Scilicet
in English! For the first time, for the 9^th Congress of the WAP, ‘A
Real for the 21^st Century’, Paris, 14-18 April, 2014.

If you go to the 
WAP Congress in April, you will receive a free copy of the Scilicet
journal, which is offered this year for the first time, translated into
English. 

If you need to remind yourself about what's special
about Scilicet you can talk to the wise old birds who've been around a long
time, or look on wikipedia.
They will tell you that Scilicet, the word, cropped up in Schreber’s memoires,
and entered into Freud’s correspondence the year that he read it (1912). It
means, literally, thou mayst know, and the early versions of journal – the first issue of the journal came out in
Spring 1968 – had written on the front: Tu peux savoir ce qu’en pense l’École
freudienne de Paris (thou
mayst know what the École freudienne de Paris thinks about it).

The
journal was revived in 2006 for the 5th WAP-Congress in Rome, with the theme of
The Name of the Father.  Then there was the issue 'Les objets a dans l'éxperience analytique’ in 2008
for the 6th WAP Congress in Buenos Aires. In 2010 it was ‘Semblants et
Sinthome’, and in 2012 ‘L’ordre symbolique au 21^st siecle’.

The
one for this year's congress, promised in English for the first time, came out
last November in French, and has also already been published in Spanish. 118
short texts (each one less than 1,000 words) arranged alphabetically like a
dictionary, starting with Anxiety,
and taking in Crime, Desire of the Analyst,
Esthetic Surgery, Science, Magic, Homoparentality, Knot, the Shoah, all the
way to Woman. The great majority of
entries have been written by Spanish speaking analysts, the second largest
language section has been translated from French. There has also been some
translation from Portuguese, Italian and only the handful of English texts this
time did not need to be put through this particular mill, this time round.

At the
end of the book are 18 Scili-Tweets, another first. These are really short
pieces inspired by 8 tweets by Leonardo Gorostiza, the outgoing president
of the WAP. In this section there are short pieces on Dostoyevsky, Bret Easton Ellis, Pornography, Organic-Green, Racism,
iPads and so on.

Thou
mayest know what people in the Schools of the WAP think about a lot of
interesting and pressing things.

Some
of us in London, and many more elsewhere, already know about this book, on
account of the fact we have been helping with the huge job of translating the
texts into English. The work bears witness to a lively and rigorous community
of analysts who have taken it in turns to invent, to write, to read and
re-read, to check, to follow up footnotes, to proof-read and to create working
relationships across the globe to get the job done.

Here
we are, a few days before the production deadline, and ‘The job’ still seems
nigh on impossible to finish. Did you ever watch the film Shakespeare in Love?
Here is a bit which sums up what I think about our prospects of completing ‘the
job’ at the moment:

Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The
natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent
disaster.

Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?

Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it
all turns out well.

Hugh Fennyman: How?

Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.

So, if
you turn up at the WAP and pick up your copy, you may know that insurmountable
obstacles on the road to imminent disaster were indeed the natural condition,
and none of us know how we got it finished in time, though perhaps some of us
know a bit more about the “nothing” that was needed to get it done…

For
now

Janet
Haney

Knotting Seminar, London Society of the NLS, 11 January 2014

Report by Janet Haney

The new-format knotting seminar in London welcomed Nathalie Laceur, secretary in the NLS Executive and member of the Kring Society (Belgium), and Susana Huler, from the GIEP society (Israel). Unfortunately, Mikhaël Strakhov, who was due to come from the group in Russia was unable to join us for the event due to last minute problems with visas. From our own London Society, Veronique Voruz also agreed to present a case for the seminar.

In the opening presentation, Nathalie took up a point from J.-A. Miller’s commentary in Athens[1] and followed the path back to The Dream of the Dead Father, which, she said, “is a dream that Lacan uses to bring us something about the question of the relationship of the subject to desire”. Freud had first used this dream to illustrate a point at the end of his work on Two Principles of Mental Functioning[2]. This ‘absurd’ dream later entered an updated version of The Interpretation of Dreams[3]. Lacan takes up Freud’s discussion at the end of the lesson of 26 November 1958[4].

