Canada & USA

UPCOMING EVENTS across Canada and the United States

In 2021

2020 rescheduled Lacan’s Ecrits Conference  September 10-11, 2021

“LACK on the Lake” rescheduled to April 19 – May 1, 2021.  At the University of Vermont, Burlington.  Keynote: Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana.  For more information: https://lackorg.com/2020-conference/

Lacanian Compass Clinical Study Days 14: January Dates not given yet 2021, in Miami Beach. “WHAT REAL AT STAKE” Guests:  not listed yet                  https://www.lacaniancompass.com/csd

In 2020

18th Annual Meeting of the APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups) Fall, 2020, in Dublin, Ireland.   Cancelled due to pandemic

LACK on the Lake, September 24-26, 2020.  University of Vermont, Burlington.  Keynote speaker: Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana.  Cancelled due to pandemic

2020 Lacan’s Ecrits Conference  Cancelled due to pandemic 

Lacanian Compass Clinical Study Days 13: February 21-23, 2020, in NEW YORK CITY. “JOUISSANCE: THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF”” Guests: Angelina Harari, Maria Josefina Sota Fuentes.   In preparation:            

Roger Litten: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjnaEIQV_Xw                               Marcelo Veras: https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=clinical+study+days+13+argument&view=detail&mid=335171646CE3D90A521A335171646CE3D90A521A&FORM=VIRE

In 2019

Lacan’s Écrits Conference 2019, October  11 – 13, 2019,  Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Organized by the Duquesne Psychology Department.  Confirmed Keynote speakers: Dan Collins, Patricia Gherovici, Todd McGowan, Calum Neill, Jean-Michel Rabate, Stephanie Swales, and Stijn Vanheule.  https://duq.edu/academics/schools/liberal-arts/departments-and-programs/psychology/2019-lacans-écrits-conference

17th Annual Meeting of the APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups) June 14-16, 2019, in Dublin, Ireland. “The Drive”.

Lacanian Compass Clinical Study Days 12: January 18-20, 2019, in Miami Beach. “THE PSYCHOANALYTIC SUBJECT IN THE MAZE: CONSTRUCTIONS IN ANALYSIS” Guests: Angelina Harari, Domenico Cosenza, Marie Hélène Brousse.

ARGUMENT
For Clinical Study Days 12, we will take up the theme of “The Psychoanalytic Subject in the Maze: Constructions in Analysis.” The word construction is of course a common word, familiar to us all, and one that Freud appropriated for one of his final texts, “Constructions in Analysis.” In this text, Freud starts by drawing a distinction between interpretation — of some unconscious formation — and construction — of the repressed history of the patient. Freud also vacillates through the text on the status of the knowledge at stake in our work as psychoanalysts, ultimately ending at the point at which he states that the impactful use of a construction in a case, if held to with conviction by the analysand herself (and he offers one of his most elegant arguments in “Constructions” on how to assess the value of the intervention of the analyst), has the same value as the factual truth of the history of the analysand.
So, with Freud’s text in mind, as well as the two readings of “Constructions in Analysis” offered by Jacques-Alain Miller — “E=UWK” and “Marginalia to ‘Constructions in Analysis'” — talks that will have their quarter century anniversary at the time of our Study Days in 2019, we propose for our participants the following questions that we would like cases to address:
What do we construct in our conduct of the psychoanalytic case? For Freud, it seems like something of a narrative, a narrative to tell the story of that which is repressed (especially primal repression) and not accessible to the analysand. Miller, in the classical psychoanalytical clinic of neurosis at least, points us in the direction of the object a (fundamental fantasy) or the signifier of the lack in the Other, S(A/), something to be constructed, we might say. In this case, are these mathemes constructed by the analysand or by the psychoanalyst? And, further, as Miller notes, Lacan really does not use this concept of construction much at all in his work, but proposes we view the Lacanian structure itself as a form of construction.
And what about psychosis, or at least classical or extraordinary psychosis? If knowledge, at least in the classical clinic, is supposed in a subject to whom the analysand addresses his suffering, in psychosis, the knowledge is held by the analysand himself. Can we not, thus, view the delusion itself, as articulated by the analysand, as the construction of the case, a part of the process of the cure, as Freud put it? And, indeed, several paragraphs of Freud’s “Constructions” are addressed to the relationship between delusion and construction. Do we find this in our cases?
But, in this moment of the aggiornamento of the Lacanian orientation, we find that our old diagnostic categories are not so useful, or even the concept of a diagnostic category itself. The blueprints, as it were, that we would take from case to case are no longer worth anything beyond the one construction for which they were first sketched. In this era of a singular practice, without universal rules, what now is the status of a construction? Is it the unique knotting of the sinthome that defines the construction of our time? Or — is it the way in which, following Miller’s work in “Being and the One”, we must cut through the Being of each speaking being to find that One that exists for each? Or, will our constructions be more like installations in the art world–not a permanent work in an established form, but unique and un-replicable, each one different in form from another (say, for example, a construction that includes a dream fragment, a piece of memory, an interpretation, some unconscious formation, and a matheme — all put together in a singular way)? In any case, whatever the form, who is doing the constructing now–the analysand or the psychoanalyst? Certainly, one other approach might be to abandon construction itself in an era without rules, but is that even possible?
We also want to query the ways in which a construction develops in a case. How are these put together? How are they put into play in the sessions themselves? How do they drive the act of the analyst? We might further elaborate on the proposition that one of the main roles of supervision is the supervision of the construction of the case. How, in your cases, has supervision played a role in the construction of the case?
What about case presentations in our work together in a School? How do we articulate the work of a case presentation and the relationship of that to the construction of a case?
And, finally, with regard to pure psychoanalysis–what might we say about Miller’s recent work on the escabeau with regard to construction? Are our Testimonies not themselves construction documents, and the escabeaus on which they are delivered not construction sites, in which the case is actively assembled before us? Well, if the Pass is the passage from analysand to analyst, can we look at the Pass Testimonies as the moment when analysand become analyst through the construction of their own case, taking on the task of construction of their own cases?
These are the questions that will guide our work over the next year in preparation for the Study Days. We also want these questions to orient the case presentations and discussion in our next Clinical Study Days.

