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The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.


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TL;DR: Lacan's "Propos sur l'hysterie" as discussed by the authors is one of the few texts devoted entirely to hysteria and it represents a decisive moment in French psychoanalytic history.
Abstract: [A]nd nevertheless I consider that in a very precise manner I have been guided by hysterics. Lacan "Propos sur l'hysterie" Hysteria ended in 1952 when the diagnosis was eliminated from the official American psychiatric nomenclature. The word was deleted from the medical vocabulary when it ceased to be listed as a separate clinical entity in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Mental Disorders (dsm-i) (1952) and in The Standard Classified Nomenclature of Disease (scnd). But the termination of the entire disease form was rather a semantic suppression than the real elimination of the illness. It was not long before this "repression" produced a predictable Freudian "return." By a curious chronological coincidence, it was also in 1952 that Jacques Lacan published in the Revue frangaise de psychanalyse an article that emerged from a seminar he taught at the Societe Psychanalytique de Paris. It focused on Freud's most detailed case study of a hysterical patient, the famous Dora's case. "Presentation on Transference" (Ecrits 176-85) is one of the few texts Lacan devoted entirely to hysteria. In addition to being a perfect example of his proclaimed return to Freud, so characteristic of Lacan's work it represents a decisive moment in French psychoanalytic history. Just a year later, in 1953, a long-standing rift would develop into a split in the Societe Psychanalytique de Paris. Lacan and others resigned to found the Societe Frangaise de Psychanalyse, under the direction of Daniel Lagache. The reasons behind the split were theoretical, directly affecting the practice of psychoanalysis. Consequently, Lacan reopened the case of Dora's hysteria with both clinical and political motives. He had been supporting liberal academics and intellectuals on the question of lay analysis and opposing the authoritarianism of those who argued in favour of medical training for the practice of psychoanalysis. As the title of Lacan's essay betrays, Dora's case enabled him to underline the clinical importance of transference--the slippery terrain of mutual implication of analyst and patient in the treatment, the role of the "person" of the analyst, and the importance of the patient's belief in the analyst. Lacan foregrounded the transference bond in the analytic cure and, above all, to the role of the analyst within the transference. Lacan was also aware, following Freud's example, that medical training was the least helpful in preparing an analyst to deal with the deceiving, non-empirical nature of transference. It was precisely unanalyzed transference love that "impregnated" Anna O. and terrified her doctor Joseph Breuer; Breuer "resisted" the sexual reality of the unconscious revealed by Anna's imaginary pregnancy and parturition and abruptly terminated her treatment. Not wanting to know anything about it, he hastily declared her "cured" and ran away from the powerful force of transference (see Breuer and Freud). Freud, in contrast, did not vacillate: he not only admitted the existence of transference but was also courageous enough to publish his first major case study on hysteria, although it would fail. This case is fragmentary (let us recall that it was published under the title "Fragment of an Analysis ..."), an incomplete analysis, for the defiant Dora had abruptly broken off the treatment. This unsuccessful case, however, taught him an important lesson on transference. Furthermore, it may suggest that psychoanalysis is best grasped through its own failure. It is well known that Freud did not mind publishing controversial case studies; he intended the obstacles to develop into clues for discovery. This becomes quite clear in his "Postscript" to Dora's case, in which Freud learns from his mistakes and attributes his failure to his delay interpreting his own participation in the transference (see "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" 118). …

12 citations

Book
01 Jan 1996

12 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Fitzpatrick as discussed by the authors drew a parallel between tent and stage, the contractor Ewbank's celebration and the playwright Storey's play, and pointed up relationships between life and the stage that have maintained a powerful theatrical appeal throughout Western literature.
Abstract: was . .. committed?"' His parenthetical correction points up relationships between life and the stage that have maintained a powerful theatrical appeal throughout Western literature. The tent is a stage within a stage. Fitzpatrick, then, is drawing a parallel between tent and stage, the contractor Ewbank's celebration and the playwright Storey's play. The correspondence Fitzpatrick highlights is, of course, not only a particular commentary on modern theatrical conventions but also an evocation of the perennial theatrumn mundi metaphor.' The theatrum mundi metaphor constitutes, of course, a complex of relations that involve what might be distinguished as other metaphors. If the stage, taken at face value, is an untrue, unreal, or fictional reflection of life itself, then in Platonic terms any such "pale" imitation of reality is analogous to the stage. Thus stage and dream-the two most pervasive manifestations of the imaginative, imaginary, subjective, ideal dimension, as opposed to the actual and material -become easily linked as metaphors and implicitly invoke each other. It would be possible to expand consideration of plays to another reflection of the real-unreal or real-ideal dialec-

12 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argued that class politics was never a real alternative at all, but merely a nostalgic dream imagining the complexities of contemporary political antagonisms under the form of the harsh frontiers of an incipient capitalism.
Abstract: Today, on "the Left" and in the domain of theory, a choice is being posed: class politics or radical democracy? And yet, as with any allegedly exhaustive polarity, the choice as formulated is not an innocent one, for the terms of which it is comprised are only bound together by the force of a normative hierarchy. We are by all means "free to choose," but there is a right choice and a wrong, which is to say that, however we may choose, the very fact of the opposition will have already done the choosing for us. Within the range of this "choice," class politics was never a real alternative at all, but merely a nostalgic dream imagining the complexities of contemporary political antagonisms under the form of the harsh frontiers of an incipient capitalism. And if we who dream this dream, we who operate in the political imaginary of "Marxism," were only to awaken, we would discover that we have cosed ourselves into a "class ghetto," isolated from the terrain on which politics takes place today. A novel variation on this theme is the recent suggestion that the way out of this "ghetto" has already been given in the "ghetto" itself, that a careful examination of our inner-city

12 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The meeting with the Other sustains new ways of life and grants deep transformations in subjectivity as mentioned in this paper, however defined, vision and divine voice are at the heart of religious experience.
Abstract: Vision and divine voice, however defined, are at the heart of religious experience. The meeting with the Other sustains new ways of life and grants deep transformations in subjectivity. After chron...

12 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
2023563
20221,296
2021145
2020180
2019178
2018199