Published in The Lacanian Review No 12 (American Lacan), p149-160, June 2022.

Download at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Lacan (October 1966)

Preface to section : ‘Lacan, at the Moment’ by Cristina Rose Laurita

p140 of The Lacanian Review No 12 (2022)

As we mark the 40th anniversary of Lacan’s death, we ask: How is Lacanian psychoanalysis alive today? Particularly in the US and in English, how, where, and to what extent does it exist? Does it ex-sist, or does it insist?

Freud famously brought the plague to America. Today, the particular variant that is Lacanian psychoanalysis has infiltrated our borders. Indeed, the steady growth of Lacanian analysis in the US in recent years is evidence of its spread. A transmission that is, we might say, on the side of life, and on the side of desire.

For many of us, the Lacan variant carries within it an infectious desire, to work within and transmit something of the Lacanian orientation. Each one of us singularly bitten. This touches the real of life and death at the very heart of psychoanalysis. It is akin to what Éric Laurent refers to as “the transmission of the way in which the unconscious has to be read, not as a dead thing […] but as a living thing that has the need for the contribution of each one of its practitioners to find its proper place in the world.” [1]

In this section, several analysts testify, one by one, to his or her singular relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis today. To its life and its transmission.

Cristina Rose Laurita

[1] Éric Laurent, “Thoughts about the current forms of the impossible to teach” 21st September 2000 https://www.lacan.com/symptom12/thoughts-about.html Also, with notes, Thoughts about the current forms of the impossible to teach : 21st September 2000 : Éric Laurent at this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Laurent)

References given by Thomas Svolos

-P149 Over the last several years, my own analytic experience and my experience as an analyst and supervisor have highlighted for me the importance of Lacan’s statement that psychoanalysts must address the subjectivity of their time.

Note : This text is probably related to Of Structure as an inmixing of an Otherness prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever: 21st October 1966 (Baltimore, USA) : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19661021), so Lacan’s statement that psychoanalysts must address the subjectivity of their time is from this text.

This is a possible quote to which Svolos refers:

P122 of Lacan (21st October 1966), of Macksey & Donato (1970) : Now where is the subject of this little story? At first glance (but you will quickly see why I do not stop at this) the subject is obviously myself, in so far as I was found wanting in the whole situation, for the important point in the story is obviously not the fact that I was the one who gave the order and, finally, got satisfaction, but rather the way in which I failed altogether by not asking, in the first place, for the proper person among the reigning hotel hierarchy, in order to obtain this service without too great a delay. Anyway this gives me an opportunity to point up the difference between subject and subjectivity. I might assuredly be the subject if it were only a question of this lack. I am the subjectivity in as much as, undeniably, I evinced throughout the affair a certain impatience.

On the other hand what seems to me to be the subject is really something which is not intra nor extra nor intersubjective. The subject of this affair seems to me (and don’t take it amiss; I say it without the slightest derogatory intention, but fully aware of the weight of what I will propose): What sort of subject characterizes a style of society in which everyone is theoretically as ready to help you as the question “May I help you?” implies? It’s the question your seat-mate immediately asks you when you take a plane—an American plane, that is, with an American seat-mate. The last time I flew from Paris to New York, looking very tired for personal reasons, my seat-mate, like a mother bird, literally put food into my mouth throughout the trip. He took bits of meat from his own plate and slipped them between my lips! What is the nature of this subject, then, which is based on this first principle, and which, on the other hand, makes it impossible to get service? Such then is my question, and I believe, as regards my story, that it is here, on the level of this gap—which does not fit into intra or inter or intrasubjectivity—that the question of the subject must be posed.

-P150 of Svolos’s text: Of course, for a psychoanalyst, this simultaneously raises the question of how analysts might approach the real-in a manner beyond or outside of interpretation or meaning; I am especially intrigued with how Lacan worded this in Seminar XXIV, namely this expression “catch hold”. As we reconsider the analytic act in a post-interpretive era, or in those moments of the analytic experience when we go beyond meaning, I find this expression an apt description of a dimension of the analytic act orientated to the real. And, further, I believe that this is Lacan’s signal contribution to psychoanalysis.

Probably P11 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation of 16th November 1976 gives, How, I will ask you the question, how identify – because it is distinct – how identify hysterical identification, the so-called loving identification to the father and the identification that I would call neutral, the one which is neither one nor the other, which is the identification to a particular trait, to a trait that I called – that is how I translated the einziger Zug – that I called any trait whatsoever? See Seminar XXIV L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre (1976-1977) : begins 16th November 1976 : Jacques Lacan at this site (4 Jacques Lacan or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts

-p150 of Svolos’s text, First and foremost, this has led me to reconfigure the ways in which we might historicize psychoanalysis itself. It is difficult in a discourse such as ours not to periodise our work-indeed, Miller’s Six Paradigms of Jouissance is itself a paradigm of such work in his lucid explication of six successive logics of Lacan’s use of the concept of jouissance.

Paradigms of Jouissance : 24th, 31st March & 7th April 1999 (Paris VIII) : Jacques-Alain Miller. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Miller or Index of Other Authors’ texts)

-p150 of Svolos’s text, My interest here has led me in several different directions. The first was a reconsideration of three “cases” in the history of psychoanalysis (the Rat Man, Leclaire’s unicorn case, and a Testimony of Veronique Voruz) as following or aligned with three moments of the novel-realism, modernism, and postmodernism. What
struck me in this work was that it opens up a new way of not only looking at the history of psychoanalysis-our conceptualization and our practice as psychoanalysts-but an articulation of that with historical change in other domains of experience,

The Rat Man,

Notes upon a case of Obsessional Neurosis (The ‘Rat Man’) :1909d : Sigmund Freud

SE X p155-249 or Penguin Freud Library (PFL) : Vol 9 : p31. Published bilingual at homepage of www.Freud2Lacan.com /go down the page to NOTES UPON A CASE OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS [The Ratman] & click
&
Sessions 1-7
Bilingual : German from the G.W. Nachtragsband, pp. 509‐526/ English translation by Richard Klein : from www.Freud2Lacan.com /Home Page / SESSIONS 1-7 OF FREUD’S ORIGINAL RECORD OF THE CASE [bilingual] not in the SE.
&
Original Notes of the Case (The ‘Rat Man’) : 1907-1908 [1st October 1907 & from 10th October 1907 to 20th January 1908] : Sigmund Freud
SE X p253-319 : See also Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society 1907. : Published bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com / home page /ADDENDUM: ORIGINAL RECORD OF THE CASE. [The Ratman] & click on it. Translator James Strachey{NOTES UPON A CASE OF OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS [The Ratman]

ADDENDUM: ORIGINAL RECORD OF THE CASE [The Ratman] }

Leclaire’s unicorn case

The Dream with the Unicorn – Pôor(d)j’e-li : 1st November 1960 (Bonneval Hospital, Paris) : Serge Leclaire. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Leclaire or Index of Other Authors’ texts)