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The Letter, Issue 1, Summer 1994, Pages 28 - 67 Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory Malcolm Bowie ' Zukunft' - ich habe das Wort in den Titel meines Vortrages aufgenommen, einfach, weil der Begriff der Zukunft derjenige ist, den ich am liebsten und unwillkürlichsten mit dem Namen Freuds verbinde. Thomas Mann, 'Freud und die Zukunft' (1936) ('Future' - I have used this word in the title of my address simply because it is this idea, the idea of the future, that I involuntarily like best to connect with the name of Freud. 'Freud and the Future') The temporality of the human subject as studied by Freud suffers from an internal disproportion that has often been noted but seldom discussed: whereas he describes past time fondly and in detail, his account of future time is foreshortened and schematic. The present in which the analytic subject speaks is poised uneasily for Freud between discontinuous time-worlds. The problem lies not in the fact that past and future are logically asymmetrical, but in the seeming flatness that afflicts one of them: the past has character, but the future has none. Romancing the matter only a little, we could say that for Freud the past is 'a character', while the future is a cipher and something of a bore. My own discussion of this state of affairs falls into two unequal parts. The first and main task that I have set myself is that of describing ’the future' -the concept rather than the tense -as it has been manipulated by psychoanalysis. Here I shall be paying particular attention to the later writings of Lacan, suggesting some of the ways in which his discussion of temporality completes and complexifies Freud's, and pointing to one or two of the problems that this discussion raises for psychoanalysis as a theoretical discipline. 'What kind of future can psychoanalysis have when it talks about futurity in this fashion?. This is the sort of question that I shall be asking in due course.

The Letter, Issue 1, Summer 1994, Pages 68 - 81 What are the Consequences of Drawing an Analogy between Speech and Money? John Forrester The very first patient described at some length in Freud’s writings, Frau Cacilie M. or Baroness Anna von Lieben, suffered from an "'hysterical psychosis for the payment of old debts”' [1] . All these old debts had been accumulated, he indicated, by her making false connections in the past: her neurotic symptoms were masks, excessive stories, covering over the true and hidden connections, which her cathartic cure would reveal. Getting the true words out, expressing them adequately, in the proper place, to the proper person: this is another way of describing her paying off or perhaps writing off these old debts. The speech emitted can almost be counted off, on one side of the balance sheet, against the debt, the past obligations, represented, as if they were old IOUs, by symptoms. The German word Freud used to describe his patient is a wonderfully rich and ambiguous term: " hysterische Tilgungspsychose ''. Tilgung means the deletion sign in typography; tilgen means ’to extinguish’，’to strike out', 'to wipe out, to efface', ’to delete' (in typography); Schuld tilgen , means 'to pay, compound, discharge, cancel'; Anleihe tilgen means 'to redeem', so that Tilgungschein means 'certificate’ of redemption'. Anna von Lieben spent much labour redeeming all her old debts, issuing certificates of redemption through the hard work of catharsis she accomplished with Freud. It took her three years, Freud writes, of the talking cure to redeem the old debts of thirty- three years.

The Letter, Issue 2, Autumn 1994, Pages 1 - 46 LACANIAN COMMENTS ON "WHAT CAN I KNOW?" "WHAT OUGHT I TO DO?", "WHAT MAY I HOPE FOR?" Julian Quackelbeen It must surely have struck the reader of the Ecrits how often Lacan refers to Kant. The reader of the Seminars is so familiar with this reference to the great philosopher of Koningsberg that in the long run he is erroneously going to take it for granted. When Jacques -Alain Miller starts the sixth chapter of Television with the invitation to make a stand against Kant, he is not only aware of the fact that his question is stimulating, he also realizes that it nourishes a fundamental ambiguity. This ambiguity is revealed by two possible characterizations of Lacan: "Lacan, philosopher amongst analysts" versus "Lacan, analyst amongst philosophers". Miller had supported the philosopher Lacan when he invited him to give a lecture on the foundations of Fregian logic during his 1963-1964 seminar. [1] When he abandons his masters Canguilhem and Althusser, he will do so to join Lacan, the analyst.

