Untreatable: The Freudian Act and its Legacy

Crisis and Critique, Vol.I, Issue 3 (Crisis Today), 2014

The present contribution seeks to develop the basic determinations of the procedure of the passe, invented by Lacan in 1967, in order to investigate the usefulness of this idea for a rethinking of the productive dimension of psychoanalysis. This project, which makes use of several concepts developed by Slavoj Žižek, has the collateral effect of also clarifying the constructive dimension of the Žižekian theory of the act. Keywords: symptom, analytic act, testimony, transmission

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Austrian neurologist who founded Psychoanalysis, took his experience and theories through many analyses and developments, before coming to name anything. He took great care to make his concepts and theories intelligible, while Lacan was more interested in what cannot be limited to ordinary definitions. He was interested in what happens between words and lines, with the margins of the psyche, with an unconscious La Linguisterie that is the art andscience of the word that fails. Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), the French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is considered the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. Lacan deliberately wrote in a Prose style, that would resist any neat summary of his concepts and avoid being over systematised. His style of writing and analysis is full of play, puns, jokes, metaphors, irony and contradictions that resemble the psychoanalytic ‘free association’ of images words ideas and meanings that change with context and reveal unconscious desires. For this essay, I am using ordinary psychoanalytic terminology and theory. In a Freudian understanding, this self-restriction to representing standard psychoanalytic theory, is achieved through the repressive function of my superego. In a Lacanian understanding, this writing function is achieved in the name of the Symbolic Father of Freud’s Totem and Taboo. If like Lacan however, the playful son, I allowed myself creativity and unconscious fluidity in writing about Freud and Lacan, this would be a very different kind of essay. My experience of studying, reading and interpreting Lacan however, was a fluid and erotic experience, so perhaps his theory of the intimacy of language and desire is correct. “Will our action go so far, then, as to repress the very truth that it bears in its exercise?” (1)

The New Klein–Lacan Dialogues, 2018

We often tend to over-evaluate the sudden emotions that arise in our minds. "It's stronger than me", I catch myself thinking, walking through uncommon thoughts, contradicting my own rules of conduct. All of this is centered in the blind believe that the heart, opposed to logical thinking, possesses the most "truthful" truth. Jacques Lacan refuses these rights to Affect and warns us that it tricks us even saying the truth. Could it be a paradox? The aim of this presentation is to unfold such paradox, based on the exposition of Lacan's readings on Freud's original literature about Affect. What I'm going to present owes almost everything to my work as psychoanalyst of the Escola Brasileira de Psicanálise, in the movement of the "lacanian orientation", the name of J. A. Miller seminar that gives the diapason to the World Association of Psychoanalysis. 1 Affect and Representation To be sad, means that suffering exists. Even if an actor forces to shed some tears, even if his acting skills are horrible, whenever sadness is portrayed, it will always be sad. This is the truth about the Affect: it is what it is. Like Freud says: "It is the essence of the feelings to be recognized by consciousness". This is its truth. It is always recognizable. 2 We may have doubts about its origins and sources, or maybe its reasons remain unknown-sometimes even against all logical assumptions. Although sometimes we don't know exactly the reasons behind why we cry, we always know that if we do cry, therefore we are sad. It tricks us, however, by making us believe it can be a guide reaching our deepest truths, that if we follow it we will reach the animal inside of us, for example. Lacan proposes that the feelings may also lie-intending to make us stop believing recklessly in feelings, as if they would lead us to find such internal truths without failing, more than the words themselves. 3 As psychoanalysts, the truth we often have to deal with is not a feeling, neither primitive nor energetic-in Lacan's words, the real we do seek is completely out of the box, outside the mainstream and commonsense. An analysis may not be seen as the search for a primary meaning for life but, instead, as a tool to deal with the real, that part of the life that have no name. Based on such assumptions, we have to change our mental habits and common procedures regarding the world of feelings. Affect, as proposed by Lacan, "comes to the body"-it does never arise from the body itself, it is never primary but always secondary to the discourse. That is the Lacanian resumption of Freud's definitive sentence that "there is no unconscious Affect". 4 For Lacan unconscious is a discourse. Though alternative to the official speech of the ego, fragmented and disperse, the unconscious discourse is still a discourse and, likewise, it may  Lecture presented in the Klein-Lacan Dialogues, London,

