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The Letter, Issue 36, Spring 2006, Pages 62 - 68 GEORGE BEST AND THE NAMES OF THE FATHER [1] Charles Melman Excuse me for speaking in French, but I think it will be easier on your ears! When I arrived at Dublin airport, in the taxi the driver asked me 'Did you know that George Best died? As it happened I did, and during the journey I said to myself: here is a remarkable man who throughout his life tried to be the best. It can be said that for him - as I said to myself in the taxi - it was the name of the father that had determined his whole existence, that he had to go too quickly to the end of the journey to reach his home. I know that during his life he deviated from that path a little but finally it caught up with him. So we have every reason to think that our life is only a journeying towards that place where we are going to finally be at rest. Life is simply a semblance, a preface, while we are waiting to finally rejoin the dwelling place of the father. From this point of view time is linear as Cormac was saying this morning, but we know from psychoanalytic experience that our journey is marked by a different rhythm, the rhythm of repetition. What are we repeating? We regularly repeat the unique failure of our desire every time we are dupes of our desire - since repetition is going to show the failure of that desire. So we already see that time is not linear and that what is really guiding us is an object that is unnamed, that has no name and that we cannot connect up with. Namely, if I am engaged along the path of these repetitions I am a dupe, and I no longer know the meaning or the direction of my life.

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 69 - 74 WHY WAS PSYCHOANALYSIS FOUNDED BY AN EMIGRANT? Charles Melman This paper addresses the question ‘ Why was psychoanalysis founded by an emigrant ?’ It draws parallels between Freud’s position in relation to his father and that of both emigrant and hysteric. It is proposed that the position of the emigrant is fundamentally a guilty one in relation to the father and therefore the problem posed by emigrants is not simply at the origin of psychoanalysis but is still current to psychoanalysis. [1] Keywords: Freud; Psychoanalysis; masochism; emigrant; hysteric; father First of all I will say that we are - all of us - masochists. It’s the very condition of our survival. We are all masochists, which means that we live out our suffering and our problems face to face with God, as a confrontation with the very presence of the real of God, in other words, He who stops us from going too quickly to get to the end of our lives. First of all, he says that our time is His, in other words, what He has prescribed for us. A maniac is someone who wants to go too quickly to the end of his life. If we are masochistic and if that is the condition for our survival, we can’t tolerate the idea that God himself is a masochist because that would mean cutting him off from His power, as if He himself were subjected to another influence.

The Letter, Issue 64, Spring 2017, Pages 83 - 88

The Letter, Issue 48, Autumn 2011, Pages 1 - 7 INSIDE AND OUTSIDE IN THE CASE OF PRESIDENT SCHREBER Charles Melman [1] Are our thoughts and actions governed by innate ideas, as Plato would have it, or by the experience of reality mediated by our senses which is Aristotle’s position? This ancient question can be clarified through the psychoanalytic study of neurosis, phobia and mourning but it is especially well illustrated in the experience of psychotics and in particular that of President Schreber. Keywords: Inside and outside, sexuality and trauma, the Moebius strip, the Schreber case. The question that President Schreber gives rise to for us is to know from what position or what locus we are governed ( commandés ) and in that locus through whom and through what, by whom and by what are we governed? If I govern something or if I try to govern something, by whom am I authorised and at the same time who is governing me? This is an old question that dates from about two and a half thousand years ago and we still have not answered it. So we are going to see whether today we can begin, perhaps, to see what the answer might be.

The Letter, Issue 41, Summer 2009, Pages  133 - 140 What Thrilled Me in Fierens’ Book Charles Melman The following paper, translated into English by Cormac Gallagher, was read by Charles Melman during a two-day conference in 2003 on the themes of Christian Fierens' book Lecture de L'Etourdit. Lacan 1972, Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002. Keywords: Christian Fierens; L'Etourdit; lalangue; saying; topology I got to know Fierens' book through Jean-Pierre Lebrun who sent it to me and I immediately found that it was an amazing work and that even if I was not necessarily in agreement with the reading that he gave of this text, it was one of the most stimulating and successful works to be met in our domain. I am saying this all the more because I have with this text of L'Etourdit - I told Christian Fierens about it yesterday - a rather particular relationship. Because, I will pass over this very quickly, Lacan had given me this text for me to publish in Scilicet 4. I had given it back to him telling him that it was an absolutely unreadable, impossible text; that no one would ever understand anything in it; and that the sense of such a publication seemed to me to be absolutely not obvious. Which he did not take very well.

