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The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages 39 - 49 IN PURSUIT OF THE FADING SUBJECT ACROSS THE FIELD OF FANTASY Olga Cox-Cameron Reading Lacan over the years I have often found myself, like Joxer in The Plough and the Stars in a state close to intoxicated perplexity. 'What is the moon and what is the stars?' are however questions which occupy me less than 'What is the subject?'. Obviously one can address this question to the widest possible forum of experience but in Seminar VIII it is anchored to the issue of transference, and is linked repeatedly to the fundamental fantasy. The most striking feature in these repeated references is that this subject, the subject of the fundamental fantasy is a fading or vacillating subject. The term 'fundamental fantasy' itself has an archaeological ring about it which would have pleased Freud. Even more poetically perhaps, Lacan's desiccated algebraic formula ? $ <> o evokes in its strict neutrality those grey Japanese paper twists which when immersed in water, blossom into myriad multi-coloured flowers. Beneath the proliferating wealth of fable, myth and legend, beneath the multiplied scenarios of daydream and story, are we not to imagine this seemingly static formula, unvarying and absolute, yet capable of engendering almost infinite permutations? And it is not simply our fantasies and our creativity that this formula subtends. It magnetises the most disparate of biographical data, shaping it according to the inexorable curve of unconscious desire. For all of us as for Alcibiades, despite apparent contradictions, what is at stake always in the successive high points of our lives is as Lacan says 'the same supreme point where the subject is abolished in his fantasy, his agalmata'.

The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages 1 - 25 LATENT FREUDIAN THOUGHTS TOWARDS A THEORY OF NEUROTIC DEPRESSION Lieven Jonckheere Part One The Anxiety-Neurotic Depression * Introduction Four types of neurotic depression according to Freud This paper deals with the question of neurotic depression from a Freudian point of view. This means that I will try to isolate some elements towards developing a theory about the neurotic depressions that could have been Freud's own theory - because, as you know, Freud himself did not develop an explicit theory on this point. For this purpose I have collected together a number of remarks on depression which are to be found scattered throughout his work. These remarks could be compared to a kind of latent thought from which it should be possible to construct a manifest Freudian theory of the neurotic depressions. With Lacan we could say: a theory of the depressions within the structure of the hysterical discourse. In what I have been saying up to now, some of the crucial points in every psychoanalytic discussion of the depressions are already implied. The first point is that from the very beginning, even before his invention of the psychoanalytic discourse, in his so-called pre-analytic period, Freud made a clear-cut distinction between two kinds of depressions: on the one hand, neurotic or hysterical depressions - on the other hand, psychotic depression or melancholia. Freud maintained this structural distinction, without ambiguity, throughout all the subsequent metapsychological and nosological revolutions of his psychoanalysis.

The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages 26 - 38 LATENT FREUDIAN THOUGHTS TOWARDS A THEORY OF NEUROTIC DEPRESSION Lieven Jonckheere Part Two A Purely Hysterical Depression? * A purely hysterical depression without obsessional mechanism Previously, I explained that sexual depression of the anxiety-neurosis type does not have a psychic or symbolic etiology, (related to Oedipus, castration and so on) - but that it corresponds to a psychic lack or a lack in the signifier, with a direct transformation of the real of sexual jouissance. I also pointed out that 'melancholic' depression at the end of the analytic experience of the neurosis has another kind of real etiology, the identification with the real of the object (a). But of course not all of the neurotic depressions are of a purely real type, - in some there is also an important symbolic contribution to their etiology. I mentioned for instance that psychoanalysis after Freud has tended to reduce almost all of these symbolic depressions to the obsessional type, that is, the result of oedipal ambivalence towards le Nom-du-Pere, the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father or the dead father. In the obsessional depression the death-wish against the loved father is turned against the subject itself. In contrast to the anxiety-neurotic depressive mood, these obsessional depressions do not constitute a real limit or nucleus, structurally inherent to the hysterical discourse. Obsessional depressions are only a kind of symbolic or even imaginary dialect: the dialect of hate, grafted onto the underlying structure of an hysterical discourse. Now we must ask ourselves if something like a 'purely hysterical' depression exists. By this is meant a neurotic depression with a psycho-symbolic or oedipal etiology which is not that of a classical obsessional etiology.

