Issue 71 now available

The Letter, Issue 30, Spring 2004, Pages 87 - 100 KLEIN'S BOTTLE: GETTING REAL * ROB WEATHERILL When Freud himself admitted that he had underestimated the negative - 'I can no longer understand how we have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness... in our interpretation of life' [1] - he was also underestimating the force that was to be Kleinianism within psychoanalysis. Half a century later a whole cluster of modern maladies associated with atomistic culture, that might have once been registered as hysteria, had been described. Kleinianism visits the wordless place of the inhibited, the schizoid, the psychotic, the borderline, the autistic, the psychopathic. Klein explores the negative and the obscene, analyzing there at the mute limits of the human. Here, in this domain, violence operates independently, as it were, beyond the pleasure principle. Always beyond. Today, this might be the Kleinian argument: everything hangs on this beyond, beyond subjectivity. Clearly, Klein did not envisage the paranoid-schizoid or the depressive positions as epigenetic stages of development, like Anna Freud and developmental psychology. No, these are not stages of growth. As we enter into, or are inserted into language, some translation of this mute world occurs, but much must be left "outside." As George Steiner says, translation does violence to the translated. It is to these mute violent remnants that attention must be paid. Klein therefore implicitly challenges the hegemony of language. If the world is structured by language and we cannot think or speak otherwise, then the Kleinians want to oppose this with their own pre-biographic demonology. The violence of language and its autocracy invites, let us imagine for a moment, a mute counterviolence of the drives, who it appears have become deeply unhappy, we might say, with the strident assertion (a total reversal on the classical way of thinking) that they themselves were created by language, that they are no more than an effect of language. This question of the re-transcription of biology, that the somatic is somehow re-written, as it were, is deeply offensive to the drives who have been fighting for their rights, staging a come-back with their own violent liberation struggle.

The Letter, Issue 30, Spring 2004, Pages 77 - 86 DESIRE UNTO DEATH: CHILDSPLAY * Helena Texier Earlier on the week I noticed that in the course of Seminar II Lacan says the following: You can disprove Hegel but not the Song of Sixpence. [1] And I was delighted because I knew my presentation today would derive much more from what I owe to the likes of Sing-a-Song-of-Sixpence than to what the field of philosophy had to offer. My contribution to today's proceedings certainly - undeniably - owes a great deal to my memory of the many revolutions in our field in the mid-60's. This field - Our field - is not that of psychoanalysis. It is rather the Our-field-that-was-opposite-our-house, and which was the venue for childsplay, a staging of all of the local children's productions. The revolutions then are not those of the streets of Paris May '68, nor are they those revolutions in thinking attributed to Lacan's seminars. Rather, the revolutions refer to the endless circuits of our field (the one opposite our house) executed by myself and my childhood comrades; revolutions in the field of enjoyment then. [2] In this field of enjoyment there was played, amongst many others, one children's game, which is probably well known to you all, and which I think well represents the processes at play in and the triumph of the neuroses. In addition, the game manages to cover both the strategy of hysteria and that of obsessional neurosis. Remarkably, the game at one point also manages to include the enactment of the phantasy to which Freud devoted his famous paper, - A Child is Being Beaten, [3] (a paper which, you'll remember, while it aims to add to the theory of perversion, does so via a phantasy which Freud notes occurs regularly in the analysis of obsessionals, and particularly in the case of women).

The Letter, Issue 30, Spring 2004, Pages 62 - 76 CHILDREN IN DISTRESS: APPROACHES AND CHALLENGES TO PSYCHOANALYSIS WITH CHILDREN IN THE SCHOOL SETTING * Dolores Tunnecliffe Troubled children who are unable to speak about their suffering because it is too painful will unconsciously express their trauma by impulsive acting-out behaviour. The 'acting-out' is a message to another who is refusing to listen or who is unable to decipher the message conveyed in their actions. It is crucial that we provide children with the opportunity to speak their truth to an Other who listens or they may continue to live in confusion and repeat the cycles of violence that have been part of their early history and socialization. When an eight-year-old child jumps through a window smashing his life away in a last attempt to escape from a situation of ongoing abuse, the crisis for children at risk becomes blatantly poignant. At the inquest into this "accidental death" the deceased child's ten-year-old brother, who witnessed the tragedy, spoke about how they had been subjected to years of abuse from infancy. This was not the deceased child's only suicidal attempt. Both children had been involved in dangerous behaviours and juvenile offences on several occasions. Their actions were their only way of being able to communicate their distress which, tragically, had always gone unheard. This is only one of many instances of children living in distress today. We are constantly confronted with a world which neglects children by allowing child slaves, child soldiers, child labourers, starving children, abused children, children left orphaned by or dying from AIDS, children uncared for in overcrowded institutions... and so it continues.

The Letter, Issue 30, Spring 2004, Pages 44 - 61 THE FORMULAE OF SEXUATION From Inexistence to Possibility and from Impossibility to Contingency * Patricia McCarthy The field of lalangue is constituted from the real and has to be thought of as leached of any psychology or representation. It forges the semblance of man and woman. It allows their induction. In the seminar ...Ou pire, Lacan is proposing - Anyway I will do my best ...ou pire (...or worse)! - that this induction has to be done through a mathematical operation which he calls the matheme of our discourse. This matheme becomes the formulae of sexuation: With these formulae, Lacan is proposing that the inexistence of the primal father Bx .Ox is a logical necessity that grounds the possibility that all men are subject to the phallic function Vx. Φx. While from the impossibility of there existing someone who is not subject to the phallic function Ǝx. Φx, there is the contingency that not-all of the woman is subject to the phallic function Vx. Φx. These references to the primal father, men, woman give 'personality' to the logical dimension of castration and its relation to sexual enjoyment. This paper explores the possibilities around the terms of castration and sexual enjoyment and their place in the formulae.

The Letter, Issue 30, Spring 2004, Pages 31 - 43 THE PARMENIDES AND THE ONE * Barry O'Donnell ...I recommend to those who want to hold the position of the analyst with what that involves in terms of knowledge not to run away from it, to bring themselves up to date with what of course for them can only be read by working on Parmenides. [1] Introduction I am going to talk to you about a dialogue by Plato called Parmenides because both in Seminar XIX, ...ou pire, and in the series of lectures entitled The knowledge of the psychoanalyst, Lacan indicates it as a text which will inform our attempts to grasp what he means by the Real. In particular, he suggests that the Platonic dialogue's account of the One is crucial to an understanding of the term: the Real. At this time in his work Lacan was emphasising the importance of the notion of the Real for our approach to the condition of the speaking subject, the subject constituted in a relation to language. The Real is a very difficult and challenging term. Therefore, before speaking about Plato's text, itself a perplexity to centuries of readers, I will read a few of the statements Lacan makes about the Real in his Seminar to provide some kind of orientation. In the third week of the Seminar Lacan tells us that this Real 'ought to be privileged by us.. .because it shows in an exemplary way that it is the paradigm of what puts in question what can emerge from language.' [2] In other words, the Real is about the limit of language, the limit for language, and the limit belonging to language.

The Letter, Issue 30, Spring 2004, Pages 19 - 30 EXAMINING A CLINIC OF THE NOT-ALL * Claude-Noele Pickmann When Lacan introduced the notion of the not-all into psychoanalytic knowledge, at the beginning of the seventies - more than thirty years ago then - his goal was 'to draw out (faire sortir) something new about feminine sexuality'. He says it explicitly in the seminar Encore: 'We have to pave the way by means of an elaboration of the not-all. This is my real topic this year, behind this 'Encore', and it is one of the meanings of my title. Hopefully I will manage to draw out something new about feminine sexuality.' [1] 'Faire sortir' (literally, to make exit) is a strange expression in French when it is a question of theory. It evokes the idea of a concrete skill like, for instance, that of the magician who is able to extract an unexpected object from an unlikely place. Here, however, it is going to be a question of logic, about a skill with logic, and this is the reason why this expression evokes especially the idea of forcing. It is the structure itself which Lacan is going to attempt to force. Indeed, The woman, the one that Lacan tells us does not exist, can only exist paradoxically, by making a hole at the very heart of the structure. That being so, one can say that Lacan gives a place to the feminine as such, in the structure; the feminine as such, or in other words as the Other sex, as what is radically Other to the signifier, but also as what comes to ask the question of the heteros at the very heart of the world of the One, phallically ordered. The first consequence, therefore, is that it divests the question of the feminine of all its Imaginary associations. Up to this it had been posed in terms of mystery or enigma, terms which, calling upon an added signification, could only ever miss it. It is from this that everything has always been able to be said concerning women; everything, which as we know is another way of saying absolutely anything whatsoever.

The Letter, Issue 30, Spring 2004, Pages 1 - 18

The Letter, Issue 30, Spring 2004, Pages i - iv

The Letter, Issue 29, Autumn 2003, Pages 203 - 222 MY POSSIBLE IMPOSSIBILITY: DEATH IN THE LIFE OF THE OBSESSIONAL * Helena Texier "What, he wondered, did dying mean? It was as though the sound of the word must tell him. How frightful it must be not to see, or hear, or feel anything. He completely failed to notice his faulty conclusion . .. " [1] When in 1955 Freud's day-to-day record of his encounters with a young obsessional man was published for the first time as an addendum to the case history of 1909, we were privileged. We were privileged not only in so far as we were permitted a rare access to the historical moment of the process and the progress of Freud's day-to-day engagement, by means of which psychoanalysis was emerging, unfolding as it was being practiced, but also in so far as the rambling record, in a very tangible way, manages to carry, and sustain within its text the presence of the subject with all it's vital force. There is evidence there of the tension, the liveliness inherent to the clinical encounter, which is often eradicated in more prepared reports of the case history, where the 'meaning-full' theoretical constructs tend to hermetically seal, in the symbolic vaults, the real nut of nonsense which is the kernel of being. [2] All this to say that there are privileged points of access to this Real in Freud's works, where the subject is not at all 'preserved' in the account, where the subject has not been worked to death. Curiously enough these, the most poignant moments in his work, never wholly analysed, always have for effect something which, while these touch very closely upon something at the heart of obsessional neurosis, also touch upon something bearing on what is intimate to our very own presence. The effect of this is that they are always haunting. We could say then that the best of Freud's writing is evocative - it recalls the Real to life. One need only think of the 'stranger in the train' of The Uncanny or of those particular dreams recorded in Die Traumdeutung concerning the death of the father - even Freud's own - or of the child. It could even be said that the force of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams relies hugely on the reverberation through its pages of the circumstance of its origin. In this 'waking' of his own dead father, the Real rattles its chains through the corridors and passageways of the Symbolic.

The Letter, Issue 29, Autumn 2003, Pages 188 - 202 SIGNIFYING NOTHING: LACANIAN THEORY AND TRAGIC FORM[1] Olga Cox Cameron There is a brief moment in literary history which is of interest in the context of Lacan's theorisation of the coming into being of the subject. It is located at the juncture that Lacan designates as that of the birth of modern science and of the subject of psychoanalysis; in other words, the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In literature, this moment corresponds to the decline of tragedy and the rise of the novel. It is tempting to see in these two literary forms a version of the difference Lacan establishes between the mortal blow of the St. Augustine anecdote and the steady unfolding of muted promise which is the Ego-ideal, outcome of the Oedipal encounter with prohibition. It is probably only at this particular historical juncture that the comparison can validly be made. Novels like Robinson Crusoe and the Bildungsroman of the eighteenth century fit the bill very well, while the modern novel or even older works such as Richardson's Clarissa do not. What is in question is the move away from destiny to domesticity; from Shakespeare to Defoe, from Racine to Balzac. There are several ways of theorizing this shift, among them an analysis of the rise of a pragmatic progressive middle class. Since Lacan so emphatically links the appearance of the subject of psychoanalysis to the birth of modern science, one might also consider the refusal of the new scientific spirit to entertain the concept of impossibility. It is said of Galileo that he urged his contemporaries to measure everything that could be measured and to render measurable that which could not. Tragedy is however, of course the domain of the impossible. It is also, as Lacan saw, the domain of a time which does not belong to history. The novel, as Terry Eagleton says in a recent work, can be seen 'as a matter of chronos, of the gradual passage of historical time, whereas tragedy is a question of kairos, of time charged, crisis-racked, pregnant with some momentous truth'. [2] In some of Freud's writings, (for example in The New Introductory Lectures) one gets the impression that the work of analysis is precisely a transition from kairos to chronos, from the charged time of trauma which does not pass, to the humdrum continuities of the everyday; but arguably the greatest danger for tragic truth would be precisely its dilution into ordinariness. Unlike Freud, Lacan, particularly in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, [3] unambiguously privileges kairos.

The Letter, Issue 29, Autumn 2003, Pages 111 - 164 'IM BURNT' A PSYCHOTIC NEOLOGISM IN MELANCHOLIA Lieven Jonckheere Lacan's theory of melancholia? When I first decided on the topic of melancholia from a Lacanian point of view as the basis for what I am about to present today, I thought the most obvious thing to do would be to start by outlining Lacan's theory on melancholia, and then to 'illustrate' this theory with some clinical material. However, I found out surprisingly that explicit pointers towards a theory of melancholia are very scarce in Lacan s work. Firstly, it seems that Lacan never challenged the validity of this very old clinical category. Indeed, as you may already know, melancholia is one of the oldest psychopathologies to have been diagnosed as such. It literally means 'black bile', because in their medical theories ancient Greeks ascribed 'black thoughts' to the influence of some mysterious 'black bile'. Over the course of Western history, melancholia also acquired an important cultural significance, becoming closely associated with creative genius, and fuelling all kinds of aesthetic theories - we became convinced that 'black is beautiful'. Finally however, at the end of the nineteenth century, melancholia was reduced once more to a psychopathology, within the medical discourse of psychiatry - where melancholia is classified as a psychosis. This psychiatric classification of melancholia as a psychosis was, as a matter of fact, never challenged by Lacan. Secondly, it must be said that Lacan did not contribute significantly to the psychoanalytic theory of melancholia; he did not develop a theory of the psychical or unconscious structure of melancholia.

The Letter, Issue 28, Summer 2003, Pages 96 - 108 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RESEARCH: A MATTER OF ETHICS An Lievrouw In our society, the notion of knowledge has become dependent on the notion of science. The latter holds that knowledge can be collected and classified through formal abstraction and that it can be made accessible, provided that methodological rules are respected. By following a methodological guiding system, scientists aim at getting as close as possible to reality in as objective a way as possible. In line with this trend non-analysts and analysts often discuss the scientific status of psychoanalysis. The general tenor of these discussions is that psychoanalysts should concentrate on the scientific foundations of psychoanalysis. [1] A remarkable trend in these discussions is the tendency psychoanalysis. to consider science as equivalent to statistically based research. Considering human sciences in general, it is remarkable that quantitative research should be considered the most suitable method to obtain knowledge on human functioning. This kind of research is bound to live up to standards of objectivity (using standardized samples, objective and reliable measuring procedures, etc.) and ought to produce purified knowledge, that is, quantified knowledge that is not contaminated by a researcher's subjectivity. Qualitative research implies an alternative approach, since it is based on 'data in the form of words - that is, language in the form of extended text'. [2]

The Letter, Issue 28, Summer 2003, Pages 80 - 95 NAMING THE LOVE THAT DARES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME: THE POLITICS AND PERILS OF LANGUAGE AND SEXUALITY Ray O Neill Nommo means Word Nommo is the force that makes things live as what they are: man or tree or animal. Notnmo means word. The rabbit has the life it has - not a rat life or mongoose life - because it is named rabbit, mvundla. A child is not alive, claims Nelson, until it is named. I told him this explained a mystery for me. My sister and I are identical twins, so how is that from one single seed we have two such different lives? Now I know. Because I am named Adah and she is named Leah. [1] Thus Adah, a fifteen year old girl learns from the Congolese boy Nelson in Barabara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible not just about life and culture in the Congo, but more importantly about the nature and power of language itself, that it gives not just meaning, signification, but life, identity. The Lacanian discourse recognises this very power of language, the significance of the Symbolic Order, and how it dominates our understanding of the world. Because it is indeed our understanding of the world, there being no understanding outside of language, since it is through language that our understanding is expressed, thought, experienced and written. He pointed to his mouth. Notnmo comes from the mouth, like water vapour, he said: a song, a poem, a scream, a prayer, a name, all these are nomtno. Water itself is nommo, of the most important kind, it turns out. Water is the word of the ancestors given to us or withheld, depending on how well we treat them. The word of the ancestors is pulled into trees and men, Nelson explained, and this allows them to stand and live as muntu. [2]

The Letter, Issue 28, Summer 2003, Pages 47 - 79 AUTISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: UNEASY BEDFELLOWS * Caroline Noone Autism and autistic spectrum disorders are characterised, within the psychiatric framework, by a triad of deficits in the area of communication, social development and restricted and repetitive behaviours and interests. Currently, autism is classified as a pervasive developmental disorder, a term that is intended to cover children and adults who have severe lifelong difficulties in social and communicative skills beyond those accounted for by general intellectual delay. [1] In the psychoanalytical field autism is classified as a childhood psychosis. Those who treat autistic children psychoanalytically, speak of psychogenic, (that is, predominantly psychological causes) and of organic, (that is, predominantly biological causes) autism. They differentiate between the Kanner-type of childhood psychosis and the childhood psychosis that most resembles adult schizophrenia. In 1943 Leo Kanner wrote a seminal article on what he called Early Infantile Autism. [2] This is his description of one child: There was on his side, no affective tie to people. He behaved as if people as such did not matter or even exist. It made no difference whether one spoke to him in a friendly or harsh way. He never looked at people's faces. Whether he had any dealings with persons at all, he treated them or rather parts of them, as if they were objects. [3]

The Letter, Issue 28, Summer 2003, Pages 38 - 46 WHY NOT WAR? DIALECTICS OF THE WILL TO AGGRESSION IN THE RECENT 'U.S.' - LED WAR ON IRAQ Eve Watson But war cannot be abolished as long as the conditions of existence among nations are so different and their mutual repulsion so violent, there are bound to be wars. The question then arises: Is it not we who should give in, who should adapt ourselves to war? Should we not confess that in our civilised attitude towards death we are once again living psychologically beyond our means, and should we not rather turn back and recognise the truth? [1] Much was made of the signifier 'civilised' in the build-up to the U.S. led coalition invasion of Iraq. George W. Bush routinely employed the word to elucidate the cultural, political and spiritual dichotomy between the U.S. and Iraq, or 'us' and 'them/Other,' as we shall refer to these opposing forces in this paper. It is perhaps appropriate to begin with looking at the meaning of the word 'civilised,' of this exceptionally incisive and divisive signifier. According to the Oxford dictionary, the word 'civilise' has two meanings: the first, 'to bring to an advanced stage of social development,' and the second, 'polite and good-mannered.' We are thus left to surmise which meaning Mr. Bush had in mind in employing the word. Admittedly, we live in a world of meaning that heavily utilises binary divides and the us/Other divide speaks to a historic malaise in adequately elucidating and recognising difference and sameness. There is a power at work in the formation of the us/Other dichotomy that is set in motion by the employment of the signifier 'civilisation' that serves both as a justification for war by bringing "civilisation" to those deemed to be without it and at the same time lies at the very root of the notion of an uncivilised Other. We can say that this confrontation with the uncivilised Other in the form of Saddam Hussein stirs is us echoes of primal drives that are too terrifying to actually contemplate in ourselves. It is much easier to contemplate them in the Other. In the style of Lacan, we could say that in attempting to 'civilise' the Other, we see a powerful illumination of the 'pyrotechnics of the word exploding with supreme alacrity - toward the locus of the Other.' [2] Heavily sanitised war images in our print and television media leave us sanguine in our mis-recognition of the brutal reality of war and their effect is to embed us even more firmly within the gap of language created by the act of language. Here, we might say, is a literal illustration of Lacan's notion of how the 'symbol is the murder of the thing;' how the real once signified loses its reality; how we kill with representation; how when we speak the thing, we are no longer within it and it loses the efficacious proximity of reality.

The Letter, Issue 28, Summer 2003, Pages 23 - 37 THE UNIVERSE IS THERPEUTIC. [1] LIFE IN-SISTS BEFORE IT EX-ISTS IN SIGNS Rob Weatherill One no longer just goes for help. Instead, one enters a whole ideology of caring. Therapy for every possible condition. Soft, warm seduction - supportive, suggestive, hypnotic, congenial, client centred: we can heal your inner child - poetry and painting for the inner child. Get in touch with your true feelings. Co-dependent? Co-dependent no more. This course will identify and clarify co-dependent behaviours and enable you to let go unhealthy and stressful behaviours. Share things with us. The postmodern is therapeutic: a vast Americanisation of life and a commercialisation of human aspirations - all the signs of health. Been abused as a child? The group will offer you an opportunity to explore your own issues - in relation to self, your body and to others. Or, looking at issues affecting how women see themselves, the aim will be to empower women, to increase our self-worth, and to overcome shyness about our own bodies. Remember: your body is beautiful. Focus on your own healing process. The group offers a safe place to explore memories. Use your power to improve relationships. Experiment with new and more satisfying ways of relating. Learn to befriend fear and learn what it has to teach us about ourselves.