The Letter issue 69, 2020; pp19-30 ARISTOTLE’S AND BENTHAM’S MORAL PHILOSOPHIES IN LACAN’S ETHICS SEMINAR   Donat Desmond   This paper interrogates Lacan’s juxtaposing of the ethics of Aristotle and Bentham and Freud in the manner of a Hegelian dialectical triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis in order to develop his own ethical position.   Keywords: Aristotle; the good; Bentham; theory of fictions; Freud; pleasure principle; reality principle; ethics; psychoanalysis; Lacan   This brief investigation aims to explore an extract from Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Seminar VII  where he asserts:   Bentham’s effort is located in the dialectic of the relationship of language to the real so as to situate the good - pleasure in this case, which as we will see he articulates in a manner that is very different from Aristotle - on the side of the real. And it is within this opposition between fiction and reality that is to be found the rocking motion of Freudian experience. [1]   What I propose to do is to explore this quote and interrogate it specifically with the following questions. Firstly, why does Lacan bring up Aristotle, a 5th Century BC ethicist, and contrast his ethics with Bentham, the 18th Century AD founder of Utilitarianism? Secondly, why doesn’t Lacan simply embark on a description of his theory of Freudian based ethics based on a supplementation and refinement of Freud?

The Letter, Issue 70, pages 39-70 REPETITION AND THE REALITY PRINCIPLE Daragh Howard Lacan confronts the problem of reality as he is reformulating his metapsychology of repetition in the first half of the 1960s. Even in its basic manifestations, repetition requires an act in relation to the domain of objects, and an act in turn relies on a principle of psychical life that won’t settle for an hallucination at the level of the pleasure principle. However, according to Lacan, the relationship of the pleasure principle and the reality principle is characterised by disequilibrium and inadequation. This inadequation is underwritten by the fault in psychical reality which lies between perception and thought as acknowledged by Freud from his early work onwards, and later developed by Lacan in his conceptualization of the real during the 1960s. Lacan is particularly attentive to the problem of repetition and reality in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60) and the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964).   Keywords : Repetition; Reality; Real; Reality Principle; Trauma; Resistance; Acting Out; o-object; Death Drive; Representation; Perception; Pleasure Principle; Dreaming and Awakening   Part I. The Metapsychology of Reality Even if it is Disagreeable        Lacan:  Wiederholen. Nothing has been more enigmatic – especially on the subject of that bipartition, of such structural importance to the whole of Freudian psychology, of the pleasure principle and the reality principle – nothing has been more enigmatic than this Wiederholen , which is very close, so the most prudent etymologists tell us, to the verb to ‘haul’…very close to a hauling of the subject, who always drags his thing into a certain path that he cannot get out of.   [1] In Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning from 1911, Freud states that the introduction of the reality principle, founded upon his theory of the secondary process, is a conceptual necessity in the psychoanalytic account of mental life: [2]   I shall be returning to lines of thought which I have developed elsewhere when I suggest that the state of psychical rest was originally disturbed by the peremptory demands of internal needs. [3] When this happened, whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens to-day with our dream-thoughts every night. It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. [4]

