PAPERS Nº 5

List of members of the Action Committee of

the School One - Scilicet

Paola Bolgiani

Gustavo Dessal

Mercedes Iglesias

Ram Mandil

Laure Naveau

(Coordinator)

Silvia Salman

Florencia Fernandez

Coria Shanahan

Responsible for the edition:

Marta Davidovich

Editorial

Silvia Salman

The texts you will read in this new issue of PAPERS take on the invitation made by J.-A. Miller at the end of the last WAP Congress. The invitation to redefine the desire of the analyst as a “desire to reach the real, to reduce the Other to its real and to liberate it of meaning”1.

This requires an analyst who is willing to be formed in order to distinguish what concerns the One and to approach that real2. Thus, Lacan suggests that it is one’s own experience that the desire of the analyst emerges as a product of the analysis.

What kind of desire is it? How should it operate? What ethics does it imply? What is transformed, what remains, what gets disturbed or is forced, are some of the ways in which the authors interrogate but also respond –each one in her own way- to this invitation.

Through her title “Towards a New Psychoanalyst”, Damasia Amadeo de Freda proposes a certain kind of psychoanalyst, one who is oriented by the signs of the real rather than by signification. This leads to a new knotting between the psychoanalyst and his ethics, which is well worth exploring in the text.

Meanwhile Hebe Tizio highlights two operations arising from this reconfiguration of the desire of the analyst: reduction and liberation. These are ways to bring the analysand closer to his or her real, to build a rim that operates as a limit to discourse and circumscribes the presence of a core of real impossible to be transformed.

1 Miller, J.-A., “The Real in the 21st Century”, in Hurly-Burly, Issue 9, May 2013, p. 206.2 Lacan, J.: El Seminario, Libro XIX …o peor, Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2012, p 182.

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Finally, Susana Dicker takes the perspective of the sinthome to situate the “plus of life” that restores the position of the analyst in his act. The desire of the analyst thus leads to a decided desire to go towards the singularity of each one’s knotting of Real, Imaginary and Symbolic.

Undoubtedly these three texts will be a great contribution for those who are already working on the presentations for the Clinical Day that will take place on Wednesday 16th April. Wishing you a good reading!

December 2013

Translated by Florencia F.C. Shanahan

Towards a New Psychoanalyst

Damasia Amadeo de Freda

In his presentation of the theme for the next WAP Congress Paris 2014, Jacques-Alain Miller invites us to rethink the psychoanalytic clinic and the place of the psychoanalyst in the 21st

century.

This conference raised many questions in us which we will try to highlight and to which we will try to give some answers.

The first thing we note -which drew our attention and gave rise to the first question- is that the formula proposed there as the theme for the Congress, did not correspond in the end with the Congress’ title.

The formula A great disorder in the Real in the 21st Century does not match the title A Real for the 21st Century. Regarding the initial formula, you can see that the part "a great disorder" was taken out, the definite article “the” accompanying the term ‘Real’ became an indefinite “a”, and the word “for” was added as an index (this is our hypothesis) of the goal that aims to live up to the epoch that is ours. Despite these changes, the final title maintains the concept of real as central theme.

To try to answer this first question provoked by the Congress title choice, we shall advance into the Conference.

Miller begins by saying that this century is characterized by a great disorder in the real; that’s when he introduces his formula. Then he situates the cause of this disorder in the combination between scientific discourse and capitalist discourse.

Subsequently, he lists the transformations of the notion of the real throughout history, which gradually led to the great contemporary disorder.

At the same time, he links each of these transformations to the successive definitions of the real offered by Lacan at different moments of his teaching.

So another question arises: why does Miller establish a correspondence between the transformations of the real in civilization and the transformations that take place in Lacan's teaching with regards to this concept? This question imposes itself, given that we start from the basis that there is no temporal correspondence between these two orders of transformations.

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To be more precise, Lacan begins to develop his ideas about the real from the second half of the 20th century onwards, so that when proposes his first aphorism for the real, he does so being himself already situated in a time that corresponds to one of its latest transformation in civilization.

Therefore, we can conclude that such correspondence, such parallelism established by Miller in his conference, does not imply simultaneity. There has to be a different logic at play.

This first differentiation allows us to put on different levels the real of nature, the real for science and the real of psychoanalysis. This is what we shall deal with here..In the conference we are reminded of the fact that Lacan came to believe that his real (since it was his own invention) was his symptom, and that it was this symptom as such that allowed for the conceptual framework to hold together and for his teaching to be coherent. We consider this proposition to be of great interest, because it allows us to think about the function of the sinthome at that time, but this would require another study that we will not develop now.

