Anxiety,Desire,and the Object a : Lacan on Lucia Tower’s “Countertransference”

Abstract

Lacan’s seminars are a treasure trove of innovative psychoanalytic explorations. In Seminar X, Anxiety, he takes up this Freudian theme and explores a number of interrelated ideas: castration, the difference between the sexes, two different forms of acting out, and what he terms his only original theoretical contribution: the object a and its “various incidences.” The object a is described here in detail, especially in relation to Lacan’s argument that analysts who are women have a freer relationship to their desire and the countertransferences it spawns than do men. Lacan discussed Lucia Tower’s classic paper, “Countertransference,” in light of these notions. This essay is a close reading of Lacan’s close reading of Tower, whose account, he says, must be approached in all its “innocence and freshness.”

Keywords

Jacques Lacan Lucia Tower anxiety desire sadism seminar reading

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bion

W.R.

(1961). Experience in Groups, and Other Papers. London: Brunner-Routledge, 2001.

Eissler

K.R.

(1953). The effect of the structure of the ego on psychoanalytic technique. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 1:104–143.

Freud

(1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. Standard Edition 18:1–64.

Freud

(1925). Negation. Standard Edition 19:235–239.

Kirshner

L.A.

(2005). Rethinking desire: The objet petit a in Lacanian theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 53:83–102.

Lacan

(1958). The signification of the phallus. In Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, transl. Fink

. New York: Norton, 2006.

Lacan

(1962–1963). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book X. Anxiety, ed. Miller

J.-A.

, transl. Price

A.R.

. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014.

Litowitz

B.E.

(1998). An expanded developmental line for negation: Rejection, refusal, denial. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 46:121–148.

Roudinesco

. (1990). Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

10.

Tower

L.E.

(1956). Countertransference. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 4:224– 255.

11.

Tower

L.E.

Calef

(1954). Training and therapeutic analysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 2:175–178.

12.

Turkle

(1992). Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution. 2nd ed. New York: Free Association Books.

13.

Weiss

Sampson

, eds. (1986). The Psychoanalytic Process: Theory, Clinical Observations, and Empirical Research. New York: Guilford Press.

14.

Wilderson III

F.B

. (2020). Afropessimism. New York: Norton.

15.

Wilson

(2020). The Analyst’s Desire: The Ethical Foundation of Clinical Practice. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.