The Letter, Issue 69, 2020, pages 37-50 BEING PULLED HITHER AND THITHER [1]   On Sublimation, Knotting and Enjoyment   Patricia McCarthy     When it comes to the real, sublimation - a more sublime, more socially valued form of symptom – remains a symptom nonetheless. ‘If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well’ was Rilke’s rebuttal of psychoanalysis.  Equally fuelled by devils, sublimation and creativity have the same stem as any other symptom, which is that our desire is forbidden. Lacan names this stem a perfectly knotted pedicle of knowledge, a knowledge of the unconscious that we don’t want to know anything about. Moving between two seminars, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and Les non-dupes errent allows me interrogate this ethical question regarding a rejected knowledge.   Keywords: sublimation; moral masochism; ethics; pleasure; the useful; limit; knotting; enciphering      Our work [2]  last year on Seminar XXI Les non-dupes errent was punctuated by a return to reading The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.  This rereading was undertaken in anticipation of an International Meeting of L’Association Lacanienne Internationale  ALI that was to be hosted in Dublin in August. As with so many events at home and worldwide now on hold because of Covid-19, we are hopeful that the meeting with ALI may yet go ahead next year in May in one format or another, even if the pandemic has not lost its grip. In the meantime ISLP’s work continues.   This revisiting [3]  of Seminar VII has been felicitous. Coupled with the insights from Les non-dupes errent,  it has allowed me appreciate afresh that Lacan never relinquished the attempt to formulate an ethics of psychoanalysis in the intervening thirteen or so years and that this attempt maintains utter fidelity with Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and its laws.

The Letter, Issue 70, pages 71-80 The Mystery of  of The Unconscious   Mary Cullen   The real is the mystery of the speaking body , it is the mystery of the unconscious.                                                                                       Jacques Lacan [1]   In his recent publication, The Jouissance Principle, [2] Christian Fierens poses the question as to how desire is to be understood. If the simple function of the dream is the fulfilment of a disguised wish linked to the pleasure principle, then following on from this, the ethics of psychoanalysis, moderated by pleasure and prudence at the level of the individual, would come within the general quest of a framework for pleasure or happiness, [3]  that of a universal framework. These ideals of pleasure or perfection based on ‘fictive entities’ aiming at ‘happiness’ ‘genital love’, ‘authenticity and autonomy’, are not realisable and as Fierens emphasises, are imposed and external to the process of morality . The essential critique of this approach is,  ‘ the essence of the ideal presented as something which would exist in reality independently of us and not as part of the subjective Architectonic as Freud has already presented it in his introduction to narcissism.’ [4]

The Letter, Issue 70, 2021, pages 13-26 A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Anxiety and Protesting   Dorothea Hyneck     This article investigates the link between two apparently very distinct recent phenomena: the increasing levels of anxiety among young people and their growing participation in protest movements focusing on climate change. The article begins with a broad discussion of Lacan’s theory of anxiety and claims that protest movements can be interpreted as a form of acting out that helps in dealing with anxiety. By referring to the capitalist discourse, the article then explores why in recent times so many young people experience anxiety: the removal of limits which characterises capitalism in the twenty-first century, makes it very difficult for the youngest generations to find a lead. Protests against the inaction on climate change and the related self-imposed limitations, promoted to preserve the environment, can therefore be interpreted as a way for these youngest generations to deal with the anxiety provoking limitlessness of the twenty-first century.   Keywords: Anxiety, protests, acting out, capitalism, limitlessness, the new psychic economy.   Introduction   Over the recent decades, the Western world has faced a steep rise in anxiety, especially among its youngest generations. According to the Irish My World Survey 2, [1] half of the population in the 12-19 age bracket reports levels of anxiety ‘outside the normal range’. But why is anxiety so prevalent among the young generation, and how does this relate to other trends observed in recent years in our society?   In 2018 a young girl, called Greta Thunberg, began protesting every Friday on the steps of the Swedish parliament against policy makers that were not taking climate change seriously enough. Soon other students joined her and the movement they initiated, called Fridays for Future,  quickly gathered support from millions of students across the globe. They took to the streets to push policy makers to take concrete action against climate change. But is this movement and its global success just about fighting climate change, or are there also other underlying drivers?

