#bruce fink

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Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis

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Hysteria and obsession are 'structures' that, in a Western societal context, constitute a sort of great divide in subjective positions, but they are not Universal, transcendental necessities. They are contingent structures based on a particular (but quite widespread) form of society.

Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis

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Bruce Fink – Lacan’da Arzu (2025)

Bruce Fink’in ‘Lacan’da Arzu’ (‘Lacan on Desire’) adlı kitabı, Jacques Lacan’ın arzu kavramına dair en karmaşık seminerlerinden birini –Seminar VI: Desire and Its Interpretation– ayrıntılı biçimde çözümleyen bir yorum çalışması. Fink, Lacan’ın psikanalitik teorisini teknik dilinden arındırarak anlaşılır hâle getirirken, arzunun hem bilinçdışı yapı içindeki yerini hem de öznenin oluşumundaki…

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Sublimation is the effort to permit love to be realized with the woman. [...] to make it seem as if it were happening with the woman. Lacan

Being in love with being in love is but one form of something of very great importance to many people, which is being in love with an idea or ideal.

As we saw in the case of beauty, ideals are often latched onto by a form of aestheticized desire, leading to a kind of absolutism, utopianism, and or fanaticism.

This can, depending on the ideal, give rise to the most extreme, catastrophic results whereby life itself (one's own or that of others) is reckoned by the fanatic of little value next to the ideal itself.

Marianne in Austen's Sense and Sensibility would sooner cry than sleep, and sooner waste away out of love for Willoughby, when he leaves her for what she expects to be but a fortnight, then fail to incarnate the perfect romantic heroine, who dies of unhappy separation from her beloved.

Love, in her view, demands this of her.

Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose then when she lay down in it. But the feelings which made such composure a disgrace, left her and no danger of incurring it. She was awake the whole night, and she wept the greatest part of it. She got up with a headache, was unable to talk, and unwilling to take any nourishment; giving pain every moment to her mother and sisters, and forbidding all attempt at consolation from either. (Austen)

In this literary example, the subject primarily harms herself, though her family and friends secondarily.

In a fictionalized account of a lover, written by Kierkegaard, that seems closely related to his own real life experience with Regina, the love of his life, he writes:

He was in love, deeply, and sincerely, that was clear, and yet right away, on one of the first days, he was capable of recollecting his love. At bottom he was through with the whole relationship. At the very moment of beginning he took such a tremendous stride that he has left clear over the whole of life. Though the girl were to die tomorrow, it will not make any essential difference, he will again throw himself down, his eye will again fill with a tear. (Kierkegaard)

Just as Willoughby perhaps counted less for Marianne then her romantic ideal of Love did, Regina here counts for little compared to the fixation on a certain ideal, that of a tragic, aesthetic notion of love.

Kierkegaard prefers to think of himself as having lived in a certain way, rather than actually living in that way; like the obsessive: he is living for some kind of ideal or eternity and not for today; indeed, he might be said to be dead to life already.

In Fear and Trembling, he introduces the concept of "infinite resignation," which in Freudian terms amounts to renunciation and seems tied to his giving up of Regina once he had successfully wooed her.

The real flesh-and-blood girl is given up by him supposedly in order for him to attain something at a "higher level"; might he have called it love of God?

In other examples, thousands, if not millions of lives are counted as nothing compared to an ideal, whether it be the "purity" of a certain doctrine (like that upheld by the Catholic Church against the Cathars in the thirteenth century or the Protestant reformation in the sixteenth century), the "superiority" of the Aryan race, or orthodoxies of all ilks (Stalinism, communism, democracy, etc.).

In such fanatical devotion to a certain ideal, human beings disappear from the inhuman equation.

The fanatic's own life counts for nought, his or her health and welfare being sacrificed for an abstract ideal; others barely exist to him – hence their expandability.

This is not to say that one must never die for an ideal – whether freedom, justice, or one's right to practice one's own faith – but in many cases, and this was undoubtedly true of the Cathar's themselves, fanatically embraced ideals turn life itself into a form of death, into a kind of living death.

Lacan on Love: An Exploration on Lacan's Seminar VIII, Transference

Bruce Fink

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Lacanian Psychoanalysis with Bruce Fink - Hermitix Podcast

Bruce Fink is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. He trained as a psychoanalyst in France for seven years with and is now a member of the psychoanalytic institute Jacques Lacan created shortly before his death, the École de la Cause freudienne in Paris, and obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII (Saint-Denis). He served as a Professor of Psychology from 1993 to 2013 at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is currently on the Board of Directors of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center.

[allael]

"I could label what I am saying in my seminar this year as providing you with your edupation , provided we emphasize the fact that it is those who [do not allow themselves to be] dupes of the unconscious who go astray." — Jacques Lacan

📚 Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners, Bruce Fink, 2007.

[nousrose]

What does Lacan show us? He shows us that desire is not a biological function; that it is not correlated with a natural object; and that its object is fantasized. Because of this, desire is extravagant. It cannot be grasped by those who might try to master it. It plays tricks on them. Yet if it is not recognized, it produces symptoms. In psychoanalysis, the goal is to interpret, that is, to read the message regarding desire that is harbored within the symptom. Although desire upsets us, it also inspires us to invent artifices that can serve us as a compass. An animal species has a single natural compass. Human beings, on the other hand, have multiple compasses: signifying montages and discourses. They tell you what to do: how to think, how to enjoy, and how to reproduce. Yet each person's fantasy remains irreducible to shared ideals.

Desire and its Interpretation

Bruce Fink