PUBLICATIONS
“Woman does not exist.” This proposition of Lacan’s is the theme and title of the International Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP) – a Congress held in 2022 in the form of the WAP’s Great International Online Conversation.
Psychoanalysis and women are linked. It was indeed first with women, in the “mouths of gold” of the hysterics he studied, that Freud discovered the unconscious. Years later, in his last teaching, Lacan approached feminine jouissance through paths of logic – it is moreover at this moment that he stated: “Woman does not exist.” What does this mean, if not primarily that women only exist one by one, that they are eminently singular, and that it is thus impossible to give a definition of Woman that would be valid for all women?
For Lacanian psychoanalysts, the challenge of such a theme is threefold: first, to assert their orientation based on Lacan’s teaching; second, to give an account of their clinical practice with women and what they have learned from it; and third, to situate themselves in the contemporary world in order to interpret it, at a time when women are taking on a renewed role.
Ninth volume in the Scilicet series – Scilicet, which literally means “You can know” and whose title is taken from a journal created by Lacan – this preparatory volume for the WAP’s Great International Online Conversation includes more than one hundred and ten contributions from psychoanalysts around the world. Each of them sheds light on the issues at stake in Lacan’s proposition, “Woman does not exist.” And at the opening of this volume, a text by Jacques-Alain Miller, “Of Semblants in the Relation Between Sexes,” provides an orientation.
"One spends one’s time dreaming, one doesn’t only dream when asleep." – Jacques Lacan, "The Moment to Conclude""Dream: Its Interpretation and Use in Lacanian Treatment" is the theme that the World Association of Psychoanalysis has chosen for its biennial Congress. The challenge is to account for the contemporary practice of psychoanalysts of the Lacanian orientation in relation to dreams. This Scilicet thus aims at the heart of analytical practice. Its aim is to bring out into the open the way in which dreams are analyzed in treatments today. Thus, dear reader, you will be able to know how dreams are interpreted and what use is made of them in the treatment.This is the eighth volume in the Scilicet series, the title of which is taken from the review created by Jacques Lacan, which addressed each reader with the words – "You can know". Scilicet is an essential tool in the service of the exposed knowledge of psychoanalysts and is mobilized for each Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP).In the opening section, we are delighted to bring to the readers of this Scilicet volume a text by Jacques-Alain Miller: “Awakening”.Scilicet 8 is published by the World Association of Psychoanalysis
THE ORDINARY PSYCHOSES AND THE OTHERS
UNDER TRANSFERENCE
"Ordinary psychosis doesn't have a rigid definition. Everyone is welcome to give his feeling and definition on ordinary psychosis. I didn't invent a concept with ordinary psychosis. I invented a word, I invented an expression, I invented a signifier and I gave a very sketchy definition, just to attract the various meanings, the various shades of meaning, around the signifier. I didn't give any know-how as to how to use this signifier. I bet that this signifier could elicit various echoes in the clinician, in the professional, and I wanted it to grow, and see how far this evasive expression would go.
I was inspired by what Lacan said with 'The Pass'. Lacan gave only a sketchy definition of The Pass and opened it up to experiment so as to see, once this moment had been defined so sketchily, what would appear, what people would contribute. I wanted to do something like that with ordinary psychosis. And I believe it has been a powerful attractor of meaning."
Jacques-Alain Miller - "Ordinary Psychosis Revisited", Psychoanalytical Notebooks, No. 26, Psychosis Today, 2013.
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This is no ordinary volume. This is not a dictionary on ordinary or extraordinary psychoses. This is not a manual on transference. This is a collection of formulations by 110 psychoanalysts of the World Association of Psychoanalysis on 105 diverse terms carefully chosen to show us something new:
21st century psychoses and their Lacanian psychoanalytic treatments.
March 2018
THE SPEAKING BODY ON THE UNCONSCIOUS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
"What exactly is a speaking body? What makes a body human is indeed that it is
a speaking body. The term "speaking" here is not an adjective that would complete a predefined noun, the body, by adding to it the act of speaking. The common error made by psychology is to think that speech is a cognitive function of the body, an acquired behaviour, although it is supported in an innate way within a profound structure of the organism. This is not the case. Neither speech nor language is reducible to cognitive functions, since these functions, considered as organic functions, depend on the already a priori relation of the subject to the signifier, to the structure of language, which precedes him as body and as being that speaks. Hence, a language is not learned, it is transmitted by the experience of jouissance which touches the body of the image.
"Speaking" functions also in the expression "the speaking body" as an active participle or present participle, equivalent in some cases to the gerund. This doesn't mean that a being exists there a priori, to which the property of speaking is added. It means that this being, as Lacan points out several times, is a being only to the extent that he speaks. In the same way, we must also point out that this being is only able to have a body insofar as he speaks, insofar as he is speaking or spoken."
Miquel Bassols
The psychoanalysts of the World Association of Psychoanalysis welcome one by one
living bodies, hurt by the bewilderment or the debility forced by the discourses in which they are immersed. In this volume, which borrows its form from the dictionary, they decant their experience in order to make the speaking body resonate: Anatomy, Androgyny, Cosmetics, Exhibition, Lacanian Unconscious, Jouissance, Obesity, Ill-treatments, Pornography, Segregation, Selfies....
Psychoanalysis tends to make possible for each, according to one's singularity, the invention of an alliance between one's body and the resources of speech against the worst.
Eve Miller-Rose