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The Letter, Issue 3, Spring 1995, Pages 67 - 75 IS HYSTERIA A FEMINIST RESPONSE OR IS FEMINISM AN EXPRESSION OF HYSTERIA? Mary Cullen & Nellie Curtin * Some Introductory Remarks To begin with, I wish to highlight some of the issues relevant to womens' lives in Ireland today, and I speak from a feminist perspective, or perhaps I should say, a hysterical position! In the last few decades Ireland has changed beyond recognition. We have moved from a largely rural and traditional society to a largely modern and urban one. The shift has been so great within such a short period of time, a single generation, from the 1950s to the 1980s, that Ireland has been considered unique within the history of family studies, a point noted in a recent ESRI research paper. [1] The patterns of the traditional extended family have dissolved and have been replaced by the norm of the nuclear society. This shift has had an impact on all of our lives and womens' role has undergone a major change. Widespread education, the influence of the media, increased living standards, however unevenly spread, and career opportunities for women have led to changes in the traditional hierarchical structures of marriage. Indeed, the very constitution of families has changed dramatically. More women are working outside the home and are financially independent. In working class areas too, more women are working outside the home, but at low pay in service industries. These are often the breadwinners in families in which the father is a recipient of Social Welfare.

The Letter, Issue 4, Summer 1995, Pages 13 - 26 THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS * Helena Texier Reflecting for a moment on the title that I found I had chosen for this paper today, it occurred to me that, for those of us whose mother- tongue is English at least, this phrase Through the Looking Glass immediately evokes a reference, - not to Jacques Lacan, but rather to Lewis Carroll and his Alice's adventures. Following quickly on this, it occurred to me that really Man did not have to rely on the emergence of psychoanalysis in order to grasp the means by which he could come to realise the full weight of the mirror's effect on his being, or the possibility of a life beyond the looking glass. Even if psychoanalysis had never existed, man's reflections on his relation to his image would still be available to us in the field of the Arts and especially so in the field of the Letter. If Freud had not written about the ego, narcissism, the image, the eye, the automaton and Man's curious relation to his optical instruments in The Uncanny , we would still have Hoffman's tale of Nathaniel and his beloved doll in The Sandman, and we would still have Dostoyevsky's sad account of Mr Golyadkin in The Double. If Lacan had never seen fit to describe for us what is involved in his famous looking-glass phase we would still have at our disposal the essence of what is at stake in a work penned by our own Oscar Wilde. I am of course referring to his short novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and in particular to the following passage: Dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture, and turned towards it. When he saw it he drew back, his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognised himself for the first time. He stood there motionless and in wonder, dimly aware that Hallward was speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. The sense of his own beauty came on hime like a revelation. He had never seen it before. [1]

The Letter, Issue 4, Summer 1995, Pages 27 - 43 IS THE CONCEPT OF THE DEATH DRIVE ESSENTIAL WHEN SPEAKING OF TRAUMA? * Aisling Campbell I put my title in the form of a question initially; that was because there is something about this Freudian concept of the death drive that always raises a question. Do you 'believe' in it or not? Do we really have to think about it, can't we just take the rest of Freud's writings without having to consider the importance of Beyond the Pleasure Principle? [1] The death drive is a point of doubt for many analysts; they can't quite stomach it. It is a spanner in the Freudian works. It doesn't fit in, it doesn't work, so we try to explain it by means of Freud's depression, his grief over his daughter's death, and so on. Well, I am trying to explain also - though I have found that I haven't really succeeded in answering my own question. Yet in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where Freud introduces the idea of the death drive, he discusses some of the most pertinent of clinical questions, in particular two not unconnected topics, trauma and repetition. Repetition, in the context of analysis, and the human act, is something that is always puzzling; it doesn't make sense and so science is invoked to explain it. the story of the woman who returns again and again to her battering husband, or the man who repeatedly selects women who let him down, all these stories are familiar to the analyst and commonplace in the clinic. One often hears the explanation given 'She learnt it from her father who was a wife-beating alcoholic', 'He learnt it from his mother who abandoned him when he was young', and so on. But it is a mistake to use learning theory in this way, since the acts of the human subject are radically different from the behaviours of animals which are shaped by learning in this way. To illustrate this, I would like to give you two case histories: firstly, the case of my dear tortoiseshell cat who is to be found every morning staring at some distant point under the sofa. She has usually lost her ball and wants it retrieved. Her behaviour is successful because I will invariably rescue it on cue. Because she has learnt that staring at the sofa always gets a response, she keeps on doing it. This is truly learnt behaviour. But in the case of a human subject we must move from under the sofa and onto the couch. Lacan distinguishes the things that humans do as acts and there is a vast difference between act and learnt behaviour. I would like to outline a second case history by way of example.

