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Geneviève Morel Karnac, London, 2011, 302 pp., $38.22 paper, ISBN: 978-1-85575-584-0
Geneviève Morel has the gift of pithy formulation, of introducing a Lacanian concept in a way that is readily accessible and largely free of the proliferation of technical jargon that mars so much of the specialized literature in the field. She notes, for example, while discussing Freud’s Dora case in the book’s fourth chapter, that “the pivot of hysteria is the identification with the jouissance of the father as castrated” (p. 94). This, it seems to me, strikes to the core of hysterical structure in a way that is economical, direct and free of the encumbering theoretical obfuscation that is so often the norm in the Lacanian literature. Hysteria is perhaps the most difficult Freudian-Lacanian clinical structure to précis, and this succinct outline does better than most to offer us a straightforward working definition that might usefully serve the clinician in the psychotherapeutic realm. Morel’s clinical and expository skills are likewise on display in how she approaches the broader problematic of sexuation (that is, the assumption of a feminine or masculine position). She wastes little time in assuring us sexuation is not, and cannot be, the result of identifications alone. As she puts it: “identification alone does not solve the problem of sexuation for the subject” (p. 93).
Having dismissed the idea that gender identification may be sufficient to secure sexuation, Morel moves to consider a far less
intuitive line of enquiry, namely a consideration of what separates psychotics and neurotics in psychical structure. Traditionally, for Lacanians, this involves consideration of the radical rejection of the order of patriarchal prohibitions and cultural laws