SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought
3 total works
In A Psychoanalyst on the Couch, we find the noted psychoanalyst and Lacan commentator Juan-David Nasio on the analyst's couch himself. In the interview that makes up this book, he provides insight into his forty-year career as a writer and practitioner, elaborating on Freudian and Lacanian concepts important to his work and reflecting on broad issues related to psychology and culture—as well as personal remembrances. The result is an intimate and wide-ranging look at the man and thinker, both an introduction to his work and a deeper look at his approach and outlook.
In Psychoanalysis and Repetition, Juan-David Nasio, one of the leading contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysts in France, argues that unconscious repetition represents the core of psychoanalysis as well as no less than the fundamental constitution of the human being. Through repetition, the unconscious memory of the past erupts, without our knowledge, in our choices and actions, to such an extent that, for Nasio, we are our past in action. While Nasio explains that repetition is both healthy and pathological, the book is primarily concerned with the repetition of unconscious trauma, as trauma engenders trauma, through unconscious fantasms that are expressed, in turn, as symptoms. Through vivid clinical examples, as well as trenchant theoretical explications involving repetition, Nasio illuminates a range of fundamental concepts in Freud and Lacan and offers a rethinking of the psychoanalytic tradition in the context of this theme. Nasio's approach is richly interdisciplinary, incorporating passages from philosophers Descartes and Spinoza, for example, and from such literary figures as Pindar, Proust, and Verlaine. The interdisciplinary fabric of Nasio's discourse conveys the crucial importance of the concept of repetition in psychoanalysis and in the human condition.
