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The Letter, Issue 20, Autumn 2000, Pages 147 - 166 POLES APART? A QUESTION OF IDENTITY: FROM A UNIFIED SELF TO A DIVIDED SUBJECT Peter Kelly Introduction The philosopher Bertrand Russell once referred to common sense as the 'metaphysics of the savages' and in this rather smug way I think he was attempting to draw a distinction between serious reflection and what can at times pass for such. This quote struck me quite often as I was writing the present work for it seemed to cut to the quick of my subject matter. In other words, is the true-self the opium of a psychologically informed cultural discourse, a search for a psychic holy grail, or is it, as Lacan would argue, an alienating fiction produced as a defence against the painful realities of unconscious desire? What seem to be at stake here runs to the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise: the individual versus the subject, the ego versus the unconscious, wholeness versus division, either the true-self or the split subject. From Oprah to the self help groups and manuals, to the many 'experts' who are wheeled out by the media to explain psychological suffering, the inference appears to be that happiness is not only a right, but just a stone's throw away, and can be had once we have shed the onion-layered defences that conceal our true selves. In other words, implicit in this notion is the idea that there is something organised, stable, and central about the self, that (if you like) selfhood comprises a core element of each individual's personality and subjective existence, whether this be in the guise of some inner essence with form and substance, or in a facilitating environment and maturational process that predisposes the individual to a subjective harmony and stability.

The Letter, Issue 20, Autumn 2000, Pages 130 - 146 SIGNIFIER AND SIGNIFICATION IN THE PRACTICE OF LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS Frédéric Declercq Summary Interpretations that focus directly on signification are not psychoanalytical in the Freudian-Lacanian sense. Such interpretations characterise, on the contrary, the paranoid psychosis. This is borne out theoretically by Lacan and Watzlawick. M. Klein's clinical cases demonstrate that interpretations that focus on significations induce a paranoid-like exacerbation of the imaginary. Freud and Lacan on the other hand, aim at the signifier. The significations that Freudian psychoanalysis validates are those which result from the correlation of two signifiers. *** When Lacan defines the unconscious as being structured as a language, he refers to formal language, that is to say language without inherent signification. [1] For this reason, he founds his conceptualisation of the unconscious on a mathematical rather than on a classical linguistic philosophical pattern. [2] Indeed, mathematical algorithms do not carry signification as such: they only acquire signification in conjunction with other algorithms which belong to the same system. Applied to the formations of the unconscious, this means that it is not relevant to interpret or to attribute a meaning to a signifier as such (1), but to check primarily how this signifier articulates itself to another signifier (2).

The Letter, Issue 20, Autumn 2000, Pages 117 - 129 PSYCHOSIS, TOXICOMANIA AND THE HOMELESS' Dirk Bryssinck Formulation of the Problem: A New Diagnosis? The psychiatric landscape has undergone a lot of changes in the last couple of years. This constant evolution shouldn't surprise us, considering its youthful existence and bearing in mind that psychiatry always follows in the wake of an ongoing society. Hysteria is commonly known to adapt itself to the prevailing discourse, but that psychoses should also be appearing in a new attire is a relatively new feature. Since Nietzsche's creed that God is dead one has rarely come across the 'traditional' psychotic delusions, such as the religious delusion of redemption. In the footsteps of literary forerunners like Burroughs, Huxley and Leary, psychotics have discovered drugs, - drugs which we consider as one of the current symptoms of discomfort in our post-modern culture. This new climate is now also tangible in the psychosis department of the psychiatric hospital where I have been working for twelve years, and which has recently become an explosive mix of questionably psychotic individuals with a serious problem of addiction. Since the success (or perhaps the failure) of the DSM-III this has been known as comorbidity or dual diagnosis: psychosis/toxicomania. Whether it is a so- called drug psychosis, a toxic psychosis or a genuine underlying psychotic structure which remained hidden, is difficult to discern, precisely because the drug-use functioned for a time as an anchoring point or suppletion - and the social environment was a supportive factor - or perhaps the drug- use was even the enticing factor. An additional problem is the rise of the new synthetic drugs with a base of fentanyl. Since their chemical structures are difficult to determine and their effects difficult to anticipate the symptomatology becomes more complex when compared with established products such as cocaine and heroin, which have more clearly delineated effects.

