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The Letter, Issue 8, Autumn 1996, Pages i - iii Editorial Perversion, Religion and Anxiety take the stage in this Autumn's issue of our journal. Late last year Dr Andre Michels journeyed from Luxembourg to Dublin to deliver a series of lectures on Oscar Wilde and the subject of perversion. While the first of these aimed at presenting details of the life of Oscar Wilde, linking his homosexuality with his aesthetic theory and his work, the second draws on this 'case history' of the man who took on the cloak of the Wandering Jew, to elaborate the theoretical framework within which the enigma of perversion can be situated. We are pleased to be able to open this issue of THE LETTER with transcripts of his contributions, which are all the more valued and valuable since his remarks bear all the hallmarks of observations gleaned from clinical practice. Since the texts of his work produced here rely largely on a taped recording of those lectures, we hope these retain the texture of the author's spoken offering. Stephen Costello, during the discussion following Andre Michels' first lecture, (a transcript of which accompanies the text given here), wondered what it was in Bosie that so captivated Wilde. His article, an annex to that discussion, represents some of this 'wondering' about the lure of the look, le regard.

The Letter, Issue 7, Summer 1996, Pages i - iii

The Letter, Issue 7, Summer 1996, Pages 112 - 113 Conference Report TRAUMA IN CHARLTON Charlton, in South London, is now no longer known only for its soccer team; it was also the venue for the first of the one-day conferences run by the Greenwich Consortium of Psychotherapists on topics of interest to anyone involved in psychotherapy or related disciplines. The topic of the first conference, held in October 1995 was Trauma' and the convenor was Dr. Martin Stanton, who will already be familiar to Irish readers through his work on Ferenczi and Laplanche. Three speakers, of whom I was lucky enough to be one, were invited to speak on particular areas related to trauma to a small but most attentive and interested audience.

The Letter, Issue 7, Summer 1996, Pages 110 - 111 Conference Report ANALYSE FREUDIENNE LONDON CONFERENCE APRIL 1995. A SUMMARY. The conference theme, Ethics and the Desire of the Analyst, was addressed by speakers from England, France and Ireland under the four topics of ethics, transmission, technique and the cure. Concerning ethics, Lindsay Watson (London) wondered if the resistance to analysis in England was due to confusion between ethics and statistics. Helen Sheehan (Dublin) raised the question of the possibility of ethics, when the first appreciation of reality by the human subject is the Real, Das Ding, the 'hostile one? Hara Pepeli (London) developed the ethics of Roger Money-Kyrle, and noted the lack of ethics in Kleinian theory. Andrew Hodgkiss (London) compared Nietzche's Ubermensch and the desire of the analyst.

The Letter, Issue 7, Summer 1996, Pages 67 - 96 LACANIAN APPROACH TO PROBLEMS OF AFFECT AND ANXIETY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS Alan Rowan The system of language at whichever point you take hold of it never results in an index finger directly indicating a point of reality, it's the whole of reality that is covered by the entire network of language. [1] It has become common among psychoanalytic writers both critical and sympathetic to Lacan who are not themselves Lacanians to criticise Lacan for ignoring the role and place of affect in his theorising. Thus Kennedy in a co-authored work on Lacan states that 'unlike many other post-Freudian analysts, he (Lacan) gave little place to any theory of the affects, or feelings, and the importance of pre-verbal structures. These omissions may seem to represent a denial of much analytic experience' [2] and he adds 'it is for this reason his work can seem over-intellectual'. [3] Similarly, Green makes the point that 'with the exception of Lacan no modern psychoanalytic theory underestimates the importance of affects' [4] while Smith in his epilogue to Interpreting Lacan writes 'Green's formulations ... like the Kristeva and Vergote chapters goes toward correcting the inattention to affect in Lacan'. [5] Indeed, it could well be argued that Lacanians themselves have by and large not taken up Lacan's call to produce an 'intellectual accounting' for the affects and one purpose, therefore, of this paper is to raise debate in just this area.

