Psychographies : specularity and death in psychoanalysis

• Main Author: Wolf, Bogdan
• Published: University of Warwick 1998
• Subjects: 100; B Philosophy (General) : BF Psychology
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.325754

This thesis discusses the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis. It takes the work of Freud and Lacan as a primary reference, and implements it in the reading of the texts of Nictzsche, Heidegger and Blanchot among others. The relationship is pursued along the lines of the problems originally posed by the philosophical writers and concerning the theme of subjectivity, idcntification, image fonnation and loss in order to punctuate the difficulties and aporias as articulatcd in and by the psychoanalytical questioning. The discussion aims therefore to demonstrate how the problems raised by philosophy can, but also should, be addressed by the psychoanalytical theory, and to what extent the former mishit, in the very way in which they are raised, by virtue of ignoring the discussion of the "fundamentals" of psychoanalysis, namely the status of the unconscious, the subject and the object in the human discourse. My strategy to address the philosophical readings begins in each part of this work with an analysis of the psychoanal)1ical text followed by the effects and implications, as they are imposed on the reading of philosophy/literature. This lack or insufficiency, as emerging in such an encounter, and operative in such a problematization, is thus given a certain psychographic attention which does not merely represent a psychoanalytical 'viewpoint' but rather involves a shift in the strategy itself. This shift questions the status of the subject in the production of discourse, while deploying the subject as a lack in such a questioning, and its relation to the real (object). It is in accordance with such an approach that I have divided this work into two parts, each attempting to address in the way described above the following issues. On the one hand, the analysis revolves around the problems of narcissism, specularity, image, ego and 'I' formation, and the symptom, and in this respect discusses the texts of Freud, Lacan, Rank and Nietzsche. On the other hand. it touches upon the work of "sad passions" or passions of death as operative in the production of the letter, and apparent in what could be called fictional theorisations in the texts of N. Abraham, Torok, Blanchot and Heidegger. Such tactics, again, take us beyond the meaning caught in the real, towards the way in which the problems of philosophy can be, again, taken up by psychoanalysis. To this extent, the second part has been devoted to the discussion and analysis of melancholia, mourning, loss, voice and guilt.