The Letter, Issue 19, Summer 2000, Pages 92 - 116 LACAN READS ROUSSEAU: A NARRATIVE INSTANCE OF THE BODY-IN-PIECES Katharine Swarbrick Lacan reads Rousseau: a narrative instance of the body-in-pieces Book VII of Rousseau's Confessions involves the story of an encounter between Jean-Jacques and Zulietta, a Venetian courtesan, which presents one of the richest highlights of an autobiography whose status is paradigmatic. I have read this episode in conjunction with a spectrum of Lacanian theory which has as its focus the psychopathological incidence of anxiety and its effects on the emotional and perceptual faculties of the human subject. My objective in bringing Rousseau and Lacan together is to look afresh at the possibilities yielded by psychoanalytic inquiry into the work of Rousseau, and to provoke further exploration and discussion of the ways in which our understanding of autobiographical texts can be revitalised by detailed readings inspired by the work of major psychoanalytic thinkers. Psychoanalysis abounds with idols in the form of idealised figures which it theorises as projections of the idealised image of the self. The analyst thus proposes that the idealisation of the human form is dictated by narcissism, and is both intersubjective and intrasubjective in nature. [1] In Lacanian theory these two related levels are structured by the interplay of three psychical registers; and it is on a particular relation between the registers that the cohesion of the idealised form of the body rests. The Imaginary, Symbolic and Real as these registers are now widely known, respectively span the realms of space and visual images, language and meaning, and an absolute dimension, distanced by the others, which, for Lacan, the subject cannot directly approach or tolerate. [2] The emergence of the ideally integrated body is thus inseparably linked with the subject's projection of a coherent sphere of reality in which it can move with a degree of assured predictability.

The Letter, Issue 19, Summer 2000, Pages 50 - 91 JUST SAY NO' TO COGITO Adrian Johnston Introduction The subject the Cartesian subject, is the presupposition of the unconscious ... The Other is the dimension required in order for speech to affirm itself as truth. The unconscious is, between the two of them, their cut in act [1] Despite its fundamental rule of free association, psychoanalysis is notorious for preventing one particular thing from being said - 'No'. Pinned to a sofa, much like a point de capiton, the analysand can and must say anything at all. However, caught in the matrix of the analyst's interpretive framework, he is unable to deny the accuracy of the remarks of this grande Autre. In the context of the session, yes means yes, but no also means yes. In fact, Freud makes a fundamental clinical rule out of Shakespeare's 'methinks thou doth protest too much'. The more frequent and vigorous the patient's denials are, the closer the analyst presumes to be to unconscious truth. Critics of psychoanalysis are justifiably alarmed by this facet of its therapeutics. On the one hand, they fear the spectre of pseudo-science due to an absence of falsifiability criteria. On the other hand, they perceive the potential for harmful, authoritarian abuses of patients by analysts. If the analysand's responses all amount to the same affirmation of the analyst's interpretations, then how is it that one can discern the difference between 'good' and 'bad' analytic interventions? Of course, Freud already has several responses to these objections at his disposal. To begin with, it's not just any old 'no' that the analyst listens for (as Lacan later says, there are many forms of negation, which it's misleading to group under a single heading [2] ). It's a 'No!' that is distinctively fierce and insistent. Not only is the linguistic content of the act of negation crucial, but also the affective disposition accompanying said act.