The Letter, Issue 13, Summer 1998, Pages i - iv

The Letter, Issue 12, Spring 1998, Pages 99 - 105 A COUCH UP A PUBLIC HEALTH PSYCHIATRIST'S SLEEVE John Hughes Working psychoanalytically with non fee-paying patients in the public health sector presents certain problems. Many subjects have been patients of the psychiatric services for years, even decades, and as an analyst one is regarded: i) invariably, as yet another in a long line of medical practitioners, and ii) always, as a member of a support 'team'. Very few patients would be familiar with or interested in the distinction between counselling, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, being principally interested in alleviation of anxiety. However, despite these and other problems, results can be achieved, and perhaps the non-payment of fees is not such an insurmountable problem. I would suggest that it is the transference that provides the opportunities; and within the context of a public health setting, the absence of payment doesn't seem to become an impossible obstacle in the development of the transference. For just over three years I have been working with medical card patients, seeing each patient twice a week, at a public health 'community mental health day centre', a unit ancillary to one of Dublin's Psychiatric hospitals. A consultant psychiatrist refers patients from amongst those who attend his nearby clinic. He selects those for referral on the basis of patients who are articulate and, in his judgement, have the desire and the potential to live without medication and the support of the mental health services. When patients are referred, they would generally be taking either anti-depressant or anti-psychotic medication. In most cases, by the time they are referred, patients are eager to end what they speak of as an unwelcome dependence on medication.

The Letter, Issue 12, Spring 1998, Pages 94 - 98 THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF DESIRE WITHIN ROMANTIC LOVE AS REVEALED IN A.S. BYATTS NOVEL 'POSSESSION: A ROMANCE Orla Salmon Desire represents one of the more elusive terms in Lacanian theory. In his paper on Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire, Lacan far from cedes 'to a logicizing reduction where it is a question of desire'. [1] According to Bowie, the only positive characteristic Lacan ascribes to desire is that it propels all acts of speech or refusals to speak, and all conscious and unconscious psychic representations. It is desire that maintains the movement of the chain of signifiers 'sustaining the endless play of condensation and displacement among ideas, or of metaphor and metonymy among signifiers. [2] Such mobility and adaptability enables Lacan to present a truer and more authentic portrayal of love in sexual relationships, which inevitably resists the cold, logical, robotic descriptions presented by other theorists on the subject of eros. According to Lacan, his colleagues erred, not in refusing to speak about the 'paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous character' [3] of desire, which distinguishes it from need, but rather in their readiness to reduce desire to need. Desire is not a bodily appetite which can be easily satisfied. Nor does it consist in the relief of unpleasurable tension. Furthermore, no individual possesses the power to provide complete satisfaction for another. There is always something else at work in the relationship between the need-driven subject and the person who is in a position to provide satisfaction, namely, a demand for love, for recognition. The divided subject, divided as a result of his entry into the symbolic order, looks to the Other, not simply to meet his needs, but to answer him with an unconditional yes. If it were merely a need to be satisfied, then, as Bowie says, a sucking machine' would suffice. [4] The person to whom the demand is addressed can never answer it unconditionally since the latter person is likewise lacking or split. He, too, as a being in language, is a divided subject. Desire originates both in this non-adequation between need and the demand for unconditional love, and likewise in the discrepancy between the demand itself and the ability to deliver of the person, to whom it is addressed. Desire is not a state or a motion, but rather a split or divided space. It is a space where the subject is fated to travel too far or not far enough. It is a 'place of permanent catastrophe'. [5]

The Letter, Issue 12, Spring 1998, Pages 87 - 93 MENSTRUATION - THE ULTIMATE TABOO? Clare Daly Introduction For centuries, woman's menstruation has been viewed negatively. Anthropology confirms that there is an almost universal taboo concerning menses. This suggests that there must be a more broadly based explanation than the merely religio-cultural one. Psychoanalysis might be expected to provide a deeper understanding. Freud, its founder, fails to deal with it adequately, despite its obvious potential role in castration anxiety and the Oedipus Complex. This failure may result from conflicts in his relationship with Fliess, especially surrounding the case of Emma Eckstein. My own experience as a mother has led me to the belief that knowledge and visual evidence of the mother's cyclical bleeding can lead to deep seated anxieties in a male child. Regarding the literature, one psychoanalyst has addressed this taboo subject. Claude Dagmar Daly, describes this influence of the mother's menstruation on the child and warned that though its actuality was one of the simplest and most obvious truths in psychoanalysis, it was 'the simplest truths that are often the last to be believed'.