In 2018

Lacan Salon: La Conference: April 6-7, 2018, in Vancouver, BC. “Lacan and the Environment” Keynote Speaker: Todd McGowan.

Possible Topics to be Addressed
LaConference 2018 takes as its topic Lacan and the Environment, the latter concept meant in two interlocking ways. On the one hand, the socio-cultural environment to which the child or subject or analysand is asked to adapt. On the other hand, the environment conceived of as our planet’s ecology which, perhaps, we have forced to adapt to us. We welcome the widest possible range of papers that deal with these concepts in a Lacanian/post-Lacanian psychoanalytic manner, from the clinic to politics, from representations to praxis. Proposals are welcome from academics, students, analysts, activists, artists, and community members. Possible topics include:

Does the “primordial discord” that Lacan spoke of in the mirror stage essay mean that we repress this fundamental break between the ego and environment?
What is the environment of the clinic? What is its space and the dynamics or valences of that space?
Could we think of the environment as the unconscious, in the sense of a residue of the Real that thinks and acts?
What are possible vicissitudes of the relation between the subject and the environment when the latter is taken as Other and/or object?
What does a Lacanian approach bring to the hoary questions of nature vs nurture?
What does Lacan’s critique of Ego Psychology offer to a rethinking of the subject’s relation to the environment?
How do climate refugees ask us to think about the subject and questions of abjection and the political?
How do Indigenous politics of the environment challenge, but also demand, our thinking with respect to the aforementioned “primordial discord” between subject and environment?
How does the late Lacan (i.e. the four discourses, (feminine) jouissance, knots and strings, the semblant and the Sinthome) help us to theorize the environment? Do we enjoy the environment rather than adapt to it?
What would a psychoanalysis of climate deniers tell us? Is accepting climate change, for those of us who are not scientific, a matter of belief?
What does the long durée of planetary temporality tell us about the relative importance of the Anthropocene?
Is the ongoing ecological crisis a matter of a “state of exception”? That is, should it be privileged over other political or cultural crises as a Master Signifier?
If, as Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson have argued, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, what kind of fantasy is the end of the world? What do we desire when we imagine an environmental apocalypse?
How do televisual/filmic representations of the environment function in terms of Lacanian film theory? How can we think about how the Planet Earth series, An Inconvenient Truth and others structure the viewing subject?
What would a Lacanian theory of animals look like?
What is the role of cli-fi and other apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fiction in today’s literary scene?
What is the role of poetry in environmental activism? How, for example, does eco-lyric poetry, from John Clare to the Enpipe Line anthology, construct a reading subject?
What are the environments in and through which Lacanian theory is produced, circulated, and consumed such as the academy (where it frequently generates uneasiness), the clinic, and the various spaces in South America, Vancouver, France, Ireland, and so on.

Lacanian Compass Clinical Study Days 11: February 9-11, 2018, New York City, on the theme “Delights of the Ego”. Guests: Lilia Mahjoub, Marie Hélène Brousse, Pierre Gilles Guéguen and Véronique Vorus.

ARGUMENT

The human ego is built on the foundations of the Imaginary relationship with an other, this operation giving the primitive form to narcissism. Jacques Lacan develops it extensively in his teachings, in particular in his conception of the Mirror Stage: for the first time, the infant finds his image in the mirror, being immediately overtaken by a sense of jubilation, at a moment of life where he still doesn’t have control over his body. To acquire a body, he will need to undergo identification with a Symbolic Other, beyond narcissism, which will require him to incorporate the gap between the ego and its image, a gap that he will try to eliminate by building an equivalence between egos through a kind of “delusion of identity,” filling it with fantasies about who he is.

