Lacan on Madness: Madness, yes you can't

by Patricia Gherovici (Editor)

This new collection of essays by distinguished international scholars and clinicians will revolutionize your understanding of madness. Essential for those on both sides of the couch eager to make sense of the plethora of theories about madness available today, Lacan on Madness, Yes You Can’t provides compelling and original perspectives following the work of Jacques Lacan.

Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler suggest new ways of working with phenomena often considered impermeable to clinical intervention or discarded as meaningless. This book offers a fresh view on a wide variety of manifestations and presentations of madness, featuring clinical case studies, new theoretical developments in psychosis, and critical appraisal of artistic expressions of insanity.
Lacan on Madness uncovers the logics of insanity while opening new possibilities of treatment and cure. Intervening in current debates about normalcy and pathology, causation and prognosis, the authors propose effective modalities of treatment, and challenge popular ideas of what constitutes a cure offering a reassessment of the positive and creative potential of madness. Gherovici and Steinkoler’s book makes Lacanian ideas accessible by showing how they are both clinically and critically useful. It is invaluable reading for psychoanalysts, clinicians, academics, graduate students, and lay persons.

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 7, 2015

Reviews

[Michael A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25/5. 18 solid essays about Lacanian madness/psychosis. Being an anthology, of course some essays were better than others. And the ones that I didn't particularly enjoy, I didn't really get. Lacan is of course a notoriously obscure and difficult thinker, but I think for the most part the authors here communicate lucidly. I'd say a general familiarity with basic psychoanalytical concepts (repression, phallus, etc. transference is probably the biggest one you should know before reading this) are necessary for most of them. For specifically Lacanian stuff, some essays presuppose certain things while others explain them. This is probably intended for somewhere in between a beginner and a middle tier audience - maybe late undergrads/ beginning grad students. however, there's some clinical advice in here too. I'd say if you have an okay foundation in (Lacanian/Freudian) psychoanalysis and have an interest in psychosis, I would read this.

The .25 is because of the readability of most of the essays. Thoroughly surprising and welcomed for anything related to Lacan!