Three years ago in Vienna, the effects of a new, fresh discourse met us for the first time. Unprepared and up close. During the second Zadig Vienna Forum "Wir alle sind Exilanten“ (We are all exiles), organised by the Vienna Initiative, suddenly loud protests by some students of the University of Applied Arts Vienna aroused. [...]
“It is not from too great an indocility of individuals that the dangers for the future of humanity will come.”[1] This complex sentence was uttered by Jacques Lacan in 1945 on his return to France from a trip to England. He was talking to fellow psychiatrists about how psychoanalysis had been used by the British [...]
1. In a certain sense, there is no "Trans Issue". We have nothing to say about trans people except, on a case by case basis, about each One who comes to meet an analyst. Therefore, there is no prototype of a ‘trans case’. 2. Consequences: A clinical workshop on trans people can only account for [...]
Some weeks ago, The Guardian revealed that the world’s biggest fossil fuel firms are quietly planning vast projects of what apparently are called "carbon bombs". Defined as oil and gas projects that would each result in at least a billion tons of CO2 emissions in the course of their lifetimes, these ‘bombs’ would irreversibly drive [...]
Twice now I have seen the 2022 Daniels film Everything Everywhere All at Once, and twice it has had a profound effect. Never have I seen a film that with one hand slapped me with its message, and with the other deftly tempered it. Watching the trailers, one gets the impression that Everything is a [...]
When Kim Kardashian was recently allowed to wear an iconic Marilyn Monroe dress by designer Bob Mackie, the latter called this “a big mistake”. The dress, he said, was designed for Marilyn alone. In order to wear it, the reality star tried hard and managed to lose substantial weight in a short time. The inevitable [...]
We have all been horrified by the mass shootings that many consider an ‘American thing’. We often refer to them as tragedies. In his book, “From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Shooter”, (1) Seamus McGraw thinks of it this way: “a tragedy is not a good word, tragedy is something that happens [...]
"But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the drive is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence." Sigmund Freud, Civilization [...]
“But what need can an analyst have for an extra ear, when it sometimes seems that two are already too many, since he runs headlong into the fundamental misunderstanding brought on by the relationship of understanding? I repeatedly tell my students: 'Don’t try to understand!' … May one of your ears become as deaf as [...]
The text below was presented during the “Beat Le Pen” (BLP) Forum, hosted by l’École de la Cause freudienne, on April 22, 2022, two days before the second and final round of the French presidential election between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Many speakers presented during the two nights of the BLP (April 21-22, [...]
