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The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 87 - 105 TRAUMA AND HYSTERIA WITHIN FREUD AND LACAN Paul Verhaeghe I want to start this paper with a question: why is it proving necessary to reopen the dossier on trauma in general and Freud's vision on it in particular? An obvious answer is that today we are confronted much more with this pathology than we used to be, and not only in Belgium, for that matter. The signifier of 'posttraumatic stress disorder' is virtually everywhere. Of course, it is very difficult to prove or disprove the hypothesis that traumatic experiences are actually more frequent than they used to be. Anyhow, it is obvious that the recent hype concerning 'recovered memory therapy’ has endorsed the whole question. In itself, this discussion is already a retake, albeit in a changed form, of the discussion around Masson, who in the early eighties tried to prove how wrong Freud was in matters of trauma. [1] Such hypes have even received a name on their own, it is called 'Freud bashing'. The most interesting question from a clinical point of view is why a number of people think it necessary to bash daddy Freud, or, at the other end, think it necessary to justify daddy Freud. But this would lead us into a discussion of the oedipal complex, which is not on the agenda today ...

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 65 - 86 A REVIEW OF FREUD'S EARLY REMARKS ON ADDICTION: FROM AN IDEAL TO MASTURBATION Rik Loose ' ...why isn't everyone a drinker ?' de Mijolla and Shentoub Introduction It is a remarkable fact that there is no real substantial psychoanalytic theory of addiction, especially given that Freud had clinical experience of working with addicts. [1] This fact is even more remarkable when you know that one of Freud's first attempts to cure someone was his clinical intervention with his friend and colleague, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxov. Freud had hoped that cocaine could help his friend to get rid of an addiction to morphine. This attempt failed and eventually von Fleischl-Marxov died from a cocaine addiction. [2] Surely these clinical encounters must have aroused Freud's interest in the problem of addiction and provoked questions regarding its metapsychology? Freud had a curious mind and his theory and metapsychology was always developed on the basis of his clinical work with patients. There are numerous references to addiction in his writings, ranging from his pre-analytical period to the end of his life, which are interesting and important but it is nonetheless strange that he never wrote an article dealing exclusively with addiction. Despite the many references, we can still speak of a relative silence in Freud's work with regards to this clinical problem. Freud has developed elaborate theories on neurosis, perversion and psychosis. Why is there no such elaborate theory on addiction in his work? Are there any deep-rooted psychological motives in Freud that contributed to this neglect? These questions have been taken up by some authors and we do not propose to deal with them here. [3] It is well known that Freud's relationship to drugs was ambiguous. When Freud came across cocaine in 1884 he was immediately fascinated with it, particularly its therapeutic properties and he used it himself for a period of about ten years. He wasn’t really interested in alcohol and only occasionally drank some wine. Addiction problems in his practice and social environment irritated him. He was hopelessly addicted to smoking and nicotine. He smoked about twenty cigars a day. He needed cigars to work and lack of nicotine plunged him into a bad mood. When he was diagnosed as having cancer of the mouth he was informed that his smoking habit would kill him and on several occasions he was strongly advised by his physicians to stop smoking but he was unable to stop despite this medical advice. [4] From Freud's biographer Ernest Jones we know that for a long time Freud refused to take analgesics against the excruciating pain produced by the cancerous growth in his mouth. He likened taking drugs to the embracement of death. Freud's personal and professional ambiguities toward addiction perhaps contributed to the fact that there is no proper theoretical development in relation to addiction in his work. One can therefore not depend on a coherent theoretical foundation in Freud in order to construct a psychoanalytic theory and clinic of addiction. Nevertheless an exploration of remarks on and references to addiction throughout Freud's work show that there is a lot of material to work with and on which to reflect. For this paper we propose to concentrate on his pre-analytical period in order to show that this was a very interesting period of Freud's work, especially in relation to addiction. We will not include his papers on cocaine here as, in our opinion, they are so central to the development of his work and important for an understanding of a psychoanalytic approach to addiction that they warrant a separate exploration.

