THE INVENTION OF THE PARTNER
When you are going to encounter a psychoanalyst, you encounter a partner – a new partner you have not encountered in your life and with whom you are going to play a new part (partie). [...]
Urgency: Between Truth and Jouissance
Urgency is a hole in time, it is the time of eternalization. When a traumatic event breaks through, perplexity arises, regardless of the structural diagnosis. The subjective response will come afterwards. Urgency is a time [...]
What Bill Gates wants from me, and from all of us
During the eighties, David Icke was a famous sports presenter on the BBC. Shortly after leaving that post, he suffered an episode of epiphanic revelation on the Isle of Wight. Later, after being caught in [...]
Did Harry Potter go through the Pass?
In the final chapters of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", does the protagonist relate to an experience that might resemble that of the Pass? The part that caught my ear is the title of [...]
How does the work of art interpret the experience of confinement?
The experience of confinement, as an effect of the coronavirus pandemic, is having an impact on the subject. The artist Rosemary Cassidy Buswell (1) shows us, in this regard, how to deal with this real [...]
Women Tell Their Stories
We know that at the end of his life Freud was left with at least one unresolved enigma, that of female sexuality: I do not know what a woman wants, he said. Having unraveled the [...]
Interpretation as an Event is from the Feminine Position
“The analyst too must pay,” said Lacan in “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power.” [1] Pay with his words. Pay with his own skin. With his persona, when he lends [...]
Haphephobia and the Dilemma of Touching Each Other or Not
Since the start of the pandemic we have not stopped receiving news about different mental disorders linked to it. First, we discover the syndrome of cabin fever, that push to stay locked up. With the [...]
Titian’s Blue
Awoken from a dream, a question imposes itself on me: what is the colour of psychoanalysis? It echoes childhood memories where lively, vibrant colours marked my mother’s desire as she covered me with them. Once, [...]
The Trump Symptom
“Domestic Terrorism”, Hillary Clinton wrote on her Twitter account referring to the hordes Trump sent to the Capitol last Wednesday. From everything I’ve read about it, that diagnosis seems spot on. Terrorism can be practiced [...]
Lacan in Caracas: Forty years and (of) an instant (of seeing)
Gerado Réquiz is an AMS (Analyst Member of the School) of the WAP and of the NEL. He currently resides in Madrid, Spain. Interview conducted by Cristina Vírseda. Image credit – J. Diaz. …. Lacan’s [...]
Finnegans Wake: A Dream of Joyce – and its Real *
In the third section of Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome, titled by Jacques-Alain Miller “The Invention of the Real”,[1] and especially in its middle chapter, “On Sens, Sex and the Real” – itself an elaboration of [...]
Hate in Bubbles
The US elections have confirmed what the pandemic had already shown in the open: that hatred works today as a passion that groups people into bubbles, segregating them from one another. Freud's thesis in his [...]
A Night of Psychoanalysis in Vienna
On 4 September 2020, a balmy late summer evening in the Museumsquartier in Vienna, more than twenty people from the Initiative Wien met to read three of the Introductory Lectures that Sigmund Freud gave in [...]
Organized Solitude
Does anyone remember the golden age of confinement, when humanity believed itself to be One in universal love? Many saw the omen of redemption, the promise of a historic rectification: we would be reborn in [...]
The Place of the Secret
It is as a psychoanalyst that I am invited to this conference. It is technology that makes possible my presence with you today for this debate in Turin. I could content myself with that. But [...]
Pain and Jouissance
Freud distinguished between two basic experiences of the psychic apparatus: one is the experience of satisfaction (1905;1920), and the second is of pain (1895). In his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Freud identified the [...]
Responsible But Not Guilty
As part of the preparatory work for the forthcoming Study Days of the School* I remembered a text by Karl Abraham, which I had read a long time ago. It is an audacious and provocative [...]
From Galileo to DNA Barcodes in Food Products
In an article in Science, researchers developed a system whereby artificially created DNA barcodes can be dispersed in environmental objects, including food products.[1] This practice is starting to be used in food safety, for example [...]
Children of Trump
As I am not a political analyst, I immerse myself with profane curiosity in the fascinating phenomenon of the US elections. “American democracy hangs by a thread” was the title that Umair Haque gave to [...]
Feminine Masochism, a Male Fantasy
Feminine masochism is an issue that has often been addressed. It will not be my point. But there is an incidental remark in the comments that Lacan makes on several occasions and which has caught [...]
COVID Sadness: The New Sorrow
It’s been almost a year since it all started. We have experienced strangeness, fear and anguish, anger, love, solidarity and grief. Now, at the beginning of autumn – and without the summer light – sadness [...]
The Taboo on Touching
The obsessional is guilty. He is a “big criminal”. Mainly because he enjoys too much. This unavoidable guilt lodged in the structure is to be distinguished from the legal conviction of an individual for such [...]
