Moments de crise / Moments of Crisis – ENGLISH

Moments of
Crisis

Gil Caroz

A hypothesis: the list of psychoanalytic groups that make
up the NLS contains a knowledge about “crisis” that it would be interesting to
bring to light.  If we consider
crisis as one of the master signifiers of our time, and, as such, a way of
naming the real, the panoply of countries encompassed by our School can teach us
about a series of modes of relation to the real. Between Israel, a country
constantly in crisis, and Switzerland, which seems to avoid all crises, Greece
and Ireland have become emblems of economic crisis in Europe, Great Britain and
Canada are the precursors of the crisis of scientism and technology, Belgium is
the locus of a linguistic crisis, Ukraine is marked by the crises of a state
finding it difficult to establish itself as such, and let’s leave it there.

The signifier “crisis” refers, etymologically, to a
critical moment of upheaval and also to a judgement with respect to a decision
to be taken. From the time of Hippocrates, this signifier has been used in the
medical field to designate a phase of an illness where the symptoms manifest
themselves in an acute form. Later, the term “crisis” found its place, quite
naturally, in the field of psychiatry, and easily infiltrated the dimension of
the Other that we call political, social, economic, historic and moral. Today
this signifier is part of common discourse.