Events

Event Details

The School of the Freudian Letter is organising a seminar in London on this late weekend in November, responding to the question of the desire of the analyst one by one.

The question of the desire of the analyst is a key reference point in Lacan's work.

At the beginning of Seminar XI, he asks, “What is the analyst's desire? What does it have to be in order to operate?" with the seminar ending on his answer that, "the analyst's desire is not a pure desire…it is a desire to obtain absolute difference".

Presenters on this theme are tasked to say something of their particularity (desire) in the practice and, since the analytic act cannot be premeditated, how they find themselves working towards realising it. The aim here is to acknowledge that each analyst has their own real (often unconscious) priorities; their own cause of desire in entering the analytic field initially and subsequently to venture a further step into the arena of praxis. This singularity is a principle player in what obtains.

 Psychoanalytic formation, especially under Lacan's influence, tasks the analyst-in-formation to be attentive to this and thereby become increasingly in-formed (and, thereby, less hamstrung) by it.

Event Schedule

Day 1 - Saturday, 23rd of November

Session 1

11:00am – 11:30am – Introduction to the day and the theme

Psychoanalytic Formation: What are We Aiming For and How Do We Practice?

Penny Georgiou, Psychoanalyst

11:45am – 1:00pm - Seminar

‘The Super Ego’

Richard Klein, Psychoanalyst, President of the School of the Freudian Letter

1:00pm – 2:15pm – Lunch break

Session 2

2:15pm – 3:00pm - Cartel presentation

‘Early encounters with Lacan: musings about the beginning of the analyst's formation' Lorena Rivero De Beer, New Analyst

Chair: Penny Georgiou

3:00pm – 5:00pm – Seminar

‘The Oedipus, Cosmogony and the Alien’

Angelos Tsialides, Lacanian Psychoanalyst

Summary: The Oedipus Complex is usually characterised as the most crucial concept of psychoanalysis. Freud has shed the light upon it, and it has been both a discovery and an invention: a discovery of a psychical process from which no human being escapes, and the invention of a description for this process in the form of metaphor, the myth of Oedipus. However, Freud’s contemporaries very often only scrape the surface of what the Oedipus is about (as with everything else that Freud described). The way subjectivity was approached by Lacan opens a new dimension to the Oedipus, where we are able to perceive not only a metaphor describing certain familial relations, but one where the mystery of cosmogony is at stake in the encounter with a desire which is Alien.

Day 2 - Sunday, 24th of November

Session 3

10:00am – 11:45am – Seminar

‘How we are practising the Freudian Asceticism of Lunguage?’

Petros Patounas, Lacanian Psychoanalyst

Summary points:

- What exactly do we do in the sessions?

- The use of topology and the structures.

- When do we move the analysand to the couch?

- The foreclosure of the psychoanalyst.

- The Sinthome and the Identification with the Act.

- Solutions to analysis: The No-Body and the restructuring of the topology.

- Ends of analysis: Continuation of life and choosing how to live.

- The Act: A new orientation for psychoanalysis.

11:45am – 12:00pm – Short break

12:00pm – 01:00pm – Discussion

Description

The School of the Freudian Letter (London)
Presents: Jean-Gérard Bursztein
On the Coextension of Psychoanalysis and Subjective Topology; a Future for Psychoanalysis

This two day-event is a rare opportunity. Offering a formative lesson in four parts, it will be of interest to those who want to come to know how to work with psychoanalysis as subjective topology.

Jean-Gérard Bursztein, author of 'The Topological Transformation of Freud's Theory', stands to emphasise that there is no bipolarity between psychoanalysis and subjective topology; it is the same thing. Approaching psychoanalytical perception of the unconscious in this way is necesary because the unconscious is itself a formalisation whose structure other concepts cannot reach. Subjective topology is, then, the only way to proceed for opening the unconscious and having access to the structure that constitutes it.

Argument - click here

Excerpt:

In a project responding to the question of how to transmit psychoanalysis through the ordering of its operative insights, Bursztein recuperates and builds on the force and originality of Freud and Lacan’s discoveries, reworking familiar psychoanalytical concepts from a topological perspective.