Variations on the Concept of School (Waiting for the Re-encounter)
The School: Woman, Subject, of the Cartel, Symptom, Knowledge, Knot, Cause, Refuge, Work in Progress, of the Pass… The predicates multiply themselves, constituting a sufficiently Borgesean labyrinth that invites one to lose oneself in what [...]
Evaporation
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people disappear without trace. In police stations around the world there are lists of people who have been reported missing and who will never be found. The causes are [...]
The Covid-19 Does Not Exist
Science is in the process of substituting itself for religion, and it is still more despotic, obtuse and obscurantist. There is an atom God, a space God, etc. If science or religion wins, psychoanalysis is [...]
Interpreting the US Presidential Race as a Symptom
On September 26th, 1960, the first televised presidential debate in the history of the United States was held. It was between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. For the first time in history, the candidates [...]
The Real Presence and Slipperiness of the Body
During confinement, we experienced absent bodies from a distance. We experienced that the notions of proximity, distance, and border between self and other were insufficient to account for presence. Near, far, social distancing, blurring (an [...]
COVID-19…and now what?
It has been six months since the arrival in Europe of this epidemic, about which we have heard everything and nothing. And it’s far from over. However, the famous “next world” is taking shape. In [...]
The Hands of Freud
An elaboration on the essay by Jeannne Wolff Bernstein, “The Spanish Flu, Covid-19 and Sigmund Freud – What can we learn from history?”(1) There is the real of the virus, an element that is at [...]
Memories of Sex
If God exists, he certainly invented sex to torment us. But then again, he was the first to be bothered: Zeus did nothing other than to cast a spell on ravishing mortals, and after him, Christ chose [...]
The Ship and the Swan
Freud studied the three great factors that cause discontent in human beings: the action of nature, one's own body, the relationship with others. Today it is urgent to bring the first up to date, because [...]
Tech-no-me, tech-to-me
15.06.20 Before the pandemic and the closure of schools, I was clinically working with 4 to 12 year-old children mostly at their school environment. After the government’s decision to close the educational establishments, I [...]
The affair of the “Carrion” in Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XVII
The word "carrion" rings a bell when you are French. That is precisely what happened while I was listening to the London Society of the NLS Online Reading[i] of Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XVII[ii], Chapter 12, by Despina [...]
The Destiny of Two Letters
“[…] because I want to go out someday to the street, and soon, without dying.” The kiss of the spider woman, Manuel Puig Martin wrote two letters to his father in October 1918, [...]
Writing and Erasure under the Shadow of Covid-19
Above the auditorium near my house in Haifa, ordinarily a stage for cultural events, a huge sign continues to soar, reading “culture will win”. The sign carries both the outcry of the deserted venue, its [...]
Counter-continuity
After many days since the implosion of everyday life, I find myself looking for how to make room for the discontinuity in the discontinuity, how to obtain what a colleague –in the first series of [...]
Signifiers Matter
In our world, the world of Lacanian psychoanalysis, we sometimes talk about the decline in the power or the impact of the symbolic order as a defining characteristic of our time, and the corollary rise [...]
The School in Times of Pandemic
Doing Zoom I want to deeply thank the Council for making this night possible amidst this colossal horror named Covid19. Re-taking the floor in the School, traversed by this planetarium pandemic and affected by the [...]
School, Dream and Sinthome
The perspective I chose for the Conversation organized by the Council under the title “School in Times of Pandemic”, occurred to me based on the latest events that arose within the World Association of Psychoanalysis. [...]
Columbus in Quarantine
This last week in Houston, the mayor ordered the removal of three statues from public parks in time for Juneteenth: two Confederate memorials and one of Christopher Columbus. Juneteenth is a state holiday in Texas, [...]
It’s easy to see segregation in other cultures and not in your own
Jorge Assef by Luz Saint Phat "The United States are burning", this was one of the headlines shown in the news these days in different places around the world to portray the scale and [...]
The Veil Is Torn
Killing me softly with his song Killing me softly [1] It is a theme inscribed in the preparations of our Study Days on the sexual assault: the intimate unveiled. The expression in its simplicity implies a [...]
The Empty Plinth
As the reports of Edward Colston’s statue being pulled down from the plinth in Bristol have started to reach us, our memories were still fresh with a similar scene occurring in Baghdad at the beginning [...]
Conversing
Bernard Seynhaeve, President of the NLS, in conversation with Violaine Clément, ASREEP-NLS, by Skype, May 22 2020 Violaine Clément : You interpreted the cancellation of the NLS Congress on interpretation that was supposed to [...]
Saying the unsayable
In an analysis, the subject comes to speak about what doesn't work, what bothers him, makes him obsessed or anxious. Something of his jouissance is opaque to him. Once the Subject Supposed to Know is [...]
Pushing the impossible so that history will continue
It is only by pushing the impossible into its last defenses that impotence takes the power to make the patient turn into the agent. [1] Jacques Lacan When sanitary measures forced us to set [...]
Art#COVID19: a liquid element?
Breathtaking! At the time of deconfinement in France, the question of art’s place, in our postmodernity, arises. Since the sanitary lockdown, galleries, museums are closed, festivals and concerts are canceled. Artists one-by-one are deprived of [...]
