After the 8th WAP Congress

Frans Tassigny

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Looked on the bed and, Brother was dead
One thing is to progress towards the inexistence of the Other in the course of an analysis. Another thing is this inexistence imposing itself on the subject as a savage real, when he is dropped by the Other. It’s a way of putting the question which was laid out for us during this 8th WAP Congress entitled:‘The symbolic order of the 21st Century is no longer what it was: what consequences for the cure?’ Because indeed, the 21st Century, as was already announced in the last Century, will be marked by the inexistence of the Other.
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Informations

• Publié par: Une-Universite-de-la-Psychanalyse
• Nombre de lectures: 17
• Langue: English

Extrait

After the 8th WAP Congress

GIL CAROZ Ooh lordy, trouble so hard Don't nobody know my troubles but God ….. Went in the room, didn't stay long,

1 Looked on the bed and, Brother was dead

One thing is to progress towards the inexistence of the Other in the course of an analysis. Another thing is this inexistence imposing itself on the subject as a savage real, when he is dropped by the Other. It’s a way of putting the question which was laid out for us during this 8th WAP Congress entitled:‘The symbolic order of the 21st Century is no longer what it was: what consequences for the cure?’ Because indeed, the 21st Century, as was already announced in the last Century, will be marked by the inexistence of the Other. Leonardo Gorostiza (2), president of the WAP and Flory Kruger (3), the director of the Buenos Aires Congress, were careful to indicate this by taking as the starting point for the Congress’ orientation ‘A Fantasy’ by Jacques-Alain Miller (4), given in Comandatuba, Brazil, eight years ago.

If we could experience the pure effects of this withdrawal of the Other, we would be able to touch the distress with our finger, theHilflosigkeit,the subject’s paramount anguish when he hasn’t any recourse to the Other. But the frantic course of hyper-modernity leaves us no time to experience this because other ethics rush in to fill the hole left by the disappeared Other. The neuro-technico-cognitive-sciences as well as the capitalo-administrative bureaucracies of population management advance a symbolic that does not engage the real, correlated to a return of the invading jouissances that are difficult to treat.

In this context, the question of psychoanalysis’ survival as well as the role that it can and must play in this new world poses itself. This is what was put up for discussion at the last WAP Congress, in the plenary sessions in the presence of more than 2200 participants and in the multiple rooms at the WAP’s Clinical Day. For the first time at our Congress, a huge slot had been consecrated to the Pass. Indeed, all plenary mornings. This without a doubt reflects the WAP’s politics. The WAP is an NGO today, its Schools assume Jacques-Alain Miller’s orientation, which implies the analyst’s active participation in the life of the city, outside the consulting room. This is essential in order to prevent the wolves from eating us. But for psychoanalysis to survive, it is no less important that the Pass be invested and not solely by a few ‘specialists’ on the thing. Because faced with the contemporary Other whose action pushes the human to submerge himself in the real of the masses, the Pass is our major weapon of demassification.

In Europe, the law of Judeo-Christian symbolic still has a certain safeguarded presence. This weight of the past is less pregnant in America. In this, Buenos-Aires has been without a doubt a particularly favourable place to speak about the precariousness of the symbolic Other. During the General Assembly, the reports by the three presidents of the WAP’s American Schools (EOL, EBP, NEL) allowed us to gauge the invasion of a real that is not felt on our side of the Atlantic in such an immediate way. Where in Europe, drugs and violence are an affair of‘life in the peripheries’, or far away countries beyond our borders, in Latin America it’s a daily occurrence, within everybody’s proximity. Psychoanalysis must respond to this if it wants to survive, by safeguarding the future of analyst’s formation in a firm way. Furthermore, Rafah Nached’s arrest in Syria, which preoccupied us for several months at the beginning of this academic year, held a very intimate resonance for our Argentinian colleagues. The persecutions and missing people with ’suspect’ lifestyles, among others psychoanalysts, is an affair which belongs to a relatively recent past in Argentina. In Europe, we only feel a ‘soft’ hint of this persecution of psychoanalysis. It does not prevent the fact that under the bar of ‘Must psychoanalysis burn?’ that theNouvel Observatoirerecently felt to be a good choice of title to give to one of its numbers (to take only one example of recent events), runs a truth of which the Rafah affair gives us a glimpse.

The organisers of the AMP Congress knew how to pass these serious questions by us like a subliminal message. A rich programme of quality, with music of the 21st Century between sequences (the participants still hear the ‘boom, boom, boom’ that could be felt in the body), a libidinous Latinaffectio societatisof tango, football, personal invitations, fiestas, made us swallow the pill in good humour. That’s saying that, for us, it is neither a matter of moaning about the past, nor of wanting to restore an out-dated order. We have therefore come back with a lot of questions and with a conclusion: in this new world, psychoanalysis must take a new departure, by assuming that what was, is no longer. The soundness of our WAP community is reassuring to us: psychoanalysis wasn’t born yesterday, it is already more than one hundred years old. However, it is only just beginning!

20th May 2012

Translated by Deborah Hinchliffe

Notes 1 Extracts from a song by Vera Hall circulated in a hyper-modern version at the spectacular closing party at the Palacio Alsina Congress. 2 Resonances of« A Fantasy » : The invention of the Lacanian practice. http://www.congresoamp.com/fr/template.php?file=Textos/Resonancias-de-Una-fantasia.html

3 Presentation of the 8th WAP Congress : The symbolic order of the 21st Century. It is not what it was. What consequences for the cure?

http://www.congresoamp.com/fr/template.php? file=Textos/Presentacion-del-VIII-Congreso-de-la-AMP.html

4 Presentation MILLER, J,-A., « A Fantasy »,Mental, no 15, February 2005.

5 This point is equally under-lined by Elisa Alvarenga, President of the American Federation of Psychoanalysis for the Lacanian Orientation (FAPOL), in a preparatory text for the WAP’s committee meeting in January 2012.

Recent NLS-Messager, English:http://www.amp-nls.org/en/template.php? sec=actualites&file=actualites/nls_messager.html

Récents NLS-Messager, français:http://www.amp-nls.org/fr/template.php? sec=actualites&file=actualites/nls_messager.html

Nouvelle École Lacanienne de Psychanalyse — New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis www.amp-nls.orghttp://www.amp-nls.org

Association Mondiale de Psychanalyse – World Association of Psychoanalysis www.wapol.orghttp://www.wapol.org