Lacan Quotidien n°221

13 juin 2012
13 June 2012

Lien vers Lacan Quotidien n°221 : http://www.lacanquotidien.fr/blog/2012/06/lacan-quotidien-n221-la-ototo-rite-ratee-ii-par-jean-claude-maleval/

▪ La OTOTO rité ratée (II) par Jean-Claude Maleval ▪
▪ LA ROSE DES LIVRES par Nathalie Georges-Lambrichs ▪
Le divan crypté
▪ ALLONS-Y▪
Le 30 juin A l’écoute des autistes
Conversation clinique avec Jacques-Alain Miller, organisée par UFORCA
Des concepts et des cas

Bulletin Asreep-NLS #4

14 août 2012
14 August 2012

Bulletin Asreep-NLS #4

• Bulletin-Asreep-Nls4-juillet 2012.pdf

Report – NLS Knottings Seminar, Bruges 3.3.2012, Kring

12 avril 2012
12 April 2012

NLS Knottings Seminar
March 3, 2012
Bruges
Kring voor Psychoanalyse van de NLS

With : Natalie Wulfing (for the Executive Committee of the NLS), Gabriela van den Hoven (guest from the London Society), Peter Decuyper (member of the Kring). Chair: Joost Demuynck.

Report by Stijn Vanheule
Natalie Wulfing gave the theoretical part of the Knotting Seminar. The title of her talk was ‘what is it that we read when we listen’. As she started Natalie Wulfing indicated that Miller’s talk at the last NLS conference – Reading a symptom – was most inspirational for her.
The terms ‘speaking,’ ‘listening,’ ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ are pivotal. These language functions confuse with the symptom, but which object do these terms address?
Since Freud psychoanalysis is related to reading, which is to reading the dream. In what way is reading different from listening? A fundamental hypothesis in Lacan’s work from the fifties concerns the signifier and the signified, which are separated by a bar, indicating that both are not related. This idea of the bar is a precursor of the idea that there is no sexual relation. Lacan’s algorithms, like the algorithm S/s, are writings. A writing grasps a problem, but doesn’t solve it. It allows us to work on this problem and to start explaining it, without obtaining complete understanding. The algorithms free us from the clutter of meaning and signification. Thus considered, writing and communication are opposites. Writing is better able than communication to access the Real.
To what extent do we read what is said by an analysand, what is written in speech? From what we hear we translate to something that is written. For example, the algorithm S/s suggests hearing what the analysand says qua signifiers, and urges us to refrain from using our own understanding as a criterion. The signifier creates meaning effects, like in metonymy and metaphor. We don’t interpret as long as we are not in the analysand’s language field. Moreover, we use interpretation to cause a split between meaning and what is said.
Language has a function of making something exist that cannot otherwise be expressed. It thus has a creative effect. E.g. a schizophrenic man, who discovers his lack in being, is anxious when he is confronted with sexual jouissance. He then feels guilty, and feels that he must confess, like saying that he is ill, which has nothing to do with reality. What operates here is a mode of repression, a sequence from jouissance to naming. The unconscious is an effect of the confrontation between jouissance and language. What is beyond language? There is a symbolic aspect of the symptom that can be articulated, but there is also a Real aspect. This is the fixity. It is written as a letter. There is a gap between saying and writing. We have to listen to this gap, we have to read it. The written goes beyond the signifier. The letter does not signify. It is an impact of the signifier on the body, provoking jouissance, not meaning. E.g. a young woman complains about her husband, for not making love with her. He treats her like his mother and this disturbs her. She tidies the house all day, as she did as her mother’s favorite child. The Mother often said: ‘perfect’. This word has a special effect on her; it brings tears to her eyes, and acts as an imperative. It is an element of lalangue for her. The complaint about her husband and to have a ‘normal’ sexual life is thus linked up with ‘perfect’, not to questions of femininity.
What becomes of interpretation when we address lalangue? Speech at the level of lalangue relates to the body and not to the Other; it is a-speech. Interpretation at this level restores lalangue and addresses the equivoques. What is the signifier in the late Lacan? It doesn’t signify: outside the field of identification the signifier does not signify the subject. The Real is one’s non-being, a point of castration.

