REPORT ON THE 2nd ICLO-NLS Study-Day

Dublin, 8^th June 2013

By Carmel Dalton

In her opening address, the Chair of ICLO-NLS Florencia F.C. Shanahan welcomed all attendees and in particular Dominique Holvoet, President of the New Lacanian School, who travelled to Ireland to work with us.  She reiterated the function of the event as an occasion for the group to expose, question, and bear witness to their engagement with the psychoanalytic discourse.

The Lacanian conception of psychosis is very different to that of any other approach; for Lacan psychosis is not the name of a class. Nor can psychosis be reduced to a structure, in deficit with regards to others. However, the psychotic has to order his world without reference to established discourses.In this hyper-modern time, the question arises as to where delusion begins and ends. Florencia then made mention of two references to delusion which she urged be kept in mind throughout the day. The first one by Freud, in ‘Psychoanalytical notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia’ and the second one by Jacques-Alain Miller, in ‘Ordinary Psychosis Revisited’, where he states that to be an analyst is to know your own phantasm is a delusion and to attempt to abandon it so that you may perceive the delusion of your analysand. The subtitle of the Study-Day, namely ‘Belief, Certainty, Invention’ refers less to the psychotic and more to the transmission of the psychoanalyst, to what is at play in each individual’s singular encounter with a speaking-being.

The first session entitled “Psychosis Today”, was chaired by Linda Clarke who introduced Marlene ffrench Mullen and Alan Rowan. In Marlene’s paper ‘Life has no meaning…’ her underlying question, arising from the last Congress ‘What do we call psychosis today?’ is what does it mean to say that the Name-of-the-Father (NOTF) does not operate? We need to know what we are referring to when we speak of the NOTF- the No of the father. If the paternal metaphor operates, it names ones being, keeps the jouissance of the other at bay and installs the capacity to love. According to Lacan, in relation to how women love, how they come into being, he asserted that they are spoken into being. They demand that men speak about them and it is in this way that a woman, if language is incorporated, receives being from the other. Language issues a subject being and having- that is, a body. A symptom starts with two people and is spread out over the four positions of the discourses, where the subject is represented by S1 for S2.Language does not necessarily house jouissance but the body can. Compensation and substitution can enable a subjective soldering of the psychotic hole. The sinthome is more stable than imaginary mechanisms.

Alan in his paper ‘Dreams in Psychosis’, began by saying that while for Freud dreams were the royal road to the unconscious, they are not spoken about as much now. Lacanian analysts work with a differential clinic, that is, treat psychotic and neurotic analysands differently. With his language the psychotic attempts to name an unnameable jouissance and in this way to make a name for himself. The question of how to work clinically with dreams was then posed. Primary process thinking is evident in both dreams and psychosis. One difference however is that dreams allow a temporary withdrawal of external reality while in psychosis there is the real of experience, no withdrawal possible and a struggle to find relief. In psychotic patients there is a loss of dream associations, what is being dealt with is the real unconscious, the unconscious of jouissance, dream images are primitive attempts at representation and the dream simply is what it is, an experience. Alan proposed three answers to the question of how to work with psychotic dreams in general- treat them as a direct representation of the psychotic preoccupation of the subject, understand them as a symbolic frame and a way of allowing another relationship to knowledge to emerge away from the certainty of delusion, appreciate them as offering the possibility of an alternative construction of the subject’s history, his narrative.

The second session entitled “Belief in the Other”, was chaired by Lorna Kernan who introduced Caroline Heanue and Claire Hawkes. Caroline’s paper ‘An Inquiry. Ireland’s scandalous brutal silence’, referenced Peter Tyrrell, a man who set himself on fire in London, was in Letterfrack Industrial School since age 8 and was quoted as saying that his story, which is true, should be written in his own name. His story was published but not until some 40 years later. In the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse 2009, revelations were exposed which ruptured the social bond and made clear the failings of Church and State. The remit of the Report was to investigate abuse but much was excluded. Following it the Redress Board was set up and generic apologies were given. The national reaction was shock and disbelief -we did not know. This is representative of the discourse of Ireland which wants to know nothing. In Letterfrack supposed juvenile delinquents were separated from peers and inserted into the Real of abuse. The institution was the embodiment of a totemic father where there was no love, protection or phantasy. Locals were mute. The Report refers to two matters not previously spoken of – the enjoyment by locals of both School events and of the boys themselves. Silence continues to deny the past, there is a knowing without knowing, it is a discourse not yet concluded, a past with effects that can only be spoken of singularly.

