Clinical Day

XthCONGRESS OF THE WORLD ASSOCIATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS (WAP)

Rio de Janeiro, 25th to 28th of April 2016

A CLINICAL WORKING DAY

27th of April 2016

STARTING POINT

Starting with the expression of the ‘speaking body’, the Clinical Working Day of the 10th WAP Congress is the occasion for presenting flashes and elucidations on this theme, which, by leaving space to opacities, advance the manner in which the neologism parlêtre (speaking being) was created by Lacan. With this creation he lived up to the fact that the unconscious and psychoanalysis itself, are no longer what they were in Freud's time. If, as Miller notes, "to analyse the speaking being is what we are already doing", this working day should be an opportunity for the members of the WAP to endeavour to say what this analysis is, and how they practice it.

We ask that each text offered to this Clinical Working Day should contemplate one of the thematic axes listed below, explaining how the unconscious presents itself nowadays and how psychoanalysis of the Lacanian Orientation approaches the lively presence of the speaking body.

THEMATIC AXES

I - What is the place of sexuation in the analytic experience nowadays?

The analytic experience verifies that easy access to sexual satisfaction, and excitement with its diversity, do not present solutions to sexual impasses. The general deregulation of sexuality appears in the bodies, Miller argues, as "disenchantment", "brutalisation", “banalisation”, and "semantic void". Nowadays, symptoms resist being read as formations of the unconscious that would bear a hidden sexual meaning: they are inscribed in the body above all as a jouissance, which emerges without the hindrances of the past, though not without disturbances. Such emergence of jouissancein the body, explains Miller, might be related to what happens in another body. How does sexual division appear in the analysis of speaking beingstoday? Howdoes the phallus, presented by Lacan, as the “only real which verifies” and as “support of the function of the signifier”, still allow us to investigate what is the place of sexuation in the analytic experience, in a world where the enigmas of sexuality seem to be increasingly taken over by a process of dissolution?

II – Clinicaltypes and sinthome: what are the articulations in the contemporary psychoanalytic clinic?

The question is to show how the singular ways in which the sinthome affects the speakingbody, interfere in the configuration, localisation and treatment of the “clinical types” in psychoanalysis. In what could still be typified as hysteria, the symptom stands out as the emergence of a jouissance related to another symptom in another body. In the area of psychosis, when Joyce designates his disturbed daughter as “telepathic” because of the triggering of schizophrenia, Lacan thinks that he “attributes to her something which is in the prolongation … of his own symptom”. Furthermore, it would be interesting to explain how the emergence of jouissance in the body and the sinthome appear in the cases of obsessional neurosis, or in the diverseforms in which perversion seems to be generalised today. One could thematise what it means for the speaking body, to go beyond the “debility” and the “delusion”, that is, in Miller’s terms, to “makeoneself a dupe of a real” without adhering to it.

 III – Sinthome and stepladders: what are the vicissitudes of sublimation in the contemporary world and in analysis?

Miller defines the stepladder as a kind of “pedestal” onto which the speaking-beingsteps up, to make himself beautiful”. Miller underlines that the “stepladder” contains the “Freudian sublimation, in its intersection with narcissism”. By turning away from the banal conceptualisation of sublimation as a refinement alien to sexual satisfaction, and furthermore, by implying theun-subscription from the unconscious, the notion of “stepladder” is an important resource in the analysis of the speaking-being. For Miller the stepladder is what, on the side of the “jouissance of speech”, “includes meaning”. However, the sinthome relies on the opaqueness of jouissance as to meaning; thus, the question is to show how we analyse the different ways in which the speaking bodies use the stepladder and the sinthome, today. Lacan underlines the convergence between the sinthome and the stepladder in the way Joyce had weaved the negation of the unconscious, the jouissanceof speech, the creation of an “ego”, the outside of meaning, and the opaqueness of a jouissance. Miller also evokes Schönberg and Duchamp – in the way each had put into effect such convergence. Are there other artists who, relying only on their works, or also in the analytic experience, have put into effectthis type of convergence? If an analysis is dedicated, according to Miller, to the “castration of the stepladder in order to bring into light the opaque jouissance of the sinthome”, how would an Analyst of the School (AE) use the sinthome, emptied from the jouissance of speech, to “turn it into a stepladder”?

