This review analyzes Philipp Valentini and Mahdi Tourage’s Esoteric Lacan, describing the work in detail and the book review author’s reflections on it. Esoteric Lacan is a one-of-a-kind dialogue between Lacan and various religio-cultural studies. The study takes an interdisciplinary and interlocutive approach to ideas Lacan conversed with and goes beyond a Eurocentric context. The collection spans the gamut from Gnosticism to Judaism to Kabbalistic musings to Afropessimism to the Lacanian discourses to the Borromean Knot and Sinthome to Ibn ‘Arabī and much more.

Understanding Consciousness can almost be said to have a plot/narrative, or a dramatic structure similar to the ‘three-act structure’ model used by numerous screenwriters. In Part I—the Setup—Velmans surveys “mind-body theories and their problems”, in part II—the Confrontation—he reconstructs “a new analysis: how to marry science with experience”, and in part III—the Resolution—he shares with us “a new synthesis: reflexive monism” (v-vi). Velmans starts off in the first chapter with perhaps one of the most basic, nevertheless hard, questions in the field of consciousness studies: “what is consciousness?”

This book review discusses the theoretical, political, ethical, and clinical ramifications of Robert K. Beshara's Freud and Said: Contrapuntal Psychoanalysis as Liberation Praxis, through an exploration of Freud's influence on Said, the interrelations of psychoanalysis and de-/post-colonialism, the psychoanalysis of coloniality, and the decolonization of psychoanalysis.

Language is an essential part of psychotherapeutic work. In psychotherapy involving more than one language and/or culture, acknowledging the impact of the therapist’s and the client’s language(s) can facilitate achieving the most beneficial therapeutic process and outcome. The field has witnessed a surge in interdisciplinary work combining research methods from multilingualism and psychotherapy. This research aims to investigate the role of multilingualism in emotion expression and interpretation in psychotherapy offered by multilingual/multicultural therapists. Ten individual semi-structured interviews with therapists in the Netherlands focused on therapists’ experience of working as a multilingual/multicultural therapist with culturally and linguistically diverse clients. Thematic analysis of the results showed that language choice influenced the therapeutic process and its outcome in terms of discussing emotional topics, establishing and maintaining rapport with the client, and managing linguistic and cultural differences. Linguistic awareness of therapists allows them to manage the linguistic and cultural issues that inevitably arise in encounters with multilingual/multicultural clients.

Wittgenstein’s account of how language bewitches one’s intelligence is a singular achievement in the phenomenology of language. In section 426 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein famously claims that the meaning of a word is to be found in the “actual use” of it, and he contrasts this understanding with the projection of a picture:
 A picture is conjured up which seems to fix the sense unambiguously. The actual use, compared with that suggested by the picture, seems like something muddied. ... [T]he form of expression we use seems to have been designed for a god, who knows what we cannot know; he sees the whole of each of those infinite series and he sees into human consciousness. (Wittgenstein, 1953, section 426)

In this review, I assess Erica Burman's (2018) book, Fanon, Education, Action: Child as Method, an important and timely contribution to critical developmental psychology, which reads and critiques the work of Frantz Fanon.

This paper explores the limitations of language in psychotherapeutic writing about lived experience and how psychanalytic concepts can help us both understand and work through the inevitable loss that results from these limitations. It is illustrated by the author’s experience of undertaking a doctoral research project in psychotherapy where the experience of narrative incoherence was explored through writing. Paralleled to the doctoral research project was the author’s challenges in writing the experience of incoherence. By reflecting on and analysing these challenges, this paper explores the sense of loss that is located at the core of writing lived experience through psychoanalytic concepts including the third position and melancholia. The limitations of language in capturing the fullness of lived experienced is shed light on. Connecting the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia to Romanyshyn’s (2013) writing as elegy, I propose writing lived experience as a melancholy elegy in which what is lost in language can be acknowledged and kept alive in the writer’s psyche. I argue for the creative potential brought by the continuous engagement with the sense of loss in writing lived experience.
 
 Reference:
 Romanyshyn, R.D. (2013). The wounded researcher: research with soul in mind. New Orleans, Louisiana: Spring Journal Books.

We propose, within the context of a Skin Model of Ego Development (SMED), that Didier Anzieu’s work of the skin-ego is a useful entry point into understanding the Manichaean mythic view of femininity as creating an encapsulated skin-ego, that tends to enclose the feminine object in a defensive-isolative capsule, through culturally transmitted ideals, shaped by misogyny. Utilizing this perspective, the unconscious and the myth are seen as being, in general terms, intertwined and expressed in epidermal psychoanalytic dialogue. As a result, the psyche and the body are radically split from one another through the dysfunctioning of the skin-ego that is an asexualized phantasmal-mythic dome of ‘womanhood’, which preserves misogynistic norms and ideals and blocks any possibility of femininity as a subjecthood. Moreover, a culturally transmitted myth-fueled psychic alienation is conveyed through a linguistic mythic time machine, which, in turn, results in transmitting a mythic mindset from one generation to another. In this sense, it is of utmost importance to mention that dysfunctional skin-ego leads to dysfunctional thinking ego therein the result is the isolated mind. Encapsulated thinking ego rejects embodiment, spontaneity, and connectedness with anything that has to do with emotional life. To enrich our discussion, the Matrix movies are used to discuss how the Manichaean system of thought is in motion and survives in transmission.