Psychoanalysis

1. Psychoanalysis

2. psychology initially defined as understanding of mental and emotional processes as they related to language, literature and culture • psychoanalysis is study of these processes in individual people • psychotherapy techniques for resolving mental and emotional problems and helping people realise their full potential

3. Language-in psychological terms • primary symbolic system through which we categorise worlds within and around us • Lacan - subject's entry into language -- R/I/S • words how we distinguish • I, me, mine, yours, student, teacher, grown-up, adult • words means for expression and repression • can say some things, ignore repress others (god save the queen) • 'talking cure' • word play, slips of the tongue... • Phallus/castration

4. Slavoj Žižek, From The Sublime Object of Ideology • This dialectics of overtaking ourselves towards the future and simultaneous retroactive modification of the past – dialectics by which the error is internal to the truth, by which the misrecognition possesses a positive ontological dimension – has, however, its limits; it stumbles on to a rock upon which it becomes suspended. This rock is of course the Real, that which resists symbolization: the traumatic point which is always missed but nonetheless always returns, although we try – through a set s different strategies – to neutralize it, to integrate it into the symbolic order. In the perspective of the last stage of Lacanian teaching, it is precisely the symptom which is conceived as such a real kernel of enjoyment, which persists as a surplus and returns through all attempts to domesticate it, to gentrify it (if we may be permitted to use this term adapted to designate strategies to domesticate the slums as "symptoms" of our cities), to dissolve it by means of explication, of putting-into-words its meaning.

5. Affect Theory • Brian Massumi: Affect is a visceral, raw pre-feeling. Feelings are socially constructed distortions of affect. Affect is the manifestation of the body’s internalization of an intensity. It cannot be rendered by language or any other kind of transmittable information. Affect is perpetually undulating and reforming. It is more bodily than cognitive. The body is integral to the understanding of affect. Massumi describes the “walls” of the body as sensory receptors which allow for the intensity of an experience to be transmitted and internalized. The transmission of affect is not the exchange of affect from thing to body or body to body, it is the infolding and unfolding of intensities between the two bodies, which can be virtual or flesh. These intensities resonate apart from intended meaning of context.