Welcome to Issue 47 of The Letter, Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis.
 
Excerpt from the Editorial:
 
"Jacques Lacan‘s talk on 10 November 1967 given to psychiatrists, translated by Cormac Gallagher, deals with the formation of psychiatrists, although his remarks are equally relevant to the formation of psychoanalysts. He emphasises that the madman, the psychotic, is at the centre of the field of psychiatry, and suggests that the madman is the only truly free man. He raises a number of other fundamental aspects of formation such as mass effects, organo-dynamism, the o-object, the structure of the unconscious, the difference between the sign and the signifier, the importance of language to the clinic, truth, desire, the non-sense of sexuality, segregation and the mass media. Lacan is not attempting to question the role of psychiatry, although he draws some challenging parallels between the hierarchical structures which permeate both psychiatry and some institutions of psychoanalysis.
 
Cormac Gallagher presented his paper to a conference at All Hallows, Dublin in June 2011. This is an absorbing and sensitive treatment of Freud‘s journey and how his immersion in Judaic tradition was so influential throughout his work. The paper disturbs the commonly held belief that Freud was an atheist who had no time for religious beliefs because they were founded on obsessional rituals. Freud‘s revelation in 1895 to Fliess, concerning the great clinical secret of psychoanalysis is of utmost importance – that‘ hysteria is the consequence of a presexual sexual shock and obesssional neurosis is the consequence of presexual sexual pleasure later transformed into guilt.‘ Our attention is also drawn to the soul of Freud which underpinned so much of his scientific‘ work."
 
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