Claire’s paper ‘The repercussions of psychosis on the subject and the other’, opened with two vignettes. In each, there is devastation for the spouse when something of a psychotic structure is revealed in their partner upon marriage, in the first case, and after marriage but upon signing for a new house, in the second. Two questions come to the fore – what kept the couples together before these events, and what triggered the psychoses and destruction of their relationships thereafter. In expanding these points, reference was made to aspects of Freud and Lacan’s work and also that of Francois Sauvagnat and his comments on elementary phenomena. These are delusional phenomena which the subject can often manage until such a time as they develop fully – if this is to occur- into a delusional or hallucinatory experience. The study of elementary phenomena is thus crucial. Clinically, the diagnosis of psychosis is based on the presence of these phenomena. A potential answer to the question of what held the couples together is that this pairing served as an imaginary identification – a mechanism which functioned but was devoid of symbolic consistency. In response to the question of the triggering of the psychosis/collapse of the relationship, one notes both a structural and contingent elements. In these cases the signing of the marriage register, and the paperwork for the house respectively, each of these being a symbolic act.

The third session entitled “Certainty of the Object”, was chaired by Gerard Power who introduced Rik Loose and Susan McFeely. In his paper ‘Mania’, Rik commented that many patients he has received have come with diagnoses of mood disorders. It is reductionist to state that melancholia is the polar opposite of mania. The question arises as to how to understand mood disorders psychoanalytically? A vignette showed how the one particular analysand equates language with jouissance– it runs away with her and disconnects her from the Other. The analyst must treat the world the melancholic inhabits; to confront the truth that life is a semblance. The melancholic despises himself, enraptured by the pure culture of the death drive. Mania, within the context of depression and modern subjectivity, sees the subject set adrift, susceptible to the contingencies of modern life, the signifier has lost some traction. Mania is not the opposite but the other side of depression. In melancholia, it is not the object but rather the ideal that is lost, and once lost it is introjected as compensation into the ego. All identifications with the ideal object have their shadow side – I am nothing. In melancholia, jouissance is unlimited and internalised within the ego. In mania, the object does not provide an anchoring, there is no object cause of desire. The non- functioning of the object in melancholia has a very particular effect.

In her paper ‘Heroin or Heroin(e)?’, Susan indicated her intention to chart the movement from Freud to Lacan in relation to addiction and toxicomania, in response to the question of the function of heroin in the clinic of psychosis. Tension exists between pleasure and non-pleasure. Intoxicating substances allow the individual to take refuge in their own world which is detrimental to the subject. Subject must find for himself the particular way he can be saved. There are two outcomes for man; consolation in yield of pleasure afforded by substances or, psychosis. The psychotic can’t articulate jouissance to the law. Language is the treatment for jouissance. While three mechanisms for treating it are possible, substitution was focused on. In the clinic a new symptom is evident in toxicomania, a new organisation which defers a triggering. In one case, the triggering was around becoming a father. Heroin was this man’s solution, one which saved him but is deadly. Psychosis is not being for the Other, toxicomania is something different – it precludes the Other, severs the social link. Drugs govern, regulate and manage jouissance. Being clean is unbearable for this man and so he goes back using. The psychotic’s use of drugs is different to the neurotic’s; the command to abstain can be detrimental. Analyst knows wish to save this analysand must cease, her hope must be given up to facilitate something else to emerge.

The fourth and final session entitled “Inventing One-self” was chaired by Florencia who introduced Joanne Conway and Tom Ryan. Joanne clarifies that the name of her paper “Limitless” is that of a film and also a signifier that has emerged in her work with analysand. The film’s character, Eddie, is a struggling writer who has great plans which can never come to fruition until he discovers a pill that enables him to do anything. Soon however he is confronted with his own limit; when his body breaks down from the drug and when he cannot live up to this version of himself for the Other. The opening scene shows him on a balcony- it’s time to pay the price- but he doesn’t jump, he has one more game to play with the Other. The analysand in question, however, did jump from the roof. For him, the voice takes up the place of the vacillation between mania and melancholia. In jumping, he sought not death but the imposition of a limit, a solution to his limitlessness.

