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The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 3 - 10 AN INTOLERABLE REJECTION [1] Malachi McCoy In New Studies on Hysteria , [2] Charles Melman identifies four concepts: traumatism, incompatibility, repression and unconscious. Beyond the image is to be found a repressed and rejected cast-off; the constitution of whom, Melman asserts, is freshly preserved. Unremittingly, this original signifier’s infiltration presents the hysteric’s psychosomatic manifestations. Sounding out that foreign body, Freud’s discovery assures us that psychoanalysis alone, in deciphering the language of symptomatology, gives recognition to and discharges that real place of suffering. Keywords: Freud; Melman; repression; hysteria; incompatible; rejection; signifier. Introduction It is intolerable. It is rejected. Its rejection becomes an intolerable and highly charged infiltrating agent. In New Studies on Hysteria [3] Dr Charles Melman restores Freud’s inauguration of the essential concept of repression and of the unconscious, because one is correlative with the other. [4] The development of these new writings presents us with an idea of the freshness with which hysteria signifies the embodying preservation of an ancient, pervasive, unconscious text. What is it that we don’t want to know about the history of our subject; what implicates a traumatism so incompatible? The psychoanalyst has something new to tell us; firstly, fundamentally, he refers us to Freud.

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages iv - vi

The Letter, Issue 65, Summer 2017, Pages 89 - 97

The Letter, Issue 65, Summer 2017, Pages 73 - 87 IN MEMORY OF WILLIAM J. RICHARDSON, S.J. NOTES TOWARD A SEMIOTICS OF ADDRESS. John Muller I met Bill Richardson in the late summer of 1963. He had just completed his book on Heidegger [1] and was assigned to teach Modern Philosophy in the Jesuit seminary at Shrub Oak, New York, where I was a Jesuit in training, majoring in Philosophy. I was assigned to be his class beadle for the year. As beadle I made copies of readings, brought them to class, gathered assignments, made announcements, all as needed. It meant I also spent time with Bill, in his office or talking late into the night in one of the cottages on the grounds. He got to know my family members and eventually presided over their funerals. In later years a small group of a dozen friends who had all left the Jesuits met annually for a day-long cook-out. Bill was a faithful member of this group and we often joked that he would eventually outlive us all and bury us (as he did for four of us). In time I completed graduate work in Clinical Psychology and Bill, teaching then at Fordham University in New York City, became known to Rollo May and his colleagues engaged in existential psychiatry. Through them he met Otto Will, MD, who had been at Chestnut Lodge (and was analysed by Harry Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann). Otto was then the Medical Director at the Austen Riggs Center, a small, private psychiatric hospital located in the western Massachusetts village of Stockbridge. Otto encouraged Bill to pursue psychoanalytic training at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City and afterwards to come to Riggs as Director of Research. It was in this context that Bill invited me to join him at Riggs. He came in 1974 and I arrived a year later. My job was to treat two patients (meeting four-times weekly) and to work half-time with Bill on the texts of Jacques Lacan, whose work Bill had heard of while at Louvain and whose name I had never heard before.

The Letter, Issue 65, Summer 2017, Pages 63 - 72 NARRATIVE IMAGINATION AND CATHARSIS Richard Kearney Bill was a beautiful man. He was a wise, deep, elegant, curious, brilliant, scrupulous, angry, chivalrous, tormented, honest, kind, stubborn, inspiring, funny, loving, beautiful man. Above all he was a teacher. That is what Bill Richardson loved to do. To teach and write, write and teach, for sixty years of his academic life, mentoring and forming over three generations of students. And during all those years of masterful pedagogy, Bill was as challenging as he was inspiring. For every time he commented NG (no good) or MA (what do the Medievals say?) in the margins of an essay, he invariably added: ‘You can do it – encore!’ Ní bheidh a leithéid ann arís. ******** How are we to ‘interpret’ psychic traumas which seem to defy meaning and language? Traumatic wounds are by definition unspeakable. Yet from the earliest of literatures, we find tales of primal trauma which testify to a certain catharsis through storytelling. And we witness a special role played in such tales by figures called ‘wounded healers’. By way of exploring the cathartic paradox of telling the untellable, I will look at some examples drawn from both classical mythology and contemporary literature (including, James Joyce and Holocaust testimony). My basic hypothesis is this: while traumatic wounds cannot be cured, they may at times be healed – and such healing may take place through a therapy of narrative catharsis. In short, healing by word. A transformation of incurable wounds into healable scars.

