Skip navigation.

Publications and Articles

Robert Groome, Towards a Topology of the Subject, Aesthetics and Sublimation, Umbr(a), University of New York at Buffalo, 1999.
Purchase from Amazon.com

Robert Groome, The Phantom of Freud in Classical Logic, Science and Truth, Umbr(a), University of New York at Buffalo, 2000.
Purchase from Amazon.com



Events

Seminar


Topology by the Way of Masks
Museum of Jurassic Technology
(Upstairs Auditorium)
9341 Venice Blvd.
Culver City, CA


New Cartels Forming For 2008






boy2_purp


Interventions


A NEW ORIENTATION: CERTIFICATION OF LACANIAN ANALYSIS AT PLACE

The Psychoanalytic Post-Graduate Certification at P.L.A.C.E. provides a formation and certification in Lacanian analysis. It is open to anyone possessing a Master’s Degree in a parallel field (psychology, literary critique, philosophy, logic, mathematics, linguistics, neurobiology, history, etc.) and on special circumstances to those who have qualifications that may have been acquired on a nonstandard basis (a personal analysis, life experience, etc.). Final acceptance is only made after an individual interview with the applicant by the directors of the school and clinic.

Our goal is to make room in the United States for a contemporary psychoanalytic practice in Lacanian analysis by providing a background in the development and construction of a psychoanalytic theory, topology, and principles of the clinic. Our intervention is particularly oriented to those working in the field who are searching for an alternative to the current digressions of psychoanalysis into social work, counseling, therapy, and educator in the humanities.

As an adherent, you will be introduced to:

         •    Building a psychoanalytic theory and practice.
         •    Working not only critically, but constructively in theory and research.
         •    A collective of analytic researchers in the field.
         •    Developping psychoanalytic theory both clinically and topologically.                   
         •    The possibility of using learning at a distance modules.
         •    The possibility of achieving a certification of the Pass.

The General Program specialization prepares you to interpret and construct a theory in practice, conduct research, and account for an analytic structure in a variety of settings. It also provides a  post-graduate formation and builds practitioner-oriented theory.

Who is a psychoanalyst ? To respond to this question, it suffices to recognize two detours: 1) on one hand, the designation of a psychoanalyst is not protected by federal or state law, even an untrained person may use the title and; 2) on the other hand, psychoanalysis, is often trivialized into credentialized forms of psychodynamic therapy, then practiced on others by technicians outside a properly analytic formation. For this reason, one must be careful in not only verifying the practitioner's theory-practice, but not confusing the certifying procedure with acquiring a license, medical degree, or mere psychology diploma in order to become a psychoanalyst or do psychoanalysis. Without denying these possible derivations, the clinic and school of Lacanian psychoanalysis is constructed to resolve this dilemma of practice within the rigor and ethics of its proper theory.

The school-clinic at PLACE aims to re-establish a psychoanalytic formation in the U.S. with a didactic in psychoanalysis that neither psycho-therapizes its theory nor its practice. The Psychoanalytic School/Clinic need not fulfill any of the state requirements for achieving a career in the mental health field such as a licensed social worker, marriage family therapist, or psychologist. Just as none of the state accredited positions ask that you have a degree in or have accomplished psycho-analytic courses.

Though they have intersecting fields, psychology, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis are separate theories and practices. What is required for a psychoanalytic certification is a transmission assured by an analytic school-clinic. For this reason, the school-clinic at PLACE can afford to produce a high quality analytic theory that the technical and academic schools neither have as a goal nor the aim to accomplish. Specific details of the economy and limited number of openings will be sent within the next summer bulletin.

 Requirements
         62 total quarter credit hours
         Foundation course (24cr.)
         Cartel (26 cr.)
         Thesis-Pass (12 cr.)

For assistance with regard to this program, call 310-393-1682/323-913-1650 or email us at:
PLACE@topoi.net

Curriculum
The courses are delivered in a prescribed sequence. Each 12-week quarter, except for the first and last quarter, includes one concurrent 12-week course and one cartel. A cartel is an open topic work-group where the student actually chooses a subject to work on with 3 to 5 others.  Though a list of past cartels are made available to gage a topic choice, the final decision is left open to the students. On this basis the cartel is not only about the transmission of knowledge but founds its clinic as the student is actually inscribed into the decision making process, the protocol of its future programs, it successes and failures.

