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Many first-time readers of Jacques Lacan come to his work via psychology, a discipline that Lacan was notoriously antagonistic toward.
Derek Hook’s recently published Six Moments in Lacan takes up the dual challenge of introducing Lacanian psychoanalysis to an audience interested in various forms of psychology and psychotherapy whilst nonetheless stressing the fundamental differences between the psychological and the psychoanalytic.
Drawing on a range of examples from the clinic and popular culture, this talk demonstrates the distinctive value of Lacanian concepts as importantly distinct from psychological culture.
Avoiding the jargon and willful obscurity that so often accompanies expositions of Lacan’s work, this talk will foreground a series of crucial moments across Lacan’s teaching, noting their indebtedness to Freud, and expanding on how they provide a crucial means of exploring the unconscious dimensions of everyday life even as they challenge the routine assumptions of psychological thinking. Notions such as the ‘big Other’, ‘full’ versus ‘empty’ speech, logical time, ‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ identification, and the idea of ‘the master signifier’ are explored through a series of novel illustrations and applications.
Derek Hook is an Associate Professor in Psychology at Duquesne University and Extraordinary Professor in Psychology at the University of Pretoria. A former lecturer at the London School of Economics and Birkbeck College, he is the author of A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial and (Post)apartheid Conditions and co-editor of Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Signification of the Phallus’ to ‘Science and Truth’.