For Lacan, the position of the ego is there trapped in a circle. The ego cannot escape the actuality of its being other than by projecting itself in its virtual image. It is a blocked position that, in itself, prevents a dialectical development—an engagement with the Other—leaving the subject in a stance of violence against the order of the Other that, in certain cases, leads to a narcissism of a lost cause or to a kind of subjective position of victimization. This relationship with the Other presents special difficulties with psychosis but also in cases of neurosis, where the structure of misrecognition of the Other leads to a degree of loss of reality.

Later in his teaching, Lacan’s clinical experience showed him that the Imaginary and Symbolic dimensions were, in the subjective structure, more submitted to the Real dimension than he thought earlier, so he revises the Mirror Stage by saying that narcissism develops as a conjunction of Imaginary and Real, a joyful or erotic relationship with the image, where a decisive moment of jouissance is in play. It implies that the child, through his own image, is investing libido in the object, which is at the same time his image and the image of the other. Lacan uses the term ¨Imaginary jouissance¨ to emphasize the strong barrier it poses to the Symbolic operation.

In the psychoanalytic experience, the psychoanalyst seeks to establish a distance between the ego and its “delusional” belief, strongly charged with jouissance. The analyst, in the place of the Other, opens a space for the signifiers’ chain to develop under transference. Jacques-Alain Miller points out that what the subject takes to analysis is in the first place his ego, his “delusion of identity,” which in the course of the treatment should become less and less present, the subject being able to detach from it, leading to a fall of the transference itself. The “delusional” ego gives birth to the hysterization of the subject.

In his last teachings, the relationship of the subject with the Mirror Stage takes another turn when Lacan, very interested in the jouissance of the body itself, talks about ways of “dealing” with the subject’s symptom. He then gives us a new description of the body: there is the body of the image and the Symbolic body, both having to deal with a lack, and there is the body of the drive, represented by a hole with eroticized borders where jouissance is inscribed without the possibility of deciphering it through the Symbolic chain. These signifiers “all alone” require a different approach to contain the repetition of jouissance.

James Joyce’s way to go beyond narcissism was through his artwork: even with his limitations with regard to the Symbolic, his art allowed him to let go of the image by keeping it as his representation in front of the Other, when the body image separates from him in his childhood memory. Lacan takes Joyce’s example as the artist’s way to represent himself through his artwork. But, beyond Joyce’s particular experience, Lacan sees in it something that can be generalized to any subject: the possibility to deal with body symptoms through the construction of a sinthome, beyond the trap of narcissism and the weakness of the Symbolic.

It is said by many contemporary authors that we live in a “culture of narcissism” where the projection of the self image is the individual’s main goal. In this reading, one aspires to an ambition: to enjoy the “delights of the ego” involving the supposition that the eye of the Other—which is ultimately blocked by the ego’s own eye—will provide a completeness. Following Lacan’s proposition in his last teachings, what is at stake in the practice of psychoanalysis today is to find, case by case, the particular way a subject can find an exit from the trap of narcissism with his own resources—Imaginary, Symbolic, or Real—by organizing a link to the Other, in the era of the One all Alone.

WHY CLINICAL STUDY DAYS?

Jacques Lacan. Is there a name in psychoanalysis that gets such reaction? Such emotions of admiration, love, hatred, jealousy. But not only that, what he did put people to work: refashioning a psychoanalysis when Freud’s followers failed, but also a remarkable legacy of those who work against him, in their talks and books.

We psychoanalysts of the World Association of Psychoanalysis in the United States have sponsored for eight years a Clinical Study Days. This is a place for all those with an interest in Lacan, a curiosity about Lacan, a desire for Lacan to gather and explore clinical work within the orientation laid out by Lacan. For, while Lacan was certainly a prodigious thinker in so many fields, he was above all else a psychoanalyst. And these Study Days are dedicated to exploring clinical work within the orientation laid out by Lacan and by Jacques-Alain Miller.

Indeed, if Lacan is our first point of orientation, Jacques-Alain Miller is our second. It was Miller who Lacan himself identified as the person who was able to read Lacan, a notoriously difficult task. But, beyond that work in the realm of meaning, it was Miller who was able to do something with Lacan and the work that Lacan left us, in all the institutional work led by Miller that has given the world the Schools of the World Association of Psychoanalysis. For it is the Schools that are the means by which psychoanalysis has passed from generation to generation through the formation of new psychoanalysts.

The Study Days give speakers and participants an opportunity to work together with psychoanalysts and a taste of the life of the School.

In 2017

GIFRIC Clinical Study Days, December 1-2, 2017 in Toronto, Canada. The Cultural Construction of Sexuality and the Symptom. Willy Apollon, Lucie Cantin, Danielle Bergeron.

15th Annual Meeting of the APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups) July 14-16, 2017. Lacan’s Seminar XIV: The Logic of Phantasy. In Toronto, Ontario, Canada. To register: apwonline.org

Lacanian Compass Clinical Study Days 10: February 3-5, 2017, Miami Beach, Florida, on the theme “Beyond Oedipus: Family Dramas/Family Traumas”. Guests: Marie Hélène Brousse and Pierre Gilles Guéguen.