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 62 - 64 SYMPTOME, ETHIQUE ET DESIR D'ANALYSTE Claude Dumézil J'évoquerai la boutade de Lacan: 'La Psychanalyse, c'est le traitement que l'on attend d'un psychanalyste'. D’une telle formulation se dévoile une conception de la psychanalyse comme st ructure, ce lle de la cure. Ce point est déterminant dans l'abord de la question du s ymptôme, au ssi bien en clinique que dans ce que peut dire le psychanalyste du malaise, celui de la psychanalyse ou celui de la civilisation. Le psychanalyste incarne une fonction, presque au sens mathématique du terme (et non au sens d'un fonctionnaire). L'opératoire de cette fonction dans la cure s'éclaire en considérant celle-ci comme une structure dynamique résultant de la rencontre, dans un espace transférentiel donné, de la structure initiale d'un patient avec un désir d'analyste.

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 39 - 61 THE FOLLOWER * Helen Sheehan As the President of the United States of America William Jefferson Clinton signed the new Electronics Treaty at Gateway Computers in September of this year, we are reminded that home may no longer be a space we occupy in language but a glint in the smooth seductions of a radar beam. Kathym Holmquist, in The Irish Times , put it succinctly thus: 'The Irish Dream of the 1990's celebrates the computer and seeks a better quality of life through the profitable movement of information through cyberspace'. [1] It is almost a commonplace now to say that profound social changes are underway in the Ireland of the 90's. [2] We can say that these changes began in the 1960's. An Ireland on the run like Richard Kimble, in The Fugitive, as exemplified in Michael O'Louglin's poem of the same name, published in 1982. [3] In the hour before the metro opens I remember you, Richard Kimble with my hands dug deep in my jacket pockets walking the streets of a foreign city. But if the 1960's are remembered as the fugitive years in more ways than one, the 1970's are characterised by the particular modernisation of Ireland and are marked also by being a decade of the return. The symbolic verification of Ireland's entry into the 20th century was acknowledged when on January 1st 1970, half crowns went out of circulation to be replaced by the new 50 pence coin. [4]

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 27 - 38 PEUT-ON PARLER DE PSYCHOSE SOCIALE? Marcel Czermak * ' Le Maître modem se fiche éperdument du savoir. De toute façon, le savoir est à son service. Il lui suffit que ça marche. Et plus le savoir (S2) veut sefaire reconnaître comme savoir, plus il conforte (SI),leMaître. Ce qui explique la phobie institutionnelle Le praticien est fondé à divers titres d'intervenir dans le débat si aigu soulevé par notre conjoncture sociale et la subjectivité qui s'y forme. Dans cette conjecture, il est un élément essential: la référence générale au développement de la science dont le 'discours' semble faire autorité pour tous. Or, ce qui fait ses fondements, son universalité comme sa communicabilité tient essentiellement au rejet de toute question ontologique, de toute interrogation sur le sujet. Est-il envisageable qu'un discours qui étend son filet sur toute la planète, à la condition que nous venons de repeler, ne voie pas ces questions réapparaître ailleurs, sous forme de réponses étranges et déguisées? Ce n'est pas parce que l'on a appuyé sur le bon bouton, qu'il n'y a pas de réponses ailleurs due là où elles sont attendues, qui cachent leur nature de réponse.

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 3 - 26 THE SUBJECT OF ETHICS William J. Richardson It was the time of the Lie. The following reflection was born in the moment when an entire nation held its breath in anticipation of its President testifying before a Grand Jury about an alleged denied of an alleged sexual liaison with a White house intern in a pre-trial deposition concerning another alleged sexual liaison (also denied), and allegedly encouraging the intern in question to lie about it. To ask about the subject of ethics under these circumstances was to ask about what was most deeply at stake in the whole unhappy brouhaha. Arthur Schlessinger, Jr., had claimed in an Op Ed piece in the New York Times [1] that 'every gentleman lies about his sex life. Only a cad would tell the truth.' It may be so, but this is not an ethical issue - it is a sociological one. On August 14th the national press reported that the President's advisors were designing a strategy by which he would admit the liaison but deny that he had encouraged the intern to lie about it. Shrewd enough, perhaps, but this was not an ethical issue. It was a political issue, perhaps, or at most a legal issue, but had nothing to do with ethics. The previous week's New Yorker had carried a fine article by Jeffrey Rosen entitled The Perjury Trap, in which he distinguished eight different kinds of 'lie,' including: kidding, exaggeration, fudging, half- truth, bent facts, white lies, falsehood, and perjury. [2] But this was not the ethical issue either. For Rosen it was another version of the legal issue. But it does imply an ethical issue. For the ethical issue is: ought a human being - or ought he not - abstain from lying under any circumstance? If he ought, then the ethical question becomes: why? If he ought not, then Rosen's spectrum of 'lies' from kidding to perjury suggests a way to differentiate various modalities of a ’lie1and differentiate accordingly the various levels of 'ought* that may pertain to them. Ethics is all about Ought.