The Letter, Issue 19, Summer 2000, Pages 42 - 49 NARRATIVE IMPASSE: the Act as passage a L'acte Olga Cox-Cameron I doubted my own existence, and even today, I have no faith in it, none, so that I have to say, when I speak, Who speaks, and seek and so on, and similarly for all the things that happen to me and for which someone has to be found, for things that happen must have someone to happen to, someone must stop them. The speaker here is the voice in Beckett's Unnamable. It is not just that things that happen must have someone to happen to, someone to lock on to, but also, as the voice says, someone must stop them. How? Earlier the voice spoke of his vice-existors, Murphy, Mahood, Worm etc. as those old buffers who carried a mere tittle of his own pain, the tittle as he says, that he thought he could put from him in order to witness it. It is this gesture of putting from one, this installation of the lying old buffer of our fictional identity, which is absent in the passage a l'acte. In the Seminar on The Psychoanalytic Act, Lacan refers to a particular type of absence as constitutive not just of the passage a l'acte but of any act: 'It is a common dimension of the act not to include in its agency the presence of the subject', he says. This statement is repeated at a number of points throughout the seminar. In fact Lacan specifically says that this is what the psychoanalytic act and the passage a l'acte have in common; this fact of knowing 'that in every act there is something which escapes him as subject'.

The Letter, Issue 19, Summer 2000, Pages 32 - 41 THE 21ST CENTURY WILL BE LACANIAN OR IT WILL BE BARBARIAN! * Jean-Pierre Lebrun During his seminar of 9th January 1997 Charles Melman made the following remark: The 21st Century will be Lacanian or it will be barbarian. What people call barbarian can be given a very strict, very rigorous definition. It is not simply a metaphor for vaguely designating the foreigner or the Barbaros, the person who could only say bar-bar-bar! Barbarism deserves a rigorous definition and I am happy to propose it to you. It consists in a social relation organised by a power that is no longer symbolic but real. From the moment that established power is supported, takes as reference its own force and nothing else, and does not try to defend or to protect anything other than its existence as power , well then we are barbarian. What is proper to democracy, is that the real power, the real forces by which it is supported, the police, the army, this real power is at the service of an authority that has a purely symbolic reference. Barbarism, for its part, is outside discourse, it is not based on a discourse, it is based only on the number of agents that are at its service.

The Letter, Issue 19, Summer 2000, Pages 1 - 31 ANXIETY, TIME AND PSYCHICAL STRUCTURE* Andre Michels To begin with I would like to examine the relationship between anxiety and neurosis in the way Freud impresses it on us. Does a neurosis have a stabilising effect, even stemming anxiety or, on the contrary, does it contribute to its increase? Can we assume a correlation between the two insofar as anxiety decreases at the rate of the structuring of the neurosis and vice versa? What meaning can we attribute to the physical discharge of anxiety? This is very different in hysteria, hypochondria and the so- called psychosomatic illness. A feature of the latter, if it appears in its 'pure form' and is not covered too much by the neurosis, is an almost complete absence of fear which can be understood as one of the reasons why the subject may not see any clear reasons for undergoing treatment. In most cases, however, anxiety appears as a motivational factor and so will generally be included in the list of psychical suffering. Protection against anxiety? Freud says: ... I think the question has never been seriously enough raised of why neurotics in particular suffer from anxiety so much more than other people. Perhaps it has been regarded as something self-evident: the words 'nervös' and 'ängstlich' are commonly used interchangeably, as though they meant the same thing. But we have no right to do so ... [These words are by no means equivalent to the colloquial English 'nervous' and 'anxious'. 'N ervös ' might be rendered by 'nervy' or 'jumpy' and 'ängstlich' by 'nervous' in its colloquial sense. 'Anxious' in its ordinary usage is more like the German 'bekümmert' or ' besorgt'.] [2]

