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The School of Psychoanalysis
Jacques Lacan proposed the cartel as the School's basic vehicle for work on psychoanalysis. It is a small group of four people (sometimes three or five). The "Plus One," chosen by the four, is responsible for supporting the group effort and attending to its outcome.
The objective is twofold. First, to encourage each member to participate actively in thinking about psychoanalysis, its theory and practice, so as not to remain in the position of consumer of texts and various teachings. Certainly, these are integral to his or her training, but not enough. Second, to allow individual thinking, open as it is to all kinds of wanderings in isolation, to encounter work in common, with others, and in a sufficiently small number, such that each one can feel he is working in his own name, with the possibility of a genuine "work transference."
These cartels will be intercontinental and bilingual. That is their definition. Therefore, they will bring together members of the school from two different continents who speak at least two different languages, with the aim of promoting, as we have said, new and multiple links for work on psychoanalysis in intension, not only at the level of existing international and national organizations, but also at the base level of the School, involving all members of the School who have not yet participated in the decision-making instances. In this network, they will find a space where their work can find new resonance, through a newsletter, conferences, inter-cartel activities, and other forms to be invented.
This initiative aim to gain more clarity in distinguishing between Forum work and School work, a distinction that is constitutive of our collective from its origin as our Principles' Addendum accurately recalls.
Regularly organized meetings among cartels working on the same theme permit the necessarily partial work of each group to be passed on to the School; in return, each group receives feedback from a larger audience or diffusion.
In this sense, in the EPFCL, the cartel is a cartel of the School and has no meaning unless connected to the larger community, without which it would be indistinguishable from the random small groups that multiply everywhere.
Information on these meetings appears on the various sites of the various zones of the IF-EPFCL.
This is an instrument for uniting the School. It regularly lists established cartels, with their titles and the themes they are working on, as well as the list of participants. Thus each participant is in a position to know, even to contact, colleagues working on themes that are of particular interest to him or her.