Freud wanted to solve the symptom via a universal rule: the Oedipus complex and castration at the level of penis-envy and the masculine protest. In contrast, in Encore, Lacan brings the One to the fore; we are all alone with our jouissance. There is no pre-discursive reality: reality and the Real are totally separated. Castration is now related to the not-all. In which way does the letter give access to the Real? Lacan defines the letter as a litter, a waste product, and the speaking-being, a substitute for the unconscious, because ‘man speaks with his body’. E.g. a psychotic analysand suffers from an S1 that torments him, which implies that it cannot be treated via other signifiers. Nothing dissolves the idea; to approach it at the level of the letter has the chance of diffusing the completeness of this master-signifier, to lose some of its tormenting effects. What is it that we read? We read what is there, what is constant, what is written.
In the clinical part of the Knottings Seminar Gabriela van den Hoven first presented a case. The case concerned a hysteric woman, focusing on the question: am I a man or a woman? Next a case was presented by Peter De Cuyper, focusing on the analysis of a man whose speech is not guided by the phallus, but by a fundamental emptiness.

Stijn Vanheule

LQ Translations – A selection from Lacan Quotidien 115

31 juillet 2012
31 July 2012

From LQ 115
14th December 2011

LITTLE GIRAFFE
The child who comes

Eric Zuliani

GIVING BACK A HORIZON

After having made “bretonnisants” of us at the end of the seventies, revealing to us that we were a “sentimental crowd”, now Souchon – in his latest song – speaks to us of children. Souchon, of course, it is a simple song; he could be accused of being in the spirit of the time. I do not think so: He rather finds names for this spirit of the time [air du temps]: these times are suffocating for children. J.-A. Miller thus indicated it, in his intervention of March 19th, by stating: “When the Other suffocates the subject, it is a question of working with the child to take a step away from the Other, so that the child can get his breath.” (1)

Souchon’s song poses a strong binary that allows for the aforementioned breathing: There is the day, there is the night. The title in itself is Lacanian. Day and night, Lacan speaks of it, in fact, in February 1956 in his Seminar on the psychoses. Having visibly not convinced his audience in the previous lesson when he talked about “the peace of the evening”, he went back to what day and night are, in order to demonstrate that “reality is at the outset marked by symbolic nihilation [néantisation]”. In fact, he adds, “day and night are very early on signifying codes, not experiences”. There is day and night is the articulation that connotes presence and absence.
What does the song say? By day, it is school: “All the teacher has in his head will be put into mine (…) after a while one gets bored (…) Keep quiet, tidy up, do homework”; by night it is the dreams where “one throws oneself into the void and it is me who decides”. It is interesting to note that what is of the order of decision is ranged on the side of the dream. Freud had also noticed, during the analysis of Dora, that a dream is the equivalent of a decision, and – in relation to repetitive dreams – that a decision is maintained until it is executed. In passing, one sees that Freud distinguished the level of realization of desire from that of the concrete consequences a subject can draw from it. But already, a dream can help a subject to find a horizon, precisely that of desire. This is how allowing a child to breathe can be understood.

Sacha has repeated at school. But he was also obliged to be twice as careful in a life in which he tries to find some tranquility. His parents divorced, and the true children that are the parents tear themselves apart a bit, a lot, passionately: the ‘not at all’(2) will come, but it is slow. He is gloomy, closed and sad, not being able to speak.
He whispers: “I am not at ease. A little bit anyway, during the school breaks. Even at night I am not at ease. Even on holidays: one always has to do something.
– So who is at ease then?
– JP (the mother’s new partner), but I do not like him. The girls too are at ease, even when they cheat. It is better if they are not seen doing it. I am in love with Marie, but she? When we play, I touch her, she wants me…
– What is the name of the game?
– “Wolf family…” Sacha bursts into tears. The session could not be continued.

The next session he comes back very anguished. He had a nightmare: “Sorts of people bleeding. Wounds. It flows and it wakes me up.” A rather long silence installs itself. How to take the thing?
– “Someone has been wounded…
– Yes because one does not love him, or because he has done something bad or because it is a mission. It’s like 9/11: people got themselves killed. The character in the nightmare is lit up and it is dark around him. There are woods. (His speech revives).
– What age is he?
– More like my father… I remember when I was four or five years old. I had fallen on the gravel, into the brambles and the nettles. I bled a lot. Daddy had already gone into the woods. I tried to join him.”

He then makes a list -like citations of feats of arms or summons to appear- of incredible accidents which left traces on his body. Then he adds: “Only once I nearly died, drowning; and there I was scared.”

At the next appointment his smile is back, because he has had a dream which he is looking forward to telling me: “I could have all the toys. If I wanted to, several at the same time, I could do everything I wanted. I did not pay for them and so I could give them to someone. “

Freed from the sad reality -speech liberated- memories, formations of the unconscious, can thus emerge. The style of the dream is remarkable: the whole potential realization of the decision –that objects circulate once again- even though nothing is executed. Yet everything becomes possible. That the dream is equivalent to the realization of a desire means, in my opinion, that it allows Sacha the realization of a renewed desiring position.

