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Darian Leader is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and founding member of the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research in London. He is a thinker, speaker, and writer whose intelligence and clarity engage a wide international audience — Lacanian and beyond. Titles of a few of the books among his prolific publications include: Jouissance: Sexuality, Suffering, and Satisfaction , Strictly Bipolar , What Is Madness? (2012), Stealing the Mona Lisa , and Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post? . In his writings, Leader illustrates his belief that psychoanalysis thrives on real questions — on exploring what we don't know — and inspires his readers to question even further.
The conversation that follows occurred by email between Darian Leader and Patricia Marra, from their respective cities of London and San Francisco, over several weeks from April through June 2023.
PM: First, Darian, I would like to thank you, on behalf of fort da, for generously agreeing to our email interview.
So, let's start with what drew you to psychoanalysis — and specifically Lacanian theory and practice?
DL: I became interested in psychoanalysis in my teens. There was a special bookcase in my school library that was set apart from the rest of the open shelves, housing basically editions of Freud and Frazer. These were in some sense forbidden works, and reading them was fascinating and different to anything I had encountered until then. Beyond the thrill of their exciting ideas, I also found a way of making sense of family events that were unfolding around me at the time, even if this only became clear to me much later on.
Reading and exploring psychoanalytic literature over the next few years, I studied the work of the British analysts, yet much of their
theoretical framework and clinical approach appeared at the time quite far-fetched. There was more emphasis on the analysand's actual words in the older analytic literature and in the contemporary Lacanian work that I was drawn to. Studying history