Where to Start 1: The Psychoanalytic Theorists | Why Theory

source : Where to Start 1: The Psychoanalytic Theorists by Why Theory

Notes

The episode claims that [[Sigmund Freud]]’s most important work is Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but that you shouldn’t start reading Freud with that.

Jacqueline Rose has important commentary on Freud’s later works.

[[Sigmund Freud]] essentially believed that [[one is not born a woman]].

[[Jacques Lacan]] didn’t “become Lacan” until Seminar XI.

Hegel’s idea of the subject is only free when it recognizes itself in absolute otherness.

Lacan’s idea of anxiety is a bit like Hegel’s idea of freedom.

The hosts do not like Lacan’s Ecrits much.

[[Zizek]] believes that [[Christianity]] has an atheistic core to it.

[[Sigmund Freud]]’s point regarding the phallus is that it’s false from the start, it’s not “phallo-centric”. [[Psychoanalysis]] is an analysis of a phallo-centric society.

Recommended readings

[[Freud]]

• A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad
• Negation
• Fetishism
• The Interpretation of Dreams

[[Lacan]]

• The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
• Anxiety

[[Zizek]]

• Looking Awry
• The Plague of Fantasies
• The Fright of Real Tears
• The Parallax View
• Less Than Nothing

[[Copjec]]

The episode recommends all of Copjec’s works, but in particular:

• “The Orthopsychic Subject”
• “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason”
  • Response to [[Judith Butler]]

Zupancic

• The Odd One In
• Ethics of the Real

Ruti

• The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living
• Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics
• The Ethics of Opting Out