Reading Marc Abélès‘ “Thinking beyond the state” (Penser au-delà de l’État) and the news at the same time drives his point home. I agree that the question of desire is key when approaching the state. But I do so via Lacan whereas he draws on Deleuze & Guattari. #anthropology #psychoanalysis #state

A Lacanian analysis of addiction

From Bruce Fink’s Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key:

“Addiction” is not, in and of itself, a psychoanalytic diagnosis, inasmuch as it refers to activities found across the diagnostic spectrum. Addictions may, like so many other cyclical activities, be viewed as symptomatic (i.e., compulsive) activities that aim at achieving a form of satisfaction or jouissance that they approach but never fully attain. It is, it seems, the very failure to fully reach what is sought that leads to the repetition of such activities. (Missing one’s objective is what brings on repetition, suggests Lacan, 1978.)

It occurred to me that Alan Carr’s account of addiction sits interestingly with this model, in the sense that he argues addiction involves a misidentification of enjoyment. It’s jouissance in Lacan’s terms, a pleasure-in-pain, rather than something which exists as a more straight forward form of pleasure sensation. It could perhaps, in a Lacanian register, be seen as an argument about searching for a positive core to jouissance which can never be found.

The #Yogācāra school's eightfold model of #consciousness (#vijñāna) offers a detailed Buddhist framework for understanding perception, identity, and delusion. By analyzing layers from sensory awareness to the unconscious "#storehouse" (#ĀlayaVijñāna), it provides a unique #psychoanalytic system without a permanent self (#anatta):

https://www.fabriziomusacchio.com/weekend_stories/told/2025/2025-06-07-vijnanas/

How is it that after every brilliant analysis of the contemporary technological process, Jaron Lanier manages to squeeze in a half-baked hot take on how to save capitalism from itself, that anything Marxism is basically Stalinism or at least Leninism, followed by how neurobiology basically contradicts anything in psychoanalysis?

I write about #Nietzsche and #Klein's differing views on #gratitude and what they regard as its opposites: fear and envy.
https://www.bryankam.com/p/gratitude-and-its-opposites #philosophy #psychology #psychoanalysis @philosophy @psychology

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand

There is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light … We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine

E.M. Forster, A Room With A View, Pg 152

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUDVUZZyA0M

From Ulrich Baer’s collection of Rilke’s letters loc 673:

There is only a single, urgent task: to attach oneself someplace to nature, to that which is strong, striving and bright with unreserved readiness, and then to move forward in one’s efforts without any calculation or guile, even when engaged in the most trivial and mundane activities. Each time we thus reach out with joy, each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following but also alter the past within us, weave it into the pattern of our existence, and dissolve the foreign body of pain whose exact composition we ultimately do not know.

From James Baldwin’s final essay in Nothing Personal:

One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light. What the light reveals is danger, and what it demands is faith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf_zVzvYWuw

I am transforming
I am vibrating
I am glowing
I am flying
Look at me now

Frantz Fanon acknowledging he read Jacques Lacan without saying it. He does mention it in the book, but here I see an implicit reference to what Lacan will 10 years later call “objet petit a”. He develops it via the gaze and the mirror stage in his early teaching. #psychoanalysis #anthropology

Mental illness apparently can be broadcast. Might the same be true for therapy?

# # #
"...
Even before her nomination, some anti-vax influencers had grown suspicious of Means and her brother, Calley, a wellness entrepreneur now working with H.H.S. They saw the pair as sketchy parvenus who were diverting their movement’s attention from vaccines to food, perhaps at the behest of shadowy outside forces. After the Means siblings appeared ...

..."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/opinion/casey-means-maha.html
#AntiVax #Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis, the science of why your childhood has ruined the rest of your life.

Sigmund Freud’s office and psychoanalytic couch in the Freud Museum, London.

@Remittancegirl
Unintentionally funny, or intentionally funny?
"It’s an interesting challenge. The field of #psychoanalysis uses language *is* quite eccentric ways that make machine translation almost impossible." Bloody AutoIncorrect!

I always wondered how transgender issues are dealt with in gendered languages. At least, German has "neuter" to add to the gamut.