Affectio Societatis
Affect and Contract That the Law gives way to affect, surprises. Nothing seems further from the Law than the register of affects. One signs a contract. One cannot say the next day: “I no longer [...]
Challenges for Psychoanalysis in Times of Pandemic and Distancing
Interview by Luz Saint Phat How can psychoanalysis contribute to understanding and shedding light on some of the situations faced by subjects within the Covid-19 outbreak and the statutory provisions for isolation and social [...]
The ‘Zoom fatigue’ – A new form of tiredness
Confinement has brought us a new and paradoxical form of fatigue: the fatigue of video calls. Paradoxical because, despite the fact that now the bodies do not move through subway corridors, crowded streets or endless [...]
Notes on Science-fiction in Times of the Corona event
“For me the only true, serious science worth following is science fiction” [i] During the lockdown, with the images of deserted cities, the anonymity of doctors and nurses behind their masks, the possibility – [...]
What Is It That Interprets in Psychoanalysis?
For an analytic session, there is no criterion for success or accuracy: one can only say that it took place. It took place if it produced a certain effect, an effect which is not calculable [...]
Eschewing the Impossibility of the Real
In difficult circumstances such as our current one, the unconscious, which does not know viruses or time, persists and insists. What to do with one’s analysis, when “virtual” analysis doesn’t cut the mustard? The [...]
Summoned!
Summoned: it starts when you list your symptoms to several different people after dialing 15—the French medical emergency number—also known as SAMU. You are taken more and more seriously and then summoned urgently to the [...]
What remains to be said: on floundering, ignorance and mourning
As I look through the window and see people on balconies clapping, someone sees me and appears invigorated to clap even more. He and others keep clapping in the choir that transcends countries and continents. [...]
Last night I dreamt of Bond, James Bond
Bond films were my favorite growing up and played a part in my coming of age. Later my interest in films turned elsewhere, my gaze shifted, and Bond became a thing of the past. With [...]
Going Over The (Self-Built) Wall
Entre l’homme et la femme, Il y a l’amour. Entre l’homme et l’amour, Il y a un monde. Entre l’homme et le monde, Il y a un mur.[1] Jacques-Alain Miller comments on Lacan’s statement [...]
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there…
[1] Faced with a pandemic, a world (not all) governed by calculation and profit has the duty to protect human life at any cost, and to do so in the “general interest.” So much for [...]
Two Brief Observations from this Pandemonium
With regard to this pandemonium, two brief observations. The first is based on my analysis and, with a degree of certainty, I would sum it up it like this: My own analytic experience could definitely [...]
On the littoral…
In my latest book "Unconscious 3.0" I have dedicated some reflections to the use of technologies in the service of the denial of death. The famous episode of the Black Mirror series entitled "Be Right [...]
Life Online
There are two features of social media that are particularly worth emphasising, namely that such “information flows” have the quality of being both immediate and novel. There is a need for constant updating (e.g. via [...]
It’s No Child’s Play
During the period of Lockdown, my work with children has been most affected. Schools took precautionary measures some time before the prohibition from the central government. Without proper intimation to the children, or interaction with [...]
In memoriam – François Sauvagnat
Extracts from an interview with François Sauvagnat about his collection Le trauma psychique, aspects cliniques, éthiques et politiques (Anthropos, 2007), published on the blog for Journées 44 of the ECF, Être Mère, but conducted a [...]
Everything will be fine?
Emergencies - natural catastrophes, attacks or pandemics like the current one – always give rise to diverse attitudes and feelings. Optimism is usually more politically correct than pessimism. This is why we do not stop [...]
Shouts are heard at sunset under the Madrid sky
Madrid, Spain. Neighborhood of Salamanca. Núñez de Balboa. The media speak of a crowded street. But in many other streets in the same neighborhood and nearby, such as Arturo Soria, Retiro, Hortaleza, the neighbors accompany [...]
“Coraggio Casimiro”: Freud and Abraham Encourage each other In Difficult Times
* Recently, when I speak to friends or someone tells me about the toughness of these times, when the conversation ends this expression always comes to me, and it is not clear whether I want [...]
Institutional Experimentation and Psychoanalysis
For the past fifty days in Greece, that is since the onset of the quarantine measures, we have been experiencing a large-scale institutional experimentation. The Parliament, without having formally ceased its function, has defacto delegated [...]
STILL LIFE? – The Lacanian Review 9
New Lacanian School (NLS) / World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP) Presentation We began our research for this volume of The Lacanian Review with an equivocation between the two languages of the New Lacanian School, English [...]
Invention in the Time of Pandemic
What becomes of analytical work with young psychotic or autistic patients when our intervention is by telephone or videoconference? The bodies are no longer present, and we remain observers, outsiders to the life of the [...]
Civilization and Its Discontents and the Unbearable Lightness of the Absent Body
Over the past weeks, in the School, much has been written and by many in regard to the uncanny phenomenon of this epidemic, in attempt to formulate something about it; the challenges that it raises [...]