The Letter, Issue 4, Summer 1995, Pages 1 - 12 THE OBJECT a Guy Le Gaufey For many reasons, we are led to translate the Lacanian objet a into the English-Lacanian object o, picking up on the first letter of the little other, as Lacan in fact did to arrive at that naming. But I also think that the expression object a could remain as such in English, at least if we hear this letter 'a' as the first letter of the word 'any'. The objet a is not 'any' object; but I'd like to convince you that this object a is the first step towards mastery of this very important piece of the symbolic order which this 'any' is; that is, the ability to conceive what a variable is. You might fear that this new link between this very obscure object a and this very intricate notion of a variable is going to immediately give us all a headache. But, for the time being, I'm still confident that bringing them closer is much more likely to throw some more light on each of them than to thicken the darkness surrounding them. We'll see. Firstly, when beginning to tackle the object a , take note of where the main difficulty comes from. It arises in relation to the fact that, at the end of the fifties, Lacan was looking for a resolution to the problem of conceptualising non-narcissistic entities in the structure of the speaking subject. As a result of his endeavours, emerged this new subject 'represented by a signifier for another one', and a new object related to it: our object a.

The Letter, Issue 4, Summer 1995, Pages 76 - 98 OBSESSIONALITY, CAPITALISM, TRANSGRESSION Gerry Sullivan The argument advanced in this paper is a tentative one, based on patterns of resemblance rather than one of a confidence in the clarity of consequences derived from well grounded concepts. Nevertheless, the cultural and political importance of the issues involved stimulate me to gather together some of the ruminations on the nature of capitalism from diverse sources and to compare them with theses advanced by J.-A. Miller on the structure of obsessionality. The first point I would like to look at is the difficulty which late nineteenth century historical sociologists found in characterising the personality traits appropriate to the human individual in the emergence and consolidation of a capitalist economy and polity. I shall take the work of Werner Sombart as indicative of the dichotomy which they attempted to reconcile. Sombart regarded the flexible opportunist qualities associated with entrepreneurship as essential to the success of the capitalist form. Yet he also noted that a contrary spirit of personal qualities, the bourgeois spirit, was also required: The spirit of enterprise is a synthesis of the greed of gold, the desire for adventure, and the love of exploration, to mention but a few elements. The bourgeois spirit is composed of calculation, careful policy, reasonableness, and economy. [1] He considers that the latter spirit is predicated upon the quantification of phenomena, and this in turn is intimately related to the rise of systematic book-keeping. Firstly, ... it puts order into events and shapes them into an artful system, thus one may consider it as the first cosmos based on the principle of mechanical thinking. [2]

The Letter, Issue 4, Summer 1995, Pages 44 - 58 THE PURLOINED TONGUE * Claus-Dieter Rath It is remarkable at an international psychoanalytic congress to have to opt for English or French and not be able to use the language of Freud. Something has happened to the language of Freud through which he saw another language - lalangue. The formulation of psychoanalysis by Freud drew not only from German - from which Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt in his book Quand Freud voit la mer. Freud et la langue allemande starts off - but also influenced the german language. It brought new elements (word usage, vocabulary) into the langue and also changed the language as a means of elaboration of the knowledge of lalangue. When one speaks of Sprache , 'language' in German, one refers not only to language (langage) but also to tongue (langue). Only in selective speech is the word Zunge used for Sprache (tongue, langue), as one might say, a 'strange human tongue'. Almost exclusively what one means by tongue is that slippery organ of touch and taste, one of the objects of gratification of the sucking child, and at the same time the organ of the production of sounds - think of the problem of the English 'th' sound, or the rolling 'r'. Still German idioms consider the tongue the place from where speech issues, - the representative of a threshold or barrier which the Word must overcome but which, at times, it fails to do when, for example, a word leads to a repelling image: 'he has his heart on his tongue'; 'I cannot bring it over my tongue"; 'the word sits on the tongue'; 'control your tongue'; and 'he's burnt his tongue'. [1]

