Leon is hands down the best explainer of Lacan on youtube in my opinion. Leon, I wish you would make a whole youtube channel aimed at educating people about Lacan from the ground up!
Very interesting conversation, thank you for this! I’m currently re-reading Freud and many of Dr. Brenner’s explanations were highly useful for my understanding.
Do you mind clarifying the word you used at 1:09:38 in context of Lacan's graph of desire...subtitles say "metrolocite aspect" but I'd like to research this more. thank you!
Andrew is referring here to "Nachträglichkeit" which I think (I don't know German) can translate to "deferred action" or "retroactivity" -- this is an important concept for Freud and Lacan. Basically, retroactivity implies an experience in the present altering the meaning of a past action. In the case of Freud's wolf man, for example, he witnesses his parents having sex "coitus a tergo" as a child and thinks nothing of it. It's only years later when he's going through his own pubescent sexual awakening and becoming a sexual being in his own right that this witnessed scene ("the primal scene") becomes traumatic for him. So the nature of "Nachträglichkeit" is traumatic for the reason that it alters the meaning of past events and/or conjures forgotten memories. These memories take on a new meaning that in some sense changes the composition of the subject's entire psychic framework. How is this possible? Well, the scene witnessed may not have been traumatic at the time, but because the "mature" subject happens to suffer a fresh trauma at a later date in his life, a gap in the narrativization in his life is reopened and the previously neutral scene comes to fill in that gap (i.e. the gap of the real). Implicated therewith is the whole of the symbolic order which now must be rearranged. This is why trauma is not merely an unpleasant episode in a stream of otherwise undifferentiated experience, but rather a scene (however brutal) which is inserted into the gap in order to rectify the continuity of egoic experience. The truly originary traumatic moment is, however, consubstantial with one's entrance into the symbolic order. If the subject is that which the symbolic order cannot fully assimilate (because the symbolic order necessarily hinges on the absence of one signifier), then real trauma sustained by the individual can be equated to the (mythic) moment one becomes a "parletre", a speaking being or a subject of language. The signifier is traumatic for the subject in the same way that the subject is, for the symbolic order itself, a traumatic excess. The imaginary confers a sort of uniformity to conscious experience. When one befalls an unfamiliar event, the shock of it is such that there is a kind of time-loop which occurs. This time-loop we could only call retroactive in that it disturbs the time of the ego (which is linear) and brings to the fore the time of the subject (which cannot account for itself as it is co-identical with that which cannot be accounted for by the symbolic order) in its impossible, "kairotic" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos) dimension. I hope that was somewhat clear. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterwardsness
@@thevanishingmediators Oh wow, thank you so much!!! Your explanation shed a lot of light on the topic for me. I just ordered a book ("Reading Lacan's Ecrits" by Derek Hook, Calum Neill, Stijn Vanheule) which I hope will help me learn and navigate this territory further. I can see why Dr. Brenner emphasizes the value in participating in small reading groups to truly grasp this information! Thanks again and I look forward to your videos!
I think for me the conversation here feels lacking in broader context, unless we're really taking Freud and Lacan seriously in 2024, which seems like a kind of scholarly error to basically elbow out a hundred+ years of insights from multiple scientific (and humanities) disciplines. I guess I view the early psychoanalysts as historically interesting more than serious sources for our understanding today. I don't think a peer-reviewed medical article has cited Freud since a couple of obscure and outdated last gasps in the 1970s... I'm fairly certain this is more or less an interdisciplinary consensus in academia apart from cultural theory and some renewed interest in Lacan via Zizek.
@@DrDanLawrence Peer review…consensus…outdated….scholarly error: attempts to discredit Freud and Lacan rarely go beyond simply citing the lack of mainstreamacademic support for their ideas. If you believe psychoanalysis is outdated, then why not try counter the actual substance of the content? Leon Brenner is a Lacanian psychoanaylst who has dedicated his life to applying these concepts in his autism research. He obviously believes there’s something to these theories. Also, you’re probably thinking of the anglophone world when you refer to academia. Lacan and Freud are still highly respected in Latin America, France, Italy, and many other parts of the world. The US especially has always been hostile to psychoanalysis, but has never allowed its scepticism to prevent it from using these concepts (or dilutions thereof) to pursue its own goals (e.g. Edward Bernays and the birth of American advertising). Efforts to downplay the radicality of psychoanalysis has always formed a part of the imperialistic agenda of the US. Psychoanalysis crucially subverts the atomized invididualism upon which the capitalist ideology is based. But still, I’d be curious to know which features of Freud’s theories/Lacan’s teachings you find scientifically unsound. Mention of the academic consensus serves no purpose but that of declaring that Leon and ourselves are wrong in our belief that the study of psychoanalysis might reveal certain truths which other schools of psychological research neglect. Do consider the fact that the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and truth for their own sake has never been the most determinative factor in the academy’s prioritization of its aims. But I do encourage you to relisten to the interview and tell us at which points you feel Leon errs intellectually. If the statement you’re making amounts to little more than saying 9 out 10 dentists agree that Colgate toothpaste is better than Arm and Hammer, well then, I’m a little disappointed.
