Introduction

As any psychoanalyst or group analyst will know, it is the crucial misrecognitions that are essential to the enterprise. Granted, a disruption of a dominant and habitually idealised fantasy in a community setting provokes a proliferation of fissures across the surface of the social microcosm, accompanied by members of the group turning on one another. Eric Harper and Alan Rowan mount a lucid account of a Lacanian approach to groups, whilst wondering at the same time whether the venture is not lodged in the realms of impotence and impossibility. The hollow fictions of mastery, truth, closure, subjectivity—the ‘twilight of the idols’, indeed—and the transference onto fantasised sites of legitimating authority such as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan can be potentially un-handcuffed from the Father-Signified, which is merely the locus of a narcissistically configured ideal. In their place psychoanalysts might pass from an inappropriate certainty of consciousness, towards the unmasterable gap or hole in their ceaselessly spiralling desire.