The Letter, Issue 4, Summer 1995, Pages 59 - 75 THE SIGNIFIER AND SHAKESPEARE Anne Hanrahan Two women have fascinated me for many years: I use the word women' deliberately for, though both are in fact literary creations of Shakespeare, both, from my first 'meetings' with them, evoked in me a great sense of wonder at their power and frailty and a deep desire to unravel the enigmas that both presented. Lady Macbeth was introduced to me in my last year at primary school! Modern educationalists would question the efficacy of such a practice but I can still taste the morbid appeal of Lady Macbeth to my eleven year old self. Unable to fully understand the words used or articulate a response I, nevertheless, chilled at the horror of Lady Macbeth's depravity yet openly wept for her in her lunatic sleep-walking at the end. She was much more fearsome than any witch of fairy-tales! As part of 'A' level studies, I met the Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra. Despite the acquisition of some elementary tools of literary criticism, it was not Shakespeare's skill as a dramatist that consciously thrilled me; it was Cleopatra herself who filled me with delight and frustration. The great puzzle was to discover who she really was. The Romans called her 'gypsy' and whore'; Antony referred to her as 'wrangling queen', Enobarbas saw within her a spark of the divine; yet, when she herself appeared on stage she could be as insecure, petulant, cruel and infatuated as a teenager but, in her laments upon Antony's death, she would rise to heights of dizzying passion and lyrical beauty. 'I am all fire and air' she asserted as she approached death - and I, like many others, - was captivated.

The Letter, Issue 4, Summer 1995, Pages 99 - 114 EATING DESIRE Liberato Santoro This paper is a contribution to the debate concerning the enigmatic, baffling and paradoxical phenomenon of eating disorders in general and of anorexia nervosa in particular. Also in the light of the complexity, fragility and dangerous pathology of the syndrome of eating disorders, it does not question the necessity and value of strictly medical, psychiatric and other types of therapeutic measures and strategies. The discussion that follows does not specifically and explicitly address the clinical issues concerning the syndrome under consideration and its therapeutic treatments, rather, the paper aims to articulate some theoretical suggestions that may help the task of mapping the complex, somewhat mysterious and rebellious land of eating disorders. It explores the phenomena from a psychoanalytic point of view, in order to outline what I consider essential features of the 'deep structure' characteristic and generative of the 'surface structure' of the symptomatology of eating disorders. As will become quite obvious, the paper adopts the pre- supposition - to be verified in its results - that, to coin an expression, 'salvation comes from the Unconscious', just as - I believe - the pathological syndrome stems from unconscious roots. Those roots, I argue, are wrapped around the core of otherness (as if a seed not yet fully metamorphosed), hence around the promising constitution of self-ness in its unavoidable dialectics and dialogue with otherness. The paper can be fruitfully read - as initially conceived - in the wider context of the theme of desire in the story of the psyche and as a particular instance of the dialectics of desire, that story and narrative, amply articulated with deep insight by Jacques Lacan in particular, found in Hegel its incipient voice. Even in our reflections on the structure of eating disorders and their aetiology, Hegel's considerations on the nature of otherness and subjectivity - and their metaphorical 'substitutes' such as food, eating, processes of negation, digestion, assimilation, excretion - will prove of enormous significance. If nothing else this paper, precisely by means of the analysis of some chosen Hegelian texts, hopes to be a meaningful contribution to psychoanalytic discourse on the theme of eating disorders.

