Upcoming Events
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In 2021
2020 rescheduled Lacan’s Ecrits Conference September 10-11, 2021
In 2020
XIth International Meeting of the IF-SPFLF
18th Annual Meeting of the APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups) Fall, 2020. in Dublin, Ireland. Cancelled because of the pandemic
Third Lacan’s Écrits Conference 2020, September 12-13, 2020. Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland. Cancelled because of the pandemic
XVIIIth New Lacanian Schools (NLS) Congress • June 27 and 28, 2020 • Ghent, Belgium. “Interpretation: From Truth to Event” Cancelled because of the pandemic
XIIth Congress of the WAP • April 13-17, 2020 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “Dream: its Interpretation and Use in Lacanian Treatment” Cancelled because of the pandemic
In 2019
Second Lacan’s Écrits Conference 2019, October 11-13, 2019. Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Penn. USA
17th Annual Meeting of the APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups) June 14-16, 2019. in Dublin, Ireland. “The Drive”
XVIIth New Lacanian Schools (NLS) Congress • June 1 and 2, 2019 • Tel Aviv. “Urgence: C’est-à-dire l’urgence clinique, l’urgence de l’être parlant, l’urgence du parlêtre”. President’s statement: Bernard Seynhaeve: Analyze the School:
The NLS is the only bilingual AMP School and, although in Europe it is very well represented, the NLS brings together communities that span several continents.
…First, the language. English is becoming more and more important in our school. On the other hand, the geographical center of gravity of the NLS moves. Both phenomena combine.
I also took it into account in the composition of the new Executive Committee. Two members who live in North America, the USA and Canada, are part of the Executive Committee, which brings us to meet by Skype Sunday 11 am for America, 17 pm for Europe.
I will be the president.
The vice-president will be Alexandre Stevens.
Three secretaries will share this task: Pamela King, Maria-Cristina Aguirre [New York City] and Ruzanna Hakobyan [Montreal].
Knotting:
During my vice-presidency, I appreciated the intense desire of members to be more involved in the School’s policy. …
For the Congress in 2019: I propose that you use a text that Jacques-Alain Miller (JAM) commented on in several parts of his course: the “Preface to the English Edition of Seminar XI [1]”. This ultimate text written by Lacan deals with the past. Four major signifiers are the subject of this text: The real unconscious, case of urgency, satisfaction and of course the past. I consider them as four new concepts that articulate one to the other. In his course, “The very last Lacan”, JAM comments on the end of Lacan’s teaching and more precisely on the last three Lacan Seminars as well as “L’esp de la lapse” (this is how JAM calls it) text that was written in the days following the seminar on the sinthome). So this is the 2006-2007 JAM course I invite you to read. But more specifically this text, “L’esp de la lapse” which was commented by JAM in the first three lessons of his course “The very last Lacan”. He also talks about it precisely in yet another lesson of his course “Things of finesse in psychoanalysis”, in January 2009. All these lessons have been published in one or the other review of the ECF.
The title of Congress 2019 is … “Emergency!: That is to say the clinical urgency, the urgency of the speaking being, the urgency of the parlêtre. Like a solid, urgency is a problem that can be approached from different angles. It can be approached from the angle of the trauma, but also by the edge of the entry in the cure or by that of the end of the cure, and articulate itself to the satisfaction. It can be approached by the face of the reception of mental suffering in institutions. In short, we have here a theme that is a logical continuation of previous congresses, but also by the urgency that is pressing in the news of our School and civilization. An idea has emerged among the English-speaking members of the next Executive Committee: Why not translate these lessons of JAM that I just highlighted into English. I made a request to JAM. He agreed. I am pleased to announce that The Lacanian Review will publish in a Special Issue the first three lessons of the JAM course, “The Last Lacan” and the January 21, 2009 lesson in “The Freudian Cause” under the title, “La passe du parlêtre”; this in French and in English. This translation will be provided by Russell Grigg. I also asked JAM to publish this final text of Lacan in its English version, “Preface to the English Edition of Seminar XI” in this issue. He accepted. In my opinion, this will be an interesting working tool in view of the 2019 congress to be held in Tel Aviv on June 1 and 2, 2019. This special issue will be available to all NLS members as well as to all members of the NLS next congress. The organizing committee for this 2019 congress has already been set up.
