Book Review: Jacques Lacan (2014) Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X
Jacques Lacan (2014). Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by A.R. Price (Cambridge, UK and Malden, USA: Polity Press), pp. 352, h/b, ISBN 978-0-7456-6041-7
By
Shiva Kumar Srinivasan,Ph.D.
IIPM Chennai
Introduction
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan’s seminar on anxiety was held at St. Anne’s Hospital, Paris, in the year 1962-63, and is the tenth in a series of twenty-seven seminars (1953-1980). This seminar presupposes that the reader is not only well-acquainted with the Freudian theory of anxiety, but is also familiar with these Parisian seminars as a genre in French psychoanalysis. Given that most psychoanalysts write mainly in the form of essays, papers, or monographs, first-time readers of Lacan will find both the form and content of this seminar difficult to follow. I have therefore built-in the theoretical background necessary to understand the differences between the Freudian and Lacanian theories of anxiety. It may however be a good idea for the reader to get a synoptic view of the list of the seminars, and the topics covered in these Lacanian seminars, along with a textual ‘history of the seminar,’ itself before attempting to read this book (MacCannell, 1986; Marini 1992a; Roudinesco, 1997). Lacan’s point of entry into the theory of anxiety is Sigmund Freud’s main foray on this topic in a text entitled ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’ (Freud, 1926). Freud’s theory of anxiety is however not reducible to this particular text; it was an ongoing clinical and theoretical preoccupation that started from as early as the 1890’s when Freud set out to study the different forms of hysteria and the ‘sexual aetiology of the neuroses’ (Freud, 1906); anxiety hysteria was one of the neuroses that Freud was particularly concerned with (Sadoff, 1998; Schwartz, 1999). Freud’s theory of anxiety started with the elementary notion that it is a form of ‘unconsummated excitation’; it is usually related to ‘gross disturbances in the vita sexualis of nervous patients’ (Freud, 1925a). Subsequently, Freud, who was briefly influenced by Otto Rank, linked anxiety to the trauma of birth though he felt that Rank had over-emphasized this problem.
Forms of Anxiety
Freud also differentiates between the ‘primary’ form of anxiety (which is what the subject must mainly guard against) and the function of anxiety as a ‘signal’ of a traumatic situation. ‘These situations,’ Freud pointed out, ‘arouse automatic anxiety, the essence of which is an experience of helplessness on the part of the ego in the face of an accumulation of excitation, whether external or internal’ (Kearney, 1970). There is also a whole typology of anxiety in Freudian psychoanalysis comprising castration anxiety, separation anxiety, depressive anxiety, paranoid anxiety, neurotic anxiety, and psychotic anxiety. The main problem in most forms of neurotic anxiety is that it arises from within the subject making it difficult for the patient to escape the anxiety without seeking recourse to the defense mechanism of projection (Rycroft, 1995; Bell, 2003). Anxiety in the Freudian model is also related to forms of psychoneuroses like anxiety neurosis and anxiety hysteria; anxiety, to put it simply, can take the form of either a full-fledged neurosis or function as an important symptom in a psychoneurosis (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988a). It should be possible to reconstruct a Freudian theory of anxiety even if Freud had not written papers explicitly on this topic – which he did – by collecting all the references to anxiety in Freud’s case histories, and identifying the meta-psychological assumptions on which Freud is trying to make sense of the part played by anxiety in the different forms of the psychoneuroses that he was confronted with in his clinical practice (Freud, 1915; Freud, 1933). It will then become possible to differentiate between the function of anxiety in the anxiety neuroses as compared to psychoneuroses such as hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and the phobias.