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Pages 1 - 2 LACAN FOR BEGINNERS William J. Richardson October 1, 1998. Dear Cormac, It is time for celebration , and I have been invited to take part. I do so with pleasure and with embarrassment: pleasure , because it is indeed gratifying to look back over the years and realise how much you have achieved for the cause of Psychoanalysis—not only in Ireland but for us Anglo-Saxons in America,, too- since you definitively left Paris for home ; embarrassing; because I have nothing to offer by way of gift at the present time that is sophisticated enough to merit publication in a professional review of quality such as The Letter. But the most recent issue contained an Appendix of sorts (containing two short contributions of your own), entitled Lacan for Beginners. When I saw it, I said immediately 'That's for me'.

The Letter, Issue 14, Autumn 1998, Page i

The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages 128 - 129 Book Review LACAN FOR BEGINNERS Written by Darian Leader and illustrated by Judy Groves In Lacan for Beginners, Darian Leader has made a Trojan attempt to condense the mighty corpus of Lacan's life's work into a entertaining concoction suitable for general consumption. This is the formula of the excellent Icon books series, their wide appeal being the ability to wed distilled knowledge to a cartoon-like format, without pretending to be other than what they really are - an aperitif. In fact, the imaginative illustrations by Judy Groves uncannily portray Lacan as he really was, a larger than life character reminiscent of the heroes and villains of D.C. comics fame.

The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages 125 - 127 Book Review LACAN FOR BEGINNERS Written by Philip Hill and illustrated by David Leach. New York, 1997, Writers and Readers Publishing Inc. Is it misguided to write a 'beginners book' on a thinker as complex, obscure, fluid and rich as Lacan? It depends perhaps, on to whom the book is addressed. In the opening to the French edition of the Ecrits, Lacan states that 'the style is the man'. He then wonders is it 'the man to whom he addresses himself?' He further states that 'in language our message returns from the Other in inverted form' and again he wonders about something. This time he wonders 'if man was to be reduced to the place where all our discourse goes back to, wouldn't the question itself then be whether there is a point in asking him at all?' Indeed, what is the point? What is the point of interrogating and working through all these difficult and obscure Lacanian texts? What is the point of asking him?

The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages 117 - 124 LACAN FOR BEGINNERS Cormac Gallagher The two notes that follow formed the basis of a discussion with psychiatric and nursing colleagues in St Vincent's Hospital who at that time (1981) were rather skeptical about the clinical relevance of Lacan's work. They are reproduced here for the convenience of students who claim they still help clarify the way in which Lacan re-articulates Freud's case histories. The note on Dora is based on Intervention on transference (1951) which has since been translated into English. That on Hans gives a very condensed account of Lacan's exhaustive commentary on the case in the still untranslated seminar on 'La relation d'objet' (1956-1957). * * * ** HOW TO READ FREUD'S 'DORA' The Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) was Freud's first extended account of the process of a treatment using the psychoanalytic method; the first also in which he tried to deal with the question of his own position - the position of the analyst - in such a treatment. Here, for the first time in the literature, the problem of transference and counter-transference emerged as being of decisive importance in the success or failure of an analysis.

