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Very interesting essay where the author explores the issue of the (mis)translation of Freud’s texts into English and the consequences this has had for the actual practice of psychoanalysis in the English speaking world. Specifically for the understanding of the Lacanian perspective.
He tackles the issue of the translation of Freud’s texts into English. Specifically, why is it that Freud’s Angst was translated as anxiety in English, instead of anguish or even angst itself, terms which actually exist in English.
Read it HERE
Castrillón, F. (2014). Translating Angst: Inhibitions and Symptoms in Anglo-American Psychoanalysis. European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1, No. 2.
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'What is Psychoanalysis?' is a 4-part educational film series for students and teachers.
Primarily aimed at A-Level Psychology students studying the 'psychodynamic approach', these films are intended to facilitate first encounters with Freud's thought.
IN THIS EPISODE:
A fractured self
The ego, the id and the superego
Why did Freud develop a new model?
Devils and angels
People fall ill of their moral ideals
A horse and a rider
The ego is like a politician
The goal of analysis is to stop the ego being so silly
More info: www.freud.org.uk/education/
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On the Psychoanalysis of Babies[1]
Jean Laplanche
[Translator’s note: “On the Psychoanalysis of Babies” is Jean Laplanche’s response to a 2007 essay by Bernard Golse, Head of Child Psychiatry at the Hôpital Necker–Enfants Malades and Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Université René Descartes. Golse’s essay, “Y a-t-il une psychanalyse possible des bébés?(“Is There Any Possible Psychoanalysis of Babies?”),[2] contests the charge that a “psychoanalysis of children – and still less of babies – has no claim to a legitimate existence” (354). This charge, he argues, is based on the belief that infants are not from outset situated within the temporality of ‘après-coup’, i.e. what Freud called Nachträglichkeit (see note 3, below). To challenge this view, Golse returns to Freud’s original development of Nachträglichkeit and draws extensively on Laplanche’s resumption of it in his ‘general theory of seduction’. Working through a series of accounts of very early infant experience (e.g. the losses of developmental mourning and the apprehension of intersubjectivity, as well as, still earlier, intrauterine existence) Golse argues that from the metapsychological point of view even the youngest infant cannot be said to be outside the temporality of après-coup: tracing back to an original first trauma will always, he claims, be a “fundamentally asymptotic” endeavour (355). To the extent that the theory of après-coup thus remains valid for the understanding of infants themselves, it is possible to “remain a psychoanalyst” in work with young babies and this work may be considered “authentically psychoanalytic” (360).]
Bernard Golse and I share a mutual understanding that is solid and amiable (on both sides). I shall not discuss his deliberately provocative title concerning a ‘possible psychoanalysis’ of babies. I simply wonder, and assent to the idea that a psychoanalyst cannot and must not forget for a moment that he is an analyst in the presence of a baby. There is, however, a world of difference between this and ‘psychoanalysing’; for one may just as easily be a psychoanalyst in the presence of an ulcerated patient, a paraplegic or someone dying, without, for all that, having recourse to the psychoanalytic act.
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This article by Nicholas Ray is republished by kind permission of Radical Philosophy [1]
Jean Laplanche, one of Europe’s most eminent and original psychoanalytic thinkers, died on 6 May, 2012, at the age of 87. His death brings to an end a remarkable intellectual career dedicated to the meticulous analysis and rigorous critical expansion of the Freudian discovery.
Laplanche was born on 21 June 1924 to a family of wine producers who owned the prestigious Château de Pommard in Burgundy. In 1940, at the age of 16, he moved from Burgundy to Paris in order to study at the Lycée Henri IV with the aim of eventually reading philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. It was at the Lycée that he first met his future collaborator Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. After completing his secondary education Laplanche spent 1943 and part of 1944 working with the French Resistance before enrolling at the ENS in the 1944–45 academic year. At the ENS, he was taught by some of the foremost philosophers of the day: Ferdinand Alquié, Gaston Bachelard, Jean Hyppolite and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It was thanks in particular to Hyppolite and Alquié that Laplanche became interested in psychoanalysis. His interest intensified when in 1946–47 he won a scholarship to Harvard University. There, he studied at the progressive Department of Social Relations, coming into contact with professional psychoanalysts as well as cultural anthropologists working with psychoanalytic ideas. Having returned to Paris, at Alquié’s auspicious recommendation Laplanche entered into an analysis with Jacques Lacan which would continue until 1963. By 1951, after taking the agrégation de philosophie, he decided to become an analyst himself.
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The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research recently held the second of their annual conferences dedicated to the theme of the relation between characteristic styles of British and Lacanian clinical practice. The Conference was entitled "Lacan and the British Tradition II", and was held in the University of London Union on 29th November, 1997. The theme that is being developed in this series of conferences is intriguing as well as enlightening: a cross comparison of clinical orientation sheds much light on the nature of psychoanalytical work. This year, the focus of the meeting was on the concept of cure in psychoanalysis, and in particular the notions of the direction and the end of the treatment.