The Letter, Issue 2, Autumn 1994, Pages 87 - 111

The Letter, Issue 2, Autumn 1994, Pages 125 - 139 LITTLE HANS’ REAL FATHER [*] Helena Comiskey-Texier Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Shakespeare. The Tempest. (Act 1 Sc. 2) Lacan, in his seminar of 1956-57, La relation d'objet, tells us that the phobia emerges as a consequence of a shortcoming, a deficiency on the part of the father. [1] The story of little Hans, which is in essence and form the story of a father and a son, is a god-send when it comes to trying to explore this statement of Lacan's, - and something which is sent from God has a very particular importance, as is shown to us by Freud when he eventually intervenes in this drama of filiation. In particular this story of father and son is a witness to the fact that it is not enough that one be a nice man in order that one be a good father, - which brings us to the question around which psychoanalysis turns: what is a father? It must be noted from the start, that Herr Max Graf is a very nice man. He is concerned about his children. He cares about his son and is interested in his growing up. He brings him to the zoo and takes him with him every Sunday to Lainz. Well before the outbreak of Hans' phobia he has been bringing Freud little snippets from the boy's life. He is an enlightened man who welcomes Freud's teachings, being a member of of Freud's Wednesday group. It appears that the Graf household is a liberated one in which the psychical life of the child is taken seriously and is not inhibited by any prudishness. Little Hans is free to talk to his father about genitalia, and his parents get great amusement from their observations of the various little 'crushes' he has on pretty little girls. It would seem that this is not a household in which children are seen and not heard...or so it would at first appear.

The Letter, Issue 2, Autumn 1994, Pages 112 - 124 "THE MAN WHO SOLD WORDS": A CHINESE FABLE AND COMMENTARY C. Edward Robins Introduction "Tongue", La langue, Lalangue: this word "tongue" I take as a signifier of this congress, entitled "The Subject of the Unconscious and Language(s)". Tongues have uttered "tongue" scores of times in the presentations and discussions during these days. Now in a Cantonese Chinese restaurant, you would never hear the word "tongue" pronounced, even though beef and ox tongue are popular delicacies. Why? Because the sound of the word "tongue" (shuh) also means "losing", as in "losing money". Superstitious as Chinese are, you would never suggest the topic of "losing money"! So instead of pronouncing the word shuh as indicated by the Chinese character on the menu, the waiter announces the work li (which means "gaining", as in "gaining money"). In English the waiter's spiel would sound like this: "We have very nice ox-gaining-money today". The Fable [1] In times gone by there lived in ancient China a man named Lo Shi, who was neither dull nor bright. From early morning till late at night he toiled for others, scraped together a little money and, when the time was ripe, took himself a wife. Then, after he had earned himself a little money, he went off with a party of merchants to trade in a distant town by the Great Wall.

The Letter, Issue 2, Autumn 1994, Pages 47 - 68 PSYCHOTHERAPY, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HYSTERIA Paul Verhaeghe It is common knowledge that Freud started as the pupil of his hysterical patients. He wanted to know and that's why he kept on listening to them. During that time, he coined the idea of psychotherapy, which was rather new at the end of the nineteenth century. Today, psychotherapy has become a very common practice; it is even so common, that no-one knows any longer what exactly it means. On the other hand, hysteria as such has almost disappeared, so much so that in the latest version of the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical manual, there is no longer any mention of it. This means that my paper is on the one hand about something that does not exist any more, and on the other hand about something that exists far too much... So, it will be necessary to define what we, from the psychoanalytic point of view, understand by the word "psychotherapy" and what we consider hysteria to be.

