Adrian Johnston

In Being and Time, the philosopher Martin Heidegger portrays the conscience in a different sense from another common, characterization of the conscience, where the conscience acts as a guide to satisfy a moral code. Instead, for Heidegger, the conscience calls the human to 'take up,' or accept, the "who" that the human is, without measurement to an external, "ethical," code. In "The Call," I affirm Heidegger's distinctive characterization of the conscience. I adjust Heidegger, however, to argue that we may understand the call of conscience as a call toward the ethical if we both understand Heidegger's description of the call as different from our own and adjust our understanding of the "ethical" to reflect Heidegger's different depiction of the call. I believe this adjustment is significant for ethics because it broadens the understanding of "the ethical" to include an acceptance of the internal self.

The author of the paper examines the interrelationship between Freud’s
account of the concept of the Thing in his Project of Scientific Psychology and the
problem of the origin of categories within Kantian philosophy. Drawing on Catherine
Malabou’s “epigenesis of pure reason,” the article proposes an alternative approach
to overcome the correlationist loop, based on the homeomorphic relationship
between representational content and material structure that underlies Freud’s account of the mental apparatus.

Resumo: O artigo pretende apresentar, 15 anos depois do colóquio que 'criou o movimento' do Realismo Especulativo, uma possível linhagem herdeira deste: o realismo(/materialismo/naturalismo) transcendental. A própria polivocidade de nomes já dá mostras de seu estado um tanto informe, contudo aqui partiremos da premissa de que, se as criaturas naturais podem dar à luz monstruosidades informes, também pode fazê-lo um movimento filosófico-especulativo. Começo então com uma breve apresentação sobre a questão de o Realismo Especulativo ser ou não um movimento ou tendência filosófica contemporânea pelo debate entre alguns dos participantes do workshop de Goldsmith. A seguir delineio essa tendência 'herdeira' do movimento e tento desencavar seus antecedentes filosóficos, enquanto argumento que talvez seja pela capacidade de gerar uma prole que o Realismo Especulativo possa ser retroativamente determinado como um movimento. O escavação começa ao reconhecer uma proximidade 'transcendental' entre os projetos filosóficos de Ray Brassier e Iain Hamilton Grant, terminando por revelar uma tripla genealogia que passa pelo naturalismo transcendental de Wilfrid Sellars, pelo cyber-deleuzianismo do CCRU e pelo materialismo lacano-marxista entre outros 'personagens filosoficos'. Concluímos essa quimera genealógica discutindo trabalhos recentes de Adrian Johnston e Ray Brassier e a crescente aproximação dessa linhagem um tanto amorfa com o marxismo. Rascunhado o heredograma desse movimento contemporâneo, sugere-se a elaboração de seu etograma como projeto investigativo futuro.

In The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek outlines a Lacanian critique of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's theories of affectively shaped mental life. Damasio is faulted for failing to account for the existence of the Cogito-like subject-as-$, an existence claimed to be emotionally significant in ways directly relevant to the Damasian project. Žižek's criticisms stage a confrontation pitting psychoanalytic anti-naturalism against neuroscientific naturalism. This article involves laying out a partial defense of Damasio's proposals. In so doing, it seeks, specifically with regard to the matters at stake in Žižek's engagement with the sciences of the brain, to delineate a position based on the rejection of what is alleged to be a false dichotomy between naturalism and anti-naturalism. The forms of subjectivity posited by what would be a Freudian-Lacanian neuro-psychoanalysis are torn apart in various directions, split along fault lines of tension between what are imprecisely designated as 'natural' and 'non-natural' dimensions.

Despite Jacques Lacan's somewhat deserved reputation as an adamant antinaturalist, his teachings, when read carefully to the letter, should not be construed as categorically hostile to any and every possible interfacing of psychoanalysis and biology. In recent years, several authors, including myself, have begun exploring the implications of reinterpreting Lacan's corpus on the basis of questions concerning naturalism, materialism, realism, and the position of analysis with respect to the sciences of today. Herein, I focus primarily on the efforts of analyst François Ansermet and neuroscientist Pierre Magistretti to forge a specifically Lacanian variant of neuropsychoanalysis (as distinct from Anglo-American variants). Taking up Ansermet and Magistretti's interlinked theories of drive (Trieb) and autonomous subjectivity, I develop an immanent critique of their project. Doing so in a manner that is intended to acknowledge and preserve this neuropsychoanalytic duo's significant insights and contributions, I seek to bring into sharper relief the exact set of necessary, as well as sufficient, conditions for what Ansermet, Magistretti, and I all are commonly pursuing: an account of the genesis of denaturalized subjects out of embodied libidinal economies, itself situated within the framework of a nonreductive, quasi-naturalist materialism synthesizing resources drawn from psychoanalysis, neurobiology, and philosophy.