The Letter, Issue 12, Spring 1998, Pages 66 - 85 INSTITUTIONS AND LAW A Contribution to a Theory of Transmission Andre Michels Introduction I have three questions but maybe no answer: Firstly: What do we mean when we speak about the end of an analysis'? Without a doubt, there is a world of difference whether an analysis is brought to an end or not. Secondly: What kind of institution best accommodates psychoanalysis and which one takes into account its specificity? These two questions are in fact one and the same and are very closely related to a third one: What has psychoanalysis to say about law? What does psychoanalysis, as a practice and theory, teach us about law? What would be a typical psychoanalytic reading, an interpretation, of law? Law, in this context, is considered insofar as a subject is concerned, and so the question becomes: What is a subjective relation to law? Or, what are the subjective effects of law? This is, I think, the kernel of any ethical questioning and investigation and this, not only from a psychoanalytic perspective - In fact, is there, or could there be, any difference between a psychoanalytic and a general approach to ethics? It is on this very point precisely that an opening of psychoanalysis onto the other principle, fundamental discourses can take place. These discourses can thereby be articulated in a way which is not necessarily the same as Lacan has defined it in his seminar on the so-called 'four-discourses'. [1]

The Letter, Issue 12, Spring 1998, Pages 51 - 65 PLATO'S GOOD FOR LACAN * Barry O'Donnell This paper is about sex. And if it is about sex, it is about number. In the final weeks of the Seminar entitled Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis [1] Lacan identifies what has been a theme, perhaps the major one, of that year: they have been exploring what he terms the subjective positions of being.. He sets up this triadic schema to help orientate his listeners: What we have here is a very simple version of a schema that Lacan goes on to develop over the course of seven or eight weeks. He relates this triadic formulation to his other triad, the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. He refers it to his topographical tool, the Moebius strip. He brings in his reading of Descartes's cogito; he unravels a theory of game he finds in Pascal; he refers to the biology of uni-cellular organisms which inhabit a twilight zone between plant and animal life. However, during these weeks the most repeated reference is to Plato. It is with one reference to Plato that this paper will concern itself. What use, what good is it for Lacan's endeavour?

The Letter, Issue 12, Spring 1998, Pages 48 - 50 PSYCHOANALYSIS - WHO NEEDS IT? Sarah McAuley Indeed, in times like these, who needs Psychoanalysis? As we approach the close of the twentieth century, the human subject with a discourse of his own is in grave danger of extinction. We are indeed witnessing the death throes of 'The Century of the Individual': perhaps Marx will have the last laugh yet. Swept along on the wave of the 'Information Age', saturated by the mass media and made redundant by technology, we are becoming more hysterical and narcissistic. Entranced by the lure of the image, our lives are becoming increasingly externalised in the 'Society of the Spectacle', played out in passive vicarious experiences and virtual realities. This has led to a depletion of inner psychic reality, and what Anna O so aptly named, 'our private theatre'. We know too much and understand too little. A creeping emptiness lies at the heart of modern life as we live much of our emotional lives by proxy.

The Letter, Issue 12, Spring 1998, Pages 41 - 47 PSYCHOANALYSIS - WHO NEEDS IT? Patricia Stewart Bruce Fink opens his latest book with the old joke: How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change! [1] He goes on to tell us that many psychologists do believe that the patient must genuinely want to change for therapy to be effective. Lacan's approach, however, is different. Fink reminds us of Freud's insight that symptoms provide satisfaction, however obscure; at some level the individual enjoys his or her symptoms. There is consequently no such thing as a genuine desire to change. In the absence of this desire to change, it is often up to the analyst to express his desire that the analysis continue, otherwise the patient is likely to break offtherapy. Fink says that the patient's desire to continue therapy must, at certain times, wane or disappear. This is a problem that we have all experienced. But there is an even greater difficulty, which is encountered in varying degrees, although I believe it is a challenge for psychoanalysis in general: how do we get people into analysis in the first place? If what they want is a patch repair kit which will at least temporarily restore satisfaction to previous levels, and there are plenty of those kits on offer, who needs psychoanalysis? What are the actual considerations here?

