Secondary literature 2022

Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide

Richard Boothby

by Richard Boothby (2022)

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Synopsis

Richard Boothby's Blown Away (2022) is a grief memoir and psychoanalytic self-study in which a professional Lacanian philosopher submits himself to full analysis following his son Oliver's suicide by gunshot, and traces the arc of that analysis across two intertwined narrative registers: the week-by-week unfolding of the immediate aftermath (Tuesday through Saturday of the week Oliver died) and the longer multi-year labor on the analyst's couch with Dr. Barbara Frankel. The book's central argument is that the burning post-traumatic demand to know—to know why Oliver died, what role the father played, what could have been prevented—is itself a symptomatic defense, and that analytic work ultimately displaces that demand not with understanding but with a more radical, productive relation to irreducible unknowing. Through a succession of analytic sessions rendered in first-person present tense, Boothby traces how free association, dream-work, and the transference gradually dismantled his "happy-boy" ego-ideal, exposed a lifelong repression of aggression, and uncovered an intergenerational transmission of denied ambition and disavowed anger that may have shaped Oliver's self-destructive trajectory. The memoir weaves in two supplementary experiments in altered consciousness—a psilocybin research study at Johns Hopkins and a prior "slice of analysis" with Moustafa Safouan in Paris—to test whether the unconscious opened by analysis can be approached from non-analytic directions, ultimately affirming the irreplaceable but structurally limited nature of the analytic process itself. By its final chapters the book arrives at the Lacanian-inflected conclusion that lack, not knowledge, is the proper ground of love, and that the void opened by catastrophic loss can become, paradoxically, the very condition for renewed intimacy and the irrepressible resurgence of life.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes Blown Away within the Lacanian corpus is its genre: it is neither clinical theory nor applied cultural criticism but a lived, first-person demonstration of what it means to be on the receiving end of the analytic process when the stakes are existential rather than academic. Boothby is one of the few Lacanian scholars to have written at length about Lacan's clinical practice and metapsychology (his earlier Death and Desire and Freud's Death Drive being canonical secondary texts), yet here he deliberately suspends the authoritative theoretical voice and submits to the couch as an ordinary analysand. The result is a document that illuminates from the inside what concepts like "the subject supposed to know," "free association as a quilting point," and "the timelessness of the unconscious" actually feel like in the transference—something no amount of theoretical exposition can fully convey. The book therefore occupies a unique didactic position: it teaches Lacanian concepts by enacting them rather than expounding them.

A second distinctive contribution is the book's serious engagement with the question of whether psychoanalysis is a "tragic art"—a process that brings the subject to the foundations of their life without resolving or repairing them—and its willingness to leave that question genuinely open. Rather than closing with a therapeutic triumph narrative, Blown Away ends suspended between the death drive's pull toward oblivion and an "irrepressible" life-force that persists despite catastrophe, figured through the haunting image of a turtle's head re-emerging after a bullet wound. This refusal of resolution is itself a theoretical gesture: it embodies the Lacanian insistence that the Real cannot be fully symbolized, that the lost object is constitutively irretrievable, and that the ethics of mourning consists not in "working through" to closure but in sustaining a liveable relationship to what remains unknowable. No other text in the secondary Lacanian literature performs this argument so viscerally and so personally.

Main themes

The demand to know as symptomatic defense against the Real of loss
Free association and the analytic frame as sites of unconscious discovery
Intergenerational transmission of repressed anger, ambition, and guilt
The 'happy-boy' fantasy as compromise-formation concealing aggression
Mourning as structural reversal: the living become ghosts, the dead hyper-real
Psilocybin and altered states as supplement to, and impatience with, the analytic process
Lack and unknowing as constitutive of love rather than its failure
The death drive in tension with an irrepressible life-force
Guilt as defense screen against the deeper wound of pure loss
Psychoanalysis as tragic art confronting irreducible limits of self-knowledge

