Problems of Jouissance

 

In this short seminar, we will read two key, recently published texts on the concept of jouissance, with a view to clarifying the different types of clinical problems to which it means to refer. There is little doubt today that clinical work with such contemporary symptoms as eating disorders, technological addiction, ordinary perversions, and various narcissistic transferences all demand ever more subtle refinement and discernment in our clinical modes of attending to, intervening in, and transforming jouissance. And yet, as Darian Leader incisively points out, the purely descriptive use of the concept has left us less with the needed precision than with a formless cloud of indistinction. A particular interest of this seminar will be to explore the implications of re-specifying jouissance for Lacanian clinical practice, and show how it may well benefit from a more open approach to other analytic traditions, including ones Lacanians tend to oppose. A central assumption of the seminar is that Lacanian practice today falters in direct proportion to its ideological inability to return its concepts to the very field in which Lacan first reinvented the Freudian unconscious.

 

Texts:

Darian Leader, Jouissance: Sexuality, Suffering, and Satisfaction

Nestor Braunstein, Jouissance: a Lacanian Concept

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Faculty: Jeremy Soh, Ph.D.

Dates and Times: TBD, biweekly, January – March 2024

Location: Online

Fee: $200 or LSP Tuition

Contact: drsoh@hushmail.com

Jeremy Soh, Ph.D. is a personal and supervising psychoanalyst of the school and faculty at LSP. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow studying trauma, political violence, collective memory, climate change and alternative concepts of mind, technology and environment in indigenous worlds. Alongside his clinical practice in Berkeley, he is a writer, researcher, and lecturer in psychoanalysis, anthropology and philosophy, specializing in contemporary technological experience, digital and symbolic networks, and comparative concepts of the psyche. Currently, he is working on a theoretical and ethnographic project entitled Psychic and Technological Apparatuses, exploring the relations between digital and symbolic life in the present context of computerized society, with particular attention to its effects on psychic life and free association. He also serves as a peer reviewer for the European Journal of Psychoanalysis and is involved in various working groups focusing on technology, topology, and German Idealism.