Interview with Samuel McCormick, Ph.D

Hello folks, I’ve been working on mixing and editing this for a few weeks, and I’m very pleased to release it to you. I hope you like listening to it as much as I liked making it! Show Notes:In this episode of The Speaking Body, Neil speaks with Sam McCormick, professor of communication studies at San Francisco State University and host of Lectures on Lacan. What begins as an interview quickly becomes a wide-ranging conversation about Lacan, teaching, fatherhood, clinical practice, and psychoanalysis as a lived experience. Neil and Sam discuss what it means to read Lacan seriously without turning Lacanian language into empty jargon; the difference between knowing how to do something and knowing how to deal with what cannot be mastered; the place of the real, the end of analysis, the role of the analyst, and the importance of uncertainty in clinical work. They also touch on the question of making psychoanalysis more accessible, the meaning of payment and the body in analytic treatment, and the possibility of bringing Lacanian work into broader conversations beyond the clinic and the classroom. Table of Contents: 00:00 Welcome and Setup 01:02 Why Sam McCormick 01:57 Scheduling and Ditching the Plan 04:25 Neil Leaves Academia 07:42 Live vs Asynchronous Teaching 10:51 Fatherhood Leads to Lacan 16:25 Knowing How to Deal 18:57 Sam Introduces Lectures 21:37 Building a Global Community 28:13 Seeing Suffering Everywhere 31:45 Psychoanalysis as Experience 33:39 Certainty and Repetition Loops 36:19 Discourse Theory and Mastery 42:45 Neurosis Psychosis and Not Knowing 46:33 Analyst as Little a 48:13 Trash and Sainthood 49:52 When Analysis Ends 50:45 Draining Jouissance 52:57 From Knowing to Desire 55:43 Hysteric Trap of Insight 57:50 Threshold of the Real 01:03:20 Why Teach Lacan 01:05:19 Access and Affordability 01:07:17 Psychoanalysis in Streets 01:09:00 Why the Fee Matters 01:14:56 Teleanalysis and the Body 01:19:37 Being Versus Having 01:22:31 Miller on Existence 01:29:22 Littoral Zone and Borders 01:32:20 Closing and Next Steps This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit speakingbody.substack.com/subscribe