ARGUMENT

Without a doubt, Freud’s appropriation of Sophocles’ tragedy of Oedipus was the defining logic at the time of the invention of psychoanalysis. Freud’s Oedipus established the logic of identification for an individual in the world, based on a child’s place in the Oedipal drama. With his theory of sexuality, in particular infantile sexuality, Freud’s Oedipus also provided an approach to the organization of the libido. This Oedipal drama did not only affect Freud’s approach to psychic structure, but also to psychoanalysis itself as a practice. In as much as transference is the motor force of psychoanalysis, Freud theorized transference on the basis of this Oedipal constellation, which also provided the coordinates for the act of the analyst in interpretation.

If Freud’s Oedipus ever had value as a description of psychic reality, it could only have been to the extent it was an articulation of the manifest and latent logic of social reality itself–that is to say, dependent on the prevalence of a certain family structure: heterosexual, married, nuclear, bourgeois–the very milieu in which Freud’s patients were raised.

Well, one thing is certain: that world is gone. Perhaps not completely a thing of the past, but certainly we live in a world with a great heterogeneity of situations in which a speaking being, a child, enters the world. Sexual identifications are not as clearly defined, and there are children raised by homosexual couples, single parents, divorced parents, parents unrelated to the biological origins of the child, extended families, and with caregivers–paid or not–in a great variety of configurations. Furthermore, the expansion of the discourse of science in the realm of fertility and reproduction has had an impact on subjective interpretation of kinship and parenting and unmasked the un-natural, human dimension of what was previous viewed as natural and eternal.

The Oedipal structure as Freud defined it was centered on the function of the Name of the Father and the phallus. In the era of the Other that doesn’t exist and the vacillation of the semblant, Lacan proposed the pluralization of the Names of the Father, which lead to the development of a new approach to psychic structure beyond Oedipus: “To use it on condition of doing without it,” and the Borromean clinic, with emphasis in psychoanalytic practice on knotting more than a search for meaning and the truth. It is now the sinthome that provides coordinates with which we address the issues of identifications and the libidinal drives, issues of semblants and jouissance for the speaking being.

But, as we proposed, speaking beings today still come into existence in some type of family, however singular that family might be.

For our tenth Study Days, Lacanian Compass wishes to investigate this. What are the new family dramas created by speaking beings to situate themselves in the world? And, we wish to investigate the ways in which the families of today impact the speaking being, in particular the ways in which this Other, through language, can have a traumatic impact on the speaking being.

PAST EVENTS

In 2016

LACAN TORONTO Special Presentation: Eve Watson and Dan Collins, Sunday, October 23, 2016, at 10:00-4:00, at the George Ignatieff Theatre, Trinity College, University of Toronto. Theme of “Woman Then and Now: Psychoanalysis and Feminine Sexuality” – from Early Lacan, Late and Contemporary Lacan.

14th Annual Meeting of the APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups) July 30-August 1, 2016. “On Love”. In Vancouver, B.C., Canada. To register: apwonline.org

Lacanian Compass Clinical Study Days 9: March 18-20, 2016, on the theme “Must Do It!”. In New York City. Guests were Marie Hélène Brousse and Pierre Gilles Guéguen.

ARGUMENT

MUST DO IT!
NEW FORMS OF DEMAND IN SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE

Much is made today of certain psychic trends or so-called epidemics in society–the rise of addiction, or depression, or autism, or inattention, and so forth–all of which is frequently linked to changes in social structure–a culture of permissiveness, the decline of the father or authority structures, and the excesses of consumerism.

There is another no less prevalent, but more subtle dimension to these psychic changes–the fact that contemporary subjects are often not striving, desiring pleasure, in some sort of uncomplicated fashion, such as the way in which happiness is measured in psychological or sociological rating scales, fulfilling the Declaration’s ‘pursuit of happiness.’ Rather, that we see the subject driven by sets of imperatives, demands produced for sure in the social world, but at the same time and ever yet more insidiously internalized and reworked as the demands of what, in older Freudian language, was referred to as the superego. Not a desire for some thing chosen by a subject, but a subject incessantly driven by a force, a jouissance, out of control, without limits.

For this conference, we would like to map out these new forms of the demand and of the superego in the twenty first century. In what ways are we seeing the expression of this in the clinic? In the ways in which suffering is articulated today, especially in young people? But, also, to consider as well the ways in which the demands of the external world–due to changes in the development of capitalism and in science–are experienced differently by subjects. The role of gadgets and the development of the iHuman is certainly one dimension of this, but we should not ignore other dimensions of the way in which the organization of day to day life–take such disparate phenomena as social media and advertising, or so-called helicopter parenting, the novel workplace life of Silicon Valley companies, increasing income inequality, or, the 24/7 demands for communication–are having an impact on the subject.

