The Lacanian compass : Clinical Study days #6, The psychoanalytical act in the 21th century

The Clinical Study Days is the annual meeting presented by the Lacanian Compass.

While each Study Days is dedicated to a particular subject, its feature presentations and discussions of clinical case work are done by psychoanalysts and other clinicians sharing the Lacanian approach. The papers presented will involve institutional and private settings.

The Study Days are open to anyone interested in psychoanalysis. 

Argument :

“An act,” Jacques Lacan declared on January 10, 1968, in reference to the Psychoanalytic Act, “is linked in the determination of the beginning, and very especially where there is need to make one…” We believe we can find two inflections of this: one being the beginning of analysis, the entry of the subject into the analytic discourse, taken from the point of view of the analysant, and the other as the beginning of analysis, the entry of the subject into the analytic discourse, taken from the point of view of the analyst. This beginning is a beginning for both the analysant and the analyst. For the analysant, as we explored in Paris during the 2010 Paris-USA Lacan Seminar on “Entering Analysis,” this beginning is absolutely specific for each subject, and for each analysis, and, even, for each session, and the beginning is marked by a specific transference, which can be identified from the point of the analysant and the analyst in testimonies and case presentations. For the analyst, especially at that first moment of being used in the position of analyst, we can find the absolute radical discontinuity between the Lacanian orientation and other approaches to psychoanalysis and clinical practice in Lacan’s work: in the formulation of Discourse of the Analyst, in his definition of the transference as the subject supposed to know, and, in the elaboration of the Pass and the institutional structures relating to formation and training elaborated by Lacan and carried forward by Jacques-Alain Miller in the establishment of the Schools of the World Association of Psychoanalysis.

For our next Clinical Study Days, we will explore the status of the Psychoanalytic Act in the 21st Century. The Symbolic Order has changed today, even from the moment of the Seminar of Lacan on the Psychoanalytic Act in 1968. The transference that appeared to Freud closely linked to parental, even paternal, imagos, in part because the Symbolic Order at that moment was closely structured by the Signifier of the Name-of-the-Father, is seen less and less today. At this moment today, where the Symbolic Order is no longer what it used to be, to take the title of our upcoming Congress of the WAP, the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father no longer functions in the same way, which has implications for the possible paths in the establishment of the transference. If, as Lacan spoke on November 29, 1967, “this psychoanalytic act is something that is quite essentially linked to the functioning of the transference,” what precisely has changed about the transference, or the paths to the establishment of the transference, in today’s world? How do analsants today reach the point of the beginning of an analysis? And, taken from the perspective of the analyst: in what ways has this new Symbolic Order created a situation that requires a different Direction of the Treatment? Is it necessary for the psychoanalyst to create new strategies with regard to the transference in the face of this new Symbolic Order? What is the place of interpretation today in light of this? And what, for our psychoanalytic institutions, is necessary to sustain a place for psychoanalytic discourse in today’s world? In order for our Schools to facilitate the very passage of an analysant to an analyst, what consequences are there with regard to formation that we are facing in the 21st Century? These are some of the questions that we raise for our consideration of “The Psychoanalytic Act in the 21st Century.” http://clinicalstudydays.us/index.htm