Bernard Seynhaeve July 1st, 2018.
In 2018
16th Annual Meeting of the APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups) October 5-7, 2018. “Psychoanalysis: Science and Truth” In Boston, MA. To register: apwonline.org
First Lacan’s Écrits Conference 2018, September 21-22, 2018. Ghent University, Belgium.
IX° Rendez-Vous of the IF-SPFLF (Forums of the Lacanian Field) September 13-16, 2018. “Advents of the Real and the Psychoanalyst” in Barcelona, Spain. To hear Colette Soler speaking, access through: https://www.champlacanien.net/public/2/evRDV.php?language=2&menu=1
XVIth New Lacanian Schools (NLS) Congress • June 30-July 1, 2018 • Paris. “In a State of Transference: Wild, Psychoanalytic, Political”
XIth Congress of the WAP • 2-6 April 2018 • “The Ordinary Psychoses and the Others: Under Transference” • Barcelona, Spain. https://congresoamp2018.com/en/
In 2017
15th Annual Meeting of the APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups) July 14-16, 2017. Lacan’s Seminar XIV: The Logic of Fantasy. In Toronto, Ontario, Canada. To register: apwonline.org
XVth New Lacanian Schools (NLS) Congress “About the Unconscious” April 29-30, 2017. Paris, France.
In 2016
14th Annual Meeting of the APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups) August, 2016. “On Love” In Vancouver, B.C., Canada. To register: apwonline.org
Colorado Analytic Forum of the Lacanian Field, October 21-23, 2016 in Denver, Colorado, USA. “Reclaiming the Unconscious”
VII° Rendez-Vous of the IF-SPFLF (Forums of the Lacanian Field) July 14-17, 2016. “Linkings and Unlinkings According to the Psychoanalytic Clinic” in Medellin, Colombia.
XIVth New Lacanian Schools (NLS) Congress in Dublin, Ireland July 2 and 3, 2016. “Discreet Signs in Ordinary Psychosis: Clinic and Treatment”
Xth Congress of the WAP • 25-28 April 2016 • Rio de Janeiro, Brazil • “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body”
In 2015
13th Annual Meeting of the APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups) August 21-23, 2015. “On Transference” in Ghent, Belgium. To register: apwonline.org
XIIIth New Lacanian Schools (NLS) Congress in Geneva, Switzerland May 9, 10, 2015. “Moments of Crisis”
In 2014
Melancholia November 7-8, 2014. Dublin, Ireland. Look for details: https://www.facebook.com/events/690109527735229/permalink/692320020847513/
IXth Congress of the WAP • 14-18 April 2014 • Paris • Palais des Congrès • www.wapol.org “The Real in the 21st Century”
XIIth New Lacanian Schools (NLS) Congress in Ghent May 17, 18, 2014. “What Cannot be Said: Desire, Fantasy, Real”
The Argument:
In my title, some of you will have recognised an echo of Wittgenstein’s formulation, the last proposition in his Tractatus: “What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence”[i]. Unlike the philosopher, I have cut the formulation in the middle and allowed the suspense to complete it on the basis of what Lacan proposes in Seminar VI, along with the decisive orientation that Jacques-Alain Miller gave to it in Athens.[ii]
For psychoanalytic experience invites one precisely not to be silent about what cannot be said, “which provides an opportunity to put to the test the fact that words cannot say it all”.[iii] In the course of the treatment, the aspiration to find the word that would say the thing fades, even if Lacan began by installing the Name-of-the-Father as the final word of the story. He made it into an Other of the Other, the guarantee of the established order, which he consecrated as the symbolic order. But what J.-A. Miller shows in his presentation is that in what follows and right up to the end of his teaching, Lacan systematically dismantled this pseudo-harmony of the symbolic. That is the meaning of this formulation from Seminar VI: “there is no Other of the Other”.