The Letter, Issue 65, Summer 2017, Pages 43 - 62 ‘BECOMING’ IN HEGEL’S PHENOMENOLOGY AND IN PSYCHOANALYSIS Wilfried Ver Eecke In this article I accept the idea of Hyppolite that there is a great similarity between the dialectical changes analysed in Hegel’s Phenomenology and the changes aimed at through Freud’s psychoanalytic method. In both, the central idea pursued is that of ‘becoming.’ My contribution in this article is to show how Hegel develops a teleological becoming in which the future is the main dimension of time, whereas Freud, and also Lacan, aim in psychoanalysis at discovering a trauma in the past which the patient is invited to deal with and to accept. Psychoanalysis thus invites a searching of the patient’s past and is therefore archeological in nature. However similar Hegel’s dialectical method may be compared with the method used in psychoanalysis, I conclude that they have a totally different emphasis on the dimension of time they are preoccupied with . Introduction More than thirty-five years ago William Richardson told me that he wanted to organise a discussion group on Lacan. He invited me because we had both been introduced to the ideas of Lacan by Professor A. De Waelhens at the University of Louvain, whose course focused especially on Lacan’s 1953 discourse in Rome. [1] The more than thirty years of discussion that followed have deepened my knowledge of Lacan and served me well when I tried (and succeeded) in the ‘Passe’—becoming a Lacanian psychoanalyst.

The Letter, Issue 65, Summer 2017, Pages 33 - 42 ABSOLUTE (UN) KNOWING: LACAN WITH HEGEL Richard Boothby For the memory of William Richardson, with deep admiration and heartful gratitude. This essay attempts to show how Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis is illuminated by Slavoj Žižek’s reversal of the standard reading of Hegel: ‘Absolute knowing’ is to be read paradoxically (dialectically!) as a recognition of the limits of knowing, precisely a form of unknowing. For Lacan, the true outcome of psychoanalysis, the thing that makes it most profoundly transformative of the subject’s existence, lies less in an increase in the subject’s knowledge, a matter of what the subject comes to know about its history and constitution, than in a new engagement with what it doesn’t know. A good psychoanalysis reconfronts the subject with its own fundamental question. Keywords: Lacan; Hegel; Žižek: psychoanalysis; knowledge ‘Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, the psychoanalyst’s is perhaps the loftiest, because it mediates in our time between the care-ridden man and the subject of absolute knowledge.’ Jacques Lacan

The Letter, Issue 65, Summer 2017, Pages 27 - 32 AND YET... Helen Sheehan * As a tribute to the memory of Bill Richardson, this paper deals with the ongoing discussion between psychoanalysis and philosophy. It begins with Lacan’s poem, Panta Rhei [1] - with Heraclitus in mind, and goes on to consider the significance of Lacan’s translation of Heidegger’s Logos. Keywords: Richardson, Lacan, Heraclitus, Heidegger, psychoanalysis, philosophy, Schreber, psychosis, language. Martin Heidegger was no friend of psychoanalysis. His first serious exposure to it came through the ministrations of Medard Boss, who, in effect, introduced him to Freud. Mediated through Boss’s own attempt to rethink Freud’s insights into what he called Daseinsanalysis, Heidegger’s relation to Freud remained cool to say the least. Several attempts in the 1950’s to entice him into dialogue with the so called ‘French Freud’, Jacques Lacan, whose self-proclaimed return to Freud some found deeply consonant with certain themes of Heidegger, proved fruitless. Given this record, any new attempt to find philosophical relevance for psychoanalysis in the thought of Martin Heidegger seems ill starred, indeed. And yet... [2]