How might the experience of Lacanian psychoanalysis allow a subject to find a way, a compass point, to orient itself in such a world.

Special Presentation – Bruce Fink – Saturday, January 30, 2016. This meeting was from 10:00-4:00 at the Innis Town Hall at the University of Toronto, 2 Sussex Ave. The morning presentation focused on topics following up on Fink’s recently published books: Lacan On Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII: Transference, and his new translation of Lacan’s Seminar VIII: Transference. The afternoon was a discussion by Bruce Fink and members of Lacan Toronto of clinical material that was presented by Rolf Flor from the Boston Lacan group.

In 2015

LACAN TORONTO Special Presentation: Ona Nierenberg and Salvatore Guido Saturday, October 17, 2015, at 10:00-1:00, at the Deer Park Toronto Public Library, meeting room, 2nd floor. Both are psychoanalysts in the Lacanian Orientation practising in New York City. Their topics are Freud’s relationships with the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi and the philosopher Romain Roland, via their exchanges of letters, and as their concepts can be utilized in the Lacanian orientation.

LACAN TORONTO Special Presentation: Rolf Flor – Saturday, July 4, 2015, from 10:00-1:00, at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society.

LACAN TORONTO Special Presentation: Dr. Michael J. Miller – Saturday, June 6, 2015, from 10:00-1:00, at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society. “Emitting a Sign of Alarm: Lacan on the Teaching of Psychoanalysis in 1957.” It is based on his work on the paper in Lacan’s Complete Écrits (translated by Bruce Fink) called “Psychoanalysis and its Teaching” (pp. 364-383). Michael Miller is a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY.

Lacan Salon: LaConference 2015, May 15-16: “A Century on the Drive”. “Narci-Capitalism”. SFU Woodwards, Vancouver, British Columbia. To register: lacansalon.com

LACAN TORONTO Special Presentation: Alicia Arenas – Saturday, March 28, 2015, from 10:00-1:00, on “Anxiety”. At the Deer Park Toronto Pubic Library, 2nd floor meeting room.

Lacanian Compass Clinical Study Days 8: “Encounters with the Real” – January 24-25, 2015. Miami Beach, Florida, USA

ARGUMENT: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE REAL
In his 1998 Seminar, “The Experience of the Real,” Jacques-Alain Miller remarks that to explore the concept of the Real, we shouldn’t formulate the question “What is the Real?,” as that puts the question of the Real in the domain of Truth. Truth and the Real exclude one another.

In the trajectory of Lacan´s teachings, the Real is first situated outside the analytic experience, as it is the unconscious, as a personal history to be recovered through the psychoanalytic experience. Later, after Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), the Real is situated in the signifier, where the unconscious is no longer history, but knowledge. This is the first algorithm. However, in his final teachings Lacan articulates a Real which is not in the signifier, which is beyond meaning and knowledge. In this second algorithm, the Real is outside discourse or speech, present as an indecipherable kernel in the symptom.

The notion of the Real in Lacan has more than one approach. Throughout his teachings, we find sentences like “The Real always returns to the same place,” and “The Real as impossible,” and, “Pieces of Real.” Moreover, when he talks about “Encounters with the Real,” he is referring to the contingent aspect of the Real, the unexpected happenings that may emerge both in life and in the analytic experience.

For these Study Days, we invite our guests to present clinical cases that say something about these encounters with the Real, which can tell us about what is, in the final word, outside speech.

In 2014

Saturday, November 22, 2014, 10:30 am to 4:30 pm The New York Freud Lacan Analytic Group (NYFLAG) “The Real Politics of the Body” – Prof.Thomas Svolos, Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska.

1. The Body Politic 2. More, More, More Addiction 3. The Psychoanalytic Soapbox

The 21st century body is no longer the body of a century or a half century ago–something has changed in the ways in which people relate to or experience their bodies today and the ways they describe this to those around them, including a psychoanalyst. For this Seminar, I want to say something about the Lacanian approach to the body. This will be grounded in some classical notions of the body as imaginary body and even the symbolic body, but with a focus more on the body as real, as an event of the real. Lacan, famously known for his linguistic formulations about the unconscious as structured like a language, left us, in his final years, with a novel set of formulations that perhaps seemed bizarre at the time, but, in retrospect, were prescient mappings of our world now.
The symptom is no longer a metaphor, but a body event. The real is somehow more present, including in its reverberations on the body. Drawing from recent work of Jacques-Alain Miller, we will explore how psychoanalysis may change to respond to this new world of the body.

Prof. Thomas Svolos is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist practicing in Omaha, Nebraska. He is a member of the New Lacanian School (NLS) and World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP). He is also Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry in the Creighton University School of Medicine. His publications have appeared in nine languages.

Barnard College, Barnard Hall, room 405; Broadway and 117th St.
New York City

LACAN TORONTO Special Presentation: Maria Cristina Aguirre – September 13, 2014 , from 10:00-1:00 at the Deer Park Toronto Public Library meeting room, 2nd floor, 40 St. Clair Ave. East. She gave a class on “Lacan’s Seminar VI: Desire and its Interpretation”, as well as more recent developments related to desire such as the drive and jouissance. She was trained in Lacanian Psychoanalysis in Paris, France. She is currently a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City, the coordinator of NYFLAG (the New York Freud Lacan Analytic Group), Editor of LC Express (formerly the Lacanian Compass), the online journal of the Lacanian Compass and Senior Psychologist at Elmhurst Hospital Center, Queen’s, NY.

April 6, 2014 from 10 am to noon Alenka Zupančič, author of the celebrated Ethics of the Real, at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society, 40 St. Clair Ave. East, Suite 203. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Slovene Academy of Sciences, Ljubljana and is the author of Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (Reprint 2012); The Odd One In: On Comedy (2008); and The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (2003)

The NLS 7th CLINICAL STUDY DAYS of the Lacanian Compass took place in New York, February 14-16, 2014. The theme was “Paradoxes of Transference”.
The Guest Speaker was Miquel Bassols, from Barcelona, Psychoanalyst, AME, member of the WAP and the ELP. Future President of the World Association of Psychoanalysis. We will also have the participation of Pierre-Gilles Guéguen, Psychoanalyst, Delegate of the World Association of Psychoanalysis for the USA.

Council of Lacanian Compass: Maria Cristina Aguirre, Juan Felipe Arango, Alicia Arenas, Thomas Svolos, Karina Tenenbaum

In 2013

Special Meeting, LACAN TORONTO, Sunday November 24, 2013, from 10:00-1:00, at the T.P.S.
Our first Guest Presenter for the 2013 Fall Speaking Season was Dr. Dan Collins, of Buffalo, New York. Dan Collins is a Lacanian scholar with a Social Work degree, a Ph.D. in English Literature and an English teacher of Upper School students. He is a co-founder of the APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups, 1998). He has presented a wide range of Lacanian papers throughout North America as well as producing translations of Lacan (Seminar XXIV) and Jacques-Alain Miller.
Dr. Collins presented three papers each followed by with discussion.
The first, “What Is a Relationship?” is an introduction to the psychoanalytic notion of relationships, and refers to Henry James’s story, “The Beast in the Jungle.” The second is on the drive, and refers to Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The third is the paper he gave at the Boston APW meeting, “The Imaginary and Symbolic in Free Association.”

APRÈS-COUP MEETING in New York City Friday November 8, 2013
“The Night Is Not So Black” with Claude Rabant Friday, November 8, 2013
6:30 pm – 9:00 pm The School of Visual Arts
136 West 21st Street, Room 408, New York, NY
What are the forces behind creation? What act brings it about? Between the forces of night and of day, a tension must be maintained between ego-ideal and ideal ego. If this tension collapses, the subject collapses with it, a victim of Nerval’s “black sun of melancholy.”
Suggested Readings: Freud, “Transience” (1915), “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis” (1936). Lacan, Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
1959/60, class 18.
Claude Rabant is a psychoanalyst practicing in Paris, and a former member of the École Freudienne de Paris. He is the author of numerous articles on psychoanalysis and culture; his books include Délire et théorie, Clins, Inventer le Réel, Métamorphoses de la mélancolie, and the recent La frénésie des pères.
Après-Coup Meeting in New York City Saturday November 9, 2013
“The Frenzy of the Fathers” with Claude Rabant
Rather than deploring the “end of the paternal myth,” Lacan replaces the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father with saying (le dire). This substitution brings with it new access to the “dark continent” of femininity. What effect does this have on the relation between men and women, and between sex and love?
Suggested Readings: Lacan, Autres écrits, “L’étourdit” (1973). Rabant, La frénésie des pères (Paris: Éditions Hermann, 2012).

Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups Eleventh Annual Conference in Boston Mass. October 11-13, 2013.  On the Imaginary with keynote talks by Bruce Fink, Marco Antonio Courtinho Jorge and Richard Kearney.

In “Beyond the ‘Reality Principle,’” Lacan asserts that the “Freudian revolution, like any revolution, derives its meaning from its context, that is, from the form of psychology that dominated at the time it occurred.” So how did the Lacanian revolution begin? Famously, with a struggle against ego psychology, which saw its clinical role as the strengthening of what was for Lacan an imaginary structure, the ego. As Lacan says in “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation,” “I needed to clear away the imaginary which was overvalued in analytic technique.”
And so, for some time at least, Lacanians typically valorized the symbolic while they wrinkled their noses at the imaginary and decried its effects: entrenched I formations that  incubate neurosis, narcissistic identifications that underlie aggressiveness, illusions  of  autonomy that lead to servitude and fraud.
But surely the rehabilitation of the imaginary in the latter part of his career attests that Lacan was no Manichean, seeing the imaginary only as the deceptive “evil twin” of the symbolic. As Lacan says simply in his seminar R.S.I., “The imaginary’s where we are.”

