Michael O'Loughlin

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at Adelphi University

Uma descrição dos desafios enfrentados pelos professores nos tempos contemporâneos, quando a guerra, o deslocamento e outras forças reacionárias tornam a infância precária e resultam em uma subjetividade separada da história e caracterizada pela melancolia, é usada como base para investigar as profundas implicações desses contextos no trabalho peda...

This paper introduces the special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society on academic freedom. It explains the background to the special issue and identifies the main themes in the collection of papers. The focus is on how psychoanalysis can contribute to our understanding of contemporary pressures on, and debates about, academic freedom.

Seeking to frame the debate around academic freedom in terms of freedom of thought, this article begins with an exploration of the hazards of fascist ideology and the psychodynamics of persuadability. Attention is paid to the perverse lure of certainty and the apparent willingness of many people to accede to an instrumentalized unconscious. Through...

A description of partnership between a school of psychology and a human rights organization that offers asylum services is used as a basis for probing the ethical complexity of activism. “Doing good” is complicated by the insertion of asylum evaluation services into the reductionist and metrics‐based evaluative mechanisms utilized in conventional p...

We explicate a traumatized child's narcissistic defense against trauma. Following a review of psychoanalytic understandings of trauma we explore the invocation of narcissistic defenses against trauma. The phenomenon of Nachträglichkeit or après-coup is explored, and the paper concludes with clinical illustration drawn from the experience of a young...

There is an increasing tendency in the field to develop partnerships between schools and mental health (MH) clinics to address the MH needs of children in schools. Such initiatives are particularly important in providing services to children who attend underfunded and understaffed schools in underserved communities. These initiatives face several c...

In this work, using spontaneous expression of white skin color preference by Black Brazilian children as stimulus, we seek to examine the construction and performance of racial subjectivity in Black children. Drawing on a range of psychoanalytic theories, we strive to develop a psychoanalytic understanding of racial formation that is complex and no...

In this essay I seek to interrogate the specialized language of psychoanalysis and the implicit role unexamined racialization—and hence White hegemony—play in the American psychoanalytic imagination. I begin with a discussion of Eng & Han writing on racial melancholia, a work that offers a thoughtful exposition of the power of Whiteness to induce r...

The contributors to this issue have chosen to interrogate Irish identity by tackling historical, linguistic, literary, and social aspects of the Irish experience. All are careful not to essentialize the experience of being Irish, nor to make sweeping claims about capitalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, or Roman Catholicism. Their writings, however,...

Arguing for the importance of the clinical encounter as a site of bioethical inquiry, I focus particularly on persons experiencing severe psychic distress. Acknowledging the historical wrongs that have been done to persons with severe psychic distress, I suggest that the contemporary colonization of psychiatric care by the medical model and by neol...

Lives Interrupted: Psychiatric Narratives of Struggle and Resilience provides insight into the everyday experiences of individuals struggling with severe psychic distress during a six-month immersion program at the Fountain House headquarters, a New York-based organization that works to address the effects of serious mental illness. These narrative...

Reviews the book, Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity by Sheldon George (2016). With this book, George takes up the task of using Lacanian theory to explicate the workings of race in contemporary America. Although bracketed within a fairly densely argued exposition of Lacanian theory, George’s book is important and...

I have spent a long time seeking to understand what has caused me to be so hesitant about claiming my place in the world. Through my early immersion in books I developed some sense of imaginative possibilities, though it would be an overstatement to say that in my early years I experienced nurturance of any latent kernel of creativity.

In this essay I pose the question of whether it might be possible to articulate a collaborative, critical narrative mode of research in which teachers and students come together using a critical and analytic epistemology to engage in adventurous pedagogy. This approach has echoes of Freire’s “teachers-as-students and students- -as-teachers,” but el...

Reviews the book, What Is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years after Freud's 'Secret Committee' by Barnaby B. Barratt (see record 2012-28319-000). This book is a call for a return to a “vivacious engagement” with the kind of inquiry that ought to constitute the core of psychoanalysis. Sadly, while Barratt calls for a return to the foundational ideas of Freudi...

In seeking to characterize “the prose of suffering,” complex considerations surface in regard to our own understanding of suffering, our motives for engaging in such inquiry and our capacity to understand the social production of suffering – a production abetted in part by the regimes society puts in place ostensibly to mitigate suffering. How is i...

Psychological resilience is built on the capacity accurately to reflect on one's thoughts and feelings in relation to the thoughts and feelings of others. The strong link between bullying and psychosis highlights ways in which social isolation inhibits the development of these capacities. Prevailing ideas about psychosis tend further to marginalize...

Two case vignettes are presented to illustrate an approach to working with children that, following Mannoni (1999), the authors term “oblique.” Key attributes of this approach, loosely patterned on Lacanian technique, are then explored. Among these are the need to create an anxiety-free space in which the demand of the child can emerge, use of the...

Describes the collaboration between Bowling Green city schools and Bowling Green State University. Higher education faculty and K-12 teachers work in each other's classrooms to improve instruction, facilitate curriculum development, and enhance faculty development. The article describes partnership projects, elaborates one case study, and discusses...

Respondendo aos artigos de Michelle Massé and Marshall Alcorn, começo por argumentar pela necessidade de se reconhecer a ignorância como performativa, ao invés de meramente ilustrativa da resistência do aluno em algum sentido patológico. Eu, então, exploro a noção Lacaniana de que os professores desenvolvem suposições imaginárias sobre a falta em s...

Objective: Psychoanalysis is used to explore the effects of the annihilation of culture and how this leads to a loss of identification with a collective subjectivity and triggers catastrophic symptoms including loss of collective hope, the rise of addictive and self-destructive behaviours, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma among Ind...

The author presents the outlines of a theory of subjectivity that is anchored in processes of identification. Subject formation is a continual process of becoming that is constituted by three interrelated processes: (1) intrapsychic factors within each child; (2) effects of participation in groups on the kinds of identifications and disidentificati...

Advocates further revision of the developmentally appropriate practice guidelines of the National Association for the Education of Young Children to more fully recognize the implications of cultural and linguistic diversity and racial equality for the education of young children. Focuses on culture and universality, parent-professional partnerships...

It is misleading to speak of constructivism as a homogeneous ideology. Some forms of constructivism, such as those underlying critical, poststructuralist, and feminist theory, are emancipatory in intent. The Piagetian forms of constructivism that are gaining popularity as an alternative to traditional didactic education cannot be the basis for radi...

In the first part of the article I present an epistemological critique of forms of pedagogy founded on Piagetian constructivism. Despite the appeal of the notion that learners construct their understanding, I argue that constructivism is problematic because it ignores the subjectivity of the learner and the socially and historically situated nature...

This paper deals with questions having to do with the nature and effects of teachers' beliefs about schooling, and to the psychological relationship between theory and practice. It is posited that teachers' beliefs are likely to have a profound influence on their actions. A critical analysis of current school performance and teacher education metho...

In the initial set of studies, reported in Part II (Chapters 3-6), we examine subjects' coordination of theory and evidence as manifested in their ability to evaluate newly presented evidence that bears on a theory that they have espoused. In the work reported in Part III, we first replicate the initial research, this time using real (rather than...

Responding to papers by Michelle Massé and Marshall Alcorn, I begin with an argument for the need to recognize ignorance as performative rather than merely as illustrative of student resistance in some pathological sense. I then explore the Lacanian notion that teachers develop imaginary suppositions about the lack in their students, and that these...

Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 1988. Bibliography: leaves 264-275.