The Letter, Issue 4, Summer 1995, Pages 115 - 125 PSYCHIC CONTUSION: REMARKS ON FERENCZI AND TRAUMA * Martin Stanton Few would now question that Sandor Ferenczi was an important pioneer in formulating psychoanalytic approaches to trauma. Unfortunately, however, this critical celebration is accompanied by a set of grossly distorted readings of Ferenczi's texts, as well as by serious misrepresentations of his radical transformations of psychoanalytic technique to work with trauma victims. The main distortions are that Ferenczi re-discovered the 'truth' of the seduction theory at the end of his life, so advocated that many mental disorders in adult life related to the traumatic experience of sexual abuse in childhood. [1] Of course, it is neither hard to see why this argument has become so current, given the discovery of the importance and extent of child sexual abuse during the last decade; nor, in this context, is it hard to see why Ferenczi has become characterized as the one analyst who was prepared to say that abuse was real, as opposed to contructed through fantasy, though in fact he said nothing of the sort. Moreover, this view of Ferenczi as the discoverer of the reality of trauma - has led to equally distorting conceptions of his so- called 'radical' revision of psychoanalytic technique to adapt to this increased awareness of real sexual abuse: particularly prevalent here is the notion that championed empathy, and advocated that analysts should go out of their way to be warm and understanding with their patients in order to facilitate the trust needed for disclosure of the trauma. According to some variants of this view, it is quite acceptable to hug or hold patients when they are distressed, or to loosen the boundaries between the consulting room and the outside world - such as going for a walk with them, or having a conversation in the street, should this be seen as beneficial to building up trust. In this essay, I wish first of all to discredit this view, and show rather that Ferenczi's view of trauma had a much wider focus than child sexual abuse, and in fact centred rather on what is today called Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder. Furthermore, interest in trauma did not suddenly arise or transform with the famous Confusion of Tongues paper (1933). [2] Like all the pioneer analysts, Ferenczi's first insights into the nature of trauma came through his acquaintance with the work of Charcot and Bernheim: Ferenczi, like Freud, was particularly concerned with the concept of the idee fixe, the unprocessed amalgam of unconscious material which emerged (usually somatically) in the hypnotic trance or sometimes through therapeutic suggestion to the patient. [3] Moreover, idees fixes had neither a primary nor predominant sexual aetiology, but were structured around introjects - what was unprocessed in the idee fixe came from the other person. This remains central throughout Ferenczi's theoretical elaboration of trauma: for example, in The Confusion of Tongues he stresses that 'for our theory this assumption ... is highly important, namely that the weak and undeveloped personality reacts to sudden unpleasure not by defence, but by anxiety-ridden identification and by introjection of the menacing person or aggressor. [4]

The Letter, Issue 4, Summer 1995, Pages 148 - 150 REPORT ON THE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON FREUD'S PRE- ANALYTIC WRITINGS, GHENT UNIVERSITY, BELGIUM, 12-15 MAY 1995 Aisling Campbell It seems appropriate that a congress on Freud's Pre-Analytic writings, recognised as crucial to the history of psychoanalysis, should be held in a city that is itself so eminently 'historic'. A distant view of Ghent is dominated by the spires of St. Baaf's Cathedral, St. Nicholas' Church and the Belfry reaching toward Heaven. The streets are cobbled, and the older, inner part of the city is reminiscent of a Breughel painting. Each ancient building is meticulously composed of tiny bricks and slates and seems forever on the verge of toppling into its neighbouring canal. The awe inspired by the height of the Gothic Belfry gives a taste of the sheer terror invoked by a precipitous view from its peak. Some of these sentiments were certainly evoked by the Congress - its breadth and ambition were certainly awesome, and a certain amount of anxiety (if not terror) was detectable in those of use who presented papers.

The Letter, Issue 4, Summer 1995, Pages 126 - 147 THE QUESTION OF ORTHODOXY: CLINICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE DIRECTION OF THE CURE Claude Dumezil It is not an easy task to resolve the dilemma whimsically expressed by Lacan when he said: 'A psychoanalysis is the treatment one expects to get from a psychoanalyst', and his remark, in counterpoint, that the former determines the latter. I appreciate Lacan's little joke because it connects the question of Freudian psychoanalysis with the practice itself rather than with a programmatic, defined conceptualization which would limit our leeway, given where we are now in terms of psychoanalytic study. This may explain why a reference to the dogmatic and even religious notion of orthodoxy is surprising for those of us who are still the lay people that Freud wished us to be. My feeling is that clinical psychoanalysis is the analysis itself insofar as its very existence depends on that of the couple analyst- analysand. This point of view leads me to consider the psychoanalyst as a part of a clinical unit. From the topological point of view the cure organizes a space in which unconscious knowledge is worked over and tested in the transference, which is never unilateral. This means that the analyst himself holds a position in the unconscious within the cure; it is this asymmetrical, unstable position that the analyst holds in the unconscious of the transference space that should be made operative.