Scientific advances made in the 21st century contend that the forces of nature and nurture work together through an ongoing series of complex correspondences between brain and mental activity in our daily activities with others. Jung's cosmological model of the psyche minimizes the fundamental corporeal condition of human nature and as such is critiqued and amended, influenced by the transcendental materialist theories of subjectivity inspired by Žižek, Johnston and Laplanche.

Neuropsychoanalysis and the Problem of History During the course of the past several decades and within the context of certain psychiatric and neuroscientific circles, psychoanalysis has become a topic of renewed interest, whose future has appeared to be in need of defending. Publications appearing as early as the mid-1980s have sought either tacitly or quite openly to resuscitate and defend the potential legitimacy of psychoanalytic theory and practice. 1 Neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel, a longtime participant in this discussion (and recipient of the 2000 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Program in Literature at Duke University. I am grateful to organizers and participants at these events as well as to the editorial board of Critical Inquiry for their comments. I am especially grateful to a small group of scholars and faculty at Wesleyan University who read and offered some of the first and most encouraging feedback on the earliest draft of this paper. The completion of this article was assisted by a New Faculty Fellows award from the American Council of Learned Societies, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 1. Some examples include Arnold M. Cooper, "Will Neurobiology Influence Psychoanalysis?"

Scientific advances made in the 21st century contend that the forces of nature and nurture work together through an ongoing series of complex correspondences between brain and mental activity in our daily activities with others. Jung's cosmological model of the psyche minimizes the fundamental corporeal condition of human nature and as such is critiqued and amended, influenced by the transcendental materialist theories of subjectivity inspired by Žižek, Johnston and Laplanche.

This paper wishes to follow the injunction given to us from Badiou that philosophy shouldn't dictate the progress in various fields that it's coupled with (science, politics, etc.), and that it should instead be receptive to the 'Events' in these fields. This paper wishes to take the field of science called 'Complexity Science', specifically the idea of 'Emergentism' in it, as an Event that philosophy should be receptive to. In exploring this relatively new field, this paper wishes to draw the properly radical metaphysical conclusions that crop up from such an investigation. Thus this paper's goal is two-fold: it wishes to explore Emergentism as an important new topic for philosophy, and it wishes to explore the new avenues of thought that this science opens up. Philosophy isn't a lapdog to the sciences, though it does dwell in its shadow. Philosophy's purpose isn't to clarify the workings of science, or to cloak philosophical debates in the language of science, but is instead to look at advances in science and then see how they force us to rethink our philosophical assumptions and arguments. In this way, science is Evental (as Badiou would say) 1 , and philosophy proper should act with fidelity towards these Events. This holds true for metaphysics especially, despite the strange conclusions that may be reached with such a fidelity. This paper plans to take up this insight by examining how advances in what's been called "Complexity Science" force us to reexamine our metaphysical assumptions, specifically due to "Emergence". Though metaphysics hasn't been deaf to these advancements -much literature has been written about complexity science and metaphysics, however opaquely it was done -I don't believe it has drawn the properly radical conclusions from it, as this paper intends to do. Though I will mostly be focused on ontology in this paper, I will also briefly discuss problems for mereology, free will, and the status of scientific laws.

Mills' paper tackles an important question for Jungian studies: what are the underlying metaphysical assumptions behind analytical psychology? However, his attempt to pursue this inquiry is undermined by a strong but unsupportable insistence by Mills that Jung intended to present himself primarily as an ontologist. I also argue that various further inaccuracies and misreadings lead Mills into a fundamental misunderstanding of the intentions and aims that characterise Jung's psychology.