Chapter outline

Chapter 1: Sunday, March 12 / Chapter 2 — p.3-13
Chapters 3–4: Sunday to Monday, March 13 / Colorado memory — p.14-38
Chapters 5–6: Chapter 5 (Analysis begins) / Tuesday, March 14 — p.39-75
Chapters 7–8: Chapter 7 (Dream of the black lake) / Wednesday, March 15 — p.76-115
Chapters 9–10: Chapter 9 (Isolation as repetition) / Thursday, March 16 — p.116-142
Chapter 11 (Happy-boy fantasy and the repression of anger) — p.143-165
Chapters 12–13: Friday, March 17 / Chapter 13 (Psilocybin sessions begin) — p.166-197
Chapters 14–15: Chapter 14 (Turtle, aggression, the black lake revisited) / Chapter 15 (Dream of the renovated cottage revisited) — p.198-215
Chapters 16–17: Saturday, March 18 (Funeral) / Chapter 17 (Third psilocybin session) — p.216-238
Chapter 18 (Sacrifice, the Oresteia, and holding the gun) — p.239-255
Chapters 19–20: Wednesday, March 12 (Second anniversary) / Chapter 20 (Aftermath and renewal) — p.259-293

Chapter summaries

Chapter 1: Sunday, March 12 / Chapter 2 (p.3-13)

The book opens in medias res with the phone call announcing Oliver's death—'He's dead!'—rendered with the hallucinatory intensity of trauma: time slows, the author watches himself from outside, memory-images of Oliver at two years old and on a canoe intercut with the terrible present tense. The prose formally enacts the dissociative structure of shock, with italicized memory-fragments interrupting the telephone conversation like involuntary intrusions of the unconscious. The chapter makes no theoretical argument; it is pure testimony to what Lacan (following Aristotle) calls the tuché—the encounter with the Real that shatters the symbolic fabric of ordinary life.

Chapter 2 establishes the book's central intellectual frame: in the aftermath, Boothby becomes possessed by an epistemological compulsion, a need to know that he describes as 'the need to breathe.' He ransacks Oliver's belongings, journals, truck. This obsessive drive to reconstruct causality is then identified as the motor that drove him into full analysis with Barbara Frankel—not fear of self-harm but the demand to understand. The chapter sets up the book's overarching argument by introducing the tension between philosophical training (the commitment to theoretical clarity) and the analytic insight that such a demand for knowledge is itself symptomatic, and that analysis will ultimately displace it with something more unsettling than an answer.

Key concepts: Trauma, Real, Tuché, Unconscious, Lost Object, Psychoanalysis Notable examples: Oliver's suicide; Boothby's obsessive search through Oliver's belongings

Chapters 3–4: Sunday to Monday, March 13 / Colorado memory (p.14-38)

These chapters split between the immediate aftermath—driving through red lights to reach his ex-wife Elaine, breaking down together in her living room, the first night of collective grief—and a lyrical flashback to a father-son trip to Colorado when Oliver was fifteen. The Colorado memory (the Great Sand Dunes, a night under the stars, Oliver pressing his father to name the constellations) functions throughout the book as the touchstone image of the father-son bond at its purest, the 'most completely magical adventure' of Boothby's life. Its beauty is inseparable from its retrospective agony: it is the lost object in its most luminous form.

The chapters also begin tracking the epistemological theme around the suicide itself: Boothby meditates obsessively on what was in Oliver's mind at the moment of pulling the trigger—was it a real choice, a half-formed gesture, an accident? The speculation is radically open, refusing easy answers. This uncertainty is already implicitly framed as traumatic: it is not the fact of death alone but the impossibility of knowing its interior meaning that becomes the most unbearable dimension of the loss.

Key concepts: Lost Object, Trauma, Real, Anxiety, Repetition Notable examples: Colorado trip to the Great Sand Dunes; Father-son memory of naming constellations at Loveland Pass

Chapters 5–6: Chapter 5 (Analysis begins) / Tuesday, March 14 (p.39-75)

Chapter 5 introduces the analytic setting and offers the book's most concentrated theoretical passage on the mechanics of free association. Lying on Barbara's couch, Boothby describes how the analyst's minimal interventions—repeating a single word, allowing a silence to extend—function like punctuation marks that retroactively reorganize the meaning of the analysand's speech. He invokes his earlier 'slice of analysis' with Moustafa Safouan in Paris, whose silences and sparse repetitions had a 'shocking' effect, 'as if I'd been struck with a blunt object.' This is the book's clearest dramatization of Lacanian technique: the analyst as the site of a quilting point that reveals what the unconscious is saying beyond conscious intention.

