Communiqué from the President
Bernard Seynhaeve
Analyzing the School
The New Executive Committee
The NLS is the only bilingual School of the WAP, and while it has a large representation in Europe, it regroups communities extending throughout several continents.
What about its teaching, and what are the consequences?
First, the language. English is imposing itself more and more in the School. At the same time, the center of gravity of the NLS is changing. These two phenomena work together.
In this respect, the NLS bears much of the responsibility for the propagation of Lacanian-oriented psychoanalysis in the world.
I paid attention to this in the creation of the new Executive Committee. The Committee includes two Anglophones living in North America, in the USA and Canada, and we meet via Skype on Sundays at 11 am in America and 5 pm in Europe.
I will be its President.
The Vice-President will be Alexandre Stevens.
There will be three people in the role of Secretary: Pamela King, Maria Cristina Aguirre and Ruzanna Hakobyan.
The role of Treasurer will fall to Nelson Feldman.
Frank Rollier will take care of the cartels, as he has done with much dynamism these past two years.
Knottings
During my time as Vice-President, I took into account the intense desire felt by members to be more involved in the politics of the School. This is the point I would like to develop here.
I first looked at the question of knowing what a school of psychoanalysis in the Freudian Field is. The NLS is not an organization of psychoanalysts, such as the IPA. It is a School where the question, “What is a psychoanalyst?” is asked. This is the question Lacan asked when he founded his School. It is true that the NLS is a community of psychoanalysts, but of psychoanalysts that are in training, One by One. The School, in my opinion, regroups psychoanalyst/analysands that are summoned to answer to the question of Lacan.
On what is the training of psychoanalysts based? It is based on a triple footing.
First, it relies on one’s personal analysis. The analytic setting is the place par excellence where psychoanalysts are constituted, One by One. This we know, but I like to emphasize it and perhaps point out that it is not in our Clinical Sections that we learn to become a psychoanalyst. I do not underestimate the importance of these clinical training grounds, but I think it is useful to make this clarification.
Secondly, the practice of psychoanalysis cannot be conceived of without that of supervision.
And the third footing is that which constitutes the cartels. Their important place was sufficiently demonstrated during this last Congress.
After this introduction, I can now address my perceptions as Vice-President, in particular the desire that is manifest throughout the NLS to be involved in the politics of the School.
Marx let us know that the tool is a determining factor, therefore let’s create the tool. It is for this reason that I thought it would be interesting to organize, in the manner of the ECF, events around the theme, “Questions of the School”.
In addition, the Knottings seminars, invented by Gil Caroz when he was President of the NLS, would benefit from adapting to the changes taking place in the landscape of our School. The Knottings were invented to create a work transference between the members of the Societies. This instrument, that serves the politics of work transference in our School, should probably be honed so that we can refocus on the politics that we want to carry out in our School.
The Knottings should take into consideration the desire of all of the members of the School – of those, for example, who are not members of a Society – to use this tool. Why not, for instance, draw inspiration from the experience of the NEL in Latin America that also recognizes the problem of distance and separation between its members? In the NEL, they organize seminars via WebEx. This system functions well in Latin America, relieving many of the costs of traveling. Let’s be sufficiently geek.
Now We Come to the 2019 Congress
The Congresses that have been organized by the NLS have in general addressed clinical problems and fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. Here are some of the themes that have been taken up:
Applied Psychoanalysis
Anxiety
The Clinic of Paternity
The Body and Its Objects
Lacanian Interpretation
Daughter, Mother, Woman in the Twenty-first Century
Reading a Symptom
Moments of Crisis
The Psychotic Subject in the Geek Era
What Cannot Be Said
Discreet Signs in Ordinary Psychosis
About the Unconscious
and, In a State of Transference.
Considering our School members’ interest in what psychoanalytic training is, I thought it would be a good moment to address this question through the prism of The Latest Lacan. I propose that we take an interest in a text that Jacques-Alain Miller (JAM) commented on at several moments during his course: the “Preface to the English-Language Edition of Seminar XI. This text, Lacan’s last, deals with the pass. Four main signifiers are the subject of this text: The real unconscious, urgent cases, satisfaction, and, of course, the pass. I consider them to be four new concepts that articulate with each other.
In his course, “The Latest Lacan” [“Le tout dernier Lacan”], JAM discusses Lacan’s later teachings, in particular Lacan’s last three seminars and “L’esp d’un laps” (the title that JAM gave to the text that was written in the days following the Seminar, The Sinthome). I thus invite you to read all of JAM’s 2006-2007 course, as well as the text, “L’esp d’un laps” that is commented on by JAM in the first three lessons of this course, “The Latest Lacan”. It is also commented on in the course, “Choses de finesse en psychanalyse” during the lesson of January 2009. All of these lessons have been published in French in various journals of the ECF.
The title of the 2019 Congress has been decided: ¡Urgent! That is, what is urgent in the clinic, the urgency of the speaking being, the urgency of the parlêtre. As with a solid substance, that which is urgent can be approached from different angles. It can be looked at from the angle of trauma, but also from that of the entrance into treatment. It can be examined from the side of the end of the treatment and its articulation with satisfaction, or from that of the reception of psychical suffering in institutions. In short, I believe we have a theme that follows the logic of our previous congresses and responds to the pressing sense of urgency in our School and our civilization today.
An idea emerged amongst the Anglophone members of our Executive Committee: Why not translate into English the lessons from JAM’s course that I just underlined? I asked JAM, and he agreed. I thus have the pleasure of announcing that The Lacanian Review will be publishing a Special Issue which will include the first three lessons of Miller’s course, “The Latest Lacan”, as well as the lesson of 21 January 2009 that appeared in La Cause freudienne No. 74 under the title, “La passe du parlêtre”, in both French and in English. Russell Grigg has agreed to translate these texts for us. I also proposed to JAM that we republish the Preface of the English-language edition of Seminar XI, and he accepted this proposal. This will constitute, in my opinion, an attractive working tool in view of the forthcoming 2019 Congress that will take place in Tel Aviv on June 1st and 2nd. This Special Issue will be given to all members of the NLS, as well as to all those who register to the next Congress. The Organizing Commission of this 2019 Congress has already been formed.
Bernard Seynhaeve
July 1st, 2018
Lacan, Jacques, “Preface to the English-Language Edition”, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, tr. A. Sheridan, Norton, New York/London, 1998, pp. vii-ix.
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