Having a Life: Self Pathology After Lacan
Book Details
- Publisher : Analytic Press
- Published : January 2004
- Category :
Lacanian Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 92744
- ISBN 13 : 9780881634013
- ISBN 10 : 0881634018
Also by Lewis A. Kirshner
Between Winnicott and Lacan: A Clinical Engagement
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What is it about "having a life" - which is to say, about having a sense of separate existence as a subject or self - that is usually taken for granted but is so fragilely maintained in certain patients and, indeed, in most of us at especially difficult times? In Having A Life: Self Pathology After Lacan, Lewis Kirshner takes this Lacanian question as the point of departure for a thoughtful meditation on the conceptual problems and clinical manifestations of pathologies of the self.
Reviews and Endorsements
Beginning with the case of Margaret Little, analyzed by D. W. Winnicott, and proceeding to extended case presentations from his own practice, Kirshner weaves together an avowedly American reading of Lacan with the approaches to self pathology of an influential coterie of theorists - D. W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, Arnold Modell, and Andre Green.By drawing out common threads in their respective discourses on the self, Kirshner achieves an original integration of Lacanian theory with other contemporary approaches to self pathology. Of special note is his ability to sustain a dialogue between Lacan and Kohut, whose shared clinical object, discernible through divergent vocabularies and conceptions, is the struggle of the subject to avoid fragmentation that would obliterate a sense of aliveness and preclude active engagement with the world.Kirshner's opening chapter on the gifted, troubled Margaret Little and his concluding chapter on the eminent political philosopher Louis Althusser, whose self pathology culminated in his strangling of his wife, Helene Rytman, in 1980, frame a study that is brilliantly successful in bringing "self" issues down to the messy actualities of lived experience. Analytic therapists no less than students of the human sciences will be edified by this cogent, readable attempt to infuse Lacanian concepts with the conceptual rigor and clinical pragmatism of American psychoanalysis and to apply the resulting model of therapeutic action to a fascinating range of case material.
About the Author(s)
Lewis Kirshner, M.D., is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and Training and Supervising Analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of Having a Life: Self Pathology after Lacan (Analytic Press, 2003), and has led workshops and meetings of the American Psychoanalytic and International Psychoanalytical Associations on ""Working between Winnicott and Lacan.""
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