Helena Texier – Wo Steht Lacan Heute – Lacanian Psychoanalysis in Ireland
 
THE LETTER 13 (Summer 1998) pages 94-105
 
I cannot help feeling that there is much in the circumstances today that mirrors the psychoanalytic encounter proper. I come before you today as an unknown quantity, a foreigner, to speak in a language which I have no guarantee will be understood and which besides, is a language which is not my own but the language of the Other, as any of you who have even the barest knowledge of Irish history will know. I come to a rendezvous where there is inherent to it the demand that Lacanian psychoanalysis in Ireland give an account of itself. This question, ‘What have you to say for yourself?’, is only a variation of the question inaugurating any psychoanalytic encounter: ‘What brings you to this place?’. The ‘place’ that this question contains is, of course, a crossroads (eine Kreuzung). You all know that in the Oedipus story it was at the meeting of three roads, the three ways of walking, that the hero meets with his destiny and that the contour of these roads traces out the signifier which his father had sought to efface, the Greek letter ‘lambda’ the first letter of the name-of-the-father, Laius Labdacus. In arriving at that place Oedipus unconsciously names himself as son of a father, situating himself in a lineage.