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The Letter, Issue 5, Autumn 1995, Pages 50 - 67 SOME REMARKS ON OEDIPUS AND WRITING Andre Michels The pre-occupation with Oedipus, with the so-called Oedipus and castration complexes, is an unbroken thread which runs through Lacan's oeuvre, especially his seminars. Involved here are the following questions: - what is its status? - what is its relationship to myth and to tragedy? - to what extent does it contribute to an understanding of clinical material and therefore to psychopathology? - above all, what is its value in the practice of interpretation? I It emerges very clearly from Freud's letters to Fliess that the Oedipus drama stands at the beginning of psychoanalysis. Taking the Sophoclean reading of the Oedipus myth as his point of departure, he succeeded in arriving at a new reading of the clinical material that was at his disposal. At first he was convinced of the perversion of fathers (Perversion der Voter) until he recognized in this a product of the neurotic fantasy. Since then, this recognition has become the point of departure for every deliberation and assertion that claims to be psychoanalytical. The conscious fantasy and therefore the scenario of perversion has the same structure as the unconscious fantasy of the neurotic. For this reason Freud very early on understood hysteria as the negative of perversion. [1] (That is, in the same sense that we speak of a photographic negative). Psychosis forms itself on the basis of an inadequate or absent fantasy, the structure of which it preserves and accurately reproduces. The case is similar to the so-called psychosomatic illness, which runs its course on a completely different level, - that of the body. The bodily somatic system arises at the place where the fantasy offers the subject no protection. This protective function takes three forms: first against perversion, second against psychosis, and third, against somatic illness.

The Letter, Issue 5, Autumn 1995, Pages i - iii

The Letter, Issue 5, Autumn 1995, Pages 18 - 32 THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS* Charles Melman Introduction Cormac Gallagher: I am delighted once again to welcome Dr Charles Melman into our midst. I don't think it is any exaggeration to say that he has been one of the main forces in psychoanalysis, not just in France but also here in Ireland. He has been coming here since 1987 and has made a major contribution to the work we are doing, - mainly by polarising it and by forcing us to both lift our sights and to keep in touch with what is happening in France and, indeed, throughout the world. On this occasion, what we asked him to do was to talk about Lacan's seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. I don't know whether Charles Melman was at that particular seminar, - but in any case, he is very close to Lacan's thought and so we could have no better introduction than his. Charles Melman: I am very glad to meet you again but sorry, once more, because I don't speak your language. We are going to talk about the seminar that you are studying this year, a seminar which I did in fact attend, and one which took place in a rather dramatic atmosphere. Up until 1964 Lacan had reserved his teaching for psychoanalysts and if you wanted to go to his lectures you had to get his permission. But since at the time of this seminar he had just been excluded from the psychoanalytic community and since he also had problems with his own students, - (and it very often happens in psychoanalysis that analysts have problems with their students - that would be an interesting problem to study. Maybe at another time we will do that), - Lacan decided that this seminar would be an open one and he would no longer simply talk to psychoanalysts.

The Letter, Issue 5, Autumn 1995, Pages 129 - 140 ON PSYCHOTHERAPY A FREUDO-LACANIAN POINT OF VIEW Filip Geerardyn I would like to raise the question of whether we would be justified in considering the Studies on Hysteria as a writing about psychotherapy since firstly, the authors do not use the term 'psychoanalysis' but talk frequently about 'psychotherapy', and sometimes about 'Psychological analysis' or 'psychical treatment', - and since secondly, this publication from 1895 is without a doubt one of the oldest writings on psychotherapy as it is currently used so we cannot ignore it in any historical approach to the subject of psychotherapy. If we agree to this, then what demands are to be met by psychotherapists? A first specification of this question can be formulated as follows: by what are Breuer and Freud possessed in their respective engagement with psychotherapy? By what desire is each motivated as psychotherapist? Are they driven by a desire to cure or by a desire to know? The starting point for their joint publication was the establishment of a rather simple fact, discovered quite by accident, namely the fact that in some cases a symptom can be 'cured' or can disappear as a result of the patient talking. Anna O. spoke...and before the eyes of a somewhat perplexed Breuer, she was cured of her hysterical symptoms.

