Derek William Hook

Duquesne University · Department of Psychology

A definitive collection of Robert Sobukwe’s political writings, speeches, unpublished court testimonies, and interviews, complete with a biographical narrative by the editors that demonstrates the many challenges Sobukwe faced and his continued political resolve in the post-prison years of his life. Darkest Before Dawn captures the story of the ye...

Human science (e.g., phenomenology, psychoanalysis) and natural science (e.g., quantitative psychology, neuroscience) approaches to the mind and brain take radically different epistemological stances. Human science prioritizes subjective experience – the mind as a subject with lived experience. Natural science approaches the mind as an object that...

Neuropsychoanalysis in an interdisciplinary field that combines findings from the neurosciences with those of psychoanalysis. These are two disciplines that have traditionally not spoken to each other, with neuroscience prioritizing objective study of the brain and psychoanalysis privileging a subjective approach to the mind. However, there cannot...

An introductory essay for a special issue of Social Dynamics: Journal of African Studies on "Apartheid and the Unconscious." There are 50 free downloads available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/8WXQNIPUPNG9GTXTBH8I/full?target=10.1080/02533952.2023.2184142

This paper has two objectives. It aims, firstly, to provide an overview of the explanatory dilemmas that J.M. Coetzee highlights in his acclaimed essay “The mind of apartheid” in respect of existing theories of apartheid ideology. It then makes recourse, secondly, to a series of concepts in Lacanian psychoanalysis so as to shed light on these dilem...

Psychoanalysis is increasingly absent from undergraduate education, especially in an age dominated by neuroscientific and cognitive approaches. Students often encounter psychoanalysis through other fields (typically in the humanities) or learn about psychoanalysis as an outdated theory. This educational barrier contributes to the increased difficul...

Lacanian Discourse Analysis (LDA) refers to a broad category of qualitative research methods that study structural aspects of speech from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. LDA has previously been applied to a wide range of cultural materials such as books, newspapers, clinical interviews, political speeches, film scripts, and court documents....

Using a vignette of a perverse act—written by the first author and based on an experience that occurred during his clinical training in a forensic environment—this chapter outlines a series of constitutive features of perversion as suggested by Lacan’s idea that the perverse subject makes themselves the object of the Other’s jouissance. Several key...

Is there a distinctive form of political agency that emerges from the conditions of ‘death-bound subjectivity’? Fanon’s idea of the zone of nonbeing suggests that this is indeed the case. Yet there is an omission in the secondary literature on Fanon in this respect. While a renowned Fanon scholar like Lewis Gordon usefully explores how the zone can...

Three questions motivate this paper's investigation of various intersections between the work of Frantz Fanon and Jacques Lacan. First, what hitherto under-explored references to Lacan's work are to be found in Fanon's earliest (recently translated) psychiatric work? Second, moving beyond the remit of explicit citation: what subtle conceptual paral...

Robin DiAngelo’s influential concept of white fragility, while certainly suggestive and critically useful, does not go far enough in accounting for three central aspects of white anxiety as it occurs in the (post-)apartheid South African context. Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to sketch a rudimentary paradigm of anxiety, and focusing on t...

Playfully opposing the Biblical pronouncement ‘In the beginning was the word’, Lacan suggests rather that in the beginning of psychoanalytic practice there was love—a fact made painfully apparent in the inaugural case of Breuer and Anna O. This commentary underlines three related and immediate themes of the seminar’s opening session in order to for...

Lacanian psychoanalysis is often considered antithetical to Frantz Fanon's decolonizing political project. This paper argues, by contrast, that by exploring hitherto under-explored aspects of the Fanon-Lacan relation we are able to re-articulate many of Fanon's most crucial political insights. The paper adopts three routes of enquiry. Firstly, it i...

This paper introduces and evaluates the Lacanian idea that racism can be conceptualized both as a mode of enjoyment (jouissance) and as a reaction to the perceived “theft of enjoyment.” Despite the distinct analytical advantages of this conceptualization—which grapples with racism not merely as discourse or socio-historical construction but in its...

Jacques Lacan’s pronouncement that psychoanalysis is a praxis extends the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking and practice far beyond the confines of the clinic into the realm of the political. This introduction to the special issue on “Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Interventions into Culture and Politics” highlights a series of crucial Lacanian concep...

Drawing on the conceptual resources provided by Lacanian accounts of melancholia and the death drive, and by means of reference to a clinical case summary and the film Into the Wild, this paper hopes to open up new ways of thinking about melancholic psychosis. The paper foregrounds a series of clinical themes that may be grouped under the rubric of...

While Freud’s account of melancholia stresses the role of a lost object, a Lacanian approach draws attention to the role of an intruding and excessive “real” object and the inability of the psychotic subject to adequately shield themselves from the traumatic jouissance associated with it. While initially these approaches seem to contradict one anot...

Patricia Gherovici’s groundbreaking work in Lacanian psychoanalysis brings unique focus to both clinical psychology and today’s socio-political reality. In this interview, we ask Dr Gherovici to reflect on how Lacanian theory can be applied to the political issues of today. Our discussion takes place months after the Trump election and addresses su...