@@thevanishingmediators If I were being more tactful I would say I prefer more praxis with my theory (or really prefer a good theory to support good praxis). I'm not sure if you've ever spent time with someone who is experiencing psychosis, but Lacan is about as useful as a bag of wet socks in a real medical scenario (or worse, actually harmful). When my three year old daughter was hallucinating bugs in her bed and screaming and crying, I was thankful for peer-reviewed medical research. Lacan is the last thing you need when a patient is presenting with severe mental disturbance. I understand theory for theory's sake, and maybe that's what you are doing here, but as a viewer I prefer at least a little praxis. I intended this as UA-cam viewer feedback, since you popped up in my feed. The fact you muster a defensive instead of acknowledging or reflecting on feedback from a peer makes me even more suspicious of the validity of any of this content. Academia thrives on critique and feedback and reflection. (I think you know the bit about the toothpaste is not a good argument. I'm talking about consensus among peer-reviewed researchers across nearly every field at an international level. Even the cultural theory folks don't usually take Lacan at face value. I've spent the last 20+ years in academia and it would be very difficult to convince me that there is anything other than widespread interdisciplinary consensus that Freud and Lacan are wildly outdated. Evolutionary biologists don't just read Darwin--there's everything that comes after... and that's an extremely overly generous analogy, as it's not clear to me at all that Lacan is to psychology as Darwin is to evolutionary biology, but the point is hopefully a little clearer by the example.) Constructively, I would have just preferred to hear the three of you speak more of praxis and applications more than the coffee shop grad school theory talk, but that's just me. Or at least ground the conversation first or otherwise balance the theory with some science and reality. To go back to your first point above, it's not clear to me that there's any substance here to refute... and my comment has nothing to do with attempting to deradicalize your anticapitalist sentiment... that's plain nonsense. I encourage you to print off a few copies of whatever you consider to be Lacan's most seminal and important work or order a few copies of his books and volunteer some time discussing Lacan in a group with real people with real problems who actually live and suffer in the world with you. Go spend a few hours at a local homeless shelter having these conversations. Then report back to the peer-reviewed journals how much measurable good Lacan does for anyone. I suspect you would find the same thing that the entire scholarly community has found: it's all bunk and fluff.
@@DrDanLawrence Thank you for your comment. I am not a practicing psychoanalyst, but I do undergo Lacanian pscyhoanalysis and can attest to the strength of its effectivity in changing the mode in which I enjoy. You can choose to believe me or not. All you’ve done here is reasserted all the points you’ve made above. It’s bunk, it’s fluff, the academic community (internationally apparently) has disproved these theories and moved past them, etc. but when I ask you to comment on the substance of the concepts being treated in this conversation, you dimiss us as grad school flunkies and have not a single thing to offer besides reitering your contention that Freud and Lacan have been superseded. I’ve been undergoing Lacanian pscyhoanalysis for about a year now and it has fundamentally affected the way I experience my own being in the world, but again, my own anecdotal testimony probably isn’t enough to convince you. What you’ve given me here is not “feedback”, all you’ve done is dismissed my analogy as bad, called the theory which I and many people in this community have dedicated a great portion of their lives to studying bs, deemed my objections to your dismissal as “pure nonesense” and told me to basically touch grass. Maybe myself, Andrew, and Leon Brenner are deeply misguided and you might be able to make our errors more evident by assailing the actual points made in the video, but to equate complete dismissal of us with proffering feedback comes off as dishonest. I don’t see any substance here to refute”. How convenient for you. If a genuine critique of the theory isn’t worth your time then I’d say jumping in the comment section of a YT channel dedicated to Lacan for the sake of letting the world know that his and Leon’s work is all “fluff” and “bunk” is also not worth your time. (Mind you he’s worked with autistic children applying Lacanian theory for years now). I just can’t believe your response amounts to anything more than telling us we’re wrong, telling us the theory (the practice of which Andrew and I experience by undergoing psychoanalysis) is quack science, and refusing to attempt to counter any point made in this conversation because, surprise surprise, there is none…Thanks for the brilliant “feedback”. Also, do you make a habit of reading your dissertation at homeless shelters? Are we talking about the consensus surrounding research within academia or what underresourced people would make of an academic work?
@@DrDanLawrence Also in regards to the Lacanian praxis of treating psychosis. I highly recommend you read Darrian Leader’s work “On Madness”. He is a Lacanian analyst who has worked with several psychotic patients and recommends an approach which blends psychiatry with speech-based analysis: www.darianleader.com.
@@thevanishingmediators I've done much more than reasserted the initial points above, and gave you a direct, real life example of a serious medical crisis that occurred in my own family. If you want to ignore what I'm saying and instead pretend that I'm somehow attempting to deradicalize your ideology or whatever, then go on with the crocodile tears. Perhaps you do not have children or have not spent much time with people who are actually suffering from severe mental illness, but if you think tossing grad school jargon words around in this kind of intellectual masturbation is useful for society, science, medicine, and psychology, then by all means go on making your error of judgment. The rest of the scholarly community moved on at least half a century ago. Critiques of Freud and Lacan are necessary because these theorists have little bearing on the medical and scientific reality that is shared by the rest of us. As you age and inevitably get sicker or have children, you will be very thankful not for the Lacanians but for the people who are putting in the real work of understanding how our bodies and brains work. Whether you want to do anything with this feedback is of course up to you, but maybe it's not a random event that an academic is looking upon what you are producing with skepticism and giving critical feedback. The video showed up in my feed and I was genuinely surprised to see three apparently healthy adult humans discussing Lacanian theory in this way. This exchange has left me even more skeptical of Lacanian dogma.
Wow so very enlightening, I learned so much about Merleau-Ponty, Uexküll, Freud and Lacan..thank you Dr. Leon Brenner and Vanishing Mediators! 🙏🙏🙏
You know the conversation is gonna be fire when they mention innenwelt and umwelt
1:24:07 Leon Brenner: "you must study Lacan in a group" I love that
Great interview Andrew and Nick, very clarifying. Please bring back Leon!
We plan to!
Please, bring Leon back. Great talk you made.
Thank you. We plan to have him back - possibly mid-seminar.
Schedule one more meeting!! That was awesome
yes bring leon back! we need more leon
Sensational. I'm already hanging out for the next round. Thank you for hosting the wonderful Dr. Brenner. I can't get enough.
Leon is hands down the best explainer of Lacan on youtube in my opinion. Leon, I wish you would make a whole youtube channel aimed at educating people about Lacan from the ground up!
Wouldn’t that be a public service? We’ll try to have him on again soon and hopefully clarify some more difficult points.
I hope you guys are really planing on gettin Leon back on for the talk on foreclosure, this is pure gold!
Very interesting conversation, thank you for this! I’m currently re-reading Freud and many of Dr. Brenner’s explanations were highly useful for my understanding.
Yes this is so useful so more please and thank you
This was wonderful !!
Thanks Chetan. We look forward to seeing you at the Ecrits course!
that was really interesting
Do you mind clarifying the word you used at 1:09:38 in context of Lacan's graph of desire...subtitles say "metrolocite aspect" but I'd like to research this more. thank you!
Andrew is referring here to "Nachträglichkeit" which I think (I don't know German) can translate to "deferred action" or "retroactivity" -- this is an important concept for Freud and Lacan. Basically, retroactivity implies an experience in the present altering the meaning of a past action. In the case of Freud's wolf man, for example, he witnesses his parents having sex "coitus a tergo" as a child and thinks nothing of it. It's only years later when he's going through his own pubescent sexual awakening and becoming a sexual being in his own right that this witnessed scene ("the primal scene") becomes traumatic for him. So the nature of "Nachträglichkeit" is traumatic for the reason that it alters the meaning of past events and/or conjures forgotten memories. These memories take on a new meaning that in some sense changes the composition of the subject's entire psychic framework. How is this possible? Well, the scene witnessed may not have been traumatic at the time, but because the "mature" subject happens to suffer a fresh trauma at a later date in his life, a gap in the narrativization in his life is reopened and the previously neutral scene comes to fill in that gap (i.e. the gap of the real). Implicated therewith is the whole of the symbolic order which now must be rearranged. This is why trauma is not merely an unpleasant episode in a stream of otherwise undifferentiated experience, but rather a scene (however brutal) which is inserted into the gap in order to rectify the continuity of egoic experience. The truly originary traumatic moment is, however, consubstantial with one's entrance into the symbolic order. If the subject is that which the symbolic order cannot fully assimilate (because the symbolic order necessarily hinges on the absence of one signifier), then real trauma sustained by the individual can be equated to the (mythic) moment one becomes a "parletre", a speaking being or a subject of language. The signifier is traumatic for the subject in the same way that the subject is, for the symbolic order itself, a traumatic excess. The imaginary confers a sort of uniformity to conscious experience. When one befalls an unfamiliar event, the shock of it is such that there is a kind of time-loop which occurs. This time-loop we could only call retroactive in that it disturbs the time of the ego (which is linear) and brings to the fore the time of the subject (which cannot account for itself as it is co-identical with that which cannot be accounted for by the symbolic order) in its impossible, "kairotic" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kairos) dimension. I hope that was somewhat clear.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterwardsness
@@thevanishingmediators Oh wow, thank you so much!!! Your explanation shed a lot of light on the topic for me. I just ordered a book ("Reading Lacan's Ecrits" by Derek Hook, Calum Neill, Stijn Vanheule) which I hope will help me learn and navigate this territory further. I can see why Dr. Brenner emphasizes the value in participating in small reading groups to truly grasp this information! Thanks again and I look forward to your videos!
I haven't read that one, but it sounds promising. You're very welcome. As always, more to come.@@GlobalTheatreSkitsoanalysis
I think for me the conversation here feels lacking in broader context, unless we're really taking Freud and Lacan seriously in 2024, which seems like a kind of scholarly error to basically elbow out a hundred+ years of insights from multiple scientific (and humanities) disciplines. I guess I view the early psychoanalysts as historically interesting more than serious sources for our understanding today. I don't think a peer-reviewed medical article has cited Freud since a couple of obscure and outdated last gasps in the 1970s... I'm fairly certain this is more or less an interdisciplinary consensus in academia apart from cultural theory and some renewed interest in Lacan via Zizek.
@@DrDanLawrence Peer review…consensus…outdated….scholarly error: attempts to discredit Freud and Lacan rarely go beyond simply citing the lack of mainstreamacademic support for their ideas. If you believe psychoanalysis is outdated, then why not try counter the actual substance of the content? Leon Brenner is a Lacanian psychoanaylst who has dedicated his life to applying these concepts in his autism research. He obviously believes there’s something to these theories.
Also, you’re probably thinking of the anglophone world when you refer to academia. Lacan and Freud are still highly respected in Latin America, France, Italy, and many other parts of the world. The US especially has always been hostile to psychoanalysis, but has never allowed its scepticism to prevent it from using these concepts (or dilutions thereof) to pursue its own goals (e.g. Edward Bernays and the birth of American advertising).
Efforts to downplay the radicality of psychoanalysis has always formed a part of the imperialistic agenda of the US. Psychoanalysis crucially subverts the atomized invididualism upon which the capitalist ideology is based.
But still, I’d be curious to know which features of Freud’s theories/Lacan’s teachings you find scientifically unsound. Mention of the academic consensus serves no purpose but that of declaring that Leon and ourselves are wrong in our belief that the study of psychoanalysis might reveal certain truths which other schools of psychological research neglect. Do consider the fact that the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and truth for their own sake has never been the most determinative factor in the academy’s prioritization of its aims.
But I do encourage you to relisten to the interview and tell us at which points you feel Leon errs intellectually. If the statement you’re making amounts to little more than saying 9 out 10 dentists agree that Colgate toothpaste is better than Arm and Hammer, well then, I’m a little disappointed.
@@thevanishingmediators If I were being more tactful I would say I prefer more praxis with my theory (or really prefer a good theory to support good praxis). I'm not sure if you've ever spent time with someone who is experiencing psychosis, but Lacan is about as useful as a bag of wet socks in a real medical scenario (or worse, actually harmful). When my three year old daughter was hallucinating bugs in her bed and screaming and crying, I was thankful for peer-reviewed medical research. Lacan is the last thing you need when a patient is presenting with severe mental disturbance.
I understand theory for theory's sake, and maybe that's what you are doing here, but as a viewer I prefer at least a little praxis. I intended this as UA-cam viewer feedback, since you popped up in my feed. The fact you muster a defensive instead of acknowledging or reflecting on feedback from a peer makes me even more suspicious of the validity of any of this content. Academia thrives on critique and feedback and reflection.
(I think you know the bit about the toothpaste is not a good argument. I'm talking about consensus among peer-reviewed researchers across nearly every field at an international level. Even the cultural theory folks don't usually take Lacan at face value. I've spent the last 20+ years in academia and it would be very difficult to convince me that there is anything other than widespread interdisciplinary consensus that Freud and Lacan are wildly outdated. Evolutionary biologists don't just read Darwin--there's everything that comes after... and that's an extremely overly generous analogy, as it's not clear to me at all that Lacan is to psychology as Darwin is to evolutionary biology, but the point is hopefully a little clearer by the example.)
Constructively, I would have just preferred to hear the three of you speak more of praxis and applications more than the coffee shop grad school theory talk, but that's just me. Or at least ground the conversation first or otherwise balance the theory with some science and reality. To go back to your first point above, it's not clear to me that there's any substance here to refute... and my comment has nothing to do with attempting to deradicalize your anticapitalist sentiment... that's plain nonsense.
I encourage you to print off a few copies of whatever you consider to be Lacan's most seminal and important work or order a few copies of his books and volunteer some time discussing Lacan in a group with real people with real problems who actually live and suffer in the world with you. Go spend a few hours at a local homeless shelter having these conversations. Then report back to the peer-reviewed journals how much measurable good Lacan does for anyone. I suspect you would find the same thing that the entire scholarly community has found: it's all bunk and fluff.
@@DrDanLawrence Thank you for your comment. I am not a practicing psychoanalyst, but I do undergo Lacanian pscyhoanalysis and can attest to the strength of its effectivity in changing the mode in which I enjoy. You can choose to believe me or not. All you’ve done here is reasserted all the points you’ve made above. It’s bunk, it’s fluff, the academic community (internationally apparently) has disproved these theories and moved past them, etc. but when I ask you to comment on the substance of the concepts being treated in this conversation, you dimiss us as grad school flunkies and have not a single thing to offer besides reitering your contention that Freud and Lacan have been superseded.
I’ve been undergoing Lacanian pscyhoanalysis for about a year now and it has fundamentally affected the way I experience my own being in the world, but again, my own anecdotal testimony probably isn’t enough to convince you.
What you’ve given me here is not “feedback”, all you’ve done is dismissed my analogy as bad, called the theory which I and many people in this community have dedicated a great portion of their lives to studying bs, deemed my objections to your dismissal as “pure nonesense” and told me to basically touch grass. Maybe myself, Andrew, and Leon Brenner are deeply misguided and you might be able to make our errors more evident by assailing the actual points made in the video, but to equate complete dismissal of us with proffering feedback comes off as dishonest. I don’t see any substance here to refute”. How convenient for you.
If a genuine critique of the theory isn’t worth your time then I’d say jumping in the comment section of a YT channel dedicated to Lacan for the sake of letting the world know that his and Leon’s work is all “fluff” and “bunk” is also not worth your time. (Mind you he’s worked with autistic children applying Lacanian theory for years now). I just can’t believe your response amounts to anything more than telling us we’re wrong, telling us the theory (the practice of which Andrew and I experience by undergoing psychoanalysis) is quack science, and refusing to attempt to counter any point made in this conversation because, surprise surprise, there is none…Thanks for the brilliant “feedback”.
Also, do you make a habit of reading your dissertation at homeless shelters? Are we talking about the consensus surrounding research within academia or what underresourced people would make of an academic work?
@@DrDanLawrence Also in regards to the Lacanian praxis of treating psychosis. I highly recommend you read Darrian Leader’s work “On Madness”. He is a Lacanian analyst who has worked with several psychotic patients and recommends an approach which blends psychiatry with speech-based analysis: www.darianleader.com.
@@thevanishingmediators I've done much more than reasserted the initial points above, and gave you a direct, real life example of a serious medical crisis that occurred in my own family. If you want to ignore what I'm saying and instead pretend that I'm somehow attempting to deradicalize your ideology or whatever, then go on with the crocodile tears. Perhaps you do not have children or have not spent much time with people who are actually suffering from severe mental illness, but if you think tossing grad school jargon words around in this kind of intellectual masturbation is useful for society, science, medicine, and psychology, then by all means go on making your error of judgment. The rest of the scholarly community moved on at least half a century ago. Critiques of Freud and Lacan are necessary because these theorists have little bearing on the medical and scientific reality that is shared by the rest of us. As you age and inevitably get sicker or have children, you will be very thankful not for the Lacanians but for the people who are putting in the real work of understanding how our bodies and brains work. Whether you want to do anything with this feedback is of course up to you, but maybe it's not a random event that an academic is looking upon what you are producing with skepticism and giving critical feedback. The video showed up in my feed and I was genuinely surprised to see three apparently healthy adult humans discussing Lacanian theory in this way. This exchange has left me even more skeptical of Lacanian dogma.