Even when it is not only a matter of ontic experience, but of ontological understanding, the interpretation of being initially orients itself toward the being of innerworldly beings. Here the being of things initially at hand is passed over and beings are first conceived as a context of things (res) objectively present. Being acquires the meaning of reality. Substantiality becomes the basic of characteristic of being…. like other beings, Da-sein is also objectively present as real. (Heidegger, Being and Time I.vi 43)

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 – materiality of being, the body, the sense, the Real. The haunting spirit constitutes our primitive fear; its basic is our drive to transpass the symbolic borderline and gain access to the unspeakable jouissance to the Real. In the Realm of the Real, there is nothing being “objectively presented” as the lack, desire, love and fear are the polemics posed to itself and have never been answered 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.

Is philosophy the theoretical framework to access the Universal truth? Or rather is psychoanalysis the framework for the possible Universal truth?

Psychoanalysis has never tried to answer the philosophical question of being. Its knowledge about being is more from its interest in subjectivity as reflected in structure of paternality. There is no psychoanalytic truth without the structure of a family. The truth in psychoanalysis, if there is any, is a form of truth which we can achieve through dialectics between the love and loss in relation to parents.  But is this paternality a form of Universal truth? The love and loss in psychoanalysis create the first cause (desire) which formulates the structure of the Universe. Desire is the unfulfilled want for perfection. Perfection have never been a truth in psychoanalysis although it is what the Subject has been looking after. It is the impossibility in psychoanalysis, the zero degree in the subject’s relationship with the external world. But there is no dimension in psychoanalysis which could cover the position of achieving perfection.

Perfection is only a philosophical realm which at least logically we can have the conceptual capacity to describe it in philosophical understanding. It could be infinity in mathematics or it could be holistic experience in religion. Perfection is ultimate in philosophy but it is impossible in psychoanalysis.

However, philosophical understanding about perfection has never satisfied us as it have not fulfilled the logics of the lack. Desire has never been a philosophical problem, but it has created the neccessary constituent for our knowledge about perfection. Perfection comes out of desire, but desire has never been well explaint or simply it has denied its own validity.

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.

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

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.

Is philosophy a valid theoretical framework for the access to Universal truth?

Psychoanalysis is not the philosophy of human psyche for it tells us nothing about the truth that a philosopher would be interested in. Upon the couch, Freud has opened up the space for imagination, fantasy, lie and joke, but he has never required his patient to tell the truth.  Truth is not the imperative, for what psychoanalyst interests is the unconscious truth which may always be beyond the daily articulation.

But what could be the truth in psychoanalysis if it could not within the discourse of the patient. Lacan says the truth in psychoanalysis can only be found in jouissance, in lack, in the place where we are not present.  This truth is possible only within the larger framework of the Universal truth as lack.

Living in the world (in Heidegger’s sense) that we are trained to play the role as a subject or an object (master or slave) and we have no idea this only reflects what would be our misconception of the inwardly circumcised mediation (logics) of our status as an unified order. If the master/slave dialectics is put onto the larger background of a Universal truth, (i.e. the order of physical existence puts into interaction with the order of human existence, either in the form psycho-theological way or as a Kantian transcendental) the interface can only be the field of the freudian. The Freudian field opens up the internal world that enables the human psychoanalytic field interact, reflect, change, engage or restructure the substantiality of the Real.

Even when it is not only a matter of ontic experience, but of ontological understanding, the interpretation of being initially orients itself toward the being of innerworldly beings. Here the being of things initially at hand is passed over and beings are first conceived as a context of things (res) objectively present. Being acquires the meaning of reality. Substantiality becomes the basic of characteristic of being…. like other beings, Da-sein is also objectively present as real. (Heidegger, Being and Time I.vi 43)

This is what Heidegger taught us about the real and how it validates Da-sein as “objectively present”, as the basic of being.  And it also show us the importance of being “seen” or “discovered” as the basic of being/truth. Being as truth while it validates the connection between subject and object in discoveredness.

To say that a statement is true means that it discovers the beings in themselves. It asserts, it shows, it lets beings “be seen”in their discoveredness. The being true (truth) of the statement must be understood as discovering. Thus, truth by no means has the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a correspondence of one being (subject) to another (object). (Heidegger, Being and Time I vi 44)