Fast!
That the body is an object, well psychoanalysis knows this from its origins. An object that can be loved, hated, manipulated, bought, sold, cared for, corrupted, desecrated, destroyed... whether it is our own or that [...]
The Monsters of Reason
El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos is an etching by Francisco de Goya (1746-1828). It was created within -and refers to - the Spanish Enlightenment. According to the usual interpretation of this piece, reason [...]
Consenting to the Desire for Analysis
A psychoanalysis begins with an initial meeting between the analyst and the analysand which will determine the continuation of the process. It requires more than a tacit agreement between the two protagonists because it does [...]
Encounter with the Coronavirus: we, analysts, are mortal
On the 7th of March, I went full of enthusiasm to Barcelona to a TyA conference (Addiction and Alcoholism), thrilled to present a clinical case with the friends of the local group, at the local [...]
Mystery and Birdsong
“What is this virus, Theo?” Theo: “It’s a virus that makes children go away.” These are the words of a three and a half year old who is asking: “Why aren’t there any children in [...]
Reclusions
In Japan, the number of elderly people commiting crimes is increasing because they want to go to jail. In jail they have company, they are treated well and confinement is preferable to the extreme solitude [...]
Quarantine Chronicle (on Love and the Indocile Body)
I had promised to tell a friend what I thought about the book that she had bought me as a birthday present as soon as I had finished it. I am sorry to have to [...]
Structural Discord
I had been hoping to translate Dalila Arpin’s piece published by our colleagues in the ELP,[1] for I had been touched by how well she had put some of the impasses we encounter during this [...]
Resolutely Lacanian
About The Other Side of Bio-politics. A Writing for Jouissance, by Éric Laurent.[1] Subversion The Other Side of Bio-politics,[2] a title too Foucauldian? That was my question for a moment. But in reading the introduction [...]
A Journal
I want to share with you what my thoughts are trying to capture of the phenomena that have taken place for four days in a body affected not by a signifier, which is generally considered [...]
An Open Window
Time has been suspended, in any case it is different. It seems to be stretching but also accelerating. However, what time do we speak about here, that of the analytic session or that of confinement? [...]
The Real of Science and Its Numbers
Each of us faces his/her own real. Nowadays, however, we could say that CO-VID19 is the real of the entire planet. Every day, we witness new measures “feeding” the speech of science and the protection [...]
Viral Times
As I recently stated, surely all too naïvely and ill-considered, was that “what we are living is really new and unknown and this whole Corona/Covid-19 situation would have been unthinkable before the age of globalization.” [...]
Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011): A Reading
How should we read the film Melancholia,[1] whose visual power and meticulous aesthetics captivate our eyes so? And whose music – the overture from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Iseult – makes our ears tremble [...]
Corparlant
The rumour of the lockdown lifting has ushered in a new period: the time of tomorrow, with respect to the basic opposition of yesterday and today, since we don’t know better. It is also the [...]
The Bridge-Builder
On 24th April, the Kronen Zeitung (the highest circulation daily in Austria) reported under the headline: "Prefer Austria - Kurz: Restraint during holidays abroad" on the recommendations of the Austrian Chancellor regarding the coming summer [...]
Civilization and Its Objects a
After the coronavirus passes, so they say, the world will not go back to what it was before. When we emerge on the other side of the pandemic's rabbit hole, they tell us, the world [...]
On the phone
In these times of subjective emergencies, I will attempt to circumscribe how a phone call can constitute an intervention outside-of-the-norm, in different contexts. I will take three examples. The Voice That Disanguishes Firstly, an institutional [...]
What’s missing, what’s falling
1917: Marcel Duchamp signs a urinal with the name R. MUTT and calls it "Fountain". According to the artist, any ordinary object with a signature, a title and its placement in an exhibition can be [...]
Passions Run Wild
There was a moment of panic in Austria when hamster purchases occurred and patients told about their fears that they had taken from the supermarkets. This panic moment, which could have got out of control, [...]
Parasite(s)
What an unbelievable coincidence! Should we become superstitious? In February 2020, Bong Joon Ho won four Oscars with Parasite, a black comedy thriller film. Parasite also won the Golden Palm (a first for South Korea) [...]
Notes on Desire and Isolation
1) Deadly Machine I remember how it seemed to me awkward, in college studying the life of viruses, when I discovered that life is just what a virus doesn't have. It is not considered a [...]
Viral and other threats
I am still a bit dazed. Not really knowing what to think about the fact that just this NLS Congress had to be cancelled. Its theme was interpretation. Not for the first time. But more [...]
Where Are the Reals? / Have We Crossed the Line?
I have been following closely the stories of the coronavirus outbreak since the lockdown of Wuhan and Hubei. Reading those writings and diaries from Wuhan, I was imagining the disaster. It was too unreal not [...]
The Coronavirus and Capitalism
In this time of global crisis, itself partly caused by globalisation, it seems useful to consider together both the Coronavirus and Capitalism. Indeed, a crude analogy between the two can immediately be made, the virus [...]
