•  6
    Embracing the void: rethinking the origin of the sacred
    Northwestern University Press. 2022.
    Renowned psychoanalytic philosopher Richard Boothby puts forward a novel theory of religion inspired by Jacques Lacan's theory of das Ding. The book offers the theoretical tools for interpreting religious belief and analyzes several faith traditions.
  • This thesis is an inquiry into the conceptual architecture of psychoanalysis, guided by the work of Jacques Lacan. The primary objective is to make new sense of Freud's hypothesis of a primordial impulse of self-destructiveness: the so-called "death instinct." The general conclusion is to identify the dualism of the life and death instincts with the opposition between what Lacan calls "imaginary" and "symbolic" functions. The death drive is thereby moved out of a biological register and reinterp…Read more
  •  47
    Heideggerian Psychiatry? The Freudian Unconscious in Medard Boss and Jacques Lacan
    Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 24 (2): 144-160. 1993.
    This paper examines Medard Boss's rejection of the Freudian unconscious. Boss's position is criticized for its failure to do justice to the clinical relevance of the unconscious and to provide adequate answers to key theoretical questions. An alternative approach to the concept of the unconscious is sought in the work of the French analyst, Jacques Lacan
  •  7
    The immensely influential work of Jacques Lacan challenges readers both for the difficulty of its style and for the wide range of intellectual references that frame its innovations. Lacan’s work is challenging too, for the way it recentres psychoanalysis on one of the most controversial points of Freud’s theory – the concept of a self-destructive drive or ‘death instinct’. Originally published in 1991, _Death and Desire_ presents in Lacanian terms a new integration of psychoanalytic theory in wh…Read more
  •  57
    The lost cause of mourning
    Continental Philosophy Review 46 (2): 209-221. 2013.
    This paper examines the evolution of Jacques Lacan’s concept of mourning from his treatment of Hamlet in Seminar 6, “Desire and Its Interpretation,” to its transformation in the tenth Seminar on “Anxiety.” It is a transformation that occurs in tandem with Lacan’s reconception of anxiety as lack of the lack and his reshaped conception of the objet a as object/cause of desire. The key point is the way that Lacan’s renovated conception upends the common sense notion of mourning, that which assumes …Read more
  •  62
    Using Jacques Lacan's work as a key, this groundbreaking work reassesses the philosophical significance of Freud's most ambitious general theory of mental functioning: metapsychology. Richard Boothby forcefully argues that this theory has been misunderstood, and that therefore Freud's impact on philosophy has been unjustly muted. Freud as Philosopher illuminates in a fresh and newly accessible way the central points of Freud's metapsychology-including the guiding metaphor of psychical energy and…Read more