Loving Psychoanalysis: Looking at Culture with Freud and Lacan

Psychoanalysis was neither a product of philosophy nor of academic study. Rather, psychoanalysis was born in the clinic. Freud took his lead from hysterical women; the accounts of their pain, anxieties and physical symptoms led him to formulate his theories on the existence of the unconscious.

Psychoanalysis is neither a theory nor a way of seeing life. It is a form of ethics unlike any other, it is the subjects way of relating to the world. However, there is no doubt that it owes its existence to science. It could perhaps be termed the science of the particular, because it deals with the unique truth of the subject. Lacan, in contrast to the theoreticians who aspired towards universality, similarly described psychoanalysis as the approximate science of the subject.

This book is a kind of mosaic, composed of both beginning and concluding acts. It is an anthology of essays and lectures of recent years, which comprise an attempt to organize and pass on what can be learned from various psychoanalytical viewpoints from various cultural disciplines, particularly ones that reflect the discontent that is inherent within them.

Through the study of the theories of Freud, Lacan and Slavoj Zizek, the author offers riveting glimpses into the works of Moshe Gershoni, Lucian Freud, Paul Celan, Primo Levi and others, who all bear witness to the existence of the Other, trauma, feminine jouissance and the Real, in twentieth-century culture.