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Stijn Vanheule, Palgrave, Macmillan, 2011, 208pp., $80.00, $50.00, ISBN-10: 978-0230276644; ISBN-13: 978-0230276642
Stijn Vanheule's well written and scholarly, The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective, could not be more timely for clinicians, researchers, scholars in psychoanalysis, and even for the educated layperson interested in understanding psychosis from a Lacanian perspective. In what Lipovetsky has called our “hypermodern times,” when reality is increasingly virtual and we are asked to respond more and more to imaginary demands to consume and enjoy, thinking about psychosis clinically is indispensable. An important contribution to Lacanian work in English, Vanheule's text is a much-needed, theoretically clear, lucid, sophisticated and critical understanding of Lacanian theory on psychosis. Vanheule breaks down Lacan's work on psychosis into four distinct periods: “The age of imaginary identification/The Mirror Stage” (1930s–1950), “The age of the primacy of the signifier/The Name of the Father” (1950 s), “The age of the object a” (1960 s), and “The age of the knot/Jouissance and the Real” (1970 s).
It is important to remark on the title of Vanheule's text: Lacanians have maintained that there is no subject in psychosis since the subject is an effect of the signifier, i.e., the subject is a symbolic effect. Vanheule's title allows us to consider the subject of psychosis in a variety of ways: as the Real of psychotic suffering, as a topic of study, and as related to the clinical subject who works with psychotics.
Through all of the chapters, by way of Lacan's changing theorizations and re-conceptualizations, Vanheule provides a broad and variegated understanding of psychosis. He explains the three Lacanian registers and ho