The Letter, Issue 69, 2020, pages 1-19 EATING HONEY IN BED Liam Barnard There are few fields of human experience that have not had to reckon with the consequences of Freud’s discoveries. Ethics, a field which is concerned with human action, is a topic that is of particular importance given the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. One of the most revered and influential of ethical thinkers, at least in the Western tradition, is Aristotle, whose work the Nicomachean Ethics is regarded as a paradigm of virtue ethics. In his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan radically dismantles the system of ethics put forward by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, discarding much of it but retaining that which he sees as useful in articulating a new form of ethics, one that has at its centre the subject of the unconscious and addresses the question ‘what must one do in order to act in the right way?’, given that in the Freudian view, action emanates from the unconscious.   Keywords: ethics; Aristotle; Sovereign God; knowledge; pleasure; reality   The seminars of Jacques Lacan can be viewed as one long exploration of the question of what it is that defines psychoanalysis as a field of inquiry and, more specifically, as a practice. Lacan was first and foremost a clinician, and the questions he posed throughout his seminars were drawn from this context. The fact that the seminar project continued for over twenty years gives some indication as to how elusive a concise, reductive answer to the question of what constitutes a psychoanalytic practice was and continues to be.    By continually addressing the question of the practice of psychoanalysis through his seminars, concerning himself with the acts that take place within the analytic encounter, Lacan weaves the ethics of psychoanalysis and its practice tightly together: ‘I will say right off that the ethical limits of psychoanalysis coincide with the limits of its practice. Its practice is only a preliminary to moral action as such’. [1]  This emphasis demonstrates, to my mind, that it is only in the context of the practice of psychoanalysis that its ethics can be articulated, or at the very least that it is in the practice of psychoanalysis that one must reckon with it. One consequence of this is that throughout the seminar project, Lacan’s lifelong examination of the practice of psychoanalysis is, to some degree, also an examination of the limits of its ethics.

The Letter, Issue 70, pages 29-37 The Helplessness of the Analyst [1] Jacques Laberge ‘I was thinking no such thing.’ ‘It has nothing to do with it.’ A resounding ‘no’ echoes through the consulting rooms of analysts, for days, weeks, months, and even years on end. Denial forms part of the day-to-day workings of analysis and indicates the position of the ‘I’ and its ‘paranoiac knowledge’. It goes way back. ‘Trapped in… motor impotence and nursling dependence’, [2] the small child finds in the mirror-experience, either with an actual mirror or with any other person, an alienating and illusory compensation for its helplessness. Having read, at the age of 20, the French translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, [3]   considered the most important novel of the twentieth century and indispensable reading for an analyst, Lacan could not fail to be impressed by the great beauty of the images of specular condensation, ‘my two feet… at the end of his legs’, [4] or specular identifications ‘he is I’, ‘ lui c’est moi ’, written in French in the English text. [5] We need a better evaluation of the influence of Joyce, not only on Lacan’s later writings, but on his earlier ones also.

The Letter, Issue 69, pages 29-38 Sublimation and Creativity Anne Woodbyrne The sublimation of sexual instinct is a concept that traverses psyche, civilisation, love, religion, work, art and audience. The aim here is to trace Freud’s development of the concept, its role in civilisation and its psychical origins in man, one man in particular, Leonardo da Vinci, whom, according to Freud, had a great capacity for sublimation. Keywords: Freud; Leonardo da Vinci; sublimation; sexual instinct; latency period: psychoanalysis. It was through his work with hysterics that Freud first discovered the role sexual impulses play in the causation of neuroses. But his early writings also show his awareness that neurosis wasn’t the only path open to an unwanted drive. Freud found that these same sexual impulses could contribute to the highest cultural, artistic and social creations. He referred to this process as sublimation. This idea, that the sexual impulse can be redirected toward other aims and activities that are finer and higher, first appeared in Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria while referencing the child’s perversions and sexual polymorphism;