(1) Jacques-Alain Miller, The Child and Knowledge, in Psychoanalytical Notebooks 24, 2012
(2) Reference to the game that consists in picking petals off a daisy: “He/She loves me a little, a lot, passionately, madly, not at all” [TN]
(3) The Dream Haunting the Mogul. Gustave Moreau. In 1881 (picture attached)
Translated by Francine Danniau

INTER-CARTEL « VERS ATHÈNES » | INTER-CARTEL TOWARDS ATHENS

22 juillet 2012
22 July 2012

PROJET INTER-CARTEL « VERS ATHÈNES »
2012-2013

Chers collègues,

Les cartels électroniques ont manifestement joué, depuis leur création, un rôle prépondérant dans la vie de notre École, à la fois en tant qu’instrument de travail, d’échanges cliniques et épistémiques mais aussi en tant qu’outil de préparation du Congrès annuel.
De ce fait, nous allons pour l’année à venir poursuivre le projet inter-cartel en suivant la procédure qui a été inaugurée l’année dernière.

Tout en vous invitant à vous inscrire, permettez-moi de vous rappeler la procédure à suivre :

Deux façons de s’inscrire au projet inter-cartel 2012-2013 :
L’inscription peut se faire soit en se déclarant en cartel, soit à titre individuel.
Pour la déclaration en cartel il suffit de remplir le formulaire de déclaration que vous trouverez sur le site de la NLS (www.amp-nls.org) et d’envoyer une copie à mon adresse personnelle (d.andropoulou@yahoo.gr). Attention ! Il est nécessaire de spécifier qu’il s’agit d’un cartel « Vers Athènes ». La date limite de déclaration est fixée au 30 septembre 2012.
Si vous souhaitez vous inscrire à titre individuel, il suffit de m’envoyer un mail (d.andropoulou@yahoo.gr). Vous serez alors inscrit sur une liste à partir de laquelle seront constitués des cartels mixtes. La sélection des membres de chaque cartel sera faite par tirage au sort. Signalons que l’expérience de l’année passée nous a appris que les membres des cartels inscrits initialement à titre individuel ont travaillé avec enthousiasme au sein de la NLS tout en dépassant les limites locales.

Fonctionnement des cartels électroniques :
Comme l’année dernière, chaque cartel devra présenter deux cas cliniques : un premier, fin octobre, un deuxième, début février. Les dates spécifiques vous seront communiquées au fur et à mesure. Des groupes de deux ou trois cartels seront constitués. La composition des groupes vous sera aussi annoncée avant la discussion. Les cartels de chaque groupe discuteront et échangeront leurs points de vue autour de leurs vignettes. L’extime participera à ce débat par le biais des plus-uns qui lui transmettront une synthèse des avancées de la discussion entre les membres des cartels.

J’ouvre donc, à partir d’aujourd’hui, l’inscription au projet inter-cartel 2012-2013 en préparation du Congrès à Athènes sur le thème : « La psychanalyse et le sujet psychotique. De l’invention forcée à la croyance au symptôme ».

Despina Andropoulou
Responsable des cartels de la NLS

INTER-CARTEL TOWARDS ATHENS

Dear colleagues,

Since their introduction the electronic cartels have played an important role in the life of our School, as an instrument of work, of exchange of points of view in the clinical and epistemic field, and – last but not least – of the preparation of the annual Congress of the School.
Thus, we will continue the inter-cartel project this year too, following the procedure that was initiated last year.

Before inviting you to register, allow me to remind you of the procedure:

Two ways to register for the inter-cartel:
Registration for the e-cartel project 2012-2013 is feasible by declaration of a cartel or on individual basis.
As far as the declaration of the cartel is concerned, all that is needed is to fill in the declaration form of the cartels that you can find on the NLS website (www.amp-nls.org). You are kindly requested to send a copy to my personal e-mail too (d.andropoulou@yahoo.gr). Attention! It is necessary to specify that the cartel is « Towards Athens » in the title given to your e-mail. The deadline for registration is the 30th of September 2012.

For those who wish to register on individual basis what they have to do is simply send me an e-mail (d.andropoulou@yahoo.gr). They will be registered on a list from which mixed cartels will emerge. The member of each cartel will be selected by means of a kind of draw. Last year’s experience has shown us that the members of the cartel registered on individual basis worked with enthusiasm and they had the opportunity to work in the vast field of the School overcoming the regional limits.

