I'm currently reading a lot of Robert Langs, who was a big deal in the 70s but now seems largely forgotten.
Besides that, Winnicott, Bion (not that I understand him), some Thomas Ogden, a whole lot of Harold Searles, a bit of Bollas, Linda Hopkins's incredible biography of Masud Khan, other stuff I'm forgetting right now.
I never heard of Robert Langs nor Masud Khan before, thanks!
Let me appropriate something I heard Jean Allouch (fantastic guy, died some 2 years ago) say:
"What interests me is madness and the way of welcoming it, which is called psychoanalysis."
I used to say I practice lacanian psychoanalysis, but more and more (thanks to exchange with colleagues, seminars and so on) I have been trying to expand my knowledge.
Just like you discovered, there are so many great ideas and authors which were simply forgotten. It's a tough path to walk!
Now that's fascinating. I wonder how many practicing psychoanalysts we have on HN - you may be a singleton!
I could write a dozen replies but here's one:
Not knowing of Khan makes sense because he was not only expelled out of British psychoanalysis but mostly erased from its history. From the mid-50s till the mid-70s, though, he was the rock star and enfant terrible of that scene, itself filled with charismatic characters. The story is cinematic, and in the end tragic as he engineered his own destruction.
The biographer, Linda Hopkins, spent years putting the pieces together. She had the fortune of good timing: many of the key players were still alive, but in their twilight years and ready to spill the beans. She earned their trust—the good way, by being trustworthy—and ended up with troves of information, not just about Khan but others in that world, such as Winnicott, for whom Khan had been a substitute son and close editor if not co-author.
Before reading it, I recommend first the essay that Wynne Godley published about Khan in the London Review of Books, a brilliant piece which managed to shock the community as late as 2001, decades after the events he wrote about. The letters following the article are worth reading as well. (Godley's piece is at https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n04/wynne-godley/saving-.... This follow-up profile is also worth reading and includes a hilarious anecdote about Khan and Lacan: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robert-s-boynton-retur....)
Hopkins's biography is marvelous in that she includes Khan's dark side but shows him as larger than it. The NYT review began with "If I were a snob, a liar, a drunk, a philanderer, an anti-Semite, a violent bully, a poseur and a menace to the vulnerable, I would want Linda Hopkins to write my biography." How's that for a review? The publisher put it on the second edition :)
Langs is an entirely different character but ended up almost as isolated as Khan did. His core insights about unconscious perception and unconscious communication, if true, are enough to change how analysis and therapy should be done. But he communicated them so oppositionally that the field eventually spat him out. That's my sense of it at least. Langs lacked the charisma to inspire much of a following, though he was a gifted if fire-breathing supervisor. His vision of analysis and therapy is so austere that I imagine no one, including Langs, could actually practice it—yet his core claims are so compelling that I don't see how they can be ignored either. He seems to have been dropped because his challenge was too uncomfortable.
Lacan is one I have never been able to understand or relate to. Do you want to suggest an entrypoint?
I am sold! I will definitely get Hopkins’ book. It sounds amazing.
I read about his life on Wikipedia: What a life story and unfortunate end.
Thank a ton for the elaborated reply and the recommendation.
About Langs: It is really unbelievable how many thinkers/ideas have been buried because they were uncomfortable or because someone with power or authority basically just erased/canceled them. This haunts me a bit nowadays and I try to stay alert.
For example, I still agree with many of the ideas, practices or theories of my first years among lacanians and psychoanalysis in general. But there’s also many things which I see totally different now. Not only because I kept learning, reading and so on: many ideas were just being smashed or repeated. Some authors were just banned with some obscure mention or some story and that was it.
Since a couple of years I have been reading mainly Spanish texts or translated into Spanish from French. Perhaps Darian Leader is the only exception. Great British psychoanalyst! I really like his books. He does have an introduction to Lacan (comic hah).
I know Bruce Fink is quite popular and I have heard and read bits and pieces which have been good. But I haven’t read one of his books and if I am not mistaken he has an introductory book.
Around 2021 I joined an online seminar with an Argentinian guy: Bruno Bonoris. His ideas really, really helped me. He published a book on 2022 and I found it very clarifying.
It is not an introduction to lacanianism but it goes through many of Lacan’s ideas. Some are praised, some are criticized, some are clarified (mainly regarding to how other lacanian schools use this or that concept).
It also does this with many of Freud’s ideas and some post-Freudians. Not author by author but regarding some concepts.
I was struggling with some ideas and his book, together with his Seminar, really changed everything for me. It helped me put some things together, connect some ideas and it put words on things I had the feeling were a bit off or weird (but had learned (and repeated?) from my first analyst for example or first seminars).
The book is called “Qué hace un psicoanalista? Sobre los problemas técnicos”.
Do you happen to read Spanish? Even if you don’t, I translated with AI from chapters into German in order to share them with my girlfriend and I was surprised with the results (haha sorry, it was my first time translating something so long and about psychoanalysis). Maybe you could try this or does the idea give you the chills?
It might be a quite weird recommendation but it might also be a good one depending on where your interests lie.
I am not sure if other fields are the same, but I have found this one hard to navigate!
Reminds me of the words of a lacanian analyst at the beginning of a IPA conference he was invited to:
“There are only two things all psychoanalytic schools agree on: 1. That Freud is the founder of psychoanalysis. 2. That if the analysand doesn’t show up to his session, the person will have to pay for it anyway.”
And yes, as you know, psychoanalysis is not really popular on here!
But tell me, how come you are so involved? Is this a new interest, an old interest now being taken upon again or…?
