The Ideal Ego

If you’ve ever wondered how egos, superegos, ideal egos, and ego ideals hang together, and how others big and small are involved, Part 6 of this lecture series on “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” is the one for you. What begins in the lower-half of the graph of desire quickly heads elsewhere, however, extending from sadism and the law, to pronouns vs. proper names, to Lacanian theories of love, to the discourse and desire of the analyst, to one of the reasons why there’s no Other of the Other, to our bone-deep longing — yours and mine alike — for non-maladaptive experiences of jouissance. If you’re also into cops, pencils, tattoos, plastic bags, bodies without organs, uteromorphic creation myths, Badiou’s math, and late-capitalist pursuits of pleasure . . . well . . . here you go.

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