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CLINICAL STUDY DAYS 16: “SINGULARITIES IN NEUROSIS: TRANSFERENCE AND INTERPRETATION”
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
April 5-6-7, 2024
* The next Clinical Study Days theme, “Singularities in Neurosis: Transference and Interpretation,” opens the possibility to bring to our clinical conversation cases that touch on any of these issues as well as on a series of questions.
Psychoanalysis is confronted today with a different paradigm, where our culture does not demand a renunciation, but the right to enjoy.(1)
What is the presentation of neurosis in a time when individuals are not subjected to division by societal norms, shame and ideals, but in a quest for the recovery of jouissance that cancels their division and the possibility of any individual desire to emerge?
Under the invocation of a more ferocious superego—”Enjoy!”—a formulation that accounts for the change in nature of the superego (2) that leaves behind the regimen of the Name-of-the-Father, what is revealed is a subjectivity of impulse, where words fail, and the drive is left wandering, exposing all kinds of violence, addictions and high levels of anxiety, the so called panic attacks.
How does this change of referents affect in turn the social link?
On the one hand we have a binary clinic, Neurosis/Psychosis, where Lacan used the paternal metaphor and the phallic signifier to make a sharp division between them.
However, around his later teachings and considering our era, more emphasis is placed on thinking the clinic from the perspective of the symptom,(3) as the singular inventions each one constructs around the non-existence of a program on how to relate to the other sex.
These varied responses, as a defense against the real, will constitute their structure and, at the same time, they will be an exception to the structure. They will be outside anything else that looks like it; they will ‘ex-sist’ outside of what we identify as common in a structure.(4)
These singular responses can be located in the knottings of the three registers, Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, where Lacan also situated Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety.(5)
How does neurosis manifest through these particular forms of knottings?
When in the field of neurosis, how does the hysteric respond to the enigma of the corporeal feminine? Freud’s and Lacan’s first teachings go back to Dora’s case to point to how desire and jouissance are present in relation to hysteria.
Around this question, in Seminar 3, Lacan underlines that hysteria and the feminine are different, since it’s not the same thing to try to respond to the question of what is a woman than to become one.(6)
What are the clinical presentations of the hysteric’s symptom in relation to the symptom of another body; the paternal function and the identifications; its relation with the unconscious and history, out of which her own symptom is constituted?(7)
Lacan’s later formulation of the unconscious outside of meaning also includes a jouissance that does not speak to any one, written in silence.
How do we formalize what takes place in the jouissance of the body that escapes the phallus and the signifier?
For obsessional neurosis, Freud theorized different conceptual lines—one in relation to the topology of the partial object and its relation to character; a second line developed around a ‘compulsion’ that we can locate in relation to the logic of the One; and a third line that was revealed to Freud in the case of the Rat Man, in relation to an ambivalence around the object of love.
How does the obsessional defense against the drive and the demand of the Other, motivated by anxiety, present itself? Often constructed in the style of a Vauban fort, as a defensive strategy, where cannons can be moved from one point to the next, this defense can appear in the manner of not desiring anything.
This closed off position, that alludes to an identification with the unity of the body image, how do we address it in the clinic with the obsessional?
Although we tend to think the consistency of the obsessional neurosis as exclusively in their thought, Laurent reminds us that Lacan considered the obsessional to be someone who cannot detach themselves from the gaze. It is thus the body taken under the gaze and as “either having or not having a form in relation to the gaze that dominates it”. “It is at the level of the real of the body and the body event, that we can approach the obsessional”(8)
The path that opens up for us this year is how transference and interpretation work as operators in the treatment of neurosis. Through the signifier of transference, a speaking being is invited to speak about what causes its division.
If interpretation, as an unexpected event, as part of the logic of the treatment that has a temporal dimension connecting the outside of time of the unconscious with the present of the analysand, then, how is this revealed in the clinic with neurosis?
How can even moments of anxiety and their feelings of urgency for a subject be turned into a question that frames the beginning of an analytic experience?(9) Also, what makes these initial interviews turn into an analysis that lasts? What turning points can we formalize and verify between these two moments, the initial moment and its effects, and the subsequent moment that tends to require time?
How do we formalize what separates the practice of psychoanalysis from other psychotherapies even when only a few sessions are possible due to institutional constraints?
To access something of the singular, says Lacan, a lot of work has to be put into it, in an intervention at the study days of the École freudienne of Paris in 1975, he states: “It is only worth sweating for the singular . . . But you have to sweat through a lot of particulars to get to the singular.”(10) This will be the ethical orientation from the beginning of any analytic experience. Miller adds to this, that Singularity is that which “should not be omitted”, therefore, outside the particulars of diagnostic categories.(11)
The next Clinical Study Days will be an occasion to show what we do within our orientation, as well as to present the new forms if any, that neurosis takes in our times.
