Paris Lacan Seminar

WHEN THE CURE STOPS…

PARIS ENGLISH SEMINAR 2009

The Paris English Seminar is an activity of the Institute of the Freudian Field held under the aegis of Paris 8 University ( Psychoanalysis department) and with the support of the New Lacanian School.

THIS YEAR’S PARIS ENGLISH SEMINAR WILL TAKE PLACE ON MAY 11TH AND MAY12TH, JUST AFTER THE NLS CONGRESS ON LACANIAN INTERPRETATION.
SINCE THE CONGRESS IS GOING TO BE FULLY TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH, ENGLISH SPEAKING COLLEAGUES MIGHT WANT TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS OPPORTUNITY TO REGISTER FOR BOTH EVENTS
.
THE PES WILL BE HELD IN ENGLISH ONLY

REGISTRATION AND INFORMATION
VENUE: 31, rue de Navarin Paris IXè

SCHEDULE: Monday May 11: Morning session: 9AM-12.30 PM
Afternoon session: 2.30 PM-5.45PM
Evening session: 8.30 PM-10.30 PM
Tuesday May 12: Morning session: 9AM-12-30 PM
Afternoon session: 2.30 PM-5.45 PM
Evening: Farewell party from 8.30

REGISTRATION: You will find attached a registration form to be filled in and sent by email to Natalie Wulfing : nwulfing@blueyonder.co.uk
Payment can only be accepted in cash (on the premises) or by cheque (in the post to NW – address is on the form)
FEES: US $ 100 / student rate: $ 70

——

WHEN THE CURE STOPS…
A cure has a beginning, and, with a few exceptions, it does not last for all of the analysand’s life. A variety of stops and ways out can be elicited and differentiated.
When the cure is part of the training of the analyst it is expected to last until its “logical end”: what Lacan called the “pass” between the analysand and the analyst.
Sometimes —and should we say often— patients leave their analysis before reaching this stopping point and, at times, unexpectedly.
During the PES we will try to qualify the different ways a patient might put a stop to his cure: acting-out? act? error of the analyst in the direction of the treatment? satisfaction after a therapeutic result?
In the book “Rapid therapeutic effects in psychoanalysis”, Jacques-Alain Miller invited his colleagues to consider an analysis from the vantage point of a theory of cycles. The theme of this year’s PES concerns issues that have not been treated systematically so far within the Lacanian orientation.
Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent have accepted to bring a personal contribution to the Seminar.

Filed under: Lacan , Lacan Paris Seminar

Transference (love or others)

Transference has been regarded as an important yet less accessible issue to analysts.  Josef Breuer,  Freud’s earliest collaborator, gave up his discovery in psychoanalysis, just because he could not handle the “management of transference” which Freud regarded as “ the only serious difficulties” of psychoanalysis. (Freud SE 12, 159)

As an analyst, it seems that this is a reliable signal that is between the client and us analyst.  Why does the client keep complaining about an analyst’s wording that she thinks is not an appropriate description about her status?  Why does she keep sending email to us at night and the emotion expressed on the email can never be reproduced during the session? Why the client does not want to terminate a session even though she can not show any progress but keep repeating the same pattern (love or hate) in relations with the analyst.

Lacan says, analysis starts with transference. What he says is perfectly true and is helpful to remind the analyst about the momentum of the clinical session. This short article is intended to investigate the work of transference as symbolic politics in clinical relation which mirrors the scene of internal (imaginary) work of desire that analyst shall follow as a force to open up the unconscious.

Some analysts after Freud have tried to analyse transference as what is done with dream images. However, this change in analytic technique has created even more problems than it expects to solve. If analysis is not intended to be didactic practice as to getting the subject to adopt consciously the kind of behaviour imposed by the analyst, transference should be the starting point to reconsider the position(s) of the analyst and the momentum peculiar to the analytic situation.

Read Theoretical Writings

Filed under: Lacan

Universal Truth II

Is Psychoanalysis a framework available for universal truth?

However at the backend of human existence, there is always the haunting spirit of our own desire. Psychoanalysis tells us about desire – originated from primitive lack which is our memory of primitive love toward parental unity.  What is it? The parental unity is what exists before we are (being). The lack is what haunting us since the day we acquire the partial characteristic of being – the materiality of being, the body, the sense, the Real (for this partial being has not yet fulfilled the validation of the symbolic which is the structuration of language). That is when being is not yet being, or not yet full validated as being, as in the stage of pre-being, in the stage when lack, fear and jouissance embody yet hinder the awareness of beingness. This is also the time when being as being is still unthinkable or only partial. This is also the time when the haunting spirit of the Real constitutes the basic of the Subjectivitiy as an I upon the background of our primitive fear. In the pursue for Subjectivity, what is at stake is our drive to transpass the symbolic borderline.

In the Realm of the Real, there is nothing being “objectively presented” as the lack, desire, love, fear is a question posed to itself and is never have an answer except we see our own death face to face.  That is the impossibility of being as object, for object is not a priori knowledge and it is an impossible agent.  For an object can never be an object without already being assigned the position of the Subject as a subject. But the argument is who authorizes the Subject as a subject while the position of being as being has to be worked through the background of the lack as the Real.  If at the end of our human existence, we see only lack and emptiness, what is the value of being if put into the framework of a universal truth as lack.

Is philosophy the theoretical framework to access the Universal truth?

Philosophy has no idea what lack is and how it drives our cultural artifact to constitute human subjectivitiy through language. As philosophy is the truth to knowledge which inborn tendency is to violate the status of the Real by hindering the lack as the Universal truth. The Real is indifferent to emotional, sensitive change in human psychoanalytic field, but it will answer to our call with message. Environmental issue is at the core of this aspect of the Real. The destruction of the natural environment shall warn us to recall the effect of surplus jouissance upon the very existence of the earth as the Real.  That’s why we have no way to access to environmental issue by philosophy for the latter is based upon human knowledge which has no ideas what the Real as lack is.  Knowledge can not access to emptiness for knowledge itself is to defend the status of being/truth in unity, the Da-sein as the characteristic of beingness.

The Real has the ability and integrity to maintain its own balance as it has always already embodied the Universal truth as its final resort that links up the web of existence. The imaginary, as reflected on the surface of the Real has tried every means to invade the Real (as a paranoia psychic structure) – making possible by the fatal “foreclosure” of the symbolic law which has been dominated by ideological truth that reflects only the logics of the post-industrial world. For the culture of modern world is itself a paranoid structure. The symbolic law is not constructed for the betterment of the Real as a Universal truth; it provides only a partial understanding of the Real as serving the industrial needs for producing surplus jouissance.

If we want to understand environment issue based on the ideological truth as constructed for industrial age, we may miss the reason why non-stop production of surplus jouissance is based on a rationale to reinforce the status of ego as a unified entity.

The Real is direct reflection of the primitive lack – this lack is always there before the subject is constituted as the first cause. It is lack that is substantiated into the cause for any possible duplicating, multiplying, mutating, effact or performance. The lack is the basis of human being as an animal that does not have the capacity to exist in the Real only through his inborn capacity by his mobility, hunting technique, ethnicity. For he cannot live within the world that animal rules. He can only create what can be said as intellectuality to protect himself from the invasion of the Real. Intellectuality is the basis for linguistic communication. Intellectuality creates the mechanist talent and knowledge that facilitates the living of the human beings. But paradoxically at the end, it is intellectuality created out of lack constituted the production of surplus jouissance that has explored and drive the world into destruction.

Filed under: Derrida, Heidegger, Lacan , environment issue, Lacan, psychoanalysis, truth