Schilbrack begins this chapter characterizing ‘traditional philosophy of religion’ (TPR) in terms of the task that the discipline sets for itself: to evaluate the rationality of theism. In an illuminating decision tree, Schilbrack analyzes and organizes the variety within TPR, including counter-traditions in Continental and feminist philosophy. More importantly, this procedure helps substantiate the author’s overall critique of TPR as inadequate to the ‘full task’ of philosophy of religion because it is narrow, intellectualistic, and insular. Schilbrack identifies three subordinate tasks or three sets of questions, one for each of these problems with the aim to redressing them. The first of those tasks is to overcome narrowness. By its focus on questions to do with the rationality of theism, TPR unjustifiably omits a massive amount of material relevant to religion from its purview. This omission dramatically weakens warrants for traditional philosophers’ claims regarding theism, especially the implicit claim that SOPHIA (2014) 53:367–372 DOI 10.1007/s11841-014-0432-2

The birth of psychoanalysis owes much to Sigmund Freud's encounter with anti-Semitism. There is little doubt it led to Freud's failing to obtain a much hoped for academic appointment in Vienna and for a number of years he was forced to work without public recognition and in isolation. Later he was to write: Nor is it perhaps entirely a matter of chance that the first advocate of psychoanalysis was a Jew. To profess belief in this new theory called for a certain degree of readiness to accept a situation of solitary opposition-a situation with which no one is more familiar than a Jew.

This fascinating volume uses psychoanalytic theory to explore how political subjectivity comes about within the context of global catastrophe, via the emergence of collective individuations through trans-subjectivity. Serving as a jumping-off point to address the structural linkage between collective catastrophe, subject, group, and political transformation, trans-subjectivity is the central tenet of the book, conceptualized as a psyche-social dynamic that initiates social transformation and which may be enhanced in the clinical setting.

Each chapter investigates a distinct manifestation of trans-subjectivity in relation to various real-world events as they manifest clinically in the analytic couple and within group processes. The author builds her conceptual arguments through a psyche/social reading of Kristeva’s theory of signifiance (sublimation), Lacan’s 1945 essay on collective logic,　 Heidegger’s secular reading of the apostle Paul’s Christian revolution, and Žižek, Badiou and Jung’s conception of the neighbor within a differentiated humanity. The book features clinical illustrations, an auto-ethnographic study of the emergence of an AIDS clinic, an accounting of trans-subjectivity in Black revolutionary events in the U.S., and an examination of some expressions of care that arose in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action is important reading for psychoanalysts, psycho-dynamic based therapists, psychologists, group therapists, philosophers and political activists.

Table of Contents
Foreword by Ladson Hinton MD

Introduction: Healing is political

Self as political possibility: subversive neighbor love and transcendental agency amidst collective blindness
From leper-thing to another side of care: a reading of Lacan’s logical collectivity
A subversive reading of Kristeva and sublimation
Trans-subjective agency illustrated in the reals of U.S. (post) slavery racism
Author(s)
Biography

Robin McCoy Brooks is a Jungian Analyst in private practice, educator and consultant in Seattle, WA. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Jungian Studies and serves on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Jungian Studies. Robin is also a founding member of the New School for Analytical Psychology and active analyst member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and the International Association for Analytical Psychology. Further, she is a nationally certified Trainer, Educator and Practitioner of Group Psychotherapy, Sociometry and Psychodrama. She currently is sheltering in place aboard a wooden boat on Salmon Bay with her husband and with two Siamese cats, or their home in Bellingham, WA.

Reviews
A bold and challenging book that interrogates the awakening of ourselves to our responsibilities as political agents. McCoy Brooks takes us deep into the complexities of the self as it is wrenched away from its personal concerns and called into political action. By exposing this shift in concern and the extent to which it can be mastered we are treated to invaluable insights into the psychodynamics of social transformation and into the socio-political crises we continue to wrestle with on a global scale. Her forceful argument is both grounded in and used to critique key ideas of Heidegger, Lacan, Jung, Kristeva,　Žižek and Badiou, making it an astute and thought-provoking book on many levels.

