From Leper-Thing to Another Side of Care: A Reading of Lacan’s Logical Collectivity

Join us for this fascinating talk with Robin McCoy Brooks

This essay is abstracted from chapter two of Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Action, 2022 Routledge. I conceptualize the psyche-social dynamic of trans-subjectivity that itself is a precursor to the possibility of a collective individuation or what Jacques Lacan obliquely referred to as “collective logic.” The concept is related to what Heidegger described as “having become” (or later Augenblick), Gilbert Simondon as “trans-individuation,” and Derek Hook as “trans-subjectivity” I elaborate a notion of trans-subjectivity through a close reading of Lacan’s 1945 essay entitled “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” wherein Lacan delineates three iterative moments of logical time towards a culminating expression of collective truth.

While Lacan used the allegory of the prisoner’s dilemma to illustrate his theses, I use a clinical vignette taken from a psychotherapy retreat attended by persons living with AIDS in the early days of the pandemic. Elaborated are the traumatic/imaginal/symbolic processes underlying the movement between inter-subjective and trans-subjective logic and the culminating expression of a shared solution to an impossible demand. The times were dark and illuminating. Solidarity existed only in those trans-subjective moments that lifted and informed individuals and sometimes groups of individuals toward a kind of concrete action that often furthered its collective purpose.

The Speaker

Robin McCoy Brooks, MA, LMHC, TEP is a Jungian Analyst, international educator and consultant in private practice in Seattle/Bellingham, WA. USA. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Jungian Studies and serves on the Board of Directors of the International Association for Jungian Studies. Robin is also a founding member of the New School for Analytical Psychology, an active analyst member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and the International Association for Analytical Psychology. Further, she is a nationally certified Trainer, Educator and Practitioner of Group Psychotherapy, Sociometry and Psychodrama. She is the author of Psychoanalysis Catastrophe & Social Action (Routledge, 2022) Presently, she is co-authoring The Healing Power of Community in Mutual Aid Cultures: Exploring Radicalized Mental Health through the AIDS Crisis with Lusijah Marx and Graham Harriman (Routledge, 2023).