Psychoanalysis

I love these times to share. When I was reading your titles, I don’t surf over them. I have taken your readings seriously because, for me, your question is the result of a real question, your personal question. For me it’s a mark of respect, taking seriously your question. It’s a real question, a sign that shows what point we are at in the work. We are not all at the same point and it’s always interesting to share.

My experience of working on Freud’s Three Essays was like being Alice down the Rabbit Hole: things seem to make sense, then make too much sense before sense melting away. The text itself is circular; beginning and ending on the same topic, namely a discussion of inversion, the sexual aberration which for Freud isn’t an aberration. It doesn’t follow a temporal structure: the Essay on Infantile Sexuality begins with amnesia, not being able to remember sexual matters, and the period of latency when infantile sexuality is suppressed. Freud’s method is to present a slice of sexual theory, work over it using his concepts and let it fall where it will, resulting in a fragmentary and multi-layered text. The book we have is the result of new sections and footnotes being added over the nineteen...

Brendan Behan a Dublin playwright once said “The first item on the agenda of any newly formed group in Ireland, is the split”.
At this stage over 40 years since Cormac Gallagher brought the “plague of psychoanalysis” (as Freud called it) to our shores, there have been so many splits and repleating and restitching that very soon none of us will have anything to wear.
And, perhaps that may not be so bad after all, because the prêt a porter of the psychoanalyst is much easier to don than the especially fabricated – the “be-spoke” tailor made, as they say in all the best circles. This prêt a’porter of the phantasy seems to be spreading its wings. As Lacan remarks “Is it not true that in our era psychoanalysis is everywhere and psychoanalysts...

“Freud, the first to consent not to look away nor to investigate elsewhere, the first not to attempt to hide it in psychiatric theory that more or less harmonised with the rest of medical knowledge; the first to follow its consequences with absolute rigour.” So says Michel Foucault in “Madness and Civilisation”.[1] The aim of this paper is to examine and remind ourselves of the way in which the hysteric was essential to Freud’s founding of the technique of psychoanalysis. And to outline Freud’s contention, so succinctly put in ‘A Question of Lay Analysis’ that ‘one cannot run away from oneself’[2].