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The Letter, Issue 22, Summer 2001, Pages 39 - 58 THE PLACE AND CONTRIBUTION OF HANDWRITING IN CLINICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS Erik Porge By way of an introduction In Freud made use of hieroglyphics (in dream analysis), whilst Lacan drew inspiration from Chinese writing. Having studied the basics of this, Lacan went so far as to say, 'it is perhaps only because I studied Chinese in the past, that I can now call myself Lacanian'. Not only did Lacan find the same ambiguity in Chinese characters as in the signifier - thus re-enforcing the claim that the unconscious is structured like language - but he went further and placed emphasis on the particular dimension specific to the written word. He demonstrated (for example, using Edgar Poe's The Purloined Letter) how the instance, the insistence of the letter determines the subject's wishes. Each individual is determined by the letters from language, whether poetic or scientific, relative to his personal life story. Lacan was himself taken in by the letter when he invented a form of writing specific to analytical discourse. Recognising the specificity of the written word in speech and language has led to a new clinical approach since Freud, used for example amongst children faced with learning problems in respect of reading and writing. This specificity opens up a new approach to a question that has never been totally resolved: that of the link between the Oedipus complex and the child's curiosity regarding the difference between the sexes. This question raises problems for the child later (it is the driving force behind his sexual theories), and is also an object of research for the psychoanalyst. Taking these issues into consideration, one can better identify care demands in child psychoanalysis.

The Letter, Issue 22, Summer 2001, Pages 30 - 38 PSYCHOANALYSIS IN CHINA? The Importance of psychoanalysing the desire to heal, in particular, the desire to heal children * Gerard Pommier By way of an introduction In what follows, firstly we will speak about the sacred character of the body, and its consequences for representation, mainly in writing. Chinese writing has the advantage of showing the direct relation between body, image and speech, that is, the relation between ideographs and phonographs common to calligrams. Most importantly the holiness characteristic of the body has consequences for every person who wishes to care for others, and in particular for those who wish to care for children. **** Why have the body and the representation of the body in all eras and civilisations been considered as holy? Our hypothesis is that what is holy corresponds to the unconscious investment of the body. In the mother's desire to have a child, the child's body replaces the phallus that she has been deprived of. Freud calls this 'penis envy'. However, because the phallic signification of the child's body is incestuous, it is repressed and reappears in a mystified way in a sacred, religious dimension. Our body has been the object of maternal desire and hence, we are not our body, but we have it. We ignore what our own body is like, and that is why the mirror, our external perception by others and their love, matter so much to humans. The works of Jacques Lacan on the 'stage of the mirror' in the development of the young child have made way for our understanding of this dimension. Our body is first outside of us, in the desire of our parents. This Freudian point of view joins Marx's theory, when this latter writes in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach that the essence of man is beyond him, in the whole of his social relations.

The Letter, Issue 22, Summer 2001, Pages i - iii

The Letter, Issue 21, Spring 2001, Pages  113 - 120 LE PARI DE PASCAL - PASCAL'S WAGER Claude Landeman By Way of an Introduction ... The text given here of Claude Landeman's contribution to APPI's annual congress retains the conversational tone in which it was delivered. Claude Landeman spoke on the day via Cormac Gallagher's (almost!) simultaneous translation and we owe this present text to his efforts on that occasion and to those of the diligent note-takers in the audience. This work is an edited version of the compilation of their combined efforts. * * *** * To give you a definition of a 'wake-up call', Pascal's wager is just such a wake-up call. Se reveiller, river, - the function of waking up goes against our most beloved function, our dearest wish, which is to dream, to sleep. You all know that Freud said that the ultimate desire of the dream is the desire to go on sleeping. This goes some way to explain why in relation to Pascal's wager there has only been misunderstanding, only failure to understand and disinterest from everyone who studied him, starting from the publication of the Pensees, in which the wager is prefaced by a little note to the reader explaining that this wager was only addressed to Libertines, or unbelievers. Things have gone on just like that - Pascal the French genius who reduces the wager to a matter of self-suggestion.