APW’s eleventh annual conference explored the concept of the imaginary and its evolution within the Lacanian revolution.
Hosted by The Boston Lacan Study Group (bostonlacanreadinggroup@gmail.com) at the Holiday Inn, 1200 Beacon Street, Brookline, Boston MA

PULSE New York (PARIS – USA Lacan Seminar): CANCELLED
September 20-22, 2013
How We Live Our Bodies in the 21st Century: a Lacanian Perspective
PULSE Committee: Prof. Marie-Hélène Brousse (Université Paris 8), Prof. Pierre-Gilles Gueguen (Université Paris 8), Prof. Maire Jaanus (Barnard College), Prof. Ellie Ragland (University of Missouri), Josefina Ayerza (editor of Lacanian Ink), Dr. Eric Laurent.

APRÈS-COUP PSYCHOANALYTIC ASSOCIATION
Friday, June 28, 2013. 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm
OBJECT “AAAH”: THE INVENTION OF THE OPERATIC VOICE, Visiting Speaker: MANYA STEINKOLER
It is not by chance that the operatic voice was a Renaissance invention, historically close to that of perspective, i.e. represented space. Singing, like painting, was formalized, “naturalized” along definite principles—principles of relevance to Lacan’s object a and his later work on the infinite line.
MEETING PLACE: The School of Visual Arts, 136 West 21st Street(between 6th and 7th Avenues), New York City. Please ask at the front desk for the room number

The Lacan Salon LaConference 2013, June 1-3, at Simon Fraser University Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 West Hastings in Vancouver, BC. Guest speaker: Dr. Paul Verhaeghe
This year LaConference title was “Sixty years after Lacan: On the Symbolic Order in the Twenty-First Century” and gravitates around Lacan’s “Rome Discourse,” formally known as “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953) where Lacan proposed a return to the primacy of speech and language as the fundamental and irreducible concern of psychoanalysis. In this fashion, he restated the importance of the Symbolic in the emergence of the subject’s truth.
This conference explored the status of the Symbolic in contemporary discursive practices and asked, how have the terms comprising Symbolic transactions shifted? What are the possible consequences of this shift? And how this Symbolic shift related to the Real and Imaginary registers?
The conference presented three panels on Saturday (Clinics and Ethics, Lived Structures, and 21st Century Symbolic) and finished on Sunday with a keynote address by Dr. Paul Verhaeghe, a senior professor at Ghent University, Belgium who holds the chair of the department for psychoanalysis and counseling psychology. He teaches Clinical Psychodiagnostics, Psychoanalytic therapy and Gender studies. He is an analyst in private practice, member of the NLS and the WAP. He has published eight books (5 are translated in English) and more than a hundred papers. His two most recent books bring a critique on contemporary psychotherapy (see “Chronicle of a Death Foretold: the End of Psychotherapy”. Dublin, 2007) and on the link between contemporary society and the new disorders (see “Identity in a Time of Loneliness”. APW conference, Philadelphia, 2008)
Saturday June 1st 8-9:30pm
Dr. Paul Verhaeghe on The Diaries of Louise Bourgeois at The Western Front as a part of Scrivener’s Monthly
Sunday June 2nd 4.00-6.00pm
Closing Event: Film Screening of Larry Clark’s “MARFA GIRL”