Vertigo
Vertigo, like Hitchcock’s – we remember how his 1958 film gradually became accepted, by some, as the best ever. Something of this experience occurs to us today, when events simply sweep away our certainties concerning [...]
Sent to Our At-Home Dimension
The COVID-19 virus has sent us involuntarily to our at-home dimension for an uncertain number of days and we want to go back to our in&out-home dimension, which allows our bodies to encounter other bodies [...]
Solitude of Bodies
I told you that it is only poetry that allows interpretation and that is why, in my technique, I can hardly reach what it holds –– Jacques Lacan[1] The confinement that currently rules our [...]
The Biopolitics of Infection
Writing this text began with a question that troubled me concerning a global phenomenon now taking place in dealing with the Corona crisis: How does it happen, in our capitalist world, that the belief in [...]
Smoke and Mirrors
“One should not look at anything. Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors is it well to look, for mirrors do but show us masks.” Oscar Wilde, Salomé This [...]
France is bacon
There is a story, a meme, which is finding a revival on the internet just now, circulating on Facebook, and no doubt elsewhere too. The story relates to a celebrated post on Reddit from a [...]
Stigmatization
Stigma and the Uncanny “Stigma”[1] according to Goffman, is the deviation that results from the difference or non-harmonization to the dominant social data; acceptance (if it supposedly exists) is actually under dispute. It refers to [...]
A Spoke In The Wheel
Q: Tell me something good that is going to come out of all this... A: Perhaps many of the things we can learn no doubt depend a lot on the outcome of “all this”, because [...]
Evasion
Comedy is certainly one way of escaping the tragic conflict that imprisons the neurotic: when we are able to alleviate the many competing tensions which grip the subject, we can free his libido from its [...]
Breathless
The silent master Let’s start with the master. There has been a proliferation of masters during the plague. The master, in the Lacanian sense, corresponds to the common man of power who counts among politicians [...]
Recalling Psychoanalysis
If there were only the unconscious and the symptom: if there had never been the parlêtre and the sinthome; if the metaphor of the symptom was not “the formal envelope of the body-event”[1] then yes, [...]
Q-u-a-r-a-n-t-i-n-e. About Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Aviator’
Allene Hughes: “Q-u-a-r-a-n-t-i-n-e” Howard Hughes: “Quarentine. Q.u.a.r.e.n.t.i.n.e. Quarentine” (Opening scene of the Martin Scorcese film, The aviator) In the midst of the quarantine in which we find ourselves, I have found an extraordinary interview [...]
The Real of Analytic Abstinence
After Freud pointed out that nothing can be killed in absentia or in effigy, Lacan insisted throughout his teaching that the cure requires a real presence, beyond the imaginary and symbolic body of the analyst. [...]
Empty City
This third text comes as as a rebound from the previous one, which was a sort of chronicle of the times of the coronavirus that ended on a void. With my permit to go out, [...]
Ambiguous Proximities
A few months back, while on another headless adventure through my Facebook feed, I was pinched back awake by a wonderful meme that read something like: "remember, tradition is just peer pressure from dead people!" [...]
The Analyst-Object and Psychoanalysis as a Mobile -Virtual- Installation
The time for understanding has arrived. The CIEC (Center for Research and Clinical Studies), associated with the Freudian Field since 1998, has come out with its offer to the social. We know that a practitioner [...]
Coronavirus: Life in High Definition
This moment pushes us to reconsider the real of nature against disorder in the real. Miller writes, “capitalism and science have combined to make nature disappear.”[1] With the quieting of social chatter and abrupt downturn [...]
Virtual Reality
The smallness of our existence can acquire dimensions that we had not before suspected and, by contrast, lives accustomed to passing by without limits run up against an implacable barrier. Confinement and the norms of [...]
Pandecracy or Bureaucracy in the light of the “Battle of Veneto”
I read with amazement an interview sent to me via WhatsApp by Alejandra Glaze, whom I thank. In it, the Spanish newspaper El Confidencial calls on Sergio Romagnani, 81 years old, immunologist and internist, Professor [...]
Modes of Presence
I believe that analysis is not a puzzle but rather a mosaic, made not of pre-existing pieces for which there would be a predetermined place and whose arrangement would make a whole of good form, [...]
From Body to Body
The word "epidemiology" originated in the Greek language. Epic=inside; Demos=the people; The Hebrew word for "plague" is "Magefa". It contains a sound material of the word "Body", which in Hebrew is called "Goof". The invisible [...]
Choices and Elections During a Pandemic [1]
«Everyone carries it in them, the plague, because no one, no, no one in the world is free from it.» These words from the novel "The Plague" by Albert Camus have sounded very universal [...]
The coronavirus and the impossible to bear
An analysand recently told me that the most unbearable thing about confinement for him is that it comes from an imposed ban. A true workaholic, accustomed to permanent action, he confesses: "this plague was invented [...]