The Letter, Issue 21, Spring 2001, Pages  106 - 112 FROM NEUROSCIENCE TO NEUROPSYCHOANALYSIS - MISSION IMPOSSIBLE? Aisling Campbell Having been dispatched by Cormac Gallagher to a conference on Neuroscientific and Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Emotion this summer, I concluded that to bring together neuroscience and psychoanalysis is a challenge to say the least and that Cormac, by sponsoring this trip had set me - should I choose to accept it - a 'Mission Impossible'. For many psychoanalysts, neuroscience is imbued with all the imaginary enmity associated with the other; for neuroscientists, psychoanalysis is generally treated with disdain, provoked by the lack of certainty that is crucial to psychoanalysis. Dialogue between the two fields is, when it does occur, hostile in the main. The relationship between psychoanalysis and neuroscience is like that of the subject and his counterpart; each sees in the other unforgivable faults and failures. I hope to move the context of this debate from the 'other' to the 'Other' and to shift the potential dialogue from the imaginary to something more fruitful. It is a commonplace that this has been the decade of the brain. While we cannot be too concerned with fashion, the existence of neuroscientific knowledge is a real problem for psychoanalysis. If the material reality of the brain has little to do with the specifics of the speaking subject, clinical experience shows that brain abnormalities can be associated with psychopathologies familiar to psychoanalysts. For example, certain types of temporal lobe epilepsy are associated with psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations, hippocampal damage gives rise to dramatic abnormalities in memory, and so on. Prolonged psychosis over many years is associated with tangible deterioration in cognitive function and a decrease in cerebral volume. Furthermore, clinical experience shows that psychotic symptoms do improve with antipsychotic medication and this effect is not simply the result of sedation. In other words, the drugs do work.

The Letter, Issue 21, Spring 2001, Pages 80 - 105 THE QUESTION OF THE DRIVE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS Hugh Arthurs Introduction In terms of the meta-psychology of psychoanalysis, Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology may be seen as one of his seminal works. [1] In this Freud sets out a particular view of the mind to which he returns many times, most notably in chapter seven of The Interpretation of Dreams. [2] The fact that he develops this model of the mind from an 'economic', or one might even say a 'physiological' beginning to a final psychological form does not change its fundamental structure. Freud abandoned the Project shortly after he sent the initial draft to his friend Fleiss in October 1895. Nevertheless, he continued to hold the view that the psychic apparatus, which from this point onwards he explored from a mentalistic or psychological perspective, would in some future time be explained in terms of physiology. In this regard, Ernest Jones says of the Project that it represents Freud's 'last desperate effort to cling to the safety of cerebral anatomy'. [3] Despite having abandoned the Project Freud continued to hold to the idea that the economic dimension was the central driving force of the psychic apparatus. At the same time however, at the level of clinical practice and human interaction he seems to take the position that it is only in psychological terms that the operation of the mind can be understood. Holding that the psychic apparatus is physical does not conflict with the view that its operations can only be understood in mental or psychological terms. Thomas Nagel, commenting on Freud from the perspective of analytic philosophy, puts it in the following way: ... there is a causally complete physical system, some of whose processes ... have the property of consciousness in addition, or have conscious concomitants. The mental then appears as the effect of a certain kind of physical process. [4]

