Presentations by Après-Coup members and yearly participants.

This seminar will examine Lacan’s algorithm of transference and the transformation of the analytic relation it formalizes. Beginning with Freud’s account of transference and Lacan’s reading of Plato’s Symposium, it will consider how the supposition of knowledge establishes the transference. From this point of departure, the seminar will address the desire and the discourse of the analyst, and the place of object a, asking how the analytic process moves from the supposition of knowledge to the construction of object a as the cause of desire.

This year’s seminar will continue to focus on clinical work with children, returning to relevant psychoanalytic readings by way of clinical material brought by participants. Open to those who currently work with children.

We will continue our reading of Freud’s metapsychological papers and theoretical elaborations, paying attention to the significant decisions made when Freud’s concepts were translated into English. We will also read some of Lacan’s commentary on these papers.

“The Mirror Stage” contains a reference to an article by Roger Caillois on mimicry. This presentation will explore the role of Caillois’s concept of mimicry and the “temptation of space” in Lacan’s writing, while bearing in mind the contrasting theory of the “mimetic faculty” Walter Benjamin developed in the same years.

Isabelle Orrado and Jean-Michel Vives propose an alternative to the prevailing treatments for autistic children. Rather than trying to suppress or modify the ”oddities” that autistic persons display, they argue that these peculiarities should be seen not as problems to be suppressed, but as attempts at relating to a world that is otherwise invasive and threatening.

Through the author’s opening account of her own experience of breast cancer, mastectomy, and reconstruction, The Impossible Return offers a psychoanalytic meditation on other losses, unfinished mournings, and sublimations. Adopting the recursive structure of analysis, it explores how traumatic rupture may be transformed into prosthesis as both subtraction and appendage, crossing the animate and inanimate. Ultimately it examines the sinthome’s suturing of self and feeling in the breach of illness, and seeks new ways to think about impasse itself.

Lacan opened his seminar of 1960-61 by saying he would deal with transference “in its subjective disparity,” and this reading group too will focus on the reasons transference cannot be an intersubjective relationship.

For Lacan, the subject of the unconscious is structured like a Möbius strip: internal and external form a continuum. The Lacanian unconscious, “structured like a language,” is not, as Freud would have it, an inner domain; conscious and unconscious processes coexist on one and the same surface. For clinical practice, the longitudinal cut corresponding to this “one loop that is two” provides a topological model of psychoanalytic interpretation not as a single intervention, but rather a double movement around the subject that reveals its structure, interrupts compulsive repetition, and opens the possibility of new signification.

The third part of Spinoza’s masterpiece Ethics deals with the “Origin and Nature of the Emotions.” In this crucial section the Dutch philosopher reveals, in geometric fashion (more geometrico), his largely revolutionary ideas on the mind-body relationship and on the role of “affects” in the formation of our identity and our moral sense. In particular, desire, as the most primitive “affect,” becomes the key to understanding what “ethics” truly is, transcending or overcoming earlier philosophical tradition.

The verb “to be” tempts subjects to think they can attain the wholeness of Being. But the symbolic order is founded on lack, as subjects discover whenever the jouissance they do obtain falls short of the one they expected. One can subjectivize this disappointment in two ways: by neurosis, which clings to the Other’s broken promise of being; or by desire, which leads subjects to construct a singular object (what Lacan called object a) that brings them a surplus of jouissance.

Workshop with Erik Porge, topic to be announced

Clinical work with children allows us to establish the distinction between development, history, and the emergence of the subject — a difference that can be approached topologically. Studying the functions of symptoms, this workshop will address different structures and severe disorders, exploring the role of transference in the work with children.

The assault on human dignity that occurs in hate crimes, and the bodily harm that most often accompanies it, silences speech. Clinical work faces the challenge of allowing a silenced voice to reemerge. The direction of the cure implies giving transferential space to such a voice, reconstituting a frayed narcissistic fabric and reknotting imaginary, symbolic and real — relaunching the phantasm.

Nothing is more commonplace than transference in all its manifestations — love, hate and ignorance. And yet, for all its ubiquity, transference is the specific, fundamental tool of psychoanalysis. How can we situate and address it from the perspectives of both the analysand and the analyst?

In 1969 Maud Mannoni, one of France’s great child psychoanalysts, founded an experimental school in Bonneuil-sur-Marne, Paris. Sympathetic to the basic attitude of antipsychiatry but not its theory, Mannoni grounded her theory on psychoanalysis. Bonneuil welcomed children shut out from the school system as ‘maladjusted’: psychotic, autistic, or with ‘bad behavior’ problems, and treated them, reinstating them in a social environment.

Economics is sold as pure and apolitical: scientific, neutral, exact. Its true role is to convince us there’s no alternative to capitalism. We live under the dogma that austerity is necessary, unemployment natural, endless wars inevitable, central banks all-powerful, and those with most resources most worthy of rewards. Growth, inflation, unemployment are concepts to enforce market dependence, not freedom, disempowering us to shape the democratic decisions that govern our daily lives. Why should we accept this relatively young system that’s not scientific, natural, or inevitable — that is replaceable?

For all their basic differences, clinical facts and scientific facts are remarkably close, and overlap in several areas. Both have a special relation to knowledge, with criteria based on validity rather than truth. As with science, the clinic’s kernel lies in repetition, revealing the real in all its variations. There, knowledge can be unknotted and reknotted differently. Yet, clinical or scientific discovery comes about as a result of an intrinsic logic and not by chance, within a mode of thought that reckons with each subjective position.