Thresholds and Pathways Between Jung and Lacan: On the Blazing Sublime

301 Pages·2020·2.487 MB·English

by  Ann Casement (editor), Phil Goss (editor), Dany Nobus (editor)

THRESHOLDS AND
PATHWAYS BETWEEN
JUNG AND LACAN
This groundbreaking book was seeded by the first-ever joint Jung–Lacan
conference on the notion of the sublime held at Cambridge, England, against
the backdrop of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War. It
provides a fascinating range of in-depth psychological perspectives on aspects
of creativity and destruction inherent in the monstrous, awe-inspiring sublime.
The chapters include some of the outcrop of academic and clinical papers
given at this conference, with the addition of new contributions that explore
similarities and differences between Jungian and Lacanian thinking on key
topics such as language and linguistics, literature, religion, self and subject,
science, mathematics and philosophy.
The overall objective of this vitalizing volume is the development and
dissemination of new ideas that will be of interest to practising psychoanalysts,
psychotherapists and academics in the field, as well as to all those who are
captivated by the still-revolutionary thinking of Jung and Lacan.
Ann Casement LP is a Professor at the Oriental Academy for Analytical
Psychology, China; a member of the International Association for Analytical
Psychology, where she served on its Executive and Ethics Committees; and
a senior member of the BJAA. She lectures worldwide and has published
extensively, including Who Owns Psychoanalysis, which was nominated
for the Gradiva Award in 2005, and contributes to The Economist and
international psychoanalytical journals.
Phil Goss is Associate Professor and Director of Counselling and
Psychotherapy at Warwick University, UK. He is the author of Jung:
A Complete Introduction (2015) and Men, Women and Relationships:
A Post-Jungian Approach (2010) and has published on a range of topics
from a Jungian perspective, including education and learning difficulties,
gender and spirituality.
Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at Brunel University
London, UK, Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and Former
Chair and Fellow of the Freud Museum London. He is the author of numerous
books and papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoanalysis, most
recently The Law of Desire: On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ (2017).
“It seems so obvious, but it has taken many decades before a serious scholarly
engagement between Lacan and Jung could take place. This book conducts
such an important and fraught encounter, by focusing on the idea of the
sublime, and illuminating the convergences and differences this concept
reveals in each. With the continuing publication and translation of Lacan’s
Seminars, along with the publication of Jung’s The Red Book, both thinkers
continue to offer untapped resources for understanding what psychoanalysis
is and can be. Excellent and wide-ranging, rich in theoretical and cultural-
artistic implications, this volume is not to be missed!”
Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas, USA
“‘Jung and Lacan’? This ground-breaking and brilliant book answers the
question with a resounding YES. The notion of the sublime has been gently
eased into place as a bridge between these two traditions and is the clear
result of years of thinking by the skilled editors and erudite contributors. In
addition, not to put too fine a point on it, there has been less apparent but
much-needed professional and academic agitation and persuasion on their
part. Fields that will benefit from an engagement with the book include
clinical work, politics, art and creativity, history of ideas, and contemporary
spiritualities.”
