International Journal of Psychoanalysis and Education: Subject, Action & Society

Neoliberal Neurosis Theorizing for the Potential of a Heterophonic Curriculum

Daeyoung Goh — 2024-06-26

Human subjectivity explores how individuals relate to and know about the world, allowing them not to lose their sense of self. In this article, I address two capacities of human subjectivity, namely preservation and transformation: 1) to illustrate a neoliberal restructuring of subjectivity, which perpetuates the mode of never-ending self-control and performativity, and 2) to pave alternative ways for the curriculum to release the effects of this neurotic repression on subjectivity. Specifically, I use Freud’s understanding of neurosis, which has not received much attention in the previous education literature, together with the modern theory of the economic subject to weave the emergence of neurotic subjectivity in a neoliberal society with its curricular implications. I then argue that the disruptive drive growing from the soil of subjectivity has the potential to challenge neoliberal neurosis through which the dynamics of subjectivity flow from the continuous to the uncharted or creative, moving from the realm of a neoliberal imaginary of self-preservation to the consciousness of intersubjective transformation. This conceptualization of neurotic subjectivity and the death drive lens would offer insight into imagining an alternative curriculum beyond neoliberalism’s instrumental rationality.

The Exteriority of Mind: Some Critical remarks about Neuro-Reductionism from a Psychoanalytic Perspective

Dario Alparone — 2024-06-26

Any thesis about human nature that wants to call itself scientific today pretend to verify itself by neurosciences. These perspectives propose a pure organism that is far from unitary but with a common denominator: the reduction of the subject to its neural substrate, sometimes ignoring socio-symbolical dimension. This article develops the topics from the neuro-reductionist perspective showing its limits, both theoretical and clinical. The articulation of Lacanian conception of subject with Wittgenstein’s critical approach to philosophy demonstrates the vacuity of neuro-reductionism discourse face to the “real”, which resides at the bottom of human nature.

Between Morphogenesis and Reflexivity

Elvira Martini — 2024-06-26

Margaret Archer has contributed to defining the agenda of sociological debate in a decisive way, for decades. Her works are known throughout the world, especially with reference to the association with critical realism and for the development of the morphogenetic perspective: a complex social theory that relates structure, culture and agency without reductions – or ‘conflations’. This contribution intends to pay homage to Archer’s memory by observing a joint reflection (although necessarily synthetic) between social morphogenesis and reflexivity, two key concepts of the English scholar’s work.

Pathologies of liminality: Degradation of Rituality and Loss of Transitionality. In-between Suffering on the Borders of Obsessive Neurosis and Borderline Disorder

Raffaele De Luca Picione — 2024-06-26

The liminal function of rituals is an expression of the transformative power of the unconscious understood as an ungiven, unexpressed potential to be defined within a series of steps. As the products of the unconscious, therefore, liminality becomes particularly evident in all situations in which the human condition goes through a crisis of definition. Like in the passage rites, the function of relational creativity (with a caregiver, a therapist, or a master ceremonialist) can hopefully lead to a more mature, coherent, and integrated postliminal organization of both the individual and the collective. This paper, through contributions ranging from anthropology to psychoanalysis, figures as a seminal work in the introduction of the concept of liminality into psychodynamic theory and clinical practice. Obsessive Neurosis and Borderline Disorder are two very different mental conditions, yet both highlight the complexity of managing the elements that mark transitions: on the one hand, the compulsory repetition of rituals, on the other, the breaking of boundaries.

Neo-Existential Therapy: Approaches and Methods

Gianfranco Buffardi — 2024-06-26

Existential therapy (ET) is a form of psychological and existence therapy that links a clinical approach with a philosophical reading of reality.

Compared to other psychotherapeutic approaches, ET’s identity is not anchored to etiological certainties or codified treatment techniques. This feature, along with the complexity of the theoretical assumptions it refers to, has resulted in a reputation that is not very high in terms of popularity among both practitioners and possible patients that had resulted in a prejudice of a psychotherapy without tools.

The aim of the paper is to modify this prejudice and underline how existential psychotherapy, especially some schools as S.P.Es. (Italy), uses many tools and techniques, also borrowed from other psychotherapies. The core of existential therapy is its epistemological approach and its mental attitude of non-invasiveness of the emotional sphere and the noetic development of the client.