“Guitrancourt Prologue”

by Jacques-Alain Miller

 

This text clarifies what the teaching provided by the Clinical Section is, and what it is not.

Nowhere in the world can one do a degree to become a psychoanalyst.  And this is not by chance or through oversight, but for reasons regarding the essence of what psychoanalysis is.

One cannot imagine what a test to determine the ability of a psychoanalyst would be, as the practice of psychoanalysis is private and restricted to the most intimate confidences that a patient entrusts to an analyst.  Let us acknowledge, however, that the analyst responds by an operation — interpretation — that concerns what is called the unconscious.  Couldn’t this operation form the basis for a test, especially since interpretation in not the privilege of psychoanalysis?  Any criticism of texts, documents or writing employs it as well.  But the Freudian unconscious is only constituted in relation to the word I have spoken, cannot be confirmed without it and psychoanalytic interpretation is not probative in itself, but rather by the unforeseeable effects it has on the person who receives it and within the context of this very relationship. There’s no escaping it.

 

The result is that it is only the analysand who should be recognized as being able to attest to the abilities of the analyst, were his testimony not skewed by the effects of transference, which are established from the outset.  This shows that the only acceptable testimony, the only one that can give some guarantee concerning the work that has been done, would be from an analysand after transference, but who still wishes to serve the cause of psychoanalysis.

 

What I call here the analysand’s testimony is the nucleus of the teaching of psychoanalysis insofar as it responds to the question of what can be communicated to the public of an essentially private experience.

 

Jacques Lacan established this testimony under the name of the pass (1967). To this teaching he gave his ideal, the matheme (1) (1974).  A whole gradation exists between the two: testimony of the pass, still encumbered by the individual character of the subject, is confined to a small circle within the analytic group.  Teaching on the basis of the matheme, which must be demonstrative, is for all, and that is where psychoanalysis meets the University. 

 

This teaching has existed in France for fourteen years, and has made itself known in Belgium through the Freudian Field.  Next January, it will take the form of the “Clinical Section”

 

It is important to state clearly what this teaching is and what it is not.

 

– It is academic; it is systematic and graduated; it is provided by qualified teachers; it is ratified by diplomas. 

– It does not authorize one to practice psychoanalysis.  Freud’s imperative that an analyst must be analyzed was not only confirmed by Lacan, but radicalized by his thesis that an analysis has no other end than the production of an analyst.  In every case, transgression of this ethics carries a heavy price for the one who commits it.

– Whether in Paris, Brussels or Barcelona, whether these methods are public or private, the orientation is Lacanian. Those who receive it are defined as participants: this term is preferred to that of students because it highlights the high level of initiative given to them — the work they must complete will not be exacted from them.  It depends on them; it will be guided and evaluated.

 

There is no paradox in stipulating that the strictest exigencies bear upon those who seek to take up a teaching function of an unprecedented kind within the Freudian Field, since knowledge (savoir), although it derives its authority from its coherence, only finds its truth in the unconscious, from a knowledge where there is no one to say “I know.”  This means that we provide a teaching only provided that we support it with an unprecedented elaboration, however modest it may be.

 

We begin, in Spain as in Belgium, with the clinical part of this teaching.

 

The clinic is not a science, that is, a knowledge that can be demonstrated.  It is an empirical knowledge, inseparable from the history of ideas.  In teaching it, we not only compensate for the failures of a psychiatry, whose reliance on chemistry often causes it to neglect its classical treasure, we also introduce an element of certitude (the matheme of Hysteria).

 

The presentation of patients tomorrow will fill out this teaching.  What is called in France the domain of “detailed study” [“études approfondies”] and which requires the writing of a doctoral dissertation will come later.  In accordance with what in the past was under Lacan’s direction, we will proceed step-by-step. 

 

Jacques-Alain Miller

15 August 1988 

 

Translated by Ian Curtis

Reviewed by Philip Dravers

 

 

 

(1) From the Greek mathema, that which is learned.

