with Lacan

This is an answer offered recently on social media (a corner for discussion of psychoanalysis in general) to this question: My purpose in life is to be as authentic as possible. I want to experience every fiber of myself truthfully. Is analysis aligned with that goal or are there any other approaches that are more helpful? This question is really quite interesting. Thanks for it. What do we mean when we say 'authentic'? We have auto , self, and hentes, doing or being – it could be being oneself, in which case we might question what the self is. In my orientation we speak of a subject , which is not divisible from the language in which it is caught, and thus not as contained as one might imagine. If authority is a correspondant of autonomy, well, at the level of the subject, perhaps analysis is not aimed there. And at the same time the subject has a kind of emptiness, or being barred, and realising for oneself something of the emptiness of the subject is something that might be ...

 This is a paper I presented at the Summer University at Performance Arts Forum in St Erme, France, in late August of 2024, presenting alongside a small group of colleagues for a mixed audience, working towards the theme "Why Psychanalysis?" Is Psychoanalysis Weird? American party politics has recently put the signifier ‘weird’ front and centre in a way which is no doubt resonant, and is seemingly effective. It’s used there as a way of designating the strangeness of an out-group, and one can be reminded of Lacan’s idea of group identification [from his text on Logical Time, but this version from Éric Laurent's Racism 2.0 ]:   A man knows what is not a man;   Men recognise themselves among themselves;   I declare myself to be a man for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man.   That is to say, we don’t know so well what ‘we’ are as a group except by relation to what we take to be improper to our group, to what is alien, or foreign to it. We claim to be...