Why is stupidity sublime? What is the value of a 'dialectics of ignorance' for analysts and academics? Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid draws on recent research to provide a thorough and illuminating evaluation of the status of knowledge and truth in psychoanalysis. Adopting a Lacanian framework, Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn question the basic assumption that knowledge is universally good and describe how psychoanalysis is in a position to place forms of knowledge in a dialectical relationship with non-knowledge, blindness, ignorance and stupidity. The book draws out the implications of a psychoanalytic theory of knowledge for the practices of knowledge construction, acquisition and transmission across the humanities and social sciences. The book is divided into two sections. The first section addresses the foundations of a psychoanalytic approach to knowledge as it emerges from clinical practice, whilst the second section considers the problems and issues of applied psychoanalysis, and the ambiguous position of the analyst in the public sphere. Subjects covered include: The Logic of Psychoanalytic Discovery Creative Knowledge Production and Institutionalised Doctrine The Desire to Know versus the Fall of Knowledge Epistemological Regression and the Problem of Applied Psychoanalysis This provocative discussion of the dialectics of knowing and not knowing will be welcomed by practicing psychoanalysts and students of psychoanalytic studies, but also by everyone working in the fields of social science, philosophy and cultural studies.

There is nothing new in thinking that we live in stupid times. Many past thinkers thought about stupidity as a symptom, however, Lacan considered stupidity as immune to the influence of psychoanalysis, saying about himself, “I am only relatively stupid―that is to say, I am as stupid as all people―perhaps because I got a little bit enlightened." Here it seems that stupidity signifies (and is signified by) the absence of any coherent foundation in desire and lack, but instead emanate from the will to jouissance. Here stupidity is inescapable whether it be individual, communal, or ideological. In Stupidity and Psychoanalysis, chapters by internationally respected Lacanian analysts and theoreticians think about how we can understand stupidity as a specific psychoanalytic encounter. This collection draws critical Lacanian attention to considering new ways to approach stupidity and stupor as new contemporary subjective and social forms. Contributors provide various insights into how stupidity might be rethought as contemporary signifiers whose importance lies (for better or worse) more in producing effect than in transmitting meaning. Contributors: Giole P. Cima, Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker, David Ferraro, Luis Izcovich, Adrian Johnston, James Martell, Jean-Michel Rabate, Samo Tomsic, Antonio Viselli, and Cindy Zeiher.

"We need books like this one." --Steven Pinker At last, stupidity explained! And by some of the world's smartest people, among them Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, Alison Gopnik, Howard Gardner, Antonio Damasio, Aaron James, and Ryan Holiday. And so I proclaim, o idiots of every stripe and morons of all kinds, this is your moment of glory: this book speaks only to you. But you will not recognize yourselves... Stupidity is all around us, from the coworker who won't stop hitting "reply all" to the former high school classmate posting conspiracy theories on Facebook. But in order to vanquish it, we must first understand it. In The Psychology of Stupidity, some of the world's leading psychologists and thinkers--including a Nobel Prize winner and bestselling authors--will show you... why smart people sometimes believe in utter nonsense; how our lazy brains cause us to make the wrong decisions; why trying to debate fools is a trap; how media manipulation and Internet overstimulation make us dumber; why the stupidest people don't think they're stupid. The wisdom and wit of these experts are a balm for our aggrieved souls and a beacon of hope in a world of morons.

Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis explores the critical relationship between psychoanalysis and the work of Derrida (Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and his later writing on autoimmunity, cruelty, war, and human rights) and Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus, and more). Each essay illuminates a specific aspect of Derrida's and Deleuze's perspectives on psychoanalysis: the human-animal boundary; the child's polymorphism; the face or mouth as constitutive of ethical responsibility toward others; the connections between pain and suffering and political resistance; the role of masochism in psychoanalytic thinking; the use of psychoanalytic secondary revision in theorizing film; and the political dimension of the unconscious. Placing a particular emphasis on liminal figurations of the human and challenges to discourses on free will, the essays explore shared concerns in Derrida and Deleuze with regard to history, politics, the political unconscious, and resistance. By addressing the need to overcome the split between the psychological and the political, Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis illuminates the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to critical interrogations of culture and politics.

This groundbreaking book was seeded by the first-ever joint Jung–Lacan conference on the notion of the sublime held at Cambridge, England, against the backdrop of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War. It provides a fascinating range of in-depth psychological perspectives on aspects of creativity and destruction inherent in the monstrous, awe-inspiring sublime. The chapters include some of the outcrop of academic and clinical papers given at this conference, with the addition of new contributions that explore similarities and differences between Jungian and Lacanian thinking on key topics such as language and linguistics, literature, religion, self and subject, science, mathematics and philosophy. The overall objective of this vitalizing volume is the development and dissemination of new ideas that will be of interest to practising psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and academics in the field, as well as to all those who are captivated by the still-revolutionary thinking of Jung and Lacan.

An increasing number of scholars, students and practitioners of psychology are becoming intrigued by the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and of Felix Guattari. This book aims to be a critical introduction to these ideas, which have so much to offer psychology in terms of new directions as well as critique. Deleuze was one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century and a figure whose ideas are increasingly influential throughout the humanities and social sciences. His work, particularly his collaborations with psychoanalyst Guattari, focused on the articulation of a philosophy of difference. Rejecting mainstream continental philosophy just as much as the orthodox analytical metaphysics of the English-speaking world, Deleuze proposed a positive and passionate alternative, bursting at the seams with new concepts and new transformations. This book overviews the philosophical contribution of Deleuze including the project he developed with Guattari. It goes on to explore the application of these ideas in three major dimensions of psychology: its unit of analysis, its method and its applications to the clinic. Deleuze and Psychology will be of interest to students and scholars of psychology and those interested in continental philosophy, as well as psychological practitioners and therapists.

From the author of In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer comes an intensive look at the practice of psychoanalysis through interviews with “Aaron Green,” a Freudian analyst in New York City. Malcolm is accessible and lucid in describing the history of psychoanalysis and its development in the United States. It provides rare insight into the contradictory world of psychoanalytic training and treatment and a foundation for our understanding of psychiatry and mental health. "Janet Malcom has managed somehow to peer into the reticent, reclusive world of psychoanalysis and to report to us, with remarkable fidelity, what she has seen. When I began reading I thought condescendingly, 'She will get the facts right, and everything else wrong.' She does get the facts right, but far more pressive, she has been able to capture and convey the claustral atmosphere of the profession. Her book is journalism become art." —Joseph Andelson, The New York Times Book Review