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The Letter, Issue 37, Summer 2006, Pages 38 - 55 FREUD'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Stephen J. Costello I: Freud and liberalism The aim of this paper is to explore Freud's political philosophy, to examine his description of himself as a liberal, to outline and define the liberal and conservative doctrines, to situate them within the broader philosophical tradition and to suggest that Freud is an admixture of the liberal and the conservative, a man then who defies easy definition. That Freud viewed himself as a liberal is not in doubt as the following quotation from a letter of his indicates in which he states: 'I remain a liberal of the old school' [1] . Freud's supposed liberalism has been largely adumbrated, albeit in a wholly unsystematic and unstructured way, in three main works: Why War? [2] , Thoughts for the Time on War and Death [3] and in his great cultural commentary Civilization and Its Discontents [4] . Drawing on these and other works, I will outline Freud's political philosophy under four main headings: (1) the rule of law, (2) liberty, (3) distributive justice, and (4) just war theory. But, first, some brief, general comments on the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics.

The Letter, Issue 37, Summer 2006, Pages 25 - 37 THE PSYCHOANALYTIC CASE HISTORY [1] Andrew J. Lewis Her mask reveals a hidden sense [2] The Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis (ACP) has presented the clinical work of its members since its inception in 1986 under the name of the Melbourne Centre for Psychoanalytic Research. In 1987 this seminar became formalised into a fortnightly presentation known as the Clinical Seminar and was delivered at Mont Park Hospital, Melbourne. In 1991 the seminar moved to the Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital which in 1997 was decommissioned. Thus the seminar left the terrain of public psychiatry and was delivered at the Royal Society of Victoria where it continues today. The seminar has been intrinsic to the development of the ACP as a psychoanalytic institution, serving as the meeting point of new version of psychoanalytic theory and the clinical practice which can be derived from it. Those presenting cases practice in a variety of settings, including practitioners working analytically in child and adult psychiatry, community health, drug rehabilitation services as well as in private practice. The seminar consists of the presentation of a written case history by the treating analyst, student or invited guest in a meeting lasting 90 minutes. The presentations are followed by a collective discussion of the case and the treatment. A slightly different format has been used when members presented cases for discussion by an overseas guest. This was largely the impetus for introducing the function of a designated discussant in 1999. An analyst of the ACP who has completed their training takes the role of discussant.

The Letter, Issue 37, Summer 2006, Pages 18 - 24 JOYCE'S NORA [1] * Colette Soler The often heard expression, " symptom-partner " is used to say that the object, the condition of jouissance, is itself conditioned by the unconscious. This leads me to ask a question: what was the woman, Nora, for this man, James Joyce? Freud tried to define various types of object-choice, narcissistic or anaclitic; Lacan, in turn, in the seminar, RSI., defined the typical partner of the man who follows the father-version [version-pere] of the symptom. Yet Nora is something other than this as Joyce hirnself is other. He was more the idolater of his own text, the "Book of Himself" than of her body, and he wanted to know of nothing except the masterful saying [dire], in which he sustained himself as the Artist. His wife, Nora, his son, Giorgio, his daughter, Lucia, were not placed within the constitutive social bond. And yet he held to them in a way that was almost fanatical. This shows that the question cannot be decided at the level of observable social reality. What is more in accordance with the typical position than a wife and children? But this says nothing either of his heterosexuality or of his actual position as father. Joyce was the heretical non-dupe and was foreign to any Oedipal solution; he was not even a redeemer, for if he saved anyone, it was himself and only himself.

