Studying Lacan’s Seminar IX

Carol Owens is an Irish psychoanalyst, clinical supervisor, and Lacanian scholar. She has lectured and published extensively on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and has edited, co-edited, authored, and co-authored several articles and volumes on Lacanian psychoanalysis as applied to the clinic, culture and society. Sarah Meehan O’ Callaghan is an independent scholar, editor and writer. She has published numerous articles and book chapters in the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis, covering topics such as sexuality, disability, ethics and the body.

• 1. The Einziger zug or unary trait, 2. General Remarks on the Seminar, 3. Reading Lacan with Inattention , 4. Lacan and Peirce, 5. The Function of the O-Object in the Identification of the Subject , 6. The Impossible Interior-8: Lacan’s Implicit Ethnotopology, 7. What Use is the Torus here?, 8. Of What Use is the Torus?, 9. The Topsy-Turvy Torus: Lacan’s Implicit Inversive Geometry, 10. The inverted relations of Desire and Demand, 11. Of What Use is the Cross-Cap?, 12. Lacan the Pataphysician, 13. The O-Object Masked and Unmasked, 14. The Object and its Image, 15. The Double Frame

'Two problems invariably confront any attempt to offer extensive commentary on Lacan’s Seminar. There is the staggering range of Lacan’s literary and scholastic references, firstly, and then there is the extended period of time that Lacan allows himself, over each year long-seminar, to lucubrate over a series of topics and questions in his own distinctively elliptical and elusive way. How then to respond to these challenges and offer a novel type of engagement, especially so in reference to a seminar as (relatively) neglected as Seminar IX? Well, by assembling a veritable ‘dream team’ of scholars – Olga Cox Cameon, Dan Collins and Don Kunze, each of whom have been immersed in the material for decades - one that is able to bypass the standard stereotypical readings of Lacan’s work and isolate the questions and topics that have hitherto been missed or only inadequately appreciated. Working collaboratively, with a multi-disciplinary range exceeding that of any one scholarly expert, the team behind Studying Lacan’s Seminar XI has produced a landmark in Lacanian scholarship, one which matches Lacan’s conceptual brilliance with brilliance and originality all of its own.'- Derek Hook, Professor of Psychoanalysis, Duquesne University, Psychoanalyst'In this extensive volume of commentary, Olga Cox Cameron, Dan Collins, and Don Kunze take us on a romp through one of Lacan’s most unusual seminars—Seminar IX: Identification—highlighting, problematizing, and clarifying such arid topics as the unary trait, the topology of Möbius strips, tori, and cross caps, the origin of the psychoanalytic subject, the fundamental fantasy, object a, i(a), and more. They present Lacan’s transitional work here in the context of what came before in his seminars and what was soon to come in his work. The reader should expect to come away enlightened, perplexed, and even … disoriented.'—Bruce Fink, Lacanian Psychoanalyst, Author, and Translator