　

Lucy Huskinson, Professor of Philosophy at Bangor University, UK, author of various works including　Nietzsche and Jung　(Routledge 2004) and　Architecture and the Mimetic Self　(Routledge 2018)

　

　

　

For too long the relationship between psychoanalysis and the political has felt forced.　In a work of invigorating scholarship, McCoy Brooks revisits questions central to psychoanalysis and political philosophy alike, exploring the themes of solidarity, the nature of the subject, collective blindness, abjection, and the trans-subjective. It is rare that one finds such a bracing series of intersections between Lacanian and Jungian psychoanalysis and the philosophies of Žižek, Badiou and Heidegger, which so originally foregrounds the political crises of today (of COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, global warming, etc.) that define our times. She uniquely incorporates the clinical and theoretical perspectives of her theses throughout.

Derek Hook, Duquesne University, USA, author of Six Moments in Lacan (Routledge 2018), (Post)apartheid Conditions (2013 Palgrave) and A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid (2011 Routledge).

　

Robin McCoy Brooks has brought the therapeutic and the political – the individual and the collective – into delicate tension in what is nothing less than a masterful study of what it means to ‘do’ applied psychoanalysis.　 By mobilising the notion of trans-subjectivity, McCoy Brooks opens us to the potential for radical change in times of rapid upheaval.　 Through careful, comparative analysis and a determined focus on that which binds humanity together, she weaves a compelling narrative of relationality – a continuum of I and Other – that is only overshadowed by an equally relentless compassion, delivered through critical analysis and psychological insight.　 Give hate the right to exist and it will. Provide a doorway leading to greater mutuality, dialogue, and understanding, and the possibilities are endless.　 Stated succinctly, I would follow Robin McCoy Brooks down the rabbit hole of boundless futures yet to be imagined.　　

Dr Kevin Lu, Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex　

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Scientific advances made in the 21st century contend that the forces of nature and nurture work together through an ongoing series of complex correspondences between brain and mental activity in our daily activities with others. Jung's cosmological model of the psyche minimizes the fundamental corporeal condition of human nature and as such is critiqued and amended, influenced by the transcendental materialist theories of subjectivity inspired by Žižek, Johnston and Laplanche.

In this paper the author uses a clinical example as a focus for an exploration of his thesis that the parent is the 'other' who implants his or her unconscious message into the child by means of seduction. As the other is alien, the unconscious of the child cannot any longer be considered the centre of the person but is decentred by the implanted alienness. The author draws on Laplanche's seduction theory to argue that the unconscious message of seduction by the other is exclusively sexual and that it cannot be translated nor symbolized because an interpretative system shared by subject and object is lacking. The decentred alterity of the unconscious allows for comparison with a third object and hence a structural triangulation of the mind which is a prerequisite for symbolization. The role of the analyst in permitting a transference enactment and so facilitating the beginning of sexual symbolization is discussed in relation to the clinical example given at the start of the paper.

This paper shows that Georg Groddeck and Carl Gustav Jung shared a common cultural background, in which Carl Gustav Carus’s theory of the psyche was preeminent. Accordingly, they emphasized symbolization and unconscious creativity. These aspects affected their clinical work, aimed at pioneering therapies: Jung with schizophrenics, Groddeck treating physical diseases. They overcame the limits of the psychoanalysis of their time and, going beyond neurosis, discovered the pre-Oedipal period and the fundamental role of mother-child relationship. While Freud’s technique was based on a one-person paradigm, both Jung and Groddeck considered analytic therapy as a dialectical
process, ushering in a two-person paradigm. Therefore, they did not use the couch; a setting that is assessed in the light of recent research on mirror neurons. It is also highlighted that the analytic groups influenced by Groddeck and Jung have developed similar ideas in both theory and technique; a fact that may induce further studies on the history of depth psychology.

This article explores the psychoanalytic biases towards trans subjectivities. First, the author focuses on the socio-cultural infiltration of metapsychological concepts, showing how doxa contaminates scientific neutrality. Then, he posits a general gender trauma and a universal gender uncertainty. In this perspective, the idealization of fixed and immutable, coherent and authentic identity is understood as a defense against the primitive anxieties of intrusion and engulfment by the other.