The Letter, Issue 37, Summer 2006, Pages 8 - 17 FROM THE LACAN - JOYCE CORRESPONDENCE [1] Oscar Zentner What is the neutrality of the analyst? If not exactly this, the subversion of sense, that is a kind of aspiration, not towards the real, but by the real Jacques Lacan Mors aut honorabilis vita James Joyce On the one hundredth anniversary of Bloomsday I gave in Melbourne the reasons for, as well as my thoughts on, my debt to Joyce. [2] Following on from that, in the land of Ire, [3] and in Dublin, his city, I wonder if we can miss the irony that it is only over Joyce's dead body that we are today here as analysts. Joyce's works were designed to create aspiring Theseuses who, contrary to the myth, will remain in the Joycean labyrinth under the spell of his enigmas. My wager instead will be elsewhere. I will examine the Joyce effect that psychoanalysis has suffered as a result of his writings. The rigorous decomposition - not of language in Joyce but of lalangue beyond the sensical of the symbolic unconscious - served Lacan to formulate the one blunder that knows. [4] Furthermore, Joyce presented Lacan with another challenge: if the unconscious was structured like a language and not like lalangue, strictly speaking, Joyce was never unsubscribed from the unconscious, [5] rather he was unsubscribed from the unconscious ... of the others. [6] What Joyce certainly did not subscribe to altogether was to his lalangue, and this might clarify the lack of empathy [7] from the other. [8]

The Letter, Issue 37, Summer 2006, Pages 1 - 7 THE WRITING OF JOYCE [1] Rolando Karothy Since its beginning, literature has rotated around an apparently non-existent, ineffable knot. Literature honours the ineffable in the very moment of going through it. If we have the courage to allow language to freely do its labour, we can trace the contour of that Real. Because behind the ineffable we shall see a variety of shadows cast that will draw its silhouette in negative. The writer atomizes the signifier. In Lituraterre, Lacan states that literature excavates a void. Thus, he retakes Seminar VII, where he says that sublimation seeks to produce a signifier which shows the presence of the void of the Thing, further from the misleading object. Both analyst and artist share this relationship with the ineffable. The meeting point between the psychoanalyst and the writer is that which is impossible to say and that which is impossible to write. But the analyst and the writer diverge when the relationship with language is considered. Writing and psychoanalysis do not take the signifier in the same way because psychoanalysis is an experience of the word. While literature wants to break off with Language even with the aid of Language, it goes against the word, it is an insurrection against speech, against inner and outer uproar, against what Blanchot calls the excess of writing, ‘that talking immensity which addresses us withdrawing us from ourselves.'

The Letter, Issue 37, Summer 2006, Pages i - ii

The Letter, Issue 36, Spring 2006, Pages 103 - 112 OEDIPUS DUP(E)LICATED: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE MATR(E)ICES OF DESIRE AND THE SYMBOLIC Eve Watson This paper proposes to speak about a film narrative, Bicentennial Man. In the author's view, the film narrative lends itself to an analytic deconstruction that follows Oedipal and familial lines. Given that the film is ostensibly a 'children's film' and can be found only in the children's section of the video shop, there is a question of locating its symbolic place, an idea echoed by the android in the story who seeks to map out his own symbolic place. None of the children the author spoke to who viewed the film said they enjoyed it. And adults often don't find the film unless they happen upon it at the video shop in the children's section next to The Jungle Book or Finding Nemo. The film narrative, a sentimental tale of human exploration directed by none other than a man named Chris Columbus, seems provocative in its determination to engage with the Real by means of a confusing and lacking Symbolic. Birth, sex, love and death are prominent, driving the narrative onward towards as we shall see, the only 'real' human conclusion possible. By way of introduction, the film's box jacket enthusiastically informs us that this is a film 'about a robot that is no ordinary household appliance. Andrew is a machine with real emotions and a burning capacity to discover what it means to be human. Will Andrew ever achieve his goal to become human?' That is broadly-speaking the narrative sweep of the tale before us. Indeed, this is a story of an android, a man-like robot named Andrew who similar to Oedipus embodies as Lacan says, the passage from myth to existence. [1] He undertakes a passage from machine to human, determined to realise his destiny, a destiny implied in his naming, to become 'a man' (see below). The android tears himself apart, submitting to five 'upgrades' that transform him from immortal machine to a being-for-death, a process that allows him to realise a human destiny. If life is a lengthy dogged detour towards death, the two hundred years of Andrew's travails attend to that which insists throughout his life and all human endeavours - the attempt to impute meaning to existence, to ascertain what is behind the drama of the passage into existence. For all of that, Andrew's coming-to-be is fraught with subjective moments of enunciative anxiety, with ambiguity and uncertainty and with the varied problematics of love and desire. Let us enter into the narrative of Andrew's insistence.

The Letter, Issue 36, Spring 2006, Pages 113 - 125 OEDIPUS DUP(E)LICATED: (RE)PRODUCING CHILDREN IN THE POSTMODERN WORLD OF HYPERREALITY Ray O' Neill The words induced me to turn towards myself. And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; if they had, my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans. [1] The questions Frankenstein's creature in Mary Shelley's novel asks of its own being, its raison d'etre, are questions all humans must address or confront. Why am I? How am I? What am I? Who am I? Questions of existence and being lie not only at the heart of every philosophy, theology, religion, and psychology, but indeed all science, scientific quest, and reason; "Of what a strange nature is knowledge!" [2] From Descartes' "I think therefore I am"; to Lacan's contra- indication: "Where I think, there I am not"; to Gubar and Gilberts' feminist "The creative I am cannot be said if the "I" knows not what it is"- philosophers have proffered answers. But Frankenstein's creature's realisation 'Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money,' that coinage is the first location of identity, being, or lack thereof is identified by Baudrillard in his own postmodern, hyperreal existentialism: "I consume, therefore I am."

The Letter, Issue 36, Spring 2006, Pages 94 - 102 DESERTION AND DISINTEGRATION IN AN ADOLESCENT DREAM ODYSSEY Marie Walshe This paper is based upon a case study presented to the Child Analysis Group. The work with this child proceeded through a series of dreams, some of which were quite evocative and disturbing at times. I believe that the paper may be interesting in light of the group's work and because of the quality of her dreams. Children often present the most wonderful dreams, which they recount with an innocence that reflects their total engagement with the work. They do not seek to challenge a perceived Master's position as the adult weekend-supplement-reader may do. Instead, the child's dream speaks the true language of the unconscious. The child's dreams culminated in a repeating nightmare whose horror made her fear going to sleep. These final sessions were extremely difficult, until the nightmare could be interpreted and its unconscious symbolism unlocked. The anxiety of this one-way imperative transmission required to be tolerated, its urgency respected as the fuel that impelled the work of the session, until the messenger could hear, at last, her own message. Maria [1] was thirteen years old when referred to me by a teacher who felt her problems owed more to emotional instability than an intellectual disability. She is the third of four siblings: two older brothers and a younger sister. Maria's father deserted his family four years ago, moving in with a neighbouring widow and her daughters. Mother's family had frowned on the marriage from the outset and so were not there to support her initially when Father deserted her. However, when Mother abandoned the children also and developed a serious drink problem the maternal grandmother and aunt intervened to help her recover. She has returned to work and curtailed her drinking but she has never recovered the same level of engagement with her children. Her husband remains the object cause of her desire and she has objectified herself in her submission to his every whim. Each demand resonates with the power of Mother's desire to be the object of his desire.

The Letter, Issue 36, Spring 2006, Pages 87 - 93 PSYCHICAL STRUCTURES AND ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS Oliver Murphy Introduction This article gives an outline of a thesis presented for a M.Litt degree. The philosophical framework of the thesis was structured within ; psychoanalytic paradigm. The aim of the study was to explore which structural type will be most satisfied with the A.A. program and thus presumably benefit most from it. The hypothesis stated that subjects with an obsessional structure will be more satisfied with A.A. than subjects with a perverse structure. The results suggested that this was indeed the case. Methodology The methodology involved using a pool of twenty-five members of A.A. to test the hypothesis. Interviews were recorded and then transcribed into scripts. In practice this meant recording individual accounts of their life story by self- confessed alcoholics. There was no interruption by the interviewer and the interviewee could speak for as long as he wished and about whatever he wished although he was aware of the nature of the research. (All the interviewees were male).