A Semantic Field for Anxiety
Anxiety can also be understood in the form of a semantic field in which we can differentiate between anxiety and related terms like inhibitions, symptoms, fear, and desire in the attempt to compare the Freudian theory of anxiety with the Lacanian theory of anxiety (Evans, 1997a). These then are the theoretical preliminaries that are necessary to make sense of what the Freudian theory of anxiety actually is irrespective of what Freud himself thought his theory of anxiety to be. It is however not easy to do such an exercise in the case of Lacan since he did not write as many cases as Freud. So it is much more difficult to differentiate between what Lacan thought anxiety was and what he in practice believed anxiety to be. The best that we can do is to identify the moments in his twenty-seven seminars where he makes references to anxiety and then figure out what the specific and general meanings of the term ‘anxiety’ might be for Lacan. This would however result in a theoretical reconstruction rather than an empirical reconstruction of the notion of anxiety as is the case with Freud. Such an exercise will also make it possible to ask what function is played by the literary trope of anxiety in the Lacanian text – as opposed to the Freudian text – since Lacan was obsessed with Freudian poetics, which is another way of saying that the textual embodiment of Freud is essential to its meaning. As Lacan was fond of pointing out to those training to be analysts, ‘that in order to handle any Freudian concept, reading Freud cannot be considered superfluous, even if it be only for those concepts which are homonyms of current notions’ (Lacan, 1968).
Lacan’s Belatedness
I use the term ‘literary’ quite deliberately here since the entire model of influence in the poetics of the literary critic Harold Bloom, for instance, is not based on influence per se, but on the anxiety of influence (Bloom, 1973a). Or, to put it in other words, great writers are not just influenced by their precursors, but must wrestle with the anxiety induced by these forms of influence in a process that Bloom describes as an ‘agon.’ Bloom even considers the possibility that a great mind can not only influence others, but can even influence itself. It is as important to understand how a mind is influenced by itself since a writer who looks back at his earlier writings will find that his earlier texts are as difficult to come to terms with as those of an influential precursor (Bloom 1975; Bloom 2011). It would not be a stretch then to argue that this is precisely the situation in which Jacques Lacan found himself vis-à-vis his great precursor in the history of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. What is it that Lacan can teach us about anxiety that is not in a sense always already pre-empted in the Freudian texts? It is interesting to note that Lacan resists the Bloomian contention of an anxiety of influence by stating that he intends to do nothing more than return the reader to the meaning of the Freudian text, or that while others must decide whether or not they wish to be Lacanians; he, for his part, has always been a Freudian – so there is no need, as it were, for a literary agon (Marini, 1992b). For instance, in his ethics seminar of 1959-60, Lacan points out that he has a lot to say about Greek tragedy and that La Bruyère is wrong to point out ‘that we have arrived too late in the world that is too old in which everything has already been said. It is not something I’ve noticed. As far as the action of tragedy is concerned, there’s still a lot to be said. It’s far from being resolved’ (Lacan, 1992).
The Bloomian Clinamen
That no doubt is Lacan’s position on anxiety as well – the Freudian theory of anxiety is far from being resolved. Lacan even points out in the seminar under review that Freud doesn’t discuss anxiety at all in his celebrated paper, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.’ As Lacan writes, ‘In the disquisition of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, everything is spoken about, thank goodness, except anxiety’ (p. 9). We have here then interesting instances of Lacan resisting his own sense of belatedness as a strong writer who is not only trying to clear space for his own work, but is claiming that his precursor did not go far enough by invoking the Bloomian trope of clinamen; Lacan’s contention then, like a Bloomian ephebe (i.e. a latter-day poet), is that his theory of anxiety will take the form of a ‘corrective movement…implying that the precursor poem went accurately upto a point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves’ (Bloom, 1973b). It is also important to remember that Lacan had a formal acquaintance with the notion of the ‘clinamen,’ as his comment on Democritus demonstrates, and therefore it make sense to pose the question of whether Lacan experienced a sense of belatedness in his own attempt to articulate a theory of anxiety, and how he works-through his own anxiety of influence in this seminar. (Lacan, 1979). This problem is however not reducible to Lacan since it appears that Freud too had to wrestle with strong precursors like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche (Freud, 1914a; Freud, 1925b; Freud, 1925c; Chapelle, 1993; Henry, 1998). It is therefore a good idea to consider the Freudian theory of anxiety as a prelude to setting out what Lacan means by anxiety in this seminar.
