The English translation of Lacan’s Seminar IV is being prepared for publication by Polity, with its release date just announced for August this year. The Object Relation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV will be translated by Adrian Price, under the editorship of Jacques-Alain Miller, and is Lacan’s major seminar engaging with Klein and object relations theory, Levi-Strauss’s work on myth, and the case histories of Little Hans and the Rat Man, among other topics. For those who can’t wait – or can’t read the official or unofficial versions in French – there are many unauthorised English translations now available. Most recently, a new English translation is underway thanks to the Earls Court Group in London, based on the unedited tapes.

Sexual Difference, Abjection and Liminal Spaces: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Abhorrence of the Feminine by Bethany Morris will be published by Routledge in July. Presenting sexual difference as “an encounter with otherness through the abjected” it examines the representation of the ‘monstrous-feminine’ throughout history. Morris combines Lacanian and Deleuzian notions of otherness in relation to the Borderline classification as it pertains to the feminine in social discourse. LacanOnline.com visitors get 20% off and free global shipping on all Routledge titles using the code on this page.

Danièle Brillaud’s Lacanian Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Casebook has also had its publication date of July announced in the last month. Focusing specifically on the major concepts of the Écrits, Brillaud’s book examines clinical cases and treatment instances of patients across a spectrum of disorders. Brillaud is a practising analyst and former consultant psychiatrist in the French public hospital system. The book is translated by John Holland (who is a specialist in Henry James and Lacan, and has previously translated Soler’s What Lacan Said About Women: A Psychoanalytic Study and Lacan and Marx: The Invention of the Symptom. As with all titles from Routledge, order via the publishers and LacanOnline.com visitors get 20% off and free global shipping when using the code on this page.

Jean-Gerard Bursztein’s A Psychoanalytic Commentary of the Hebrew Bible was released last month. Bursztein finds in the Hebrew Bible all the ingredients that make up the classical Freudian view of subjectivity carried forward by Lacan: the symbolic father, the prohibition of incest, and the intermixing of justice and guilt. Bursztein is a psychoanalyst teaching and practicing in Paris, and has published a number of books on the entanglement of psychoanalysis and mathematics via topology.

Also newly-released is Daniel Burston’s Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Postmodern University, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Written for clinicians and social scientists, the book explores psychoanalysis in its connection with Marxism, postmodern and post-structuralist theories. These are elaborated on with reference to the reception of Freud in America, Jordan Peterson and the Crisis of the Liberal Arts, and the anti-psychiatry movement.

Among the journals, of note from Lacanian Review Online last month comes a snippet from Jacques-Alain Miller’s work ‘Introduction to the Lacanian Clinic’ from 2007, which is published here under the title ‘Analytical Operation, Feminine Operation’. In this short commentary Miller discusses the end of analysis, the position of the analyst, and makes the suggestion that the end of analysis would be the disappearance of love. The transformation produced by a psychoanalysis, he argues, would be one where we could say: “‘No more hate but struggle’ and ‘No more love that is repetition or passion, but rather a love that is a will'”. This piece presents what is best in Miller’s work: concise but dense, direct and precise, it addresses head on what happens in a psychoanalysis, what it means to overcome repression, and what kind of life one might expect to lead as a result. His conclusion is worth quoting: “Once repression is overcome it gives way to, it opens onto, a desire to know. It goes from passion to desire. There is a transformation of passion into desire. It goes from something that is suffered, from something in which the subject is submerged – and subverted – to an initiative, to something that gives him a margin of initiative.” This might remind readers of Lacan’s beautiful formulation in the Ecrits (from the final lines of ‘The Subversion of the Subject’ paper) that castration means that jouissance must be refused in order that it be reached again on the inverted ladder of the law of desire (E827).

Turning to events, and in advance of this year’s NLS Congress in Ghent in late June (for which registration is now open here) the School has several preparatory events running over the coming month across Europe. Bruno de Halleux will speak in Sofia, Bulgaria on 14th February on ‘The path to a real awakening of the subject’, Philippe Hellebois in Belgium on 15th February on ‘Interpretation beyond the Other’, and Anne Lysy & Rik Loose in Amsterdam on 29th February on ‘The Speaking Body’. Full details of all upcoming events and seminars organised by the NLS are here.

The full programme for Lacanian Compass’ Clinical Study Day 13, taking place in New York City between 21st-23rd February, is now available. Special guests will include Angelina Harari and Maria Josefina Sota Fuentes. The theme of this year’s CSD is ‘Jouissance: the stuff that dreams are made of’.

In London, The SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis will be hosting two talks by prominent Lacanians coming up in the next few months. First, a seminar by Bernard Burgoyne on ‘Pre-Socratic Greece and Pathways taken in Psychoanalysis’ on Saturday 7th March. The seminar will look at some philosophical orientations to psychoanalysis – phenomenology in particular – and recommendations for psychoanalytic technique. Tickets are £15 and entry includes a glass of wine. Prof Burgoyne has practiced psychoanalysis for over thirty years and is a Member of the World Association for Psychoanalysis, and is a Founder Member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London. Second, two workshops by Philip Hill, Introducing Lacanian Ideas for the Clinic’, and ‘Suffering, Subjectivity and Compulsory Enjoyment: Need, Love and Desire’. Hill will discuss how torture and orgasm are useful in a psychoanalytic understanding of the symptom, and what the pleasure principle has to do with it. Both will take place on Fri 22nd May and neither workshop will assume any knowledge. Hill is a psychoanalyst in private practice, a member of CFAR and The SITE, and is perhaps best known for his books Lacan for Beginners and Lacanian Clinical Technique – An Introduction. Tickets for this event available here.

The School of the Freudian Letter UK will be hosting a webinar on 22nd February in which psychoanalyst Petros Patounas will commence a series of presentations with the title ‘On the Monad’s Dark Matter’. Patounas will open the series with this seminar, ‘The Table of No-Body’. The seminar will take place at the premises of the Cyprus Society of the SFL at 2pm UK time and will be transmitted in real time via Zoom. Register for the event here and download Zoom to access the webinar via the code-link you will receive when registered.

The Clinical College of Colorado has announced its programme for the fall semester offering seminars and workshops, all with the possibility of online attendance. View its calendar for further details of earlier events and details of its three-year Analytic Formation training programme. The Colorado Psychoanalytic Forum is part of the Forums of the Lacanian Field.

In Australia, Russell Grigg will be running ten seminars from 14th March to 13th June with the Lacan Circle of Australia. Two sets of seminars will run concurrently and be complementary to each other. The first will be on The Names of the Father, the second on Clinical Issues in Psychoanalysis. Enrolment in his semester programme for 2020 will also be available via Zoom.

In New York City, Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association has two events coming up in the coming month. Erik Porge will speak about The Analyst’s Sublimation (Part II) on 14th and 15th February, while Paola Mieli will speak On The Subject’s Relation to Knowledge in a series that runs until 1st May. More details on the group’s Facebook page.

Lastly, Dr Derek Hook will be presenting an Edinburgh Film Seminar, in association with Lacan in Scotland, on 3rd March. Dr Hook will discuss ‘District 9 and White Anxiety’, giving a brief overview of Lacan’s theorisation of anxiety in Seminar X before exploring its usefulness in thinking the political and subjective occurrence of ‘white anxiety’. Further details and a link to book here. Dr Hook is Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria. His most recent book, Six Moments in Lacan, was published by Routledge in 2017.

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