Essays

Clinical

Essays for everyone on psychoanalytic work and the sufferings of everyday life.

What Is Psychoanalysis? The Birth and Method of the Talking Cure
From Anna O.’s “talking cure” to the unconscious, from the couch to transference: a thorough introduction to psychoanalytic work.
19 min read
What Do Dreams Mean? Why Dream Dictionaries Fail, and What Freud Found Instead
Dream dictionaries give every dream a ready-made meaning; psychoanalysis looks for it in the dreamer’s own words.
9 min read
Why Can’t I Get Along with My Mother? On the Bond Between Mothers and Daughters
The bond between mother and daughter is one of the closest and most wounding of all: from Freud to Lacan, from Demeter to today.
7 min read
Why Do People Cheat? The Gap Between Love and Desire
Infidelity is often born not of an absence of love but of love and desire failing to meet in the same place.
7 min read
Why Did They Just Disappear? On Being Ghosted
What makes ghosting so painful is not the separation itself but that the separation is never put into words.
7 min read
Why Do I Procrastinate? The Psychoanalysis of Not Doing What You Have to Do
Procrastination is not laziness but the language of a desire and a fear: from Hamlet to Oblomov, from Freud to Lacan.
7 min read
Narcissism: Narcissus, Echo and the “Narcissist” Label
From Ovid to Freud, from Lacan to Kohut and Kernberg: a psychoanalytic essay on narcissism and the everyday “narcissist” label.
18 min read
Jealousy: The Shadow of Love from Augustine to Proust
From Augustine to Freud’s three layers, from Klein to Proust and Othello: a psychoanalytic essay on jealousy.
19 min read
Why Do I Keep Living the Same Relationship? An Essay on Repetition
Repetition compulsion, fate neurosis, the cotton-reel game and Lacan’s tuché and automaton: an essay on repeating relationships.
18 min read
Anxiety: The Affect That Does Not Deceive
From Kierkegaard to Freud, from Little Hans to Lacan’s tenth seminar: why anxiety is a signal to be read rather than silenced.
19 min read
How Long Does Psychoanalysis Last? On Analysis Terminable and Interminable
From Freud’s chess analogy to Lacan’s logical time and current research: an essay on the length of psychoanalytic treatment.
18 min read
Online Therapy and Psychoanalysis: A History and a Frame for Speaking at a Distance
From the Fliess letters to Freud’s telephone analogy, from Bleger’s frame to current research: an essay on online psychoanalytic sessions.
19 min read
Exile and the Mother Tongue: An Essay on the Psychoanalysis of Migration
From Yunus Emre’s stranger to Freud’s exile, from Derrida to Özdamar: a psychoanalytic essay on exile, migration and the mother tongue.
19 min read

Culture

Psychoanalytic readings of literature, television and film.

Happiness After the Fact: Mourning, Collection and Desire in The Museum of Innocence
From the grammar of a suffix to the architecture of a museum: a psychoanalytic essay on afterwardsness, mourning, collection and desire in The Museum of Innocence.
21 min read
Aşk-ı Memnu: A Psychoanalytic Reading of the Glow of the Forbidden
Prohibition creating desire, a repetition passed down between women from generation to generation, and the mirror scene: a psychoanalytic reading of Aşk-ı Memnu.
19 min read

Concepts

Theoretical readings of the basic concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Transference: Agalma, Love and the Subject Supposed to Know
From Anna O. to Dora, from Freud’s transference-love to Lacan’s reading of the Symposium: agalma and the subject supposed to know.
19 min read
The Name-of-the-Father: Law, Name and Psychosis from Schreber to Joyce
From the myth of the primal father to the paternal metaphor, from the Schreber case to ordinary psychosis: the Name-of-the-Father in Lacan.
19 min read
The Big Other: Language, Law and the Question “Che vuoi?” in Lacan
From Kojève to Poe, from Cazotte’s “Che vuoi?” to the lack in the Other: the Big Other in Lacan.
20 min read
The Phallus: The Meaning of a Veiled Signifier in Lacan
From Freud’s phallic phase to Lacan’s Munich lecture, from the Villa of the Mysteries to the masquerade: the phallus, or the veiled signifier.
19 min read
Real, Symbolic, Imaginary: Lacan’s Three Orders
From the mirror stage to Saussure, from Lévi-Strauss to the Borromean knot: an essay on Lacan’s three orders.
19 min read
The Symptom: From the Salpêtrière to the Sinthome, the Adventures of a Concept
From the Salpêtrière’s Tuesday lectures to Freud’s compromise formation, from Lacan’s metaphor to Joyce’s sinthome: the adventures of the symptom.
19 min read

Theory

Advanced theoretical essays.

The Object Gaze: Lacan, Foucault and Las Meninas
May 1966, Foucault at the seminar: in Las Meninas Lacan sees not the representation of representation but the object gaze.
14 min read
Either I Do Not Think or I Am Not: Lacan’s Seminar on the Logic of Fantasy
“Either I do not think or I am not”: Lacan’s new cogito, the absence of the sexual act, and fantasy as axiom.
12 min read
The Established Text: Lacan’s Seminars, the Archive and an Ethics of Reading
From stenography to the established text: how Lacan’s seminars became books, and what that passage asks of the reader.
13 min read
Lacan’s Seminars: Where Each Stands in 2026
The French, English and Turkish publication status of the twenty-seven seminars, as of 2026, in a single table.
4 min read
Lacan in Turkish: Translation, Reception and the Unconscious of a Language
Lacan’s adventure in Turkish since the first translation, and the questions the structure of Turkish itself asks of psychoanalysis.
13 min read
Lacan after Lacan: A Map of Contemporary Lacan Studies
From ordinary psychosis to speaking machines: the open questions of Lacan studies forty-five years after Lacan’s death.
15 min read
The Psychoanalytic Act: Lacan, the Pass and May 1968
What is an analyst? Lacan’s seminar on the psychoanalytic act, the pass, and May 1968 falling in the middle of it.
9 min read
Formulas of Sexuation: The Not-All and the Two Jouissances
From Freud’s unanswered question to Bernini’s Teresa: Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, the not-all and the two jouissances.
19 min read
The Borromean Knot and the Sinthome: Joyce’s Signature
From a knot learned of at a dinner to Joyce’s writing: the Borromean knot and the sinthome in Lacan’s last period.
20 min read
The Four Discourses: Lacan’s Seminar on the Other Side of Psychoanalysis
From a sentence spoken at Vincennes to the capitalist discourse: the four discourses in Lacan’s seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.
20 min read
Objet Petit a: The Object of Desire and the Cause of Desire
From Freud’s lost object to Holbein’s skull, from the gaze of the sardine can to surplus jouissance: objet petit a, or the cause of desire.
20 min read
What Is Jouissance? A Satisfaction Beyond Pleasure
From beyond the pleasure principle to Sade, from the superego’s command “Enjoy!” to Bernini’s Saint Teresa: an essay on jouissance.
19 min read

The Mirror Stage: Reading the Stranger in the Mirror Again
From a talk cut short at Marienbad to the age of the front camera: Lacan’s mirror stage read again.
20 min read