Operation of the inter-cartels :
Like last year, each cartel has to present two cases: one in the end of October and a second one in early February. The specific dates will be communicated in due course. Two or three cartels will constitute a group. The composition of the groups will be announced before the discussion begins. The cartels of each group exchange and discuss about their case. The extime participates in this discussion via the plus-ones who transmit a synthesis of the conclusions that the members of their cartel have reached.

I hereby open, as from today, the registration for the inter-cartel project 2012-2013 in preparation for the Congress in Athens: “Psychoanalysis and the psychotic subject. From the forced invention to the belief in the symptom”.

For the commission of the cartels of the NLS
Despina Andropoulou

A. Stevens : 3ème samedi de la NLS au Kring

20 juillet 2012
20 July 2012

Troisième samedi de la NLS au Kring (05/05/2012) avec Alexandre Stevens

‘La racine du symptôme’

Vous auriez aimé savoir pourquoi, pour un psychanalyste, le symptôme analytique équivaut à la dépendance ? Pourquoi, selon une définition lacanienne, un éthylique est celui qui s’arrête après le premier verre et boit à nouveau toujours le même verre ? Pourquoi la bouteille, pour l’éthylique, est comme le corps pour l’autiste, Dieu pour les mystiques et l’écriture pour certains psychotiques ? Vous auriez aimé savoir où se situe la répétition inlassable du ‘même Un’ pour les analystes ?

Pour ceux qui n’étaient pas présents le samedi 5 mai à Gant, quand Alexandre Stevens, face à un public nombreux, nous a mis au fait, de manière passionnée et limpide, de ce que veut dire lire un symptôme : une courte impression.

Rappelez-vous le lapsus freudien d’un président qui ouvrait une séance avec les illustres paroles : ‘Je considère la séance close !’ Formation de l’inconscient. Freudien par excellence car le lapsus révèle un effet de vérité, fait entendre un autre sens que celui que le président avait prévu. Alexandre Stevens reprenait cet exemple pour caractériser quelque chose du symptôme tel qu’il a été façonné dans les débuts de la psychanalyse : une infinitude de sens (est-ce que la réunion promettait d’être difficile ? Est-ce que le président voulait rentrer ? Est-ce que sa femme l’attendait ? …) et – important pour cerner la raison d’être du symptôme – non sans bénéfice pour le patient.

C’est cette dimension de profit qui conduit Freud dans les années 20 à attribuer au symptôme un bénéfice primaire de la maladie : à côté du fardeau qui y est mêlé, le symptôme procure une jouissance. Freud parlera plus tard de la concession somatique et aussi de la réaction thérapeutique négative qui illustre que le symptôme possède un caractère permanent au-delà de son effet de vérité fugace.

Un analysant arrive en retard au rendez-vous avec son analyste. L’analysant s’épuise en se justifiant par des explications : ‘pourquoi maintenant !?’ Ici apparaît le Sujet qui veut dire quelque chose au-delà de l’intention de l’analysant. Il se dégage de l’écart qui a été créé par l’acte manqué. Tout comme le lapsus du président, ce type de ‘retard’ se caractérise par un effet de vérité explosif : d’abord c’est la faute du bus, puis au fait qu’on ne trouvait pas ses clefs, et en fait on n’avait pas vraiment envie de venir parce que… Et puis il y a encore, selon Alexandre Stevens, les ‘retardataires’ : les rebelles entre ceux qui arrivent en retard, qui sont seulement en retard quand il arrivent encore plus en ‘retard’ que d’habitude. Ici nous ne parlons plus d’acte manqué, mais nous voyons apparaître quelque chose du réel. Eh bien : c’est ici qu’écouter ne suffit plus et qu’il s’agit de lire.

Se référant à Jacques-Alain Miller et à Lacan, A. Stevens le prône ainsi : évidemment qu’écouter constitue le point de départ au sein de la cure analytique, mais l’interprétation du signifiant n’est pas suffisante pour mener la cure vers sa finalité, justement en raison des restes symptomatiques qui forment le noyau réel du symptôme. L’écoute de ce qui est dit doit être complétée par la lecture de ce qui se transcrit dans la cure comme ‘hors sens’, comme opaque et point fixe de la jouissance.

Ainsi, Stevens arrive, au sens propre comme au figuré, au cœur du matériel de travail de l’analyste. L’opération de la lecture est destinée à introduire une différence entre ‘parole’ et ‘sens’, et l’interprétation ‘équivoque’ nous montre la voie à suivre.

