Editorial
2021 brought us the continued challenge of working within Covid restrictions and I’m pleased to say that despite these restrictions, psychoanalytic scholarly activities, be it on Zoom or, more rarely, in person, have persevered. This issue of The Letter represents some of the work that has been produced during these challenging times.
Stephanie Metcalfe’s paper tackles the theme of the relevance of Freud’s Three Essays today. Focusing on the link between neurosis and perverse infantile sexuality she asks the question: Have we come to terms with the claims of our sexuality?
Jacques Laberge takes up the question of the helplessness of the analyst as a necessary position in order to make the psychoanalytic act of the analysand possible. How to respond to the enigmas of the client? Here he discusses how it is the usual recourse of the child, in a position of helplessness, to turn to the I for compensation but this is a course of action which can only form an obstacle to an analysis. Any attempt of the analyst to turn to the I or to make meaning in face of these enigmas only gets in the way. The analyst must be prepared to empty him or herself of the I, take up the position of dummy for the analysis to proceed.
We return to the theme of the relevance of psychoanalysis to contemporary issues in Dorothea Hyneck’s paper. Here, Hyneck examines the link between castration and anxiety and questions if the current trend of protests demanding action on climate change, driven largely by the younger generation, is a response to the anxiety provoking limitlessness of today’s world.
In 1912, in his paper Formulations on Two Principles of Mental Functioning, Freud speaks of a necessity to bring the psychological significance of the real external world into the structure of psychoanalytic theory. In his paper, Daragh Howard gives us a comprehensive account of both Freud and Lacan’s attempts to account for the significance of this real external world for human subjective experience. In this interrogation of the relation between repetition and the reality principle and the reality principle and the pleasure principle, Howard maps out the path of evolution in thinking about reality from Freud’s concept of psychical reality to Lacan’s concept of the Real.
Finally, Mary Cullen’s paper responds to Lacan’s statement in his ethics seminar ‘the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire’[1] in the light of his later formulations, in particular the Borromean knot and the situating of desire within the knot. Once again, we find ourselves on the terrain of the Real as, following Christian Fierens, Cullen introduces us to the notion that desire is linked to a radical jouissance, something which must be taken into account when formulating an ethics of psychoanalysis.
Monica Errity
[1] Lacan. J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Transl.
Dennis Porter. Routledge. 2010, p.321.
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