The Emptiness of Oedipus: Identification and Non-Identification in Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Lacan’s seminar on identification marks a turning point from the early to the later years of his work. In this book, Raul Moncayo builds on many of the concepts that Lacan developed in his seminar, focusing on the relationship between the unary trait and narcissism that occurs via ruling ideas, master signifiers, and the objet a as a part object and a partial form of identification. Moncayo advances Lacanian psychoanalysis not only for its scholarly value, but also for its bearing on the clinical practice of psychoanalysis today.

The question of Oedipus as a myth of Freud is the touchstone from which Lacan proposed to go beyond Freud and beyond the rock of castration. The Emptiness of Oedipus examines how the interpretation of Oedipus as a myth or dream, rather than a complex, provides a new way of understanding the end of analysis as the end of the identification with the analyst. The concept is proposed as Lacan’s postmodern or poststructuralist turn and as a fourth moment of Oedipus that is organized around the lack or emptiness of the Other.

The Emptiness of Oedipus offers a fresh approach to Lacanian psychoanalysis and will appeal to analysts and psychotherapists as well as academics and postgraduates with an interest in Lacan.

Raul Moncayo is training director for Mission Mental Health, San Francisco and a supervising analyst at the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis of the San Francisco Bay Area, California. He also has a private practice in which he provides psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, consultation, and supervision.