The session depicted in Chapter 5 demonstrates the classic dynamic of resistance-as-digression: Boothby's pleasurable extended reminiscence about the family cottage in Turner (Maine) is retrospectively revealed—by a 'cold hand on the neck'—as an avoidance of talking about the piano's destruction and, beneath that, of Oliver's death. The mechanism is shown in real time: 'My long-winded account of Turner—it now seems painfully obvious—was a means of staving off this.' The smashed piano and Oliver's death collapse into a single association; the sound of Oliver's voice, 'like the plink of that old piano, is gone forever.'

Chapter 6 (Tuesday, March 14) returns to the memorial week narrative: visiting the funeral home, sitting beside Oliver's coffin, speaking to him. In a remarkable scene, Boothby finds that once he begins speaking to the body the tension dissolves and a 'steady stream breaks forth'—forgiveness, gratitude, reminiscence. The chapter also introduces Anna's testimony about the moment of the shooting, including the devastating detail that Oliver used a pillow to muffle the gun, confirming deliberate intent and foreclosing the refuge of accident.

Key concepts: Transference, Free Association (implied via analysand practice), Repression, Unconscious, Lost Object, Analysand Notable examples: Moustafa Safouan's analytic technique in Paris; Turner cottage memory and smashed piano; Conversation beside Oliver's coffin; Anna's account of the shooting

Chapters 7–8: Chapter 7 (Dream of the black lake) / Wednesday, March 15 (p.76-115)

Chapter 7 is structurally central to the book: it is the first full analytic session rendered in detail, organized around a dream of the Turner lake. The dream has two parts—skating over dangerously thin ice above a black abyss, and entering the renovated cottage to discover it transformed by new owners with bold, unrestrained ambition. Barbara's minimal interventions guide the associations: the black water is Boothby's own inner darkness; the renovated cottage represents the productive, 'no-holds-barred creative energy' that his own family, and by intergenerational extension his grandfather and father, lacked the ambition to achieve. The dream's work of condensation is explicit: it brings together the black lake of grief, the family's thwarted ambition, the trap-door to unknown depths, and the transformative potential of loss itself.

The chapter also dramatizes how the analytic frame makes possible a confession that would otherwise remain unspeakable: Boothby is finally forced to articulate the guilt-laden fantasy that his son's death was his own fault. The dream-work has prepared this moment, making it both possible and almost unbearable. Chapter 8 (Wednesday, March 15) continues the grief-week narrative, introducing one of the book's key theoretical reversals: in the experience of bereavement, it is the living who become ghosts and the dead who assume 'hyper-real' presence. Oliver appears 'more real than real,' while Boothby feels 'invisible,' 'drained,' 'annihilated.' This inversion of conventional ghost-lore is offered as a phenomenological-structural insight: the survivor's void is projected onto the dead in order to convince oneself that one has survived.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Dream-work (Condensation), Repression, Trauma, Lost Object, Guilt, Transference, Anxiety Notable examples: Dream of the black lake and renovated cottage; Intergenerational pattern of thwarted ambition (grandfather, father, Boothby)

Chapters 9–10: Chapter 9 (Isolation as repetition) / Thursday, March 16 (p.116-142)

Chapter 9 enacts, in a live analytic session, the recognition of a lifelong character pattern: a compulsive withdrawal into isolation—onto the lake in a canoe, into the treetops, into 'theoria,' into philosophy—that the analysand has idealized as independence but that analysis reveals as systematic flight from intimacy and presence. The pattern links childhood escape from family work projects, detachment from his brother's striving, and his academic vocation as 'perching in a treetop' at a safe philosophical distance. Barbara's intervention—'Thinking about Turner now feels like an escape'—serves as the quilting point that retroactively reorganizes the meaning of all the preceding reminiscence.