Course Title
                                                                                                      
Quarter 1
 
PSYC 6210 – Orientation in the Lacanian Field                                            

PSYC 62101 – Cartel Vectorization : Open Topic (See below for explications)                                                           
 
Quarter 2
 
PSYC 6211 – History and Critique of Psychoanalysis                
            
PSYC 62111 –Cartel I                                    

Quarter 3
 
PSYC 6212 – Lacanian Theory and Topology of the Subject:       

PSYC 62121 – Cartel I                /Revectorization          
 
Quarter 4
 
PSYC 6213 – The Psychoanalytic Clinic and Its Topology                             

PSYC 62132– New Cartels II                           

Quarter 5 
 
PSYC 6214 – Philosophy, Logic, and Psychoanalysis           

PSYC 62141 – New Cartel II                           
 
Quarter 6 –
 
PSYC 6215 Psychoanalysis, Psychodynamic Therapy, Cognitive Science Behavorism (CBT).                                     

PSYC 6216 - Thesis                                   
 
Quarter 7
 
PSYC 6217 – Pass                                   


Course Descriptions

PSYC 6210/ Orientation in the Lacanian Field                     

Today, the difficulty of navigating the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis – and psychoanalysis in general –is daunting enough to have led many to either resignation or improvised forms of social work, teaching, doctoring, and therapeutic counseling that is analytic or Lacanian in name only. This course aims to introduce the Lacanian field in a more rigorous manner, then determine definite strategies of working and studying psychoanalysis within the U.S. system. The topics will include: certification and accreditation, the various trivializations of the analytic act in both the mental health field and standardized educational systems; differentiating the analytic act and the professional being of the analyst; setting up a practice, the transmission of a psychoanalytic discourse, juridical and economic factors, publishing, etc. Needless to say, the latter 'givens' require not merely an evaluation of a sociological situation, but their incorporation into a properly psychoanalytic theory and practice.

PSYC 62101 – Cartel Vectorization                               

The vectorization of the cartels requires the choice of both topics and people to work in small collections of (3+1) people. For details see separate Appendix (I) “Function and Structure of the Cartels” (p.4). Participation in the vectorization is mandatory for any candidature for the pass.

PSYC 6211 - History and Critique of Psychoanalysis  
                 

This course will proceed not merely, or primarily, by examining ‘schools’ of psychoanalysis – Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, etc. – but in determining an archaeology of a psychoanalytic discourse. Displacing the focus from history as linear succession, to history as excavating a temporal dimension of a discourse, our return to Freud isolates a field that extends from Parmenides and the Socratic dialogues to Descarte’s subject of science and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. All readings will be required in the original source materials, while a library pass is provided for access to the analytic documentation.

PSYC 62111 – Cartel I                                                    

First full meetings of the cartels. Development of research: planning of writing, reading, and presentations.

 
PSYC 6212 – Lacanian Theory and Topology of the Subject:     
                   

This course aims to introduce the theory of Lacan around two major divisions: (I) a theory of the unconscious and (II) a theory of the drives. Such a division has a corresponding extension in a topology of the subject and the operators of alienation and separation. The course has as its goal to provide the material such that each participant will not simply be able to develop critically the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, but determine their constructive homologues in a topology of the subject.

PSYC 62121 – Cartel I                              /Revectorization   
             

Ending the first round of cartels.  Formulating results and position towards the work with others. Judging the merits of the transmission and research; ramifications for future cartels and courses.  Decision to publish or not.  Written account of research to be registered on cartel leger list.
    
PSYC 6213 – The Psychoanalytic Clinic and its Topology                     
                                

This course aims to introduce a purely analytical writing of the symptom based on the theory of Freud and Lacan. We will begin, therefore, by introducing three major categories of neurosis, perversion, and psychosis, while indicating how such categories imply a practice of a clinical structure, not a clinical classification of people. In so doing, we will construct the subject of this structure in a topology in a way that develops the clinic in a manner coherent with a psychoanalytic theory. In light of the analytic clinic, we will go on to develop a critical reading of the dominant psychiatric-psychological nosology of ADHD, Bi-Polar, Autism, etc. as well as the descriptive classifications in the DSM-IV.


PSYC 62132– New Cartels II                                           


Revectorization of Cartel: new topics and/or people.  Discussion of the results of the first cartels.

