Jacques Lacan s Seminar V Formations of the Unconscious

Transcription

1 Jacques Lacan s Seminar V Formations of the Unconscious Dublin Lacan Study Group APW APPI Study Weekend Sat 25 + Sun 26 June 2016 DCU School of Nursing and Human Sciences Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland. Room HG22 Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy in Ireland APW Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups

2 Programme Saturday 25th June Registration Opening Address On the Development of the Graph of Desire. Dan Collins (Buffalo, NY) Coffee Panel 1 Borderlines and Potential Spaces Todd Dean (St Louis) The Solutions of Solutions: Trimethylamin re-examined. Carol Owens Lunch Panel 2 Reading Lacan and the Question of Style. Geraldine Cuddihy The Speaking Body... A Fact or a Fiction? Stephanie Devlin Tea Guest Lecture via video link Seminar V and Freud s Jokebook : Considerations of structure and some loud omissions. Peter Geoffrey Young (Berkeley, CA.) Wine Reception hosted by the School of Nursing and Human Sciences DCU Sunday 26th June Lacan and Education. Dan Collins Coffee Panel 3 The Bent Phallus: Crossroads or Dead End? Sarah Meehan O Callaghan To be or not to be the phallus: Lacan and Genet. Christine Gormley Lunch Panel 4 Why Can t a Woman be More Like a Man? Nadezhda Chekurova Almqvist Difficulties in the Analysis of Obsessional Neurosis (in late 1950s Lacan). Andrei Berezkine Re-branding Self Diagnosed Obsessional Neurosis as Eccentric. Gerry Moore Concluding Remarks Carol Owens

3 Abstracts On the Development of the Graph of Desire The definitive and canonical version of the Graph of Desire that appears in Lacan s Subversion of the Subject a talk given in 1960 but revised for the Écrits (1966) differs in many ways from the versions of the graph that were incremental steps in its development as presented in Seminar V. As it developed, the graph possessed many features that were dropped or obscured in the final version. Most notably, the diagonal line that lies between the metonymic object and the place of the code in the developmental versions of the graph doesn t appear in the final version even though it is arguably the most important line in the entire diagram. This line prevents the graph from being merely a linguistic model of communication. In fact, this line goes far to explain how language means. In this talk, I ll look at the forgotten stages of the graph s development and see what they have to teach us. Borderlines and Potential Spaces Space, both as mathematical concept and as metaphor, has always played a key role in psychoanalytic theory, at least as far back as the Project and in Freud s attention to Fechner s concept of the other space in The Interpretation of Dreams. Near the end of his life, Freud even defines psyche as space, as opposed to the a priori determinants that logical thought might require. Today spatial metaphors are so common as to go completely unnoticed: borderline is now a completely reified diagnostic concept in psychiatry whose origin as a space between psychosis and neurosis is hardly considered. One could argue that collapsing the space of the psyche into linear and logical arguments is ubiquitous in most psychoanalytic thinking. In this paper I will explore some of the ways in which Lacan navigated the problems of space in his early seminars, showing how he, like Freud before him, sometimes fell back on a priori determinants, but also how he recognized this as a problem, (provisionally) culminating in the graph of desire as developed in his fifth seminar, on the formations of the unconscious. In pursuing this line of thought, I attempt to make a case for the central importance of thinking about space in the ongoing development of psychoanalytic theory. The Solutions of Solutions: Trimethylamin re-examined Taking seriously Lacan s comments apropos the dream of dreams in Seminar II that thanks to Freud, we understand that the dream must be understood literally, and that in examining a dream we have to take both the dream and its associations together, it occurred to me that there was another way to think about trimethylamin. This time, however, strictly as signifier. In Freud and in Lacan, and in various other psychoanalytic accounts, the dream element trimethylamin is taken up and analysed as a named object with signification. Twisting things around a bit I want to argue that the parapraxis of parapraxes, aka Freud s forgetting of Signorelli, and Lacan s analysis of this forgetting in Seminar V as well as his treatment of the famillionaire indicates a more useful and interesting line of examination for this solution of solutions.