In his paper, ‘Ordinary Psychosis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film The Master’, Tom spoke of the film and its central character, an oiler in the Navy, named Freddie Quell. He is an alcoholic, a man with a difficult relationship to language. The concept of being pinned down is pervasive. For a time, he becomes attached to the Master, Dodd, the leader of cult who peddles his theories nationwide. Freddie struggles with the social bond, always on the periphery of a group. In one particular moment there is potential for a triggering- when taking a picture of an older man a child is heard crying in the background- in this instant the gaze and voice intersect and there is an encounter with the Real father. Dodd’s wife is threatened by Freddie as she recognises that the men love each other at the level of substance and lalangue. Perhaps Freddie is less an ordinary psychotic and more a man surrounded by ordinary psychosis. The Master and his followers could be ordinary psychotics. On board the yacht, there are many examples of what Marie-Helene Brousse describes as super-social behaviour – the group are compliant and obedient, diligently listening to the Master. When the time comes for the men to go their separate ways, Dodd wishes Freddie luck in finding a means to live without serving a master, a feat that he believes has been attained by no other. Alone again, Freddie seeks other ways of being pinned down, anchored.

Throughout this most enjoyable day, discussion was plentiful. Comments were made, and questions asked, of each speaker and after every session. Contributions were forthcoming from many of the attendees and those from Dominique showed clearly both his careful reading of, and attention to, the material as well as his undoubted engagement with the work itself. In particular, he noted the quality of the papers and the myriad of themes and concepts being worked on.

While it is impossible to capture fully the richness of the issues raised, among them were the following: the operation and potential disappearance of the NOTF today, determining how to work with the dreams of a psychotic subject, abuse of boys in Letterfrack as a voiceless trauma, the functioning of imaginary compensations in the stage of pre-psychosis, the chiasm through which a melancholic subject can fall, toxicomania as a symptom of the 21^st century and evidence of the constant connection between the object and the surplus of jouissance, the psychotic subject possessing the knowledge that the problem is language,and the status of the master and the ideology of freedom.

In her closing address, Florencia thanked all attendees and then announced a number of upcoming local and international events before wishing everyone a good summer break.

 

New formula of the project of the electronic cartels

Dear Colleagues,

 As it was announced at the end of the report of the second round of the electronic cartels, the e-cartel project will be lightly modified the next year. These modifications aim at the reinforcement of the work within each cartel and the facilitation of the exchanges among the cartels.

Taking into account the difficulties we have noted during last year, the new formula of the e-cartel project for 2013-2014 is the following:

1^st step: Constitution of the cartels as groups (4+1) or on individual basis. In the last case, it is the delegate of the cartels who, as a general rule, will be charged with the designation of the Plus-One. The Plus-Ones will send the composition of their cartel by the 15^th of September to the following e-mail address: d.andropoulou@yahoo.gr

2^nd step: The members of each cartel choose from the proposed cases, the vignette that will be commented upon and discussed. In order to stimulate the work by all members of the cartel, more time (about 3 months) will be allowed for the exchanges between the members of the cartel (theoretical elaboration of the case, specifications on the evolution of the case, effects of the analytical act, elaborated work on the structure of the case etc.)

3rd step: Each cartel, represented by the Plus-One, sends its elaborated vignette to the delegate of the cartels.

4^th step: Redistribution of the vignettes by the delegate.

5^th step: Each cartel works on the case of another cartel for 2 months. An extime participates in the discussion.

6^th step: The vignettes are sent to the delegate. The delegate sends back each commented vignette to the cartel that has written it.

7th strep: The author has at their disposal a month in order to send their vignette in its final version (including the commentaries of the other cartel and/or answers to questions posed).

The deadlines of each step as well as the names of the extimes and other information will be given out during the procedure.

The delegate of the cartels

Despina Andropoulou

 

 

 

HURLY-BURLY 9

Pierre-Gilles Guéguen

Light and Shadows on a Case of Gay Bashing (excerpt)

“The following text is based on an article dating back to 2010. Since then, public opinion has become more favourable towards homosexual and lesbian persons. President Obama has made several moves to make gay rights evolve. Still, the facts related in this article remain too frequent; they remind us that human sexuation is not natural but linked to the traumas exerted by language on our bodies and that for each subject they have a resonance that is unique and should be taken into consideration as such.

     An article in the New York Times on the 4th of October 2010, written by the journalist Jessie McKinley, a correspondent of the NYT in San Francisco, had a resounding success at moving public opinion. The article reports on a series of suicides amongst gay adolescents, following the humiliation and abuse that was inflicted upon them by their classmates or fellow students. 

     The list of these suicides is long, but the journalist focuses on four specific cases, one of which particularly shook public opinion; it is about a student who was filmed, without his knowledge, in his room in a university residence during a homosexual relation. The video was then placed on the web. Shortly afterwards, the young man committed suicide in a spectacular way by throwing himself off the George Washington Bridge in New York City.”