The Freudian Theory of Anxiety
This section will summarize what Freud meant by the term ‘anxiety’ in ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,’ before considering Lacan’s contribution to this theme. Freud revisited this text in 1933 in his ‘new introductory lectures’ because he had revised his ideas on the causative factors in anxiety (Freud, 1933). This however was a topic that Freud had been working on from as early as 1895 when he came up with a formal account of ‘the clinical symptomatology of anxiety neurosis,’ in the attempt to identify the ‘incidence and aetiology of anxiety neurosis’ (Freud, 1895). What was interesting in the text of 1926 was the fact that Freud not only had separate sections on these topics, but also related these categories to each other – so it is not the case, as Lacan argues above, that Freud does not address the problem of anxiety at all in the text of 1926. It is more a case of Lacan trying to clear space for his own theory of anxiety rather than a lack of interest in anxiety on the part of Freud or a willingness to theorize it to the extent possible. Freud’s main contention is that while the trauma of birth could be a source of anxiety, it does not make sense to reduce all forms of anxiety to only this factor. So, for instance, in his analysis of inhibitions, Freud points out that the areas most likely to be affected by inhibitions include the sexual functions, eating, locomotion, and professional work.
Inhibitions and Anxiety
There can also be inhibitions in a patient without it being accompanied by anxiety or a neurosis. These inhibitions reduce the ambit of a patient’s life; they are however not always bad in the sense that they may not represent forms of psychopathology. An inhibition can however become symptomatic (under certain circumstances) and will require analytic forms of treatment or intervention. The main difference between an inhibition and a symptom is that the latter is always a ‘substitute’ for some form of repression that the patient is not conscious of. When Freud finally considers anxiety, he points out that anxiety can be either a symptom or a neurosis in its own right. There are however neuroses that are not accompanied by the symptom of anxiety at all. What comes in between anxiety and a symptom is a danger or a dangerous situation. So, not all forms of anxiety are neurotic: there can be a realistic element in anxiety as well. Freud differentiates between ‘anxiety’ and ‘fear’ by stating that anxiety lacks an object whereas fear localizes anxiety around a particular object that can be identified in analysis, or when the subject tries to introspect on his own. The main feature of neurotic anxiety is that it is in excess of the danger that the subject is responding to; this element of excess has a libidinal component. What analysis tries to do in such a situation is to reduce this element of excess in anxiety neurosis by converting it into a form of realistic anxiety. The traumatic situation is then managed as though it were a dangerous situation. The helplessness of such a traumatic situation which was experienced passively by the patient in the first instance is repeated later on in an active but weakened form; the patient can now get a greater sense of control in the here-and-now than he could in the past.
The Lacanian Theory of Anxiety
The main difference between the Freudian and Lacanian theory of anxiety will focus on whether or not anxiety has an object. While Freud and Lacan agree that fear has an object, Freud argues that there is something diffuse about anxiety making it hard to identify what the object of anxiety really is; there is even a category called ‘free-floating anxiety’. Lacan however will put in a lot of effort to argue in this seminar that anxiety is not devoid of an object, and that the object of anxiety is the Lacanian objet petit a (p. 131). I will return to this topic in more detail in the course of setting out Lacan’s main arguments in this seminar. Suffice it for now to differentiate between these two models of anxiety on the object of anxiety. The term ‘object’ here means an empirical object or a mental object that serves to inspire fear or anxiety; and, more broadly speaking, the function, purpose, or the existential rationale for anxiety in the patient’s psyche; there is, needless to say, an entire history of the term ‘object’ in psychoanalysis (Nagera, 1970). The preoccupation with the object is another way of asking why there should be such a thing as anxiety at all in a theory of the subject. What the reader will notice here is that the Freudian model of anxiety is based on the model of ‘absence,’ while the Lacanian model of anxiety is based on an overwhelming ‘presence.’ The Freudian child suffers from the absence of the maternal breast while the Lacanian child suffers from too much proximity to the maternal breast. Readers approaching Lacan without a background in the Freudian theory of anxiety, and an understanding of how this term has been used, will not be able to make sense of why Lacan stakes out his theoretical positions in the way that he does. That is why this review has slowly worked its way to the Lacanian seminar on anxiety without overlooking the need for a theoretical prelude in the Freudian texts on anxiety, anxiety neurosis, and the relationship between inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. To recapitulate then: there are three important forms of misunderstanding on the problem of anxiety. The first is the difference between anxiety as a symptom and anxiety as a neurosis; the second is the difference between anxiety and fear; the third is the relationship between anxiety and desire. There is also a need for clarity on related topics such as whether anxiety is an affect or an emotion; the difference between the object and the objet petit a; the topological relationship between anxiety and the symbolic Other; and the differences between lack and the lack of a lack in inducing anxiety in the subject. Lacan’s goal in this seminar is to clarify precisely these issues in his theory of anxiety.