4 Reading Lacan and the Question of Style The style is the man himself, so reads the opening sentence of Écrits wherein Lacan quotes Buffon (2002). A number of commentators, including Bruce Fink (2004), Jane Gallop (1985) and Sean Homer (2005), have noted how Lacan s style is performative. The ways in which Lacan s style enacts or mimics the subject matter (in this case, the unconscious) will form the primary focus of this paper. Drawing largely on Seminar V (Formations of the Unconscious), I will explore Lacan s use of various figures of style in order to illustrate how these imitate the workings of the unconscious. A secondary focus will be on the process of reading, or more specifically, the reading experience. In The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters, Jane Gallop emphasises the importance of how we read, even more than who we read (2000). I want to suggest that a pertinent question here might be: what is it to experience a reading of Lacan? To this end, I will offer a personal reflection on my experience of reading Seminar V. The Speaking Body...A Fact or a Fiction? In seminar VI, Lacan, referring to Freud s contribution and the analytic experience reminds us of the intimate relation between desire and what he calls the mark. This mark, he tells us, is what supports castrative relations. Using the analogy of sheep branding, he succinctly reminds us that the problem of recognition is not solved with the shepherd being able to distinguish his own flock for who knows where he (the shepherd) is to be found wandering himself? When it comes to the human subject and desire, things are not so simple. Indeed it is a question of how this desire and the mark is incarnated for the subject, and the various impressions, manifestations and significations it creates in terms of individual subjectivity and social embodiment. It comes as no surprise to say that the unconscious bears heavily on the corporeal body and we know this, especially from the beginnings of psychoanalysis, its forays into the nature of hysteria with its deeply repressed sexuality and somatic conversions. You could say; one suffers from one s body and since we cannot live in the material world without it, we inhabit it and make use of it as a jouissance producing vessel. Our bodily codes, practices and inscriptions basically constitute who we are as we continue to manipulate it in an endless quest for identity and recognition. In this seminar, Formations of the Unconscious, Lacan is specific in his statements about the markings on the body and how they always inscribe there, a double connotation. Today, we seem to be speaking through our bodies more than ever before, carving them out in very specific ways, so as to give rise to a particular form of subjectivity and desire. Ironically, in our current climate of modernity, the body itself has become as complex as sexuality was for Freud! The body of the symbolic, an incorporeal one, bequeathed to us by the signifier affects the corporeal body in various ways. What is the consequence of this for a human subject? To pose the question in another way: in receiving the mark of the signifier, what does the body become? a site of display, of identification, of self-harm, a locus of inscription, a work of art, a monument? The signifier also violates mutilates and dismembers the body, as an entity, a body of drives, which struggle to reach a fullness, beyond the symbolic system into which it is inserted. The first effect of the signifier on the body, according to Lacan is: to mortify

5 it. In this short paper, I hope to highlight the significance of the enhanced, eroticized, and wounded body and reflect on how it speaks to the psychoanalytic mind. Lacan and Education Aristotle said that All men by nature desire to know. This remark contrasts starkly with Lacan s presupposition of a passion for ignorance. And between knowledge and ignorance, neither of these positions sheds much light on how people learn. But Lacan was involved in a decades-long teaching, and he made many comments on his own role as a teacher. Focusing on the topic of our weekend, I ll ask what Seminar V can tell us about how teaching and learning actually occur. The Bent Phallus: Crossroads or Dead End? In Formations of the Unconscious it is clear that Lacan is bent on the phallus as a concept in the organisation of desire, sexuality and identity. A signifiant-carrefour or crossroads signifier, the phallus can be seen as an artery within the network of signification. This paper is not about the meaning of the phallus, for to attempt to define a concept that underpins the signifying properties of definition per se is a fallacy, a circular debate. However, it is in the very grappling with the plurality of avenues opened up by this concept in Seminar V that the basis or desire for thinking differently may stem. Lacan threads a path in this seminar to considering desire as something transforming, a movement that is more fluid than set. This path is woven with theories concerning sexual development with a heterosexual bias, and while vacillating between anatomical considerations and something else in excess of this, a space for desire is opened, a space that can be read in a different bent. Reading the phallus in light of queer theories, theories that interrogate desire in its multiple, non-essentialist possibilities, highlights the potential of this slippery concept in its very slipperiness. According to Judith Butler, the phallus has potential for fluidity in signification, in as much as the phallus signifies, it is also always in the process of being signified and resignified. In this vein I will explore how the phallus in Seminar V is already a queer concept. To be or not to be the phallus: Lacan and Genet In his seminar on the formations of the unconscious Lacan said that, in so far as he is virile a man is always more or less his own metaphor. This is even what attaches to the term virility a certain shadow of ridicule. Laughter is produced where it is a question of having/not having the phallus. In the same seminar Lacan speaks about the laughter which greets Gide s miserable cry at the loss of his correspondence with his wife. Is this the same laughter? What forms at the dissolution of the Oedipus complex as Lacan reworks it in this seminar is in the one case, the ego - ideal, and in the other case, perversion. Both produce comedy, but what is so funny? Here Lacan s reading of Genet s play Le Balcon reveals how pivotal the genre of comedy is to an understanding of the subject. Why Can t a Woman be More Like a Man? In Seminar V Lacan remarks that the obsessional s essential aim is certainly that of maintaining the Other. He also says that what the obsessional wants to maintain above all - without the air of doing so, having the air

