Hello,

I'm Neil, and this is Lacanian Mojo, one of the email newsletters I write on a regular-ish basis. What I try to do in this newsletter is share the little bits of understanding I've been able to conjure out of my attempts to read and make use of Lacan's teachings.

Usually, I sent out an edition of Lacanian Mojo one time per month, and during the other three weeks of the month, I send out another newsletter called The Gorman Limit. TGL is more of a proper "newsletter" where I focus on what I'm doing, thinking, reading, etc.

However, my partner and I recently had our second child, and I find myself trying to be a dad to an almost two-year-old and a newborn, trying to be a good partner to my partner, trying to be a competent full-time professor to my students, and trying to be an attentive analyst to my analysands.

As a result, I've got to change up my format a bit.

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The Shift (Big Picture, or Content Changes):

For some time now, I've been doing things to help people understand Freud and Lacan better. Or at least to help people understand what it is that I'm getting out of my study of psychoanalytic praxis. To do this, I've been mainly thinking (or struggling) in ways that other people can witness.

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• I've done podcasts (InForm, TGL, From78).
• I do this newsletter.
• I've blogged stuff.
• I facilitate a reading seminar where people read and discuss Lacanian texts.

Every now and then, someone has reached out to me and told me they find these sorts of things to be either interesting, helpful, or both. It's very gratifying when I get that sort of feedback, but I've been thinking a lot about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it... And I want to do something different.

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Why do something different:

For a long time, I've been in a phase of trying to cobble together an understanding of Freud's work and Lacan's work.

I've been working at Freud's work for longer than I've been working at Lacan's, but I think that Lacan's work, which is based on Freud's, is more useful. I'm still a long way from understanding Lacan the way that many of the people I admire do (such as Svolos, McGowan, Hook, Miller, Laurent, etc.) However, I do think that after years of trying to get a grip on what Lacan was doing, I can say nowadays I do feel like I've managed to grab onto something.

I also think that if I want to continue to get a better understanding of Freud and Lacan, I'm going to need to start doing more rigorous work and thinking at a more in-depth (and more complex) level than I've been working at.
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More Rigorous work:

Specifically, I'm going to need to spend more time with the source material, with Freud's writing and Lacan's teachings. I'm going to need to read and re-read texts.

I need to do this because Freud and Lacan don't just focus on one thing. They weave together many different things together in the work they do. I can only follow one thread of the weave at a time, so to follow the many lines, I'm going to need to read a lot of stuff more than once.

In addition to this, I'm going to need to start putting tracing the development of various concepts/ideas through the different phases (or moments) of Freud's and Lacan's work. Being able to do this takes lots of time and energy.

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The Lose Plan for Lacanian Mojo:

From here on out, Lacanian Mojo will be

1. More frequent.
2. Shorter (fewer words)
3. And they will also be more focused

I hope you'll all travel with me as I move into what I think is the next phase of my work at understanding what Freud and Lacan were up to and think through how we can apply their thinking to the things we experience today.