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Neil Gorman

Neil Gorman

Neil Gorman is an assistant professor at the Aurora University School of Social Work, and a practicing Lacanian analyst, and a maker of podcasts, newsletters, & other sundry things.

📍 Near Chicago http://neilgorman.com

Subjectivity Between Consciousness & The Unconscious

From The World of Fragile Things: Psychyand the Art of Living , by Mari Ruti. psychoanalysis recognizes the unconscious as an essential component of psychic life, it shifts our conception of what it means to be a human being: rather than equating personhood with structures of consciousness, rationality, or the ego,

A note on The Transferential Unconscious V. The Real Unconscious

In doing some work, I came across this bit of text that I had highlighted in Thomas Svolos's book Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis. (Let me add parenthetically, that in the later work of Lacan, more relevant today in practice, as further developed by Jacques-Alain Miller, in addition to this

In Pynchon: Collusion between tech companies, foreign governments and shadowy agencies crystallise

Summarizing the Pynchon novel Bleeding Edge, in a post titled "Down, Down, and Gone:" Gothic Cyberspace in Bleeding Edge, the blog The Wasted World writes: The novel’s protagonist is Maxine Tarnow, a recently divorced mother of two and fraud investigator, usually of the financial kind, who is

Some Notes on Inherent Vice by Pynchon

From Pynchon at the Beach: Inherent Vice is the key to understanding Thomas Pynchon. Why do critics hate it? By Jim Ruland. Throughout his [Pynchon's] novels—which address subjects ranging from the founding of America to the destruction of Europe—he is interested in those on the wrong

A Note on Pynchon's Themes

From Upper West Side Story: On ''Bleeding Edge'' and Thomas Pynchon's Tangled Web by Rachel Wetzler. Though their settings have varied wildly, from colonial America to 1970s Los Angeles, Mr. Pynchon’s basic themes have remained remarkably consistent: the dark underside of technological progress,

Lacan | Seminar XI - Session 1

Excommunication: The Main Points This post is part of a series of posts having to do with a reading of Lacan's Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, which was given in 1964. It was the first Seminar Lacan gave after his excommunication from the IPA. -◉

Democracy, Elites, & Legitimacy

From The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri: The fate of democracy, I believe, is inextricably bound to the fate of elites in democratic nations. The current elite class, having lost its monopoly over information, has been stripped, probably forever, of the authorizing magic of legitimacy. [...] We need to

Psychoanalysis & Punk Rock

One of the things that runs through several episodes of InForm: Podcast is the question: Does psychoanalysis need to be marginal? The claim that I've made is that psychoanalysis does need to be marginal. What I've offered to back up this claim comes from the book

Pure Psychoanalysis & Pure Punk Rock

From the opening pages of Our, Band Could Be Your Life, by Michael Azerrad. On September 24, 1991, an album called Nevermind by a band called Nirvana came out, went gold in a matter of weeks, bumped Michael Jackson off the number one spot on the Billboard album charts soon

Psychotherapy is About Reclaiming (Investing) in an Identification

In Pure Psychoanalysis, Applied Psychoanalysis, and Psychotherapy, Miller does a deep dive into what makes psychoanalysis different from psychotherapy. Miller highlights many things, but the text below strikes me as very important. (It is also connected to what I posted earlier here.) In terms of psychotherapy, one could say: the