Biography
He studied at the University of Paris 7 between 1967 and 1973, where he obtained a Maîtrise (master's degree) in Psychology. In the same period he followed seminars by Roland Barthes (at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes) and Jacques Lacan. He obtained his second degree in Sociology (in 1976) at the University of Urbino (Italy) and trained in psychoanalysis with analysts Elvio Fachinelli and Diego Napolitani in Milan, where he lived and worked between 1974 and 1979. He was Visiting Researcher at the Philosophy Department of the New School for Social Research (1989-1991). Since moving from Milan to Rome he has divided his work activities between research in Social Psychology with CNR, his private practice as analyst and his writing, both as author of papers and as journalist publishing in newspapers and magazines. In 1984, he co-founded the cultural magazine Lettre Internationale (which comes out with editions in German, Italian, Spanish and several other languages). He also contributes to American Imago and to Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, and to various international magazines (such as the French L’Evolution psychiatrique and Cliniques Méditerranéennes, the German Texte, the Russian Psykoanalyz). In 1995 he founded in New York the semestral Journal of European Psychoanalysis, later EJPsy - European Journal of Psychoanalysis, which he edited until 2020 (www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu). Since 2011 he teaches Psychoanalysis at Kyiv's International Institute of Depth Psychology and the Esculapio, post-University school for Psychotherapists in Naples (Italy).
Thought
Benvenuto has addressed fields apparently very different from one another – social psychology, philosophy of language, political philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory – in the nineties he began to structure a predominant project that touches upon all these fields: to replace the primacy of reflection on Truth (typical of Western culture) with a reflection that aims at the Real. In this way he seeks a third way between the two predominant and opposing Western cultures: positivist epistemology (concerned with the truth conditions of propositions) on the one hand, and hermeneutics (concerned with disclosing a Truth that unravels throughout human history) on the other. He adopts the concept of Real from Jacques Lacan, but broadens its meaning, including in it everything that remains external (origin and remainder) to every structure of sense, whether scientific, aesthetic, ethical and political. The Real is the background upon which every scientific theory, every artistic production, the psychoanalysis of each subject, every ethic arrangement, revolves and it is always in excess of all these “discourses”. Thus, the Real of every scientific theory is the Chaos that sets itself as the limit and background of every causative process. The Real in psychoanalysis is the background to the drives, the bodily, irreducibly individual background before which all interpretation stops. In particular (for example in La strategia freudiana [The Freudian Strategy] and in Perversionen [Perversions]) he has engaged in an original reinterpretation of Freudian theory and of psychoanalysis in general, as founded on a precise metaphysics of “the signifying flesh”. Freud's interpretative and explicative tissue, however, also refers to something uninterpretable and inexplicable: the drive as an opaque non-signifying source of subjectivity.
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Metapsychology is that aspect of any psychological theory which refers to the structure of the theory itself rather than to the entity it describes. The psychology is about the psyche; the metapsychology is about the psychology. The term is used mostly in discourse about psychoanalysis, the psychology developed by Sigmund Freud, which was at its time regarded as a branch of science, or, more recently, as a hermeneutics of understanding. Interest on the possible scientific status of psychoanalysis has been renewed in the emerging discipline of neuropsychoanalysis, whose major exemplar is Mark Solms. The hermeneutic vision of psychoanalysis is the focus of influential works by Donna Orange.
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John Forrester was a British historian and philosopher of science and medicine. His main interests were in the history of the human sciences, in particular psychoanalysis and psychiatry.
Todd Dufresne is a Canadian social and cultural theorist best known for his work on Sigmund Freud and the history of psychoanalysis. He is Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Oscar Abelardo Masotta was an Argentine essayist, artist, teacher, semiotician, art critic, and psychoanalyst. He was associated with the Torcuato di Tella Institute. He translated Jacques Lacan's works into Spanish and introduced his psychoanalytic philosophy to Latin America.
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Libidinal Economy is a 1974 book by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. The book was composed following the ideological shift of the May 68 protests in France, whereupon Lyotard distanced himself from conventional critical theory and Marxism because he felt that they were still too structuralist and imposed a rigid "systematization of desires". Drastically changing his writing style and turning his attention to semiotics, theories of libido, economic history and erotica, he repurposed Freud's idea of libidinal economy as a more complex and fluid concept that he linked to political economy, and proposed multiple ideas in conjunction with it. Alongside Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Libidinal Economy has been seen as an essential post-May 68 work in a time when theorists in France were radically reinterpreting psychoanalysis, and critics have argued that the book is free of moral or political orientation. Lyotard subsequently abandoned its ideas and views, later describing it as his "evil book".
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.
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