Translated from the French by Frances Coates-Ruet,

with thanks to Nancy Gillespie

HURLY-BURLY 9

 

Sophie Marret-Maleval

 

Lacan’s Henology: from Ontology to the Ontic (excerpt)

 

 

“If Jacques-Alain Miller recalls that “there is no particular moment where you can isolate Lacan’s turning point”, that he makes his way step by step, Miller nevertheless situates Chapter 8 of Seminar XX as “the moment when it becomes patent that Lacan renounces the reference to being, renounces ontology, including his own, his modified ontology, in order to privilege the register of the real””

………

“The passage from ontology to the ontic concerns the displacement of emphasis operated by Lacan from the register of being to that of existence.

The two first periods of his teaching remained captive to ontology. Here, Lacan tried to elaborate “what could be called a being without substance”, a product of the signifier, a “being without the real where, let’s say a being, that of the subject, that is only inscribed by being differentiated from the real and by posing itself at the level of meaning”. Jacques-Alain Miller indicates that it is at this level that the “semantic ontology” of Lacan is at work. The want-of-being and the desire to be, that constitute the pivot, are still situated in the regime of being.”

………

“The object a, as delimited negativity, does not allow for a rupture with ontology. He further underlines that with the crossing of the fantasy, Lacan “preserves the idea of […] the ontological conclusion, he spoke about it as disbeing [désêtre]”, going back to what he had already said “in a more poetic way when he spoke about the want of being or of the uninhabited horizon of being”. We can see in the deflation of desire, “that desire is only a metonymy of the want-of-being, a revelation, and the ontological revelation is this, it is the revelation of disbeing [désêtre].””

 

 

Translated from the French by Dylan Trigg and Bogdan Wolf

 

  PIPOL NEWS  60  

 
Après coup of PIPOL 6

A Sunny Weekend in Brussels

Jean-Daniel Matet

There were lots of people -1300 delegates— at the Square Meeting Centre in Brussels, for the 2nd Congress
of the EuroFederation of Psychoanalysis, PIPOL VI, on 6 and 7 July
2013. The careful reception and preparation by Gil Caroz’s organising
team favoured a rigorous exchange which demanded to be prolonged beyond a
very precise timing.

On Saturday, in ten multi-function rooms, 120
speakers from many countries of the EuroFederation and the WAP
(Argentina, Belgium (Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia), Brazil, Bulgaria,
Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece,
Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain,
Switzerland) gave an overview of clinical practice in institutions or in
the private practice of psychoanalysts. Each one-hour session, with a
moderator and a discussant, was an opportunity to discuss two papers on a
variety of subjects, in Italian, Spanish, French, Flemish and English.
The general orientation was given under the title “The case, the
institution and my experience of psychoanalysis.” Some trying to capture
the logic of the treatment, the effects on the symptom, jouissance and
interpretation, consequences of the evolution in the relations of the
masculine and the feminine. Others testified to these consequences in
the institutional clinic – always considered on a case by case basis-,
as well as to the institutions themselves, their structure and their way
of functioning.

On Sunday, the presentations concentrated in
the plenary hall, with high quality simultaneous translations, to
approach the evolution of the forms of desire and jouissance marked by
an expansion of the feminine. The opening address by the Vice-President
of the European Parliament, Isabelle Durant, who articulated with
precision her interest for the papers of this congress, was able to
translate what she observed of political life in Europe, and its
resistances and hopes for the place of women in contemporary lifestyles.
The President of the EuroFederation, Gil Caroz, who welcomed her, found
an opportunity to express to her the sentiment of a friendly
relationship shared through the fights led since the Forum of Women, in
Paris in 2010. The President of the WAP, Leonardo Gorostiza, introduced
the presentations by recalling the orientation given by Jacques-Alain
Miller through Lacan’s teaching.

The first session brought a precise light
onto the clinic after Oedipus, through the feminine clinic (Eric
Laurent), the decline of psychiatry (Miquel Bassols), and the
institution when it gives place to the feminine (Alexandre Stevens).

Under the title “Lacanian Actions,” the
original initiatives of three women — in Moscow, Yulia Akhtyamova, in
Paris, Mireille Battut with La main à l’oreille, in Belgium, Nathalie
Laceur, through the expertise oriented by the Lacanian clinic during a
court trial- who showed their determination to displace conventional
discourses by relying on their own experience of psychoanalysis.

As the guest speaker of the following
session, chaired by Lilia Mahjoub and Jacques-Alain Miller, failed to
attend due to unforeseen circumstances, Clotilde Leguil and Ben Verzele
showed the link that is established between the analysand’s supervision
and his/her interventions in cases received in institutions. At the risk
of only hearing the echo of the effects on the analyst of the encounter
with the patient, with emphasis on counter-transference, Jacques-Alain
Miller noted the necessity, for the future, to go “to the bottom of the
structure” in the analysis of a case.