Nathalie led us through the steps that Lacan took in his commentary on Freud’s approach. First, he noted that this man did not dream of his father in order to satisfy the wish to see him. This was not a dream of wishful thinking. Secondly, he noted that Freud tried to resolve the absurdity of the dream by assuming that there were signifiers that must be added back into it, and that this presupposed that there had been signifiers that had first been subtracted from it. But Lacan had gone on to say “this gives us strictly nothing from the point of view of what Freud himself designates to us as the final aim of interpretation, namely the re-establishment of unconscious desire.” So, if restoring the missing clauses brings nothing new, reasoned Lacan, then it is their removal that has assumed a positive value, and it was this that brought new meaning. What was new was the idea of “an elision”, a process of merging abstract ideas together, which could produce new signification according to the structure in which it occurs. “The dream, far from making an allusion to what came before, namely the relationship of the father with the son (during the father’s lifetime), introduced something that sounded absurd, and that had a range of completely original meanings on the manifest level.” In raising the question of structure, Lacan opened the possibility of considering the question not only via repression but also by rejection, or foreclosure, and arrived at the idea that there could be a feeling of living alongside a death.

This gave the seminar a jolt of life, and as Nathalie paused to question the translation of her words, the mood in the room shifted a gear. “What would happen here, if we were all fully alive?” she asked us, paraphrasing Lacan: “you may imagine what you want, but perhaps you do not dare to even think about it. Though, probably, it doesn’t have the slightest chance of happening, let alone of being desirable.”

Caring for the other, she underlined, is how Lacan coined the heart of the neurotic strategy, for to care for the half-dead in the other ensures that you do not wake the half dead in yourself. 

In her style and presentation of these ideas, Nathalie created a buzz in the seminar, and proceeded to the conclusion of this section of the meeting by summarising the difference between Freud’s and Lacan’s relation to the holes in this dream. “Unlike Freud, Lacan no longer treats the text on the basis of its holes, but as a text in itself. It says something that usually goes unnoticed. Lacan reads the text of the dream, together with the elision of clauses, he takes the absurdity of the dream literally and does not rush to plug the gaps. Rather, he considers the elision as a means of producing a new sense, certainly absurd, but new, and in doing so he makes accessible something that most of the time must remain hidden.”

Then it was Susana Huler’s turn to take the floor, and to give us another chance to appreciate how this novel tack away from Oedipus can work out in practice. She spoke about a case in her clinic – a successful woman who knows a lot about therapy. Susana’s analytic interventions refused to allow her analysand to find refuge in the sleep of complacent self-interpretations, and she showed us the vivacity of her own style and her use of the variable-length sessions to keep her patient alert to life: standing, to end the session she replied to her patient’s self-interpretation with “it is not because you love him that he will die [like your father], but because, like everything that exists, he can cease to exist”. The analysand said (although not in reply to this, but at another time) “what happens to me here is absurd. But empathy holds us back. Empathy makes life easy and comfortable, but not effective. I think it helps that you are not empathetic.”

Finally, Veronique Voruz invited us to consider the way that three different supervisors kept her alert to the real at stake for her young patient who in turn responded to one of these reorientations (‘faut pas rêver’ – get real) by saying something of her intimate truth. The analyst was so struck by how real this declaration was that she thanked the girl for telling her something so true about herself, and thus welcomed and validated it. This then made it possible for the girl to begin to bring further ‘vital’ disclosures, which in turn made it possible for her to talk about her experience with the real and her body. Later, the girl asked her analyst to apologise to her previous therapist on her behalf for not having told her these vital things. Both presentations showed us the parts that can be reached by this particular orientation of our analytic tradition, the roots of which can be traced to Seminar 6.