PSYC 6214 Philosophy & Logic-Mathematics: A Psychoanalytic Perspective


Too often the domain of logic and mathematics is spoken of as a problem of ‘technique’, while philosophy is viewed as a field of rationality having little to do with the ‘affect’ the analyst is engaged with. Our course proceeds otherwise: firstly, by disengaging this field from its academic and political boundaries, a mode of writing and method is revealed that is crucial to contemporary psychoanalysis; secondly, by undoing logic-mathematics from its implicit or explicit philosophies, we introduce a structural theory that, once relieved of an ontology, produces the principles for a psychoanalytic theory and practice. Said briefly, our psychoanalytic reading of Logic/Mathematics no longer seeks to understand their import in terms of Being (l’étre) but in terms of the Letter (lettre) or a Logic of the Signifier. Our first entry will introduce the logic of F. Brentano and show its influence on his pupils S.Freud and E. Husserl, then we will turn to readings in modern logic beginning with the philosophical logic of Pierce, Frege, Russell, Quine, Wittgenstein, while concluding with the mathematical logic of Tarski-Godel-Hintikka. In the course of study, we propose as an exercise in style to transform Badiou’s L'être et l'événement into a properly psychoanalytic Lettre et Signifiant.

PSYC 6215 – Psychoanalysis, Psychodynamic Therapy, or Cognitive                                                        Science-Behavorism(CBT)   
                                                                  

Over the course of the last century, Freudian psychoanalysis has been assimilated into various forms of psychodynamic therapy, while the latter has been either dismissed altogether by its critics in behavioral psychology and cognitive science, or trivialized into various brands of neuro-psychoanalysis. Our course proceeds to de-sediment psychoanalysis from the sociological assimilations and trivializations by showing what is being avoided. We begin by showing how neither the theory nor the practice of contemporary psychoanalysis can be isolated within the perspectives determined by psychodynamic therapy, CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), or speculative neuro-analysis. In beginning to clear the field our coursework not only examines the tenets of psychodynamic therapy and CBT, but de-doubles the field in order to make room for the constructions and research of the future analyst.

PSYC 6216 - Thesis                                                  
 (to be discussed in the Orientation)
 
PSYC 6217 – Pass                                                   
(to be discussed in the Orientation)


Appendix I: General Function and Structure of the Cartel


What is Psychoanalysis ?

Neither the response to this question nor a transmission of psychoanalysis can be obtained merely by speaking at others in the form of a lecture. Further still, a response is only superficially approached by speaking to another in a personal psychotherapy. Thus, both the notion of an academic education in  psychoanalysis and a psychotherapeutic session must be bracketed in order to open up a place for the day someone can not only receive a psychoanalytic transmission, but ask for a true psychoanalysis. Today, there is rarely place for either. PLACE aims to open this site for the introduction of its cartel, school, and clinic. In so doing, a psychoanalysis in intension is made room for.

What follows aims to bring out the cartel in a 1) Descriptive stating the general purpose and aim; 2) The Function of the Cartel in the School-Clinic; 3) the Structure of Cartel in the formation of a Topology; 4) The Modality of the Cartel in its relation to discourse.

1) Descriptive

Unlike the standard attempt to educate the student in psychoanalytic theory on an academic model, PLACE formulates the transmission of psychoanalytic theory in a purely psychoanalytic structure – the cartel. In order to abbreviate this reorientation, the standard professor-student relation is replaced by that of the analyst-analysand. The psychoanalytic cartel was first formulated by J. Lacan in order to assure the development and practice of a psychoanalytic theory beyond the sociological derivations and philosophical tradition of an academy. Following Lacan, the cartels at PLACE function to establish the clinical basis of a transmission of knowledge having the effect of a school. Thus, the school in psychoanalysis is an effect of its clinical knowledge and is in no way a place for a purely theoretical and contemplative acquisition. This type of stagnation not only is found in the current scholarization of psychoanalysis, but in the therapeutic reduction of psychoanalysis in intension to a purely ‘personal affect’. Inversely, the psychoanalytic clinic is not a place for experimental research and the application of a theory previously studied in a school. For the ethics of psychoanalysis makes it evident that it does not suffice to have a school and professors in order to teach and educate the student in psychoanalysis; just as it does not suffice to be in a transferential analysis (therapy) in order to have accomplished an analysis.  The problem is not there and the field, both in extension and intension requires a re-orientation.

Firstly, the relation to knowledge and the divisions of labor within the analytic school itself must be established on the basis of the transfer. Thus, the analytic school is always already functioning at the level of its clinic. Hence, the singularity of each individual is engaged in an analysis of the transfer such that a transmission of psychoanalysis goes far beyond the acquisition of intellectual concepts to include both an affective component and a question of truth. The cartels are designed to  introduce this question of singularity into a transmission in a way that includes the style of each individual and allows a truth-affect to be achieved in doing so.  In this respect, analysis is never practiced on others, but with others; just as the transmission of a school is never taught from a professorial position, but from the subject barred from knowledge $. To begin to introduce this ignorance and affectivity in a transmission in a way that does not digress into mere drama or passion, but produces the construction of a truth and in the most refined instances an object , requires a theory and practice adequate to the task. It is our position at PLACE that Lacan first determined this adequacy in determining the analytic school-clinic on the basis of the cartels. On the admission into the program, the cartel will be developed in detail from the first semester Course: Orientation into the Lacanian Field.


