ABSTRACT
Our book aims to address the problem of violence today in terms of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory. The school shooting in Parkland, FL, is the 18th school shooting of 2018. Gun legislation changes and mental health-care reform are not even on the table. From mass shooting to mass incarceration, from fundamentalist terrorism to the war on terror, from the rise of the Alt-right to the implementation of racist legislation, from the power of the new populism to the systematic subtraction of government protection for the vulnerable, from the withdrawal from the Paris accords to the hurricanes and wildfires raging across the United States, it is time that psychoanalysis addresses the problematic of violence, oft considered an “extra-psychoanalytic concept.” Our book brings together a diverse group of international Lacanian clinicians and scholars to reflect upon this problem in its myriad causes and manifestations. This collection is an example of the strength in community that Freud contends is the albeit fragile bulwark against the violence of tyranny.