IV – Should the events of the body be interpreted?

In a world dominated by demands of satisfaction, Miller defines an analytic interpretation, in its incidence outside the field of meaning, as “a saying which aims at the speaking body in order to produce in it an event”, which, as it concerns the body, implies also an emergence ofjouissance. Miller invites us to a new way to conceive of and to use the analytic interpretation, given that it is no longer “a fragment of construction which focuses on an isolated element of repression”, thus it differentiates itself from the “lucubration of knowledge” and from “an effect of truth.” On one hand, the event of the body is a trauma, in its inaugural dimension, another name of the sinthome, which echoes in the body, not by means of repression, but by means of an iterative reminiscence and it is not interpretable. On the other hand, this event causes jouissance, enters the body and reverberates thanks to the “incorporeal” object a, the letter which inscribes itself in the body as symptoms, jouissance with meaning, and hence it is interpretable. The question is to verify, in each case, what concerns the speaking body, what has to be interpreted, and how interpretation operates.

V – How is the fantasy transformed in the course of an analysis?

For some time, the perspective of “crossing the fantasy” delineated the horizon of what was conceived of as the “end of analysis”. Relying especially on the experience of the Pass, Miller has allowed us to problematize this notion of “crossing”: along the analytic experience, it is more a matter of knowing how to do with (savoir y faire) a jouissancethat takes over the body, which means, to manage and elucidate it, though not neglecting what iterates in it as obscure, unpassable, undecipherable. However, in various testimonies of the Pass, the fantasy insists as an operator of jouissance which must be taken into consideration in order to discern, not without opacity, the constructions at play in the sinthome. Taking as a basis Lacan’s last teaching, the testimonies of the Pass, and also situations in everyday analytic practice, could be appropriate to show how the clinic of the sinthomeunderlines the transformations of the fantasy along the treatment.   

The Scientific Commission

FORMATING, TITLING AND SENDING OF THE TEXTS:

A text for the Clinical Working Day has to be in Times New Roman, and have a maximum of 7000(seven thousand) characters including spaces.After the title of the text, the specific thematic axis it refers to should be stated. The following information should appear in the subject line of the email: CLINICAL DAY + NAME AND FAMILY NAME OF THE AUTHOR + THE SCHOOL TO WHICH HE BELONGS.

Each text should be by one author only, and only one text per person can be sent. At the time of submitting the text, the author should already be registered for the 10th WAP Congress. If the author does not receive a confirmation of receipt of his text within two days, he should re-send it to the two email addresses below.   

After receiving the texts, the Reading Commission of the Clinical Working Day will readthem to decide which ones will be presented at the 10th WAP Congress. Aspects to be taken into consideration are the clarity of the text, its pertinence to the thematic axis, theconceptual precision and the clinical rigour in what is presented about what it means to analyse the speaking being.  

EMAILS TO SEND THE TEXT TO: [email protected]and[email protected]

DEADLINES FOR SENDING THE TEXT: 31th December 2015.

The Reading CommissionoftheClinicalWorking Day: Andréa Reis, Angelina Harari, Anne Lysy, Carlos Augusto Nicéas, Domenico Cosenza, Elisa Alvarenga (coordinator), FabiánNaparstek, Heloísa Prado Telles, José Fernando Velásquez, Lucíola Freitas de Macêdo, Marcelo Veras, NohemíIbáñez Brown, Pierre-Gilles Guéguen, RamMandil, Romildo do Rêgo Barros, Sérgio Laia, Vicente Palomera.

TranslatedbyNogaWine

RevisedbyNathalieWulfing