The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages 106 - 116 IDENTITY AND INTER-RELIGIOUS DIALOGUE DIALOGUE OR IDENTITY-HATE * Yves Pierre Baumstimler There are people who suddenly lack their support for existence and who, instead of sinking into depression, begin to hate the one whom they think has this support; that he has taken or stolen this support from them; and in this hatred, they find the support they need to exist. [1] For a while during my childhood, my maternal tongue was forbidden in my country. My first given name was also excluded simply because it could not be translated into the master language. My first given name, unlike my surname (Baumstimler), was thereby excluded because it had no German equivalent. If the given name represents it's bearer and the surname indicates family tradition, then the intention to eliminate, at all costs, 'small differences' between the given and the family name was achieved (in my case) by doing away with the French first given name and by 'translating' the second (Pierre) into Peter. Is this not a way of wiping out, at the level of the given and family names, the small difference which simply voids the importance of the father's name as difference? The National Socialist state run by Hitler occupied a piece of French territory which he thought he could easily integrate into Germany according to the principle of the recognition of nationality by right of possession. This state had simply forbidden the use of the French language and changed all names which could remind them of this history. The name is not just a word. Its particularity lies in the fact of its having no meaning other than that of representing a citizen. An attack on a person's name is therefore an attack on his symbolic identity. The next stage in this nullification process of a person's genealogical history will consist in suppressing his name, replacing it by another or perhaps just with a number. This game may be continued until finally ending with the genocide of a whole people, as everyone knows.

The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages 94 - 105 WO STEHT LACAN HEUTE? LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS IN IRELAND * Helena Texier I cannot help feeling that there is much in the circumstances today that mirrors the psychoanalytic encounter proper. I come before you today as an unknown quantity, a foreigner, to speak in a language which I have no guarantee will be understood and which besides, is a language which is not my own but the language of the Other, as any of you who have even the barest knowledge of Irish history will know. I come to a rendezvous where there is inherent to it the demand that Lacanian psychoanalysis in Ireland give an account of itself. This question, 'What have you to say for yourself?', is only a variation of the question inaugurating any psychoanalytic encounter: 'What brings you to this place?'. The 'place' that this question contains is, of course, a crossroads (eine Kreuzung). You all know that in the Oedipus story it was at the meeting of three roads, the three ways of walking, that the hero meets with his destiny and that the contour of these roads traces out the signifier which his father had sought to efface, the Greek letter 'lambda' the first letter of the name-of-the-father, Laius Labdacus. In arriving at that place Oedipus unconsciously names himself as son of a father, situating himself in a lineage. The entirety of the myth of Oedipus revolves around a difficulty in the articulation of a name, - the mark of his father's insignia being at the origin of his impediment, - the difficulty in the articulation of his feet, which is repeated in the mutilation to the articulation of his eyes. Here, something is articulating itself in every problematic articulation of the body, in his symptoms. Which all goes to show that it is not so far from eine Kreuzung to eine Kreuzigung (a crucifixion)!

The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages 82 - 93 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AND THE THEME OF THE DOUBLE Hugh Cummins 'Ambivalence, ambiguity, duality, dichotomy, bifurcation - these are the kinds of nouns customary when analysing Stevenson' writes Frank McLynn in a recent biography, noting also that 'the Stevensonian divided self is overdetermined at a number of levels'. [1] Robert Louise Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 of strict Calvinist parents, and it is this religious background that offers the first clue to his lifelong preoccupation with duality. Calvinism posits a number of radical oppositions, such as predestination and free will, faith and works, grace and nature. In Calvinist terms, the fall of man is so total he is incapable of mitigating, let alone reversing, its sinful effects. Good works and outward manifestations of righteousness are worse than useless if seen as paths to salvation, serving only to mask corrupt wishes and desires. Calvinism as such, embodies a radical suspicion of human motives and a keen awareness of the possibilities of human duplicity. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that some have seen in psychoanalysis its secular equivalent. However, as I hope to indicate, there are other reasons why Stevenson's preoccupation with duality and 'doubles' is of interest to psychoanalysis. Towards the end of 1885, in the space of ten weeks, Stevenson's most sustained meditation on the double theme was 'conceived, written, rewritten, and re-rewritten', [2] to be published the following January. In his essay A Chapter on Dreams, he traces the origins of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to a dream that supplied him with two key scenes for the novella. In the same essay he acknowledges what he calls his 'Brownies' as the unconscious springs of his inspiration. The Brownies are 'the little people who manage a man's internal theatre' [3] and provide, in the form of dreams, ready-made plots for novels and stories. Stevenson speaks of 'a double-life, one of the day and one of the night', and it is the managers of this night-life that supplant the Cartesian 'cogito' and enable him to be a writer:

