Art of the Subject

Clinical theory, to be effective, must provide psychoanalytical practitioners with a framework and a mental space that takes into account the disturbances in the analytic field that necessarily occur during the work in progress. Since Freud, there has been no psychoanalytic school of thought that has been able to address the realm of illusion, images and bodily sensations together with the conditions that open the field of speakable desire. This volume provides this theoretical space by weaving together Winnicott’s British School focus on the necessity of illusion and Lacan’s (French School) emphasis on the limit that makes subjectivity possible. And as is true of the process of psychoanalysis itself, the one plus one of Winnicott and Lacan yields here a potentiating third from which fresh and vibrant aspects of the analytic matrix emerge and are voiced. The reader should discover an interlacing of strands from Winnicottian and Lacanian theory - ideas that are different and complimentary occupying the arc of tension between the psychic realm, eg image, fantasy and necessary illusion versus the psychic field of language, speech and desire; as well as ideas that are supplementary to one another, such as the notion of what is Real within the psychoanalytic discourse. The book tenders an odd clinical and theoretical coupling and presents why these two, when put into play together, address both the art and the suffering of the analytical subject.