We welcome you to start our work towards the next clinical study days. Chairs: Sergio Garroni, Liliana Kruszel
Axes of work
*Initial consultations. Modes of presentation of neurosis today.
*The entry into analysis.
*What transference today.
*The psychoanalytic act and interpretation.
*Treatments in virtual modality
*Institutional work with neurosis: clinics, hospitals, schools
*Psychoanalysis with children
(1) Miller,J.A. “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body”. In: World Association of Psychoanalysis (Eds.). Scilicet: The Speaking Body. On the Unconscious in the 21st Century. NLS Publication, 2015, pp. 27–42.
(2) Lacan, J. “The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX, Encore 1972–1973.” Norton, 1998.
(3) Miller,J.A. “The Symptom: Knowledge, Meaning, and the Real.” https://www.lacan.com/ symptom7_articles/miller.html
(4) Lacan, J. “Of Structure as an Inmixing of Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever.” The Lacanian Review. 12, Spring 2022.
(5)Lacan, J. “The Third.” The Lacanian Review 7, Spring 2019.
(6) Lacan, J. “The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book III, The Psychoses 1955– 1956.” Norton,1993.
(7) Lacan, J. “The Sinthome, Book XXIII “ (ed. J-A. Miller, trans. A.R.Price), Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.
(8) Laurent, E. “An Interview with Éric Laurent :The Unconscious and the Body Event”. The Lacanian Review. 1, Spring 2016.
(9) Lacan, J. “Preface to the English Edition of Seminar XI.” The Lacanian Review. 6, Fall 2018.
(10) Lacan, J. “On Pleasure and the Fundamental Rule”. The Lacanian Review. 11, November 2021.
(11) Miller, J.A. “Sutilezas Analíticas”. Paidós (2012) “Analytic Subtleties” (our translation)
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CALL FOR PAPERS
Clinical Study Days 16
“Singularities in Neurosis: Transference and Interpretation”.
April 5-6-7, 2024
Savor Cinema,
503 SE 6th St
Fort Lauderdale
Florida, 33301
The Scientific Committee of the next CSD16 invite you to propose a clinical case dedicated to the theme of our next meeting.
* Individuals who wish to submit a case will need to first register for CSD16.
* Registration before November 15 is $ 300, after that date $400. Students with ID and under 21 y/o, $100.
* Submission of cases deadline is October 30.
> REGISTER HERE
Case presentations must address one of the following themes:
• Initial consultations. Forms of presentation of neurosis in our time.
• The entry into analysis.
• What transference today.
• The psychoanalytic act and interpretation.
• Treatments in virtual modality.
• Institutional work with neurosis: clinics, hospitals, schools.
• Psychoanalysis with children.
Cases should be a maximum of both 15 minutes long when read aloud and 9,000 characters (with spaces). The submission deadline is October 15.
We appreciate your interest and look forward to reading your papers and seeing you in Florida.
Please send your text and any questions you may have to the CSD16 Scientific Committee at daliamer@aol.com
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SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
• Aguirre, Maria Cristina
• Alvarez, Isolda
• Garroni, Cristina
• Garroni, Sergio (Chair)
• Kahn, Azeen
• Kruszel, Liliana (Chair)
• Tenenbaum, Karina
• Seth, Samya
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VENUE
Savor Cinema,
503 SE 6th St
Fort Lauderdale
Florida, 33301
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WHY CLINICAL STUDY DAYS?
Jacques Lacan. Is there a name in psychoanalysis that gets such reaction? Such emotions of admiration, love, hatred, jealousy. But not only that, what he did put people to work: refashioning a psychoanalysis when Freud’s followers failed, but also a remarkable legacy of those who work against him.
Since 2005, psychoanalysts of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, working in the United States, have sponsored the Clinical Study Days. While Lacan was certainly a prodigious thinker in many fields, he was above all else a psychoanalyst. The CSD is an event for anyone interested in Lacan to gather and discuss clinical work in the orientation given by the teaching of Lacan and by Jacques-Alain Miller.
Indeed, if Lacan is our first point of orientation, Miller is our second. It was Miller who Lacan himself identified as the person who was able to read him, a notoriously difficult task. But, beyond that work in the realm of meaning, it was Miller who was able to do something with Lacan’s teaching and the work that Lacan left us, in all the institutional work led by Miller that has given the world the Schools of the World Association of Psychoanalysis. For it is these Schools that are the means by which psychoanalysis has passed from generation to generation through the formation of new psychoanalysts.
The CSD offers speakers and participants an opportunity to work together with psychoanalysts and is vital to the life of the School.