Freud, Lacan, and Libido Theory
The three main problems set out above is an attempt to differentiate between the Freudian and Lacanian theories of anxiety. The rest are problems that are specific to the Lacanian theory of anxiety, but which nonetheless help us to rethink the main postulates of the Freudian model of anxiety as well. Lacan is also interested in situating anxiety in the context of jouissance that reinstitutes, in a sense, the traditional Freudian preoccupation with libido and libido theory (Freud, 1923a). Freud, it must be remembered, started by situating anxiety in the locus of the id in his libido theory. So, surplus libido becomes a source of anxiety – especially if the patient does not have adequate powers of sublimation. Later, Freud situates anxiety in the locus of the ego rather than in the locus of the id and distances himself from the libido theory of anxiety. So even while Freud attempts to restructure the sources of anxiety, and the locus in which it emerges in the psyche, it must be remembered that insofar as the ego is itself only a portion of the id that is in contact with reality, it is not possible for Freud to undo the libido theory in its entirety. As Freud pointed out, ‘I was then already aiming at a libido theory of the neuroses, which was to explain all neurotic and psychotic phenomena as proceeding from abnormal vicissitudes of the libido’ (Freud, 1914b; Freud, 1925d; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988b). That is why libido theory cannot be wished away and makes a subtle re-entry into Lacanian theory as well under the guise of jouissance, which is variously translated as libido, sexuality, the pleasure-in-pain, the pain-in-pleasure, plus-de-jouis (i.e. too much or too little of libido in any given instance of libidinal expression), and so on (Fink, 1995). Lacan, for instance, emphasizes that there is an interesting relationship between anxiety and desire. It is important for an analyst to be able to work-through his own anxiety in a clinical situation. There are a number of formulations that Lacan has about anxiety and desire (p. 271). So, for instance, he was fond of pointing out that ‘anxiety is a way of sustaining desire when the object is missing, and conversely, desire is a remedy for anxiety, something easier to bear than anxiety itself’ (Evans, 1997b).
The Structure of the Seminar
There are four parts in this seminar comprising twenty-four chapters. The main topics covered in these four parts include the following: the structure of anxiety in psychoanalysis; the status of the object; situating anxiety between desire and jousissance; and a typology of the forms of the objet petit a. The rest of this review will briefly summarize Lacan’s main arguments in the context of these four parts.
The Object of Anxiety
Lacan’s main contention in the first part of the seminar is that anxiety is an affect and not an emotion. The psychoanalytic model of repression relates to the repression of signifiers and not affects though this is widely misunderstood; this is because of the legacy of terms like ‘strangulated affect’ from Freud’s early studies on hysteria (Freud 1923b). While a theory of affects is an interesting topic in itself, Lacan does not attempt to situate anxiety within a ‘comprehensive theory of affects’ because that is the task of psychology rather than that of psychoanalysis. Lacan also calls attention to the second book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the place where readers can find an interesting typology of the passions that is relevant not only to the ancient world, but also for those interested in psychoanalysis (Aristotle, 2004). These emotions should however not be conflated with affects, repression, or with anxiety. They are the so-called passions – i.e. strong emotions – that have traditionally been the province of drama, literature, and rhetoric. Examples of such emotion include anger, calm, friendship and enmity, fear and confidence, shame, favour, pity, indignation, envy, and jealousy. Aristotle analyzes each of these emotions. Elsewhere, Lacan refers to the Buddhist tradition which recognizes three fundamental passions comprising ‘love, hate, and ignorance’ (Lacan, 1958). Lacan’s focus here however will be on anxiety, which will serve as ‘the cutting edge’ of his analysis (p.15).