En ce qui concerne l’homophonie, il a été stipulé qu’elle était redevable à la lecture. Les petits enfants, avant qu’ils ne puissent lire, semblent parfois témoigner de l’homophonie dans l’oreille des adultes, tandis qu’il s’agit indéniablement de naïveté infantile. Il y avait l’exemple d’une jeune fille (francophone) qui, à la stupéfaction de ses parents, enchaînait sur la discussion entre adultes sur les risques de ‘Tétanos’ : ‘je connais ça, on peut mourir !’, ‘comment ça, mourir ?’, ‘c’est aussi dangereux que quand on prend la médication avec ‘une tête en os’ sur l’emballage !’ Il ne peut être question d’homophonie ici étant donné que la condition nécessaire de la lecture est en défaut. Suivant cet exemple, Stevens a décrit les différentes modalités d’interprétations où (la lecture de) la matérialité de la lettre, beaucoup plus que le sens, est au premier plan.

Pourquoi cette insistance sur la lettre ? Ceci nous rapproche un peu plus du titre de la conférence de Stevens : la racine du symptôme. Peut-être pouvons-nous dire que nous avons d’un côté l’architecture du symptôme : la matérialité et la forme dynamique de l’effet de vérité, le ‘par-être’. D’autre part il y a la base qui permet de créer la construction. La lettre constitue le témoin silencieux d’une rencontre contingente, un événement de jouissance, ‘un choc initial’ qui a comme produit la formation des symptômes.

C’est cette rencontre, ce choc initial, que la racine du symptôme a en commun avec la toxicomanie comme répétition inextinguible du même Un.

La toxicomanie est la racine du symptôme dûe au fait que la dépendance répète quelque chose qui ne se calcule plus. L’ivrogne ne compte plus. Il boit un verre et il le répète, ‘une fois de plus, toujours’.

À travers un fragment clinique, A. Stevens a illustré comment l’alcoolisme d’un homme fonctionnait comme une commémoration d’un phénomène de jouissance originel qui a pénétré le corps ; la commémoration hors-sens dans une interminable et monotone répétition du même Un éternel. Dans la discussion qui suivait, la contingence de la rencontre avec la bouteille a été reconstruite. L’homme semblait s’être mis à l’abri dans la cave de la maison parentale en réponse au bruit insupportable des querelles entre ses parents. Ou comment la fuite, face au bruit, dans la bouteille a créé un partenaire-symptôme que l’homme en question n’a jamais pu vider.

Ces répétitions inlassables de jouissance hors-sens sont ce que nous retrouvons également, par exemple, dans la relation entre l’autiste et son corps, entre Joyce et le langage, entre la mystique et Dieu… Si nous adoptons la question de la finalité de la cure avec cette notion de la racine du symptôme – la dépendance – , alors il s’agit d’examiner la relation du sujet avec sa dépendance, qui est le rapport entre le Sujet et le même Un qui se répète. Stevens a précisé qu’il s’agissait de chercher au cas par cas les restes symptomatiques, la construction, le montage du même Un.

Dans la clinique de la toxicomanie, nous examinons dans quelle mesure nous pouvons éteindre la dépendance et nous constatons qu’il est plutôt exceptionnel que la consommation de drogue s’arrête. Dans la plupart des traitements de la dépendance, le travail psychanalytique consiste à implanter d’autres supports (à côté des drogues) afin d’obtenir un amortissement de la consommation.

Si nous affirmons que Joyce a été accro à la langue, nous ne pouvons ignorer qu’il a travaillé énormément sur cette langue, et que cela a entraîné des changements énormes, y compris en ce qui concerne son alcoolisme par ailleurs.

Considérer la racine du symptôme comme une dépendance ne signifie pas que la clinique de la dépendance devrait devenir un nouvel idéal, non, il s’agit, par exemple, aussi dans les témoignages de la passe, d’examiner minutieusement le rapport du Sujet et le reste symptomatique de jouissance.

Cette connaissance en main, un cas fascinant, apporté par Frédéric Cauwe, a été la cerise sur le gâteau pour le public. Un cas qui a été lu et habilement reconstruit avec l’aide d’Alexandre Stevens. Ce qui le rendait intéressant, sans doute aussi pour celui qui l’avait construit à l’origine, était le point de départ. Le cas a été présenté à partir d’une difficulté, à partir d’une question de l’analyste qui a été transmise au public et autour de laquelle un travail s’est effectué. Il est incontestable que cette conception est propice à la clinique.