The Letter, Issue 21, Spring 2001, Pages  55 - 79 A STRUCTURAL DIAGNOSIS OF TOXICOMANIA [1] Tom De Belie Toxicomania and the Psychoanalytic Field The work of the analyst is sometimes described as to allow the analysand to unpack his suitcases which up to then he dragged with him full of unnecessary ballast, so that a new journey can begin with less baggage. [2] The way in which an analyst attempts to make this possible is by presenting the analysand with a bag with a hole in it. The analysand, in unpacking his suitcases, is eager to try to fill the bag of the analyst, in order to leave him to decide which items to bring and which not. The analyst's task is to keep the bag open all the time. However, because of the hole, everything that goes in the bag, inevitably ends up on the floor. In the end, depressed by his vain attempts to involve the analyst in choosing and provided with a better overview of the contents of his luggage, the analysand decides to fill his own suitcases again, leaving the rubbish to keep company with the holed bag of the analyst. It is not difficult to recognize in this metaphor the encounter between the discourse of the analyst and the hysteric's discourse in psychoanalytic treatment. The hysteric's discourse is the discourse into which the analysand is forced by the analytic discourse that the analyst adopts. [3] This is only possible when we are dealing with analytic symptoms, that is, symptoms that are governed by SI, the phallic signifier, analytic symptoms, which are to be considered as attempts at recovery within the chain of signifiers. The psychoanalysis of such a symptom is to bring a subject as near as possible to SI, using the logic of free association, so that he can reconsider choices made in the past, which make him suffer in the present by the 'hystory' he made of them. This reconsidering of the past, this rewriting of the history of the subject, is what Lacan referred to as the traversing of the fundamental fantasy and is represented by the right antipode in the analytic discourse. However, the clinic is more than analytic symptoms alone. Very often the analyst is presented with symptoms that operate outside the signifier, that are not mediated by the Name-of-the-Father. The psychotic structure, where the Name-of-the- Father is foreclosed, is to be considered as such a case. Similarly, the clinical category of actual neurosis, that can operate within the three clinical structures [4] , is not mediated by the Symbolic. Finally, attempts at recovery that operate outside the signifier, such as toxicomania, acting- out/ passage a l'acte and psychosomatic illnesses also belong to this category. Toxicomania, which can be considered as an attempt at recovery via the compulsive intake of an external substance, shortcuts the chain of signifiers and deals directly with the body of the subject. [5] Acting out and passage a l'acte can be viewed as attempts at recovery via un-symbolized acts of the body. [6] So too can psychosomatic illnesses be regarded as attempts at recovery via the route of the body itself. In each of these three cases an additional jouissance is administered by a particular way of dealing with the structural or an accidental trauma. [8] A certain jouissance added to the sexual jouissance that is governed by SI. The situation described is to be regarded as posterior to the position of the subject in language. Indeed, the three structures of neurosis, psychosis and perversion with the three negations of repression, foreclosure and disavowal are the first and foremost 'answers' of the subject to the structural trauma of the entrance into the symbolic order.

The Letter, Issue 21, Spring 2001, Pages  52 - 54 THE SYMPTOM BETWEEN MARXISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS Lieven Jonckheere [1] 'From 'Mehnvert' to 'plus-value' and back ...': this rather enigmatic title of Gerry Sullivan's contribution suggests a relation between the Mehnvert or surplus value of Marx and the plus-de-jouir or surplus jo uissance of Lacan. On the one hand we know that Lacan's plus-de-jouir is, among other things, a conceptualisation of Freud's idea of the Lustgewinn - this Lustgezvinn being the pleasure liberated by a joke when, for a moment, we may drop our lifelong sustained effort at repression. We could say this is a free pleasure, a pleasure that costs nothing. On the other hand, there's this intriguing remark on the Mehnvert by Lacan, in his sixteenth Seminar D'un Autre a Vautre, precisely in the year 1968. There Lacan recalls how Marx, at one of the 'fertile moments' of his discovery of the Mehnvert, had been struck by the laughter of the capitalist. Indeed, according to Marx's dialectical experience the capitalist master cannot help laughing when, trying to justify what he's doing, he succeeds in hiding that he's putting into his own private pocket the Mehnvert produced by the slaves of the working class. This laughter provoked by the hidden possession of this Mehnvert also seems to correspond to a pleasure that costs nothing. And maybe in its own way, and on its own level, this free pleasure of the capitalist Mehnvert is also the result of a kind of joke, in this case a huge economic joke. Of course, I am not saying that the economy is a joke. I only say that it is structured like a joke, that it has the economy of a joke if I may say so. However this may be, for Lacan this quasi-maniacal laughter of the master is the sign of his avoidance of the object little (a) - or the avoidance of a pleasure that costs too much, what Lacan calls jouissance.

