Abstract: The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis Ethics in Adorno, Lacan, Badiou By Jamieson Webster
Advisors: Dr. Lissa Weinstein, Dr. Elliot Jurist, Dr. David Lichtenstein, Dr. Angelica
Nuzzo, and Dr. Jean-Michel Rabate
After over a century since its inception, psychoanalysis as a clinical discipline is facing a crisis of legitimacy.
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The response to this crisis has increasingly been to suture the discipline to more academic, more scientific, more cognitive, and more popular inroads with a proliferation of methods, techniques, terms and, in general, emendations to the original canon. This dissertation seeks to reject these solutions and address the legitimacy of the crisis of legitimacy; a crisis inherent to any discipline centered on a radical notion of the unconscious.
The life of psychoanalysis depends on always standing at the edge of this crisis, the horizon from this vantage point always threatening its very extinction. If one accepts the concept of the unconscious as Freud conceived of it and the clinical work of the analyst as centered only upon its progressive elucidation, then the discipline of psychoanalysis is one that must resurrect itself ethically rather than epistemologically. The unconscious, both theoretically and clinically, challenges the value of knowledge and aims towards what Lacan calls, its fall. By maintaining the ethical position of the analyst in the face of the transference love of the patient, one moves in the direction of a recentering of subjectivity around the hole that knowledge had previously filled with the neurotic symptom. Testing a clinical ethics through an encounter with three contemporary thinkers who center their discourse on ethics, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan, and Alain Badiou, I will challenge the concept of knowledge. In particular, this challenge will be evoked by the writing itself whose movement is framed by the ethical constraints of a psychoanalysis within a transference.