Knitting the thread of life together with the one of language
In this space and time, the onset of the pandemic didn’t thunder in a peaceful sky, just as psychiatrists used to explain for a subject, who never shown any sign of pathology, the sudden onset [...]
The Elephants in the Room
The coronavirus pandemic requires, indeed insists that we act in new ways, ranging from social distancing to self-isolation, in essence, and as far as possible, to restrict and confine our “acts” to the private world [...]
Cut
That the lawless real is what every subject is working both in and out of – in this speeded-up time which is sweeping away rhythms and scansions – is the figure which concerns everyone, today [...]
To Intervene
Psychoanalysis? In the 21st century? In the era of neuroscience and medical imagery? Psychoanalysis? Dragging along its cortege of mummy and daddy, St. Oedipus and all the normative nonsense in the epoch of gender studies [...]
Measures
The current global COVID-19 crisis situation reveals a key aspect of our contemporary civilization - the role of numbers. It is not a new discovery. In the argument for PIPOL 9 it was already named [...]
Life
The Austrian government took restrictive measures at a relatively early stage, limiting public life to a necessary minimum. In doing so, the Chancellor repeated again and again that "we have to get used to the [...]
Coronavirus as Metaphor
In 1978, Susan Sontag published Illness as Metaphor, a book composed of three long essays which were originally delivered in the distinguished James Lecture Series at the New York Institute for the Humanities, and then [...]
Are the Old worth more per Artist than per Person?
A society that does not accept death can hardly enjoy life. The Portuguese Nobel Prize Laureate Jose Saramago, author of The Intermittencies of Death, wondered what would happen if death failed to kill. His response [...]
The Little Bit of Freedom
With the virus, which infiltrates the pulmonary interstices, without any warning or presentiment, we find ourselves caught up in the impact of a real without presence, certainly a bodily one. We give that corporeal presence [...]
TP or not TP: That’s My Question
“One day I couldn’t leave my home, the city, the country, the planet was infested by virus causing respiratory problems and obligated the governments to take measures. The citizens stayed home. Everybody had to follow [...]
Corona and then Time / Jouissance / Desire
Corona For a few weeks now the world as we know it has changed – ever since an epidemic has breached the borders, from something far away, to something right here in front of our [...]
Keeping Desire Alive
“Hopefully we can keep that desire alive”. So concludes a text published by Judith Butler a few days ago,[1] in the midst of what the North American philosopher rightly calls “a new pandemic time and [...]
Sitting Ducks or Praying Mantises?
“Here, the point of desire and the anxiety-point coincide” in the visual field, according to Lacan [1]. How does this apply to a world suddenly emptied of the semblables, where places once crowded with the [...]
What the virus reveals about the market and biopolitics
What does the ultra-rapid extension of this pandemic reveal to us about the current state of the biopolitical management of bodies? And what does the treatment by governments of the current health crisis highlight about [...]
Psychoanalysis in Time of Coronavirus
Conversation with Antonio Di Ciaccia[i] Bollorino: Let’s start from psychoanalysis as a clinical and institutional practice: cancelled sessions, Skype therapies, missed conferences: how does psychoanalysis change in times of contagion? Di Ciaccia: The real [...]
Reflections on the Super-ego as a Result of the Quarantine
It is common to establish a comparison between the Freudian super-ego, which opposes a renunciation upon jouissance, and the contemporary one – so wisely anticipated by Lacan – that orders enjoyment. We can, however, intertwine [...]
The Body, Foreign
In 1944 Sartre wrote his famous play "No Exit"[1], where it was shown that "Hell is other people". The Second World War had not yet come to an end and Paris had not yet been [...]
Riders without reins
Limits! This claim, heard everywhere, resonates in school and in the family, among parents and teachers. Limits, more limits! Does the lack of limits derive from the decline of the paternal function? There is no [...]
In Times of Crisis, the Other Demands Your Body to Cover Up His Lack
Worldwide, human subjects experience an imposed control and restriction of their personal freedom in view of the COVID-19 pandemic. Eventually all governments resort to the same measures: self-isolation, social distancing, total lockdown, restrictions of free [...]
We shall build up again…
In the summer of 1913, during his vacation in northern Italy, Sigmund Freud went walking with two friends, one of whom, the poet, complained that he could not enjoy the scenery because the idea that [...]
THAT OTHER PRACTICE OF THE LETTER
On the basis of Television, we must distinguish between a clinic of moral cowardice and a clinic of the rejection of the unconscious. In the first case, what is in question is a subject defined [...]
The Host of the Virus
Confined, reading articles about the virus, I notice a signifier relating to the origin of the virus appearing repeatedly. Its strangeness surprises me. The host of the virus; in Greek: xenistis. “A virus is an [...]
The Con Man Behind The Curtain
“It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain,”[1] writes Peter Wehner in his column for The Atlantic referring to Donald Trump. [...]
Banality of the Real
It is not a secret that Count Johnson has been using services of various cunning advisers who stand behind his policies. It has now come to view that the source of proposed “herd immunity” policy, [...]
