RU234: DRS DEREK HOOK & STIJN VANHEULE ON LACAN ON DEPRESSION & MELANCHOLIA - RENDERING UNCONSCIOUS

Rendering Unconscious episode 234. You can support the podcast at our Patreon. / vanessa23carl
Your support is greatly appreciated!
Drs. Derek Hook and Stijn Vanheule are here to discuss their new book Lacan on Depression and Melancholia (2023). www.routledge.com/Lacan-on-De...
Derek Hook is an associate professor of Psychology at Duquesne University, USA, and an extraordinary professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He is the author of Six Moments in Lacan (2018), and with Calum Neill, he edits the Palgrave Lacan Series. Be sure to check out his CZcams channel.
Stijn Vanheule is a clinical psychologist and professor at Ghent University, Belgium. He is also a privately practicing psychoanalyst and a member of the New Lacanian School for Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective (2011), Diagnosis, the DSM: A Critical Review (2014), and Psychiatric Diagnosis Revisited: From DSM to Clinical Case Formulation (2017).
Be sure to check out the Reading Lacan’s Ecrits book series edited by Derek Hook, Stijn Vanheule, and Calum Neill.
Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Signification of the Phallus’ to ‘Metaphor of the Subject’ (2018)
Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘The Freudian Thing’ to ‘Remarks on Daniel Lagache’ (2019)
Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Logical Time’ to ‘Response to Jean Hyppolite’ (2022)
Listen to previous discussions with Drs. Hook and Vanheule:
RU30: PROFESSOR STIJN VANHEULE, PSYCHOANALYST & PSYCHOLOGIST ON DSM, TREATMENT
RU42: PROFESSOR DEREK HOOK ON POST-COLONIAL PSYCHOANALYSIS, PHILOSOPHY
RU159: SHELDON GEORGE, DEREK HOOK, MICHELLE STEPHENS & SHEILA CAVANAGH ON LACAN & RACE
Rendering Unconscious Podcast is hosted by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair, a psychoanalyst based in Sweden, who works with people internationally: www.drvanessasinclair.net
Follow Dr. Vanessa Sinclair on social media:
Twitter: / rawsin_
Instagram: / rawsin_
TikTok: / drvanessasinclair23
Visit the main website for more information and links to everything: www.renderingunconscious.org
The song at the end of the episode is “Inside you is outside me (Hymnambulae Remix)” from Carl Abrahamsson’s album The larval stage of a bookworm (remixed).
highbrowlowlife.bandcamp.com
Music also available to stream via Spotify & other streaming platforms.
Many thanks to Carl Abrahamsson, who created the intro and outro music for Rendering Unconscious podcast. www.carlabrahamsson.com

[@sagaxister]

I absolutely loved your pronunciation. Thanks. Love from Brazil.

[@caribicresidency]

To generalise people living “off grid” outside toxic society as melancholic-psychotic subjects (Derek Hook) seems so pathologising and conservative, for lack of a better word, and ultimately so far from the truth and from my understanding of the Lacanian orientation which stays clear of ‘normalising’ modes of living that I found this example honestly quite disturbing..

[@RaphaelDuBosch]

How is this a normalising expression exactly?

[@caribicresidency]

@@RaphaelDuBosch Using the example that people who live off-grid (outside society) are melancholic-psychotic subjects is a generalisation and incorrect, and it’s suggestive of there being normative ways of living (in society). Living off-grid is not an indicator of any psychic structure. Entire societies live off grid, for good reason

[@RaphaelDuBosch]

@@caribicresidency You might be correct about the hasty generalisation (at the very least the logical structure in the way you posed it), but I don't see that 'suggestion' you're talking about here. To say that one lives outside the (symbolic) bounds of society, is not to say that living inside of it is better than being on the outside of it per sé. The very point in the Lacanian theory of psychosis is that we can't understand it under a normative frame of reference; it is simply the functional parameters of the signifier that differ, and this defines the structure technically, not normatively.
I'm also not sure what you mean by societies living off the grid when you specified "off the grid" earlier as "(outside society)". When Lacan speaks about psychotics and the way they relate to society, he does so with respects to the symbolic functioning, and not in the sense of being materially cut-off from anything.

[@caribicresidency]

@@RaphaelDuBosch To use the example of people living off grid to be outside the social bond is misleading. They are not necessarily outsiders hiding in the woods, that's why I'm saying there are entire societies living outside society. In recent years, many such reductionist slurs came up in psychoanalytic discourse, namely 'the conspiracy theorist', 'anti-vaxxer' or 'climate change denier' - ALWAYS serving as examples for psychotic structures! This is unnuanced, stigmatising and potentially harmful because these "examples" stick and fuel the fire, creating scapegoats and pathologies imo