Parlêtre Press (formerly Somaraja Press) is a niche publishing house for long-form essays and conversations at the frontier of the unconscious—where psychoanalysis and medicine weave with aesthetic currents.

Parlêtre is a coinage from Lacan that combines parler (to speak) and être (to be) to connote “speaking being”. I speak, therefore I am. Parlêtre articulates the project of the press as a social link, where speaking beings inscribe a shared discourse through inspired writing.

Structure

The publication is currently organized into four streams:

• Psychoanalysis — essays on Lacanian psychoanalysis and adjacent schools of thought.

• Medicine — essays on Asian medical traditions (Ayurveda, Tibetan Medicine, Chinese Medicine), and the modalities of acupuncture, moxibustion, and homeopathy.

• Astrology — essays on astrological and divinatory systems, including Vedic astrology, Tibetan astrology, Chinese astrology (Bazi, Yijing), and Human Design.

• Podcast — free-associative conversations on Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Ethics and Philosophy

Parlêtre Press follows Freud in observing the unconscious as the linking factor across disciplines:

It is enough to say that psychoanalysis, in its character of the psychology of the deepest, unconscious mental acts, promises to become the link between Psychiatry and all of these other fields of study.

This understanding gives psychoanalysis a multidisciplinary privilege, by acceding its function to the field of the liberal arts. As Lacan says:

At the present time, psychoanalysis is perhaps the only discipline comparable to those liberal arts [of the Middle Ages], inasmuch as it preserves something of this proportional relation of man to himself—an internal relation, closed on itself, inexhaustible, cyclical, and implied pre-eminently in the use of speech.1

The ethic of the press is thus rooted in the traditional notion of the liberal arts—East and West, antiquity and modernity.

In ancient India, the liberal arts were conceived as the six limbs of the Veda (vedānga): phonetics, poetics, grammar, etymology, astrology, and ritual. This developed into a multidisciplinary model of education that encompassed philosophy, medicine, grammar, logic, and the arts.

In medieval Europe, the liberal arts were comprised of seven disciplines divided into the trivium of the language arts (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium of mathematical arts (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music).

Parlêtre Press reinvigorates these intersections at the through line of the unconscious. Where do we situate the unconscious if not on an axis in time and space? Where is psychoanalysis as a phenomenon that sees the hidden proportion of man? What is the nexus of culture and thought?

Psychoanalysis developed in aesthetic step with surrealism. Parlêtre follows this beat into the thready pulse of transcendental realism, a new clinic of the real that finds its footsteps neither in the past nor the present but a future anterior already prophesied. Transcendental realism is an assemblage of ecstasy, where desire flows in the jouissance of the speaking subject—where the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary translate to the real, the true, and the beautiful.

Submissions

Parlêtre Press exists for the enactment of analytic discourse between speaking beings—an associative dialogue that slides across terroir.

Parlêtre Press welcomes exceptional writing that charts new territory in relation to the unconscious and the liberal arts. The press is a home for serious thinkers, pioneering clinicians, and independent scholars who desire to move beyond the closures of university discourse and into an open avant-garde of the written and spoken word. Here, the unconscious is the only thread that links the discourse of psychoanalysis with medicine and the esoteric anatomy of the real.

Parlêtre Press is an online publication that has the desire to publish print collections in the near future. (Work that is published online will be eligible for inclusion in print collections).

See our Submissions page for guidelines.

Why Subscribe?

Parlêtre Press offers thought-provoking writing that broadens the therapeutic inquiry of the healing arts. Parlêtre Press also champions an East-West dialectic by exploring the relationship between Asian and European philosophies and practices.

Currently, all the content of this site is free. Paid subscribers receive a 10% discount on any of my services. All my subscribers are supporting the good cause of ongoing research and inquiry in the healing arts.

Publishing Schedule

Essays are published on Saturday, on a weekly-to-monthly frequency.

Podcast episodes are published every other Thursday.

Editorial Team

Neeshee Pandit, Editor-in-Chief

Neeshee Pandit is a psychoanalyst, acupuncturist, and astrologer. He originally founded the press as a home for his own writing and has since expanded it into a collective project. Neeshee previously served as a senior editor for the Dawn Horse Press, and brings his many years of editorial experience to Parlêtre Press.