The recognition carries immediate self-accusatory force: if his whole life has been organized around withdrawal, what did that cost Oliver? The chapter traces how the analysand's idealized narrative—happy, sunny, the family pleaser—begins to fracture under analytic pressure, with the 'happy-boy' persona emerging as a symptomatic mask over genuine sadness and loneliness. Chapter 10 (Thursday, March 16) is largely narrative: reviewing a dossier of Oliver's eight years of addiction crises, Boothby registers both fury at Oliver's stubborn refusal of treatment and a grudging admiration for the same stubbornness when applied to his insistence on having his son Jack despite all practical objections.

Key concepts: Repetition, Identification, Fantasy, Symptom, Repression, Analysand, Subject Notable examples: Pattern of childhood solitary withdrawal at Turner lake; Oliver's insistence on fathering Jack despite addiction

Chapter 11 (Happy-boy fantasy and the repression of anger) (p.143-165)

This chapter is the analytic climax of the first half of the memoir. The 'happy-boy' persona is now theorized explicitly as a compromise-formation: a fantasy that simultaneously conceals inner rage and loneliness, maintains the illusion of domestic harmony, and allowed Boothby to serve contradictory imperatives (pleasing his parents while doing it on his own terms, as a PhD rather than a physician). The structure of the neurotic compromise clarifies 'like a ship coming out of the fog': his career in philosophy was the symptomatic solution that gave him both the prestige of a doctorate and the distance from his father's world.

The session then moves to the repression of anger: Boothby's 'sham harmony' marriage to Elaine is reread as the product of an intolerable relation to his own rage, expressed only in 'quietly destructive' displacements. The analytic move is explicit: 'My whole self-image—it's excruciating to admit it—has functioned to hide the force of my own anger.' This acknowledgment opens the 'inverting mirror' hypothesis: if Boothby systematically denied and repressed his own aggressive current, Oliver may have assumed precisely that current, becoming the vehicle of the father's disavowed aggression—a model of intergenerational symptom-transmission. The 'plague dream' (in which Boothby shoots himself with hyperrational coolness) is now deciphered as the ultimate revenge fantasy, and the three bullet-wounds—turtle, dream-self, Oliver—are condensed into a single signifying chain of guilt.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Symptom, Repression, Identification, Intergenerational Transmission, Guilt, Condensation, Fetishistic Disavowal, Neurosis, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: 'Happy-boy' persona as symptomatic mask; Plague dream and self-shooting; Three bullet-wounds as condensed chain of guilt; Brother Jim's joining the Unification Church as parallel rebellion

Chapters 12–13: Friday, March 17 / Chapter 13 (Psilocybin sessions begin) (p.166-197)

Chapter 12 covers two registers: the grief-week narrative (helping Anna find a new apartment, clearing Oliver's blood-stained room with his friend Whit) and a crucial analytic session in which Boothby discloses the marital separation to his family and confronts Barbara's silence as a 'cold, gray stone.' The analytic silence here functions less as quilting point than as a weight of judgment the analysand cannot shake, illustrating how the transference can produce both productive and persecutory valences.

Chapter 13 introduces the psilocybin subplot: recruited for Roland Griffiths's Johns Hopkins research study on the spiritual effects of psilocybin, Boothby participates (well into his analysis) as a supplementary experiment in grief-work. The chapter frames the decision explicitly as impatience with the analytic process—'After many months on Barbara's couch, I was impatient with the analytic process and was hungry for some different kind of exploring'—and as a repetition of his old penchant for the treetop escape. Barbara's resistance to the plan is noted. The psilocybin experience itself is described as a dissolution of ego/non-ego boundaries in which identification with the dead Oliver becomes possible as a form of mourning that analysis alone had not yet enabled.

Key concepts: Transference, Anxiety, Lost Object, Identification, Jouissance, Psychosis Notable examples: Clearing Oliver's blood-stained apartment with Whit; Johns Hopkins psilocybin research study (Roland Griffiths); First psilocybin session and identification with Oliver

Chapters 14–15: Chapter 14 (Turtle, aggression, the black lake revisited) / Chapter 15 (Dream of the renovated cottage revisited) (p.198-215)

Chapter 14 returns to the analytic sessions with renewed intensity following the psilocybin experiences. Barbara circles back to the dream of the black lake, specifically to Boothby's earlier association that the black water 'felt like the blackness inside me.' The chapter weaves together the turtle memory (a baby snapping turtle he and Oliver kept as a pet, released to the lake) with a childhood memory of shooting a turtle with a BB gun and watching its head re-emerge—an image that will become the book's central symbol of the death drive in dialectical tension with life. The turtle-shooting is identified as the 'Oedipal moment, the fantasy of myself as a murderer,' and the three bullet-wounds are now explicitly theorized as condensations of guilt.