Corona – Eros is not the answer
In different blogs, psychoanalysts attested that corona confronts us with a ravaging real that causes worldwide anxiety. This anxiety demands a symptomatic answer, to mask the lack in the symbolic and the painful nonsense of [...]
The City that Never Sleeps…
New York City has fallen into a deep slumber. Broadway is asleep, the lights are out, and the show is not going on. Likewise, the museums, the houses of worship are closed; all sports events, [...]
The Times of the Virus
Maintaining sessions by the various means that modernity makes available to us, in this period of chaos for the social bond, brings sonorous and signifying material to this epidemic.[i] An analysand talking about a dream [...]
Love in a time of Isolation
In the face of the coronavirus pandemic to isolate has become a social act, an act of care, if also one tinged with anxiety, and of course, one that is enforced in those countries whose [...]
Social Distancing and Lacan’s ‘Discreet Brotherhood’
A crisis rarely has had so many different aspects, and covers so many different domains on such a large scale as the corona crisis that keeps us all in our own places if it does [...]
Salva Veritate?
The subject in psychoanalysis is split, this is a basic assumption of the theory. This split forms a perspective different from the one, which gives the "ego" absolute superiority as a representation of man by [...]
To Each His Own Pandemic
“The real as impossible to bear” Jacques Lacan, “Ouverture de la Section Clinique” “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” John Donne, Devotion 17 We knew that epidemics existed. They [...]
Life Over Death
In one of his last essays, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud offered a kind of metapsychological model of what we Lacanians call the drive (poorly translated in English as instinct). He advanced a hypothesis of [...]
The Law of Nature and the Real without Law
The real without law seems unthinkable. It is a limit idea that in the first instance means that the real is without natural law. - Jacques-Alain Miller Everything that you take from nature, she later [...]
A Viridical [sic] Relation to the Real
A “veridical relation to the real” is how Lacan put it upon returning to France after his five-week visit to England in 1945 [1]. I have often tried to imagine what it might have been [...]
A New Version of “West Side Story” Shocks Broadway
We know that the musical, this theatrical genre so popular in English-speaking countries, reaches its maximum development on Broadway. Although most of the classics of the genre come from the London West End, the global [...]
Pandemic: The Endless Trench
I am writing about the pandemic. Everything we do lately is about the pandemic, in the sense of being caught up in it, being immersed in it. We enclose ourselves in it, we are frightened [...]
Well! Well! And now?
When the real arises in our life, it comes without warning, as unknown, it constitutes an event we cannot describe. We are speechless. Following in the footsteps of Freud and Lacan, we can talk about [...]
The Other that Does Not Exist and Its Scientific Committees
The epidemic and its committees What is very striking in this global epidemic is that all governments, dictatorships, democracies whether illiberal or not, populisms of all kinds and all forms are led to take drastic [...]
Overexcitation
Recently, there has been an increasing number of pictures in the media that show us that the earth is being overexcited with Covid-19. On Sunday, March 15th, Austrians were exposed to an impact of a [...]
Where Is The Money?
Coping with the 21st Century Corona Epidemic In the year of 1848, a phenomenon called the Gold-Rush occurred in the world. The rumors of gold found by James W. Marshall in California, followed by masses [...]
# 23312
There is a particular image, originally distributed by Reuters, the British news agency, and created by Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgings, which is circulating on the internet. It is easily retrievable on the web by [...]
I am waiting, but not hoping
Question: what do you make of the contradictory hullabaloo that’s been going on for a few years in China? Lacan: I’ve been waiting, but I don’t hope for anything.[1] We must recognize that Lacan [...]
Finding in the Very Impasse of a Situation the Vital Force of Desire
"It’s war on the virus". "War", this was the quilting point in the address given by the President of the French Republic on Monday, March 16 at 8 p.m., just prior to the decision of [...]
The Bonfire of the Vanities
For some time now contemporary capitalism in the form of bio-politics has succeeded in colonising the domain of life in order on the one hand to extract maximum profit from the health market and on [...]
The Periphrastic Silence of Kiki Dimoula: A Tribute
Instances of our analytical experience can often be detected in the art of poetry, and it is a pleasant surprise whenever this happens. These instances seem to incubate in the inside of poems imperceptibly, almost [...]
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Virus is a pure force, the real without borders or limits. It must be taken at its most radical at the time of impact: terror without terrorist, identity or objective. The name Lacan gave to [...]
Side Effects
Walking through the streets and shops, across television channels, we conclude that civilization has finally produced its maximum measure of unity, the pandemic. It overcame right-wing and left-wing ideologies, dictators, media giants and religions. It [...]
When The Fantastic Becomes Normal
"What surprises me is not so much what is going on as how familiar this story is to me, a story that is no less fantastic for being real", writes Daniela Danelinck[1] about what is [...]
A World in Quarantine?
The COVID-19 is a new name of the real, that which from the start does not have a whole sense, since we do not know exactly what it is and, although we try to compare [...]