Tranquille et ferme dans la construction de son argumentation, A. Stevens fut très pertinent et prêt à répondre aux questions qui étaient loin d’être évidentes (psychosomatique ? La fin de la cure pour le toxicomane ? Le trait unaire et la relation avec la lettre ?). Ce fut un plaisir d’accueillir Alexandre Stevens pour ce dernier ‘samedi’ de notre année de travail.

Vic Everaert
(Traduction : Cédric Van Moorsel)

LQ Translations – A selection from Lacan Quotidien 217

15 juillet 2012
15 July 2012

From LQ 217

30th May 2012

Childhood Under Control
Miquel Bassols

This intervention was given in Barcelona on the occasion of a preparatory meeting towards the 3rd Forum of the ELP, to be held in Seville, on June 2nd 2012, on the theme: “What evaluation silences: Childhood under control”

1) Childhood, as we understand it, has not always been defined in the same way. This is a fact that had already been highlighted in studies, for example, by Philippe Ariès and the History of Mentalities. The time designated as “childhood” has changed considerably throughout history, which indicates that childhood is primarily a fact of discourse. What is meant today by “childhood” is necessarily constituted as a “bygone time”, more or less idealized, as a place located within and from the discourse of the Other. Moreover, it is always worth recalling, as Lacan repeatedly did, the etymology of the word “childhood”, which comes from the infant: (in-fari) someone who is not able to speak, not articulate words but to speak in public, to represent himself in public as a subject of discourse. Childhood is thus first established as a place prior to and outside of discourse. The child is thus he who necessarily remains under the responsibility of the Other, without being able to make himself the subject of a social responsibility.

2) And why should we “control” this fact of discourse? Because childhood has also come to designate something ignored in the life of each subject, something that also remains outside of discourse, as that which is at the same time most intimate and foreign, which is the most idealized but also the most hidden. If Freud could say that every memory is a screen memory then childhood is, in terms of the experience of a subjective time, each subject’s screen memory par excellence: it always hides a family secret, it is the veil, the screen, of a secret always ignored.

3) And what is this secret, which is always ignored? It is first of all the secret of what we call “jouissance”, namely, an experience around different drive objects. Childhood thus brings forward the object of an experience of jouissance for each subject. “Childhood under control” is therefore childhood as an object of practices of control by the Other, practices of power, of surveillance, of punishment (cf. Michel Foucault). Childhood as an object is also, necessarily, the place of segregation. Historically it joins the series along with the place of madness and of the woman. Let us recall Jacques Lacan’s remark in 1968, in his “Remarks on child psychoses” (“Allocution sur les psychoses de l’enfant”): segregation is “the factor, the most burning issue of our time, in so far as, firstly, it has to experience the putting into question of all social structures by the progress of science”(1). Lacan thus anticipated segregation as the phenomenon extending to our world “in an ever pressing way”.
Despite the good intentions of any policy of integration, how can one not notice that childhood is nowadays an object of segregation, in so far as this is inherent to the function of the object as remainder of jouissance? It is not sure that a greater attention and a heightened vigilance can preserve childhood from this structural segregation. One can see these effects in some policies of integration at all costs of the “different” child, an integration that in fact duplicates this effect of segregation. Under the normalizing ideal of the child there is always this place of “segregated” object as remainder of jouissance.

4) The child has been and is an object of jouissance of the Other, especially as a sexual object: one supposes that this remark – accepted as such – is part of the Freudian discovery. But to recognize the child as object was not the most subversive point of this discovery. The real discovery – already present in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” of 1905 – was to listen to the subject of childhood as a subject in his own right, in his relation to the unconscious and to desire. There is something even more subversive than having exposed the place of the child as a sexual object: it is the idea of sexual jouissance in childhood itself, the idea that there exists a subject, responsible for a desire and for a jouissance, in the proper space designated as “childhood”; it is also the fact that there is a responsibility in the subject of the Freudian unconscious which extends to childhood, as place of a subject of speech and language.

5) Who is willing today to take on this truth and its effects in the various fields of knowledge, and in the practices that belong to them? Usually silence is kept about childhood as place of a subject of desire and jouissance.
Scientific discourse, in its alliance with the discourse of capitalism, decidedly embarked on a strategy of evaluation, control, surveillance and screening of childhood, as subject of jouissance, which becomes intolerable, which even bodes the worst social destiny. One should remember the campaigns carried out in schools in various countries for the prevention of adult crime, based on the evaluative control of children.
Legal discourse has difficulties today recognizing the responsibility of the subject of childhood: from when can a subject be considered legally responsible for his actions? Law enforcement sets this moment back to an increasingly early age.
Pedagogical discourse, meanwhile, remains today clearly divided between a conception of the child as an object of control and prevention against “disorders” of the adult world, and a conception of the child as an educando, a subject of experience in relation to knowledge.