Andrew Samuels, Former Professor of Analytical Psychology,
University of Essex, UK; Author of Jung and the Post-Jungians
THRESHOLDS
AND PATHWAYS
BETWEEN JUNG
AND LACAN
On the Blazing Sublime
Edited by
Ann Casement, Phil Goss
and Dany Nobus
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Ann Casement, Phil Goss and Dany Nobus;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Ann Casement, Phil Goss and Dany Nobus to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
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infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-54544-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-54543-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-08966-7 (ebk)
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Contents
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS vii
Introduction 1
PART I Theory 5
Chapter 1 Simply sublime? Lacan, Jung and The Red Book 6
PAUL BISHOP
Chapter 2 Sublime anxiety 31
BERNARD BURGOYNE
Chapter 3 The complex pleasure of the sublime 50
ANN CASEMENT
Chapter 4 Jung, the sublime and apophatic mysticism in
psyche and art 64
JOHN DOURLEY
Chapter 5 The subjective sublime: “like a diamond”? 76
PHIL GOSS
Chapter 6 The sublime: opportunity for the
integration of otherness 94
NAMI LEE
Chapter 7 The hermetic subtle body and the sublime in
Jung and Lacan 108
ALBERT MORELL
Chapter 8 Lacan’s clinical artistry: on sublimation,
sublation and the sublime 123
DANY NOBUS
v
vi Contents
Chapter 9 A crumpled note or purloined letter? Sublime and
feminine creativity in destruction in Jung and Lacan 153
SUSAN ROWLAND
PART II Culture 165
Chapter 10 The object of Victor Frankenstein’s desire 166
LIONEL BAILLY
Chapter 11 The Soviet Antigones: the poets versus the state 175
HELENA BASSIL-MOROZOW
Chapter 12 Thunder, Perfect Mind: entering the land
of the sublime 186
ISABELLE M. DeARMOND
Chapter 13 Unconscious processes, instrumental music and
the experience of the sublime: an exploration
through Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time 199
GIORGIO GIACCARDI
Chapter 14 The Sinthome and the work of Imre Kertész 218
SHARON R. GREEN
Chapter 15 Expressing the inexpressible: art as a challenge
to its own object 229
NIHAN KAYA
Chapter 16 The Nibelungenlied: a Germanic myth and
the sublime 245
ARTHUR NIESSER
Chapter 17 James Joyce’s “The Dead” and paleo-
postmodernism: a Lacanian/Jungian reading 257
CATRIONA RYAN
Chapter 18 Apostolic actuality: David Jones and sublimation 268
LUKE THURSTON
INDEX 282
Contributors
Lionel Bailly is a psychoanalyst and a child and adolescent psychiatrist.
He is a member of the Association Lacanienne Internationale and a Clini-
cal Associate of the British Psychoanalytic Society. He teaches and super-
vises students at the UCL Psychoanalysis Unit and is the author of Lacan:
A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2009) and co-editor (with David Lichten-
stein and Sharmini Bailly) of The Lacan Tradition: Lines of Development –
Evolution of Theory and Practice over the Decades (Routledge, 2018).
Helena Bassil-Morozow is a cultural philosopher, media and film schol-
ar, and academic author. Her many publications include Tim Burton: The
Monster and the Crowd (Routledge, 2010), The Trickster in Contemporary
Film (Routledge, 2011), The Trickster and the System: Identity and Agency
in Contemporary Society (Routledge, 2014), Jungian Film Studies: The Es-
sential Guide (co-authored with Luke Hockley) (Routledge, 2016) and Jun-
gian Theory for Storytellers (Routledge, 2018).
Paul Bishop is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages at the University
of Glasgow. He has written on various topics in German intellectual history
(including Cassirer, Goethe, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer).
He has recently published German Political Thought and the Discourse
of Platonism: Finding the Way Out of the Cave (Palgrave, 2019), Ludwig
Klages and the Philosophy of Life: A Vitalist Toolkit (Routledge, 2017),
and On the Blissful Islands: With Nietzsche & Jung in the Shadow of the
Superman (Routledge, 2017).
Bernard Burgoyne is a psychoanalyst practising in London. He was edu-
cated at the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics and
the University of Paris. He is Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis at Mid-
dlesex University, and is currently interested in how frontiers of desire are
determined by general topological properties of the structure of the mind.
vii
viii Contributors
Ann Casement is a member of the International Association for Analyti-
cal Psychology, where she served on its Executive and Ethics Commit-
tees, and a senior member of the BJAA and JPA (New York). She lectures
worldwide and has published widely, including Who Owns Psychoanaly-
sis? (Karnac, 2004), which was nominated for the 2005 Gradiva Award.
She contributes to The Economist and international psychoanalytical
journals
Isabelle M. DeArmond is a physician, a psychologist in private practice in
Berkeley, CA, and a candidate at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.
She has published on the archetypal aspects of the transference at the end of
life and the role of places for individuation, among other subjects.