Bursztein will develop the Lacanian theory of the structure of the unconscious as cut and the Borromean knot with the concept of Lalangue, where Lalangue refers to the first mnemic traces, termed "Letters" by Lacan, which coat the signifiers of language with traces of lack of jouissance and trauma. Commencing with the concept of the unconscious in its coextensiveness to structure and to the cut, Bursztein deploys the opening and closing movement of the Mobius strip to afford representation to the otherwise opaque idea of the unconscious as a movement of opening and closing without a stop.

Bursztein situates the idea of psychoanalysis as subjective topology as clearly present in Lacan’s thinking in 1972; notably in the text, L’etourdit[i] (‘someone dizzy’, and literally, ‘turning speech’). This provides a new foundation for psychoanalysis in relation to what JGB terms ‘fundamental topology’ and a major step in the theorisation of psychoanalysis. On this precise point, topology is not a theory, it is a knowledge. The difference between these two concepts being that with a theory one can have some ideas about an issue without knowing what to do about it. Topology, then, is not a theory but a pure element of psychoanalytical knowledge; an achievement of knowledge.

In Bursztein's elaboration, Lacan comes to be situated alongside Aristotle and René Thom who, each in their own way, found as he did that topology affords coherent illumination regarding how we construe our way of knowing.

Recommended preparatory reading:

Bursztein, J-G, Topological Transformation of Freud's Theory, Karnac Books, 2015.

Dates:

• Saturday, 17th March 2018
• Refreshments and Registration from 10am
• Session 1 11:00-13:00
• Session 2 - 15:00-17:00
• Sunday, 18th March 2018
• Refreshments available from 10:30am
• Session 3, 11:00-13:00
• Session 4, 15:00-16:30 (Close)

Description

School of the Freudian Letter - Alterities
Presents: Jennifer Yusin
Speaking on The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition

Proceeds from this evening will be donated to AVEGA

Yusin spent some time at the Eastern branch of AVGEA, and it was there that she met the widow who forever changed her thinking about trauma and its afterlives. The photograph above captures one of the moments from her stay.

This seminar offers us an opportunity to extend active, participatory thought in areas where, precisely, thought and act are first crushed by the massive impact of trauma and then condensed, commodified into jouissant soundbites. Our awareness of irrupting events has never been greater, placing the 'citizen' as witness in a state where s/he can neither respond to nor unknow. The capabilty to act demands a vital working through and a working out beyond the trap of compulsive consumption of news objects.

Speaking in person on The Future Life of Trauma affords Yusin the opportunity to work through this challenging question of a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event. She works by situating a ground-breaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourse. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as presented in the Freudian metapsychology, she renews her thought of the relation between temporality and traumatized subjectivity, demonstrating how the psychic event, as a traumatic event, is a material reality that alters the character of the structure of repetition.

By examining the role of borders in the history of the 1947 partition of British India and the politics of memorialization in postgenocide Rwanda, Yusin raises the implications of trauma as a material event in contemporary nation-formation, sovereignty, and geopolitical violence. In showing how the form of the psyche changes in the encounter, she presents a challenge to the category of difference in the condition of identity, resulting in the formation of a concept of life that elaborates a new relation to destruction and finitude by asserting its power to transform itself.

Description

The School of the Freudian Letter (London)
Seminars 2017/18
Reading Group - Bertrand Russell Room

This year we will engage in a close reading of Lacan's Seminar V, Formations of the Unconscious. The aim of the series is to stimulate formative engagement with the text. Readings will be organised broadly as follows:

At the beginning of each session, Richard Klein will give a 15 minute introduction on a theme from chapters of the text opening to contributions from participants.

During the first session, participants will be invited to offer a date for a 15 minute presentation of comments/questions arising from their readings.

There may be some line by line reading as well as preparation of chapters for discussion, as called for by a working through of the treasures of the text.

Introductory sessions: 18th September and 16th October.

Monthly on Mondays, 7pm-8:30pm