In this talk, I will try to defend the Freudian notion of the unconscious and its materialist implications against what neuroscientists call the "emotional brain." Although there seem to be the overlapping territories between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, it is my claim that the two fields diverge eventually because their fundamental orientations are incompatible. Following Gilles Deleuze, if we accept that concept-creation has always something to do with a specific set of problems, we should first see whether Freud's concept of the unconscious and neuroscience's emotional brain respond to the same set of problems.

This paper is an attempt to present Jean Laplanche's interpretation of the Freudian field as one that is driven and shaped by opposing gravitational pulls. These he represents by developing Freud's analogy of the Copernican and psychoanalytic revolutions to demonstrate the successive decentrings and recentrings of the human subject in relation to a primal and formative other at the level of a psychoanalytic theory that is itself alternately both 'Copernican' and 'Ptolemaic'. In doing so, he replicates those movements at work at the level of the formation of human subjectivity. Focusing on Freud's shifting conceptions of the unconscious, the drive and the id, this paper seeks to show how Laplanche radicalizes certain 'Copernican' elements of Freud's metapsychology to establish the primacy of the other and the dimension of 'primal seduction' in concepts intended by Freud to decentre the narcissistic illusions of the ego, but which are captured by regressive movements of thought, retreating to 'Ptolemaic' conceptions of an endogenous, biologically grounded development of subjectivity.

Mills’ paper tackles an important question for Jungian studies: what are the underlying metaphysical assumptions behind analytical psychology? However, his attempt to pursue this inquiry is undermined by a strong but unsupportable insistence by Mills that Jung intended to present himself primarily as an ontologist. I also argue that various further inaccuracies and misreadings lead Mills into a fundamental misunderstanding of the intentions and aims that characterise Jung’s psychology.

Theory Vexed by an Incorporeal Ontology https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429261763 In Chapter 5 , Robin McCoy Brooks critiques aspects of C.G. Jung’s epistemological basis for psychic reality that contributes to a view of the self that is ungrounded in biological life and the material world because of his para-psychological biases. Thus, Jung’s attempt to establish the prominence of the objective psyche as a foundation to the other sciences of his era had the unfortunate effect of disregarding the material realities inherent in self- formation. The author investigates the historical contexts to which Jung was inured as a means of determining what of his corpus regarding a disembodied self remains relevant today amidst our present scientific revolution and analytical psychology’s contemporary identity crises. The critique into Jung’s prevailing psychical biases focuses on the historical tensions that contributed to Jung’s ambiguous relationship to natural ( Naturwissenschaften ) and human ( Geisteswissenschaften ) sciences throughout his lifetime that led him to rely on new- Kantian philosophical ideas (a foundational ontology) and turn away from contemporary developments advanced by philosophical phenomenology and Freud’s biological model of personhood. Brooks contends that analytical psychology today has been dealt a fatal theoretical blow if we do not radically reconsider the indivisibility of material and more than material realities as viable influences in self- formation.

The terms of reference for the human sciences are described to help folks unfamiliar with the term to feel encouraged to submit papers and to attend the 2020 conference of the International Association for Jungian Studies in conjunction with Duquesne University's Dept Psychology.

The relationship between psychoanalysis and the natural sciences has been difficult over the years. Attempts to marry the two, from Freud's infamous 1985 Project for a Scientific Psychology, through Wilhelm Reich's bio-spiritualism, to Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's libidinal anarchism, have failed again and again — a symptom perhaps of attempting to close a gap that Freud himself warned against prematurely bridging. Today, from the perspective of the life sciences, it appears that recent developments in our disciplines have finally rendered obsolete Freud's pragmatic separation. But this comes with an important caveat: a relationship may not be on the cards either.

An important work by Johnston and Malabou attempts an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the integration of symbolic with neurophysiologic systems in the developing brain that creates the subject. Affect is central to their approach. This review sets out the issues and discusses the problems inherent in all modified dualist approaches.

From a Jungian point of view, human mental constructs and processes of the psyche, including experiential categories of gender and sexuality, are constituents of a creative field that modifies nature and the natural in particular ways. Gender understanding unfolds from the arising of human civilization in general as an imaginal exercise that entwines the needs of the individual and the group in which they are embedded.  This social fabric continually unfolds as new ways of thinking become possible and this unfolding needs constant attention in order to be as compassionate and inclusive as possible while still maintaining individual and group coherence.

