Main description:

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.

Contents:

Foreword: Is the American Youth Rebelling Against America? Gerard Pommier

Introduction Vanessa Sinclair and Manya Steinkoler

Chapter 1: Bodies and the Object-Death Jean-Jacques Moscovitz

Chapter 2: Political Philosophy in Freud: The Death Drive and the Critical Faculty Judith Butler

Chapter 3: The End(s) of Violence Juliet Flower MacCannell

Chapter 4: The Sex in Their Violence: Eroticizing Biopower Todd McGowan

Chapter 5: Lone Wolf Terrorists: Howling in the Eye of the Wind - The Case of Adam Lanza Manya Steinkoler

Chapter 6: The Tortured Child Franz Kaltenbeck

Chapter 7: Click and Destroy: The Clinic of Video Games Vincent Le Corre

Chapter 8: Violence in Repetition Martine Fourre

Chapter 9: The Violence of Psychiatric Diagnosis Patrick Landman

Chapter 10: How to Measure What: Notes on Universals and Particulars Todd Dean

Chapter 11: Violence to Aggressiveness Guy Dana

Chapter 12: Why the Zombies Ate My Neighbors: Whither Ambivalence? Carol Owens & Stephanie Swales

Chapter 13: Susan Stern: Sham Genevieve Morel

Chapter 14: Breaking the Spell of the Slave Revolt in Morality: From the Subreption of Identity-in-Difference to the Repetition of the Paraconsistent Alireza Taheri

Chapter 15: Terror and the Unconscious: Psychoanalysis in Argentina 1976-1983 Patricia Gherovici