On Psychoanalysis and Violence ― Contemporary Lacanian Perspectives

Psychoanalysis has not examined violence as such since it is a sociological and criminological concept; psychoanalysis is concerned with speech. On Psychoanalysis and Violence brings together noted Lacanian psychoanalysts and scholars to fill an important gap in psychoanalytic scholarship that addresses what the contributors term the "angwash" of our current time.

Today violence is everywhere. We are inundated with it, exhausted by it, bombarded by images and reports of it on a daily, even hourly basis. This book examines how psychoanalysis can account for the many manifestations of violence in contemporary society. Drawing on a broadly Lacanian perspective, the authors explore violence in war, terrorism, how the media portrays violence, violent video games, questions of identity, difference and the ‘other’; violence narratives and violence and DSM, and explain how to account for how violence arises and the effect it has on us on both an individual and social level. These are just some of the daily social realities of the present day whose aggression are felt by everyone, which horrify us and which we often feel powerless to change. The contributors have therefore coined a term for this cultural malaise: "angwash", arguing that we are awash in angoisse or anxiety, in a constant panic regarding the impossible and contradictory demands of a "civilization" in crisis.

On Psychoanalysis and Violence will be of great interest to Lacanian psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Vanessa Sinclair, Psy.D. is a psychoanalyst based in New York City, USA and Stockholm, Sweden, author of Switching Mirrors (Trapart, 2016) and the upcoming Scansion in Psychoanalysis and Art: The Cut in Creation (Routledge, 2019) and editor of Rendering Unconscious (Trapart, 2018).

Manya Steinkoler, Ph.D. is an English Professor at Borough of Manhattan College CUNY and a psychoanalyst in New York City, USA. She is co-editor with Patricia Gherovici of Lacan on Madness: Madness Yes You Can’t (Routledge, 2015), Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and forthcoming Psychoanalysis and Sexuality: From Feminism to Trans (Cambridge University Press, 2019).