In this episode of the New Psychoanalytic Spaces sub-series, Sophie Mendelsohn responds to questions about the work of the Collectif de Pantin she founded in 2018 and continues to operate in Pantin, a diverse Paris suburb, with a focus on interrogating race in the analytic experience and on observing the effects of taking race, as well as coloniality and postcoloniality, into account in clinical and social contexts. Sophie Mendelsohn reflects on problems of articulating clinical experience to...

This episode’s interview is with Derek Hook, who studies and practices psychoanalysis and is Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University. He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan, among many other works and important edited volumes on Lacan’s Écrits and Lacan and Race, among others. To respond to the prompt for this series of Penumbr(a)cast, on a life-changing or at least impactful artwork, following Freud’s powerful experience with Michelangelo’s Moses sculpture, Dr. Hook points to an...

In this episode, Fabrice Bourlez, who teaches aesthetics (ENSBA) and practices psychoanalysis in Paris, speaks about his exploration of concepts of tact and elasticity in his practice, and in his reading of Freud, Ferenczi, and Lacan, as well as of Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and queer theory. The author of Pulsions pasoliniennes (Pasolinean Drives) and of Queer psychanalyse: clinique mineure et déconstructions du genre (Queer Psychoanalysis: Minor Clinic and Deconstructions of...

In this episode, Fabrice Bourlez, who teaches aesthetics (ENSBA) and practices psychoanalysis in Paris, speaks about his exploration of concepts of tact and elasticity in his practice, and in his reading of Freud, Ferenczi, and Lacan, as well as of Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and queer theory. The author of Pulsions pasoliniennes (Pasolinean Drives) and of Queer psychanalyse: clinique mineure et déconstructions du genre (Queer Psychoanalysis: Minor Clinic and Deconstructions of...

In this episode, Dr. Stephen Sternbach (Harvard Medical School; Cambridge Health Alliance; member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and of the École freudienne du Québec) speaks of his journey into psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and also literature as a space to explore the encounter with the Real. Sternbach discusses the changing relationship to psychoanalysis in psychiatric education and practice over the past decades in the United States. He touches on the concept of the defect in language...

This episode's interview with Ankhi Mukherjee focuses on her recent book, Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor. It discusses Mukherjee's research on Freud's free clinics and their afterlives in different cities and projects that make psychoanalytic interventions in marginalized communities. We discuss the roles literary criticism can play in the work of these clinics, as well as the urgent need for spaces for subjectivity that are not limited to economic elites and that extend...

This episode features an interview with Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Professor Emerita of the Centre d'études féminines et de genre at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-St. Denis, founder of the CNRS research lab for Gender and Sexuality Studies LEGS, and affiliated Romance Studies Professor at Cornell University. Berger shares her thoughts on the status and implications of reading and writing, the links between deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and their current political relevance and...

This episode is an interview with Juliet Flower MacCannell, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and English at UC Irvine, and author of The Hysteric’s Guide To The Future Female Subject  (2000), The Regime of the Brother (1991), Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious (1986 and 2014, reprinted), and with Dean MacCannell The Time of the Sign (1982), as well as of many essays. This third experiment in inviting the interviewee to discuss a work of art that profoundly...

This interview with Jean-Michel Rabaté invites us to explore connections between psychoanalysis and multiple fascinating instances of modernism (from Rimbaud to Jarry to Proust and Gide to Kafka) and avant-garde art (surrealism and dadaism). The political and analytic power of laughter, horror, irreverence, and scandal come to the foreground in discussions about the affective dimension of art-viewing and reading literature. Rabaté thinks about the death drive in relation to writing, discusses...

In this episode, psychoanalyst and German/Jewish literature professorJeffrey Librett speaks of the structure of the address that psychoanalysis subverts. This structure in the social link sets limits on what can be said to and recognized by someone else. There is therefore a structural failure in communication. But even one's private thoughts are limited by this structure. Transference in psychoanalysis, as Librett understands it, lifts repression to welcome speech about what is left out of...

This special episode of Penumbr(a)cast - The Other Scene features a conversation with Dr. Patricia Noboa Ortega, cofounder of the Clínica Legal Psicologica in Puerto Rico, a clinic that provides legal and communal support to marginalized communities deeply affected by hurricane María in 2017, as well as individual psychoanalytic listening for members of these communities. The interview considers what enables the clinic to bring to these sites elements from  psychoanalysis after Lacan, and...