The Letter, Issue 65, Summer 2017, Pages 1 - 26 TRUTH AND FREEDOM IN PSYCHOANALYSIS * William J. Richardson, Ph.d. This paper seeks to find a philosophical relevance for psychoanalysis in the thought of Martin Heidegger. Given Heidegger’s rejection of Freud’s hypothesis, it raises the question whether or not he would have been equally hostile if it had been presented to him from a Lacanian perspective, as something ‘structured like a language’. It endeavours to show the compatibility between certain basic Heideggerean and Lacanian concepts, focussing on the notions of being, truth and freedom. Keywords: Heidegger; Lacan; language; Dasein; psychoanalysis. Martin Heidegger was no friend of psychoanalysis. His first serious exposure to it came through the ministrations of Medard Boss, [1] who, in effect, introduced him to Freud. Mediated through Boss’s own attempt to rethink Freud’s insights into what he called Daseinsanalysis , Heidegger’s relation to Freud himself remained cool, to say the least. Several attempts in the 1950’s to entice him into dialogue with the so-called ‘French Freud,’ Jacques Lacan, whose self-proclaimed ‘return to Freud’ some found deeply consonant with certain themes of Heidegger, proved fruitless. Given this record, any new attempt to find philosophical relevance for psychoanalysis in the thought of Martin Heidegger seems ill-starred indeed. And yet . . . .

The Letter, Issue 65, Summer 2017, Page iv

The Letter, Issue 64, Spring 2017, Pages 73 - 82 WHAT CAN BE DONE WITH ANXIETY? ENJOYMENT AND ACTING Christian Fierens There are two different answers to the question ‘What can be done with anxiety’? depending on two different conceptions of psychoanalysis. The first one depends on a more or less Cartesian conception of the affect and is related to Freud’s first theory of anxiety. The second depends on a more or less Spinozist conception of the affect and is related to Freud’s second theory of anxiety and to Lacan’s theory of affects. Keywords: anxiety is not a flaw; affect; Descartes; Spinoza; enjoyment; action Anxiety is probably one of the most frequent reasons for consulting the social worker, the psychologist, the psychiatrist or even the general practitioner. But it seems that they may achieve nearly nothing by addressing anxiety simply as an affect. Anxiety affects. It is a very unpleasant experience for both the patient who doesn’t know precisely why he is anxious and the practitioner who finds himself powerless to help him: that experience is all the more unpleasant as neither is able to identify the object of such anxieties. We are afraid of or frightened by something: we know or at least we have a premonition of an object which is frightening. But in anxiety, it seems that we are being affected in the absence of any concrete object. Of course, the psychoanalyst may say that anxiety has an object, it is the object of an unconscious wish. He may state that much, but we usually fail completely to locate such an object; and even if we could fathom in imagination its hidden object, anxiety keeps going on - as it does not crystallize in any usual kind of fear. The object remains a mere theoretical point of view (as we may not directly handle it). We should be able to find a way out for anxiety and its object should be made quite concrete in the course of the practitioner’s intervention.

The Letter, Issue 64, Spring 2017, Pages 65 - 72 PRE-PHOBIC ANXIETY * Malachi McCoy ‘My dear Professor, I am sending you a little more about Hans - but this time, I am sorry to say, material for a case history.’ [1] The boy woke up one morning in tears; asked why he was crying, he said to his mother ‘When I was asleep I thought you were gone and I had no Mummy to coax with.’ [2] It is therefore ‘An anxiety dream.’ [3] In 1909 the publication of the case-history ‘caused a great stir and even greater indignation’. Would the findings of a psychoanalysis of a suffering child today meet with the same agitations and scorn as Freud’s case history of the analysis and recovery of Little Hans? Or, can we learn from it and find hope? It’s my hope that this paper, rather than giving a chronological account, can remind us of the mental activities driving the anxious and fearful child before calling up the intervention of his phobic object. Freud writes ‘We must regard [this dream] as a genuine punishment and repression dream and, moreover, as a dream which failed in its function, since the child woke from his sleep in a state of anxiety. We can easily reconstruct what actually occurred in the unconscious.’ [4]