---

 London Society Programme 2013/2014 

 

 

 Our theme of work for this year is

The London Society will henceforth take up the theme of the Congress and its references through different tools of work: 

 

ELECTRONIC CARTELS ‘Towards Ghent’: Deadline to register individually or as a cartel is 15 September by email to d.andropoulou@yahoo.gr . Sign up to NLS-Messager https://amp-nls.org/page/gb/42/sinscrire-nls-messager to receive all the necessary mails to take part in this special device. 

 

NLS-KNOTTINGS SEMINAR: A special occasion with invited colleagues of the NLS – a representative of the NLS Executive Committee with a theoretical paper, a colleague from a different NLS Society, a colleague from an affiliated NLS Group, and a local colleague all presenting clinical papers, on the Congress theme. The most important event of the year, building a sense of our School and our working community in action.

 

NLS-SEMINAR: The NLS-Seminar on the theme of the Congress will take place twice this year, with an invited speaker of the WAP commenting on aspects of ‘What Cannot be Said – Desire, Fantasy, Real’. This theme, itself derived from the proposition ‘The Other without Other’, is especially pertinent in this, still a little new, 21st Century where the Other of the Other, the guarantee, has almost definitely gone awol.

 

CLINICAL CONVERSATION: A new format will be introduced to make this a day of study and commentary for clinicians who have signed up prior to the event. To take part in a rigorous exchange of clinical work on a theme to be confirmed and communicated in due course, please follow future emails in which the procedure shall be explained. 

 

 

28 June 2014 [NB: not confirmed] – Psychoanalytical Notebooks to Celebrate 15 years (London)

 

 

J-A Miller’s speech in French, and the NLS-President Dominique Holvoet’s Argument are available at www.amp-nls.org. The translation of Miller’s speech will be published in the forthcoming issue of Hurly-Burly.

 

www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk

 

 

NLS Congress  |  17^th and 18^th May 2014 in Ghent

 

What Cannot Be Said

Desire, Fantasy, Real

 

 

In my title, some of you will have recognised an echo of Wittgenstein’s formulation, the last proposition in his Tractatus: “What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence”^[i]. Unlike the philosopher, I have cut the formulation in the middle and allowed the suspense to complete it on the basis of what Lacan proposes in Seminar VI, along with the decisive orientation that Jacques-Alain Miller gave to it in Athens.^[ii]

 

For psychoanalytic experience invites one precisely not to be silent about what cannot be said, “which provides an opportunity to put to the test the fact that words cannot say it all”.^[iii] In the course of the treatment, the aspiration to find the word that would say the thing fades, even if Lacan began by installing the Name-of-the-Father as the final word of the story. He made it into an Other of the Other, the guarantee of the established order, which he consecrated as the symbolic order. But what J.-A. Miller shows in his presentation is that in what follows and right up to the end of his teaching, Lacan systematically dismantled this pseudo-harmony of the symbolic. That is the meaning of this formulation from Seminar VI: “there is no Other of the Other”.

 

Free association necessarily encounters the impossible to say. It is thus at the moment when the word with which to say it is found to be lacking that the subject falters to the point of panic, there where he must, as Lacan says, face up to his existence. “At this moment which is, if one may say, a panic point, the subject must cling to something, and what he clings to is precisely the object qua object of desire.”^[iv]

 

Wittgenstein would be right, says Jean-Claude Milner, “if only what we cannot speak about consented to be silent.”^[v] The analysand would thereby conclude his analysis on the revelation of a want-to-be that constitutes the metonymy of his desire and arrive at the “forsaken horizon of being.”^[vi] As J.-A. Miller notes, this version of the end of analysis turns the subject into a non-dupe, in other words, a subject founded on erring.

 

However, as he pointed out in Athens, the place where the end of analysis is played out is not on the side of the insubstantial being of a desire, which would be a pure signifying metonymy, but on the side of the fantasy, which is enjoying substance [substance jouissante]. Thus, “the heart of this seminar is not interpretation; it is the subject’s unconscious relation to the object in the desiring experience of the fantasy.”^[vii]

 

What is a psychoanalysis practice that aims at the object a of the fantasy? What is at stake is not that the analysand narrates his phantasmagorias, it is a question of circumscribing what the subject’s life is structured around when he is a prisoner of his fantasy – in the singular and unconscious – just as Lacan does in his analysis of dreams or of Hamlet. There is no direct experience of the unconscious fantasy, which is why it is necessary to reconstitute it in our constructions.

 

The Congress in Ghent will thus focus on what does not consent to be silent and makes its way through the inter-said [inter-dit]. We shall emphasize “the opposition between the closed order of the father (metaphor is always a stopping point) and what desire brings, on the contrary, of the irregular and fundamentally out of place.”^[viii] The theme unfolds between what cannot be said except between the lines and what is impossible to say. It may be true that “the analyst offers himself as a support for every demand, and responds to none of them”,^[ix] but it is not merely in this non-responding that the mainspring of our presence lies, as Lacan says at the end of Seminar VI. As this Seminar reveals, the true nature of the objects of the fantasy is to be real objects, “separated from the subject though they are closely related to his vital drive.”^[x] The analyst makes himself into its “inexorable”^[xi] support. In the different structures, the reconstitution of the fantasy as support of desire will serve as the turntable with which to articulate the relation of the subject’s desire to the desire of the Other… without Other. 

 

 

Dominique Holvoet

 

 

Translated by Florencia F.C. Shanahan and Philip Dravers

 

 

 

XIIth NLS CONGRESS – May 17 &18 2014 – GHENT (Belgium)

Jacques-Alain Miller’s presentation in Athens, entitled “The Other without Other”; will orient the work of the NLS towards the Congress. The recording was transcribed by Dossia Avdelidi and the text was established by Anne Lysy.

We suggest that this version is used when translating or reviewing translations from now on. This text will be published in the next issue of Mental (in French) and in the forthcoming issue of Hurly-Burly (in English)

 

Download pdf

 

The next NLS Congress will take place in Ghent, on 17th and 18th May 2014
It will be preceded, on May 16th, by a Clinical Conversation reserved to the members of the NLS, under the auspices of the WAP

 

www.amp-nls.org

 

 

 

 

Presentation at the SLP Congress in Milan, 12 May 2013

by Dominique Holvoet

 

 

When Paola Francesconi, president of the Scuola Lacaniana di psicoanalisi asked me to speak about the Cartel at the SLP, I was caught unprepared.  I had just interrupted cartel work in a cartel for which I was the plus-one, supposedly due to other responsibilities, but also because of a certain malaise about which I hadn’t yet drawn the consequences. I found myself called upon to participate in this cartel, to stand in as the person who would know, and from whom a teaching is expected, without being able to correctly function as a plus-one, to occupy the right place. With regards to Paola’s proposition, I’ll add that up until then I had always thought that it was better to form cartels than talk about them! I have revised my judgment after writing this presentation: it is necessary to know the structure of the cartel in order to avoid its pitfalls. Jacques-Alain Miller speaks about cartels in terms of the four discourses: absence of production if there is a master at the starting point, free association without direction if the plus-one thought s/he occupied the position of the analyst, cartel crisis if there is only “plus-one-of-knowledge” (plus-un-de-savoir).  Knowledge is only gained if the plus-one is in the place of $ (the barred subject).

 

Reading Lacan’s founding texts and Jacques-Alain Miller’s interventions on cartels, I revisited -after this cartel crisis- the important point that made me, thirty years ago, choose the Cause Freudienne as a School of psychoanalysis.  I had, indeed, been very surprised and encouraged by the fact that analysts were taking the time to read my modest work, to listen, to comment and to help me move forward in my questions. This unique position, which I had never encountered at the university or elsewhere, gave me the desire to work and the cartel immediately seemed to me to be the best tool for reading Freud and Lacan, especially since the stimulating presence of the others is added to the support of the plus-one, which pushes the effort beyond that modesty which is always a bit fake, or coward.  Because of this, the cartel has always seemed to me to be an incomparable means of controlled elaboration, and I believe that the WAP colleagues share my opinion.