The afternoon began with an intervention by
Mitra Kadivar, two weeks after her visit to Paris, who recounted her
journey in Teheran to promote the Freudian text and transmit her
enthusiasm for its translation into Persian. Not without a humorous
touch that her analytic formation has given her, she showed, under her
chosen title, “A superb self-reliance,” the obstacles she faced on her
pathway and the support she found from Jacques-Alain Miller, the Schools
of the WAP, but also her fierce determination, achieving a transmission
of the corrosive salt of the Freudian message within the Iranian
society of her time.

Echoing their recent publications, Mercedes
de Francisco, Philippe Hellebois and Stella Harrisson made some figures
of the contemporary feminine resonate (“Hypermodern women”) through
literature on “Love in the Feminine,” “Scandalous Women,” “News on
Feminine Sexuality.”

The last session, Feminine Passages, gave the
floor to four Analysts of the School (AS) — Hélène Bonnaud, Paola
Bolgiani, Guy Briole, Araceli Fuentes — who were able to transmit to us
that which, in their analyses, had shifted in relation to the body and
the mother.

Jacques-Alain Miller, in a commentary of some
sections of Lacan’s recently published Seminar VI, Desire and Its
Interpretation, showed the mutation outlined by Lacan with regards to
the place of the Other of language and the status of the object, still
related to the image, but anticipating its real status through the
formula of the fantasy introduced in the graph. The novelty of his
reading has made us even more eager for his course to resume where these
commentaries will unfold.

Gil Caroz briefly concluded these two intense
congress days by thanking the many members of the organising team who
impeccably assured the development of the Congress. He himself received a
very long applause for the work he carried out over the last three
years as head of the EuroFederation, before handing it over to his
successor, Jean-Daniel Matet, elected the previous day by the General
Assembly.

The hospitality and friendliness of the
Belgian colleagues, from Friday evening around drinks, strengthen the
affectio societatis, culminating in the soirée which brought the
delegates together in this wonderful place that is the Albert Hall, and
gave this congress a warm working atmosphere.

9th July 2013 

Translation: Florencia F.C. Shanahan and Ian Curtis

The electronic intercartels at work – Report on the second round

By Despina Andropoulou, NLS delegate of cartels

The fruitful work of the electronic cartels came officially to its end a few days before the Congress of the NLS in Athens, a Congress that has exceeded any expectation, being up to the celebration of the ten years of our School.

The significant contribution of the e-cartels to the preparation of this great event dealing with the theme “the psychotic subject in the Geek era” is an undisputable fact. One of the papers of the first round and five papers of the second were presented at the simultaneous sessions, which proves that the electronic cartels are an essential instrument that promotes work transference within the NLS.

“Reality is approached by apparatuses of jouissance…”[1]

Every speaking being is constituted on the one hand by the primordial jouissance and on the other hand by the Other of language that is already there as an apparatus that regulates this jouissance. Lacan has related the subject of the signifier to the demand of the Other through the matheme of the drive (S barred ◊ D). Lacan strictly casts of drive as a signifying chain. The subject of the unconscious is designated ton the basis of an organic location (oral, anal, etc.)[2]. Moreover, it is by means of the circular movement of the drive around a subtracted object that every speaking being reaches the dimension of the Other of language[3].

The questions elaborated by the 17 vignettes presented concerned, on the one hand, the designation of the trouble in the subject’s ballasting in language, in this circular movement of the drive in subjects where the excess of jouissance floods the living being. Οn the other hand, they examined the identification of singular solutions invented by these subjects to deal with the non-ballasting.    

The real speaks

In his early teaching, Lacan relates the diagnosis of psychosis to the existence of language disorders. In the 3^rd Seminar on “Psychosis”, we read: “I refused to diagnose her as psychotic for one decisive reason, which was that there were none of these disturbances that are our object of study this year, which are disorders at the level of language. We must insist upon the presence of these disorders before making a diagnosis of psychosis”[4]. Adding that: “But for us to have a psychosis, there must be disturbances of language- this at least is the rule of thumb I suggest you adopt provisionally”[5]. Moreover, J. Lacan underlines that Clérambault’s virtue was “to have shown its ideationally natural nature, which in his language means that it’s in total discord with the subject’s mental state”[6] and notices that “in the phenomenology of psychosis everything from beginning to end stems from a particular relationship between the subject and this language that has suddenly been thrust into the foreground, that speaks all by itself, out loud in its noise and furor, as well as its neutrality. If the neurotic inhabits language, the psychotic is inhabited, possessed by language”[7].

