Is Jouissance a Psychoanalytic Concept?

Darian Leader

Saturday, January 16, 2021 • 11:00 AM – 1:30 PM (EST)

Online with Zoom

Advanced Lacanians are supposedly those who have a ‘clinic of the real’ or of ‘jouissance,’ but beyond the sophisticated terms we often find feeble and unhelpful conceptualizations. The label ‘jouissance’ is now used almost entirely descriptively, thus blocking further exploration of a variety of clinical issues and shutting down rather than opening up clinical and conceptual questions about the symptom, the body, repetition, and sexuality.

Suggested readings: Freud: Introductory Lectures (1915-17), Lecture 23, “The Paths of Symptom-Formation.” Lacan: Seminar VII, 1959-60, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, classes 4 and 5, on the Thing (Dec. 9 and 16, 1959). Stephen, Karin: The Wish to Fall Ill (1933, Cambridge University Press).

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst working in London and a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and of The College of Psychoanalysts-UK. He is the author of several books including Why do women write more letters than they post?; Freud's Footnotes; Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing; Why do people get ill? (with David Corfield); The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression; What Is Madness?; Strictly Bipolar; Hands; and his most recent book, Why Can’t We Sleep? (2019). He writes frequently about contemporary art.

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