6) For psychoanalytic discourse, the child is first and foremost a subject-supposed-to know in the same way the adult is. This remark was made by Jacques-Alain Miller in his intervention at the Study-Day on the Child, in March 2011, entitled The Child and Knowledge:
“In psychoanalysis, it is the child who is supposed to know, and it is rather the Other who is to be educated, it is the Other who is better taught how to handle himself. When this Other is incoherent and torn apart, when he leaves the subject with no compass and no identification, it is a question of elaborating with the child a knowledge to hand, custom made, one that he can make use of. When the Other suffocates the subject, it is a question of working with the child to take a step away from the Other, so that the child can get his breath. In every case, the analyst is on the subject’s side…” (2)
To listen and to understand childhood as the subject supposed to know involves taking each child as a being who speaks, as a speaking being, even where he is rather spoken by the Other as infans, as symptom of this Other, but in the end a subject responsible for the desire and the jouissance that inhabit him, always out of control.

Translated by Francine Danniau

(1) Jacques Lacan, Autres Ecrits, Le Seuil, Paris, 2001, p. 362.
(2) Jacques-Alain Miller, The Child and Knowledge, in Psychoanalytical Notebooks 24, 2012

Translations – A selection from Lacan Quotidien 200

11 juillet 2012
11 July 2012

POSITIONS
A very outdated view on psychoanalysis

In response to the Nouvel Observateur of April 19th 2012
Clotilde Leguil

While the next Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis will try to draw the consequences of the transformations of the symbolic order in the twenty-first century -which is no longer what it was-, asking about the changes today’s world induces in the cure, the Nouvel Observateur of April 19th 2012 produces a dossier entitled “Must psychoanalysis be burnt?” presenting, with a bit of a medieval title, a very fifties-like vision of psychoanalysis.

Reading this issue, one would believe that psychoanalysis in France has remained what it was in the post-war society: a society in which feminism did not exist; where claims for equality between sexes and sexual liberty whose messenger was the movement of ’68 did not exist; a society where everyone was given their place, father, mother, the children and the uncles and the aunties; a society where the unconscious remained governed by the Oedipus complex, and where subjects suffered from too authoritarian fathers; where children had no right to speak at school; where one was hit on the fingers the moment one violated the rules; and where, against this world order certain of its foundations, psychoanalysis could represent a form of liberation.

So dear friends, journalists of the Nouvel Observateur, know that the twenty-first century psychoanalysts did not remain there. Psychoanalysis did not cut itself off from society; on the contrary, it has not ceased to confront the new impasses produced by the hypermodern Western civilization.

Primo: Analysands and analysts are more than anyone aware of the reality of the changes in the symbolic order. It is even the title of a book just published, The unconscious of daddy and ours, by the psychoanalyst Serge Cottet. What is implied, for those who had not noticed it yet, is: our unconscious, and thereby our malaise and our existential impasses, are not the same as those of our fathers and mothers, even less of our grandfathers and grandmothers. Psychoanalysis of the twenty-first century does not operate in the atmosphere of Freud’s time, or in that of Lacan’s. And we, analysands and analysts of this new era, are here to bear witness to this.

Secundo: Where did you see that according to today’s psychoanalysts homosexuality would be a disease? Wake up! Homosexuals, when they wish, undertake an analysis, as heterosexuals do. And their symptoms are not necessarily related to their sexual orientation. Moreover, we really do not see how the fact of being homosexual would offer a guarantee against anxiety and existential difficulties. Like everyone else, they may suffer difficulties in their love and sex life, at work or within the family, and they may want to speak about it with an analyst. One should rather ask whether it is not the neuroscientists looking for the gay gene who consider that being gay could be the result of a genetic defect…

Tertio: What makes you say that in the United States, the analytic discourse seems to be outdated? Judith Butler, the main representative of Gender Studies, does not deprive herself of resorting to Jacques Lacan’s contribution, when she reinterprets his aphorism The Woman does not exist (La Femme n’existe pas) in order to question gender disorder. And even if the deconstruction of gender follows quite a different logic from that of the Lacanian approach in the questioning of femininity and the impossibility of defining the universal feminine, it nevertheless owes him something and is inspired by him to a certain degree. Lacan did not miss this appointment with his time and he even anticipated one in the future, in an era where the question of what women want has become a major issue of civilization.