The latest aphorism for the real that we are given is that, for psychoanalysis, there is no knowledge in the real. It is also emphasized how science (whose aspiration was to write this knowledge in the real in order to anticipate it) finds today its limits, thus contributing to the contemporary disorder.

For psychoanalysis (and especially nowadays) the unconscious produces a kind of knowledge that would be an elucubration about a real stripped of any supposed kknowledge, stripped of any want to say.

We thus verify that, on the one hand, there is currently a great disorder in the real and, on the other hand, psychoanalysis arrives at the same idea with regards to its own real, since it considers it to be, structurally, a disordered and unsystematic remainder.

Perhaps the sense of the conference is to show us that there is a knotting between the disorder in the real proper to our times and the disorder of the real proper to psychoanalysis.

From this perspective, the idea of disturbing the defense would be to knock down something like a double fortress: the one built to defend oneself from the real proper to the subject, but also the one built against the disorder in the real of our times.

This perspective not only clearly separates psychoanalysis from any form of therapeutics, but also involves a redefinition of the psychoanalyst and his act.

Miller speaks about a psychoanalyst whose desire aims at reducing the Other to its real and liberating it of meaning. The problem is (and this has not yet been elucidated) that the Other is already “discredited” with regards to meaning, and this is due to the same reasons that led to the disorder in our times.The Freudian psychoanalyst, he who could interpret by occupying the place of the subject supposed to know, has lost its splendor and its effectiveness as a consequence of this disorder.

Faced with this fact, and if we want psychoanalysis to live up to the subjectivity of its time, the question we are forced to ask is: what psychoanalyst for the 21st century?

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This question imposes itself because we see a new psychoanalyst emerge, a psychoanalyst who is much more oriented by the signs of the real than by the signs of signification.

The fall of the order of signification inevitably drags the subject supposed to know along with it. Now, the effects of such fall are felt in a new transferential tonality to which the contemporary clinic testifies, and which leads us to suppose that the very idea of transference will soon be modified.

If love is no longer addressed to knowledge, since knowledge is discredited and disjointed, it may be that transference will perhaps take up the form of a love addressed to the real.

If we are to take this idea to the extreme, we are inevitably led to consider that there will then be a new conceptualization of the beginning and end of analysis.

Finally, if what is at stake is to begin to define today the psychoanalyst of the near future, it will become necessary to interrogate his mode of operation and especially his main instrument, namely, interpretation. In fact, on many occasions did Jacques Lacan and Jacques-Alain Miller reformulate this notion, taking into account the advances of psychoanalysis as well as the changes in the RSI registers on which it operates.To conclude, we will say that psychoanalysis must take into account the subjectivity and the historical moment in which its action is inscribed. It is an ethical problem that goes far beyond the modifications we have outlined above. The problem is ethical because what is at stake in this

transformation is the destiny of psychoanalysis itself.

We think that “A real for the 21st

century” (as Miller proposes it and on which we will focus at the next WAP Congress) will be the product of a knotting between the new psychoanalyst and the ethics of psychoanalysis.

Translated by Renata Cuchiarelli

The Real and the Desire of the Analyst

Hebe Tizio

To approach the topic of the Real in psychoanalysis is not an easy task. It is a necessary category, but it paradoxically produces its own misrecognition, which poses the question of how to operate with it.

In his Seminar XI, Lacan had formulated a question: “What must there be in the analyst’s desire for it to operate in a correct way?”3

In the Seminar The moment to conclude, Lacan stated that it was excessive to say that the analyst would know how to operate: “What would be necessary is that he [the analyst] knows how to operate conveniently, namely, that he can be aware of the slope of his analysand’s words, which he undoubtedly ignores.”4

3 Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 11, The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, W.W. Norton & co., London, 1998, p 9.

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To go along this slope we find support in Miller’s proposition that the desire of the analyst is “the desire to reach the real, to reduce the Other to his real, and to liberate it of meaning.”5

Here we have a specification, the real of psychoanalysis is singular, and what is at stake in an analysis is an operation of reduction and liberation. The reduction to “his” Real implies certain liberation of meaning. It is a freeing from the meaning that functions as a screen, but not from the dimension of meaning inherent to the knotting.

The operation is possible because there is a desire to reach the Real, and for that a forcing is necessary. This implies that the analyst’s desire is an authorization to operate a forcing beyond the demand in order to disturb the defence, and in that sense, to go against the Real. Going against the Real in order to circumscribe it is to exhaust the fictional rim and allows for a new knowing how to do with it. Bringing the analysand closer to his Real generates a pragmatics, a ‘functioning’ to be practised.

The analyst is the product of an analysis that leads him to being authorised by himself, namely, by this real without law which lies at the heart of the symptom and gleams in the act. The act pierces the analyst, and its chance lies in him consenting to operate with what he ignores, going through the horror that it brings about.