MIASMA
We don't so often speak of miasmas now, but they once explained all kinds of illnesses the causes of which were not quite clear. Miasmas were invisible vaporous emanations, or "bad air" from decaying organic [...]
Coronavirus and the Hole in the Big Other
This pandemic has struck, and unlike prior epidemics and pandemics, we – scientists, physicians, the general public – do not know a lot about it. The infectious agent is new, new to science, in addition [...]
Art & Fiction: Castillo Pedroso Misleidys Francisca
Awe-inspiring! On the occasion of the 4th Edition of the Art Fair Galeristes - the presentation of works of art by the Cuban artist Misleidys Castillo Pedroso is an invitation to meet a unique art, [...]
Against the Passion for Ignorance
“My mission is to make sure that nobody can say: 'I didn't know”[1] Yannis Behrakis, (1960-2019), photographer, was regularly on the road covering violence and upheaval all over the world. He was one of Reuters’ [...]
Jouissance and Sexual Difference
[i] On November 17, 2019, in Paris, during the 49th study day of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne (ECF), Paul B. Preciado was invited to give a talk on women in psychoanalysis. This was [...]
The Social Bond in the Hyper-connected World
From a psychoanalytic point of view, when we speak about the social bond we know that we are referring primarily to the structure of discourse. However, we must keep an eye on the common meaning [...]
A Viral Disorder of the Real
In late 2019, a new unknown coronavirus (2019-nCoV) has emerged in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, and is now causing an outbreak of respiratory illness worldwide, with serious health and economic consequences. As this paper [...]
Racism and Supervision
I propose to consider that among what is taught in supervision, “being not racist”, is of importance. Especially since racism is perhaps the most widely shared thing in the world. “We would be wrong”, Lacan [...]
Make Man Great Again: A Cunning Motto That Won’t Happen
Beyond their differences, the discourses of feminism have provided an alternative basis for how to be a woman. They promoted a series of narrative constructions capable of transforming the lack of a feminine essence into [...]
Parasite
Parasite evokes two immediate psychoanalytic references. First, as Lacan articulated, language is a parasite for all speaking beings. Language inhabits us; we are infected with language before birth; and this parasite continues to worm its [...]
Father don’t you see we’re burning?
The start of the new year has seen the world flooded with images of the disastrous Australian bushfires distributed by the media all over the world. These scenes have evoked an equal measure of panic [...]
The Gypsies of the European Union
The trigger for writing these lines was a post on Facebook stating the following: This would be really alarming if it was true. Nevertheless, as we all know there is always something true in the [...]
Analytical Operation, Feminine Operation
What are the positions of the analyst and the patient in the analytical experience? It is certain that the analyst has, has power, that there is a phallicisation of the position of the analyst. This [...]
Chasing The Perfect Beauty
On Tuesday, 27/06/2017, in downtown Athens, a journalist who suffered from anorexia nervosa for years was found dead in her home by her own father. The medical finding reported multiple organ dysfunction. Her death had [...]
The Ephemeral Hero
In our world today – determined by the market, science and technology – the signifier ‘hero’ as an emblematic figure of the financialized managerial discourse questions the difference between the common man and the hero. [...]
The Choice of Psychoanalysis (*)
“Since the beginning, religion has been all about giving meaning to things that previously were natural. It is not because things are going to become less natural, thanks to the real, that people will stop [...]
Burnt Out
If you have paid attention even slightly to international news in recent weeks, you may be aware of a series of catastrophic bush fires in Australia. Images from the fires have done much to depict [...]
Walls and Holes in Psychiatric Institutes
As a young psychiatry intern, I often heard my senior colleagues say sarcastically that psychiatry could have been a wonderful profession had it not been for the patients. As I grew older and already a [...]
Wake Up To Keep On Dreaming!
A window open onto the real In order to prepare the next Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires next April titled "Dream. Its Interpretation and Use In Lacanian Treatment", we [...]
Deep Song
Deep Song [Cante jondo][1] Madrugada[2] Pero como el amor los saeteros están ciegos. Sobre la noche verde, las saetas, dejan rastros de lirio caliente. La quilla de la luna rompe nubes moradas y las aljabas [...]
THE LAUGHING UNCONSCIOUS (You are joking…)
Freud was treading carefully to distinguish between jokes and their relation to the unconscious from the phenomena of laughter[1]. He described the latter, following his reading of Dugat, Spencer, and Lipps as variants of libidinal [...]
After the Berlin Wall… Capitalism and Enjoyment Thrive
On November 9th the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was celebrated at the once divided city’s iconic Brandenburg Gate in remembrance of a truly momentous occasion, one that, at the time, [...]
The Dark Side of the Moon
It will undoubtedly be a titanic task, but one day we will have to rewrite the entire history of Humanity from the gynaecocentric perspective. The role of women in civilization, which has always remained in [...]
The Flavour of the Nightmare
In 1977, Jorge Luis Borges delivered a talk called “The Nightmare”[1] at the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires, the same city where the AMP Congress will be held in April. In that conference Borges concentrates [...]