The Letter, Issue 21, Spring 2001, Pages  41 - 51 THIS IS MY BODY.... THE CLINIC OF THE O-OBJECTS OR OF THE BODY OF ENJOYMENT Patricia McCarthy Introduction Analysis is a discourse that has consequences. For the suffering subject the renunciation of enjoyment is elaborated in a discourse of the body. In the course of analysis this is a topologically arranged discourse involving loss. The body of enjoyment is not equivalent to the body as intuitively recognised at the level of the ego or the specular image. I will illustrate this absence of equivalence clinically. I will also attempt to demonstrate how the body of enjoyment is topologically arranged. ***** Our Annual Congress this year has an even more difficult title than usual. I can't afford to think too much about how you will receive what I have to say about the clinic of the body of enjoyment. My knowledge is obviously derived from clinical work and is supported by the current seminar. I have a certain discomfort with the difficulty of the topic and the different levels of understanding among people in the audience. I have no choice however but to put this anxiety aside, bearing in mind that this is, after all, our annual congress, the seventh since 1994 - which is no mean record - and the place where one can present work in progress.

The Letter, Issue 21, Spring 2001, Pages  28 - 40 THE PROXIMITY OF THE OTHER. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LEVINAS [1] Rob Weatherill Introduction This paper attempts to demonstrate the importance of the work of Levinas for an ethics of psychoanalysis that transcends ideological difference. Firstly, the role of language in psychoanalysis and the construction of subjectivity is stressed, secondly, the work of Bion and the containment of anxiety. However, beyond these 'positions', there remains the impossible proximity of the other as singularity, for whom, according to Levinas, I am responsible without limit. For Levinas, as for Freud, the subject is not one, but instead, open, gaping, exposed between being and nothingness, a diachrony, which language, the Law and philosophical systems in general, dissimulate and betray. Technique saves the analyst from this proximity of the 'client' but at once becomes cynical and complacent, unless it remains haunted by its own resistance to the other, indeed its own failure. Post-Lacan, no one could dispute the central place that language holds in the practice of psychoanalysis. The son of alcoholic parents talks about 'bottling-up' his feelings; the man whose father is a womaniser dreams of 'raking' the autumn leaves. A French analyst reports that his patient dreams of giving him *six roses*. The patient's father had died of 'cirrhosis' of the liver. A woman who has troublingly missed her period dreams of a newspaper 'being read all over'. The significance of the word 'rat' for the Rarman is multiple. [2] The rat, the biting dirty little animal, the rat/ children lured away by the Pied Piper of Hamelin, heiraten meaning to marry, Raten meaning installments, or the payments to Freud for sessions 'so many florins, so many rats', spielratte (a play-rat, a gambler, as his father was), rat equals penis, the carrier of infections and diseases, rats burrow into the anus, anal eroticism and the pleasurable itching of worms in his childhood, the rat that runs over his father's grave, the biting rat (as a child he had bitten someone), and so on. More condensation is at work in the description of the 'May-beetle dream', [3] where a may-beetle was crushed by the closing of a window. The dreamers associations were: a moth had drowned in a tumbler of water the night before, her daughter's cruelty to insects, the plague of may-beetles, her birthday was in May, as was her wedding. At the time of her dream, her husband was away and she had the involuntary thought aimed at her husband: 'Go hang yourself. Earlier she had read that a man who is hanged gets an erection. Get an erection at any price. The dreamer was aware that the most powerful aphrodisiac is prepared from crushed beetles. And so on, as we trace out the weaving, the inter-weaving, the cross hatching, the multiple determinations that surround any utterance. [4]