Encountering the Uncanny
The relationship between the first and second parts of the seminar is the invocation of the objet petit a in the attempt to argue that anxiety is not devoid of an object. What is really at stake however is the need to redefine what the term ‘object’ means in analysis, and then to rethink the maternal object of which the breast is the prototype – not so much in terms of the usual dialectic of presence and absence, but in terms of its ‘imminence,’ which serves as the source of the patient’s anxiety (p.53). Another important Lacanian preoccupation in the earlier part of the seminar is with the incorporation of the Freudian notion of the uncanny within his theory of anxiety. Freud differentiates between the canny (das Heimliche) and the uncanny (das Unheimliche) by arguing that the latter is ‘something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’ (Freud, 1919a). The term ‘canny’ means that which is familiar and the term ‘uncanny’ means that which is unfamiliar, but there is a little more than that to this distinction. So, for instance, the Freudian notion of the uncanny is that which is ‘secretly familiar’ and not something that is completely unfamiliar; it is that ‘which has undergone repression and then returns from it, and that everything which is uncanny fulfils this condition’ (Freud, 1919b). Anxiety then, in the Lacanian sense, can be defined as the affect that results from an encounter with the uncanny (p. 41). So, in this sense, there is something about a psychoanalytic interpretation itself – as Freud well-knew in his essay – that had the effect of the uncanny on the patient or the reader.
Defenses Against Anxiety
Lacan also points out that ‘acting-out’ and ‘passage to the act’ are the ultimate psychic defenses against anxiety. Acting-out refers to a situation when a patient goes public with a repressed conflict because he feels that the analyst is not willing to listen. A passage to the act is when the patient kills himself. In both these situations, the patient is seized with more anxiety than he can bear. It is however not clear to the patient why this should be the case since he may not be consciously aware of the conflicts that he is subject to in his psyche. An important task that Lacan takes up in this seminar is to establish clearly the differences between these forms of psychic defense since this has both clinical and theoretical implications for the practice of psychoanalysis (Evans, 1997c; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988c). Anxiety however is not reducible to the object; it also relates to the ‘desire of the Other’ that is encapsulated in the Lacanian formulation: Che vuoi? This formulation is usually translated as ‘What does the Other desire of me?’ Anxiety then is situated in Lacanian theory in the context of either not knowing the answer to this question or in not being able to work-through the anxiety induced by this question (p. 292-293). So, both the object petit a and the enigmatic ‘desire of the Other’ are implicated in the Lacanian theory of anxiety. That is why it does not make sense to talk about anxiety in isolation; it is important, as Lacan points out in this seminar, to understand the topological relationship between anxiety, the objet a, and ‘the desire of the Other.’ What this entails is to rethink the ‘status of the object’ within a theory of anxiety. That is what Lacan does in part two and four of this seminar. Not only does he rethink what the definition of the term object should be, but he also works out a typology of five types of the object comprising the oral, the anal, the phallic, the scopic, and the superego (p. 294). These parts presuppose that an object is present, but the object of anxiety or desire may also be an object that is missing in the symbolic Other.
Lacanian Topology
What part three of the seminar does then is to work out the conditions in which the existence or the non-existence of the object can be thought through in terms of how anxiety and desire substitute for each other. This process of substitution results from the task that these affects impose on the subject. Subjects vary in terms of whether they prefer to process the affect in the form of anxiety or desire. This is not commonly understood and the reader may come to the conclusion that these terms have nothing to do with each other. In Lacanian analysis, all terms are defined in terms of topological continuities – so it is important to understand why there are any number of illustrations and explanations of topological constructs in this seminar (pp. 95-99; 131-134). While it may not be possible to analyze these constructs at great length in this review, we should at least note that there is a long history of the part that they play in Lacanian explanations of psychic phenomena. So, for instance, an important Lacanian preoccupation is to argue that topological objects are not just analogies, but direct representations of the underlying structures that constitute the Lacanian categories since they call into question simplistic notions of the inside and the outside in a model of the unconscious. The main contention in this context is that ‘topology shows the real of structure…these are real places, not metaphorical constructs to be donned or cast aside at will or whim. What cannot be said or seen is tacitly shown’ (Ragland, 2002). In addition to this seminar, Lacan also went public with this contention at the Johns Hopkins University in 1967, where he argued that he is not talking in terms of analogies and metaphors; his interest in topological objects relates to the fact that they not only exist, but represent ‘exactly the structure of the neurotic subject’ (Lacan, 1967). Lacanian topology has in itself become an important area of research for not only Lacan but also for Lacanians who start out of curiosity because of Lacan’s own interest in the area, but find that there is a lot more to it than they realized when they started out since it has implications for both how Lacanian terms are defined and how Lacanian constructs are modelled. Topology then to conclude has implications for situating the objet petit a in the contexts of anxiety, desire, and in their relationship to the Symbolic Other. Lacan, I must point out, also discusses the different diagnostic categories like anxiety neurosis, obsessional neurosis, hysteria, and the phobias, and the part played by anxiety in the clinical presentation of symptoms. The main difference though between the approach that Lacan invokes and the traditional model in the analytic literature is that he avoids taking a reductive approach in his theoretical formulations to the extent possible even while he invokes or tries to translate the Freudian triad of ‘inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety’ within the context of his own schemas and topological objects. In order to get the most out of this seminar on anxiety, analysts in the Anglo-American tradition must remember that Lacan’s goal is not to produce a final treatise on the problem of anxiety; but to discursively implicate the conceptual schema of the Freudian text within the contours of his own Parisian seminars. This will no doubt be the main source of attraction for habitual readers and the main source of resistance for first time readers of Lacan.