6 of aiming at some other thing - is this Other, where things articulate themselves in terms of signifier. In this presentation I ll discuss the neurotic and his desire alongside examples from the musical, My Fair Lady. What can Professor Higgins, an expert in the science of speech, a man who studies simple phonetics teach us about the obsessional s relation to the signifier? How can someone who dedicates his life to promoting articulate English speech fall in love with a woman (Eliza) who speaks with an accent and utters such disgusting, depressing noises? Lacan says that for the obsessional the Other becomes the relay of the approach of the subject to his desire. The Other as locus of the speech, as addressee of the demand, also becomes the place where desire must be discovered. In the case of Professor Higgins, there are moments in his rational and quiet life, where his discourse is interrupted by a woman. Lacan distinguishes the way the hysteric approaches desire from that of the obsessional in terms of the fantasy $ <>a. Taking examples from this classic musical, I want to emphasize some of these differences. Difficulties in the Analysis of Obsessional Neurosis (in late 1950s Lacan) In the late 1950s, Lacan voices a critique of analytic method, particularly with obsessionals, given that certain established schools, in his view, were overlooking the structural conformism of an obsessional, an oversight which in turn failed to pinpoint the desire/demand tension. It seems, he saw analysis as traditionally geared mainly towards hysterics to the detriment of obsessionals. Thus, a lack of meta-critique of the analyst s position then, was seen by Lacan as an obstacle to a better theoretical understanding of the neurotic subject, as well as an appreciation of the (meta)position of analysis itself. What is this newly evolving Analyst position (if any) that Lacan gradually offers to both an obsessional analysand, as well as the analytical establishment at large? Re-branding Self Diagnosed Obsessional Neurosis as Eccentric This paper explores one man s narrative of his history of engagement with mental health, addiction services, and psychotherapy in the form of CBT, alongside his struggle to re-brand himself outside of a mental health discourse and the world of international finance and within academic and psychoanalytic discourses. The revision of the self as eccentric rather than insane is reflected in questions around desire and the challenge of presenting a body to the world on which he has inscribed his story. The metaphor of journey is frequently used to map a life or engagement with psychotherapy. While rendered meaningless by overuse it is resurrected here as it reflects this man s transition from rural to urban life, from academia to employment followed by a return to academia where a desired comfort not found at home or work might be revisited. This journey through dependence to pseudo independence, from Ireland to Eastern Europe involves switching languages, swapping the couch with Skype, rebranding obsessional neurosis as eccentricity, and a gradual acknowledgement that the map that orientates the traveler is unconsciously inscribed.

