The Later Lacan

Generic Compositors

Description

This book includes essays by some of the finest practicing analysts and teachers of psychoanalysis in the Lacanian community today. The writings offer an essential introduction to the later teachings of Jacques Lacan, illuminate the theoretical developments introduced by the later Lacan, and explore their clinical implications with remarkable acumen.
Preface
Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf

Acknowledgments

Part I The Letter and the Limits of Interpretation

Interpretation in Reverse
Jacques-Alain Miller

Discretion of the Analyst in the Post-interpretative Era
Pierre-Gilles Guéguen

The Purloined Letter and the Tao of the Psychoanalyst
Eric Laurent

Part II From the Analytic Symptom to the Sinthome

The Sinthome, a Mixture of Symptom and Fantasy
Jacques-Alain Miller

Two Statuses of the Symptom: "Let Us Turn to Finn Again"
Jean-Louis Gault

Hysteria and Sinthome
Marie-Hélène Brousse

Identification with the Symptom at the End of Analysis
Esthela Solano-Suárez

Part III A Psychoanalytic Clinic of Psychosis

From the Elementary Phenomenon to the Enigmatic Experience
Herbert Wachsberger

Three Enigmas: Meaning, Signification, Jouissance
Eric Laurent

A Child through the Mirror
Gabriela van den Hoven

Part IV Jouissance, the Object, Anxiety

Jacques Lacan and the Voice
Jacques-Alain Miller

Embarrassment, Inhibition, and Repetition
Alexandre Stevens

A Lacanian Reading of Dora
Véronique Voruz

Gaze and Representation
Richard Klein

The Perception and Politics of Discourse
Bogdan Wolf

Part V Sexuation

Love and Sex Beyond Identifications
Alexandre Stevens

Feminine Positions of Being
Eric Laurent

Women and the Symptom: The Case of the Post-Freudians
Pierre-Gilles Guéguen

Sexual Position and the End of Analysis
Marie-Hélène Brousse

Afterword: The Response of Psychoanalysis to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
Jacques-Alain Miller

Index
About the Contributors

Sujets

• Humanistic psychology
• Psychotherapy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9780791480601
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE LATER LACAN An Introduction

Edited by Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf

T H E L AT E R L AC A N

SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture

Henry Sussman, editor

The Later Lacan

An Introduction

Edited by Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf

S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W YO R K P R E S S

Published by State University of New York Press Albany

© 2007 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner what- soever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means includ- ing electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press, 194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210–2384

Production and book design, Kelli Williams Marketing, Fran Keneston

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The later Lacan : an introduction / edited by Véronique Voruz, Bogdan Wolf. p. cm. — (SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. -13: 978–0-7914–6997–2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Lacan,-13: 978–0-7914–6998–9 (pbk. : alk. paper) Jacques, 1901–1981. 2. Psychoanalysis. I. Voruz, Véronique. II. Wolf, Bogdan. III. Series. BF109.L23L38 2007 150.19'5092--dc22 2006012825

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface,Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf Acknowledgments

Part I The Letter and the Limits of Interpretation

Interpretation in Reverse,Jacques-Alain Miller

Discretion of the Analyst in the Post-interpretative Era, Pierre-Gilles Guéguen

The Purloined Letter and the Tao of the Psychoanalyst, Eric Laurent

Part II From the Analytic Symptom to the Sinthome

The Sinthome, a Mixture of Symptom and Fantasy, Jacques-Alain Miller

Two Statuses of the Symptom: “Let Us Turn to Finn Again,” Jean-Louis Gault

Hysteria and Sinthome,Marie-Hélène Brousse

Identification with the Symptom at the End of Analysis, Esthela Solano-Suárez

Part III A Psychoanalytic Clinic of Psychosis

From the Elementary Phenomenon to the Enigmatic Experience, Herbert Wachsberger

Three Enigmas: Meaning, Signification, Jouissance,Eric Laurent

A Child through the Mirror,Gabriela van den Hoven

vii xix

3

10

25

55

73 83

95

107 116 128

|| vi       

Part IV Jouissance, the Object, Anxiety Jacques Lacan and the Voice,Jacques-Alain Miller Embarrassment, Inhibition, and Repetition,Alexandre Stevens A Lacanian Reading ofDora, Véronique Voruz Gaze and Representation,Richard Klein The Perception and Politics of Discourse,Bogdan Wolf

Part V Sexuation

Love and Sex Beyond Identifications,Alexandre Stevens

Feminine Positions of Being,Eric Laurent

Women and the Symptom: The Case of the Post-Freudians, Pierre-Gilles Guéguen

Sexual Position and the End of Analysis,Marie-Hélène Brousse

Afterword: The Response of Psychoanalysis to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy,Jacques-Alain Miller