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 91 - 98 THE ABSENCE OF ANXIETY: A CASE OF TRANSVESTISM Aisling Campbell Anxiety is so universal a human experience that it is remarkable only when it is absent. It is generally accepted as ubiquitous in the neurotic and the psychotic. Only the perverse individual seems to escape its insistence, albeit briefly, when he is playing out his phantasy. In this situation, it is not just that his anxiety is suppressed - it is completely absent. Rather, he induces anxiety in others; witness the panic engendered by the paedophile priest. I would like to discuss the case of a man whose absolute lack of anxiety when he is engaged in transvestism is instructive of the particular structure of the pervert as differing from that of the neurotic or the psychotic. I have given him the name Brian to facilitate my discussion. His life was by no means free of anxiety: he came with symptoms of severe anxiety when he was required to speak to anyone outside his own family, especially with anyone in authority. He was barely able to carry on a conversation even with his workmates without being crippled by this anxiety. His most distressing symptom, however, as far as he was concerned, was his habit of dressing in womens' clothing. He had begun by buying and dressing in underwear but progressed to wearing more and more complete feminine outfits. When he felt anxious and frustrated - which was often - he would experience an irresistible urge to "dress up", and would dress in front of the mirror to the accompaniment of frenetic masturbation. This was the only time he got pleasure out of anything at all in his life and the only time he was free of anxiety. He is thirty-three, married and his first child is a boy of seven. He came to analysis following the birth of his second child, also a boy, now three. His father was a butcher and was addicted to alcohol for as long as Brian could remember: in fact his father died of alcohol-related diseases soon after he began analysis. His mother also drank, but secretly. His father made no secret of it, falling down drunk just outside the front door every night, so that it was impossible to ignore him; Brian would regularly have to step over him in order to enter the house, a house he thought of as his mother's house. His mother continually put his father down to himself and his brothers and sisters - but she spoke about the father constantly, his failure as a husband and father permeating her discourse. He made an energetic attempt as a child never to take sides in his parents' arguments. He is the third eldest of five; his older brother is psychotic, uncontrollable and deluded, and lives at home with his mother. Brian is constantly called upon by his mother to run errands for her, to take his brother to the psychiatric hospital; he finds it difficult to refuse her.

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 74 - 78 ANXIETY, ART AND AUFHEBUNG: SUBLATION, MANET AND ANXIETY Brendan Staunton It is a characteristic of our minds to be ever engaged in passing judgement. John Henry Newman The performance of the function of judgement is not made possible until the creation of the symbol of negation has endowed thinking with a first measure of freedom from the consequences of repression, and, with it, from the compulsion of the pleasure principle. Sigmund Freud The thesis of this paper is that anxiety is a phenomenon that appears when the new is negated rather than sublated; that anxiety happens when a trauma is experienced and something is repressed. (We know from Freud's critique of Rank that the birth trauma is not the sole determinant of anxiety, without denying that birth is traumatic). [1] To unpack the abstract terms, and bring out the distinction and relationship between repression, negation and sublation, I will tease out a parallel between an event in art history, and what Freud and Lacan say about anxiety, the permeating immediacy of which is self-evident in our work, but whose recognition is problematic, due to it being the prime affect, that is linked to and different from, fear, anger and hate.

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 54 - 62 ANXIETY AND PHOBIA: SIGN AND SYMPTOM? Helena Texier In the course of his seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan, in answer to a question from the audience says that 'For analysis, anxiety is a crucial term of reference, because in effect anxiety is that which does not deceive. But anxiety may be lacking'. [1] There is perhaps no better way of unmasking the positive face of anxiety and its role as the purveyor of truth than by way of referring to a clinical case which begins with its marked absence. And there is quite possibly no better case to serve us in that regard than the well-known case of little Dick which Melanie Klein presents in her 1930 paper The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego. [2] It was this case presentation which served Klein in establishing what was to become for her the central role of anxiety as the driving force in the process of symbolisation and as the prime agent in the creation of phantasy. A discussion of the case is doubly advantageous to us here today since Lacan's commentary on it in his 1953-54 seminar, Freud's Papers on Technique, [3] provides us with dues to understanding his early position with regard to anxiety, a position which can be understood as asserting that anxiety is synonymous with (and is a sign of) the unconscious.

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 24 - 31 THE CONCEPT OF ANXIETY WITHIN AN OBJECT RELATIONS PERSPECTIVE Helen Sheehan In a paper submitted to the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1943, Ronald Fairbairn, the Edinburgh based psychoanalyst wrote Freud's libidio theory has remained relatively unquestioned. This is a situation which I have come to regard as most regrettable ... In my opinion it is high time that psychopathological inquiry which in the past has been successively focused first upon impulse and later upon the ego should now be focused upon the object toward which impulse is directed. To put the matter more accurately if less pointedly the time is now ripe for a psychology of object relations. [1] By this seemingly innocuous statement Fairbairn set in motion a word which became act and which has had very important consequences for psychoanalysis. One is here reminded of old King Lear's demand for a public display of affection, 'Tell me my daughters which of you shall we say doth love us most?' [2] , which in itself is harmless enough but we are reminded of the dire furies it unleashed. In fact Lear provides a perfect backdrop from which to study the history of the psychoanalytic movement itself - the moments of barrenness, of storms, both part of the natural world and of the psychical- of alienation - of excommunication - of mindless suffering - even The Thing itself appears in the shape of the beggar.