Para compreender as apostas do “materialismo transcendental”, projeto filosófico de Adrian Johnston, devemos, antes de mais nada, ser capazes de captar a inflexão singular de seu hegelianismo. Para isso, é preciso dividir a elaboração do materialismo transcendental de Johnston em duas fases subsequentes.

Researchers often talk about a powerful heuristic potential of the Kantian heritage, but sometimes they do not show concrete examples in defense of this opinion outside Kantianism and Neo-Kantianism. This article contains an attempt to demonstrate that on the example of how efficiently C.G. Jung used Kant's ideas to construct the theoretical basis of analytical psychology in general and his conception of archetypes in particular, we can see the urgency of Kant's heritage not only for his direct spiritual successors. In addition the question is discussed: why did Jung claim that epistemologically he took his stand on Kant?

A loose, sketchy discussion, continuing on some of my work on Johnston and Zizek. Defending what I think Badiou's position entails. A speculative paper. Given in Baltimore at the wonderful Transcendental Materialism conference at Loyola, organized by Michael Burns, in 2015. Slightly revised.

This introduction to a selection of Laplanche's essays, organised around the theme and figure of the other, traces Laplanche's return to and critical development  of Freud's theory of seduction as the basis for a revised metapsychology of the otherness. The other of seduction for Laplanche is not the sadistic abuser of Freud's model of infantile sexual trauma, but the adult agent of nurturance in the fundamental anthropological situation of what Laplanche calls 'primal seduction'. This is an adult with an organised sexuality and an unconscious  in a primal situation where the radically dependent infant has neither. In this situation the reciprocal relation of nurture and dependency is also the carrier of a unilateral and unconscious transmission from adult to infant of what Laplanche calls enigmatic signifiers, exciting and agitating overdetermined elements within the adult messages of love, nurturance and protection. The essay traces how this primacy of the adult of primal seduction relocates and reworks the fundamental psychoanalytic concepts of of the drive, the ego, memory and its relation to fantasy, transference, repression and the repressed unconscious itself.

This chapter explores the relationship between the unthinkable and the un-representable in Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), through an engagement with Catherine Malabou’s dialogue with psychoanalysis in The New Wounded. There, Malabou identifies what she sees as new forms of post-traumatic subjectivity that necessitate “the complete theoretical reinvention of psychopathology”. My approach will come from an avowedly Lacanian orientation, but I will be considering what sort of questions Malabou’s concept of “destructive plasticity” poses for psychoanalysis – and for psychoanalytic approaches to trauma – and wondering whether Žižek’s riposte to Malabou – for example – in Living in the End Times is sufficient to meet her challenge. My approach will also be that of a film theorist, and in this chapter I will be seeking to ask what contribution the cinema can make to this dialogue on “cerebrality” and “plasticity”, and – equally – how this dialogue might help us to approach the depiction of trauma in Haneke’s film. Could Amour constitute a fictionalised, cinematic version of what Malabou (after Luria) refers to as a “neurological novel”, where “Anne is no longer Anne”? After all, Malabou herself refers to literature and theatre in her work, so – I will suggest – why not the cinema? As she says, “narrative work is a clinical gesture”, and so this chapter will explore the possibility – through Amour – that the cinema could stage for the psyche knowledge of a trauma that the psyche itself cannot know. By focusing on Anne, I will attempt to explore the subjectivity of the new wounded and approach, from a Lacanian perspective, the post-traumatic subject’s experience of, for example, inhabiting the same body but in a radically different way.

The far-reaching historical transformations of recent decades, including the decline of the Keynesian/Fordist organization of polity and economy in the West, the collapse of party-state command economies in the East, and the emergence of a neo-liberal capitalist global order, suggest that contemporary critical theory must be centrally concerned with historical dynamics and large-scale structural changes. The paper argues that these broad developments can best be apprehended by a theory premised on the Marxian theory of capital, but only if that category is fundamentally reconceptualized in ways that distinguish it from its usage in traditional Marxist interpretations.

