Lacan, Jouissance, and the Social Sciences (Routledge Focus on Mental Health)

Exploring how a Freudian-Lacanian approach to psychoanalysis intersects with social and cultural theory, Lacan, Jouissance, and the Social Sciences demonstrates the significance of subjectivity as a concept for the study of leadership, social psychology, culture, and political theory.

Raul Moncayo examines Lacan’s notion of surplus jouissance in relation to four types of socio-economic value: Productive Value, Exchange Value, Surplus Value, and Profit. Also drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, Moncayo contends that surplus production cannot be reduced to alienated labor but rather includes various levels of jouissance-value. In this way, the jouissance that drives capitalization and organization can be theorized as constructive rather than destructive and encompass satisfaction and prosperity rather than individual suffering and asceticism or living with less.

This volume will be of great interest to psychoanalysts both in practice and in training and to academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, Lacanian studies, and social sciences.

Raul Moncayo, PhD, is a supervising analyst and a founding member and past president of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, USA. Dr. Moncayo was also the training director of a large psychiatric clinic for many years in San Francisco. In 2022 he founded The Chinese American Center for Freudian and Lacanian Analysis and Research. He has been an adjunct faculty and a visiting professor both locally and abroad and is the author of 11 books.