Freud’s notion of melancholia has been stretched and distorted virtually beyond recognition by varying instances of social and postcolonial theory. It has likewise been challenged even from within psychoanalysis. This chapter aims to defend facets of Freud’s original conceptualization via the consideration of fragments of a case history. Crucial he...

Many first-time readers of Jacques Lacan come to his work via psychology, a discipline that Lacan was notoriously antagonistic toward. Six Moments in Lacan takes up the dual challenge of introducing Lacanian psychoanalysis to an audience interested in psychology, while also stressing the fundamental differences between the two disciplines. Punctuat...

In his interview Derek Hook argues for a more sustained psychosocial engagement with the temporalities of overlapping and entangled histories that comprise psychological systems of knowledge. Through his scholarship, he observes the complex relationship between human desire and power as it continually forms and returns in the complex flow of politi...

This paper provides an overview of Jacques Lacan's views on psychology, paying particular attention to how such critiques support a distinctively Lacanian view of the subject. Lacan attacked various facets of psychology, including: psychology's objectifying (and objectivistic) tendencies; the discipline's historical attempt to model itself on the n...

The notion of “enjoyment as a political factor” is a key motif in Lacanian psychoanalytic social theory. This article explores the notion of enjoyment/jouissance—a type of “negative pleasure” or intense libidinal arousal—as an instrument of political analysis. Crucial here are a series of qualifications that refine an understanding of the concept....

This comment addresses the omission of a series of critical reflections in recent discussions of undergraduate education in psychology. The lack of a stronger focus on human meaning and experience, on social context, on methodological diversity, and on social critique limits the critical horizons of undergraduate psychology education. Many perspect...

The work of Slavoj Žižek contains arguably the most conceptually ambitious re-articulation of the Lacanian notion of the death drive. This paper offers an expository thread joining many of the fragmentary depictions of the death drive in Žižek's work. I begin by tracing the most counter-intuitive aspects of Žižek's re-articulations of the concept....

What is it that underlies the growing public interest in the figure of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe? Sobukwe has been the subject of a form of historical amnesia – indeed, of a consensus of forgetting – in South Africa for at least the last 20 years. One way of appreciating both the force and importance of the retrieval of this historical legacy is by...

This paper tackles the Lacanian topics of scansion and the variable-length session, drawing both on existing literature and on two short case studies. Scansion – the clinical procedure of punctuating, interrupting or cutting a patient’s analytical productions – is discussed in view of a key historical precedent within psychology, namely the notion...

The concept of the master-signifier has been subject to a variety of applications in Lacanian forms of political discourse theory and ideology critique. While there is much to be commended in literature of this sort, it often neglects salient issues pertaining to the role of master signifiers in the clinical domain of (individual) psychical economy...

The concept of the master-signifier has been subject to a variety of applications in Lacanian forms of political discourse theory and ideology critique. While there is much to be commended in literature of this sort, it often neglects salient issues pertaining to the role of master signifiers in the clinical domain of (individual) psychical economy...

The political writings of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, like those of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede and Steve Bantu Biko, are shot through with psychological notions (ideas of consciousness, mental emancipation, psychological enslavement, self-realization, the African personality, etc.). The use of such terms is not psychological in a strict disciplinary sen...

This is the first comprehensive text on social psychological approaches to communication, providing an excellent introduction to theoretical perspectives, special topics, and applied areas and practice in communication. Bringing together scholars of international reputation, this book provides a unique contribution to the field. © D. Hook, B. Frank...

How might we read temporality, that is, the psychical and social experience of time, as an index of the prevailing political and intersubjective impasses of the apartheid and post-apartheid eras? This paper explores three perspectives on this broad problematic. Achille Mbembe’s thoughts on repetition and nostalgia provide, firstly, a means of under...

Waiting, the title of Vincent Crapanzano’s (1985) influential ethnography of white South Africa in the dying days of apartheid employs a single word to characterize this period in the country’s history. That Crapanzano (1985) chooses a signifier that qualifies the experience of time in invoking this period, is telling. It suggests that the myriad s...

This paper, the second of two focussed on the libidinal attachments of white children to black domestic workers in narratives contributed to the Apartheid Archive Project (AAP), considers the applicability of the concept of social melancholia in the case of such “inter-racial” attachments. The paper questions both the psychoanalytic accuracy, and t...

This paper, the first of two focussed on the topic of libidinal attachments between white children and black domestic workers in narratives contributed to the Apartheid Archive Project (AAP), offers a series of methodological insights derived from a Lacanian type of psychoanalytic reading practice. A Lacanian reading practice is one which emphasize...

This paper opens up a series of windows on racialised life in past and present South Africa as a way arguing for the value of antagonism as a mode of critical enquiry. Sampling a cross-section of recent writing on South African race politics, the paper calls attention both to strident critiques of white privilege, and to concerns over allegedly ant...

The subject of psychosis: A Lacanian perspective, by Stijn Vanheule, London & New York, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011, 208 pp., (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-230276642