Psychoanalysis

Situated in Draft G, in his letter to Fliess in 1895, Freud outlines a schematic diagram of sexuality, divided along the lines of a somatic-psyche boundary and an ego boundary. It depicts a quadrant with a psyche-soma frontier and an ego frontier.[2] It is interesting to note that the schema is embedded in Freud’s paper on ‘Melancholia’, in which he states “The affect corresponding to melancholia is that of mourning- that is, longing for something lost. Thus in Melancholia it must be a question of a loss- a loss in instinctual life”.[3] We see melancholia in other discourses in the clinic, where “the shadow of the object, has fallen on the ego”,[4] where object loss retreats to ego loss. In these presentations, there is a persistent encounter with the Real of loss, whereas in the work...

It is fitting that this group New Studies on Hysteria which is hosting this Conference today has had no permanent place of domicile since its inception.
For quite some time, the Milltown Institute offered us a place of refuge but due to its imminent closure we are once again searching for a place in which to work.
Some of you will recognise something of the same kind of situation in which Lacan found himself in Nov. 1963 when he was finally excommunicated (a word he himself uses) from the International Psychoanalytic Association. To be more precise, Lacan’s teaching had been the object of censure and a ban on this teaching ensured that he would never again be sanctioned by the I.P.A. Lacan regarded this as tantamount to excommunication. This is of course a religious...

It is important to remember that we cannot separate theory from practice for Freud and to remember that every discovery Freud has made has in one way or another been influenced not only by his theoretical work but by what was happening in his personal life and this is because, it seems to me, for Freud theory is not something you do – you write about. What you write about are the little threads of significance that go to frame a Life and then we call this theory. In other words, as Lacan insists the unconscious is that which does not stop not writing itself.

Desde algunos años, la actualidad mediática en Francia y Bélgica sobre todo, focaliza su atención sobre el tema de adolescentes y jóvenes que cometen atentados en lugares públicos y emblemáticos de la posmodernidad, entre los más recientes, el Bataclan de París (noviembre 2015) y el aeropuerto internacional de Bruselas (marzo 2016) o contra personas representativas de la laicidad atea, como los caricaturistas de Charlie Hebdo (enero 2015), actos reivindicados luego por el Estado Islámico. Muchos debates de diversa índole, han nacido alrededor de las causas psicosociales de estas violencias espectaculares y de la personalidad de los perpetradores. En esas discusiones, se observa un cierto antagonismo entre por un lado, los defensores de los valores superiores del Occidente que ven en...