The Letter, Issue 44, Summer 2010, Pages 59 - 65
Through the Lenses of the Cartel...
Mary Cheyrou-Lagrèze
This article contrives to illustrate the fact that committing oneself to participation in a cartel requires an informed leap into the unknown; that operating in obscurity demands radical questioning of received as well as preconceived ideas; that words and meanings outside Lacan's texts are limited, and inside, incomplete. Yet in the "not-alls‟ and the "half-saids' of the cartel we can form a social bond… by way of the psychoanalytic discourse.
Keywords: apprenticeship; transmission; discourses; cartel, social bond, writing. The Irish School for Lacanian Psychoanalysis (also referred to in other articles in this issue), was formed in 2008 to further the work of psychoanalysis as elaborated by Jacques Lacan in the Founding Act, Adjunct and Preamble.[1] Active participation in a "cartel‟ - designed to make possible a new style of work that promotes on-going formation, as set out in the aforementioned texts - was singled out by the founders of the School as a necessary task of its first year of functioning. As an introductory step, cartels made up of experienced and training analysts chosen by lot, were formed. They were then invited to investigate the statement of Jacques Lacan in L'étourdit: „The psychoanalytic discourse… can establish a social bond cleansed of any group necessity‟,[2] and produce written evidence of their individual experience.