Communiqué from the President of the NLS

Analyzing the School

 

The New
Executive Committee

 

The NLS is the only bilingual School of the WAP, and
while it has a large representation in Europe, it regroups communities
extending throughout several continents.

 

What about its teaching, and what are the
consequences?

 

First, the language. English is imposing itself more
and more in the School. At the same time, the center of gravity of the NLS is
changing. These two phenomena work together.

 

In this respect, the NLS bears much of the responsibility
for the propagation of Lacanian-oriented psychoanalysis in the world.

 

I paid attention to this in the creation of the new
Executive Committee. The Committee includes two Anglophones living in North
America, in the USA and Canada, and we meet via Skype on Sundays at 11 am in
America and 5 pm in Europe.

 

I will be its President.

The Vice-President will be Alexandre Stevens.

There will be three people in the role of Secretary:
Pamela King, Maria Cristina Aguirre and Ruzanna Hakobyan.

The role of Treasurer will fall to Nelson Feldman.

Frank Rollier will take care of the cartels, as he has
done with much dynamism these past two years.

 

Knottings

 

During my time as Vice-President, I took into account
the intense desire felt by members to be more involved in the politics of the
School. This is the point I would like to develop here.

 

I first looked at the question of knowing what a
school of psychoanalysis in the Freudian Field is. The NLS is not an
organization of psychoanalysts, such as the IPA. It is a School where the
question, “What is a psychoanalyst?” is asked. This is the question Lacan asked
when he founded his School. It is true that the NLS is a community of psychoanalysts,
but of psychoanalysts that are in training, One by One. The School, in my
opinion, regroups psychoanalyst/analysands that are summoned to answer to the
question of Lacan.

 

On what is the training of psychoanalysts based? It is
based on a triple footing.

 

First, it relies on one’s personal analysis. The
analytic setting is the place par excellence where psychoanalysts are
constituted, One by One. This we know, but I like to emphasize it and perhaps
point out that it is not in our Clinical Sections that we learn to become a
psychoanalyst. I do not underestimate the importance of these clinical training
grounds, but I think it is useful to make this clarification.

 

Secondly, the practice of psychoanalysis cannot be
conceived of without that of supervision.

 

And the third footing is that which constitutes the
cartels. Their important place was sufficiently demonstrated during this last Congress.

 

After this introduction, I can now address my
perceptions as Vice-President, in particular the desire that is manifest
throughout the NLS to be involved in the politics of the School.

 

Marx let us know that the tool is a determining
factor, therefore let’s create the tool. It is for this reason that I thought
it would be interesting to organize, in the manner of the ECF, events around
the theme, “Questions of the School”.

 

In addition, the Knottings
seminars, invented by Gil Caroz when he was President of the NLS, would benefit
from adapting to the changes taking place in the landscape of our School. The Knottings were invented to create a work
transference between the members of the Societies. This instrument, that serves
the politics of work transference in our School, should probably be honed so
that we can refocus on the politics that we want to carry out in our School.

 

The Knottings
should take into consideration the desire of all of the members of the School –
of those, for example, who are not members of a Society – to use this tool. Why
not, for instance, draw inspiration from the experience of the NEL in Latin
America that also recognizes the problem of distance and separation between its
members? In the NEL, they organize seminars via WebEx. This system functions
well in Latin America, relieving many of the costs of traveling. Let’s be
sufficiently geek.

 

Now We Come to the 2019 Congress

 

The Congresses that have been organized by the NLS
have in general addressed clinical problems and fundamental concepts of
psychoanalysis. Here are some of the themes that have been taken up:

 

Applied Psychoanalysis

Anxiety

The Clinic of Paternity

The Body and Its Objects

Lacanian Interpretation

Daughter, Mother, Woman in the Twenty-first Century

Reading a Symptom

Moments of Crisis

The Psychotic Subject in the Geek Era

What Cannot Be Said

Discreet Signs in Ordinary Psychosis

About the Unconscious

and, In a State of Transference.

 

Considering our School members’ interest in what psychoanalytic
training is, I thought it would be a good moment to address this question
through the prism of The Latest Lacan. I propose that we take an interest in a
text that Jacques-Alain Miller (JAM) commented on at several moments during his
course: the “Preface to the English-Language Edition of Seminar XI.[1]
This text, Lacan’s last, deals with the pass. Four main signifiers are the
subject of this text: The real unconscious, urgent cases, satisfaction, and, of
course, the pass. I consider them to be four new concepts that articulate with
each other.

 

In his course, “The Latest Lacan” [“Le tout dernier
Lacan”], JAM discusses Lacan’s later teachings, in particular Lacan’s last
three seminars and “L’esp d’un laps” (the title that JAM gave to the text that
was written in the days following the Seminar, The Sinthome). I thus invite you to read all of JAM’s 2006-2007
course, as well as the text, “L’esp d’un laps” that is commented on by JAM in
the first three lessons of this course, “The Latest Lacan”. It is also
commented on in the course, “Choses de finesse en psychanalyse” during the
lesson of January 2009. All of these lessons have been published in French in various
journals of the ECF.

 

The title of the 2019 Congress has been decided: ¡Urgent!
That is, what is urgent in the clinic, the urgency of the speaking being, the
urgency of the parlêtre. As with a
solid substance, that which is urgent can be approached from different angles.
It can be looked at from the angle of trauma, but also from that of the
entrance into treatment. It can be examined from the side of the end of the
treatment and its articulation with satisfaction, or from that of the reception
of psychical suffering in institutions. In short, I believe we have a theme
that follows the logic of our previous congresses and responds to the pressing
sense of urgency in our School and our civilization today.

 

An idea emerged amongst the Anglophone members of our
Executive Committee: Why not translate into English the lessons from JAM’s
course that I just underlined? I asked JAM, and he agreed. I thus have the
pleasure of announcing that The Lacanian
Review will be publishing a Special Issue which will include the first
three lessons of Miller’s course, “The Latest Lacan”, as well as the lesson of
21 January 2009 that appeared in La Cause freudienne No. 74 under the title,
“La passe du parlêtre”, in both French
and in English. Russell Grigg has agreed to translate these texts for us. I
also proposed to JAM that we republish the Preface of the English-language edition
of Seminar XI, and he accepted this proposal. This will constitute, in my
opinion, an attractive working tool in view of the forthcoming 2019 Congress
that will take place in Tel Aviv on June 1^st and 2^nd.
This Special Issue will be given to all members of the NLS, as well as to all
those who register to the next Congress. The Organizing Commission of this 2019
Congress has already been formed.

 

 

Bernard Seynhaeve

July 1st, 2018