The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages 69 - 81 THE REAL OF RELIGION AND ITS RELATION TO TRUTH AS CAUSE Stephen J. Costello There is nothing doctrinal about our office. We are answerable to no ultimate truth. We are neither for nor against any particular religion. [1] Introduction: Lacan and Religion Lacanian psychoanalysis has strong theological overtones. Witness Lacan's concept of the 'name-of-the-father', his epistemological triumvirate of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary orders which remind us of the Trinity. Indeed, in Desire and Its Interpretation [2] he relates the Trinity to the Oedipus complex and its three moments. Clinically there are three structures - neurosis, psychosis and perversion. He describes his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association as an 'ex-communication'. He talks of the Other, and in The Formations of the Unconscious [3] he instructs us to go out into the world 'as apostles of my word, to introduce the question of the Unconscious to the people who have never heard it spoken of, words reminiscent of Christ's injunction. He holds that in the beginning was the Word, which has echoes of St. John. There are innumerable other examples we could cite. Critics have pointed to the 'high Priesthood' of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Throughout, Lacan seems to be saying re: his position on religion: 'It's for me to know and you to find out'. Lacan's epigrammatic and enigmatic allusions to religion are scattered throughout the corpus of his works, from Desire and Its Interpretation (1958-9) to Le sinthome (1975-6), [4] at least. In what follows, we shall attempt to elucidate Lacan's reflections on religion which remain those of a psychoanalyst. Where Lacan stands on the question of God, it is almost impossible to say. He was brought up a Catholic and his brother, Marc-Frangois Lacan, has spent most of his life as a Benedictine monk, having been ordained priest in 1935. No doubt, theists and atheists alike will project their belief and unbelief onto Lacan. In my opinion, it is better to read him in the same light as Heidegger - impossibly agnostic, ambivalent or perhaps understandably withdrawn and caustically cunning. Probably, I have misread, misunderstood and misinterpreted him. So much the better. Only in misreading Lacan can a reading of him take place but always against the backdrop of meconnaissance. Whatever he is, he is, above all else, a psychoanalyst of Freudian hue, a post-Freudian psychoanalyst, talking to fellow analysts about psychoanalysis, as he himself always insisted. And as an analyst (medicin), he is like a saint, almost a saint, half a saint (medi-saint) , as he points out in Television. [5]

The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages 50 - 68 HYSTERIA AND FEMININITY * André Michels The Freudians appear to have been outstripped by a modernity which they contributed in fashioning, and by a femininity which up till then had not dared to be spoken or to show itself, which besides they were amongst the first to bring to light; they had even given it a prime place in setting it at the centre of their clinical and therapeutic project. They feel out of their depth to see displayed in broad daylight what constituted one of the knots of repression for them and so, some of them at least, question themselves about their responsibility in this 'return of the repressed', astonished, sometimes shaken, to meet a bisexuality for which their theoretical struggles must have paved the way, and which corresponds to their most daring hypotheses, on the first street-corner. Could it just be the most recent and the most provocative disguise/unveiling of a never- mastered hysteria? They find themselves, sometimes in spite of themselves, at the place of the elder or ancestor, a position which in a way they have always occupied and even claimed as theirs, powerlessly witnessing effects of their teaching that they had neither foreseen nor wanted, at least in that form. There's no doubt that a certain modernity is overtly inscribed on the other side of their discourse which nevertheless authorises it implicitly, even to the finest detail. This complex relation should not worry them because it constitutes an opportunity and a sort of challenge that it's up to them to rise to, like a travel invitation perhaps permitting them to make new discoveries. Nevertheless, a pure discussion of ideas is not what is called for here, rather they should go back to what constituted their point of departure, meaning the clinical research which is the hallmark of their originality. The psychoanalytic clinic is defined according to the more or less broad range of defences against the feminine position and what this conveys and implies, that is to say, a radical difference which we associate with castration. For the Freudians as well as their adversaries, this latter term is one of the most debated and most controversial. In what follows I will try, using a clinical example, to make my own contribution to this already thick dossier. This will be my way of paying homage to that wonderful discursive opening induced and introduced by the Studies in Hysteria, published exactly a century ago. This opening attracted men and women of great quality towards psychoanalysis, but also had the effect of pushing others away who, instead of consistency and univocity, had only found metaphor slipping through their fingers like sand, so escaping their grasp (in the sense of concipere, begreifen) and their efforts to master it.