Twenty years later, in the 23rd Seminar on “The Sinthome”, Lacan returns to the question that constitutes the main thread of his teaching: “The question is rather one of knowing why a normal man, one described as normal is not aware that speech is a parasite; that speech is something applied; that speech is a form of cancer by which the human being is afflicted”[8]. The psychotic subject is the only one that could teach us about the structure of language, as long as “we cannot feel that the speech on which we depend is somehow imposed on us”[9]. Certain subjects “go as far as feeling it”[10].

Three of the cases presented illustrate the phenomenon of imposed speech quite clearly: The case of a 14 year-old girl (by cartel 1), having identified with the figure of a manga cartoon, is obsessed by the thought of “selling her soul to Devil” after her death (moment of separation from her parents). In order to defend herself against this threat, this non-repressed real that comes from the Other in the form of hallucinations (auditory and visual), she repeats her own words “never”, “it’s not true”, “I am not with the devil” etc and she gives herself over to rituals (prayers, washing hands, reading texts in a reversed order) looking for expiation. At the same time, bodily phenomena bear witness to the dissolution of the imaginary: the soul is detached from the body, becoming a multi-coloured ball wandering all over the place and returning to the chest causing her deep anxiety. In order to calm the culpability of being, the fault of existence, she will reach the point of rejecting life, testifying in this way to the mortifying aspect of her melancholy.     

In two other cases (cartel 7 and 8), the phrase “you are a fag”, is a predicate, an S1 nominating the jouissance in the real. For O., it is at the age of nine that “the fundamental xenopathy of speech”[11] will mark the beginning of a series of phenomena extending from paranoia to hetero-aggressive passages to the act, passing through fertile moments of delusion. The same sentence “you are a fag” set off by accusatory voices when the mobile phone rang, or by the sun streaming in through the hallway, will lead another young man to the analyst (cartel 8) after losing his position in politics. His main difficulty was his impossibility to assume a sexual position. The identification to a female friend who had completed suicide, right after his separation from a woman who wished he would be the father of her child and who misjudged his ideal, will be the onset of visual hallucinations marking the death of the subject.   

If in neurosis and perversion the subject receives from the Other his own message, in the case of psychosis the important thing is that it is heard really, in the real”[12].

The main characteristic of elementary phenomenon is that it is “without any attempt to integrate it into a dialogue” or moreover “closed to all dialectical composition”[13].

Petrifaction under an S1 : an ideal signifier out of a dialectic

The absence of a dialectic which characterises the discourse of the psychotic subject is not only traceable in the interrupted phrases or the insults transmitted by voices concerning a point of jouissance (“gay” or “fag”). The lack of an interval between S1 and S2 is also noticeable in the status of the ideal that supports the subject, which have appeasement and social integration as non negligible effects.

If the ideal of the “best lawyer” (cartel 3) and of the “best doctor” (cartel 5) are goals that give a meaning to J’s and V.’s life, the fact that these signifiers do not enter into a dialectic with a second signifier, make these specular identifications open to the threat of a devastating return of jouissance. The anxiety that emerges at the moments of vacillation of these identifications, leads to the emergence of the real in the form of elementary phenomena (mental automatism, hallucinations) which evolve into “small delusions”, revealing in this way the precariousness of the covering of the symbolic hole that they ensured up until then.

Likewise, in the case of L. (cartel 10), retirement is a turning point, it is even the point of the triggering-off of her psychosis. “Bank employee” like a master signifier that directed her life, had carried up to that point the function of a “pseudo Name-of-the-Father”, permitting her a certain separation from the maternal madness. The impossible separation from the “bank-mother” at the moment of losing her job has marked the unplugging from the Other.

These cases show the way in which the psychotic subject appears to be solidified under this S1, petrified by the signifier[14]. Subject and signifier constitute a monolith when the subject does not function as lack, when the object is not extracted. In addition, the subject’s identification to being the Other’s waste, constitutes the source of melancholy in two other cases of feminine subjects. The non-saying of her anxious and depressive father’s non phallicised jouissance petrifies S. (cartel 11) in a state of depression and culpability, that she cannot articulate. Death, expressed through suicidal thoughts seems to be the only possible way out. As it is impossible for her to talk to her “dead father” in her mother tongue, she will find a bilingual analyst to talk to, in a foreign language. The analyst is supposed to be in the subject’s fantasy the translator, a mediator between S. and her father, providing a certain separation from the trauma of the paternal lethal language. In the case of Z. (cartel 12) “forming a whole” with the mother, is her way to articulate the holophrastic whole that she constitutes as a subject with the other. A third party being excluded, it is impossible for her to assume a subjective position and commit herself to a professional activity. The prevalence of imaginary relations in the form of discreet erotomania generates the strong feeling of annihilation at the moments of loneliness to the point of suicidal thoughts. Z. is the Other’s object whose absence signifies her being dropped [laisser tomber].

