Kate Briggs, Ph. D.
E-mail: kbriggs@westga.edu
Phone: 678-839-0602
Office: Melson 105
How do you explain leaps from one state of being to another? How have such transformations been described in the field of psychoanalysis? These are questions my work has sought to address, through extended meditations on the questions of the death drive, sublimation and ethical practice.
Undergraduate studies in the classical social theory of Marx, Weber and Durkheim led me to contemporary French philosophy. What began as my honors’ thesis explained Foucault’s conception of political responsibility as a postmodern ethic, committed to left-political struggles from a post-revolutionary outlook. Following the roles of identification and interpellation in the construction of gender, a study of feminist film theory then led to psychoanalytic principles I felt impelled to explore. What is it that drives unwanted repetition in one’s own behavior and how is this linked not only to unconscious representations, but to what cannot be represented? My first postgraduate thesis examined Freud's theory of the death drive. It was thus concerned with the problem of accounting for the eruption of an idea that appears to contradict common sense, but which provides a pivotal means of examining both the conceptual architecture of psychoanalysis and its elaboration in the hands of Freud's followers.
My doctorate continued this study by considering sublimation, a topic also elusively laid out in Freud’s work. I considered the distinctions between the readings of sublimation offered by Freud, Klein, and Lacan, focusing on the relations between anxiety, sublimation, and belief from the perspective of clinical work and with an emphasis on clinical cases. Lacan’s early psychoanalytic work developed in response to Klein’s, while in later work he moves to a position that is closer to, though distinct from, Klein’s. Lacan used the term jouissance to refer to the intensity of experience that gives our lives meaning in both dimensions of the unbearable and the ecstatic, our symptoms and our creations. His development of the distinction between maternal and feminine jouissance is tied to the question of sublimation and affects the ethics of psychoanalytic interpretation. For Lacan’s work is motivated by an ethic that involves the recognition rather than an erasure of the particularity of feminine experience and feminine jouissance. While this point is overlooked in many contemporary readings of the relation between the work of Lacan and Klein, it is a pivotal issue on which their differences with regard to sublimation may be explained. Beyond teaching and publishing this work, I am now interested in exploring the psychology of religious experience in two distinct domains: how fundamentalist religious discourse functions in different psychic structures; and how faith, as a relation to the unknown, may be an ethical, rather than moral, position.
In teaching I seek to emphasize the conceptual work involved in reading and writing texts so as to think critically about their functions for oneself and in the world. My psychoanalytic training and work as a psychoanalyst has, I believe, benefited my teaching practice, for the ethical position of an analyst is determined by the desire that an analysand articulates his or her own position, rather than attempt to follow or identify with the person or views of the analyst. In teaching I endeavor to transmit this relation between knowledge and lived experience. I consider that postmodern theorists such as Bataille and Foucault illustrate and reinforce both this ethic of living and the radicality of the Freudian formation of the unconscious. For a de-centering of the conception of an essential or naturally given self and gender defined the new humanism of these authors, as it aims to recognize the particularity of each individual as the basis of an ethical relation.
Books that have influenced me
Sigmund Freud, Collected Works
Jacques Lacan, Seminars
George Bataille, Visions of Excess
Margurite Duras, The Lover
Clarice Lispector, Discovering the World
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
Immanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity
Luce Irigaray, Divine Women
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
Edmond Jabés, The Book of Questions
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought
Alain Badiou, Ethics
Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing
Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love
Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus
