Aristodemou, Maria (2016) Freedom in the free world: the extimate becomes the law. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 48 , pp. 85-91. ISSN 0160-2527.
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Abstract
My article takes Robert Burt's piece as a starting point to highlight how a lacanian analysis of law differs from the one Robert Burt (rightly) rejected and from the alternative psychotherapeutic scenario Burt develops. I focus on what I consider to be the novel characteristics of a lacanian analysis, particularly its insistence on the castration of the human subject by language, a castration that problematizes our understanding of “freedom” and “free speech”, and, in turn, on Law's own castration. The gradual peeling away of the claims made on behalf of the subject by ego psychologists, enables us to arrive at what a lacanian analysis would ideally uncover, that is the subject's extimate core. I illustrate this with the film The Act of Killing, a documentary which displays not only the extimate core at the heart of the subject but the extimate as the Law itself. The encounter between law and psychoanalysis, I conclude, far from leading to mutual understanding, leads to the dissolution of the analysand's pretenses, and, in turn, to the withdrawal of psychoanalysis from the scene altogether.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Law, Psychoanalysis, Lacan, Freud, Castration, Language, Extimate |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Business and Law > Birkbeck Law School |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics (MAMSIE) |
| Depositing User: | Maria Aristodemou |
| Date Deposited: | 27 Jun 2016 09:23 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:25 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/15636 |
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