Each case presentation, in its own style, showed the inventiveness and verve of each analyst (more examples: one went to visit a school to change their decision about removing the child to a school for ‘rejects’, the other welcomed the analysand’s partner into the session to hear her accusations against the analyst). And after this invigorating seminar, the members of the London Society gathered round the table to discuss the results of the work of the ‘flash cartel’ (or ‘fulgurant’ which also translates as ‘lightning’), which had given a careful reading to Chapters 20 and 21 of Seminar 6. More energy pulsed through the group and in writing this now, I am reminded of the exchange in the afternoon seminar, between analyst and her young analysand: the girl expressed a wish to get a job where she could bring inanimate objects to life with electricity, the analyst replied that electricity was to objects what speech was to humans.

Ode to perversion

Report of the Saturday of the NLS, 18 January 2014

by Abe Geldhof

On January 18th 2014, Hervé Castanet, professor and psychoanalyst in Marseille, was our guest in the ‘Kring voor Psychoanalyse’ on the ‘Saturday of the NLS’. His lecture was entitled The Oedipus doesn’t say everything about desire. He started with the personal note that he already read the sixth seminar of Lacan thirty years before the official publication. When Jacques-Alain Miller isolated a quote on account of this publication, there was thrown a new daylight on the whole seminar in retrospect. Lacan namely deconstructs there what he had been elaborating in his earlier seminars. In the last chapter he says: “It is in this sense that we can qualify what is produced as perversion, as the reflection of the protest at the level of the logical subject against what the subject undergoes at the level of identification, in so far as identification is the relationship which establishes and commands the norms of the social stabilization of different functions” (Lacan, 1958-1959: 569, own translation). The lecture of Castanet was in fact a rigorous comment of this quote.

And this quote is an important one! Those who followed the recent debates in France concerning gay marriage and those who remarked how psychoanalysis has been misused in these debates, will be warned immediately. Psychoanalysis has been used by some who wanted to reject homosexuality as a perversion. This is nonetheless absolutely incompatible with the Lacanian point of view. In such a use of psychoanalysis the father is considered as a guarantee that anchors the semblances of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in a biblical relation. Seen in this way, homosexuality doesn’t confirm established ideals and would “thus” be a perversion. This is not the opinion of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Nevertheless a reading of Lacan’s early Seminars III, IV and V could mislead us concerning the status of desire. There he still asserts that so there could be desire, there is a need of the law, the father, the structure, the Oedipus complex. He often quotes in this context the letters to the Romans in which St. Paul judges that the moral law makes sin only more sinful. The law plays in fact in the hands of sin because it spurs on desire to it even more. Desire is so to speak only possible when the third phase of the Oedipus complex has been passed through giving the subject the certificate of “neurotic”. Lacan had already taken the step to unlink desire from the Freudian mythology and from the normative ideal of complete genital love. Against Maurice Bouvet he didn’t believe that the partial drives are bundled in one genital drive targeting one object. In opposition to Melanie Klein her dual conception of the relation between mother and child, he put forward a structure with four elements. The phallus is necessary as a mediating term between mother and child and it is the figure of the father that puts the phallus at its place. This is our dogma, stressed Castanet, but it remains a dogma and as such it has to be questioned incessantly. Starting from the sixth Seminar we can say that desire was before that considered as an imaginary quantity. The Oedipus complex and perversion were facing each other. The consequence is that homosexuality could be considered as an unachieved Oedipus complex and that only neurotics (in the orthodox meaning) could become analyst.

The sixth Seminar of Lacan is a major step forward to this. Now perversion is considered as a protest! And in this context it provokes Lacan’s sympathy. Perversion doesn’t accept what the Other drivels. It is a disagreement with imposed identifications to the social order that makes the subject dumb. When Lacan takes in this point of view, he leaves the structuralism that is like Lévi-Strauss searching for the elementary structures of kinship or like Durkheim researching rules of Patriarchate. With the perversion Lacan introduces a split with regard to the structure. The sixth Seminar can therefore be seen as an important moment: it is the Seminar of the non-existence of the sexual relation.

