Néstor Braunstein


Néstor Alberto Braunstein is an Argentine-Mexican physician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

Biography

Braunstein graduated as a physician in 1962, at the age of 20, and received his M.D. in 1965 from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, where he taught at college level as early as 1959. In 1974 he was forced into exile for political and academic reasons and moved to Mexico where he worked as a psychiatrist in different public institutions for the treatment of both children and adults. Braunstein is a naturalized citizen of Mexico. He is currently a graduate studies professor, a practicing psychoanalyst and an active writer.
In 1978 he was banned from his duties and positions in all Mexican psychiatric institutions because of his critical epistemological views on the official taxonomies of the so-called mental illnesses : Psicología: Ideología y ciencia in which he demolishes academic psychology and denounces its conceit as a true science. Instead, Braunstein proposed psychoanalysis as an alternative and as a methodological tool to deal with human subjectivity and to redirect the study of psychology. The book had enormous success: 24 editions were printed between 1975 and 2008. This work helped to change the ideological landscape in almost every school of psychology in Spanish speaking countries of Latin America and the author was invited to lecture about his ideas on psychology and psychoanalysis to commemorate the 20th, 25th and 30th anniversary of the first edition of the book.
In 1980 he published a pioneering book dealing with Lacanian psychoanalysis, the first to appear in Mexico, Psiquiatría, teoría del sujeto, psicoanálisis. which was also received with general acclaim; 14 editions were printed and is widely read, referred to and quoted. Beginning in 1981 he became the editor of a continuously reprinted series of books, Coloquios de la Fundación with 13 titles published that helped to expand the knowledge of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in Latin America.
Between 1975 and 2005 he taught Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Graduate Studies Department of Clinical Psychology at the Facultad de Psicología of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and since 2005 he has been teaching in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of that same institution. He is a member of the board and professor in the Ph.D. in Critical Theory of 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos and Secretary of the Administrative Board of Siglo Veintiuno Editores .
In Mexico, he introduced Lacan's teachings by different means in different venues. He taught the first course devoted to Lacanian Studies, published the first Mexican article on Lacan and wrote the forementioned book ''Psiquiatría, teoría del sujeto, psicoanálisis. Braunstein was also the chairman and co-founder of the first officially recognized psychoanalytic teaching institution in the country where he taught until 2003.
He is active in the psychoanalytic lecturing circuit and has given opening or closing lectures in several international symposiums including the following: Bogota, Paris, New York City , Istanbul, Rome and Santiago de Chile .
Beginning in 1985 he has traveled constantly to different cities of America and Europe imparting seminars on Lacanian psychoanalysis.
As a cultural journalist specializing in psychoanalysis he has written many articles for general and specialized Mexican newspapers. He is active as a member of the editorial boards in several psychoanalytic journals published in Spanish, French, Portuguese and English and he has translated a number of literary and psychoanalytic texts into Spanish.

Works and ideas

Braunstein recognizes the following authors as the main influences on his thought: Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Louis Althusser, Jorge Luis Borges, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben.
His works have dealt with a variety of subjects in terms of the relationship between psychoanalysis and culture: philosophy from Plato to Wittgenstein and Derrida; literature from Sophocles to Sebald and Christa Wolf; the visual arts; music; opera; film theater; history; theology; medicine; neuroscience; law; linguistics; anthropology; academic psychology; pedagogy; politics; psychiatry and daily life in the 21st century. Since 2003 he has turned his attention to the subject of memory, articulating the meaning and research on the ability to remember in psychoanalysis and its constant references and those sources that can be derived from other disciplines such as literature, philosophy, history and neuroscience.
In his best known work Goce Jouissance. A Lacanian Concept, he argues that the nucleus that holds psychoanalytical clinic and theory together is the concept of jouissance, which can be minimally defined as "the ways in which a body is affected by language". In this sense he argues that psychoanalysis can be understood as a sort of science of jouissance in the speaking being, a sophisticated knowledge that has been carefully constructed, first by Freud, continued by Lacan and still ongoing.
In his last book published in French, Depuis Freud, Après Lacan Braunstein posits his theory of three different periods in the history of psychoanalysis. They can be emblematically traced to the year 1900, 1950 and our present age, ruled by the omnipresent and anonymous discourse of the Markets.

Books

Published in Portuguese as: Gozo, São Paulo, Escuta, 2007., and currently being translated into English
To be published in Paris, Au bord de l'eau, 2014. Translation by Ana Claudia Delgado Restrepo.
Braunstein was invited to write the chapter “Desire and Jouissance in Lacanian Teachings” in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, Jean-Michel Rabaté. and
Author of more than 230 papers on psychoanalysis, philosophy, art and culture published in specialized journals and magazines of America and Europe.

Editorial work