Reviews for Loving Psychoanalysis: Looking at Culture with Freud and Lacan

The average rating for Loving Psychoanalysis: Looking at Culture with Freud and Lacan based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-17 00:00:00 Carmen Gauvreau Ellie Ragland (she dropped the -Sullivan from her name with this book, apparently) is one of those exemplary, orthodox Lacanians that I just can't stand. Her earlier book, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis was an extremely competent but sternly rigid interpretation of Lacan in the light of his philosophical influences. This book's title is a little more puzzling - Essays on the Pleasures of Death?! Certainly the third chapter focuses on this question, but the rest of the book coheres more closely around the book's subtitle, "From Freud to Lacan." As such, after opening with a meditation on translation (French to English, Freud to Lacan), Ragland essentially plays here a selection of the Lacanian greatest hits, showing how Lacan draws from and modifies Freud's theories in order to translate them into his own setof ideas. As such, the book has no real sense of flow, direction, or argument, it merely outlines how Lacan reworks Freud's theories of the ego and narcissism (Ch.1), his theory of psychoses (Ch.2), the death drive and its relation to jouissance (Ch.3), the notion of the cure (Ch.4), the ethics of desire (Ch.7), and the paternal metaphor (Ch.8). If you've read Freud and Lacan, there will be that is new in here. The best parts of the book occur in Ragland's analysis of the death drive in Chapter 3 and the notion of ethics in Chapter 7, where she does at least show in a somewhat interesting way how Lacan's work is revolutionary in its rereading of Freud. Otherwise, though, the book is dry, technical, and academic - not to mention the fact that it is obviously intended more for an audience of analysts than theorists. Essays on the Pleasure of Death is not a bad book as such, it's just that it lacks a certain level of innovation and new insight that is on display in both Ragland's contemporaries (Jane Gallop or David Macey, for instance) or the New Lacanians (like Joan Copjec or Slavoj Žižek). There is little in this book that I couldn't have found by going back and rereading Lacan's seminars and Écrits. I also object to Ragland's sycophantic adoration of Jacques-Alain Miller, whose interpretations of Lacan's work I find almost propagandist in their mythologization of the "Master." Thankfully this mode of Lacanian thought is rapidly disappearing into the mire of history.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-10 00:00:00 Wally Majors Interesting, though difficult, analysis of the links between Frued and Lacan and how Lacan developed Freud's thought. There are some interesting lines of thought. A challenge to Chomsky's language theories which I didn't find wholly convincing. The concept of the "Death Drive" which Frued mentions but does not adequately develop is followed up here. There is an excellent anlysis of the impasse between wanting and being leading to an examination of how pornography uses words that depersonalize, but body parts are personalized. On the whole a difficult but rewarding read.