The Letter, Issue 69, 2020, pages 51-56 Sick, Dying, Dead, and Buried…Rotten and Forgotten Monica Errity This paper explores Lacan’s concept of the second death and its significance for an ethics of psychoanalysis. Keywords: Psychoanalysis; ethics; second death; desire; Antigone Between reading Lacan’s seminar on ethics, dealing with the threat of the coronavirus and watching some children playing, I was put in mind of a game I used to play with others as a child. We called it ‘sick, dying, dead and buried’.  It works on the principle of players in the game trying to avoid being hit by a ball. Each time a player is hit, they move through the different levels of sick, dying etc., and once they are hit they try to hit someone else with the ball.  It certainly seems like a game for our times. Any accounts I’ve heard of the game only had the levels sick, dying, dead and buried, then you’re out of the game. I’m not sure where the last two stages, ‘rotten and forgotten’ came from in our game but I always thought of it as an extension of the game. The game’s not over just because you’re dead and buried: you’re not truly dead until you’re forgotten. I bring this to your attention because I think it illustrates something of what Lacan is talking about when he introduces the idea of the second death in his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis . In this short paper I want to look a little closer at what he says about it and its relevance for an ethics of psychoanalysis. In preparing the ground for the introduction of the notion of the second death Lacan draws on a passage from the Marquis de Sade’s Juliette . Here Sade puts forward what Lacan calls a wild theory - that nature requires the destructive acts of man to bring about its creations e.g., acts like burning scrubland so that new growth may appear and life is renewed. The implications being, the vices of man are of more value than the virtues. Lacan quotes Sade:

The Letter, Issue 66/67, Autumn 2017/Spring 2018, Pages 75 - 82 FREUD’S INTEREST IN THE ORIGINS OF HUMANITY AS REFLECTED IN HIS THEORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS [1] Nellie Curtin From his earliest writings Freud frequently drew parallels between origin stories and psychoanalysis. In his later writings he goes further and makes direct links between the prehistoric and the unconscious: ‘the man of prehistoric times survives unchanged in our unconscious’ [2] In relation to a similar theme of myth, Lacan states that to establish these connections seems ‘to me indispensable if we are to situate our domain well, or even simply find out where we are.’ [3] This paper attempts to look at these parallels and connections with a view to assessing their relevance and application to psychoanalytic theory and practise. Key words: Mythic Formations; ancestral prehistory; totem; archaic heritage; residual phenomena. With the approach of the Winter Solstice and its association with Brú na Boinne , Newgrange, we are reminded of the ceremonies and mythologies relating to these ancient peoples of 5000 years ago. There is a curiosity about their origins. There is also a certain mythology surrounding our individual origins: we don’t remember our own birth – birth itself being a primeval experience. Combining myth and research seems to be one way of finding pointers that might solve the puzzle concerning the origins of humanity and civilization. Freud was interested in these questions. He tells us that in his youth he felt an overpowering need to understand something of the riddles of the world and perhaps even to contribute something of their solution as an adult. Understanding the riddles of medicine wasn’t quite enough for him. So he moved from the verifiable scientific world of neurology and entered into the unknown territory of psychoanalysis. Part of this excursion into a new field included his interest in and use of anthropology and archaeology.

The Letter, Issue 69, 2020, pages 57-64 Nocturnal Whispers:   What could be concealed within Freud’s Primal Scene?   Donna Redmond   While acknowledging that the inevitable encounter with language is the traumatic encounter par excellence that structures subjectivity, this paper explores a fantasy that Freud remarked on many times, namely the fantasy of the primal scene.  In focusing on this moment, be it real or imagined, Freud, in his scrutiny of infantile sexuality, draws our attention to the materiality of body and the centrality of the drives and explores their implications with regard to subjectivity.   Keywords: infantile sexuality: primal scene: fantasy: Freud: Pascal Quignard   The poet Galway Kinnell’s playful yet rueful meditation on the discomfiture that children can cause by interrupting an intimate moment between adults, is presented in his poem ‘After Making Love We Hear Footsteps’. [1]     Allow me to begin by quoting a selection of lines from it….   let there be that heavy breathing, or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake and make for it on the run - as now we lie together, after making love… and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep, his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child… this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making