Chapter 15 extends the dream-work analysis to the renovated cottage: the new owners' bold dismantling and reconstruction of the family home is read as an image of denied ambition—the family's (and the grandfather's) failure of nerve, the choice of the safe retreat rather than the larger world. The trap-door found by the new owners becomes the figure for the unknown depths of the analysand's own psyche: 'The new owners found a passageway to some depth of the house that was unknown to me.' The chain of intergenerational retreat (grandfather quitting the bank after 1929, father choosing the safe job in Maine) is laid out explicitly, and Boothby's own philosophical 'theoria' is implicated in the same dynastic flight from ambition and risk.

Key concepts: Condensation, Repetition, Guilt, Trauma, Fantasy, Sublimation, Death Drive, Intergenerational Transmission Notable examples: Turtle-shooting memory and the re-emerging head; Grandfather's deathbed confession of insufficient ambition; Renovated cottage as image of uninhibited creative-aggressive energy

Chapters 16–17: Saturday, March 18 (Funeral) / Chapter 17 (Third psilocybin session) (p.216-238)

Chapter 16 (the funeral) provides the grief-week narrative's emotional climax: Boothby's prior cynicism about funeral sentimentality is completely undone by the overwhelming crowd (300+) and the experience of collective mourning as a genuinely restorative force. The chapter is not theoretical but performs an important function in the book's argument about the sociality of grief: the void of loss is temporarily, unexpectedly filled by the surplus presence of others. The funeral stands as a counterpoint to the isolated, analytic work of mourning.

Chapter 17 is the most philosophically ambitious section dealing with the psilocybin study. The third session produced what Boothby calls a series of 'revelations'—overwhelming intuitions of the ultimate unity, beauty, and perfection of all things. The neuroscientific account of psilocybin (disruption of the default mode network, dissolution of ego/non-ego boundaries) is used to pose a genuine philosophical question: can the stabilizing ego-bound reality of everyday experience claim to be the 'true' reality, or is it a 'dimmed-down and flattened version of life'? This question is explicitly connected to the Lacanian category of the Real: the psychedelic experience of unity may be a more authentic encounter with what always escapes the symbolic order, rather than mere wish-fulfillment.

Key concepts: Real, Jouissance, Anxiety, Sublimation, Knowledge Notable examples: Oliver's funeral and the crowd of 300+; Third psilocybin session at Johns Hopkins (February 9, 2007); Default mode network and ego dissolution

Chapter 18 (Sacrifice, the Oresteia, and holding the gun) (p.239-255)

Chapter 18 is the analytical and emotional nadir of the book. A late session with Barbara produces the memory of Oliver's extraordinary self-diagnosis at nineteen: 'I'm the wasted thing. I'm a sacrifice. I've wasted my life in drugs.' Oliver had connected his descent into heroin—'the most totally wasting thing'—to the need to realize his mother's worst fear, a formulation that Boothby found and still finds vertiginous. The session opens onto the Aeschylean frame: was Oliver's life and death a repetition of the Oresteia, a tragic transmission of parental crime and guilt? Boothby's adultery, discovered by Oliver, is hypothesized as the 'fatal trigger'—Thyestes' adultery rewritten in a Baltimore apartment. The grandiose framing is acknowledged as embarrassing, yet the emotional logic is presented as irreducible.