In this essay I will discuss the concept of the unconscious between Lacan and Freud; and, examine how it relates to desire, focusing on how desire reveals itself through Lacan's participation in Kojeve's dialogue with Hegel. In this examination of identity, Freud's concept of the unconscious is situated between, "Cause and that which it affects" (Lacan, 22). I will argue that Lacan and Freud not only privilege the male, but also accept and reconstitute the language of domination; therefore impacting the power structure of the other.

2010

This thesis examines the continuity and the changes in Lacan's elaboration of psychoanalytic ethics. It focuses in particular on the shift from Lacan's classic formulation of psychoanalytic ethics in relation to the criminal figures of Sade and Antigone in Seminar VII, to his later formulation of a psychoanalytic ethics based on a re-elaboration of the concept of symptom - the sinthome - in the 1970s. By illustrating the way in which psychoanalytic ethics is constantly, from Freud to Lacan, defined against a critique of civilization, and by engaging with a number of contemporary clinical readings of Lacan's work, this thesis argues that the development of Lacan's understanding of psychoanalytic ethics should be seen as an attempt to adapt the practice of psychoanalysis to a major change in the structure of contemporary civilization. In this way, this thesis also insists on the importance of maintaining a distinction between Lacan's theory of ethics and, on the ot...

Choice Reviews Online, 2002

Viennese Jewish Modernism. Freud, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, and Beer-Hofmann, 2009

Everyone knows that Moses shattered the tablets of the covenant. The Bible tells us so. Yet in "The Moses of Michelangelo" Freud resists this knowledge, instead choosing to celebrate a sculpted image-the statue of Moses carved by Michelangelo for the grave of Pope Julius II-that denies this account. According to Freud's midrash on the image, Moses was on the verge of breaking the tablets when he felt them slip from his grasp and topple forward. This almost losing that to which he had devoted his life brought him to his senses and led him to secure them against his body. Moses regains his self-control, and the covenant is safe; but the tablets will remain forever in their accidental, upside-down position. Freud turns scripture on its head for much the same reason that Yehuda Amichai, in his poem "I Want to Confuse the Bible," enables Moses to enter the Promised Land after all. He claims that this version is superior to the story recorded in the Bible because it vivifies both the artist and the scholar's endeavor to record what is true about the psychic mechanism of inheriting and transmitting an almost-shattered past. Freud's modernism draws out the monumental implications that lodge in small adjustments and chance events, insisting all along that it is only being faithful to the plain view. What I wish to emphasize in this chapter is Freud's connection to the literary figures of the Vienna circle through his counterscriptural, psychological readings of cultural figures. For Freud, the wisdom of unbreaking the tablets has to do with the overriding sense that human reality must be oppositional-that there are two sides to every story, even the most ancient of legends. Freud had already developed this conclusion about the language of dreams. In the essay "Über den Gegensinn der Urworte" (On the Oppositional Meaning of Primal Words, 1910), Freud took this perplexing characteristic of dream work as a touchstone for a meditation on the double-sided nature of words. Why is it the case that signs within dreams often represent, or are linked with, their opposites? Freud explained this phenomenon by way of two scholarly sources he came across, characteristically, by chance. In his research of ancient languages, the linguist Karl Abel arrived at the identical conclusion drawn by the English philosopher Alexander Bain, whom Freud cites: "The essential rela

The Moses Complex The Judeo-European State of Emergency and the Theological Invention of the Real in Freud and Lacan By Dr. Itzhak Benyamini [email protected] © All rights reserved to Itzhak Benyamini, 2024. Keynote Lecture in the Catholic Academy in Berlin, September 5, 2024, the workshop “Jacques Lacan and Religion” https://intellectualdiaspora.org/culture-of-difference_jacques-lacan-and-religion/