Lacan on Depression and Melancholia

Lacan on Depression and Melancholia considers how clinical, cultural, and personal understandings of depression can be broken down and revisited to properly facilitate psychoanalytical clinical practice.

The contributors to this book highlight the role of neurotic conflicts underlying depressive affects, the distinction between neurotic and psychotic structure, the nature of melancholia, and the clinical value of Freudian and Lacanian concepts – such as object a, the Other, desire, the superego, sublimation – as demonstrated via a variety of clinical and historical cases. The book includes discussions of bereavement and mourning, transference in melancholia, suicidality and the death drive, excessive creativity, melancholic identification, neurotic inhibition, and manic-depressive psychosis.

Lacan on Depression and Melancholia will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in practice and training, Lacanian clinicians, and scholars of Lacanian theory.

Derek Hook is an Associate Professor of Psychology and a clinical supervisor at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA, and a Extraordinary Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

Stijn Vanheule is a clinical psychologist and a Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology at Ghent University, Belgium. He is also a privately practicing psychoanalyst and a member of the New Lacanian School for Psychoanalysis.