Miami NEL Symposium on First Issue of Culture & Clinic in Miami Beach, Florida, May 31 – June 2, 2013: “What Lacan Knew About Women”. Guest speakers were: Pierre Gilles Guéguen, Marie-Hélène Brousse, Eric Laurent, Joan Copjec, Leonardo Gorostiza. At this meeting there was also be a special Plenary Table of four women Analysts of the School. The meeting was held in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Report on Miami Conference 2013 of the New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis/ Nouvellle Ecole Lacanienne de Psychoanalyse
The Planning Committee for the Miami Symposium 2013 thanks each and every one of the participants who made this event possible with their attendance and their work, and who were able to transform this meeting into a real “Festival” of epistemic and human exchange, as Pierre- Gilles Guéguen indicated in his recent article for the Lacan Quotidien No. 329.
Colleagues from 19 countries actively participated in this event, sharing their clinical singularities and knowledge through their presentations. We’d like to highlight the vast amount of attendees and the bountiful number of papers received. We’d like to express special gratitude for this. The significant attendance, among which Argentinians and Americans stood out by their numbers, was proof of the great commitment to psychoanalysis.
In his opening statement, Leonardo Gorostiza emphasized that the objective of the Symposium was to launch the first issue of Culture/Clinic, a publication of the University of Minnesota Press, edited by Maire Jaanus and Jacques Alain Miller, with the collaboration of Marie-Hélène Brousse. Highlighting the significance of this new publication, he pointed out that, according to what’s stated in the editorial, the objective of this publication was to provide “a space for open debate and controversy, in which the clinical experience, always unique, as well as the current state of civilization, which must entails collective considerations, can exchange their points of view and overcome what often becomes a paralyzing opposition between the individual and the social.”
By locating the coordinates of current times, he pinpointed that we live in an era that is now frequently found outside the limits of the aegis of the Father and tradition, proving the limitations of the Freudian Oedipus in finding a way to understand the transformations of the clinical practice nowadays, as well as to shed light on current social phenomenon. “As a matter of fact –he concludes—we are confronted by what has been called a feminization of the world, which might be one of the deepest phenomena of our era, one that we can debate and discuss during this Symposium.”
This was confirmed through the development of the table discussions. An intense debate took place in the plenaries as well as in the simultaneous meetings, driving forward the formalization of several of these topics, and displaying the value of the work done throughout the world with Jacques Lacan’s teachings.
On Friday, May 31th at 1:30 p.m., the event opened with a presentation of Culture/Clinic by Maire Jaanus, Veronique Voruz, Scott Wilson, Marie-Hélène Brousse and Russell Grigg, followed by a lecture by guest of honor Joan Copjec with commentary by Elisa Alvarenga, Marie-Hélène Brousse and Veronique Voruz. Afterwards, a roundtable of Miami professors Irma Barron and Diana Barroso (CAU) with Daniel Brady and Nan Van Den Bergh (FIU) and commentary by Pierre-Gilles Guéguen followed. The afternoon moderators were María Cristina Aguirre and Thomas Svolos.
On Saturday June 1st, a full day of conference took place in which colleagues from all over the world presented 64 papers in four simultaneous rooms, each with their respective discussion, addressing various topics such as “The Women of Today,” “Feminine Masquerade,” “Mother vs Woman,” “Women’s Destinies,” “Hysteria Once Again,” “Madness, Women and film,” “Feminine Jouissance” and 25 other stimulating subjects.
On Sunday, June 2nd, the Symposium took off with a panel titled “Women of Today: Lacanian Women.” Marie-Hélène Brousse, Flory Kruger and Jorge Forbes participated in the panel, which was discussed by Leonardo Gorostiza. After the coffee break, during the table panel titled “Female Psychoanalysts Who Have Finished their Analysis,” four women, AE and former AE, discussed their experiences. They were Graciela Brodsky, Anne Lysy, Silvia Salman and Ana Lydia Santiago, with commentary by Eric Laurent and Angelina Harari as a participating moderator.

The Symposium concluded with a large table composed of psychoanalysts from different countries, who, for five minutes each, shared closing remarks with their event impressions. They were Rômulo Ferreira da Silva, María Cristina Aguirre, Mauricio Tarrab, Gerardo Réquiz, Nancy Gillespie, Jorge Chamorro and Jorge Forbes. Lastly, on behalf of the Planning Committee, Karina Tenenbaum and Juan Felipe Arango expressed special acknowledgement and thanks.

SPEAKING OF LACAN – Toronto, Canada.
Dr. Andre Michels (Luxembourg)
Title: Meaning and Jouissance: The Question of Interpretation
Date: Friday, April 26, 2013 – Time: 7:00 – 9:30 p.m.
Date: Saturday, April 27, 2013 – Time: 10:30 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Website:
Andre Michels is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing in Luxembourg and Paris, and an Analyst and Supervisor at Apres-Coup. He is also a member of Espace Analytique in Paris. He is co-editor of the Jahrbuch fur Klinische Psychanalyse, editor of Actualite de l’Hysterie, and the author of numerous articles on Lacanian psychoanalysis published internationally in book chapters and journals . He has presented his work to a wide variety of audiences in the United States, Europe and South America.
The overlapping of meaning and jouissance determines an empty space, usually understood as non-sense (non-sens). This field is critical for the practice of interpretation which proceeds by a process of reevaluation and a reworking of all logical, epistemical and ethical values. As such, it constitutes a basis for the clinical and doctrinal field of psychoanalysis. This presentation will be highlighted by clinical examples.

LACAN TORONTO
Dr. Michael J. Miller, a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY, presented “Listening Closely: The Clinical Lacan” at the Scientific Session of the Advanced Training Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy of the T.P.S. on Saturday April 13, 2013 at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society, 9:00-12 noon.
Dr. Michael J. Miller also attended a meeting of LacanToronto on Sunday April 14, 2013 where he responded to questions sent to him earlier from Lacan Toronto group members. This was at the T.P.S. from 10:00-1:00.

LACAN TORONTO March 23, 2013.
Professor Levi Bryant, a former psychoanalyst of the Lacanian orientation and currently a professor at Collin College outside of Dallas, Texas, presented “Lacan’s Universes of Discourse and the New Symptoms” at a Special Meeting of the T.P.S. Extension Program on Saturday March 23, 2013 at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society, 10:00-1:00.
In preparation for this exciting event , we suggested you explore the following papers by Levi Bryant and Lacan’s seminal paper on which much of Bryant’s work is based:
Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse by Levi R. Bryant
The Democracy of Objects by Levi R. Bryant
On Psychoanalytic Discourse by Jacques Lacan