Gregory Bistoen

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting

In Le Désir Foudroyé, French psychoanalyst Sonia Chiriaco (2012) clarifies the specificities of the Lacanian psychoanalytical approach to trauma by means of a series of clinical case studies. She argues that the strength of this framework lies in its unique emphasis on the presence of a subject behind the victim of trauma. Going against the grain o...

The title of this chapter is reminiscent of Alenka Zupancic’s (2000) book Ethics of the Real, which situates and typifies the ethics particular to psychoanalysis, as developed by Lacan mainly in Seminar VII (1959–60). In what follows, this paradoxical notion of an ‘ethics of the real’ will be scrutinized, whereby the primary focus on trauma is mome...

The previous chapters introduced Lacan’s concept of the real and related it to the fields of trauma, ethics and politics respectively. In Chapter 3, it became clear that the real cannot simply be equated with the external referent of our representations in the sense of the Kantian das Ding. Although the real by definition resists recuperation in th...

Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001) remains to date one of his more successful and bestselling books. It starts off with a polemical charge against contemporary ethics in its relation to the discourse on human rights (pp. 1–39). Badiou observes that ethics, today, has become a matter of busying ourselves with these r...

In the spirit of the previous chapter, I will now turn towards the place of the Lacanian category of the real in the field of politics. The link with trauma will become evident much sooner in this chapter, specifically when we discuss the formative role of shared fantasies in social groups — and the deteriorating effects that follow the traversal o...

The feminist trauma theorist Judith Herman was amongst the first to insist, in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1997), on the necessity of a political movement alongside the practices of studying and treating psychological trauma. She argues that ‘advances in the field occur only when they ar...

This book deals with a series of problems associated with the contemporary psychiatric approach to trauma, encapsulated in the diagnostic category of PTSD, by means of a philosophical analysis inspired by the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.

The psychiatric construct of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD is often viewed as a universally valid and scientifically backed construct. In recent years, several clinicians and academics have laid bare some of the shortcomings of this influential trauma model. In this dissertation, the author focuses on four core criticisms of PTSD: (1) prob...

There exists a conceptual parallel between psychological accounts of psychic trauma on the one hand, and French philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of the event on the other: both are defined by a relation of incommensurability or excessiveness with regard to the pre-existent context or system. Further development of this parallel, i.e., viewing trau...

The Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit is central to the psychoanalytical understanding of trauma. However, it has not received much attention within the contemporary field of trauma studies. This paper attempts to reconstruct the logic inherent to this concept by examining Freud’s remarks on the case of Emma. Furthermore, it is argued that Nacht...

In 2014, honderd jaar na de start van Wereldoorlog I, worden een hele reeks initiatieven georganiseerd die de slachtoffers en de horreur van dit conflict in herinnering brengen. Waar het nu als vanzelfsprekend wordt beschouwd om het menselijke leed in dergelijke situaties te begrijpen door de lens van psychisch trauma, was dat toentertijd helemaal...