Congress
The case, the institution, and my experience of psychoanalysis
The case, the institution, and my experience of psychoanalysis
Introduction to the simultaneous clinical sessions of PIPOL 6
(Short version)
The institution is a manifestation of the master’s discourse. The ancient paradigm of the institution is the Oedipal family1. Nonetheless, in pinning the expression After Oedipus to the contemporary world, Jacques-Alain Miller brings us to a wider reading of social or health institutions. After Oedipus other ethics have come to orient institutions, substituting the weakening family tie and taking up the place left vacant by the father. In this new institutional landscape, the best cases are those oriented by psychoanalysis.
In the Freudian Field, the mode of presence of psychoanalysis in an institution has been studied for many years. Clearly, the practitioner with psychoanalytical experience very often has a fair relationship and a novel know-how with the clinical real. It is the point we wish to elucidate during the simultaneous clinical sessions of PIPOL 6.
On discourse and the lalangue in the institution
The psychoanalytic orientation in institutions passes by way of an effort to say things well, or better, or differently. Instead of “he steals all the time”, we prefer: “he de-completes the Other”. Rather than saying “he’s really violent”, we prefer: ”he frequently passes to the act”, the passage to the act being the acted expression of unspoken words. Instead of “he’s hyperactive”, we prefer “enjoyment [jouissance] is rebounding in the body”.
This effort to tear the ambient discourse of the institution in its imaginary, educational or “scientific” coordinates from the clinical event with the aim of localizing it in the structure is not simple good willed humanism, because when we say things differently, we modify them. Over the long haul, these expressions become an institutional language that determines the politics of the institution in its dealings with the clinical real. At the same time, the practitioner with analytical experience reinvents each time, according to the case at hand, a novel way of saying things well that dislodges common institutional language, whichever it may be.
Where does this capacity for invention come from?
It’s through the reading of their own lalangue in the psychoanalytical experience, that practitioners also become available to the lalangue of others. They read in the subject’s narration what is written beyond the screen of this language. This reading of the subject’s most private language allows the practitioner to answer in an inventive way, beyond institutional language.
The institution as a canvas of the letter
Reading the lalangue doesn’t always require this effort of piercing the subject’s narration since it is sometimes already out in the open. In this case, the practitioner intrudes in this lalangue by participating and encouraging the subject to elaborate work on the letter, without insistence on understanding, nor any haste to make sense of this private language. Every element of the institutional structure is available to put this work on the letter in motion: the waiting areas, corridors, offices, doors, vehicles, activities, work shops, etc. This ”subject-practitioner ” partnership can then trace the circuits of the drives and move about them, bordering a panic stricken jouissance that splatters all around it, pluralize a persecuting and too consistent Other that invades the subject, and encounter a swarm [essaim] of signifiers that allows the subject to embark on the path of a singular sinthome.
From private speech to public speech
There is not only the letter. In other cases, the working relationship is forged by wrenching the subject away from the autistic dimension of his lalangue in order to deposit it in language. This operation that goes from private speech towards public language is an application of the Lacanian principle concerning autistic children: ”there is surely something to say to them”2. This principle is then extended beyond autism strictly speaking to the autistic dimension of every subject. It’s about talking with what is not addressed to the Other, by introducing the lalangue into the dialogue. The practitioner then submits the hypothesis of an Other of the code to the subject. The subject says: “fema int e nanay?” and the practitioner responds: “Sure, Thelma’s here today. She’s in the kitchen”. The institutional substance does not serve as a canvas for the letter here, but offers a material for the construction of an Other.
A major element in this construction of the Other is the staff meeting. This operates as a reference beyond-the-practitioner, a tool at his disposal. If every analytical session implies the presence of the Other of language as third, the staff meeting often gives the necessary consistency to this third in institutional work. This space beyond, where speech is embodied in the exchange of multiple voices, lifts the weight of the imaginary relationship between the resident and the practitioner, forging a form of dialectic in the certitudes.
Having the experience of psychoanalysis
We have said the psychoanalytical experience is necessary in order to read the lalangue. First, one’s own, then that of an other. It is also necessary to have the experience of one’s own enjoyment [jouissance] in order to handle it in the encounter with the other, without recourse to the father, castration, justice and morals. Or again: It’s the knowledge from the couch that makes doing without the ideals of an institution possible while at the same time making use of them.
Still, the practitioner’s know-how is not established. For as long as the analysis has not been terminated, this knowledge is unbeknownst to itself, but nonetheless, it pierces the knowledge produced in an institution as well as in the psychoanalytical doctrine in general.
