Summer 2019 | The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis

First published in 2019 by:
The SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis
the-site.org.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Edited, designed and produced by:
Nic Bayley, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz, Val Parks, Julie Walsh and Barry Watt.

Editorial Advisory Panel
Julia Borossa, Bernard Burgoyne, Olga Cox Cameron, John Fletcher, Stephen Frosh, Chris Hauke, Anastasios Gaitanidis, Dany Nobus, Chris Oakley, Haya Oakley, Joanna Ryan, Naomi Segal, Ross Skelton, Paul Verhaeghe, Rob Weatherill, Peter Wood, Amy Wygant.

Notes for Future Contributors
Sitegeist uses a peer-review system based around electronic submission. Authors are invited to send abstracts of not more than 200 words to the editors. Calls for Papers are made, on occasion, and are publicised on our website: the-site-org.uk and Twitter feed: @SITE_GEIST.

Editorial

In his paper “On Death-Work” J-B Pontalis ponders the puzzling double faced nature of the death drive: Is it aggressive and destructive behaviour… above all self-destructive, or is it a state of apathy? Is it unrestrained violence or the temptation of nirvana (each generation finding or rediscovering its own)? Is it an overabundance, an excess...

Water in Water: Psychoanalysis and Post-humanism?

‘Man’ is a little thing that has learned to stammer the word “infinity.” — Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation Oceanic Residues “The separate being,” Georges Bataille writes, “is precisely a thing in that it is separated from itself: it is the thing and the separation” (1989, 75). Psychoanalytically-speaking, this “separate being” would correspond to...

The Irreducible Datum

Without a word – the men Leaving the gardens tidy Never such innocence, Never before or since. 1 ((MCMXIV Philip Larkin.)) * I started off with nothing and still have most of it left. 2 ((This is a title by blues singer, Seasick Steve.)) Call it the Original Sin, or the primal scene of the...

Consciousness, Repetition and the Death Drive, 1895 and 1920

Beyond the Pleasure Principle published in 1920, is famous as the work where Freud first supposed the existence of a “death drive”, which would be a recurrent theme in his writings from then on. But a reader who comes to Beyond in search of the famous death drive may be surprised to find that the...

Encountering R. D. Laing’s Divided Self 1960. Penguin Modern Classics: 2010. ISBN: 9780141189376. £10.99

As a Lacanian coming to Laing late, the title of his most renowned book had always held such allure: was the contemporaneous Divided Self working along similar lines to Lacan’s concept of, and theory surrounding, the divided subject? Yes and no, of course; but also, so much more. With Lacan, despite his psychiatric beginnings; the...

Whose Story? Review: History of Modern Psychology, Lectures Delivered at ETH Zurich, Volume I, 1933-1934, by C. G. Jung, edited by Ernest Falzeder and translated by Mark Kyburz, John Perk, and Ernest Falzeder, Princeton University Press, 2019, ISBN: 978-0-691-18169-1

This volume is a detailed reconstruction of the first semester in a series of public lectures that Jung delivered at the ETH in Zurich between 1933-1941. “Like a complex Jigsaw puzzle”(1i), the editors assembled different transcripts and notes taken by participants at Jung’s lectures which, during many years’ work, has been translated, compared and edited. While...

Book review: Fictional Clinical Narratives in Relational Psychoanalysis: Stories from adolescence to the consulting room by Christina Moutsou, Routledge, London, 2019, ISBN:978-1-138-31549-5

Christina Moutsou has put together a remarkable series of short stories in which she aims to eludicate the therapeutic process from a relational perspective. She tells us that the cases are fictional but of course, to write such an account, she will be drawing on her clinical experience. Fictional cases get around the issue of...

Beyond the Banana Skin Review: Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy, Edited by Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler, Cambridge University Press 2016 ISBN 978-1-107-08617-3

Patricia Gherovici has a knack for producing books that sum up a moment so neatly that you hardly have to actually read them, though doing so is always a pleasure as well as importantly informative. Please Select Your Gender was one of those, and though it has a less catchy title, Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy...

Review: Narcissism, Melancholia and the Subject of Community edited by Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh, Palgrave Macmillan 2017 ISBN 978-3-319-63828-7 Andie Newman

This book offers readers a wonderful invitation to re-explore two of Freud’s most significant papers, On Narcissism: an Introduction (1914) and Mourning and Melancholia (1917 [1915]). The book’s chapters provide diverse pathways which weave us both back into an intimacy with the texts, and out and beyond the theoretical sphere - into the social -...

Response to Chris Oakley review of The Anti-Oedipus Complex, Lacan, Critical Theory and Post-Modernism

The cover of The Anti-Oedipus Complex depicts the labyrinth carved into the wall of the Cathedral of St. Martino in Lucca, Italy. Hermann Kern (Kern 2000) speculates about the precise placement of the Lucca labyrinth, suggesting is a game for the fingers of the faithful as they enter the Cathedral, analogous to the French pavement labyrinths,...

Notes on Contributors

Nic Bayley is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Reading and a member of The Site and the College of Psychoanalysts. He teaches psychodynamic counselling at the University of Oxford. Daniel Bristow is an alumnus of the universities of Bath, Bath Spa, Kingston, and Manchester. Author of many articles and editor of various publications, his...

Call for Writing

Sitegeist was founded with the intention of promoting varied, lively and creative approaches in writing to the questions facing psychoanalysis today. For our next issue, number 15, we invite submissions on any psychoanalytic theme or topic. Abstracts and ideas for articles and reviews (of books, exhibitions, conferences etc.) are very welcome and should be sent...