The Letter, Issue 2, Autumn 1994, Pages 69 - 86 NARRATIVE AND DESIRE IN "THE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DAYS OF SODOM" Aisling Campbell The first symbolic binary language of "fort" and "da" [1] introduces the subject to the world of the signifier, in which desire is implicated. The signifying chain implies an historicization of events - "fort" is significant only in terms of "da", which has preceded it - and vice versa. Language and narrative attempt to articulate desire, but something always escapes, a beyond of language. Without language, the question of desire would remain closed - yet through language the subject eludes an ultimate satisfying of desire, which would bring death. Sade, as perverse subject, sought to approach the object of desire directly, risking the death of desire in the process. Yet he was more famous for his writings than for his actual misdeeds; his writing allows a tension to be maintained between the subject and the object and between the subject and the object of his desire. It is impossible to read Sade in a dispassionate way. As linguistic and perverse act, The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom involves the reader as participant in Sade's discourse. One is struck by a peculiar ennui - it is difficult to be as enthusiastic as Sade's characters about their adventures. The most conscientious reader finds it difficult to accompany Sade's heroes to a supposed endpoint (which, however, never comes). Far from being merely a pornographic archive, however, Sade's discourse opens up essential questions regarding language, desire and death.

The Letter, Issue 3, Spring 1995, Pages 1 - 20 A CASE OF HYSTERIA? Rik Loose & Gerry Sullivan * Introduction In 1896 Freud proposed the theory that hysterical obsessive neurosis was caused by an actual sexual encounter between father and child. [1] The first hint of a movement away from the seduction theory came on 8 February, 1897 in a letter to Hiess. His change of heart becomes explicit in the well-known letter to Fliess of 21 September, 1897 in which Freud presents his reasons for revising his hypothesis, although it was not until 1906 that Freud publicly renounced his seduction theory. [2] A general dissatisfaction with Freud's stated change of heart and his reasons for repudiation of the seduction theory have led to a number of alternative explanations. We will briefly mention two and include some additional comments relevant to the paper we are presenting: One prominent thesis claims that Freud abandoned the seduction theory as a result of his self-analysis, which gave him an insight into his own fantasies of incest and eventually led him to formulate the Oedipus complex. [3] Lacan's remarks from Seminar XI are of interest to us, both within this context of Freud's self-analysis and the broader context of the theme of this conference. He says: "So hysteria places us, I would say, on the track of some kind of original sin in analysis. There has to be one. The truth is perhaps simply one thing, namely the desire of Freud himself, the fact that something in Freud was never analysed". [4]

The Letter, Issue 3, Spring 1995, Pages 100 - 108 THE TRACE OF L'OBJET PETIT O THROUGH THE CASE OF ANNA O Patricia McCarthy Josef Breuer, Anna O.'s analyst, at the end of his theoretical contribution to Studies on Hysteria , consoles himself and his readers regarding the incompleteness of the then current understanding on hysteria by quoting Theseus, Duke of Athens in A Midsummer Night's Dream . While Theseus, as spectator, says of the play "the best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are now worse, if imagination amend them", Brener considers his "clumsy hypothesis" on hysteria as "gaping lacunas which have been concealed rattier than bridged". These hypotheses he considers naturally defective and "must attach to all physiological expositions of complicated psychical processes". "And even the weakest (of them) is not without value if it honestly and modestly tries to hold on to the outlines of the shadows", "unknown real objects". His acknowledgements of an irreducible unsatisfactoriness between our representations or ideas and the thing or the process itself is a fitting introduction to this question of a trace of l'objet petit o through the case of his celebrated patient, Anna O. The case of Anna O. was the first case history of the new science of psychoanalysis. It was here that Breuer demonstrated that hysterical symptoms erected themselves in the place of speech, that they could be talked away by speech. As we know, Anna O. took this method unto herself as her "talking cure". Essentially, this is the story of a young 21 year old woman who developed an overt hysterical illness contemporaneously with her father's organic illness. Her father, of whom she was "passionately fond”, became ill of an affliction of the lungs in July 1880 which failed to clear up. He succumbed nine months later in April 1881. Anna O. became ill at the same time as her father and, although she assiduously assisted her mother and the other sick bed attendants in caring for her father for the first six months into his illness, (which involved shift work and long hours of sitting by his bedside day and night), she had developed the "whole assemblage of hysterical phenomena without anyone knowing it" before she "took permanently to her bed" in December 1880. Until the death of her "adored father" three months later, it appears she was hardly aware of his condition and his death on April 5th, 1881 came as a great shock to her, with a further deterioration in her condition. By June 7th, 1881, three months later, she had become so unmanageable that she was transferred to a sanatorium. The account of her treatment with Breuer spans another year until June 7th 1882, the anniversary of her transfer to the institution by which date she determined that the whole treatment with Breuer should be finished. So his involvement with Anna O. dated from sometime before her taking to her bed, that is before December 1880, until June 7th, 1882.