Psychoanalysis has to do with poetic violence, the one practised on what is crystallized in language. The Freudian

4 Lacan, J., Seminar 24, The moment to conclude, 15-11-1977. Unpublished.5 Miller, J-A., “A Real for the 21st Century”, Presentation of the Theme of the IXth Congress of the WAP, in Hurly-Burly 9, May 2013, p 202.4 Verse 312 from Aeneid: “If I cannot deflect the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell”.

epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams, “Flectere si nequeo superos. Acheronta movebo”4, put in Juno’s mouth, places such violence at the dawn of psychoanalysis. To move Hell is to advance in the Real as far as to build a rim, an edge that is the limit of discourse; the limit of semblant, in order to approach it. This is also a subjective safeguard, because it recognizes it as an incurable.

In the 21st Century, the analyst must be “a partner able to respond.” We can say that this possibility of responding is linked to the times and progress of discourse.Lacan used to say that for that the analyst should find support in desire which, despite the “litany of culpability”, is more comfortable than putting into play in analysis a quantum of anxiety that can cause this operation. But we must update here anxiety as fear of the body, as Lacan points out in “The Third”, for the body of the analyst is at stake.

The analyst offers himself as an instrument of which the patient can make use. The effect brought about by the attempt to reach the ‘bits of real’, is to fall as waste, which means that the desire of the analyst hosts the impossible. For this pathway you must know how to command as a remainder, which is the treatable form of what takes the place of the Real, and from there to authorize oneself to disturb the defence. This is what the matheme of the analytic discourse shows; but we must remember that it has its roots in a form of treatment of the Real. Therefore, it is what sustains discourse and to which discourse tries to give an order.

Beyond the semblant of object, the analyst-sinthome embodies a Real

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without law, and lends it his body to sustain the act. The analyst’s body is what allows for the Real to be present, in so far as it [the real] is thus able to enter the scene in a veiled form.

The function of the analyst’s body in the treatment provides not only a frame for saying [le dire], but also embodies the object that veils the Real. The body as screen is the necessary semblant to get to the littoral, to the edge where the elaboration of knowledge reaches its limit.The “in-body” [en-corps] analyst introduces the object a while at the same time veils the lawless Real that sustains the setting. The homophony that Lacan makes resonate between “en-corps” and “encore” marks the temporal dimension of what must be sustained throughout an analysis and is without doubt an ethical question.

The question of the analyst’s desire as not being a pure desire takes on a different dimension insofar as the body is introduced. The end of analysis may produce an analyst inhabited by a desire to reach the Real, who may offer a void to lodge the analysand’s sayings; who serves as an instrument, and who assists “in-body” the analytical path. But from the moment the body is implicated, there is jouissance, and the Real that animates it: hence the knowing how to do with anxiety in the analytic position. That is sustained by keeping the analysand-position, to prevent the identification to the symptom from becoming inert. That is to say, the analyst may sustain the desire to reach the Real if he continues to work as analysand: that is the price to be paid.

Translated by Betina Ganim

“Being a heretic in the right way”1 On the

Analyst’s Desire in Lacan’s Latest Teaching

Susana Dicker

In his closing conference of the VIIIth

Congress of the WAP, which is at the same time an invitation to work towards the Congress 2014 in Paris, J.-A. Miller introduces its theme, telling us that what is at stake is “‘aggiornamento’[…] to the bringing up to date of our analytic practise, its context, its conditions, its novel co-ordinates in the 21st Century, with the growth of what Freud called the discontents, and what Lacan deciphered as the dead-ends, of civilization”.

In the last part of his teaching, Lacan invites us to a practice of psychoanalysis whose main axis implies a radical change in the concept of the symptom, which goes hand in hand with other reformulations that somehow institute a before and after within this practice. And although we must not forget that the latest does not erase the earliest, the conception of the analytic experience and of what the position of an analyst would be in it, are marked by the power of the changes thereby introduced. These changes are sustained in findings and inventions resulting from his own pathway, but they are also related to “a world amply restructured by two historical factors, two discourses: the discourse of science and the discourse of capitalism.”2

 The symptom, body event

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“The unconscious is a sedimentation of language. And, at the opposite end of our practice, there is the real. This is a limit idea, the idea of what excludes any kind of sense”3. This quote actualises Lacan’s movement throughout his teaching, from an unconscious structured like a language (sheltering a truth and a meaning to be revealed) to an unconscious that is the effect of the mark of lalangue, of libidinal signifiers on the body of the speaking-being. In his later teaching Lacan will distinguish this body as being the locus of jouissance, it is a body that one has and which enjoys. This is what makes him say in Encore: “we do not know what it means to be alive, except for the following fact, that a body is something that enjoys itself”4. A jouissance which is no longer articulated to the law of desire, but is the effect of a traumatism, a contingency and which, as a result, involves a satisfaction that is out-of-meaning.