John Dourley was a Roman Catholic priest and a member of the Oblates
of Mary Immaculate. He was also a member of the Ontario Association
of Jungian Analysts, wrote prolifically and lectured widely in Jungian and
academic circles. John died on 22 June 2018, aged 82.
Giorgio Giaccardi is a Jungian analyst in private practice in London (BJAA)
and Milan (ARPA). He previously published a paper on Dionysian and
Apolline pathways to the numinous. He writes, teaches and presents on
aspects of post-Jungian theory, with a particular focus on symbolisation,
gender and sexuality, on which he contributed chapters to two edited vol-
umes published by Routledge in 2019.
Phil Goss is Director of Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of
Warwick and a Jungian analyst (AJA, London). He is the author of Jung:
A Complete Introduction (Hodder and Stoughton, 2015) and Men, Women
and Relationships: A Post Jungian Approach (Routledge, 2010) and has
published on a range of topics from a Jungian perspective, including educa-
tion and learning difficulties, gender and psychotherapy, holism and spir-
ituality.
Sharon R. Green is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Seattle, WA,
and a founding director of the New School for Analytical Psychology
(www.nsanpsy.com), a multidisciplinary consortium of clinicians and
scholars. Her published work includes a chapter in the award-winning
book Temporality & Shame (L. Hinton and H. Willemsen, Eds., Rout-
ledge, 2017).
Nihan Kaya is the author of fourteen books in Turkish: five novels, two
collections of short stories and three non-fiction works about creativity,
aesthetic theory and the child archetype. She contributed a chapter on crea-
tivity to Dreaming the Myth Onwards (Lucy Huskinson, Ed., Routledge,
2010). She is currently teaching at the MEF University Psychology Depart-
ment in Istanbul.
Contributors ix
Nami Lee is a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst who teaches at Seoul Na-
tional University Hospital, and who is also working as the director of a
human rights centre. She has published 25 books on mythology, fairy tales,
religion and society from Jungian perspectives. Her books have been trans-
lated into Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese. She is currently a board member
and supervising analyst at the Jung Institute of South Korea.
Albert Morell is a Lacanian clinical and research psychoanalyst in private
and institutional practice. He is a former university lecturer in literature,
philosophy, comparative religion and film studies, as well as a former
screenwriter. He is co-editor of The Los Angeles Psychologist, and founder
of the California Forum of the Internationale des Forums – École de Psy-
chanalyse des Forums du Champ Lacanien (IF-EPFCL), based in Paris.
Arthur Niesser is a professional member and a former Chair of the As-
sociation of Jungian Analysts in London. After training in Stuttgart in his
native Germany and in London, he now works in private analytic practice
in Porthmadog in North Wales. As a retired general practitioner, he is par-
ticularly interested in the interface between biology and psyche. He is con-
cerned with the application of Jungian concepts to developments in society
and in a political context.
Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at Brunel University
London, Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and For-
mer Chair and Fellow of the Freud Museum London. He is the author of
numerous books and papers on the history, theory and practice of psychoa-
nalysis, most recently The Law of Desire: On Lacan’s “Kant with Sade”
(Palgrave, 2017).
Susan Rowland is co-Chair of the MA in Engaged Humanities and the Cre-
ative Life at the Pacifica Graduate Institute. Author of nine books on C.G.
Jung in relation to creativity, modernity and transdisciplinary studies, her
latest book is Jungian Literary Criticism: the Essential Guide (Routledge,
2019). She was founding Chair of the International Association for Jungian
Studies (IAJS jungstudies.net) from 2003 until 2006. Educated in the UK at
the Universities of Oxford, London and Newcastle, she now lives in Cali-
fornia, USA.
Catriona Ryan SFHEA is the Director of Scriptor Cube Ltd., which embeds
well-being into its research and learning courses for university students and
academic staff. She is also an Irish poet, a published academic, a critical
theorist and a world leading authority on the work of Tom MacIntyre,
with an international standing in Irish Studies. She is a Senior Fellow of the
HEA, an Honorary Research Fellow at UWTSD and a Student Experience
specialist. She has worked in three universities in Ireland and the UK over
the last 12 years.