The Letter, Issue 3, Spring 1995, Pages 21 - 35 BEAUTY AND THE BUTCHER - THE DESIRE OF THE HYSTERIC AND ITS INTERPRETATION Maeve Nolan * There was once a clever hysteric. It was the turn of the century and because she was a hysteric she went to see Dr. Freud. In fact, because she was a hysteric she went to outwit him, and to prove to him that his newly-elaborated dream theory was wrong. He had concluded that dreams always represent the fulfilment of a wish, so she brought him a dream which was the exact opposite - a dream in which one of her wishes was not fulfilled and she defied him to fit that into his theory. This was her dream: I wanted to give a supper party, but I had nothing in the house but a little smoked salmon. I thought I would go out and buy something, but remembered then that it was Sunday afternoon, and all the shops would be shut. Next I tried to ring up some caterers, but the telephone was out of order. So I had to abandon my wish to give a supper party. [1] Freud devotes only four pages of his dream book to this dream, its interpretation, and the inevitable conclusion that of course it supported his theory after all. There are many things we don't know, like why she came, how long she stayed, and what became of her. Despite this, due to the richness, as ever, of Freud's text, there is much we do know and much more we can deduce from the text we have. By the time Lacan turns his attention to it over fifty years later and uses it in his seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious as an example par excellence of the desire of the hysteric, we have a very meaty story indeed.

The Letter, Issue 3, Spring 1995, Pages 76 - 99 FROM IMPOSSIBILITY TO INABILITY: LACAN'S THEORY ON THE FOUR DISCOURSES Paul Verhaeghe During the late sixties and the early seventies, the intellectual talk of the town was about structuralism and the structuralists, with Foucault, Lacan and Barthes being the most prominent figures. The fact that each of these three denied being a structuralist was considered irrelevant, and added a bit of parisian spice and frivolity to the discussion. As far as Lacan is concerned, I find it rather difficult to answer the question of whether he was a structuralist or not. In a discussion of that sort, everything depends on the definition one adheres to. Nevertheless, one thing is very clear to me: Freud was not a structuralist and, if Lacan is the only postfreudian who lifted psychoanalytic theory to another and higher level, then this Aufhebung , elevation in Hegel's sense, has everything to do with Lacanian structuralism and formalism. The rest of the postfreudians stayed behind Freud, even returning very often to the level of the prefreudians. It is obvious that Freud was fundamentally innovative. He operated on his own a shift towards a new paradigm in the study of mankind. He was so fundamentally innovative that it would seem almost impossible to go any further. So, if we state that Lacan operates an Aufhebung, we have to explain what we mean by that. What is there to gain with Lacanian theory?

