Throughout his career, Lacan was working on the deliteralisation of Freudian concepts. What are these concepts that Lacan was working on? In Fink’s translation of ‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious’ in the…
Literature provides fertile ground to explore the inherent ambiguity of traditional psychological constructs, and Lacan’s approach to literary theory is no accident. What does this mean? We have learnt from literary theory that what it…
In Lacan’s view, the analysand is not ‘analysed’ by the analyst; it is the analysand who analyses, and the task of the analyst is to help him to analyse well. What does this mean and…
Lacan defines counter-transference as “the sum total of the analyst’s biases, passions, and difficulties”. What does Lacan mean here? Lacan uses the metaphor of a game of contract bridge to unpack what he means here. …
Lacan, like Freud before him, addressed the transference in a number of different ways through the development of his theoretical work. How did Lacan define transference and counter-transference? With transference, which is spoken about in…
by Philip Boxer BSc MBA PhD I am writing this blog to clarify the implications of the distinction between the small-s symbolic and the big-S Symbolic which is present in a number of previous blogs: Difficulties…
by Philip Boxer BSc MBA PhD Yiannis Gabriel has written a paper on psychoanalysis and organisation studies.[1] He usefully distinguishes two epochs: A first epoch, defined by the practice of clinicians ‘psychoanalysing organisations’ through the metaphor…
by Philip Boxer BSc MBA PhD A colleague of mine, Larry Hirschhorn, had the following to say about his experience of the difficulties of ISPSO members speaking to each other about their differing readings of…
by Philip Boxer BSc MBA PhD The plus-one process starts with the narrating of an originating situation[1], taken by the speaker to present some kind of challenge. The process generates three metaphors that point towards…
by Philip Boxer Lacan returns to Freud’s 4-part structure of the drive: a gap[1] – an experienced edge or limit to being able to give meaning; an object[2] – some structuring of behavior that is related…