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 63 - 73 PSYCHIC STRUCTURE AND MANIFESTATIONS OF ANXIETY WITHIN THE CLINIC Gerry Sullivan The aim of this paper is to explore the connection between the context within which anxiety is manifested in the clinic and the psychic structure of the analysand. It is usually held that the difference between the psychiatric and the psychoanalytic clinics is that the former is a clinic of symptoms, while the latter is a clinic of fantasy. [1] This implies that it is symptoms which provide the basis of a judgment of psychic structure in the case of the psychiatric clinic, while it is the nature of the fantasy which is the significant element in the circumstances of the psychoanalytic clinic. However, given the psychoanalytic view of anxiety as the most revealing, the least duplicitous of the affects, it is the hypothesis of this paper that the manifestations of anxiety within the psychoanalytic clinic may also be effective guides to psychic structure. In order to sustain this argument we will briefly review Freud's later position with respect to anxiety, before considering its symptomatic clinical manifestations. The text we shall draw upon is his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and, in particular, upon the thirty second lecture 'Anxiety and Instinctual Life'. Stratchey, in an editorial note, refers in particular to this lecture, and the previous one, which we shall also touch upon, in terms of a ' ... plunge into metapsychological and theoretical discussions of a difficulty which had been studiously avoided fifteen years earlier'. [2] The lecture referred to above is sandwiched between two others, the preceding on the general structure of the mind and the suceeding on femininity, which proved a continuing theoretical difficulty to Freud, producing ongoing extensive revision and theoretical reformulation. We can consider the concept of anxiety as belonging to this sequence of crucial yet intractable ideas. In terms of the earlier conception of anxiety as an unpleasurable discharge, its tension with respect to the fundamental notion of homeostatic discharge as the foundation of pleasure was a contributory element in the emergence of a conception of a beyond of the pleasure principle, and an uncoupling of the automatic bond between discharge and pleasure. With respect to the later notion of anxiety as signal, the question of the looming source of the apprehensiveness manifesting itself in anxiety necessitated a structural differentiation of anxiety with respect to triggering sources.

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 110 - 117 NOT ENOUGH AND NEVER TOO MUCH * Dany Nobus The last time I experienced anxiety was around two o'clock this afternoon when Cormac Gallagher asked me to formulate the closing remarks of this Second Annual Congress of the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland (APPI). At that particular moment, I was suddenly- confronted with the mysterious desire of the Other. However, the first question I asked myself was not 'What is going to happen next?', but rather 'what have I done to deserve this?’ A possible answer to this question suggested itself, along the lines that I had come quite a long way to attend this congress, after having met and heard some Irish people at a conference in Belgium, after having read some excellent pieces in an Irish Lacanian journal and after having been stimulated by the strong working alliance between the Department of Psychoanalysis of Ghent University on the one hand and what I dare to call the psychoanalytic circle of Dublin on the other hand. Indeed, this could be exactly what I had done to deserve this. Of course I do not have any proof that this was precisely what provoked either the Other's desire or my anxiety, that is, I cannot be certain that it was not another figment of my neurotic mind and as such something completely alien to the whole situation. As a matter of fact, perhaps I only deserved the anxiety of being asked to present the closing remarks because I had not done anything really. In this respect, I would like to remind you of the joke of the Russian farmer who is sent to a Gulag for twenty-five years because of alleged anti-communist practices. At the entrance of the camp, the janitor asks the poor man: 'What have you done to deserve this?’And the Russian farmer responds: To be honest, I have not done anything really!' Whereupon the janitor exclaims: 'You can count yourself lucky, since for doing nothing they usually give you a life- sentence'.

