David Lichtenstein, PhD

February 4-5, 2023

Kinzie Hotel (Wolf Point room ) 

20 West Kinzie Street

& ZOOM

Dr. Lichtenstein is is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC, working with both adults and children. He is the founding Editor of DIVISION/Review, Co-Founder of Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association and Adjunct Faculty member at the NYU Post Doc. Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, CUNY Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology and The New School University Dept of Philosophy, and has worked with Das Unbehagen (New York) and Le Cercle Freudien (Paris). He has written numerous articles and book chapters especially addressing psychoanalysis as influenced by the work of Jacques Lacan.  He is the co-editor of the recent book The Lacan Tradition (Routledge, 2018). He has led reading groups in New York for many years and is currently teaching Lacan for Clinicians a course for CE credit independently sponsored by the Fifth Floor Associates.

Seminar Title: The Contemporary significance of Lacan’s Approach to Psychoanalysis: The DeathDrive Reconsidered

Seminar description:  Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He led a seminar in Paris from 1953 to 1980 that had a profound influence on the history of psychoanalysis in France, and throughout Europe and the rest of the world. His work has been known here in the US since the 1960 ’s but has been taken up more by scholars in the Humanities than by clinical psychoanalysts.  

The seminar will be an introduction to the clinical significance of Lacan ’s teaching and will place that significance in the contemporary context of psychoanalytic practice in the United States. In considering the importance that Lacan gave to speech and language in both the theory and the practice of analysis, we will link his views to current questions about the field and focus on intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis, the analytic relation and its third dimension, hermeneutics in psychoanalysis, translation and the function of unconscious signifiers, etc.

Lacan also considered the psychic and symbolic function of death to be central to psychoanalytic praxis as well. He reinterpreted Freud ’s Death Drive, replacing the biological foundation with one located in the psychic formation of the divided subject. The seminar will address this idea and consider its importance for the clinical process of psychoanalysis.

Selected Readings.

Eissler,K. R. (1971) Death Drive, Ambivalence, and Narcissism. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 26:25-78.

Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE 18:1-64.

Lacan, J. (1979) The Neurotic ’s Individual Myth. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 48:405-425.

Lichtenstein, D. (2022) Forthcoming Book Chapter – Death and the Use of Pleasure (PDF will be supplied).

Nobus, D. (2021) Narcissism and the Pleasures of Extinction: For the Centenary of ‘Beyond the         

Pleasure Principle ’ . European Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol 8, No.1.

Segal, H. (1993) On the Clinical Usefulness of the Concept of Death Instinct. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 74:55-61.