´This special episode of Penumbr(a)cast - The Other Scene features a conversation with Dr. Patricia Noboa Ortega, cofounder of the Clínica Legal Psicológica in Puerto Rico, a clinic that provides legal and communal support to marginalized communities deeply affected by hurricane María in 2017, as well as individual psychoanalytic listening for members of these communities. The interview considers what enables the clinic to bring to these sites elements from  psychoanalysis after Lacan, and...

This episode starts a series of Penumbr(a)cast - The Other Scene devoted to exploring the effects of art and literature on a subject. The interview with Tim Dean, explores his work as a thinker and writer, his thoughts on the critic Leo Bersani, and his response to the poem Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Special thanks to Luke Heister and Omar Brown for their editorial assistance with this episode.

This episode discusses a contemporary use of the term castration, introduced by Freud. Cantin distinguishes between imaginary, symbolic, and real castration in relation to different moments of the human individual life and to the psychoanalytic cure, highlighting the relevance of castration as a work that liberates subjects from the cultural montage of sexuality that hijacks unconscious desire. The second half of the episode specifically explores the experiences and difficulties women face...

This episode (in two parts) discusses a contemporary use of the term castration, introduced by Freud. Cantin distinguishes between imaginary, symbolic, and real castration in relation to different moments of the human individual life and to the psychoanalytic cure, highlighting the relevance of castration as a work that liberates subjects from the cultural montage of sexuality that hijacks unconscious desire. Part 2 specifically explores the experiences and difficulties women face with regard...

This episode (in two parts) discusses a contemporary use of the term castration, introduced by Freud. Cantin distinguishes between imaginary, symbolic, and real castration in relation to different moments of the human individual life and to the psychoanalytic cure, highlighting the relevance of castration as a work that liberates subjects from the cultural montage of sexuality that hijacks unconscious desire.  Grand "merci" à Denis Morin, for his help with the transcription, and to Kellen...

Second half of the conversation with Bret Fimiani on psychosis in the psychoanalytic clinic. Find Bret Fimiani’s work here: Psychosis and Extreme States (2021) (Palgrave Lacan Series) References mentioned in this episode: The Schreber Case — Freud  Hearing Voices Network History Beyond Trauma — Francoise Davoine & Jean-Max Gaudillere  Follow the Center for Psychoanalysis and Culture on Facebook Read Penumbr(a), a new journal of psychoanalysis and modernity: penumbrajournal.org/ 

This episode discusses psychosis as a psychic structure and psychoanalytic work with experiences of psychosis and extreme states. It draws on Bret Fimiani's recent Psychosis and Extreme States - An Ethic for Treatment (Palgrave 2021) to distinguish a psychoanalytic approach to the experience of psychosis, and to explore the perspectives of the psychotic subject in analytic treatment and of the analyst sustaining transference with psychotic subjects.  Find Bret Fimiani’s work here: Psychosis...

This episode discusses the concept of the unconscious as the result of an experience under transference, understood in terms of the effects of the analyst's own experience of undergoing analysis. The episode also discusses what is at stake in feminine jouissance, non-neurotic psychic structures, the beautiful, and it concludes with a reflection on time. Thanks to Steven Miller for reading the English translation for this version of the episode.

This episode discusses the concept of the unconscious as the result of an experience under transference, understood in terms of the effects of the analyst's own experience of undergoing analysis. The episode also discusses what is at stake in feminine jouissance, non-neurotic psychic structures, the beautiful, and it concludes with a reflection on time.

This episode discusses the concept of structure in the psychoanalytic clinic, which enables an understanding of what is specifically at stake in the course of an analysis, in its distinction from structuralist theory, a DSM-based diagnosis, and psychotherapy. 

In this episode, Daniel Wilson discusses the notion of the unconscious Thing ("das Ding") in the work of Freud, Lacan, and Apollon, as the inaccessible cause of the subject and thus the crucial problem at stake in desire and the drive over the course of an analysis, and in an individual's life.

In this episode Tracy McNulty discusses the Lacanian conception of the act and the related operation of the pass that he introduced in his school of psychoanalysis in 1967 and that remains a crucial procedure at the end of an analysis and also in a school of analysis.  

Penumbr(a)cast - The Other Scene is a podcast related to Penumbr(a), the journal of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis & Culture at Buffalo: https://www.penumbrajournal.org  Special thanks to Megan Hirner for her assistance with the audio files and many other details to produce this podcast.  This brief introduction explains how the podcast came into existence in 2020, as well as its initial project.