The Letter, Issue 19/20, Summer/Autumn 2000, Pages i - iii

The Letter, Issue 18, Spring 2000, Pages 104 - 114 OVERVIEW OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC ACT Translated by Cormac Gallagher Lacan's summary of the seminar of 1967-68 for the year book of the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes This, Lacan's own, summary of the seminar on The Psychoanalytic Act, written for the yearbook of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, must prove a vital element in the correct interpretation of his years teaching for 1967-68. The only English version of that teaching is the unpublished translation which has been the focus of the working group at St. Vincents Hospital in 1998-1999 and which provided the theme for the November congress of APPI. The translation of his Summary attempts to follow Lacan's text as closely as possible. [1] *** The psychoanalytic act, neither seen nor heard of before me, namely, never mapped out, much less put in question, we suppose here to be something belonging to the elective moment when psychoanalysand passes to psychoanalyst. This is the most commonly admitted recourse as regards what is necessary for this passage, all other conditions remaining contingent as compared to it. Thus isolated from this moment of installation, the act is within reach of everyone who enters into a psychoanalysis.

The Letter, Issue 18, Spring 2000, Pages 93 - 103 HYP-KNOT-ISM OF THE OBSESSIONAL SYMPTOM IN ANALYSIS Megan Williams If the structure we work in is a knot, as proposed by Lacan, [1] then what does it knot? To answer this, the first reference is Freud's early work on the primary symptom. In The Neuroses of Defence, [2] Freud proposes a primary level of symptom corresponding only to defence, and not to the compromise structure of the neurotic symptom proper. This symptom is not a return of the repressed, but the 'normal trend towards defence' which brings about the first repression. It is in response to 'premature sexual stimulation1, [3] experienced as an overwhelming of the ego by an excessive tension: what Lacan will call an encounter with desire in the Other as something real and unnamed. The sequence Freud proposes is: (1) a premature and traumatic sexual experience, (2) its repression on some later occasion which arouses a memory of it and at the same time the formation of a primary symptom, (3) a stage of successful defence, (4) the return of the repressed ideas in the compromise form of the neurotic symptom proper. [4] That the symptom is originally defence alone tells us the experience of the drive is an alien one for the subject. In hysteria the primary symptom is fright, giving rise to aversion. [5] Jouissance has a negative value which accuses the Other of perversion. [6] In obsessional neurosis Freud postulates a primary experience which is hysterical, but its recall is mixed with pleasure, and the primary symptom is self-reproach. [7] The obsessional covers the trauma of a passive experience by transforming it into an active seeking of satisfaction, but this 'pleasure' is still too much: as the memory is repressed, it takes on a positive jouissance value which leads to compulsion and engenders guilt.

The Letter, Issue 18, Spring 2000, Pages 87 - 92 PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE FORMATION OF THE PSYCHIATRIST Anthony McCarthy Shortly after I started work as a psychiatrist in London some years ago, an Irish patient named END A, who had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, was booked in to see me at an outpatient clinic. When I saw him waiting outside my office I introduced myself to him and asked him was he Enda. He replied that he was but that, as I was obviously Irish and probably Catholic, I must know who he was already. After some questioning by me he went on to explain that I must know because everyone knew who he was. As evidence he mentioned that the prayers after the rosary were about him, for example his mother's favourite prayer had as its last line: 'and world without end amen ' 'and world without END A men'. So, what are Enda Men I wondered and what is a world without Enda Men. As he was just about to become a father for the first time I also wondered to myself about N Ad Men. This is the sort of stuff that made me, and would make any self respecting Lacanian analyst lick their lips or at the very least say 'I believe ... in Lacuna and Language'.

