This title, “Psychoanalysis in the City” emerged at the intersection of two priorities: on the one hand, what is within our reach: the training of the psychoanalyst, which is the very subject of the School, its primary action: ensuring the conditions of training with the two pillars of the pass and the guarantee, on the other: the city that is catching up with us political impact.
with the most recent episode of the Fasquelles resolution which aimed at nothing less than condemning and banning psychoanalysis in the treatment of autism. This episode is only a new incidence of the administrative and political offensive against a broader institutional field (education, health, universities) where the struggles for a reference to psychoanalysis to survive are about to become established over time.
The title Psychoanalysis in the City interprets this intersection. Firstly because it combines the most current of psychoanalysis and an outdated term, that of city since society no longer has the form of a city (no more center, a network configuration, moreover the poster reflects a city in detached pieces with precarious borders).
Then because it indicates that Psychoanalysis in the city is indeed a question of School: the School makes itself responsible for the training of psychoanalysts insofar as it concerns analysis, practice, clinic, study, teaching. Insofar as it also concerns psychoanalysis in the city, the training includes this chapter of “Lacanian politics”.
Lacanian politics as Jacques-Alain Miller
defined it in his seminar of the same name (1997-1998) concerned first and foremost the analytic city: it was a question of extracting from the major events of the history of the analytic institution, principles in order to draw mobile database from them a policy of psychoanalysis, an orientation for the School. But this dimension did not exclude the notion of politics in the more general sense. To the extent that the history of psychoanalysis is synchronous with the surrounding world, that it unfolds in the city, that it exists only creating product catalog feeds in the city. With the pass, did Lacan not give psychoanalysis the field of an exercise extended to the city, because it requires a new social link, a community, but also because it touches on the institution of the Other, because it has an impact on the field of authority.
Defining the political incidence in question in psychoanalysis is a question as urgent as it is formidable. For at least two reasons:
because of the antinomy of discourses: antinomy between psychoanalysis and the devices of mastery that one could condense in this statement by Lacan: on the side of the master ” one lets glimpse that there could be a way of life ” [1] .
This pretension on the side of the contemporary
master takes on the appearance of S1, injunctions cut off from tradition, from the ideals of ancient times.
But also because psychoanalysis clean email is not completely freed from its link with the master’s discourse: the fact that it is a discourse is enough to classify it ” in the kinship of the Master’s Discourse ” [2] insofar as it constitutes the matrix of the social bond. There is therefore no exact division between Analytical Discourse and Master’s Discourse but a relationship that is always symptomatic between the two: psychoanalysis is in the city always against the current.