BRUCE FINK: The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1995, 240 pp, $35. ISBN 0691037604. There are many Lacans. Each person seems to read into Lacan's prose whatever he or she wishes to find there. An entire voluminous literature has arisen as a response to Lacan's ambiguous, tortuous, esoteric pronouncements, many of which, as included in his "seminars," have not been translated into English. There are numerous quarreling schools of interpretation of Lacan's work, and Jaques Alain Miller, his son-in-law, and appointed heir, has by no means received general acceptance as the correct interpreter of Lacan's seminars. Lawsuits abound in Paris on these matters. The Lacan of Bruce Fink, who is a psychologist from Duquesne University, and who he tells us, is a "practicing psychoanalyst," would be approved of by Miller. Fink enjoys Lacan's obscure "Mathemes," to which he even adds graphs of trigonometric equations. The chapters in this book are of uneven composition. Some can be understood by a reader with little knowledge of Lacan's work while others are extremely esoteric, and made more esoteric by Fink's attempt to stick with Lacan's system of "Mathemes." Fink admits this in his preface, suggesting that the first chapter aims at "simplicity" and that the other parts of the book "become progressively more complex"-and that is certainly true. The chapters that might be of greatest interest to our readers if they are not familiar with Lacan's tortuous peregrinations, would be the first and the fifth chapter. One might ask to whom this book is addressed also. Beginners approaching Lacan will find it impenetrable. Therefore I would imagine that only Lacanians who are followers of Miller and who are intrigued by Lacan's "Mathemes" will truly enjoy this book. In spite of all this, certain ingenious ideas of Lacan pop up from time to time in all the pseudo-mathematical symbols and gibberish. For example, Children's endless whys are not, to Lacan's mind, the sign of an insatiable curiosity as to how things work but rather of a concern with where they fit in, what rank they hold, what importance they have to their parents (p. 54). The discussion of children's needs and the tasks that children set for themselves of trying to align themselves with every whim and fancy of the mother's desire is well delineated in this chapter. In the same chapter, there is a nice discussion of Lacan's practice of "punctuating" the analysand's discourse with a comment, a cough, a grunt, or a word or, in Lacan's notorious five-minute hour, the termination of a session that jolts analysands, "suddenly bringing them back to the realization that they know not what their analysts want or mean, that the latter are looking for something else in their discourse than what the analysands intended, that they want something else from it, something more" (p. …

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance,

This article will consider the therapeutics of despair according to Kierkegaard [Kierkegaard, S. (1989). The sickness unto death: A Christian psychological exposition for edification and awakening (A. Hannay, Trans.). London: Penguin Classics.] and the forensic literature, with particular reference to despair in the prison setting. The therapeutic resolution of despair as outlined by Kierkegaard (1989) can be seen to start at a potentially different definition of therapeutics from the forensic literature which, in promoting psychotherapy for despair, focuses on the management and treatment of symptoms of despair. For Kierkegaard (1989), despair is not seen as pathology but fundamentally over the self and a characteristic of the spirit. Despair is therefore not something that can be isolated and subsequently ‘known’, and accordingly its resolution is, ultimately, a beyond [Berthold-Bond, D. (1998). Lunar musings? An investigation of Hegel's and Kierkegaard's portraits of Despair. Religious Studies, 34, 33–...

Therapeutics of despair in the prison setting

In 1983, The President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research urged greater use of medical ethics committees. The Commission suggested that these committees could not only review treatment decisions made on behalf of incompetent, terminally ill patients and conduct reviews of those medical decision having ethical implications, but could also provide spiritual, psychological or social counseling for distressed family members. They could, furthermore, serve as prognosis committees endeavoring as such to confirm those prognoses which finds no reasonable possibility of a patient’s return to cognitive state. Today, more and more, ethics committees throughout the country reflect the vision that the President’s Commission articulated in 1983.This Article presents five constructs - with varying ethical levels of constraint and responsibility - for operating institutional ethics committees. Specific analysis is made of the approaches advanced by an early pioneer in the field - the late Dr. John C. Fletcher, Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Virginia School of Medicine - for strengthening, structurally, the focus and the practical work of clinical ethics. By incorporating specific ethics consultative services into the over all foundational structure of ethics committees, the contemporary purpose and mission of these committees become complimentary to the very goal of palliative care at the end of life - namely, assuring humane, efficacious medical assistance.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1574174_code855447.pdf?abstractid=1574174&mirid=2