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages i - ii

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 44 - 53 THE RIDDLE OF CASTRATION ANXIETY: LACAN BEYOND FREUD 'Mind The Gap. Mind The Gap. Mind The Gap ...’ [1] Paul Verhaeghe One of the most obvious observations that can be made about castration anxiety is that it is very difficult to observe. Indeed, in clinical practice it is very hard to find a subject that comes to us complaining about his or her castration anxiety. To my knowledge, the ultimate castratophobia does not exist. This clinical fact is endorsed by an historical one: the concept of castration anxiety itself only received its general expression at a rather late stage of Freud's theory. For example, as late as 1914, Freud equates the castration complex with 'masculine protest' and states explicitly that there are neuroses in which this element does not appear at all. [2] Twenty years later, in 1933, castration anxiety is transform ed into the ultim ate stum bling block of psychoanalysis, both in theory and in clinical practice. Indeed, in Analysis Terminable and Interminable Freud describes castration anxiety as the biological bedrock on which every psychological treatment must necessarily fail and where every psychological theory meets its limit. Biology is also held responsible for two different forms, neatly distributed along the gender line: castration anxiety for the male, penis envy for the female. Moreover, as this idea is formulated by way of conclusion of this very important paper, it receives all the characteristics of a postulate, expressing a 'nec plus ultra'. Other than that, we only have recourse to other theories (biology, genetics etc.) and to another practice, of which Marie Bonaparte was the historical example and which can nowadays be found to be reappearing in Donna Haraway's ideas about cyborgs. [3]

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 99 - 109 IN SCHREBER'S CASE: AN EXPLORATION OF PSYCHOTIC ANXIETY Patricia McCarthy I want to begin by showing you a photograph of Paul Schreber as a young man, [1] probably in his early thirties, before his marriage and before the suicide of his brother Gustav. This is to put you at your ease by showing you that Schreber, whose account of his madness is difficult to approach for all of us, once looked like that. As you can see, he was a handsome man, correct and conventional in his dress who didn't look mad. We can relate to an image like this, much less so than to the character described thus at the height of his stay at the Sonnenstein asylum: 'Conduct unchanged. Often naked in his room before a mirror, laughing and screaming, adorned with gaily coloured ribbons'. [2] So what brought about this terrible change? It’s a very big question. Yet we must try to take our bearings. The paranoic completely subverts our notion of a unified subject, of what is inside and what is outside. As we conduct our affairs at the level of the social agency which is our ego, we by and large take as given our sense of unity, of autonomy. We have a sense of identity, - separate from our fellows, we are more or less at home with our specular image. There is an inside and an outside. This notion of inside and outside was first developed for us by Charles Melman in his talk on paranoia, [3] when he described the representation of space for the subject of consciousness as Euclidian, a closed system where the surface is the cut. Though this is our spontaneous way of thinking, when we take the simple topological entity of the moebius strip, we are introduced to a continuous surface. Here there is no cut and so there is a confusion between what is inside and outside. This surface of the moebius strip challenges us to re-order our representations of space and in so doing, we can begin to think about anxiety and the paranoic.

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 32 - 43 LIBIDO AND TOXIC SUBSTANCE Rik Loose If writing, according to the king and under the sun produces the opposite effect from what is expected, if the pharmacon is pernicious, it is so because it doesn't come from around here. It comes from afar, it is external or alien to the living, which, is the right-here of the inside, to logos as the zoon it claims to assist or relieve. J.Derrida in Plato's Pharmacy Introduction Despite Freud's tendency to deny this, there can be little doubt that the Cocaine Episode wa s an important part of his scientific and therapeutic work. Elsewhere we have proposed a reading of Freud's Cocaine Papers which considers them as a beginning of the Freudian adventure .[1]

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 79 - 90 THE ILLUSION OF A FUTURE: FREUD'S ANXIETY AND RELIGION Tom McGrath From the dawning of consciousness either collectively or individually, the human subject is faced with wonder, and the response that is evoked is the desire to know, the desire to understand, the Eros of the Mind. The Eros of the Mind expresses itself continually - apparently irrepressibly - in the quest(ions) - the endless questions of the child, the historical and contemporary questions of human subjects about meaning and truth, and beauty and love, and life itself. One can understand religion in its most general sense as being an hypothetical answer to that quest of the subject. Essential to the notion of question - or quest - is the fact and the experience of limit, of gap, of lack, of what there is not, and by implication of what is anticipated, of what might be, what could be or what should be. In every case the what-is-not-yet, is an indication of a lack, or a gap, or an absence, or a privation, or one might say a pain, and the pain is evoked by the not knowing what it is all about, or not knowing where it is all going, or not knowing what is the point of my life - each in different ways formulates, or is the product of, a lack of meaning. In the absence of that meaning, in the fact of that gap, the human subject has shown enormous ingenuity in inventing or constructing illusions or systems for him self/herself that enables the gap to be bridged or to allow him or her to overlook it, or to ignore it, or to deny it. The exaggerated claims ofhumanistic science amount to a crude denial of what it, that is science, itself can’t explain in its own terms.

The Letter, Issue 6, Spring 1996, Pages 1 - 23