Konturen: Vol 3 (2010)
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Borderlines in Psychoanalysis
The « borderline » personality occupies a privileged, albeit highly unstable site along the edge of psychoanalysis. The current Special Issue begins to fill the glaring lack of any sustained work at the intersections of humanities border theory and the clinical discussion of the « borderline»--with essays by psychoanalysts, humanists, and social scientists of diverse methodological traditions and persuasions.
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Item Open Access Introduction: Reason, Unreason, and the Epistemology of the Borderline(University of Oregon, 2010) Librett, Jeffrey S.Item Open Access Drawing Lines: From Kernberg and Haraway to Lacan and Beyond(University of Oregon, 2010) MacCannell, Juliet FlowerThis paper reviews the key concepts underlying the diagnosis of “borderline personality disorder” as exemplified in the work of Otto Kernberg. It looks both to history and philosophy (Rousseau), to social thought (Erving Goffman) and to psychoanalysis (Deutsch, Freud, Lacan) to show the limitations and problems with the diagnosis. It also looks at later cultural developments attacking the idea of limits and ‘borders’ (e.g, Haraway refusal of metaphoric distinctions among human-animal-machine) as having their own vexed psychoanalytic profile. The paper concludes with strong speculation about the reasons humans, and humans alone, draw lines.Item Open Access Introduction: Reason Split into Rationalism and Empiricism: Divergent Traditions on the Borderline(University of Oregon, 2010) Librett, Jeffrey S.Item Open Access The Borders between Autism and Psychosis(University of Oregon, 2010) Bergeron, DanielleThe borders between autism and psychosis are determined by the position that the subject takes with respect to the entry into language during the mirror stage. An ethical choice on the part of the subject of the unconscious seems, very early in life, to determine the passage or the refusal of passage into the field of the Other. As a result of their experiences, certain children choose to reside in the present instant and to build their own space by surrounding themselves with objects, while other children take the risk of language and enter the time of the Other through which their history will be structured. We will address this question through consideration of the autobiographies of autistics and the clinical testimonies of psychotic patients.Item Open Access The Borderline or The Impossibility of Producing a Negotiable Form in the Social Bond for the Return of the Censored(University of Oregon, 2010) Cantin, LucieHow do we think the problem of the “Borderline” within psychoanalysis and the structural conception of psychic organization it proposes? As for the notion of a border between neurosis and psychosis that the case of the Borderline would simultaneously raise and call into question, we must rather recognize the failed experience of an internal limit in the subject with regard to the management of the censored that works and disorganizes the body in a jouissance that finds no path for its expression. The Borderline grapples with the work of the unbound drive, which is free and mobilized by unconscious and censored mental representations which fail to find both their mode of expression outside of the body and their meaning for the subject, as well as their negotiable form in the social space. In the absence of this space carved out in the social bond for the expression of the drive and of desire, the symptom and acting out inscribe and stage the censored within the public space, where its dramatization inevitably leads to a breakdown.Item Open Access A Way of Comparing Levi-Strauss and Lacan(University of Oregon, 2010) Simonis, YvanThis essay attempts to compare and contrast the different conceptions of the human subject in Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, with specific reference to the notions of art and the act. For this occasion I will draw on my reading of structuralism, developed elsewhere, as a “logic of the aesthetic perception of the social.” Structuralism apparently distances itself from the act, but it presupposes the act as a foundation. Psychoanalysis takes the act as its point of departure and seeks its art. In each case, the human subject is conceived differently. Nonetheless, the exercise appended to this essay proposes a space in which these two approaches can perhaps encounter each other on the common ground of structure.Item Open Access Psychoanalytic Process, the Paradoxes of Self-Reference and Intermediacy(University of Oregon, 2010) Bass, AlanItem Open Access The Limit: a Fundamental Question for the Subject in the Human Experience(University of Oregon, 2010) Apollon, WillyFrom oneself to the Other, from the unpresentable quest of desire to the space of the receivable structured by the social link, from the audible (where the time of the quest is structured) to the visible (where the absence of its object reveals itself), the human lacerates itself in the impossible articulation of a passage to the limit. Borders that are forever to be reconstructed recount something that is impossible to say, in the process of which each one of us ceaselessly redefines his or her position in the difficult response to the only question that counts : “ up to what point can I go too far, without cutting myself off from others ? “Item Open Access The Face as a Fingerprint: Mediation, Silence, and the Question of Identity in Ingmar Bergman's Persona(University of Oregon, 2010) Stern, MichaelThis volume is dedicated to readings of the borderline informed by Psychoanalysis. My essay is the exception. In it, I analyze Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) with an eye to the dangers of a one-way conversation. Interestingly, Persona dramatizes an inversion of a typical psychoanalytic session, for here the patient says nothing and her nurse confesses. The aftermath of this inversion and its consequences are explored with the help of the Italian feminist, Adrianna Cavarero, the Danish Philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, and the Serbian performance artist, Marina Abramović. Enjoining a debate within psychoanalysis from the border regions of existential and feminist philosophy, I argue that the silence of an interlocutor creates a mask screening the speaker from the mutual recognition needed for a healthy sense of identity. This essay argues the case for conversation.Item Open Access Introduction: From Reason-vs-Madness to Science-vs-the Nonscientific (and Beyond)(University of Oregon, 2010) Librett, Jeffrey S.Item Open Access Intro: On the Exclusion of Madness from Reason: Between History and Philosophy(University of Oregon, 2010) Librett, Jeffrey S.Item Open Access Keeping Narcissism at Bay: Kant and Schiller on the Sublime(University of Oregon, 2010) Mathäs, AlexanderThis essay considers the sublime as a veiled form of narcissism. Both narcissism and the sublime test and reveal the limits of the concept of the self and both can be viewed as attempts to transcend the borders of the self. Yet while narcissism has been defined as a “failure of spiritual ascent” (Hadot), the sublime has been used to transcend the limitations of the self by pointing to its infinite potential. The essay explores how the sublime in Immanuel Kant’s and Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetics relies on narcissistic impulses by creating a male inner self and protecting it from the stigma of vanity. I propose that their use of this aesthetic category helped objectify an essentially subjectivist aesthetics. Yet while Schiller follows Kant in deriding the sensual aspects of human nature as egotistical and amoral, Schiller’s dramas also challenge some of the Kantian premises. When Schiller’s protagonists sacrifice lives in the service of ethical ideas, the sublime’s oppressive spirit reveals itself.Item Open Access Anxiety: The Uncanny Borderline of Psychoanalysis?(University of Oregon, 2010) Weber, SamuelFreud begins his well-known essay on the Uncanny with a disclaimer that raises the question of why he writes the essay in the first place. This text argues that the explanation is to be found in the shift his thinking was undergoing at the time, not only in moving "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" but also in rethinking its relation to Anxiety.