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International Events
Every two years, on alternating sides of the Atlantic, an International Meeting reunites the members of the IF and the School around a theme decided upon at the previous Meeting.
Each Meeting is an occasion for gathering together, for a day and half, the groups of the IF and the School, with the goal of bringing to bear-on orientation and function-our acquired experience and evolving circumstances.
The question of social links is acutely posed in Jacques Lacan’s designation, in 1970, of the “Lacanian field” as the field of jouissance. Today this question is everywhere, since this field is everywhere. The links which bind the couple, the family or the world of work have become so precarious that the question of what undoes them is on everyone’s lips. The failure of capitalism, they say, or indeed of the science that conditions it.
Nevertheless, it was in psychoanalysis that it pressed forward when Freud, at the beginning of last century, questioning himself about “group psychology” as he listened to the thread of his analysands’ speech, could do nothing less than re-animate that ancient couple of Eros, god of the link, and Thanatos, the “daemonic” power that separates. Thus he reconnected, through the clinic of intimacy, the questions which rage in capitalist society, thereby showing, as Lacan put it, that “the collective is nothing but the subject of the individual.” [1] From then on, psychoanalysis has something to say about both, since for both the same question arises: what is it that invisibly brings bodies together, enough to make couples and societies, and what is the power that breaks them apart? This power that Freud recognized, Lacan called it jouissance. It constitutes the substance of the Lacanian field, which is not only the field of desire but also that of jouissance-events of the body, where they are produced. But jouissance does not link, it only ever belongs to an individual, be it in repetition, the symptom or even….the sexual act.
This theme of social links thus invites us to traverse the field of the social as well as that of the “one by one,” and first of all by using instruments forged by psychoanalysis to think the subject of the unconscious.
With these Lacan attempted to rethink and reorder the whole Freudian clinic of what makes linking and unlinking.
1. Freud gave us the original master words: drive, libido, narcissism, repetition, death drive and, we must not forget, the corresponding identifications by which beings who speak are socialized. These Freudian roots are to be re-explored.
2. Lacan recast them first on the basis of the chain of language, what he called the “fleece-like aggregations of the Eros of the symbol” via demand and desire. Then, based on the structure of discourse, which ordains distinct places that assure social links in the absence of a sexual order that does not exist. Finally, he had recourse to the Borromean knot with its three registers proper to beings who speak, namely, the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, the knotting of which does not happen without the occurrence of speaking, thus accounting simultaneously for what at times he called the “real subject” and for its possible social links. With each of these steps, it is the ensemble of the Freudian clinical corpus that is being reworked, testifying to the fact that here, as elsewhere, a theory is responsible for the facts it makes possible to establish, which facts in turn validate it. A demonstration that is always to begin again.
1. Its definition in psychoanalysis starts from Freud’s group psychology and goes to the structure of discourse in Lacan. For Freud, it is always the libido--including love and desire--and the various identifications it determines--which assure the links. But there are various types of links, and the order they establish between individuals is always an order of jouissances, for “the only discourse there is...is the discourse of jouissance.” [2] Whence the political incidence: without the regulation of the jouissances that the discourses assure, no society is possible. The whole question is to know how this regulation is installed in each individual. This is the point on which capitalism presents its challenge.
2. Without even mentioning the misery it produces, one no longer doubts that it degrades established social links, generating solitude and precariousness, already the individual is the last residue of this degradation. We know this, but one ought to say how, by what trick, and what are the possible limits to its ravages? Could Eros be a recourse?
The question concerns romantic couples inside and outside psychoanalysis.
1. One might wish that love would make one out of two, but human loves have a destiny that is fully mapped, as ancestral experience testifies: it goes from rapture to despair or disenchantment. Lacan marked out its boundaries in the gap between two formulas “You are my wife” (tu es ma femme) in 1953; and “kill my wife” (tuer ma femme) in 1973. It is a question of showing what is at work here, and in each particular case, to rupture the expected dialogue and the encounter of bodies. This is the problem of the real at stake in love and of knowing what it becomes after an analysis.
2. And then there is the analytic transference which introduces something new into love, a subversion [3] which certainly “makes a promise” [4] but of what? The vicissitudes of transference love discovered by Freud have lost none of their currency. They go from perpetuation to ruptures to reiteration. And what about their resolution? The formulas abound: liquidation, a perceived break, a fall, but are these the end of transference, even at the end of an analysis? Here again, it is only the particulars of each case that can instruct us.
Colette Soler, December 22, 2014
Translated by Devra Simiu
The IXth Rendez-vous of the International of the Forums of the Lacanian Field is comming soon. The work of the Rendez-vous on “Linkings and unlinkings according to the psychoanalytic clinic” will be preceded by the Vth Meeting of the School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field.