The Letter, Issue 36, Spring 2006, Pages 80 - 86 ADDICTS IN RECOVERY: RE-COVERY IN ANALYSIS? Carol Owens Alcoholics' stories are narratives. They rise and fall with drama, humour and pathos. They're descriptive and emotional, they're sagas and parables. We tell them to each other a lot; they get polished and improved, and if you're hearing one that isn't slurred and burped or told with self-pity and anger you're probably listening to a happy ending. The point is that they have a plot, but the plot is always retrospective. It's a trail that becomes obvious after you've travelled it. While you were living it there was no plot, no plan, no goal, no grand design. [1] I'm not too in love, I'm not too high, lover I'll get by, faking my recovery. [2] Whose signifier is this anyway? Recovery... Re-Covery... Re-Cover... Cover... Like the plot of the alcoholic sketched by A.A. Gill above, the meaning locked into the signifier 'recovery' is retrospectively located in the word - cover. My question today concerns the challenge posed to those of us who work psychoanalytically with clients who present as recovered addicts: how do we circumnavigate the 'discourse of recovery' within which former addicts locate themselves in order to mobilize a discourse of analysis which doesn't reinforce a re-covering.

The Letter, Issue 36, Spring 2006, Pages 69 - 79 ADDICTION: GETTING CL(O)SER - A REAL INTOXICATION Peter Kelly Introduction One of the characteristics of post-modern culture is the emphasis given to surface over depth, image over substance, the indeterminate and fleeting over the fixed and immobile, the Real over the Symbolic. There are no absolutes, no grounding coordinates, no reference points within which the beleaguered subject can situate him/ herself. One could call this a crisis of representation. To be human is to live at the level of representation. Essentially this is what language does. It involves the movement from a situation of pure being to a symbolic representational existence. In other words, the symbolic order allows us to transform sense impressions, primitive sensations, and anxieties into thoughts and phantasies. As Rik Loose points out in his book: We need the distance of representation.... If this is not the case one will experience the uncanny deep familiarity of the psychotic-like moment of depersonalization, an experience that occurs to people close to death or in utter trauma. When people say after such experiences that they have always kind of known this, they are already beginning to take a distance by trying to symbolize the utterly familiar, yet most alien, part of themselves. [1] In the field of addiction and problem drug use this is played out in a number of ways. Addiction can be characterized as a kind of absence of speech or non-speech, a/diction. In other words, the movement of addiction runs counter to speech. Addiction generally revolves around an active immediacy, an instant gratification, what one could call an 'act in the real/a solution in the real' whereas speech and language involve the long laborious symbolic process of trying to represent via the medium of words and signifiers. Hence, we ask our clients to try and speak about themselves and in so doing facilitate a shift from what can be termed the 'real solution of toxicity' to the symbolic solution of speech and language.

The Letter, Issue 36, Spring 2006, Pages 52 - 61 A RING ERRORS Denise Brett This paper is based on the seminar Les non-dupes errent. It is a very interesting seminar because during it, Lacan visibly grapples with the concepts of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Although he goes on to further revise some of his concepts in subsequent seminars this paper is largely based on his position at that particular time. I am going to try to convey a sense of why Lacan was preoccupied with the Borromean knot, why he kept returning to it and why he insisted on it. Although at this time Lacan is developing a theoretical concept, his work is always and ever based on the work in the clinic as he says himself in Seminar XL Psychoanalysis is the theorisation of a praxis, not the practice of a theory. I remember learning when I was first introduced to computers that the operating system could never diagnose its own problems, because it had to use the same mechanism requiring a diagnosis in order to diagnose, and this is not considered possible. This bears an anology to our situation as humans: we are determined by language and we try to explain ourselves using language. But language fails, because in choosing to enter the world of language, there is a lot we have to leave behind. This leads to us being split subjects, with language never quite functioning the way we want. Indeed as subjects we believe language has meaning, and that it is a form of communication from one to another. Lacan says: ...The signifier is a sign, that is only addressed to another sign; [that] the signifier, is what makes a sign to a sign, and that is why it is the signifier. That has nothing to do with communication to someone other, it determines a subject, it has as an effect a subject. [1]