About the Contributors Index

137 147 158 180 191

211 222

243 251

261

269 271

Preface

Véronique Voruz Bogdan Wolf

An introduction to thelaterLacan needs to address a few preliminary questions. Why isolate a given phase in Lacan’s teaching? Why not sim- ply speak of a more or less gradual evolution over thirty years of semi- nars and writing? And if there is a distinction to be made, a distinction that cuts through Lacan’s teaching, how do we determine the coordi- nates of this break? Finally, what characterizes Lacan’s later work, mak- ing it stand out even against his own corpus of earlier writing? The texts assembled in this volume will substantiate the identification of a later Lacan as they work through Lacan’s rearticulation of the classic con- cepts of psychoanalysis and his enunciation of new ones to name the impasses and paradoxes produced by his earlier engagement with both psychoanalytic theory and praxis. It is a constant feature of the analytic clinic that it rapidly encoun- ters the limits of its theoretical framework: a case of the real catching up. Thus, Lacan’s persistent reworking of psychoanalysis—in which his approach resembles that of Freud—has as much or more to do with the practical need to address impasses encountered in the consulting room as it does with theoretical difficulties. And indeed, throughout his teaching Lacan tirelessly introduces new concepts to overcome both the obstacles encountered by Freud and the ones produced by his own framework. Each new cycle of thought enables psychoanalytic practice to retain and renew its clinical efficacy; it is a thought that cannot rest. For instance, Freud grew so accustomed to the rapidity with which his own advances encountered their limits in practice that in the end he named the clinical manifestation of this phenomenon

|| viii       

“negative therapeutic reaction.” Freud, and Lacan in his wake, eventu- ally had to acknowledge the impossibility of fully ‘draining’ the uncon- scious with the signifier. This recognition produces what can be called a ‘push-to-the-real’ in their work—or an orientation on what, in the un- conscious, insists beyond truth. And it is the deep imprint of the real that characterizes, above all, the later teaching. In this preface we will situate the later teaching in Lacan’s work in a preliminary manner, before moving on to introduce the volume itself. We will then conclude by delineating the clinical areas that currently draw most on the later Lacan. The seminar of Jacques Lacan can be divided into three periods, each lasting for approximately a decade. Roughly speaking, and as devel- oped by Jacques-Alain Miller in his ongoing Paris seminar, each of these periods is characterized by the prevalence of one of the three reg- isters of the analytic experience that Lacan named imaginary, symbolic, 1 and real, and in that order. Clearly, though, it is not because Lacan treats one register of psychical life as somehow predominant over the other two at a given time that all three orders are not elaborated contem- poraneously, and with as much attention. For example, the third phase, oriented on the real, also sees a rehabilitation of the imaginary, a regis- ter that had previously been regarded as an obstacle to the movement implicit in the ‘symbolic’ concepts of ‘truth’, desire, and transference. The first phase of Lacan’s teaching is concerned with the mirror stage, narcissism, identification—and so the formation of the ego. In this phase, Lacan engages in a passionate debate with IPA analysts, seminal psychiatrists, and contemporary philosophers (Kris, Hartmann, Lagache, Jaspers, Ey, Kraepelin, Balint, Winnicott, Bernfeld, Klein, Deutsch, Horney, Macalpine, Anna Freud, etc.). In the course of this often heated debate, Lacan reformulates the clinical questions posed by the ego in terms of the rivalry between symmetrical others, the obsta- cles posed by the three imaginary passions of love, hatred, and ignor- ance, the reversibility of ego libido on the imaginary axis, and the intru- 2 sion of the imaginary axis in the analytic transference. Lacan’s work on the imaginary is informed by the observation of various characteristics of animal behavior: for example, that members of a same species recog- nize one another through a shared physical feature: certain mating ritu- als. For speaking beings, however, the signifier disrupts the ‘natural’ that parades as real. And the alliance of ego and other is both disrupted and propped up by the symbolic.

Preface || ix

At this stage, Lacan sought to instrumentalize the symbolic axis to displace the imaginary asresistance. This focus on the imaginary cul- 3 minated in Lacan’s work on anxiety in his tenth seminar, in which the many Freudian definitions of angst are taken up by Lacan, who reaches the following ‘resolution’ of the Freudian problematic: the affect of anxiety alerts the subject to his or her imaginary fragility. In this semi- nar Lacan also argues that this affect is caused by the proximity of the object. And it is his recognition of the centrality of the object—as irrup- tion of the real—that leads Lacan to formalize the object of anxiety as objecta,a central concept in Seminar XI, in which the second phase of Lacan’s teaching is truly initiated. With the concept of objecta—a logical supplement figuring a real caught in the symbolic order—at his disposal, Lacan sets out to articu- late various ways in which this real can be circumscribed. Thus, from Seminar XI onward, Lacan works consistently on the parameters of sub- jective positioning in the Other, or symbolic order. The symbolic coor- dinates of the subject, already combined with his or her imaginary con- structs, are now also articulated with this residual real. With this focus on structure and positioning, Lacan comes up with the very useful logi- cal operations of alienation and separation, which he correlates to the 4 concepts of symptom and fantasy. Lacan’s efforts to absorb, treat, or at least account for the residual real caught in the symbolic culminates with his invention of the four discourses, each proposing different ar- ticulations of the social bond according to what occupies the position of agent: S (master signifier), S (knowledge),a(surplus-enjoyment), or ¡ 1 2 (barred subject). Arguably, Lacan’s attempts to subsume the real in dis- course come to an end with Seminar XX, which just about begins with the following words: “With the passage of time, I learned that I could say a little bit more about it. And then I realised that what constituted 5 my course was a sort of ‘I don’t want to know anything about it.’” So the period we refer to as the later Lacan starts with Seminar XX. Following on from Lacan’s recognition of the irreducibility of the real, the later teaching is characterized by a concern with the real as immov- able; insistent, but also intimately bound up with language in its entirety. 6 In this phase, jouissance characterizes human existence. Not only does jouissance deregulate and upset the pleasure principle of symbolic bal- ance and proportion, it also becomes specific and integral to speech, now conceived as a carrier of jouissance. The symbolic function of speech does not reduce jouissance but produces it. Speech no longer thwarts the