The Ethics of Ethics Committees

What is the relationship between language, the self or subject, and the realm of the ineffable? Is the true self or subject something that precedes or underlies language, or does it only come into being through our acceptance and mastery of linguistic forms? What is madness’s relationship to that which is (or which is experienced as being) inaccessible or inexpressible through the medium of language? In his exemplary essay, “Talking Cures: A Lacanian Reading of Hegel and Kierkegaard on Language and Madness,” the philosopher Daniel Berthold investigates these issues by exploring the views of the three key authors mentioned in his title. Each of these authors is known for the complexity of his thought and the difficulty, verging at times on impenetrability, of his prose style. In Berthold’s fine essay, these challenging issues and authors are treated with a clarity and grace that is very rare. One cannot help but feel grateful to a writer who lives up so successfully to the motto of the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset: “In philosophy, clarity is courtesy.” My purpose in this commentary is not to dispute anything Berthold says: as indicated, I find his arguments essentially convincing and his formulations clear. I shall try, rather, to clarify further these inherently difficult issues by attempting to sum up, from a somewhat different angle, a number of the key themes that are treated in Berthold’s article, and also by expanding on the distinctness of the Lacanian perspective.1

Madness and the Ineffable: Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Lacan

Daniel Berthold’s “Talking Cures: A Lacanian Reading of Hegel and Kierkegaard on Language and Madness” is an eloquent discussion of speech, silence, and the ‘talking cure’ in the three figures highlighted in the title. There is much to admire in this paper. The treatment of speech and silence in the thought of Hegel and Kierkegaard, with many well-chosen quotations, offers much for reflection, both with respect to these philosophers and more generally with respect to the human condition. This is a paper that deserves more than one reading. I find nothing to criticize here and intend the following as further discussion of the themes Berthold has brought to us. Taking his cue from Lacan and reading back into the nineteenth-century figures from the perspective of Lacan’s emphasis on language and what he (Lacan) terms the Symbolic, Berthold explores the question of madness in Hegel and Kierkegaard. In my remarks, I connect Berthold’s analysis with older traditions of madness, distinguishing what I call the madness of the philosophers and the madness of the clinic. With the phrase, madness of the philosophers, I refer to a longstanding philosophic tradition that opposes reason and passion and attributes madness to an excess of the latter. In Berthold’s paper, Hegel is the representative of this position, with his description of madness as a regression into the primitive “life of feeling.” As Berthold puts it:

Madness of the Philosophers, Madness of the Clinic

In examining Hegel's and Kierkegaard's theories of language, I argue that both entail conceptions of the therapeutic power of language to heal us from madness and despair. I show that whereas Hegel quite straightforwardly celebrates the emancipatory power of language, Kierkegaard is more ambivalent; on the one hand, he devotes his life to a maieutic authorship in service of aiding the reader, but on the other, he believes that ultimately it is only faith in God that can cure us, and that faith requires silence. I use Lacan's psychoanalytic account of the role of language to explore Hegel's view that language constitutes the self and Kierkegaard's experimentation with an indirect form of communication that he hopes will enable him to fulfill each of his apparently conflicting goals, to write and yet to remain silent.

Talking Cures: A Lacanian Reading of Hegel and Kierkegaard on Language and Madness

Talking Cures, the Clinic, and the Value of the Ineffable

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Talking Cures: A Lacanian Reading of Hegel and Kierkegaard on Language and Madness

Talking Cures, the Clinic, and the Value of the Ineffable