Review of Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future
Materialism. Vol. I. The Outcome
of Contemporary French Philosophy
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013, 257pp.,
ISBN 978-0810129122
Adrian Johnston, Adventures in
Transcendental Materialism. Dialogues with
Contemporary Thinkers
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, 376pp.,
ISBN 978-0748673285

In this commentary on a paper by Adrian Johnston, I consider whether his attempt to develop a materialist ground for psychoanalysis can avoid versions of reductionism and verificationism that would threaten any autonomy psychoanalysis might have as a science.

At the beginning - says Laplanche - there is a riddle: an enigma in a double sense. The sender of
the enigmatic message does not know that he has issued a message, the receiver of the message does
not  know  that  he  has  received  a  message.  The  human  mind  is  built  around  this  enigmatic  message.
Psychoanalysis is an attempt to solve this puzzle. But the solution of a riddle cannot be a sign, because
each sign, in turn, must be interpreted. And so on ad infinitum. The solution of the riddle cannot be
another puzzle. What we need is to find a different logic from that of the enigma and language. In this
paper, I propose to consider the aesthetic experience as the only way out of the language. Above the
riddle, there is the image.

Recent advances in the cognitive, affective and social neurosciences have enabled these fields to study aspects of the mind that are central to psychoanalysis. These developments raise a number of possibilities for psychoanalysis. Can it engage the neurosciences in a productive and mutually enriching dialogue without compromising its own integrity and unique perspective? While many analysts welcome interdisciplinary exchanges with the neuro-sciences, termed neuropsychoanalysis, some have voiced concerns about their potentially deleterious effects on psychoanalytic theory and practice. In this paper we outline the development and aims of neuropsychoanalysis, and consider its reception in psychoanalysis and in the neurosciences. We then discuss some of the concerns raised within psychoanalysis, with particular emphasis on the epistemological foundations of neuropsychoanalysis. While this paper does not attempt to fully address the clinical applications of neuropsychoanal-ysis, we offer and discuss a brief case illustration in order to demonstrate that neuroscientific research findings can be used to enrich our models of the mind in ways that, in turn, may influence how analysts work with their patients. We will conclude that neuropsychoanalysis is grounded in the history of psychoanalysis , that it is part of the psychoanalytic worldview, and that it is necessary , albeit not sufficient, for the future viability of psychoanalysis.

Abstract
This paper draws together a complex assemblage of analysis, critique, and exemplification in its attempt to provide cogent argumentation for its claim that the notion of subjectivity, as championed by Kierkegaard, is immanent to the Hegelian system despite Kierkegaard's express claims otherwise. By simultaneously resisting and insisting on the schismatic differences between Hegel and Kierkegaard, this paper endeavors to illustrate what I allege to be a definite homology between Hegel's absolute Idea and Kierkegaard's concept of essential knowing, which together posit a subjectivity that is defined by the inherent tension of contradiction, and which makes up a particular "materialism" that inheres at the core of a disjunctive absolutism; the truth of which is the subject as such. The emergence of this consideration is to be located in a critico-theoretical conjunction of my own mustering, involving but not limited to Adrian Johnston's transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity, Kant's Thing-in-itself (Ding an sich), and the radical heterodoxy of Slavoj Žižek's dialectical-materialist hermeneutics of Hegelian philosophy. In fine, the aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to provide an (exegetical) account of Hegel's absolute Idea à la Žižek's newly minted dialectical materialism, and (2) to thereby put forward a "neo-Hegelian" reading of Kierkegaard's concept of essential knowing; a reading, I hope, that will pair nicely Kierkegaard's concept of essential knowing with Hegel's absolute Idea—insofar as the very subjectivity that Kierkegaard claims to be lacking in the Hegelian system is nonetheless central to it.

In this chapter I will explore the process by which an individual self, unfolding after birth within the relationship with the maternal object and the cultural matrix, "creates" its internal and external world. I will borrow from Jung's theory of the self and the archetypes and from Michael Fordham's contributions on child analysis and on the self in infancy. When Michael Fordham felt the need to apply Jung's theory of the psyche to the onset of life, he expanded the scope of analytical psychology and connected it to modern developments in psychoanalysis and infant research. Alan Schore's 1994 research in the field of neurobiology, regarding affect modulation and the origin of the self, are parallel to archetypal affective states investigated in 1952 by Jung in his paper on synchronicity. At that time Jung was fascinated by Pauli's research in the field of physics. Jung writes: