You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Reaching back to his 1951 collaboration with Georges Th. Guilbaud, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Émile Benveniste, Jacques Lacan had a life-long fascination with topology.1 From his invocation of the torus in his 1953 Rome Address, through his turn in the 1960s to the Möbius strip, Klein bottle, and cross-cap, Lacan's near obsessive engagement with topology culminated during the next decade in his seminars on the Borromean knot and his reading of le sinthome in James Joyce. Increasingly, Lacan relied on topological figures to theorize the relationship of scientific knowledge to psychoanalytic truth. But equally important, topology advanced Lacan's later social observations on material culture, information media, and what Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent have recently described as the “Ordinary Psychosis” of the contemporary public sphere.2 Whether endorsed or declaimed, Lacan's topological speculations—their rigor or lack thereof—have been the subject of heated critical debate.3 Less attention has been paid, however, to the pertinence of Lacanian topology to clinical practice and literary reading. Striking linkages, however, among Lacanian psychoanalysis, science, and the literature of psychosis can be discerned in the clinical settings of Robert Lindner's midcentury-modern memoir The Fifty-Minute Hour (1954).
A graduate of Bucknell University, Robert M. Lindner received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology in 1935 at Cornell University where he then taught for two years. Returning to Bucknell, he served as an assistant psychologist and later chief psychologist at the U. S. Penitentiary at Lewisburg. During the 1940s, Lindner entered private practice as a lay analyst in Baltimore, and was associated with the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), founded by his mentor Theodor Reik. Lindner was not only on the editorial board of