 

Nevertheless, the Cartel never ceases to cause problems. We must in fact recognize that the cartel meets a resistance that seems to be structural. We return constantly to the question of the cartel in the Schools of the WAP, we talk about it over and over, we have to invent something to give it back its vigour. And you will notice, as I have, that just like the cartel, the “pass” keeps causing problems. One could say that the pass and the cartel are the two lungs of the School of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Without the cartel and the pass, the school would suffocate. But one could also say that the pass and the cartel are two grains of sand in the functioning of the group; two little grains of sand that Lacan placed there to jam the machine, to block the “it works” of the group, which is the other side of the discourse of the analyst; two grains of sand to make the School. As Jacques-Alain Miller has shown in his text, “The Cartel in the world”[1], the invention of the Cartel in 1964 accompanied an anti-authoritarian movement. The cartel, of course, responds to the Freudian logic of the collective, which only constitutes itself as a group thanks to a leader, responding to the logic of male sexuation. But in the cartel the place of the at-least-one, the leader, is reduced. What’s more, it is a permutative function.  No at-least-one, but one-more, one-extra (un-en-plus) adding him or herself to the four to be the hysteric or Socratic agent of a provoked elaboration. The plus-one is here extimate, adding him or herself to the cartel only to incomplete it. The plus-one is the person who selects and discusses the work of each, the person who chooses the outcome to reserve for the work, writes Lacan, in the act of foundation. In short, the plus-one is the person who takes care to consider the work of others, to give to the work of each its place. But the plus-one is also the person who feminizes the cartel, making it pass from the logic of the all to that of the not-all.

 

Cartels in the NLS

 

In its relationship to the School, the cartel is thus one of its organs, that is to say, something that makes it lively, or… moribund if the organ is sick. Lacan wanted the cartel to be the place of ebullition of the School’s work. But what is “the School’s work?” Seen from the cartel, it is the elaboration that is sustained by each, an elaboration submitted to the attention and the criticism of peers in a small group, an elaboration that can know a public fate, since the plus-one looks after the outcome of the work. This is where the apparatus that was fine tuned ten years ago in the NLS by the first delegate of cartels, Gil Caroz, comes into play, an apparatus refined over the years. I’m not talking about the work of the cartels as a whole. There is the classical version of the cartels’ work whose publicity is made in the online Catalogue of Cartels on the School’s site, and then there is another version, that of the electronic intercartel. I will distinguish between the “electronic” use of the cartel and that of the intercartel per se.

 

The question of electronic use should be the subject of a work in itself and goes beyond the cartel, for that matter — it concerns our lifestyle which has been turned upside down by chatting, email and social networks in which the temporal dimension and that of the body of the other are put on hold. The electronic cartel essentially functions through email, that is, through a written form. This is a pragmatic choice that allows people to work together despite distance. But the absence of bodies in this work is not without effect. It goes, for some, against the logic of the cartel, while others see in this work through writing a positive effect of disimaginarization. I am not convinced by these opinions. Work through writing and the absence of bodies real-ize solitude and therefore add a supplementary demand that requires of the plus-one a strong desire that confines with the not-all.

 

The NLS’s intercartel runs from September to May in accordance with the theme of the forthcoming annual Congress. It only takes into consideration clinical work. It is expected of the plus-one to select a clinical vignette, presented by one of the participants. This vignette is the subject of a continuous work of elaboration that begins inside the cartel. The elaborated vignette is then read by another cartel.  Cartels are thus constituted in tandem. Each vignette is thus elaborated in the initial cartel, read and re-elaborated in the tandem cartel with the extime, and re-read and finalized again in the initial cartel. This finalized work is distributed to the rest of the participating cartels and only to them for reasons of confidentiality. A general public report is written by the delegate to the cartels that puts emphasis on this work, drawing theoretical and clinical conclusions from the provoked elaboration. This apparatus supposes a very active role on the part of the delegate of Cartels that animates the whole. S/he organizes the cartels that form and composes the tandems, chooses the extimes and writes two public reports a year. The result is the realization of a knotting of groups via effective and critical work. Thanks to this work, the intercartel is, with the Congress, what effectively constitutes the School in the NLS and makes it live.

 

 

 

Translation by Ian Curtis