The Letter, Issue 5, Autumn 1995, Pages 33 - 49 SOME SHORT ODDS ON GAMBLING: A PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH * Rik Loose Introduction We often consider gambling to be dangerous in the same way as drugs and alcohol: It is something to which we can become addicted. The destruction and deterioration caused by addictions reveals a similar pattern and is expressed on a physical, psychological and social level. The unifying nature of their manifestation for the gaze of the Other is reflected in the uniformity of the description of their symptomatology. This has led to the development of treatment models which make hardly any distinction between addictions or addicts, such as the 12-step programmes of self-help groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous. Several questions arise when we look at the addictions from a psychoanalytic perspective (which is the perspective of the subject and not that of the description of observable clinical phenomena). Are different psychological mechanisms at work in compulsive gambling and the toxicomanias (alcoholism and drug addiction)? Are we dealing with different kinds of enjoyment? [1] The scope of this paper will not allow us to formulate an answer to these questions, but we will take the first steps toward an understanding of gambling as an addiction and the way in which it differs from the toxicomanias in terms of the enjoyment which compels the compulsive gambler.

The Letter, Issue 5, Autumn 1995, Pages 108 - 128 DALI: PSYCHOANALYSIS VISUALISED Sandra Carroll The only meeting between Salvador Dali and Sigmund Freud was organised by Stefan Zweig in London in 1938. When Dali visited Freud in London he showed him the painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus [1] and was purportedly told: It is not the unconscious I seek in your pictures, but the conscious. While in the pictures of the masters...that which interests me...seems mysterious...to me, is precisely the search for unconscious ideas, of an enigmatic order, hidden in the picture, your mystery is manifested outright. The picture is but a mechanism to reveal it. [2] Afterwards, Freud wrote to Zweig: I have been inclined to regard the Surrealists as complete fools, but that young Spaniard with his candid, fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate. [3] Dali's comment on the meeting was that Freud's cranium resembled a snail. [4] Freud's interest in the creative artist is evident throughout his published works: ...creative artists are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know of a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind they are far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we have not yet opened up for science. [5]

The Letter, Issue 5, Autumn 1995, Pages 91 - 107 JACQUES LACAN'S RETURN TO FREUD: WOMAN DOES NOT EXIST * Paul Verhaeghe I would like to talk to you this evening about two interesting subjects. The first one is women, which is always very interesting. Maybe it will become clear this evening why women are much more interesting than men, who are as a category, after all is said and done, rather boring. The second subject is sex, which is even more interesting. That's the good news. The bad news is that, following Jacques Lacan, neither of these two exist, which means we have to spend the entire evening talking about the nonexisting... To be more specific, Lacan has said that The Woman, in capitals, that 'The Woman does not exist', in the original French: 'Lμ Fetnme n'existe pas', that's why he writes Th/e with a slash through it; secondly, that The Sexual Relationship does not exist', I1 n'y a pas de rapport sexueV. The second statement is a logical consequence of the first one, which is the most important of the two: if The woman does not exist, there can't be such a thing as THE sexual relationship with THE woman. Clearly these statements are rather provocative. They are meant to be. It is precisely the kind of statement that gave the name of Lacan the ring of controversy, of incomprehensibility or esoterism. Well, that's my second and most important goal for this evening: explaining why those Lacanian statements are strictly Freudian and how they constitute the essence of Lacan's return to Freud.

The Letter, Issue 5, Autumn 1995, Pages 68 - 90 THE PERE-VERSIONS OF DUBLINERS * Helen Sheehan Lacan tells us in The Formations of the Unconscious (1957-58) that Freud, in his search for the Symbolic Origin and the Real Origin of the primitive chain in the history of the subject, finds these origins in his fundamental work A Child Is Being Beaten. [1] Freud has shown that contrary to the general consensus, not that the price we must pay for life is death, but that in fact the reward for death is life. In more accurate Freudian terminology, there is at the beginning of all life fusion/liaison of the libidinal instincts, the life instincts with the death instincts, and that the evolution of the subject involves, at certain stages, the isolation of the death drive. A Child Is Being Beaten is a testament to the decisive struggle engaged in by any future subject whatsoever. Lacan shows how Freud has isolated three crucial moments in the construction of the phantasy and how it is in fact this construction which is the determining point for a future speaking subject. The importance of this phantasy lies in the following five principal areas: 1. It underlines the permutations of the signifier. 2. It shows the consistency of the Imaginary. 3. It helps to explain the enigma of the desire of the mother. 4. It imposes (or fails to do so) the father as author of the law. 5. Finally it brings into play this crucial moment of passage when the Real of genitality becomes Symbolic.

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