The Letter, Issue 18, Spring 2000, Pages 70 - 86 WHOSE DECLINE AND FALL? - EYSENCK'S VERSION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS Liberato Santoro-Brienza Man is a heap of contradictions. (F. W. Nietzsche) According to Pavlov's experiments, behaviourally conditioned dogs salivate when stimulated by the ring of a bell - previously associated with meal-times and the simultaneous co-presence of food - even in the absence of food. An artificial stimulus triggers an established and reinforced nervous reflex. The ringing bell causes the dogs salivation, directly or without any mediation. There is an old joke that tells the story of two dogs meeting in Moscow. One of them - a former patient at Pavlov's laboratories - is well-nourished and healthy, the other pitifully emaciated and weak. The skinny and sickly dog asks the other: 'How do you manage to be so healthy? How and where do you find food?'. The reply is, of course, quite obvious - especially if you happen to be a behaviourist. 'Well - the other dog answers - it is really very easy ... Every day, at meal-time, I go to the Pavlov Institute, I am let in by the porter, and I start to dribble with great enthusiasm. Suddenly a conditioned psychologist arrives, promptly gives me lashings and lashings of food, and then rings a bell'. In this story, as Umberto Eco comments ... ... the scientist reacts to a stimulus, while the dog establishes a sort of reversible relationship between salivation and food: it knows that to a given stimulus a given reaction must correspond and therefore the dog possesses a code. Salivation is for it the sign of the possible reaction on the part of the scientist. Unfortunately for dogs, this is not the way things are - at least within the framework of classical experiment: the sound of the bell is a stimulus for the dog, which salivates independently of any social code, [symbolic order] while the psychologist regards the dog's salivation as a sign (or symptom) that the stimulus has been received and has elicited the appropriate response. [1]

The Letter, Issue 18, Spring 2000, Pages 55 - 69 PHANTASY AND THE PSYCHOANALYTIC ACT - FREUD, KLEIN AND LACAN What is involved in the psychoanalytic act... Michael T. Murphy Introduction The opening words of Lacan's Seminar on The Psychoanalytic Act presuppose a link with the Seminar he gave the previous year on The Logic of Phantasy. He says "... those who heard me speaking ... may feel themselves in some way already introduced to this dimension that the psychoanalytic act represents' [1] which is why I have entitled this paper Phantasy and the Psychoanalytic Act - Freud, Klein and Lacan. I subtitled the paper What is involved in the psychoanalytic act ... because of the movement between the two registers it plays upon: the che vuoi question redolent of phantasy: ' What is involved in the psychoanalytic act?' and then, the response of what is meant, the state-meant of 'what is involved in the psychoanalytic act ...'. The question is in the minor key of reluctantly having to accept your fate as a human being, while the statement is in the major one of choosing to subjectify that fate, and make it your own. These two are inseparable: the one implies the other through its presence, through its absence ... The cornerstone of the psychoanalytic act is the truth of phantasy. In the theatre of the Freud/Fliess letters, reality collapsed on the twenty-first of September 1897, and an understudy, phantasy, stepped into the spotlight and moved centre stage. Freud finally accepted; ... the certain insight that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect... ' [2]

The Letter, Issue 18, Spring 2000, Pages 35 - 46 ACT AND BEHAVIOUR: PAVLOVIAN FALLACIES Patricia Stewart There are two possible emphases in the title of this congress. Firstly it provides an opportunity to examine the aspects of the psychoanalytic act which are essential to it as a specifically psychoanalytic phenomenon. Lacan's focus in this Seminar is certainly on the ways and the extent to which we may describe the practice of psychoanalysis and on its essence. The psychoanalytic act, he tells us, defines those who practise it. [1] The other possibility suggested by the title is an examination of what might be meant by act in this context. This is also Lacan's concern in the Seminar, as he seeks to delineate the operational field of the concept. What is it that Lacan establishes about an act, and how do acts relate to behaviour? It is this second concern that I have tried to open up here. The starting point is some remarks made by Lacan in this Seminar concerning the two volume work by Roland Dalbiez, Psychoanalytical Method and the Doctrine of Freud, [2] published in France in 1936. He undertakes this critical survey in the name of science, a necessary task, he informs us, because Freud has made no clear distinction between his method and his doctrine, is incapable of presenting his thought in a convincing form, and completely lacks the philosophical mind. It is as a result of these shortcomings that psychoanalysis has fallen foul of the scientific establishment. Dalbiez looks to Pavlov to provide the vehicle for Freud's rehabilitation.

The Letter, Issue 18, Spring 2000, Pages 1 - 21