The Letter, Issue 36, Spring 2006, Pages 35 - 51 PSYCHOANALYSIS IS THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE RULES OF THE GAME OF LOVE A COMMENTARY ON THE LOGICAL AND TOPOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF UNCONSCIOUS KNOWLEDGE Patricia McCarthy Introduction Good, so then I am entering into the core of the subject [1] . This is how Lacan opens the Ninth session of Seminar XXI - Les non-dupes errent. Going on to introduce three differently shaped Borromean knots to his audience - an African one, a plaited one, and one with a complicated symmetrical core - he then announces that he is 'in the process of questioning love' [2] . Because 'we imagine that love is two' and also 'the Imaginary is not what is to be most recommended for finding the rule of the game of love' [3] he exhorts us to do better than to simply rely on the Imaginary to find out about love, now that the analytic discourse is a fact of our lives for over a hundred years. So then let us question ourselves about what might happen if one made serious ground from the angle that...love is thrilling but that this implies that one follows the rule of the game (of love) in it. Naturally for that, it must be known. That is perhaps what is lacking: it is that people have always been here in the most profound ignorance, namely that they play a game whose rules they do not know ..... it is perhaps for that that analytic discourse may be of use. [4] For Lacan at this time, the Borromean knot will be part of the means by which the knowledge of the rules of the game of love can be invented.

The Letter, Issue 36, Spring 2006, Pages 28 - 34 ERRING FATHERS Florencia F. C. Shanahan Lacan's Twenty-First Seminar is not easy to follow. Not only because of Lacan's style in the transmission of psychoanalysis, but also because - it seems to me - it is placed, as a hinge, at the very heart of a decisive turning-point of the clinic in which this transmission is based. What kind of subject do we operate with? The Lacanian subject can be defined as 'the effect that permanently displaces the individual from the species, the effect that separates the particular from the universal, the case from the rule' [1] . It is not then the universal subject of language that the analytic action is addressed to, but the singular product of the encounter between language and a certain body. I will consider one paragraph that caught my attention while reading Seminar XXI, aimed at teasing out what sort of clinical problem Lacan is trying to posit, and the consequences this may have in relation to the position of the analyst within the psychoanalytic treatment.

The Letter, Issue 36, Spring 2006, Pages 20 - 27 LACAN'S INVENTION Barry O' Donnell Lacan was always concerned with what was distinctive about psychoanalysis, with what is new with psychoanalysis, and why it is justifiable to speak of the Freudian discovery. This concern occupied him no less in Les non-dupes errent. During his seminar of 11th December 1973 he speaks of the effect of Freud's discovery. He says that the possibility of analytic discourse tells us that 'what you do, far from being a matter of ignorance, is always determined. Determined already by something which is knowledge, and that we call the unconscious.' [1] This is what is new with Freud. This founds a new discourse. In the first seminar of that year Lacan had directed attention to the final paragraph of The Interpretation of Dreams. He reads Freud as finishing this inaugural text with a question not about the 'divinatory value of dreams' [2] but about the effect of this new way of responding to dreams. In short Freud is asking what will happen to the new discourse inaugurated by The Interpretation of Dreams. We know that one consequence of that text is our meeting and speaking here today. Whether in the Rome discourse where he identifies the function and field of speech and language as the domain of this practice originated by Freud or in his Seminars where time and again he distinguishes psychoanalysis from other forms of psychological intervention, Lacan remained acutely aware of the particularity of the Freudian legacy. [3]