The jouissance of the intact Other: persecution and erotomania

Another trouble at the level of the operation of separation has been noticed in cases where the subject, confronted with an intact Other (an Other without lack), identifies jouissance in field of the Other. As long as jouissance and signifier are identical, “what the Other means, what one implies, remains obscure and at the same time concerns the subject personally”[15]. At the same time, narcissism and identification are the two prevailing dimensions of the structure. A sexual relationship with a man of her father’s age when in her thirties, constitutes the moment at which A. (cartel 6) finds herself confronted with the central failure of the symbolic, causing her anxiety and perplexity. Being confronted with One-Father, a figure of the real father, reveals the deficiency of the paternal signifier having as major consequences the disorder in the symbolic and the delocalisation of jouissance. A. identifies in her sexual partner the unbridled jouissance that disturbs the order of her world and hence he becomes her persecutor: “He wants to hurt her, command her and read her thoughts”. Separation from him doesn’t relieve her from the persecution from the Other. His malevolence is extended and aims at A. whose “actions acquire a signification for the others.” From that moment on, she becomes the object that completes the Other who enjoys her. As this paranoid certainty does not produce a stable construction, it gives way to the invasion of the body by the real, the “death of the subject”. On the other hand, O’s paranoia reveals the effort of the psychotic subject to “civilise jouissance by bringing it towards the signifier”[16]. Even though he succeeds in localising the “Kakon” in the maternal Other, in the transmitted parental genes and in his fiancée’s family, he is led to a passage to the act in order to separate himself from it, aiming at the loved object transformed into persecutor. Aiming at her beloved one, he aims the monster that he is for the Other after his surgical operation (that caused him a visible handicap). O. “is subtracted from the equivocations of speech as well as from every dialectics of recognition, he rejects the Other”[17], from the moment when the effects of the chirurgical intervention affected the body image.

Another woman (cartel 13) declaring to be “emotionally dependant”, deals with her erotomania and persecution by means of drug abuse, an addiction that separates her from the Other by the mortification of the body. Sexual relationships are repetitive encounters with the real father who abandons her for “God’s love”, while relationships with women lead her to the ravage of imaginary relations in the form of a delusion of jealousy.

In order to cope with the real that appears in the form of elementary phenomena (verbal insulting hallucinations, interpretative phenomena), another subject (cartel 17) chooses the pathway of requisition in court. This is her way to say “no” to the jouissance of the evil Other she recognises in the others.

Child psychosis: the child as the support of the maternal desire in an obscure term[18]

 “When there is no interval between S1 and S2, when the first dyad of signifiers becomes solidified, holophrased, we have the model for a whole series of cases –even though, in each case, the subject does not occupy the same place. In as much, for example, as the child, the mentally- deficient child, takes the place, on the blackboard, at the bottom right, of this S, with regard to this something to which the mother reduces him, in being no more than the support of their desire in an obscure term, which is introduced into the education of the mentally-deficient child by the psychotic dimension”[19]. The position that the psychotic child occupies is the position of the object a, the object that causes the mother’s desire, another name of the condenser of the maternal jouissance, which excludes him from the field of desire[20].

In his commentary[21], Eric Laurent underlines that “what the psychotic subjects bears witness to, is what a body is. In any case, it is not something that speaks. There is no language of the body. It is a point of effraction, incessantly open to the return of the unbridled jouissance. The psychotic who has not symbolised this jouissance, has not concentrated – as long as Lacan uses the expression “condenser” for the object – this jouissance in the organ that he abandons, that is the phallus. Therefore, the whole body of the psychotic subject can become an erogenous zone […] So, we can seize the child’s effort not to reconstitute a delusional metaphor, but to locally figure out in what way the child can try to make a function out of an organ. In other words, in what way he will be able to abandon it […] From the moment that for the psychotic child the paternal operation is not being produced, it is taken in the sexual relationship, which means that it enjoys. […] If the psychotic child is in this frightening work of making a function of its organs, it is due to the fact that, like every one of us, he is a son of the logos. He does whatever he can, to live up to that challenge”[22].

