Willy Apollon
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By: State University of New York Press
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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> Movements -> Humanistic
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4
Average rating: 3.0 of 5
A "Must Read" 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 14 people found this review helpful.
This is the best book I have read in my field in many years because it is both deeply clinical and theoretically sophisticated yet, at the same time, very readable. It was written for an audience already familiar with some of the fundamental concepts in Freud and Lacan. In that sense it's not an introductory text. It's especially delightful to read if you're familiar with Freud because the writers at once return to Freud and Lacan and push them further. Also, the book would be a challenge to read in the absence of this knowledge - not because the writing is cryptic or obscure but because it may confront the reader with pockets of ignorance. Nonetheless, the book is a good starting place for the novice because the writing is so accessible, even as it honors complexity. In short, I highly recommend this book for clinicians and theoreticians at every level.Many books claim to create a dialogue between theory and practice, but at best most just juxtapose the two. A huge strength of this book is that the authors actually link concrete clinical material with theoretical concepts. For example, Bergeron's clinical example on pages 65-67 of a psychoanalytic signifier is probably the clearest example I have ever read of this concept. Add to this clarity the poetics of someone who is also able to refer to the signifier as "the writing of a loss," (p. 61), and you will soon see that this book is a treasure.
There are gems embedded in the text amidst larger arguments, but these gems are presented so unpretentiously that they might well go unnoticed. For example, Cantin refers briefly to adolescence as, "that time of life where revolt feeds on the discovery of the arbitrary and which also supports the accusation brought against the other as the one who hinders satisfaction." This incidental comment, so beautifully phrased, appears in the midst of an elegant clarification of the concept of desire.
One of the great strengths of this book is the authors' clarity in presenting original ideas. My sense is that their ease in this regard results from two factors. First, the powerful and organizing introduction by Hughes and Malone points to three authors who do not work in isolation but rather in constant interaction with one another and with an entire school of analysts, students, and collaborators. Second, their thinking is grounded in their abundant experience in the clinic. As a result, their theoretical exposition feels embodied and vivid. Further, while the book is full of "understandings" that push my thinking further, it is also implicitly informed by a different kind of knowing: the "savoir" of the individual authors, that is, the particular knowing they have each articulated for themselves in relation to the things we cannot know. In a very immediate sense, this book prepares me to begin framing the question: how can we best succeed in living given the hardest human realities, namely, the inevitability of absence and death?
Finally, in remarkably few pages the authors manage to address most of the key concepts in Lacanian psychoanalysis beautifully. For example, the explication in Chapter 9 of Lacan's Graph of Desire is remarkably clear. Similarly, in Chapter 2, Apollon's clarification of the concepts of jouissance, drive, instinct, and the phallus is at once demystifying and brilliant - and in very few pages to boot. With precision and an economy of words, the authors address not only the link between individual theoretical concepts and the clinic but also something of the broader movement of a psychoanalytic treatment from symptom to fantasy. In doing so, the book makes explicit what is at stake in the Lacanian clinic. I could say so much more, but more to the point, I suggest you savor the savoir of the book yourself.
Editorial Review:
The authors use examples from their own clinical practice to explain the development of Lacanian theory.