In a certain sense Lacan is thus paying homage to perversion. This ode concerns especially the point at which a speaking being accepts its most intimate relation to its own body. Nonetheless we can always perceive a double movement in Lacan’s opinion on perversion. After the initial ode there also comes a disregard to perversion. In his Seminar XXI on Les non-dupes errent Lacan for example states that masochism is a sham. “Le masochisme c’est du chiqué”. Lacan is indeed much more resolute in his ode to psychosis. Among other things he praises psychosis because of its rigor. In this sense Lacan pays only homage to perversion insofar as it denudes and challenges desire.

After this theoretical lecture Castanet gave an account on a case in his own practice that has a direct link to what preceded.

Report on the ICLO-NLS Seminar

with Pierre–Gilles Guéguen

Dublin, 6th December 2013

The third clinical conversation with members of the WAP in the series for  2013-14 entitled “The Names of the Real in the 21^st Century” took place in St.Vincent’s Hospital Fairview on December 6^th on  the topic ‘The Status of the Fantasy from Seminar VI toSeminar XXIII’with Pierre-Gilles Gueguen, AME of the ECF, NLS and WAP.

Pierre-Gilles opened the seminar by referring to Jacques-Alain Miller’s introductory address on the next NLS Congress in a text titled ‘The Other without Other’, where J.-A. Miller writes that the core of Seminar  VI  is not interpretation, but ‘it is the subject’s unconscious relation to the object in the desiring experience of the fantasy’. [1]

In this text, Miller précised that the object of desire is for the first time differentiated from the other person, partner or ambition, it is unconscious desire and asks what does desire aim at?.  For Lacan desire is a desire for an object that causes it, that is object a. In addition to the oral and anal objects Lacan adds the gaze in Seminar X and the voice in Seminar XI. There is a continuous thread in Lacan’s thought evolution to link desire as a lack of something, a lack of being – the locus on the body of the subject will lead Lacan to formulate the drive as a source of jouissance in his later teaching.  

Object a escapes the Name-of-the-Father and the paternal metaphor. This is important to understand in today’s practice and theory, putting the accent on the fact that the Name-of-the-Father is a concept of early Lacan, as civilization shows us that the position of the Name-of-the-Father does not regulate the position of the subject today. In the contemporary clinic of psychoanalysis the Name-of-the-Father is inoperant though there are still analysts who maintain the orthodoxy of the Name-of-the-Father.

The orientation of Seminar VI is based on a phrase – there is no sexual relation – that will appear later in Lacan’s teaching in Seminars XIX and XX in the 1970s: there is no harmony between partners except through the prism of the fantasy. The world and the relationship we have with the world is mediated by what Lacan calls ‘the window of the fantasy’  in Seminar XI: the fundamental fantasy is the unconscious fantasy. While the patient complains about his symptom, he does not complain about the fundamental fantasy – usually because he does not know about it. It is uncovered only through analysis, free association and through repetition. The fundamental fantasy emerges via the sayings of the analysand.  It repeats itself over and over again and is not susceptible to interpretation.  In other words the fantasy as such, whether it is the fundamental fantasy of a man or of a woman, is equivalent to a supplementary jouissance, to a jouissance that does not obey the phallic function.

This raises some issues that J.-A. Miller confronts when he writes that ‘psychoanalysis takes place at the level of the repressed and of the interpretation of the repressed thanks to the subject supposed to know’.[2] Today, analysands are still encouraged to free associate as much as possible – this is the dimension of the transferential unconscious, however ‘in the 21^st Century it is a question of psychoanalysis exploring another dimension, that of the defence against the real without law and without meaning.[3] The thesis is, that this defence against the real is the fantasy or as Miller writes it‘..the real unconscious is not intentional: it is encountered under the modality of “that’s it”, which you could say is like our ‘amen’.[4]  

