Vision as an Event in the Experience of Psychoanalysis - Clotilde Leguil

26th January 2024

7pm-9pm

Trinity College Dublin

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Admission: €30 and €20 Student Rate

"Vision as an Event in the Experience of Psychoanalysis” - Clotilde Leguil

In what sense can we say that vision - in Lacan's sense – truly constitutes an event in psychoanalysis? Between shadow and light, darkness and dazzle, the experience of the unconscious is an experience of “seeing” and “not seeing.” If the analysand begins by realising that he does not see the cause of what is happening to him in his life, he comes to confront himself with a blind spot of his destiny. The experience of “being blinded,” of “seeing nothing,” of “seeing blurred,” or of “being dazzled,” all represent different modalities of relating to the unconscious in terms of “seeing.”

Vision as an event would then coincide with that moment when the unconscious-light, "that which leaves no room for shadow" as Lacan wrote in 1967 (Autres écrits, p. 334), is encountered in an unprecedented way. Where I used to blink, dazzled by too much light, I come to be able to see what I had never seen before. I come to read that which left its trace and could not be revealed at first. The final vision is an event. At last I can read the cipher of my destiny. At last the lost letter has reached its destination.

Clotilde Leguil, École de la Cause freudienne (ECF), World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP). A psychoanalyst and philosopher, she is a lecturer in the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII-Saint-Denis. Author of numerous texts, her most recent publications are L'ère du toxique (2023) and Céder n'est pas consentir (2021).Previous works include: Les Amoureuses, voyage au bout de la féminité (Seuil, 2009), which won the 2010 Prix Œdipe des libraires, and « Je », une traversée des identités ( Puf, 2018). She prefaced the new translations of Freud published by Éditions du Seuil (2010-2011) and contributed to L'Anti-livre noir de la psychanalyse, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (Seuil, 2006).