The Letter, Issue 7, Summer 1996, Pages 40 - 57 LACAN IN BARTHES Nessa Breen The radical heteronomy that Freud's discovery shows gaping within man, can never again be covered over without whatever is used to hide it being profoundly dishonest. [1] When we speak ... of a divided subject, it is never to acknowledge his simple contradictions ... it is a diffraction which is intended, a dispersion of energy in which there remains neither a central core nor a structure of meaning: I am not contradictory, I am dispersed. [2] Over twenty years separate Jacques Lacan's Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis and Roland Barthes' anti- autobiography Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. The conditions of production of the Lacanian and the Barthesian texts are quite different. Function and Field had been delivered to the Rome Congress in September 1953 at a moment of significant political import for psychoanalysis. In his Discours de Rome Lacan attempts to return psychoanalysis to its true parameters, that is, to speech and language. The Discours immediately assumed the status of a manifesto for the new movement in psychoanalysis. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes was published in 1975 as a kind of serious joke, when Barthes was asked to do his par lui-même f or the E crivains de toujours s eries. Its credibility was further called into question following Barthes' own review of his autobiography in the Q uinzaine litteraire, e ntitled B arthes jouissance trois - Barthes par Barthes, b y Barthes.

The Letter, Issue 7, Summer 1996, Pages 58 - 66 NARRATIVE, ANXIETY AND THE TEMPORAL FACTOR* Olga Cox Any coffee break conversation with Irish Lacanian students will confirm Lacan's own assertion that the concept of lack is not in itself anxiogenic. 'Ah yes', people breezily say, lighting up a cigarette, 'sure it's all about lack you know'. It is tempting to surmise that when Lacan describes subjectivity as resulting from 'the organization of a hole' or represents the subject as 'the existence of a hole and his supplementary two sutures' [1] that Irish analysts feel a degree of satisfaction in being not just scatologically but psychoanalytically correct when referring to a colleague as 'a pain in the hole'. The term anxiety is an exceptionally inclusive one. It can be used to refer to the sudden falling away of the ground of one's being in which time is abruptly suspended, or alternatively to the ongoing uneasy undertow which in itself constitutes the temporal dimension of human existence. Paradoxically Lacan locates it not as the opening up of a chasm but as the total filling in of a void which should be preserved. It is when there is nothing to keep this lack in place that anxiety appears. In the year which precedes his seminar on anxiety, Lacan had set out, via the difficult conceptual model of the Moebius strip, to demonstrate that this lack which is radical for the constitution of subjectivity is an included lack, a structural flaw, a very particular absence which conditions all presence, notably the presence of the signifying chain, but which remains itself, properly speaking, unnameable. It is this included lack which I would like to look at today, leaning on narrative theory rather than on the topology of the Moebius strip.

The Letter, Issue 7, Summer 1996, Pages 97 - 109 PSYCHOANALYSIS, REPRESENTATION, POLITICS: ON THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF A PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF IDEOLOGY? * Sean Homer The definition of 'government' has been re-interpreted by the conference organisers to include issues of representation in general. I should like to stretch this interpretation a little further, if I may, to include questions of politics. Politics, that is, in its broadest sense, and not specifically cultural politics, in other words, the politics of representation, of identity and of subjectivity, or, more locally the politics of psychoanalysis. What I want to address, therefore, will encompass questions of cultural and social theory as well as issues specific to psychoanalytic studies. I am also aware mat to insist on such a distinction between, let us say, politics proper and cultural politics will be an anathema to many people here today and indeed it is not a distinction that I would myself usually wish to defend. But for the purposes of this presentation it is a distinction I will make and will hope to prise open in order to pose certain questions; firstly, what has become of the politics in the politics of representation? Secondly, what has psychoanalysis got to offer both political theory in general and cultural politics in particular? Is it simply the case, as the critic Elizabeth Bellamy has observed of Laclau and Mouffe's influential work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, that one can remove the psychoanalytic terminology from the discourse of cultural politics with no discernible lose to the overall theory, [1] or, as I want to argue here, that there is a specific and irreducible dimension that psychoanalysis can add to current cultural and political debates? What I would like to do, therefore, is to reflect initially upon the historical trajectory of certain contemporary political and cultural discourses of impossibility before turning these arguments back upon themselves and posing the question of the possibility of a psychoanalytic political theory.

The Letter, Issue 7, Summer 1996, Pages 12 - 20 HOW CAN LACANIAN THEORY BE REPRESENTED IN THE MEDIA? * Aisling Campbell It is a common practice among psychoanalysts in Ireland - and no doubt in other countries also - to bemoan the lack of awareness of psychoanalysis among the general population. To this is added - sotto voce, for fear of appearing too mercenary - the complaint that it is impossible to make a living from analytic practice; a half-serious fourth to be added to the three impossibilities that make up the topic of the conference. Mindful of these complaints, some time ago I agreed to participate in a radio discussion on psychoanalysis. The show consisted of an half-hour discussion between myself and an interviewer who might be described as naive to psychoanalysis. It was typical of the difficulty in locating analysis in the field of generally accepted knowledge about humanity, that the programme was the final one in a series investigating the various forms of counselling and psychotherapy. The interview was not entirely traumatic in that the interviewer allowed the discussion to develop without the outraged objections that generally result at some stage from any attempt to transmit psychoanalytic theory. There is always some point beyond which it is impossible to teach psychoanalysis - like analysis itself, there is a rock on which it always founders. Thirty minutes was perhaps insufficient to reach this point. Such a discussion in the public realm, however, is not only a form of teaching but also of representation - in the sense that he who teaches in the public domain is assumed to be some kind of representative of the totality. There is an inherent impossibility in the representation of psychoanalysis, as borne out by my experiences following the broadcast.

