International Conference on Jacques Lacan's Ecrits: Call For Papers

Via @thomgiddens:

21-22 September 2018 the Department of Psychoanalysis at Ghent University organizes an international conference on Jacques Lacan’s Écrits. 

Keynote speakers at the conference include Bruce Fink, Patricia Gherovici, Adrian Johnston, Dany Nobus, Ed Pluth, Manya Steinkoler, Paul Verhaeghe, and Eve Watson. The conference chairs are Derek Hook (Duquesne University), Calum Neill (Edinburgh Napier University), and Stijn Vanheule (Ghent University).

A call for papers and panels is open at http://lacanecritsconference.psychoanalysis.be

We invite you to write papers focusing on:

*Specific conceptual topics and texts from the Écrits

*Themes from the Écrits in relation to philosophy, history, arts, literature, gender studies, organization studies, education, psychology…

* The clinical use of ideas from the Écrits

Levy and Cohen on Mental Illness, Dangerousness, and Involuntary Civil Commitment

Ken Levy, Louisiana State University Law Center, and Alex S. Cohen, Louisiana State University, have published Commentary on Szmukler: Mental Illness, Dangerousness, and Involuntary Civil Commitment in Philosophy and Psychiatry: Problems, Intersections, and New Perspectives 147(Daniel D. Moseley and Gary J. Gala: Routledge, 2016). Here is the abstract.

Prof. Cohen and I answer six questions: (1) Why do we lock people up? (2) How can involuntary civil commitment be reconciled with people's constitutional right to liberty? (3) Why don't we treat homicide as a public health threat? (4) What is the difference between legal and medical approaches to mental illness? (5) Why is mental illness required for involuntary commitment? (6) Where are we in our efforts to understand the causes of mental illness?

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Star Wars As a Window Into the Psychopathic Mind

J. Wesley Judd discusses the use of Star Wars to study psychological disorders in an article for Pacific Standard. Lando Calrissian as a gambling addict? Well, that's certainly one possibility. Darth Vader as a sufferer from PTSD, or someone with borderline personality disorder? There I have to disagree. The guy just wants to rule the world--or the universe. Or else he's a Gray Eminence. ;) Nothing difficult to understand there--move along, move along--most of us run into his type all the time. IMHO, he doesn't have a personality disorder. He's ambitious and he knows what people with personality disorders want to hear. Now, the Emperor--there's someone with a personality disorder. More about the use of Star Wars for such purposes in a paper by Ryan C. W. Hall and Susan Hatters Friedman, Psychopathology in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: the use of Star Wars' Dark Side in Teaching, 10 Academic Psychiatry 1 (May 2015) (subscription may be required).

The History of the Law of Suicide

Danuta Mendelson, Deakin University School of Law, and Ian Freckelton, University of Melbourne, have published The Interface of the Civil and Criminal Law of Suicide at Common Law (1194-1845) at 36 International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 343 (2013). Here is the abstract.

Nowadays, suicide is considered essentially a private act, although what constitutes suicide for epidemiological and even clinical purposes in not wholly resolved. Historically, however, at common law, the act of self-killing was a felony with significant religious and legal consequences that impacted upon the deceased person as well as upon his or her whole family. This article identifies the influence of Christian theology, legal theory, and social and medical developments upon attitudes to the felony of self-murder and its definition. It focuses upon what it identifies as the start of a liberalisation in more psychologically informed attitudes manifested in landmark court judgments involving exclusion clauses in insurance contracts in mid-nineteenth century England. The article illustrates that the law in respect of socially controversial matters neither necessarily develops in a linear progression, nor accurately reflects public sentiments. More specifically, it describes an ongoing definitional conundrum with suicide – whether it should be designated as committed by persons of significantly impaired mental state. It observes that in spite of reform to the criminal law of suicide, the civil law relating to suicide has continued to be characterized by ambivalence, ambiguity and significant vestiges of counter-therapeutic moralizing.

Download the text from SSRN at the link.