Finally, “a missed appointment with science”, according to you… Why? Because “the fundamentalists of the unconscious continue to refuse any form of evaluation”. The fact that psychoanalysis grapples with current scientist demands, such as quantitative evaluation, which incidentally seems to cause much damage in the corporate world (of which you as journalists are well aware), does not however mean that it ignores the issues of its time. To resist dehumanization and the dissolution of the subject by refusing to become an object of statistics is not to ignore progress, but rather to defend a different idea of humanity than the neuronal man or the man living like the others who will have nothing to say any more about his own destiny. It is not to naively believe that a pill or a conditioning may change as if by magic our compulsion to repeat in our lives, which makes us suffer as well. It is to believe in the fact that we are in some respects ethically responsible for our existence and that we can do something about it. As for the issues currently posed by so-called techno-maternity, or all the new possibilities that science offers to women in order to meet their desire for children, they are at the heart of the concerns of psychoanalysts, who do not believe that scientific advances allow us to economize the psychical and ethical consequences that result from them.

If science enjoins treating anxiety, phobias, depression, inhibitions, by means of behavioral reeducation, psychoanalysis continues to give value to speech. Although the way of speaking about intimacy has radically changed, this has not made the treatment easier since the commodification of intimacy in our civilization has led at the same time to a devaluation of speech itself. The effects of interpretation can no longer be produced according to the modalities of Freud’s time. That is why the cures of the twenty-first century only distantly resemble those of Dora, the rat man or the young homosexual. And perhaps one should say that they also differ as much from the cures practiced by Lacan and his contemporaries.

Thus, to confront the current modalities of suffering by continuing to believe in the power of speech, at a time where it is devalued, does not necessarily mean to have remained at the point of daddy’s unconscious, the Oedipus complex and penis envy. During his teaching Lacan went beyond this first version of psychoanalysis, showing how the difficulties that Freud himself had encountered around the question of anxiety or femininity should indicate the points from which psychoanalysis could move forward.

So, who would dare to say that our voyeuristic and exhibitionist civilization does not give rise to more and more anxiety and malaise?

Is it really proven by so-called scientific assessment that speech no longer has any value since you can get a picture of the brain of he who complains of a symptom?

Is it true that, because it is for them possible to be equipped with a camera to film their actions, subjects in the twenty-first century are healthier and happier?

Do we not want to see that the answers given by technology to the malaise of contemporary subjects are also a form of abandonment and letting down?

The aversion towards the functions of speech, which Lacan had diagnosed within the analytic movement itself, has spread to all spheres of civilization. To be educated, you’d rather be placed in front of screens than having to listen to an Other; for the treatment of depression, it would be better to view images on a computer checking boxes for the types of emotions that we feel than to speak to an Other. In short, every form of speech has become suspect in relation to the accuracy of science and machinery.

So to conclude, psychoanalysis, which certainly does not have an answer to everything, which has always worked on its failures, reflected on its difficulties and limitations, does not sell its results as industrial products seeking a share on the market. Psychoanalysis questions itself on the suffering of the subjects in this new symbolic order that is no longer what it was and will never be again. The new forms of addiction, the difficulty of wrenching a subject away from his jouissance, which leads him to hate the other and to self-destruction, the fragility of being and of desire in a world where we ought to believe that it is enough to simply seek pleasure, without limits and without ever encountering the Other, in order to be happy; the loneliness of individuals subject to assessment of their daily performances… These new coordinates of the human condition are the ones which psychoanalysts of the twenty-first century deal with. So yes, psychoanalysis is necessary for those who want it, because it does not abandon people to their impulses and their follies. It still believes that speech has value and that a human being can succeed in resisting the dizzying whirlwind of calls for jouissance, finding through language the possibility to exist as a subject.

It is a strange accusation -that of fundamentalism– against psychoanalysis, coming from those who wonder whether psychoanalysis should be “burnt”. To see here an assumed reference to the regime that burned the books by Freud is not an option. Maybe it should rather be seen as a reference to the Middle Ages that burned its witches? Is it then the significant presence of women in the world of psychoanalysis that inspired the Nouvel Observateur to this too rigid title? What do you want to burn? The books, the analysands, the analysts? This is only an image, of course, but it says maybe better than the articles of the dossier what the symptom is of an era that no longer believes in speech and prefers to silence those who still dare to defend it.

Translated by Francine Danniau