The Letter, Issue 1, Summer 1994, Pages 136 - 148 PARANOIA [*] Charles Melman Paranoia is above all linked to our representation of space, because spontaneously our representation of space is Euclidean, which has been the natural geometry for centuries. We continue to think according to the rules of this geometry, and there has been an effort made by rationalism to assimilate the rules of thinking to the rules of this geometry. But this Euclidean geometry is based on the existence of closed figures, that is, an isolation of what is inside from what is outside. Here is an absolute boundary between the inside and outside (the circle) which is the basis for paranoia. People have questioned themselves for a long time about the materiality of the line, and that is why geometricians say that it is a line without thickness. But in so far as it separates the inside from the outside, we can say that it is a cut or a cutting. What gives meaning to the Euclidean surface is this cutting. Lacan has this very surprising formula: he says that the surface is the cut.

The Letter, Issue 1, Summer 1994, Pages 17 - 27 The Analyst Confronted With State Legitimacy Guy Le Gaufey There are many ways of approaching this question: until now, it has mainly been presented as being a legal issue, especially when what is in question is primarily the making of new laws in Brussels today. Is it true that a sort of European status of the psychoanalyst is going to be landed on us soon? Are we going to be paying taxes as psychoanalysts (and if so, on what basis)? Don't we need to be protected against all that? It is not that these questions are either worthless or out of place, but I want to stress that a lot more light needs to be shed on them so that we might arrive at answers which would be of any value. In my opinion, all of these questions arise from the same single mistake: they identify purely and simply the analyst as a citizen, without paying any attention to the fact that such an identification is without foundation and that it is incorrect to pass from one of these qualities, that of being a citizen, to the other, that of being an analyst without noting and underlining the gap separating them. There is an obvious symptom of such a gap, at least for French analysts: no matter which school, group or association they belong to, there is no diploma which qualifies them as psychoanalysts, which clearly means that the state authority doesn't recognise them as such. I am not trying to assert that all of them are happy with this situation: but as a point of departure we must take note of the fact that numerous generations of psychoanalysts have taken special care not to obtain such diplomas. Why?

The Letter, Issue 1, Summer 1994, Pages 111 - 114 THE JOUISSANCE OF THE MYSTIC Helen Sheehan If, as Lacan says in his Seminar of 1972, Encore, to understand any discourse whatsoever we have to begin with the enunciation that there is no sexual rapport and that from this all other discourses will follow, then this enunciation has profound implications for the jouissance of the mystic. In fact the mystic completely subverts the notion of a discourse because the mystic introduces us into a new kind of knowledge of the Truth about the Reality of Being and so, in a certain way there is no more to be said - but me - myself - not being a mystic I will continue to speak! The mystic is on the side of Being - and he knows that where there is Being there is a desire for Infinity. The mystic knows that in Truth there is a price to be paid for Being. St. Teresa of Avila knew this. She knew that she had to be saved and that it was only God who could do this "I do not think that you left anything undone to make me Yours, entirely even from my youth" [1] .

The Letter, Issue 1, Summer 1994, Pages 95 - 102 Analytical Discourse and Scientific Discourse: A Difference in Responsibility. Rik Loose The Discourse of Analysis According to Oscar Wilde, "education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught". [1] What is worth knowing has a special place in the discourse of analysis and it is something that is difficult to transmit. In psychoanalysis, knowledge, [2] , is related to truth; it occupies the place of truth in its discourse and it is the only knowledge with which it is concerned. This is knowledge that speaks the truth, but only manages to do this partially. Truth here is not-all; it is constituted as an effect of language and it ex-ists within it. This truth always more or less escapes us when we try to grasp it. It will only allow itself to be encircled by myth and fiction. These myths and fictions are what constitute knowledge in psychoanalysis, namely, the Oedipus complex, Totem and Taboo, Narcissus, and so on; by means of which the Real of the impossible sexual relationship and questions of what man, woman, death and birth are for the human subject, can be approached. These myths and fictions are at the place of truth and are kept there. They are what the subject supposes the analyst to know, but they are also what the analyst presupposes as knowledge in the subject.