7 Biographies Andrei Berezkine has recently completed an MSc in Bereavement Studies (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland). He is engaged in clinical work within inner-city services for socially deprived areas, with both adults and children. Nadezhda Chekurova Almqvist is a Dublin based psychoanalytic therapist. She works with people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds. She holds a B.A. in Social Work from Sofia University, as well as an M.Phil from Trinity College, and a M.A. from Independent Colleges Dublin. She is a Reg. Pract. member of A.P.P.I and also a member of the A.P.P.I Scientific Committee. She participates regularly in seminars, congresses, and workshops in Ireland and Bulgaria, and attends reading groups in ancient and modern philosophy. Nadezhda has been a member of the Dublin Lacan Study Group from its inception. Dan Collins is a founding member of Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups, a group that promotes clinical Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has given numerous talks and lectures on psychoanalysis. He is a member of Lacan Toronto, where he is a teacher in their education program. Dan lives and works in Buffalo, NY. Geraldine Cuddihy has a BA in Women s Studies and Policy Studies from London Metropolitan University, and an MA and PhD in Women s Studies from University College Dublin. Her PhD thesis is based on the novels of Julia Kristeva. She is a member of the Dublin Lacan Study Group. Main areas of interest include: Postmodernism/ Poststructuralism, Queer Theory, and Feminist Theories of the Body. Stephanie Devlin is a Psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a member of the Dublin Lacan study group. She is in private clinical practice in North County Dublin. Todd Dean is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in St. Louis, Missouri. He is a senior editor of Division/Review, a quarterly journal of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association, and an editorial advisor for The Candidate Journal. Christine Gormley recently completed a clinical Masters degree in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Independent Colleges Dublin. She holds an M.Phil. in Psychoanalytic Studies from TCD and a B.A. in English and Philosophy from UCD. She is a member of A.P.P.I. and currently practices in a clinic in north inner city Dublin. Sarah Meehan O Callaghan is involved in PhD research (Comparative Literature) at DCU. Research interests include theories of representation, theatre, sexuality and the body via Lacanian/Freudian psychoanalytic theory. She is a member of the Dublin Lacan Study Group and has had a long running interest in psychoanalysis, individual process and theory. Gerry Moore is a Lecturer in Psychotherapy and former Head of the School of Nursing and Human Sciences at Dublin City University where he teaches on the Masters and Doctorate in Psychotherapy, Mental Health and Psychology programmes, he previously worked in the mental health services. He is a

8 registered psychiatric nurse, registered general nurse and psychoanalytic psychotherapist (registered practitioner member of APPI). Gerry is currently a member of APPI s Scientific Committee and the Executive of the Irish Chapter of IntNSA. He has published and presented papers in the fields of mental health, addiction, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Carol Owens holds a BA and Phd in Psychology, MPhil in Psychoanalytic Studies, and MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. She is the founder and convener of the Dublin Lacan study group. A Registered Practitioner member of the APPI, she is currently Chair of the Scientific Committee of the organization. She has published a number of articles and book chapters on aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice, and has lectured at TCD, DCU, and Independent Colleges. She works in private practice in North County Dublin. Peter Geoffrey Young is Candidate and faculty member of the Lacanian School of psychoanalysis. He has translated Lacan s seminars from (including Seminar V which the Dublin Lacan study group have been using this year). He holds a Masters degree in Psychology and is in private practice in Berkeley, CA. He is currently pursuing doctoral studies in San Francisco. From Peter was Co-convener of Psychoanalytic Seminar Tuzla (PST), organized to examine the structure and purpose of jokes in relation to the commemoration of war and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Saturday Evening Supper A group booking will be made at a local restaurant for supper on Saturday 25th June for 7pm. Please advise Carol if you would like to come along (carolowensappi@gmail.com). Car Parking Free car parking available on Saturday and Sunday entering DCU via the Ballymun Road gate and proceeding to Car Park 4 at the back of library barriers remain open all weekend. Otherwise if entering via Collins avenue an 8 per day parking will apply. The Dublin Lacan Study Group is currently in its eighth year of work and meets twice monthly at Rathdown House, DIT Grangegorman, Dublin 7. Membership is open to anyone who is interested in studying and discussing the seminars of Jacques Lacan. In September 2016 the group will commence reading Seminar VI Desire and its Interpretation Enquiries to Magda Kurzawska: magda.kurzawska@gmail.com front cover: The Life of David Gale 2003 (USA), Directed by Alan Parker, Screenplay by Charles Randolph.