Main description:

Lacan on Depression and Melancholia considers how clinical, cultural, and personal understandings of depression can be broken down and revisited to properly facilitate psychoanalytical clinical practice.

The contributors to this book highlight the role of neurotic conflicts underlying depressive affects, the distinction between neurotic and psychotic structure, the nature of melancholia, and the clinical value of Freudian and Lacanian concepts - such as object a, the Other, desire, the superego, sublimation - as demonstrated via a variety of clinical and historical cases. The book includes discussions of bereavement and mourning, transference in melancholia, suicidality and the death drive, excessive creativity, melancholic identification, neurotic inhibition, and manic-depressive psychosis.

Lacan on Depression and Melancholia will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in practice and training, Lacanian clinicians, and scholars of Lacanian theory.

Contents:

List of contributors

Introduction: The failings of depression - A Lacanian orientation

Derek Hook and Stijn Vanheule

Depression reconsidered: The well-spoken, neurotic conflicts, and desire
Stephanie Swales

In between the signifier and the Real: On depressive experiences
Stijn Vanheule

Forgetting and remembering
Russell Grigg

Some thoughts on Mourning and Melancholia
Darian Leader

Conceptualizing and treating (manic-depressive) psychosis: A Lacanian perspective
Stijn Vanheule

Maneuvers of transference in psychosis: A case study of melancholia from a Lacanian perspective
Joachim Cauwe and Stijn Vanheule

The complex of melancholia
Derek Hook

Susan Stern: Sham
Genevieve Morel

Excessive creativity in melancholia
Leon S. Brenner

Dressing up the death drive: Mourning as a defense against melancholia
Jamieson Webster and Patricia Gherovici

The specificity of manic-depressive psychosis
Darian Leader

Depression screening as the latest avatar of moralism in American public health

Thomas Svolos