The Letter, Issue 64, Spring 2017, Pages 47 - 53 THE OBJECT OF ANXIETY Guy Le Gaufey I will tackle the question of anxiety from a semiotic viewpoint in so far as Freud, in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety , presents this affect as a sign the ego sends to himself when he faces a certain danger, mostly internal and instinctual. In the face of this kind of danger, a helpful ‘object’, the mother, is supposed to have regulated the situation previously. Now, she is no longer in sight and available, so that the child is overwhelmed with a feeling of ‘helplessness’. This occurs almost mathematically in Freud’s writing: take the ‘helpful’ away and you get the ‘helpless’. That is why Freud characterises anxiety by considering the infant longing for this helpful object. He writes: Anxiety [is] about something (Die Angst ist Angst vor etwas). It has a quality of indefiniteness [Unbestimmtheit] and lack of object [Objektlosigkeit]…. Its connection with expectation belongs to the danger-situation, whereas its indefiniteness and lack of object belong to the traumatic situation of helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) - the situation which is anticipated in the danger-situation. [1]

The Letter, Issue 64, Spring 2017, Pages 39 - 46 SEARCHING FOR THE LOST CAUSE FREUD’S FIRST STEPS – (TOWARDS A THEORY OF ANXIETY) Helen Sheehan This paper follows Freud’s first tentative steps towards his understanding of the origins of anxiety. It will deal in particular with his work from 1892 until 1895 and will engage briefly with Lacan’s comments on the matter. Keywords: anxiety; origin; aetiology; neurasthenia; George Beard; anxiety neurosis; transformation; jouissance; affect; soma; psyche; Other It is important to remember that we cannot separate theory from practice for Freud and to remember that every discovery Freud has made has in one way or another been influenced not only by his theoretical work but by what was happening in his personal life and this is because, it seems to me, for Freud, theory is not something you do – you write about. What you write about are the little threads of significance that go to frame a Life and then we call this theory. In other words, as Lacan insists, the unconscious is that which does not stop not writing itself.

The Letter, Issue 64, Spring 2017, Pages 27 - 37 ON ANXIETY AND ITS SYMPTOM(S) Patricia McCarthy Taking Freud’s 1926 paper Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety as a major reference, Lacan teases out the distinctions between these three terms in the course of his 1962 – ‘63 seminar Anxiety. He concludes that to consider anxiety solely as a symptom that we name pathological by virtue of its affective manifestations - as these, for example, present themselves in panic attacks, generalised anxiety disorder or phobia – does not encompass what anxiety signals at the level of subjectivity. For Lacan, anxiety lies on the hither side of the symptom and is the response of the subject to enjoyment, which is in the real. What should be found shocking is the psychoanalytic understanding that we all suffer from the effects of anxiety, effects that, by definition, are symptomatic of how we negotiate enjoyment. For those who do not consider themselves to be neurotic, anxiety’s symptom has taken the form of a knowledge that knows not that it does not know. We are challenged therefore to understand anxiety differently, no longer simply as a pathology but as a fact of structure. This has ethical implications for our approach to the many patients who indeed suffer from anxiety’s effects. Keywords: anxiety; phobia; knowledge as a symptom; power; enjoyment; self-consciousness; the lacanian subject; projection

The Letter, Issue 64, Spring 2017, Pages 15 - 26 WHAT DO PSYCHIATRISTS MEAN BY ANXIETY? Brendan D. Kelly In contemporary psychiatry, the term ‘anxiety disorders’ covers a broad range of conditions including phobias, panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and other conditions with varying relationships with anxiety, such as acute stress reaction, adjustment disorder, conversion disorder and somatoform disorder. Anxiety disorders are treatable conditions. Treatment tends to involve combinations of psychological therapies, medication and social inputs. Psychotherapy, chiefly cognitive-behaviour therapy, is usually the mainstay of treatment, augmented by other measures as indicated. For all patients and families, psychoeducation, self-help and support groups can also be extremely helpful. The vast majority of people with anxiety disorders are treated successfully in primary care or as outpatients, and the outlook for improvement is very good in the absence of complicating factors (e.g. alcohol misuse) and provided there is sensible, sustained treatment in the context of a good, steady therapeutic relationship. A wider diversity of psychotherapeutic approaches is, however, needed, in order to reflect the wide diversity of anxiety disorders that present, and the even wider diversity of people who present with them. Keywords: anxiety; cognitive behavior therapy; medication; psychoanalysis; psychiatry