The chapter closes with one of the most powerful scenes in the book: retrieving the pistol from police evidence and holding it. The expected response—rage, revulsion—does not come; instead Boothby is 'washed over by an enormous wave of feeling I can only describe as love,' holding the gun with 'the exaggerated tenderness of a mother cradling a newborn baby.' This scene crystallizes the book's central epistemological argument: the impossibility of parsing what this feeling means is not a deficiency but the very structure of the wound. The demand to know is confronted with an 'implacable limit,' and the question is posed starkly whether psychoanalysis is 'finally a tragic art, a process of bringing us up against the foundations of our lives... that remain mostly unfathomable.'

Key concepts: Trauma, Real, Guilt, Jouissance, Knowledge, Psychoanalysis, Sublimation Notable examples: Oliver's self-identification as sacrifice; Oresteia / Agamemnon parallel; Retrieving and holding the gun

Chapters 19–20: Wednesday, March 12 (Second anniversary) / Chapter 20 (Aftermath and renewal) (p.259-293)

Chapter 19 (dated to the second anniversary of Oliver's death) marks the deepest point of the mourning process: pain has not diminished but penetrated more deeply, and tears no longer flow easily. The first year was protected by the numbness of shock; the second year brought a more naked encounter with the lost object beneath the defensive structure. The analytic argument here becomes explicit: guilt has functioned as a 'protective screen against the deeper wound of pure loss,' and only when that defense is progressively dismantled does the subject encounter 'the more fundamental Real of absence.' The chapter ends with the book's central image: the turtle's head re-emerging after the bullet, figuring the death drive's dialectic with life—the pull toward the dark shell of oblivion versus an 'irrepressible impulse once more to live.'

Chapter 20 moves forward in time to survey the longer aftermath: Elaine's near-suicide and slow recovery, Anna's resilience, Jack's remarkable growth, and a moving trip Boothby takes with twelve-year-old Jack to Maine after Jack learns the true story of his father's death. The chapter's closing meditation on love and unknowing articulates the book's final theoretical position: the assumption of 'seamless knowing' in intimate relationships is a defense against deeper engagement. 'Bowing to such unknowns is a matter of truly making room for them, for the irreplaceable one-off they really are.' The void opened by Oliver's death becomes, retroactively, the very condition for a form of love more honest and more adequate to its object—a formulation that directly parallels the Lacanian insight that lack is constitutive of desire.

Key concepts: Trauma, Lost Object, Real, Repression, Death Drive, Lack, Desire, Mourning and Melancholia (implied), Repetition, Anxiety Notable examples: Second anniversary session with Barbara; Turtle-head image as life-force against death drive; Trip with Jack to Maine; Jack's learning the true story of Oliver's death

Main interlocutors

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures
Jacques Lacan, general teaching
Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Moustafa Safouan
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Aeschylus, Oresteia
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind
Albert Camus, The Plague
John Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder

Position in the corpus

Blown Away occupies a genuinely unusual position in the secondary Lacanian literature: it is the only book-length work by a major Lacanian theorist (author of Death and Desire and Freud's Death Drive) that approaches the theory from the position of the analysand rather than the analyst or critic. As such it sits adjacent to but distinct from Lacanian clinical case studies (Darian Leader's grief work, for instance, or Bruce Fink's clinical writings) and from applied Lacanian cultural theory. It shares ground with memoir-theory hybrids like Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary in its willingness to let grief disorganize theoretical certainty, but it is more explicitly committed to the psychoanalytic framework as both subject and method. Readers coming to it after Boothby's own theoretical texts (Death and Desire, Freud's Death Drive, Sex on the Couch) will find the formal concepts (Real, tuché, death drive, fantasy as compromise-formation) made vivid by their embodied enactment; readers new to Lacanian theory will find it an accessible, deeply humanizing entry point that models what analytic concepts do in practice.\n\nThe book also belongs alongside Todd McGowan's work on lack and universality, and Adrian Johnston's writings on the subject of drive, both of whom are cited as intellectual interlocutors in the acknowledgments. It should be read before or alongside texts that theorize mourning through a Lacanian lens (e.g., Leader, The New Black; Žižek's accounts of the death drive) and pairs productively with Freud's Mourning and Melancholia and Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the primary clinical texts it implicitly dramatizes. For corpus users, it provides rare testimonial evidence of the analytic process itself—the transference, the quilting point, the retroactive reorganization of meaning—that can anchor more abstract theoretical discussions.