Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan

Some notes on Structuralism

The French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) started his exploration of the human mind because during his work he discovered that there were certain cases that could not be explained somatically. In order to understand psychiatrist patients, it was not enough to understand the human body, but also the condition in general. As that other doctor, Freud, had encountered the ...

A century after Freud's project: is a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and neurobiology at hand?

In his 1895 "Project for a Scientific Psychology" Freud attempted to construct a model of the human mind in terms of its underlying neurobiological mechanisms. In this endeavor "to furnish a psychology which shall be a natural science," Freud introduced the concepts that to this day serve as the theoretical foundation and scaffolding of psychoanalysis. As a result, however, of his ensuing disav...

The Tragic Human and Desire in “the Ethics of Psychoanalysis” Seminar V11 of Lacan Sublimation in the Psychoanalysis of Lacan and Freud by Colin Leslie Dean

The Mark, the Thing, and the Object: On What Commands Repetition in Freud and Lacan

In Logique du Fantasme, Lacan argues that the compulsion to repeat does not obey the same discharge logic as homeostatic processes. Repetition installs a realm that is categorically different from the one related to homeostatic pleasure seeking, a properly subjective one, one in which the mark "stands for," "takes the place of," what we have ventured to call "an event," and what only in the mov...

The Place of Acting out in Psychoanalysis: from Freud to Lacan