This study day, organized by the CIOS, will take place on July 14th, 2016. College of initiatives and orientation of the school (CIOS) : LOMBARDI Gabriel, MAIOCCHI Maria Teresa, DE LA OLIVA Maria Luisa, SOLER Colette.
The CIOS, closely collaborating with the CIG and other structures of the School, is still studying the organization of the work on the theme.
Colette Soler, April 21st, Buenos Aires
With this title, my aim was to reflect on the place of the Pass in the School and on the effects of this place. Indeed, Pass and School are united but distinct.
Lacan made the Pass the end point, and we take it up from him; it is where the desire of the analyst is questioned and, in Lacan’s terms, its aim is to guarantee that there is an analyst. The Pass puts in the hot seat colleagues who have the necessarily long experience of analysis, whether as passants or passeurs. There is no obligation to do this and, as Lacan reiterates, it is not for everyone.
The School is different; it is for all its members, even non-practitioners if there are any, and for those who work in institutions and for analysands who come to psychoanalysis without having any idea about where it might lead them. The School concerns them all, for the work the School must undertake is that of psychoanalysis itself in all its aspects, with the aim of causing the desire for psychoanalysis. Certainly, the Pass can have effects for all, but on the condition that the discourse about the procedure is not exclusively focussed on the procedure, on what happens or doesn’t happen etc., for then we forget to speak to all the members of the School.
The expression “the desire for psychoanalysis” has produced some surprise and this surprise has surprised me in turn. I am going to argue for it. I understand where the surprise comes from, indeed it was more than surprise, it was a bungled [bévue] reading, due to the fact that in our vocabulary the term we expect is “desire of the analyst”, and as Gabriel Lombardi remarked, the misreading of the title as “the desire of the analyst” occurred repeatedly!
However, the desire for psychoanalysis is not so mysterious; the desire for psychoanalysis designates nothing more than the transference to psychoanalysis, that is fundamental, and aside from affects, a relation to the subject-supposed-to-know of psychoanalysis. Since the latter exists, this transference very generally precedes speaking to an analyst. Not always, it is true; we still sometimes encounter subjects for whom this isn’t the case, notably in institutions, but this is not so common.
Moreover, what do analysts complain of today if not the absence of this preliminary transference, and they deplore the fact that the supposition of knowledge is displaced onto neurobiology and its ideological outcomes above all. And what are we talking about when we say, for example, that Anglo Saxon culture is resistant to analysis, if not just that the transference to analysis is weaker there than in countries where Romance languages are spoken.
Besides, the expression “desire of the analyst” is itself equivocal: in the subjective sense of the “of’, it is the desire that animates the psychoanalyst, the desire that propels someone to assume the function of analyst. In the objective sense, however, it is the desire that there be an analyst. The latter is on the side of the analysand, and we can see it in the form of this particular expectation: the demand for interpretation.
I note again that when Lacan – if we wish to refer to him – introduced the expression “the desire of the analyst” for the first time, he did not make it subjective, he did not designate the desire that animated the analyst. The first time, he used the expression to designate a structural necessity for the transferential relation, the necessity of causing, as desire of the Other, the analysand’s desire that his demand for love covers.
Thus there is a question: where does this desire for psychoanalysis come from?
Let’s look at the history. I would say that Freud generated it ex nihilo. We can draw out the historical conditions, cultural as much as subjective for they depend on the appearance of Freud, and we can also open the chapter on what Lacan formulated about these conditions. But whatever they might be, it is Freud’s saying [dire] that is the cause of the transference to psychoanalysis. It is the “Freud event” that made a desire for psychoanalysis exist. To say “event” is to designate an emergence and a contingency.
Certainly, Lacan succeeded in launching a new transference to psychoanalysis that is clearly evident in the new or revived presence of psychoanalysis wherever in the world his teaching has reached. For him however it was not ex nihilo. And from the start there was a going beyond the point of arrest in Freudian practice in the so-called “resistance” of the patient and in the final impasse of the refusal of castration.
These two examples suffice to affirm that the desire for psychoanalysis essentially depends on analysts.
Moreover, according to Lacan, transference love is new only because there is “a partner who has the chance to respond”. If this partner fails, the transference ends and goes somewhere else. Freud was presented as the partner who responded, while Lacan – and this has always struck me – is introduced as the one who announced he was going to respond anew, at the point where Freud gave up, as did the Post-Freudians too, and he announced it even before the fact. In doing so, he produced in those who listened to him the expectation of his response. In 1973 he says, “this chance” – so good fortune [bon heur] again – “this time it is up to me, this time I have to provide it”.
So the question: how can analysts today continue to have the “the chance to respond?”