2) Function of the Cartel with the School and Clniic


The following text proposes to set up a series of guidelines for the structure of the cartels at P.L.A.C.E.  The cartels follow the procedures set up by Lacan (texts available on request) and are only modified to suit their transplantation to the United States. This text consists does not state the  I- Formal conditions (=Vectorization) that determine the choice of topics or the names of the collective one chooses to work in, but seeks only to state in general terms the interdependency between cartel-school-clinic. 

Cartel-School-Clinic

0) At the beginning of a semester, each participant chooses a topic that they would like to work on and the names of 3 others with whom one would like to work with.  Some of these names maybe unfamiliar, but the purpose of the Orientation Course will have included specific presentations by anyone caring to transmit their current work in analysis. After one month of the orientation course, the vectorization of the cartel will begin.

1) The cartels are composed of (3+1) or (5+1) people.
2) They meet every other week and an individual can participate in a maximum of two cartels.
3) There may be many different cartels functioning during any one semester term.
4) The (+1) is chosen as someone who others suspose to have more knowledge than they on a subject.  This ‘supposition’ is nothing more than the subject supposed to know and situates the transfer in the cartel.
5) The cartel is based on a transfer of work and only begins as the therapeutic projective identificiation.
6) The cartel is an analysis of the transfer, which does not mean to de-suppose the knowledge of the +1, but to de-naturalize the relation to knowledge in whatever field one is working on: logic, mathematics, psychoanalysis, literature, philosophy, psychology, etc.
7) Such a de-naturalization results in the production of an object: either as quite literally a constructed object or a collective writing that may or may not be published.
8) The results of the cartels are to be discussed as to their effect in the production of the courses of the school: a particularly successful or failed cartel could become the topic of a course, while those participating in a cartel could be engaged as the transmitters of a particular course.  For instance, if a cartel in mathematical logic and psychoanalysis was deemed to have succeeded, then a course maybe proposed for the next year on its basis.

3) The Structure of the Cartels

The Cartels of Lacan began with his topological entry into psychoanalysis and can not be separated from this orientation

1) The choice of a topic determines the place of a discourse: topology being the place of a discourse (topos) and its savoir/logic.

2) The choice of a name determines the vectorization of the space according to the transfer of work: just as in physics one requires a work to add a dynamic to a space , it is the work of the individual that determines the orientation of the space. Thus, the name of a person abbreviates the choice of work. Each name forms a vertex in a complete graph, where each oriented edge indicates a choice.  A cartel is formed only by graphs that have edges that go both ways and where each named vertex is connected to each and everyone of the others.  Thus, for 4 people in a cartel, there should be 12 edges, where 3 edges go to each of the others.   Further still, there is the choice of the name of the +1 that is required and is darkened:
                                                            B                                     Names = A,B,C,D
                                A                                                                 Choices =
                                       (image to follow shortly)                                              
                                                                                                    Plus One =
                                                    C

The formation of this graph is non-trivial, especially since it can be noted that with the addition of the +1 there is a non-commutativity (asymmetry) that is established.  A more detailed version of these procedures will be presented in the first semester Orientation.

4) The Modality of the Cartels

We will leave here two quotes in order to give the reader an insight into how J. Lacan and P. Sourry defined the work of a cartel:


Pierre Sourry on the Cartel (unpublished seminars1979/ Translation B. Bishop))

I can resume with the following two inclinations: (psychoanalysis, small group, sociability) and (the well spoken, artificial speech, intelligent conversation).

Given that some people congregate regularly, what do they do? What have they created as a practice? Which deployment of speech do they use?

I had noted two trends: one purely mundane which is fine with “intelligent conversation,” that is to say, which doesn’t suspect that a small group is able to create any other use of speech than one regulated by the constraints of sociability. – And a scholarly inclination which valorizes boredom, forcing it to a scholarly mode.

I tend towards an “artificial speech,” inspired by the artifices of the group’s animations and projective play.

In order to make a cartel, the prerequisite demand that I articulate to its participants is: what do you know how to do besides have an “intelligent conversation” or make yourself shit? This is articulated aggressively, but I’m more afraid of the normal incapacity of normative sociability to mediate a practice of speech.

