Yves Vanderveken
Member of the WAP, choose a specific case. The one that interests you the most and resonates with the theme of the congress. While keeping as close to the case as possible, show in what way it is mad (beyond its structure), in what way it is deluded and defends itself against the real, but also how the real catches up with it. Highlight the orientation of the cure or treatment. Let’s renew the clinic, without nostalgia.
The proposed contribution should be 7000 signs, characters, including spaces.
It should be written in Times New Roman font, size 12, interspacing of 1.15, and sent in Word format. It can be written in one of the languages of the WAP: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese.
Deadline for submission: September 30, 2023
At the top of the text, before the title, please include the author’s full name, email address, mobile phone number and the School of which he is a member.
The subject of the email should be: AMP2024 – Simultanées cliniques Last Name, First Name – the language of the text
Please send the texts to AMPsimultanees2024@gmail.com
Freud situates dreams, delusions, phobias, obsessions, hallucinations, etc., within a continuity – as they are psychic phenomena[1].
If regarding those we can invoke a separation from reality, classify them as part of the realm of phantasmagoria, reduce them to the imaginary, and therefore strive to oppose them while directing therapy towards a return to reason, Freud, as far as he is concerned, takes them seriously: “one must never allow oneself to be misled into applying the standards of reality to the repressed psychic structures; and on that account, perhaps into undervaluing the importance of fantasies in the formation of symptoms on the ground that they are not actualities “.[2]
Freud reasons that these repressed psychic formations are part of the ordinary functioning of the psyche, and it is in this regard that he outlines a continuity. “Neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable – either the whole or parts of it. The most extreme type of this turning away from reality is shown by certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis […]. But in fact every neurotic does the same with some fragment of reality”[3].
Lacan, in turn, locates in these psychical phenomena, a real – one that contributes specifically to the formation of human symptoms.
Therefore, it is, in the Freudian sense, inherent to the human psyche to turn away from an unbearable reality, and in the Lacanian sense, to defend oneself against the real. There is continuity by “nature”[4]. Everyone is delusional. This is one aspect of the depathologization specific to psychoanalysis. Lacan pays tribute to this Freudian orientation at the end of his teaching.
If there is a continuity by nature, it is still necessary to constantly search for and refine what establishes distinctions of “quality”[5] between the different ways of “denying reality”: repression and the return of the repressed; denial, fetichism, and “displacement of value”[6] ; Verwerfung and return in the real. On this aspect, the psychoanalyst is led, in a necessary way, to “save the clinic”[7].
This dimension of defense against an unbearable real obliges us, moreover, to situate the “hallucinatory” field that is characteristic of human desire as such. Desire tirelessly seeks to recover a libidinal satisfaction that is other andsupplementary, as supported by the initial satisfaction of needs but not being reduced to them – this satisfaction, as a matter of fact, does not diminish. In this regard, the little of reality in daydreaming in which the speaking being continuously evolves, as one might say, is primarily in the service of an indestructible surplus-enjoyment that no reality check can extinguish, which is impossible to negate and to which the entire psychic apparatus is subservient. It is with regard to this indestructible other jouissance, which doesn’t stop returning, that one encounters the unbearable of the lack, of the hole: that of castration, the lack in the Other, and the hole in the symbolic order.
Continuity by nature, once again. And here too, one must understand in what way Jouissance returns. If it’s in the nature of the speaking being to dream, to be deluded, and to hallucinate, in short, to enjoy, quality lies in the various modes in which this return takes place. The Ich Spaltung is present for everyone[8] ; what differs is the mode in which one is split.
Freud urges the psychoanalyst not to retreat in the face of the formations of the unconscious, as they involve ‘all metapsychology and all clinical work.’[9]. How do we, today, avoid retreating? This is the question that we will put to work during the Parallel Sessions of the XIVth Congress of the WAP.
“One is bound to employ the currency that is in use in the country one is exploring”[10]. This is perhaps what allows Jacques-Alain Miller, drawing from Jacques Lacan’s teaching, to say that ‘analyzing the speaking being […] is to direct a delusion’[11]. This certainly echoes Lacan’s statement that an analytic cure amounts to “introducing in the subject a guided paranoia”[12], because through interpretation and the nature of the transference, it calls for an appeal… interpretive… to meaning. But an analytic cure is not reducible to a call for meaning. The aim, in the orientation of the cure of the speaking being, is to ‘pin down a real,’ a ‘real that has no meaning,’ that ‘cannot be other than what it is’, and to which all that one can hope, at best as a result of an analysis, is to be ‘fooled’[13].
The parallel sessions of the XIVth Congress of the AMP will delve into this question. We call for your contributions to highlight these ‘formations of the unconscious’ in their extensive sense, the guises they take today, in our era of ideological and legal depathologization, and the direction of the cure they evoke.
Those formations of the unconscious are singular, valid only for one: the subject, within the framework of his analysis. The aim will be to extract and produce the depathologizing formula specific to psychoanalysis. Whether it is at the beginning of an analysis, during an ongoing analysis, or at the end of an analysis. The goal will be to move from the particularity of the structure to the singularity of the case, to grasp how it is constructed for each one. And this, with the aim of potentially learning from what cannot be taught: the practice of psychoanalysis.
Translation: Stéphane Préteux
Revision: Amal Wahbi
[1] Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), J. Strachey, Trans. Vol 4, Vintage Books, 2001, p. 100.
[2] Freud, S. Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911), J. Strachey, Trans. S.E. Vol 12, VintageBooks, 2001 , p. 225
[3] Ibid, p. 218
[4] We borrow the opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘quality’ from the orientation text for the Congress. Miller, J.-A., ‘Everyone Is Mad – WAP 2024’,https://congresamp2024.world/
[5] Ibid.
[6] Freud, S. ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence (1938)’ J. Strachey, Trans. S.E. Vol 23, VintageBooks, 2001 , p. 277
[7] Miller, J.-A., ‘Everyone Is Mad – WAP 2024’, https://congresamp2024.world
[8] Freud, S., ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence (1938)’, op. cit., pp. 276-278.
[9] Miller J.-A., ‘Everyone Is Mad – WAP 2024’, https://congresamp2024.world
[10] Freud, S., ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911)’, op. cit., p. 225.
[11] Miller, J.-A., ‘The Unconscious and the Speaking Body’ (2016), https://wapol.org
[12] Lacan, J., ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’, Écrits (1966), B. Fink. Trans, New York: Norton, 2006, p. 89.
[13] Miller, J.-A., ‘The Unconscious and the Speaking Body’, op. cit., https://wapol.org