The Letter, Issue 21, Spring 2001, Pages  1 - 27

The Letter, Issue 21, Spring 2001

The Letter, Issue 20, Autumn 2000, Pages 219 - 221 Conference Report 1ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON NEUROSCIENTIFIC AND PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVES ON EMOTION * Aisling Campbell Every once in a while one has the sense of being in the middle of something completely 'cutting edge' or 'state of the art', hearing something utterly fresh. Such was the sensory experience generated by the inaugural conference on Neuroscientific and Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Emotion, organised by the Anna Freud Centre in London this summer. There is an almost canonical belief that neuroscience and psychoanalysis can never meet -and it has to be said that this view is adhered to far more tenaciously by psychoanalysts than by neuroscientists. However those attending this conference will have had the sensation of having been just about to say themselves that dialogue between the two perspectives was not only possible but also essential for the survival of both. Indeed the result of the conference was similar to that of a good analytic interpretation - while memories of the factual content may have faded, what was articulated seems to resonate with what is below the surface of our thinking and it certainly gave rise to much in the way of further associations. One had the sense of something crucial being articulated without any particulctr view being privileged as the correct one.

The Letter, Issue 20, Autumn 2000, Pages 210 - 218 NOTE ON SEXUALITY IN THE WORK OF MICHEL FOUCAULT * Frederic Gros ** I would like to tell you, by way of introduction, about a debate I once had with some judges, about an experience which is of course a major one in our culture: that of crime. I recall that we were perpetually confronted with the hard and sombre heart of the criminal act, and that many saw, in the perplexity that took hold of us on each occasion, the sign of a radical lack of understanding which finally sent us back to the mystery of Evil itself. At that point I tried to defend the thesis which maintains that the difficulty, the complication of the criminal act, comes less from a fundamental obscurity which is thought to be essential to crime, from a hidden and as it were impenetrable identity, than from the historic entanglements, the complex sedimentation of discourses about crime, which meant that when we spoke about it we always stumbled, less because of an essential difficulty, than because of, I believe, a historical confusion of discourses. It is this consideration that I would like to put as an exergue, or at least as a preface to our discussions: the idea that the opacity of the sexual also comes perhaps less from a difficulty belonging to the very nature of sexuality, than from the confused intermingling of discourses which, for thousands of years, have been woven around the sexual act. It is the idea that the foundation of the hesitancy that comes over us when we try to speak, this confession of ignorance about what is at the basis of the sexual, derives more from a re-sifting of discourses, from a tight knit accumulation of words, than from an essential astonishment. This opacity in short, also comes from the historic saturation of discourses.

The Letter, Issue 20, Autumn 2000, Pages 183 - 209

The Letter, Issue 20, Autumn 2000, Pages 167 - 182 LEARNING DISABILITY: TWO WRITERS AND A QUESTION Philip Dodd Introduction This paper reviews selected writings of two people, Maud Mannoni and Valerie Sinason, both of whom have worked psychoanalytically with people with a learning disability, with a view to considering in light of their work, whether psychoanalysis is appropriate to this patient group. Maud Mannoni In the 1960s there was a renewal of interest in handicap in France. Here the torch for psychodynamic thinking in mental handicap was carried by psychoanalyst Maud Mannoni, and most clearly shown in her work, The Retarded Child and His Mother. [1] Opening her book with the question, 'How does one become an analyst?' Mannoni affirms immediately that the events that marked her life are not without relation to her interests in retarded development and psychosis. Maud Mannoni was born in 1923. Her mother was of Belgian origin, and her father was Dutch. As a diplomat, he was posted to Ceylon, where Maud spent the first years of her life. When she was six years old, her family had to return to Europe, settling in Belgium. Her school years, spent in Anvers, left her with memories of boredom and mediocrity. It was her university years that would be truly formative for her. This was paradoxical, for the University was closed at the time as a sign of protest against the German invaders in World War Two. She was thus trained 'on the job', at the psychiatric hospital. Due to the war, she experienced great liberty at the hospital, in particular with regard to the care of 'feeble-minded' adolescents and psychotics in the suburbs of Anvers. She spent the better part of her time with them outside the hospital in the daylight, in the wilderness, and she staged a travelling theatre with them. Further, with these patients, she favoured the use of the Flemish dialect in order to facilitate the symbolisation in words of the violence that had been suffered and enacted by the adolescents. In fact, it was a sort of 'anti-psychiatry' experience before it was theorised as such.