Well then, the audacious project of the simultaneous clinical sessions of PIPOL 6 will be to approach the saying of this unutterable point by highlighting the triangle formed between the case, the institution and the practitioner’s experience of psychoanalysis. Practitioner-analysands – be they analysts or not – will, based on a clinical case, talk about how they were able to make use of their own experience of psychoanalysis to read the lalangue, to uphold it, deposit it in public language, and handle the institutional discourse in order to extract and preserve the subject’s inventive solutions.
Gil Caroz
Congress Director
EuroFederation of Psychanalysis
Translation: Julia Richards
Reverse side of poster
Second European Congress of Psychoanalysis (PIPOL 6)
After Oedipus
The Diversity of Psychoanalytic Practice in Europe
Reverse side of poster
“After Oedipus”? What does that mean?
That the world isn’t the way it used to be: the Father has lost his punch. His function has worn thin, has been pluralized, leveled out. Who still remembers his censorship, the respect he commanded, or the dignity of his ideals? Today, he is granted no credibility a priori. He must constantly prove himself, more by his acts than by his words. Enjoyment [jouissance] has a hard time being regulated. The control and surveillance, deployed by the contemporary master, have nothing to do with what the authority of a father was. It is deplored and there is an endeavor to trap enjoyment using tools borrowed from science —in the worst of cases, from a terror-stricken scientism— and joined to unlimited capitalism.
You’re doing a sort of sociology of the father. Oedipus is a psychoanalytic concept all the same, a whole apparatus!
It so happens that Oedipus was the only compass psychoanalysis had for a long time. It indicated, in the form of a complex, a pathology. At the same time, it was the standard for the « normal » itinerary for a neurotic, while it was presented in the mode of a radical absence, a hole, a foreclosure [forclusion] for a psychotic. The psychoanalysis of Lacanian orientation allows us to extend the clinic well beyond this Oedipal reference, to include cases that are in a way, indifferent to it. Jacques-Alain Miller’s most recent teachings, prompted by Lacan’s last teachings allow us to get past this Oedipal standard to define the structure, the knot that the subject created for itself in order to face its existence, the enjoyment produced by the contingent encounter between the signifier and the body – the extreme point of singularity that we call the One alone[l’Un tout seul].
Could you please expand on that, be more concrete…
Addictions of all types, the various dys (lexia, calcula, orthographia, etc.), the hyper (activity, sexuality), the disorders of adaptation, antisocial personality, high potential… all these hypermodern disorders attest tothe rise to the social zenith of an enjoyment that cannot be resorbed in the structure. Each time, it’s in excess – too much. Too much consumption, agitation, intelligence; too much anti, too much pleasure… This loss of measure also bears witness to the lost vigor of the phallus. We can also remark that the names given to these communities of hyper or dys speaking-beings are so many attempts to classify subjects, not by their symbolic constructions, but by the enjoyment that groups them. This necessity of apprehending things in terms of enjoyment obviously does not escape psychoanalysis of Lacanian orientation. But it operates inversely: it aims for what is most singular in the enjoyment of each subject, that which has no common measure with the enjoyment of an other. By fully considering the consequences of the One alone, we say that there are as many classes as there are cases.
So what about the difference between the sexes After Oedipus?
The leveling of the paternal function is correlated with a leveling of the phallus that simultaneously loses its function as operator of the sexual difference. Many phenomena of civilization bear witness to this: gender studies; marriage that, torn from religion, tends toward the contract and makes no distinction between the sexes; surgery that allows the fantasmatic positions of the subject to pass into the real… The phallic compass has lost its sparkle and its operative quality and ability. Moreover, the proprietors of a penis don’t know what to do with this organ that has become too real and that encumbers them. Have a look at boys and girls in the school setting and you’ll see that the girls « navigate » much more easily in the logic of the notall [pastout]. The future is feminine.
Shouldn’t we be busy rehabilitating the father?
Certainly not! First, because it’s impossible. Second, because advocating in favor of lost causes leads to hopelessness. Those who go on dreaming about reinstating the father turn to fundamentalism of one form or an other. No, it’s not about reanimating the world that was. It’s more about looking at the world today as it is, square in the eyes, and adapting our practice to the age After Oedipus.
After Oedipus,how does the analyst do it?
