Preparations for the restart

Laura Sokolowsky

Dear colleagues and friends of psychoanalysis,

I extend my best wishes to you at the start of this new year placed under the sign of the present and future fight to defend our orientation, our practices, and our institutions.

I extend my best wishes to you at the start of this new year placed under the sign of the present and future fight to defend our orientation, our practices, and our institutions. We have a duty to unite our forces in order to denounce the scientistic and technocratic vision of the world that has been imposed for decades on the field known as mental health.

Freud estimait que la psychanalyse n’est pas une vision du monde d’être incluse dans la science. Freud considered that psychoanalysis is not a worldview to be included within science. Following him, it was necessary to guard against separating psychoanalysis from its native soil, namely, research, the patient study of unconscious factors, and the constant putting to the test of theory through clinical practice. If a case exposes a flaw in theory, then it is the theory that must be modified and rethought. Freud’s work is founded on the principle that the subject’s symptom rebels against diagnostic reduction and that there will always be a remainder that cannot be assimilated, a trauma, escaping symbolization.

When we are confronted, sometimes belligerently, with the Popperian argument that psychoanalysis is non-refutable, what is misjudged is that psychoanalysis is being perpetually reinvented: it sheds its skin in every session, every supervision, and at each of our study days. This is precisely why psychoanalysis is so alive, it is constantly advancing. It does not deal out supposedly objective truths obtained through consensus and the harvesting of data processed through the mill of AI. We are accused of flouting science? Very well, let’s talk about it! To believe that imaging, molecules, or methods of brain stimulation will get the better of the symptom is to succumb to the illusion of a medicine based on irrefutable evidence. The tables are turned.

Freud maintained moreover that what would be harmful to psychoanalysis would be its transformation into a technique of care, that is, its absorption into medicine. Hence his obstinate refusal, until the end of his life, to guard analytic practice solely for physicians. His foresight is evident: we must be careful not to reduce psychoanalysis to its psychotherapeutic effects in order to prove its efficacy.

It is on this very terrain that our detractors await us, hoping to deliver the final blow.

Consequently, it is incumbent upon us to know where we come from and where we are going. Jacques-Alain Miller has recently emphasized this point: what kind of School do we want? The path that I defend is that of psychoanalysis as bequeathed to us by Freud and Lacan, one that heals indirectly by not aiming primarily to eradicate the symptom. Consequently, it is in the domain of the analytic intelligence of the symptom, its relation to the drive, its real, that we must yield nothing. The future of our orientation is at stake, on the other side of the discourse of the master. It is this future for which we are collectively responsible today, this collective itself composed of singular voices expected to contribute to the debate.

This debate was initiated at the beginning of December on ECF Messager, by way of a text concerning a journalistic publication which, in retrospect, appears of relative importance compared to the major stakes of Lacanian action. This same debate will continue along two lines: that of resistance and counterattack against our detractors; that of examining and redefining the aims and missions of the School.

Within this dual perspective, I am pleased to announce here the relaunch of Lacan Quotidien in the form of an electronic bulletin of the École de la Cause freudienne, distributed via ECF Messager. Indeed, the legislative offensives against psychoanalysis revive the necessity of this online publication. Its purpose will be to inform and debate the scientific, political, and cultural issues involved in current attempts to reconfigure clinical practice. Certain on the ground experiences will also be of interest to readers of Lacan Quotidien. It will be a matter, once again, of reinventing the School that we will transmit to future generations, with lucidity and courage.

Lacan Quotidien will be directed by myself in my capacity as President of the ECF. Editorial coordination will be ensured by Angèle Terrier. Ève Miller-Rose will serve as Editor-in-Chief.

The battle ahead will be tough, Lacan Quotidien will be our lookout.

Yours,

To submit contributions to Lacan Quotidien
– texts in Word format, Georgia font, size 12, line spacing 1, justified
– 3500 signs maximum (spaces included)
– Subject heading of the email and the file name: LQ + SURNAME First name
– Documents should be sent to Laura Sokolowsky and Ève Miller-Rose:
laura.sokolowsky@gmail.com
eve@lacanquotidien.org

Published in Lacan Quotidien on 05 January 2026
Translated from French by Anthony Stavrianakis