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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 – [...]

  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: 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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

[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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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? [...]

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 [...]

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.” [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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) [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

«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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 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 [...]

“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 [...]

“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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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. [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 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 “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 [...]

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 [...]