If “Llanguage [lalangue] affects us first of all by everything it brings with it by way of effects that are affects”5, it is by producing a letter, a mark on the body, that it operates. This will also allow Lacan to say -three seminars later- that the sinthome is the consistency of those marks: a pure body event, a remainder of the operation of lalangue, incurable as it is what will not change, fixity of a jouissance that is opaque to meaning.

An invitation for a redefinition of the analyst’s desire

In his conference J.-A. Miller opens up the question of redefining the desire of the analyst as “not a pure desire, as Lacan says, not a pure infinity of metonymy but appears to as the desire to reach the real, to reduce the Other to its real and to liberate it of meaning”6

This goes hand in hand with another

invitation: to bring psychoanalysis beyond repression and the interpretation of the repressed. If the Lacanian unconscious of the last decade [of Lacan’s teaching] is at the level of the Real, what is at stake is to explore the dimension of the defence against the real without law and out-of-meaning, and to dismantle it. But also to think of a clinic which cannot exclude certain concepts: the difference between transferential unconscious and real unconscious; the perspective of the sinthome, which involves going to the encounter of a singular knotting of Real, Symbolic and Imaginary in each one. That is, making use of the writing of the Borromean knot, there where it is possible to represent the Real stripped of meaning.

E. Laurent goes back to a question posed by J-A Miller: “How far must we take the perspective of the sinthome?”7. He thus establishes a counterpoint between the clinic of our times and the psychoanalytic clinic that refers to the sinthome. He reminds us that the former goes towards a clinic separated from lalangue, dreaming of a symptom without unconscious, which conceives itself as unsubscribed to any reference to what can be said and which it transforms into a numerable and observable artefact. On the contrary, Lacan’s proposal with “the question of the sinthome, allows for a complete reordering of the analytic clinic, in a perspective which is also unsubscribed from the unconscious. The unsubscribed in lalangue on the one hand, meets the unsubscribed in the unconscious on the other. And an strange intersection is produced, which shows our question about the transformation of the clinic presented to us”. This proposal includes “the plus of life” that emerges in the encounter with the analyst, and which is forgotten behind what is said [....]it is

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about restoring this dimension, about presentifying it always, at least on the side of the analyst8 It is the analyst alive, embodying a presence that testifies to the impact of lalangue on the body. An analyst who can be called analyst-sinthome, analyst-body, analyst-trauma; an “an analyst who is more on the side of jouissance than of knowledge, more on the side of the act than of interpretation, more on the side of the void than of the object a”9.

The Lacanian troumatisme (made of trauma and hole) may orient us in this proposal to link the symptom as body event and the analyst of the sinthome. The troumatisme describes a double status: “the impact of lalangue or the radical defect in lalangue (...) the void of lalangue is the locus of the eruption of jouissance (…) The trauma of lalangue on the body (...) is rather the fact that always, from the start, the signifier that was required lacked.”10

This is something that several testimonies of the pass account for and that S. Salman thus summarizes: “...The void of the analyst does not function without the body, and the body of the analyst does not operate without the void. Because the void has its locus in the body (…) which is precisely what makes the desire of the analyst not pure”.

To conclude

Miller proposes three correlative formulae that give a direction to analytic listening: autoerotic jouissance of the body, there is [something of the] One, and there is no sexual relation.11

Lacan orients us: “The right way is that which, having recognised the nature of the sinthome, does not spare himself using it logically, namely to the point of reaching its Real at the end of which it

is no longer thirsty”12 This perspective sustains itself in the position of the analyst not without his sinthome and makes of the desire of the analyst a logical operator.

Translated by Betina Ganim

Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 23, Le Sinthome, Unpublished.2 Miller, J-A., “A Real for the 21st Century”, in Hurly-Burly, Issue 9, May 2013.3 Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 24, Unpublished.4Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 20, Encore, W.W.Norton & co., London, 1999, p 23.5 Ibid., p 139.6 Miller, J.-A., op. cit.7 Miller, J.-A., “Sutilezas analíticas”, Paidós, Bs As, 2011, p 83.8 Laurent,E., III Coloquio de la Orientación Lacaniana, Grama Ed. ,Bs.As.9 Salman, S., “El cuerpo en la experiencia del análisis”, in Colofón 33. Cuerpos que hablan, Boletín de FIBOL, Grama Ed., Bs. As.10 Laurent, E., op. cit., p 41.11 Miller, J-A., Seminario de la Orientación Lacaniana, “El ser y el Uno”, 30/3/2011.12 Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 23, Le sinthome, Unpublished.

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