Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory that, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.
Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality development relating to the practice of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology. First laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work. The psychoanalytic theory came to full prominence in the last third of the twentieth century as part of the flow of critical discourse regarding psychological treatments after the 1960s, long after Freud's death in 1939. Freud had ceased his analysis of the brain and his physiological studies and shifted his focus to the study of the psyche, and on treatment using free association and the phenomena of transference. His study emphasized the recognition of childhood events that could influence the mental functioning of adults. His examination of the genetic and then the developmental aspects gave the psychoanalytic theory its characteristics. Starting with his publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, his theories began to gain prominence.
The Yale school is a colloquial name for an influential group of literary critics, theorists, and philosophers of literature that were influenced by Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction. Many of the theorists were affiliated with Yale University in the late 1970s, although a number of the theorists – including Derrida himself – subsequently moved to or became affiliated with the University of California, Irvine.
Jouissance is a French term meaning "enjoyment", which in Lacanianism is taken in terms both of rights and property, and of sexual orgasm. The latter has a meaning partially lacking in the English word "enjoyment". The term denotes a transgressive, excessive kind of pleasure linked to the division and splitting of the subject involved, which compels the subject to constantly attempt to transgress the prohibitions imposed on enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle.
Performance studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses performance as a lens and a tool to study the world. The term performance is broad, and can include artistic and aesthetic performances like concerts, theatrical events, and performance art; sporting events; social, political and religious events like rituals, ceremonies, proclamations and public decisions; certain kinds of language use; and those components of identity which require someone to do, rather than just be, something. Performance studies draws from theories and methods of the performing arts, anthropology, sociology, literary theory, culture studies, communication, and others.
Jane Anne Gallop is an American professor who since 1992 has served as Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990.
Cathy Caruth succeeded Jonathan Culler as Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in the departments of Literatures in English and Comparative Literature. After graduating cum laude from Princeton University, she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale. Before coming to Cornell, she taught at Yale, then Emory, where she developed an archive of Holocaust testimony, co-organized a national interdisciplinary conference on trauma, and significantly expanded the graduate program in Comparative Literature.
André Green was a French psychoanalyst.
Barbara Ellen Johnson was an American literary critic and translator, born in Boston. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her scholarship incorporated a variety of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives—including deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory—into a critical, interdisciplinary study of literature. As a scholar, teacher, and translator, Johnson helped make the theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida accessible to English-speaking audiences in the United States at a time when they had just begun to gain recognition in France. Accordingly, she is often associated with the "Yale School" of academic literary criticism.
Elizabeth A. Grosz is an Australian philosopher, feminist theorist, and professor working in the U.S. She is Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor at Duke University. She has written on 20th-century French philosophers Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze, as well as on gender, sexuality, temporality, and Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Élisabeth Roudinesco is a French scholar, historian and psychoanalyst, affiliated researcher in history at E.N.S.- P.S.L ; University of Paris, in the group « Identités-Cultures-Territoires ».
In the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, afterwardsness is a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events... [from the German word] Nachträglichkeit, translated as deferred action, retroaction, après-coup, afterwardsness". As summarized by another scholar, 'In one sense, Freud's theory of deferred action can be simply stated: memory is reprinted, so to speak, in accordance with later experience'.
Richard Allen Macksey was Professor of Humanities and Co-founder and longtime Director of the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins University, where he taught critical theory, comparative literature, and film studies. Professor Macksey was educated at Johns Hopkins, earning his B.A. in 1953 and his Ph.D. in 1957. He taught at Johns Hopkins since 1958. He was the longtime Comparative Literature editor of MLN, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He was a recipient of the Hopkins Distinguished Alumnus Award. Dr. Macksey also presided over one of the largest private libraries in Maryland, with over 70,000 books and manuscripts. An image of the room overspilling with books has been a popular internet meme in the 2010s and 2020s.
Somatic theory is a theory of human social behavior based loosely on the somatic marker hypothesis of António Damásio. The theory proposes a mechanism by which emotional processes can guide behavior: in particular, decision-making, the attachment theory of John Bowlby, and the self-psychology of Heinz Kohut.
Lacanianism or Lacanian psychoanalysis is a theoretical system that explains the mind, behaviour, and culture through a structuralist and post-structuralist extension of classical psychoanalysis, initiated by the work of Jacques Lacan from the 1950s to the 1980s. Lacanian perspectives contend that the world of language, the Symbolic, structures the human mind, and stress the importance of desire, which is conceived of as endless and impossible to satisfy. Contemporary Lacanianism is characterised by a broad range of thought and extensive debate between Lacanians.
Teckyoung Kwon is a literary critic, translator and professor in English literature at the School of English, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea. Her research interests are psychoanalysis, ecology, American and British fiction, narrative theory, neuro-humanities, Korean literature and Dao.
Bruce Fink is an American Lacanian psychoanalyst and a major translator of Jacques Lacan. He is the author of numerous books on Lacan and Lacanian psychoanalysis, prominent among which are Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (1995), Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan's Seminar VIII and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique.
Dori Laub was an Israeli-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, a clinical professor in Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry, an expert in the area of testimony methodology, and a trauma researcher. A Holocaust survivor himself, Laub co-founded the Holocaust Survivors Film Project with Laurel Vlock.