Free association necessarily encounters the impossible to say. It is thus at the moment when the word with which to say it is found to be lacking that the subject falters to the point of panic, there where he must, as Lacan says, face up to his existence. “At this moment which is, if one may say, a panic point, the subject must cling to something, and what he clings to is precisely the object qua object of desire.”[iv]
Wittgenstein would be right, says Jean-Claude Milner, “if only what we cannot speak about consented to be silent.”[v] The analysand would thereby conclude his analysis on the revelation of a want-to-be that constitutes the metonymy of his desire and arrive at the “forsaken horizon of being.”[vi] As J.-A. Miller notes, this version of the end of analysis turns the subject into a non-dupe, in other words, a subject founded on erring.
However, as he pointed out in Athens, the place where the end of analysis is played out is not on the side of the insubstantial being of a desire, which would be a pure signifying metonymy, but on the side of the fantasy, which is enjoying substance [substance jouissante]. Thus, “the heart of this seminar is not interpretation; it is the subject’s unconscious relation to the object in the desiring experience of the fantasy.”[vii]
What is a psychoanalysis practice that aims at the object a of the fantasy? What is at stake is not that the analysand narrates his phantasmagorias, it is a question of circumscribing what the subject’s life is structured around when he is a prisoner of his fantasy – in the singular and unconscious – just as Lacan does in his analysis of dreams or of Hamlet. There is no direct experience of the unconscious fantasy, which is why it is necessary to reconstitute it in our constructions.
The Congress in Ghent will thus focus on what does not consent to be silent and makes its way through the inter-said [inter-dit]. We shall emphasize “the opposition between the closed order of the father (metaphor is always a stopping point) and what desire brings, on the contrary, of the irregular and fundamentally out of place.”[viii] The theme unfolds between what cannot be said except between the lines and what is impossible to say. It may be true that “the analyst offers himself as a support for every demand, and responds to none of them”,[ix] but it is not merely in this non-responding that the mainspring of our presence lies, as Lacan says at the end of Seminar VI. As this Seminar reveals, the true nature of the objects of the fantasy is to be real objects, “separated from the subject though they are closely related to his vital drive.”[x] The analyst makes himself into its “inexorable”[xi] support. In the different structures, the reconstitution of the fantasy as support of desire will serve as the turntable with which to articulate the relation of the subject’s desire to the desire of the Other… without Other.
Dominique Holvoet
Translated by Florencia F.C. Shanahan and Philip Dravers
VIII° Rendez-vous of the IF-SPFLF – « LES PARADOXES DU DÉSIR »
25-28 JULY, 2014 Paris, France.
In 2013
SEMINAR OF THE NEW LACANIAN SCHOOL IN LONDON – SATURDAY 9th, MARCH 2013 2:30pm-5pm
Preparatory Seminar: Towards the XIth Congress of the NLS ‘What is it that we call psychosis today?’
Guest Speaker: Marco Focchi, psychoanalyst and member of the Scuola Lacaniana di Psicoanalisi (SLP) “Psychosis in the age of lost pre-established harmony”
Chair: Natalie Wülfing
University of London Student Union, Bloomsbury Suite, Second Floor, Malet Street, London W1
April 26, 2013 in Sofia – Report on the Second Seminar of the Bulgarian Society for Lacanian Psychoanalysis (BSLP) with Bernard Seynhaeve, psychoanalyst, member of NLS, ECF and WAP, director of Courtil
By Evgeni Genchev, vice President of BSLP, member of NLS
The II Seminar of the BSLP was held on April 26, 2013 in Sofia in the premises of the French Institute of Culture.
The seminar was introduced by Vessela Banova, President of BSLP and it proceeded with the Discipline of Reading, where two of our members Kristina Krasteva and Bistra Dancheva commented on one sentence each, from the first chapter of Seminar III of Lacan – The Psychoses. The sentences chosen by Bernard Seynhaeve were the following: 1. “When he speaks, the subject has the entire material of language at his disposal, and this is where concrete discourse begins to be formed. Firstly, there is a synchronic whole, which is language as a simultaneous system of structured groups of opposition, and then there is what occurs diachronically, over time, and what discourse is.” – commented by Kristina Krasteva and 2. “The insult is always a rupture in the system of language…” – commented by Bistra Dancheva.