The Letter, Issue 3, Spring 1995, Pages 45 - 52 CULTURE AND HYSTERIA Rob Weatherill On 16 April 58, Lacan writes about Freud that his 'only mistake, as one might say was, drawn along in a way by the necessities of language, to orientate in a premature fashion, to put the subject, to implicate the subject in too definite a fashion in this situation of desire'. [1] This would by now be a familiar Lacanian complaint about the non-Lacanian treatment of the hysteric; that is, as I understand it, the consideration of hysteria outside the context of the construction of human subjectivity itself. Here, the non- Lacanians see the sexually-coloured excessive demandingness of the hysteric within the narrower context of some fundamental failure of the early infantile environment. If only this had been good enough, integrative enough, then there would be no need for the later pathologies of the hypersexualisation of adult life. From this perspective, then, the analytic task becomes one of re-integration of the aberrant pregenital impulses which are seen to be so disastrously disruptive of the normal happy life we have all come to expect. Hysteria is seen, then, ultimately as deviant, demonic, dangerous - unanalysable if we take Zetzel's fourth category. [2] Here is the description. These patients are floridly hysterical, and unable to distinguish between phantasy and reality. Frequently, they will have been to more than one therapist. They have few areas of conflict-free interests; their defences are directed towards controlling external reality. In this grouping the developmental history will reveal one or more of the following findings: significant absence or separation from one or both parents during the first four years; serious pathology in one or both parents, often associated with divorce or unhappy marriage; prolonged illness in childhood; ongoing hostile/dependant relationship with mother, who is seen as either devaluing or devalued; absence of meaningful and sustained relations with either sex. Any two of these, combined with a regressed transference, should constitute a warning signal, she says.

The Letter, Issue 3, Spring 1995, Pages 53 - 66 MODERNITY AS AN HYSTERICAL EXPERIENCE Gerry Sullivan From Marshall McLuhan to Baudrillard there is a significant strand of what has come to be called postmodernism which offers an apocalyptic vision of the effect of media on modern culture. It is considered that the multiplicity of representational images, originating in photography, accentuated by the effect of the cinema, and culminating in the ubiquity of televisual images, has on the one hand had the effect of devaluing the status of any particular image, however profound or sacred its origin, whilst, on the other hand, inciting a craving for ever fresher and ever more revealing images. [1] It is considered that the effect of these developments is to undermine the basis of literate culture, by shortening the attention span of individuals to an extent incompatible with the continuance of a widespread acquaintance with the heritage of this culture. As a corollary of this, it is assumed that the consequence of a severe shortening of the attention span of individuals is a degradation in their capacity to form rational judgments. This in turn leaves them open to general manipulation through the mass media, whether this takes a propagandistic, inflammatory or concupiscent form. There are elements of truth in this vision, but it is by no means as clear-cut as the more apocalyptic of its adherents would hold. Indeed, if the plaints of these social and cultural commentators are placed in historical series and context, an entirely different light is thrown on their import.

The Letter, Issue 3, Spring 1995, Pages 36 - 44 HYSTERIA AND LITIGATION: COPING WITH THE REAL OF TRAUMA Aisling Campbell The topic of my discussion today is one which may not impinge very much on the practice of analysts, but about which, nevertheless, I think analysis has something to say. I am going to talk about those patients, ubiquitous in psychiatric practice, who suffer from "post-traumatic stress disorder" as a result of accidents and who subsequently seek financial redress through personal injury claims. I think that these patients are the "new hysterics" of our time, perhaps replacing Anna O. and Dora and the other hysterics to whom we owe so much. As a psychiatrist I am in the happy (or perhaps not so happy) position of having seen a lot of these patients and I hope that my comments will hold some interest for you. Most of you will be aware that personal injury claims have increased at a dramatic rate in Ireland over the past ten years. For some, litigation is so profitable that this method of making an income is affectionately known as "The Compo". Here, four times as many claims arise as in the UK, and our settlements are the highest in Europe. Some of the claims made on insurance companies and city corporations are deliberately fraudulent and their perpetrators are motivated only by greed. This phenomenon is not the topic of my discussion today. However, there is undoubtedly a large number of individuals who genuinely suffer injury and mental anguish after an accident of some sort and who seek compensation in court without any intent to defraud. Psychiatrists and other doctors see many of these patients as we are frequently called upon to bear witness to the genuineness of their suffering. They are extremely difficult to treat and seem to do badly in any sort of therapy, even when the therapist has no part in the provision of medicolegal reports. Analysts certainly see few of them, particularly before settlement. They present particular difficulties for analysts by virtue of having received financial reward for their suffering.

The Letter, Issue 3, Spring 1995, Pages 109 - 124