The Critique of Jouissance

While jouissance is often invoked as a foundational Lacanian idea, it has been criticized on both clinical and theoretical grounds as overly simplistic. Darian Leader has charged the Lacanian use of jouissance as theoretically imprecise, obscuring the relation to the Other, and smuggling in problematic substantial and energetic presuppositions. To the degree that my Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis relies on jouissance, these criticisms pose a potential problem to my meta-neuropsychology. Here, I develop Leader’s criticisms of jouissance in relation to my Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis.