Issue 71 now available

Editorial 2021 brought us the continued challenge of working within Covid restrictions and I’m pleased to say that despite these restrictions, psychoanalytic scholarly activities, be it on Zoom or, more rarely, in person, have persevered. This issue of The Letter represents some of the work that has been produced during these challenging times. Stephanie Metcalfe’s paper tackles the theme of the relevance of Freud’s Three Essays today. Focusing on the link between neurosis and perverse infantile sexuality she asks the question: Have we come to terms with the claims of our sexuality? Jacques Laberge takes up the question of the helplessness of the analyst as a necessary position in order to make the psychoanalytic act of the analysand possible. How to respond to the enigmas of the client? Here he discusses how it is the usual recourse of the child, in a position of helplessness, to turn to the I for compensation but this is a course of action which can only form an obstacle to an analysis. Any attempt of the analyst to turn to the I or to make meaning in face of these enigmas only gets in the way.  The analyst must be prepared to empty him or herself of the I, take up the position of dummy for the analysis to proceed. We return to the theme of the relevance of psychoanalysis to contemporary issues in Dorothea Hyneck’s paper. Here, Hyneck examines the link between castration and anxiety and questions if the current trend of protests demanding action on climate change, driven largely by the younger generation, is a response to the anxiety provoking limitlessness of today’s world. In 1912, in his paper Formulations on Two Principles of Mental Functioning , Freud speaks of a necessity to bring the psychological significance of the real external world into the structure of psychoanalytic theory. In his paper, Daragh Howard gives us a comprehensive account of both Freud and Lacan’s attempts to account for the significance of this real external world for human subjective experience. In this interrogation of the relation between repetition and the reality principle and the reality principle and the pleasure principle, Howard maps out the path of evolution in thinking about reality from Freud’s concept of psychical reality to Lacan’s concept of the Real. Finally, Mary Cullen’s paper responds to Lacan’s statement in his ethics seminar ‘the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire’ [1]  in the light of his later formulations, in particular the Borromean knot and the situating of desire within the knot. Once again, we find ourselves on the terrain of the Real as, following Christian Fierens, Cullen introduces us to the notion that desire is linked to a radical jouissance , something which must be taken into account when formulating an ethics of psychoanalysis.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Monica Errity         [1]  Lacan. J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis       Psychoanalysis  Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Transl.     Dennis Porter. Routledge. 2010, p.321.

Editorial The papers in this issue come mainly from the work of the ISLP cartels presented at the cartel study day in June 2020: a unique study day for ISLP in that it took place in the middle of a pandemic with a small group of people presenting in person to those attending via zoom. Covid restrictions may have limited our ability to meet face to face but they didn’t get in the way of the work.  Four of the papers presented here are the fruit of the preparatory work for the planned conference on Lacan’s seminar on ethics which was to be held in August 2020 in Dublin but which, unfortunately, has had to be postponed until 2021, due to the advent of Covid19.  The other two papers come from the ISLP study day of June 2017.  Both Liam Barnard and Donat Desmond, in their papers, consider questions around Lacan’s references to Aristotle in his Ethics  seminar and specifically his use of pre-existing thought as a foil against which to introduce his own views. Liam Barnard highlights how, despite considering Aristotle’s ethical goals to be far removed from a psychoanalytic ethic, Lacan sets out to repurpose the work of Aristotle to create a new ethics for psychoanalysis. Lacan describes this reformulation of Aristotle’s schemas and his placing of das Ding  in the place of the Sovereign good as ‘putting new honey into old pots’. Following on from this, Donat Desmond asks why Lacan should introduce Bentham into the mix in his discussion. He proposes that in noting the difficulties of devising an ethics that takes the real into account, something which has not been achieved by philosophy up to now, Lacan, in carving out his own ethic, presents Aristotle’s and Bentham’s philosophies as forming a sort of Hegelian like triadic dialectic of thesis, antithesis, with its synthesis being found in Freud. Another theme taken up by Lacan in his Ethics  is the theme of sublimation. Before launching into the Lacanian take on sublimation, Anne Woodbyrne’s paper reminds us of Freud’s work on the subject, particularly in reference to the work of  Leonardo da Vinci as illustrative of  the link between sublimation and creativity. While Freud saw sublimation as a desexualised redirecting of the aim, not so Lacan, he places it in the same role as the symptom; a representation of our forbidden desire.  Patricia McCarthy takes up the question of the fate of this rejected knowledge in her examination of the texts of The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and  Les Non-dupes errant.  My own paper, possibly sparked by our current circumstances in the middle of this pandemic, seeks to address the question of what Lacan meant by a second death. In establishing a link between the knowledge of one’s own death and the emergence of desire, Lacan questions the ethics of an analysis which ends with identification with the analyst and proposes an ethics which brings the analysand face to face with his own death.  The question of existence is also at stake in Donna Redmond’s paper. Here, with the aid of the work of Pascal Quignard, she explores the primal phantasy in its function as a screen. A screen which is formed to cover over the  anxiety, horror, forsakenness, yearning, alterity, otherness, incompleteness that cannot be articulated when we are faced with the fundamental question, one which informs the ethics of psychoanalysis; how is it possible to exist in the face of the incomprehensible mystery of our lives?                                                                                           Monica Errity

The Letter, Issue 1, Summer 1994, Pages 1 - 16

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 19 - 25 BEING A STRANGER TO ONESELF [1] Guy Le Gaufey Is there any kind of relationship between knowledge and fatherland? Between the fact of knowing something (a lot of things) and the fact of belonging to a land, a language, a culture? To answer such a question, I will rely on two strange statements, the first one coming from Heidegger in The Principle of Reason : ‘There is a mysterious play of correspondences between the appeal to provide reason and the withdrawal from native ground’. And the second one coming from Lacan, when he enigmatically uttered as a ‘formula’ of his, in the seminar On Anxiety: ‘As soon as it is known that something depends on knowledge ( tient au savoir), there is something lost; and the surest way to approach this something lost is to conceive it as a fragment of the body.’

The Letter, Issue 7, Summer 1996, Pages 21 - 39 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND NEUROSCIENCES A PARTICULAR PARCOURS INTERVIEW WITH MARK LEONARD DE GIER SOLMS [1] Filip Geerardyn and Julien Quackelbeen Question: Can you tell us of your current professional occupation, what it is that you do and where? Mark Solms: At the moment I am working in three different contexts, by which I mean clinical contexts. I am working in the division of neuro- surgery in the Royal London Hospital. There I am involved in the diagnostic work with the patients, presurgical and postsurgical. I am also involved in diagnostic work with neurological patients. My specific area of expertise in that setting is understanding the neuro-pathological implications of mental changes. I don't know how much you know about this sort of thing but there is a whole medical specialisation concerning the understanding of the neurological correlates and implications of mental changes in, for example, memory, personality, ability to conceptualise and operate in space, the higher visual functions, the tactile agnosias, all of speech and language, calculation, and so on. All of these different aspects of mental life have specific ways of breaking down when there are specific lesions to specific parts of the brain, and also to some extent when there are specific pathological processes, in other words specific diseases. It is not only a matter of anatomy, where the lesion is, but also the type of pathology. You can make a contribution to the diagnostic aspects, for example, of dementing patients by a careful, clinical examination of the quality of the mental change in the patient. Broadly speaking this goes under the heading of behavioral neurology.

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 182 - 194 THE TIGHT-ROPE WALKERS Guy Le Gaufey The idea according to which Freud began with psychoanalysis by putting an end to his practice of hypnosis is generally very well accepted today. In spite of some criticism which claims that this is not so obvious, the analytic community (let's suppose for the moment that such a thing exists) holds to this assertion through thick and thin. But it is equally evident that something had been kept alive from hypnosis in the new technique of free association, and a simple look at two of Freud’s texts will be enough to support this: the first one written in the glorious time of hypnosis, the second, ten years later, in Die Traumdeutung. The former one, the little known and not much read Psychische Behandlung, was written in 1890, to be included in a collective book whose title was: Die Gesundheit: Ihre Erhaltung, ihre Storung, ihre Wiederkerstellung (Health: its preservation, its troubles, its return). Because this book was known only in its third edition (dated 1905), this essay is even attributed to 1905 in the Standard Edition, which looks immediately impossible given its contents: an emotive defence in favour of hypnosis, a technique which, according to this Freud, represented 'a progress in the art of healing'.

The Letter, Issue 35, Autumn 2005, Pages 101 - 111 THE ART OF THE EPIPHANY Sandra Carroll In what follows I want to discuss one particular scene in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I want to examine the Joycean concept of epiphany which I believe to be closely linked with Impressionistic art and I shall conclude with some remarks about the representation of women that informs Joyce's writing. In the passage at the end of chapter IV in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus watches a girl in the river: A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

The Letter, Issue 49, Spring 2012, Pages 1 - 21 L’ÉTOURDIT by Jacques Lacan A Bilingual Presentation of the Second Turn. Chapter 3. Sense and Structure Translated by Cormac Gallagher We published the First Turn chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 in Issue 41, Summer 2009. This was followed by the Second Turn - Chapter 1, in Issue 43, Spring 2010, and by Chapter 2, in Issue 45 Autumn 2010. The facing French text is from: L’archive de L’Ecole Lacanienne L’ETOURDIT. THE SECOND TURN. Jacques Lacan CHAPTER 3: SENSE AND STRUCTURE 1. Sense and teaching Let us get moving here on the business of sense, promised earlier because of its difference to meaning. What allows us to grapple with it is the enormity of the condensation between ‘that which thinks’ of our day (with the feet that we just mentioned) and the inept topology Kant reinforced in his own argumentation, that of the bourgeois who can only imagine transcendence, aesthetic as well as dialectical. We might say that this condensation is in effect to be understood ‘in the analytic sense’, as the received formula has it. What is this sense, if precisely the elements condensed in it are univocally qualified by a similar imbecility, indeed are capable of taking pride in it from the side of ‘that which thinks’, Kant’s mask on the contrary appearing stony before insult, except for his reflection on Swedenborg: in other words, is there a sense of imbecility? Here we touch on the fact that sense is never produced except by the translation of one discourse into another.

The Letter, Issue 61, Spring 2016, Pages 1 -22 THE PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE. A SECOND READING OF LACAN’S L’ÉTOURDIT Christian Fierens C. Fierens , Le discours psychanalytique . Une deuxième lecture de l’étourdit de Lacan. To ulouse, Point hors ligne, Erès, 2 01 2. Trans. C. Gallagher 2014. TABLE OF CONTENTS[1] Presentation Introduction: The differ a nce 1 THE ROLES OF THE ANALYST The analyst who knows. The dogmatic analyst The analyst who does not know. The sceptical analyst The analyst who tracks stating. The dynamic analyst The analyst who says what there is. The analyst as witness 2 THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE Without resources With resilience ‘There is no sexual relationship’ or the development of the matheme of the impossible The undecidable Conclusion 3 THE LOGICS OF SEXUATION The ‘masculine phallic formulae’ The question of the subject The impasse The ‘feminine phallic formulae’ 4 THE STUFF OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE AND ITS CUT ...4 The philosophical discourse and the psychoanalytic discourse: the same stuff The cut-the stitch, the effacing of the psychoanalytic discourse The novelty of the psychoanalytic discourse Saying privileged in the psychoanalytic discourse 5 THE SENSE OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE The comfort and the impossibility of the psychoanalytic group The rejected psychoanalyst The directive idea of the psychoanalytic discourse The psychoanalytic discourse as compared to the other discourses 6 THE STRUCTURE OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE, IS INTERPRETATION Between meaning and absence, the flickering of sense Structure The equivocation of interpretation The three kernel-points of equivocation and the psychoanalytic discourse as Borromean PERSPECTIVES FOR THE PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES CHAPTER 4 THE STUFF OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE AND ITS CUT THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE AND THE PSYCHOANALYTIC DISCOURSE: THE SAME STUFF The philosopher can say the truth. He can speak about everything on condition of taking into account that he is speaking about it (Kojève). It’s his trade. He knows that it is doable, on condition of clearly knowing that the truth will remain a half-said. Not only will all never be said, the said will be never complete. But much more, even if he takes his own speech into account, the philosopher will always remain at the dit -mensions of the said, the truth does not get away from the said and does not touch saying; even if it [truth] takes it into account, saying remains outside. The said is constitutive of the approach of the philosopher. To be sure, the philosopher confronts chaos, the radical real, absence, the question of the void. He does so by fitting the saids together into a coherent discourse creating concepts and organised on a plane of immanence which acts as locus for these concepts (Deleuze, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? ). The chaos only appears under the species of dit -mensions. At this level, the psychoanalytic discourse is perfectly well inscribed into the discourse of the philosopher, it organises chaos under the species of dit mensions named imaginary, symbolic and real.

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 93 - 106 A FOREIGN TONGUE Barry O’Donnell This paper is a response to the question: Why was psychoanalysis founded by an emigrant? The paper proposes that speech being strange to the speaker is fundamental to psychoanalytic practice. This has consequences for the transmission of psychoanalysis. Keywords: subjectivity; speech; strange; lalangue; Gaeilge. Psychoanalysis occupies itself with what is experienced as strange in the most intimate aspect of ourselves, our speaking. [1] Whether a dream, a slip, a symptom or a joke there is a quality of it being a foreign production, albeit one of my own subjectivity, a product alien to my conscious sense of myself. It is in this direction that I am drawn in response to the question: Why was psychoanalysis founded by an emigrant? This fundamental experience of what is strange presents some problems: how do each of us in the field sustain the ability to tolerate the strange? How do we work together without making the language of the group over-familiar and the basis of group membership? How do we ensure that the discourse of psychoanalysis remains alive to the strangeness? Why would anyone engage in the work of psychoanalysis in this age, which is arguably more and more intolerant of subjective effects, of anxiety, of questioning?

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 83 - 92 MOVING AWAY FROM THE FAMILIAR [1] Glenn Brady The founding of psychoanalysis is a milestone historical event. Freud’s ideas challenged our preconceptions of who we think we are. He embarked on a journey away from the familiar. Is there something pertinent in Freud leaving the familiar? Does ‘moving away’ from what is ‘familiar’ create a new space where we can dare to unshackle ourselves from stultifying influence of the mob? I will not attempt to draw conclusions from a biographical study of Freud’s early life but rather ask the question of whether something monumentally significant to an understanding of who we are, that is, the founding of psychoanalysis, could only be achieved through the speaking of a loss and thereby, truly moving away from the familiar. Keywords: Psychoanalysis; Freud; hysteria; emigration; loss; speak-being. The online etymology dictionary tells us that the word ‘emigrant’ comes ‘from the Latin emigrantem (nominative emigrans ), present participle of emigrare, ‘move away’. [2] Why was psychoanalysis founded by this person who ‘moved away’? And from what did Freud move away but from that which was familiar, not only to him, but also the rest of us. ‘Familiar’-from Latin familiaris , ‘domestic, private, belonging to a family…The Latin plural, used as a noun, meant ‘the slaves’. [3]

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 55 - 64 RECONSTRUCTING REMINISCENCES Terry Ball ‘Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ This paper [1] looks at the distinction between three related but distinct terms, reconstructing, remembering and reminiscences, in order to examine the origins of the key psychoanalytic concepts of repression and the unconscious. Imbedded in this exploration is a discussion on psychoanalytic practice, its task and its aim. Freud’s texts from 1893 to 1937 are consulted as are some of Lacan’s Seminars and texts from the 1950s which support Freud’s theses. There are musings on Freud’s being made to feel like an alien in his early student years and how he later described the unconscious as an alien, foreign body. Keywords: reconstructing; remembering; reminiscences; repression; unconscious; alien; foreign body; archaeology; metaphor; metonymy The starting point of this paper is Freud’s assertion that ‘[h]ysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences’ [2] and furthermore that the task of the analyst is to reconstruct these reminiscences so that the patient can be induced to remember . It is worth clarifying at the start, therefore, that r eminiscences are not synonymous with remembrances and, furthermore, that remembering is not the same as reconstructing .

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 47 - 54 POST HOC EXSILIUM OSTENDE [1] Paul Bothorel This paper looks at the link that might exist between psychoanalysis and emigration within language, by examining the perspective that Freud, who emigrated to London towards the end of his life, gives us in “Moses and Monotheism”. Keywords: Exile; language; psychoanalysis; loss; Moses. First of all, I must tell you that I came up with this title in an instant, as a reply to Helen Sheehan’s pressing question. It brings to mind a Witz or a slip of the tongue… I shall try to explore this further with you. This verse comes from a beautiful hymn to the Virgin Mary which is sung at Compline, at evening prayer. It evokes our position as humans; as separated beings exiled from the object of our desire which is within God; as children of Eve, exsules filii Hevae , that is to say, permanently excluded from earthly paradise, from Eden, awaiting celestial paradise and eternal felicity. So, we can follow this with Saint Paul, ‘For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known’. In another letter he evokes that future in which we will have full knowledge.

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 37 - 45 WHAT FREUD ALLOWED THE HYSTERIC TO TEACH HIM [1] Stephanie Metcalfe This paper aims to look at how, through working with hysterical patients, Freud developed the revolutionary technique of psychoanalysis which allowed the patient to both make sense of her symptom and enabled her to find a way of resolving it through speech. The way is paved for a relief through speaking because, as Freud demonstrates, each symptom is constituted symbolically. His humility of approach and willingness to learn from his patients is striking. Lacan follows in Freud’s footsteps and impresses on us the importance of listening to what in the patient is struggling to be heard. In this way, in attempting to deal with the past, we are given the opportunity to approach the future differently, having transformed the Imaginary via the Real through working in the Symbolic. Keywords: Symptom; hysteria; psychoanalysis; symbolism; transference; he hustera ‘…[T]he first to consent not to look away nor to investigate elsewhere, the first not to attempt to hide it in psychiatric theory that more or less harmonised with the rest of medical knowledge; the first to follow its consequences with absolute rigour.’ [2] So says Michel Foucault of Freud in Madness and Civilisation . The question posed by today’s conference brings us back to the beginnings of psychoanalysis. Before we can address what it was that enabled Freud to take those first steps along a different path I intend to retrace those beginnings in order to remind ourselves of what the hysteric and her symptom taught Freud; a lesson most succinctly expressed in A Question of Lay Analysis, ‘ one cannot run away from oneself’.’ [3]

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 27 - 35 ALIENS, THIS WAY PLEASE Helen Sheehan This paper aims to consider the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, as outlined by Jacques Lacan in Seminar XI. Special attention will be paid to his theory of Alienation and Separation. [1] Keywords: Freud;Lacan; unconscious; repetition; transference; the drive; excommunication; aliens; legislation; alienation; separation; desire. It is fitting that this group New Studies on Hysteria which is hosting this Conference today has had no permanent place of domicile since its inception. For quite some time, the Milltown Institute offered us a place of refuge but due to its imminent closure we are once again searching for a place in which to work. Some of you will recognise something of the same kind of situation in which Lacan found himself in November 1963 when he was finally excommunicated (a word he himself uses) from the International Psychoanalytic Association. To be more precise, Lacan’s teaching had been the object of censure and a ban on this teaching ensured that he would never again be sanctioned by the I.P.A. Lacan regarded this as tantamount to excommunication. This is of course a religious reference and excludes the possibility of a return within the Jewish tradition while the Christian tradition delights in the one who has been lost coming back to the fold.

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 11 - 18 ‘WE SEE IN HYSTERIA SOMETHING WHICH IS A DEFENCE AGAINST DISSATISFACTION’ [1] Ros McCarthy Hysterical discourse is an attempt at creating a rapport with the Real of the body. The body’s expression of symptoms comes from the Real, a body disposed to jouissance. For the hysteric, it is a jouissance deprived of the phallic signifier. The pseudo original signifier replacing S1 is foundational and gives rise to a new moral order. The pseudo signifier and S2 will organise a gap, which will maintain a dissatisfaction. At the core of the hysteric’s discourse, the subject supports himself only by dissatisfaction as a result of the failure to seize the lost object through the signifier. Objet a as cause of desire is subsumed under an object as lost as if it were another human being. This is defended against through insistent demand. [2] Keywords: Hysteria; loss; jouissance; signifier; drive; Other Situated in Draft G, in his letter to Fliess in 1895, Freud outlines a schematic diagram of sexuality, divided along the lines of a somatic-psyche boundary and an ego boundary. It depicts a quadrant with a psyche-soma frontier and an ego frontier. [3] It is interesting to note that the schema is embedded in Freud’s paper on ‘Melancholia’, in which he states ‘The affect corresponding to melancholia is that of mourning - that is, longing for something lost. Thus in melancholia it must be a question of a loss - a loss in instinctual life’. [4] We see melancholia in other discourses in the clinic, where ‘the shadow of the object, [has fallen] on the ego’, [5] where object-loss retreats to ego-loss. In these presentations, there is a persistent encounter with the Real of loss, whereas in the work of mourning there is usually an endpoint to grief, according to Freud. In the discourse of the hysteric there is inescapable proximity to the Real of loss, aggravated by the repression of the phallic signifier.