At the end of lesson on 23^rd May 1959 Lacan tries to define anew what is our mission, our duty as psychoanalysts. He affirms once again the task of the analyst is not to adapt the subject to reality. The key of the dimension of truth demands of the subject  ‘those that concern his being’. In the dimension of fantasy there is no promise of happiness. The fundamental fantasy can bring the subject to loss and Lacan shows this in writing about Hamlet: the realization of Hamlet’s fundamental fantasy will bring his own death. There is no desire if there is no sexual fantasy that sustains that desire which Lacan also declines in another way – ‘there’s no such thing as pure desire’. Wanting-to-be cannot sustain itself without a wanting to find a testimony of being, something that brings life to desire which otherwise would be a desire for a void. J.-A. Miller says that ‘in an analysis to act is to act in such a way that the imaginary takes charge in the analytical experience of the real’[5] There is no knowledge in the real, only knowledge about the real. The closest we can go to the real is through the formula of the fundamental fantasy. The real is what cannot be said, it can be approached or circumscribed by the symbolic and imaginary, but we cannot say what the real is made of. Even the object is not the real – the object is the excitation of the part of our body, for example, the oral object is the sensation that eating produces in the mouth and the body.

The jouissance of the body is autistic: thanks to love and to the fantasy we can have relationships with partners – but in the end jouissance is autistic. Pierre-Gilles tells us that Lacan makes an important clinical point indicating that the analyst should not interpret the fundamental fantasy, as it encourages the analysand to stay attached to it. Since desire has to be sustained and mixed in with fantasy, it can be perverse if not sublimated: desire is always mixed with sexual desire, with sadism, with masochism.

Lacan offers something in Seminar VI which will last until Seminar XXX111 and more – as he asks, how do we operate if we cannot interpret the fundamental fantasy, what can we do? To answer this, Lacan elaborates on the separation and alienation of ‘the cut’ and in Seminar VI, he gives examples of the object that can be cut in neurosis and psychosis.

With regards to psychosis Pierre-Gilles spoke about the cut in the delusion via the example of Schreber. While Schreber’s fantasy is of a woman submitting to copulation, the object is the voice: it is through the voice and the voice of god that he can derive his fantasy.Lacan does not make a separation between what a psychoanalyst does with a psychotic subject and what he does with a neurotic or perverse subject. The question for psychoanalysis is where to do the cut, making the cut at the right moment.

It is the differentiation between the text of the fundamental fantasy and the object that is at stake. This is consistent with what we know from Freud. The analytic task would be to operate a good separation, that is, to keep the desire going, sustained by the fundamental fantasy and still separate from the object – that is, what is in the analysand that he does not want to know about himself.

Pierre-Gilles concluded his seminar by sharing a case and two vignettes with us. The case was of a young boy who attended analysis for eighteen months. Via the case Pierre-Gilles brought to life some of the elements that he spoke about in his earlier conversation, for example, by interpreting, by making the cut, the analyst produced a before and an after that was clearly marked for the young analysand.  For Lacan, that is the definition of the analytic act or as Pierre-Gilles says, the analyst sees the effect of something, on the subject when he says it. The analyst identified the master signifier for this child which related to the paternal metaphor and the different moments when movement took place within the analysis. The analysis concluded with the child choosing a path of life and hope instead of endless repetition.

In the first vignette Pierre-Gilles spoke about a young hysteric woman whose symptom – related to the father – brought the body and her fantasy into play and the question of being either a woman or a mother as it seems it is not possible for her to embody both positions.

The second vignette related to a young girl who is very unhappy as her mother is expecting another child. Via dreams and drawings, this child reveals her fantasy and the transferential relationship allows her subjective desire to emerge.

In the afternoon session, Florencia Shanahan  and Rik Loose shared two extremely interesting clinical presentations. The first case put into question and opened up a dialogue as to the differential diagnosis of the subject in question. The second case – a completed analysis – concerned the gaze and the jouissance of the gaze and Pierre-Gilles commented that it was a rich and wonderful case.

The day was an important one for ICLO members. On behalf of ICLO-NLS we thank Pierre-Gilles for his presence and generous contribution to the formation our members.

Claire Hawkes (ICLO)