The Letter, Issue 12, Spring 1998, Pages 25 - 40 LACAN ON LAS MENINAS THE VISUAL STRUCTURE OF THE HUMAN SUBJECT Brendan Staunton Psychoanalysis is the science of the particular. J. Lacan Introduction The Telescope, Microscope and the Scopic Drive This paper summarises some of Lacan's thinking on Velasquez's Las Meninas, a painting that art experts voted the greatest ever painted in 1985. [l] For Lacan, the particularity of this painting is that it incarnates one of his four fundamental objects of psychoanalysis, that of the look. For me, it also embodies the psychoanalytic method, a method grounded in a conception of the human subject that is new, that is 'Copernican'. This summary, (not a report), is an effort to evoke something of why Lacan took an interest in this painting, which of course was not the first time he spoke about the visual arts, in order to teach the structure of phantasy, the scopic drive, the lost object, the look, the cause of desire, (that which we refuse to relinquish). Desire, constituted by lack, implies divided subjects, where 'desire is the metonomy of Being in the subject'. The work under consideration at this Congress is a continuation of Lacan's Seminar XI, What is a Painting?, [2] where he spoke about Holbein's The Ambassadors, in the context of the gap between the look and the gaze. We will now remind ourselves of this painting from 1533, before moving to 1656 and Velasquez. (It is interesting that both paintings are set in a royal court).

The Letter, Issue 12, Spring 1998, Pages 14 - 24 THE HEART OF THE MATTER More Topological Considerations On The Subject Patricia McCarthy Introduction It is interesting that it was toward the end of his seminar for 1960-61 on the transference that Lacan first introduced the (o) object. This seminar on Transference had been largely devoted to Socrates address to and about Alcibiades' quest for the agalma. It would appear that from then on Lacan turned away from any further 'mythification' about the (o) object which was what the agalma represented. From then on he seriously began to describe a science of the (o) object as material cause of truth for the subject. This necessitated an engagement with arid and peculiar looking shapes from the world of topology, a branch of mathematics. These included the moebius strip, the torus, the Klein bottle and the cross-cap which he claimed held the key to understanding what is unrepresentable about analysis. It is at the level of the (o) object qua object which falls from the apprehension of knowledge that we are, as men of science, rejoined by the question of truth. Through looking at the sphere and the cross-cap in particular, this presentation attempts to examine the limits of our apprehension of knowledge when it comes to the question of the truth of the subject in analysis.

The Letter, Issue 12, Spring 1998, Pages 1 - 13

The Letter, Issue 11, Autumn 1997, Pages 108 - 129

The Letter, Issue 11, Autumn 1997, Pages 98 - 107 AFFECTS: THE ABSOLUTE SUBJECT * Rob Weatherill According to Michel Henry in his book The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, [1] affects and affectivity should be the central preoccupation of psychoanalysis. Controversially, he will argue that the unconscious is destructured like an affect, and that psychoanalysis has been side-tracked into an over emphasis on linguistics. This paper attempts to follow Henry in this respect. I will set-out part of his argument. Firstly, consciousness, in its ontological conception is pure appearance itself in contradistinction to the ontic conception of consciousness which relates to the contents, dreams, symptoms, parapraxes etc. Similarly, the unconscious can be understood ontically as contents: drives and their representatives, unconscious mechanisms, repressed or phylogenetic contents, childhood experience, and so on. Ontologically, the unconscious is simply, what does not appear! Rather than deal in these formal and 'empty' categories consciousness and unconsciousness, Freud opts for the contents of the unconscious, the system Ucs. It is contents that are crucial, not so much whether or not they are conscious or unconscious. The notion of the unconscious has two different meanings: (1) barred consciousness seen only in relation to representational consciousness, as the latter's double, with the two contents being interchangeable and dialectical. In principle, as Henry says: 'Every unconscious content can take on the opposite quality of consciousness and enter the light; every conscious content is destined to leave it and return to the unconscious'. [2] But, there is a totally different conception of the unconscious, (2) that 'secretly refers to life's essence' that can never become known. Hence, Freud's assertion, in Instincts and their Vicissitudes, that not all unconscious contents can surface to consciousness. Freud straddles these two notions of the unconscious.