Conclusion
This seminar will be of great use to both theorists and clinicians. In fact the distinction between theoretical work and clinical work is a bit redundant in Lacanian schools throughout the world since Lacan did not recognize the conventional distinction between a ‘therapeutic analysis’ and a ‘training analysis’; this was one of his many heresies in terms of analytic method. All psychoanalyses in the Lacanian model are – so to speak – forms of training analysis. The end of the analysis is less a matter of ‘cure’ in the traditional clinical sense of the term than an existential preparation to take up the challenge of being an analyst in the ethical sense (Lacan, 1992; Evans, 1997d; Fink, 1997; Fink, 2007). This review has invoked a theoretical prelude on the problem of anxiety in psychoanalysis because a seminar like this will not make much sense to somebody attempting to read Lacan for the first time on his own. There is also the problem of technical vocabulary since Freud and Lacan use terms that appear similar but have very different meanings like the oft-invoked term ‘object’. That is why it is important to calibrate the technical vocabulary carefully and be prepared for translational challenges in reading both Freud and Lacan. There is also the problem of poetics (i.e. textual specificity) in the case of Freud and Lacan since reading either of these thinkers cannot and should not be avoided in the attempt to read what is the ‘latest’ in terms of the theories and techniques of psychoanalysis.
My endeavor in this review has been to get both psychoanalysts and the intelligent lay-person interested in the genealogy of psychoanalysis and to think in terms of comparing the Freudian and Lacanian texts in order to arrive at more nuanced version of what function the trope (and not just the theme) of anxiety has played in the history of psychoanalysis. As habitual readers of Lacan know, his propensity to discursivity and circumlocution in his Parisian seminars makes it horrendously difficult if not impossible to summarize his theoretical and technical contentions in the way that is common to the Anglo-American psychoanalytic tradition. I can only hope that this review will at least get those belonging to other schools of thought curious about what Lacan tried to do in his seminars in general and in this seminar on anxiety in particular. All of Lacan’s seminars have been published so far without the elaborate scholarly apparatus of the annotated edition; that is all the more the reason why it has become important for reviewers of his work to try and situate him in the tradition of both French and Anglo-American psychoanalysis. This review has been a modest gesture in that direction. It is based on the assumption that any further incorporation of Lacan’s theories into the mainstream of Anglo-American psychoanalysis will require an opening up of Lacan to those who may be interested, but not conversant with the conventions that are invoked in reading Lacan by his habitual readers in France, Spain, Latin America, and elsewhere. This book should also be of immense use in courses in English, French, and comparative literature since the review uses the ‘comparative method’ to provide a point of entry into the Lacanian text for those who are interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis, but have hitherto been hesitant to read Lacan.
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Shiva Kumar Srinivasan has a PhD in English Literature and Psychoanalysis from Cardiff University, Wales. His PhD thesis was titled ‘Oedipus Redux: D.H. Lawrence in the Freudian Field’ (1996). He has served as a faculty at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur; Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi; Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; Xavier Labor Relations Institute, Jamshedpur; Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode; and International Institute of Planning and Management, Chennai.