In her commentary Kristina made an overview of language and discourse trying to clarify those concepts from a linguistics point of view. Bernard commented on the connection of this sentence to Lacan’s elaboration of the question of hallucinations.
Bistra stressed upon the foreclosure of the Name of the Father as a reason for the rupture in the system of language. She also elaborated on the hallucinatory aspect of insulting. She presented two vignettes illustrating her commentary.
The exposé of Bernard was constructed as a commentary on the phrase: “I’ve just been to the butcher’s”. He started by coming back to Lacan’s “L scheme” and stressed upon the imaginary dimension. In this trend of thought, he also commented on the phenomenon of Paranoia and Transitivism and the Ego as an imaginary formation. He also made a connection to the late Lacan and the importance he attributed to the unconscious as a real.
Two cases were presented by Yordanka Hristozova and Ekaterina Vitkova.
The case of Yordanka presents her work with a psychotic man who presents a clinical picture of Schizophrenia. Her interventions make possible for this psychotic subject to maintain a very fragile equilibrium and to overcome some psychotic crises without a serious passing to act.
The case of Ekaterina presents a man with a clinical picture of Ordinary Psychosis, who tries to fill in the hole in the knowledge with medical signifiers.
The discussions of the presentations and of the cases introduced different aspects of the very big topic of Psychoses in Lacanian Theory and in the psychoanalytic practice.
18th and 19th May 2013 | XIth NLS Congress in Athens, Greece
Title: The Psychotic Subject in the “Geek” Era
Report
The prestigious ceremonial hall of the University of Athens was packed on Saturday May 18, for the opening of the XIth Congress of the NLS. More than 400 participants worked during two days on the theme of “the psychotic subject in the geek era”, in a friendly and studious atmosphere.More than sixty papers were in the program. Without much respite, participants, speakers, chairpersons and discussants brought to life, during this weekend, the results of the research on psychosis carried out throughout the year within the New Lacanian School, following Eric Laurent’sinvitation last year in Tel Aviv.
Should we mourn because the modern subject relates increasingly to technological gadgets which he enjoys in an autistic mode? Neither bio-catastrophic nor techno-prophet, as noted by François Ansermet, the orientation of the papers rather showed how psychoanalysis allows the subject to reinvent his subjective position before the real of the non-relation. The information flooding us from the internet does not deliver the solution to the sexual equation. On the contrary, it is by progressively sifting the mode of jouissance of the symptom in art, in a way of life or, for us, in the analytic experience, that a way out emerges to “go beyond the solitude of the One” -as shown particularly by the beautiful session of the AS chaired by Anne Lysy and Miquel Bassols, with Bruno de Halleux and Marie-Hélène Blancard.
In the NLS, perhaps more than in other Schools of the WAP, the dynamics of the Congress are inseparable from the construction of the School as such. We have seen to what degree a School of psychoanalysis is equivalent to the sum of the analyses of its members, and how it is thus built in a constant work-in-progress. Moreover, the members of the NLS gathered on Friday afternoon to hold their first Conversation of the School, chaired by Jacques-Alain Miller. From a careful reading of the preparatory report, J-A Miller closed down some illusory doors and opened up some promising ones! The question of the guarantee in the School, the clinical debate in the form of a Conversation for a greater rigor in the construction of the cases, the place of the instances nominated by the WAP, or even the question of the pass, the cartels and the formation of the psychoanalyst, were debated in a clarifying atmosphere where the issue of trust was central.
The climax was reached on Sunday afternoon when, chaired by Alexandre Stevens, and following the remarkable intervention of Yves Vanderveken -vice-president of the NLS-, Jacques-Alain Miller took the floor to give impetus to the next Congress under the title: the Other without Other. Based on the imminent publication of Book VI of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan “Desire and its interpretation”, he revealed, before a captivated audience, the great secret of psychoanalysis, opening multiple pathways for our next Congress in Ghent on 17th and 18th May 2014. We are already working on the transcription.