The Letter, Issue 1, Summer 1994, Pages 103 - 110 THE ECONOMIES OF THE SUBJECT SERVE BOTH REPRESSION AND THE SIGNIFIER Patricia McCarthy Mindful of the theme for this Congress "The Subject of the Unconscious and Language’’，I wish to confine this communication to a clinical demonstration - yes, in the way physicians demonstrate clinical signs - a demonstration of the action of the signifier on the subject. The signifier, as we know, is any inert element of language which unconscious meaning borrows to communicate itself. When a neurologist, let's say, wants to demonstrate a palsy or a paralysis of the seventh cranial nerve, which journeys from the base of the brain through the skull to serve the muscles of the face, he asks the patient to smile and there will be a drooping of the mouth on the side of the paralysed nerve, confirming the palsy. In psychoanalysis, paralysis of the action of the signifier has equally devastating results. But unlike a nerve which can be irreversibly damaged, the signifier which cannot be destroyed, can be specifically activated in analysis, to undo a certain spancelling of the subject. If you have seen Arnold Schwartzneggar in the movies about "The Terminator", the indestructibility of this machine which masquerades as a man, will give you some idea of the durability of the signifier.

The Letter, Issue 1, Summer 1994, Pages 82 - 94 Beckett’s Unnamable: Not I, not Mad. Olga Cox To cede the initiative to words is the task of the artist according to Mallarmé. In a more sinister context this dictum could also be said to describe the obscure directive which immobilizes the psychotic. In the last part of his great trilogy ' Molloy ', ' Malone Dies ', ' The Unnamable ', Samuel Beckett has managed to subsume this second terrible imperative within the first, artistic one, and in doing so has created a novel which is one of the most extraordinary achievements of our time. It is always an act of temerity for psychoanalysis to engage with a work of art, and it was Lacan's opinion that even Freud himself did not do so without mishap. Nonetheless, following Freud who was quick to point out that the artist invariably precedes the analyst onto his chosen terrain, I would like to suggest that Beckett's unsettling masterpiece throws into relief the extremities of a subjective position which ordinarily is either veiled by the screens of normality or sealed in the slabs of psychotic delusion. Indeed it is precisely because it is a work of art that it offers us privileged access to this position, which is neither mad nor sane but impossibly and precariously precedes such differentiation. By uncompromisingly eschewing the lures of both reason and madness, the speaker in Beckett's Unnamable lays bare the latent discourse which subtends all human existence, and which erupts startlingly and incomprehensibfy to tyrannise the psychotic. This discourse in The Unnamable however, although striated and infiltrated by madness, is not mad. The mocking echo which madness offers to reason, audible in the speculative systems of great paranoiacs, makes itself heard here in the domain of language itself, and in the extraordinarily sophisticated and self-reflexive gesture by which a fictional work, in paralysing all fictional movement, exposes not the silent depths but the ragged clamour at the heart of human subjectivity.

The Letter, Issue 1, Summer 1994, Pages 117 - 135 THE THIRD GENERATION OF DESIRE William J. Richardson Claudel! Why Paul Claudel? In a seminar entitled Transference [1] , where Lacan introduces his long extrapolation on Claudel, the issue ought to be, after all, transference. I am referring, of course, to his Seminar VIII (1960-61) that goes by that single-word title. The long meditation on Plato's Symposium with which the Seminar begins already seems far­ fetched enough until one realizes that Lacan is using Plato's famous dialogue on love as a means of discussing love in psychoanalysis, i.e., transference love. In these terms, the analysis of Alcibiade's relationship to Socrates as a transferential one that Socrates handles in model fashion is both pertinent and illuminating. But Claudel? What can he tell us about psychoanalytic transference? Yet Lacan devotes four sessions of the seiminar to a discussion of not one but three of Paul Claudel's plays, the famous Trilogy that includes L'Otage ( The Hostage [2] [1911]), Le Pain dur ( Stale Bread [3] [1918]) and Le Pere humilié ( The Humiliated Father [4] [1919]). What relevance all this may have for the problem of transference and what gain there might be for us in struggling with it - these are the questions I wish to address here. The business is complex, and to keep matters manageable, I propose: to trace in as uncluttered a manner as possible the storyline that runs through the three plays; to discern Lacan's reading of them as distinct from Claudel's own; and to conclude by pointing out certain issues concerning desire that emerge from the discussion and remain for us to deal with.