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.

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.

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 .

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.

The Name-of-the-Father articulates the structure that gives rise to the subject, formed by the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. According to Lacan, the Father acquires respectability and authority by binding his name to a desire-causing object. We will therefore examine the intrinsic relation between the law and desire.

Ever since Deleuze and Guattari brought attention to it, Artaud’s concept of a “body without organs” (from his 1947 play To Have Done with the Judgment of God ) has been overused as a metaphor for individual and collective rebellion. Yet many other lessons remain in his “absolute materialism” and the painful, powerfully revolutionary conflict he waged with the pervasive presence of matter — from physical objects to the soul, thoughts, and even God.

How does the incorporation of the signifiers determining the subject and their sedimentation as letters take place? The expression “eating the book” borrowed and promoted by Lacan offers one approach to this question.

A Workshop with Nicolas Guérin and Manuel Hernández

The DSM tells us that child psychosis no longer exists. Structures are erased and replaced by symptoms, categorized into “disorders.” The “handicapped” child requires exclusively rehabilitative care. Through clinical examples, we'll see how, for psychoanalysis, the diagnosis of psychosis retains all its relevance, even if the identification of structures is complicated by the patient's age. Following the teachings of Freud and Lacan, we’ll find our way through the constitution of structure, of fantasy, and the place of the child in its relationship with the Other and with reality.

The phantasm responds to the question of the Other's desire, and thus the subject’s desire, by articulating subject and object, signifier and jouissance. It is a screen to the Real, and therefore crucially at stake at the end of the treatment, opening onto another mode of jouissance. Suggested readings

To determine the position of psychoanalysis in relation to modern science, it is crucial to return to the logic at stake in Freud’s invention, most clearly exposed in his writings on dreams, wit, and slips of the tongue. Lacan’s return to Freud continually examined psychoanalysis as a logical procedure undermining the principle of contradiction (or non-contradiction) expounded by Aristotle. Focusing on the signifier, the phantasm, and the Borromean knot, we will contrast psychoanalytic logic with the psychologism implicit in the social and political sciences that pervades almost all aspects of modern life.

Autistic subjects live in the grip of the real, facing an invasive jouissance and a threatening Other not yet symbolized. Yet in their bricolage, or tinkering, they devise a way to relate to that real, a singular style for inscribing themselves in the world. If Freud conceived psychotic delusion as an attempt at healing, or the neurotic symptom as a compromise formation, we can identify in the autistic difference a solution found by the subject. Clinical examples will be discussed, and we will learn to read this subject’s signature, strange as it may appear.