The analyst does! He/she gets out of the office, and is no longer confined in a clandestine position, below the line [barre]. The analyst gets involved in the political; mixes in the « social », in the institutions of mental health; calls on government officials in order to reintroduce the subject into the considerations of the Other. And above all, in the practice, the analyst adapts to this direct confrontation with the enjoyment that no longer transits via the symbolic mediations that Oedipus once left at his disposal. To the interpretation in the name of the father, the one that gives meaning, the analyst substitutes a new handling of the enjoyment of the One alone, that is riveted to the body. The analyst who used to be a decipherer of the unconscious becomes the pragmatist who, attentive and bodily present, converses, knots, unknots, loosens, consolidates… A handyman/woman who operates with the real unconscious that we have, rather than with the transferential unconscious that knows.
Am I after Oedipus?
Subjectively,we’re never completely there. It’s a horizon. In any case, psychoanalysis of Lancanian orientation has at its disposal a very efficientcompass for navigating in this zone After Oedipus. A compass called the pass. It’s about a zone that is reached once the subject has crossed through a certain number of constructions that it uses as a defence in relation to the real: identifications, phantasms, ideals and their repetitive effects (as distinguished from addictions) in everyday life – emotions, braveries, cowardices, failures, useless conflicts, fears, passages to the act… In short, all that is human. In this zone beyond the screens, there is only impulse and outside-of-meaning. The practitioner can learn from those who explore this zone of the pass-beyond [l’outrepasse],to strive toward an inventive dimension necessary to the clinic of those subjects for whom the Oedipal standard offers no efficient orientation.
I’m not quite there yet!
The Second European Congress of Psychoanalysis will be the occasion to find out more. We will address the consequences of the age After Oedipus and talk about the diversity of the psychoanalytic practice in Europe. That is, beyond the Oedipal standard, inventions can only be diverse. Moreover, this diversity also carries with it a political dimension. The EuroFederation of Psychoanalysis is implanted in different countries with different languages and cultures. Each practitioner oriented by psychoanalysis adapts the psychoanalytic practice to the specific working context without giving up the unicity of psychoanalysis. During our Congress, we will draw up the map of Europe using the particularities of psychoanalytical practice in each of its regions.
Gil Caroz
Congress Director
EuroFederation of Psychanalysis
Translation: Julia Richards
Toward Pipol 6
2nd European Congress of Psychoanalysis
The Organising Commission of the 2nd European Congress of Psychoanalysis (PIPOL 6) decided to adopt the title proposed for it by Jacques-Alain Miller:
After Oedipus
The Diversity of Psychoanalytic Practice in Europe
The congress will be held in Brussels on 6 and 7 July 2013, at the Square Brussels Meeting Centre
* * *
Après l’Œdipe
Diversité de la pratique psychanalytique en Europe (French)
Después del Edipo
Diversidad de la práctica psicoanalítica en Europa (Spanish)
Dopo L'Edipo
Diversità della pratica psicoanalitica in Europa (Italian)
Pas Edipit
Larmia e praktikës psikoanalitike në Europë (Albanian)
ما بعد الأوديب
تعددية الممارسة التحليلنفسية في أوروبا (Arabic)
Edipoaren ondoren
Praktika psikoanalitikoaren aniztasuna Europan (Basque)
War-lerc'h Eudip
Liested ar bredelfennerezh en Europ (Breton)
След Едипа
Разнообразието на психоаналитичната практика в Европа (Bulgarian)
Després de l'Èdip
Diversitat de la pràctica psicoanalítica a Europa (Catalan)
Efter Ødipus
Mangfoldigheden i den psykoanalytiske praksis i Europa (Danish)
Oedipuksen jälkeen
Monimuotoisuus psykoanalyysin harjoittamisessa Euroopassa (Finnish)
Na de Oedipus
Diversiteit van de analytische praktijk in Europa (Flemish)
Nach dem Ödipuskomplex
Die Vielfältigkeit der psychoanalytischen Praxis in Europa (German)
Μετά τον Οιδίποδα
Ποικιλομορφία της ψυχαναλυτικής πρακτικής στην Ευρώπη (Greek)
אחרי האדיפוס
רבגוניותה של הפרקטיקה הפסיכואנאליטית באירופה (Hebrew)
Tar éis Oedipus
An Éagsúlacht ar chleachtas psychoanalytic san Eoraip (Irish)
Po Edypie
Rozmaitość praktyki psychoanalitycznej w Europie (Polish)
Depois de Édipo
Diversidade da prática psicanalítica na Europa (Portuguese)
После Эдипа
Разнообразие психоаналитической практики в Европе (Russian)
Після Едіпа
Розбіжність психоаналітичної практики в Европі (Ukrainian)
Après l'Eûdipe
Divèrsitè dèl pratique psikanalitique an-Eûrope (Walloon)
Ar ôl Oedipus
Amrywiaeth o arfer seicdreiddiol yn Ewrop (Welsh)