On Psychoanalysis and Violence Contemporary Lacanian Perspectives

Psychoanalysis has not examined violence as such since it is a sociological and criminological concept; psychoanalysis is concerned with speech. On Psychoanalysis and Violence brings together noted Lacanian psychoanalysts and scholars to fill an important gap in psychoanalytic scholarship that addresses what the contributors term the "angwash" of our current time. Today violence is everywhere. We are inundated with it, exhausted by it, bombarded by images and reports of it on a daily, even hourly basis. This book examines how psychoanalysis can account for the many manifestations of violence in contemporary society. Drawing on a broadly Lacanian perspective, the authors explore violence in war, terrorism, how the media portrays violence, violent video games, questions of identity, difference and the ‘other’; violence narratives and violence and DSM, and explain how to account for how violence arises and the effect it has on us on both an individual and social level. These are just some of the daily social realities of the present day whose aggression are felt by everyone, which horrify us and which we often feel powerless to change. The contributors have therefore coined a term for this cultural malaise: "angwash", arguing that we are awash in angoisse or anxiety, in a constant panic regarding the impossible and contradictory demands of a "civilization" in crisis. On Psychoanalysis and Violence will be of great interest to Lacanian psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Foreword: Is the American Youth Rebelling Against America? Gérard Pommier Introduction Vanessa Sinclair and Manya Steinkoler Chapter 1: Bodies and the Object-Death Jean-Jacques Moscovitz Chapter 2: Political Philosophy in Freud: The Death Drive and the Critical Faculty Judith Butler Chapter 3: The End(s) of Violence Juliet FlowerMacCannell Chapter 4: The Sex in Their Violence: Eroticizing Biopower Todd McGowan Chapter 5: Lone Wolf Terrorists: Howling in the Eye of the Wind - The Case ofAdam Lanza Manya Steinkoler Chapter 6: The Tortured Child Franz Kaltenbeck Chapter 7: Click and Destroy: The Clinic of Video Games Vincent Le Corre Chapter 8: Violence in RepetitionMartine Fourré Chapter 9: The Violence of Psychiatric Diagnosis Patrick Landman Chapter 10: How to Measure What: Notes on Universals and Particulars Todd Dean Chapter 11: Violence to Aggressiveness Guy Dana Chapter 12: Why the Zombies Ate My Neighbors: Whither Ambivalence? Carol Owens & Stephanie Swales Chapter 13: Susan Stern: Sham Geneviève Morel Chapter 14: Breaking the Spell of the Slave Revolt in Morality: From the Subreption ofIdentity-in-Difference to the Repetition of the Paraconsistent Alireza Taheri Chapter 15: Terror and the Unconscious: Psychoanalysis in Argentina 1976-1983 Patricia Gherovici

Vanessa Sinclair, Psy.D. is a psychoanalyst based in New York City, USAand Stockholm, Sweden, author of Switching Mirrors (Trapart, 2016) and the upcoming Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art: The Cut in Creation (Routledge, 2019) and editor of Rendering Unconscious (Trapart, 2018). Manya Steinkoler, Ph.D. is an English Professor at Borough of Manhattan College CUNY and a psychoanalyst in New York City, USA. She is co-editor with Patricia Gherovici of Lacan on Madness: Madness Yes You Can’t (Routledge, 2015), Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and forthcoming Psychoanalysis and Sexuality: From Feminism to Trans (Cambridge University Press, 2019).