The Congress committee, under the guidance of Epaminondas Theodoridis in Greece, and the involvement of the Executive Committee of the NLS, worked hard to make this congress a great success for psychoanalysis. I extend my warmest greetings and thanks to them and to all the participants who, each in their own way, gave the best of themselves to produce the-formation-effect -always aside-, implied by the analytic experience.
At the end of this Athenian weekend, appointment was given on 7 July in Brussels, for the PIPOL Congress of the EuroFederation of Psychoanalysis
Dominique Holvoet, President of the NLS
SPF ENGLISH SPEAKING SEMINAR July 6 and 7, 2013 in Paris
This Seminar was organized and presented by the IF-EPFCL Research Group for the Study of Lacan in English (Colette Soler’s group).
Where: School of Psychoanalysis of the Forums of the Lacanian Field, 118 rue d’Assas, Paris
When: Saturday, July 6 and Sunday, July 7, 2013
THEME: The Name of the Father and Fathers (Nom du Père et Pères)
The seminar consisted of two full days of papers, presented in English.
Presenters: Colette Soler, Sol Aparicio, Luis Izcovich, Patricia Dahan, Marc Strauss, Radu Turcanu
Each member of the Research Group had chosen a formulation of Lacan for commentary.
Our references were the three following Seminars : Les non-dupes errent, 1973/1974. R.S.I., 1974/1975. Le sinthome, 1975/1976.
PATRICIA DAHAN Chair, Luis Izcovich
Seminar XXI The Non-dupes Err, lesson of March 19, 1974
“ … a function is substituted for this name of the father that is none other than to name-as. To be named as something, that’s what appears in an order that is actually substituted for the name of the father. Except that here the mother is generally enough by herself to indicate the project, to be a trailblazer, to point the way …it is nevertheless her, her, her desire that indicates to her kid this project that is expressed by the naming-as. To be named as something, that’s what, for us, at this moment in history, is preferred—I mean actually preferred, it comes before—what the name of the father is.”
SOL APARICIO, Chair, Marc Strauss
Seminar RSI, lesson of April 15, 1975
“What one must manage to clearly conceive of is that this prohibition [of incest] consists in the hole of the Symbolic. There must be something of the Symbolic for there to appear individualised in the knot this something that I, I do not so much call the Oedipus complex, it is not so complex as all that. I call that the Name of the Father. Which means nothing but the Father as Name, which means nothing at the start, not simply the father as name, but the father as naming.”
COLETTE SOLER, Chair, Radu Turcanu
Seminar R.S.I., from the lesson of January 21 1975
“It is necessary that anyone can make an exception in order that the function of the exception becomes a model, but the reverse is not true—the exception mustn’t hang about with just anyone, for it thereby constitutes a model.”
MARC STRAUSS, Chair, Sol Aparicio
Seminar, The Sinthome, lesson of November 18, 1975
“The Oedipus complex, as such, is a symptom. It is in as much as the Name-of-the-Father is also the Father of the name that everything is maintained, which does not make the symptom any less necessary.
The Other which it concerns is shown in the case of Joyce, by this, that in short, he is responsible for the father.”
RADU TURCANU, Chair, Colette Soler
Seminar XXIII, The Sinthome, lessons of January 13, 1976 and February 17, 1976
“Exiles is truly the approach of something which is, for him (Joyce), in short, the symptom. The central symptom in which, of course, what is at stake is the symptom constituted by the deficiency proper to the sexual relationship (du symptôme fait de la carence propre au rapport sexuel). But this deficiency must indeed take a form. And this form is the one that knots him to his wife… (13.1.1976)
I centered the matter around the name, the proper name. And I thought that—make what you wish of this thought—that it was by wanting a name for himself that Joyce compensated for the paternal lack (carence paternelle )”. (17.02.1976)
LUIS IZCOVICH, Chair, Patricia Dahan
Seminar The Sinthome, lesson of April 13, 1976.
“The hypothesis of the unconscious—Freud emphasizes it—is something that can only be used by supposing the Name-of-the-Father. To suppose the Name-of-the-Father, that’s God for sure. It is that that psychoanalysis succeeds in proving that one can also do without the Name-of-the-Father. One can do without it, on condition that one makes use of it.”