, whether in contrast, juxtaposition, or interplay. Illustrating the power and flexibility of this framework with analyses of films ranging from Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers classics to Dr. Strangelove and Groundhog Day, McGowan shows how humor can reveal gaps in being and gaps in social order. Scholarly yet lively and readable, Only a Joke Can Save Us is a groundbreaking examination of the enigmatic yet endlessly fascinating experience of humor and comedy.