This collection of essays offers some novel reflections on the nature of the crowd, the collective, and the subject’s relation to the social link. Prompted mainly by Freud’s Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, the authors analyze crucial issues ranging from La Boétie’s late Renaissance theory of voluntary servitude to the early 20th-century Europe’s collapsed empires and revolutionary uprisings, to progressive South Africans’ turn to segregationism, to Bolsonaro’s adoption of Nazi rhetoric.

As global armed conflict seems once more imminent, we will examine from this perspective the articulation between psychoanalysis and politics. We will return to Freud’s thought on impending war, and consider how psychoanalysis can trace an ethico-political trajectory that dissipates violence and cruelty.

Lacan traced his object a as voice in several clinical phenomena within each of the psychic structures: the presence of voices in psychosis, the function of the Superego in neurosis, masochism in perversion. This working group will follow some of these articulations by reading selected chapters from Lacan’s Seminars: III, The Psychoses; X, Angst; XII, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis; and XVI, From an Other to the other .

In addition to a long-time concern with framework and setting, an ensuing search for new institutional strategies in treating psychoses leads to a proposal of two orientations: one based on translation and the other on the concept of perspective. The invention of perspective in the realm of pictorial representation may serve as a desirable model for analytic work with psychosis.

Freud put forward two different views of chance: “I believe in external (real) chance, but not in internal (psychic) chance. This is the opposite of superstitious.” Freud’s formula, which neatly divides a chance that exists and another that doesn’t, brings about the confrontation between the fundamental rule and unconscious causality, which implicitly offers us a valuable key to analytic technique and the articulation of the analytic act.

The case of “Professor Brain” was written about by three important psychoanalysts, in three different languages: in German in 1934 by his first analyst, Melitta Schmideberg; in English in 1948 by his second analyst, Ernst Kris; and in French by Jacques Lacan, who referred to it several times, starting in 1954, in his Seminars and his Écrits. “Professor Brain” was convinced he was forced to plagiarize the ideas of others, and for this reason was unable to publish his own research.

“For psychosis to be triggered, the Name-of-the-Father — verworfen, forclosed, that is, never having come to the place of the Other — must be summoned to that place in symbolic opposition to the subject.” (Lacan, Écrits, p. 577; Norton edition, p. 481)

In his dialogue On Divination, Cicero writes that the Pythagoreans cultivated the practice of “observing voices”: “not only the voices of the gods but also those of men, which they named ‘omens.’” Building on discussions at Après-Coup in 2022 and 2023, this presentation will explore the conditions in which sudden speech events have become objects of attention in ritual, literature, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, yielding insights into omens, slips, and epiphanies.

We will continue our reading of Freud’s clinical and historical cases, paying attention to the significant decisions made when Freud’s concepts were translated into English. We will also read Freud’s metapsychological papers and theoretical elaborations.

The doubts arising out of today's clinical work with children force us to thoroughly question our therapeutic practice. This reading group returns to the conceptual assumptions of psychoanalysis through a study of the canonical texts of child analysis, from Freud to Klein, from Winnicott to Lacan. Participants are invited to provide examples from their own clinical experience with children (required).

Lacan countered the long-disputed biologism of Freud’s “anatomy is destiny” with “the unconscious is politics.” Yet he never separated what the unconscious elaborates from real bodies, for instance of sexual organs in their copulation, with regard to their defective sexual jouissance. Noting that what is called the sexual relation, le rapport sexuel, precisely is not one, and that something else has been substituted in it, something he termed plus de jouir, we can surmise that it’s there that politics begins.

For the past twenty-five years, Gisèle Chaboudez has been rigorously interpreting and writing on Lacan’s concept of the sexual non-relation. For millennia the sexual law that universally defines “man as the one who has and woman as the one who is what he has” has masked and compensated for the absence of sexual relation, while generating a myriad of subjective and social effects. The feminine side of sexuation, which can be occupied by any gender, introduces the logic of the Not-all, creating the possibility for two jouissances to be shared in a singular and inventive way.