The boy of three and a half years (cartel 14) who jostled, bit the other children, enjoyed from being isolated and was talking to himself in an incomprehensible way, manages to construct a border to jouissance by being plugged into a double, who is the analyst. Subsequently, he produces imaginary identifications: one concerns a knowing-how, the profession of “bus driver”; and another one concerns the sexual position “evil girl”. “Due to his difficulty to sustain a phallic position, he differentiates the two sexes by binaries like good-evil. In other terms, for lack of phallic reference, he cannot do this distinction in relation to the sexual signifier”[23]. Furthermore, we can understand his game, which consists in attributing numbers to a series of buses by creating lines on a plate and in dispersing them violently, as an action of encoding, “a way of ciphering, of inscribing a part of the real rather than of giving sense. Ciphering is an operation of putting into order, of sorting out, which restricts the proliferation of language, being at the same time a practice of out-of-meaning.”[24].

U. (cartel 16) who was brought to the analyst at the age of 18 in order to treat his dysorthography, his dyslexia, and his significant learning delay in school, consents to enter into a sort of dialogue by means of guessing the analyst’s drawings. Whereas questions triggered perplexity and anxiety, the guessing game “introduced him into the enigma of language, where there could be on the contrary a surplus of knowledge [savoir] of the Other”[25]. As a second step, it is U. who invents a creative game and uses the analyst as his partner. Subsequently, knowledge on informatics becomes the object of dialogue with his partner. At the same time, in order to treat the invasive jouissance of the voice, he listens to music on his MP3. It is his way to close the ears, to “make turn his organ into a function, to abandon it”.      

In another case, M. (cartel 4), who consulted an analyst at the onset of adolescence (12 years old) on the occasion of an extremely violent episode, was able to pass from the “phrases of nobody” to the “phrases of myself” with the help of the analytic act.

More precisely, M. shouted “shit” in the underground instead of defecating on the lawn and this was due to the clinician’s intervention, who had remarked: “you are not a dog, you are a boy”. At the moment of the shout, the analytic act -that consisted in suggesting to him to write on a piece of paper the “real-ised” word- constituted a cut. Thus he achieved a treatment of the real by means of the letter. It is an effort to constitute a border, to constitute a body for himself. Subsequently, the clinician, by subtly making the piece of paper disappear into his pocket, effected a certain subtraction of the object. The production of a “pseudo oo lost-object” had as a result the subject’s access to speech[26].

The phenomena of “real-isation” of the symbolic as well as the will for immobility are also noticeable in the case of N. (cartel 9) who comes to the analyst in order to make sure that nothing in her or in her surroundings runs the risk of changing.

Possible ways out

As noticed in the report of the first round of the cartels, the two most frequent means of stabilisation and of appeasement in the cases presented were writing and compensation through nomination. The latter provides the subject with a certain knowing-how to do with his symptom while, at the same time, ensures him a position in the social bond (“geneticist”, “biologist”, “doctor”, “lawyer”). Once again, we observed that especially in the cases of paranoia (erotomania in the case of cartel 12, litigious delusion in the case of cartel 17) the subject finds a way out via writing. According to Jacques Alain Miller’s interpretation “in writing, the subject recuperates his activity in a univocal way. When one speaks, one is speaking and being spoken. It is inherent to the dialogue or to the exchange, one reverberates on somebody’s speech etc. It is as if writing put the question of the evil intention at a distance. There may be questions of decoding, but the intentionality is less presentified”[27]. This treatment of the Other by means of the letter is even more evident in the case of S. who writes in her mother tongue –while she chooses an analyst with whom she speaks in a foreign language- in order to assume something of the real that invades her. As the analyst notices: “her writings seem to be nominations that make holes in the real”. 

I all cases we observed that the analyst “waits for the subject as invention”[28] and that he is present so as to acknowledge receipt of it.

Acknowledgments

We will be back with the electronic cartels, in a slightly modified form, in September 2013 so as to prepare for the next NLS congress in Ghent.

I would like to thank all the colleagues who worked this year, the Plus-Ones for their contribution to the coordination of the cartels as well as the extimes for their availability and contribution to the elaboration of the cases: Patrick Monribot, Geert Hoornaert, Jacques Borie, Claudia Iddan, Monique Kusnierek, Franck Rollier, Jean-Luc Monnier and Philippe Stasse.

Translation: Despina Andropoulou and Iannis Grammatopoulos

F

PIPOL NEWS INFO 17

PIPOL 6

Reference points, briefly

Address

No stress: avoid waiting in line

Finding your way around

Translation headphones: so we understand each other…

The Simultaneous Sessions game

The pace of the Tomassenko Plenary Session

Wi-Fi

Restoration

The Soirée of the Future 

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