Why is our speech so stuffy, aggravated, inhibited, stung-up, full of worthiness?    

Does it concern personal inhibitions? I have reasons for not believing this.

Does it concern inhibitions internal to the cartel? Perhaps, there it’s difficult.

Does it concern inhibitions linked to a modality in large assemblies of disciples, linked to the pedantry of the modality itself? It must be something like that, and there above, in the small group, one may rush things.

Does it concern inhibitions linked to speech itself? Surely.

Will this critique be supportable? I believe so. Is this critique the right method? I hesitate. I waver between two inclinations. Firstly, the adherence, deviations, compromises, unremitting critique – the very talk of disciples, stilted and cultured, that is the generator of deviation and compromise. Secondly, the well-spoken and the considerations owed to repression. What are the considerations owed to repression in a cartel? What are the considerations owed to repression, when there is a large number of people, or when there is a small number, or when there are two?

Jacques Lacan on the School-Clinic-Cartel

The following citations on the modality of the psychoanalytic School-Clinic-Cartel were taken from  Lacan’s Proposition du 9 Octobre (1967) appearing in Analytica  (1978). ( 1st draft Translation R. Groome)

1) The School can witnesss that the initiative of the psychoanalyst brings with it a guarantee of a sufficient formation.

(L’Ecole peut témoigner que le psychanalyste en cette intiative apporte une garantie de formation sufficsante.)

2) It can also constitute the milieu of experience (experimentation) and critique that establishes or supports the conditions that guarantee the best.

(Elle peut aussi constituer le milieu d’expérience et de critique qui éstablisse voire soutienne les conditions des garanties les meilleures. ).

3) It can do this and must do this, since it is a school, it is not only in the sense where it distributes a teaching, but where it introduces between its members a community of experience, of which the heart is given by the experience of practitioners.

(Elle le peut et donc elle le doit, pusique’ Ecole, elle ne l’est pas seulement au sens ou' elle distribue un enseignement, mais ou' elle instaure entre ses members une communauteé d’expérience, dont le Coeur est donné pa l’expérience des praticiens).

4)We take leave from the root of the experience of the field of psychoanalysis posed in its extension, the only basis to motivate a school, is to be found in the psychoanalytic experience itself, we want to say taken in intension: the only reason to formulate the necessity of an introductory psychoanalysis in order to operate in this field.

(Nous partons de ceci que la racine de l’expérience du champ del a psychanlyse pose en son extension, seule base ˙a motive rune Ecole, est ˙a trouver dans l’experience psychanalytique elle-même, nous voulons dire prise en intension: seule raison juste ˚a former de la nécessité d’une psychanalyse introductive pour opérer dans le champ).

5) It is true that it is the same university types that favorize the idea that analytic praxis is made for opening our relation to the patient by comprehension.  It is complacency or misunderstanding that falsifies our selection where it is shown that they do not loose their orientation (lit: the northpole) when it is a question of material.

(Il est vrai que ce sont les memes [universitaires] qui favorisent l’idée que la praxis analytique est faite pour ouvrir notre relation au malade ˚a la comprehension.  Complaisance ou malentendu qui fausse notre selection ou se montre qu’ils ne perdent pas tellement le nord quand il s’agit de la matérielle.)

6) On the question of the analysis of the transfer, Lacan states the problem of viewing it as supposing a knowledge in others (whether the patient or the doctor) then states:

This mystification that doubles the antiquity of medical status, here is what has sufficed to carve out the place where psychoanalysis has been lodged ever since.  What is this to say other than psychoanalysis is connected to who must be named the psychoanalyst: Freud the first in occasion demonstrating that it is possible to concentrate in himself the whole experience. Which does not make an auto-analysis however.

(Cette mystification qui double l’antiquité du statu medical, voila qui suffi ˚a creuser la place ou le psychanalyst s’est loge depuis. Qu’est-ce ˚a dire, sinon que la psychanalyse tient a’ celui qui doit ëtre nommé psychanalysant:: Freud le premier en l’occasion, démontrant qu’il peut concentrer en lui le tout de l’experience. Ce qui ne fait pas une autoanalyse pour autant.)



 Govern, Educate, Psychoanalyze ?



1- Three Untenable Professions

Freud listed three professions as 'untenable', that of the educator, the politician, and the psychoanalyst . Nonetheless, he also noted there are always candidates looking to fill these positions. They are even positions that are reputed to be advantageous; that is not to say, that neither the governor, nor the educator, nor the psychoanalyst would have the slightest idea of what it is to govern, educate, or psychoanalyze.  No doubt, they end up having just a bit of an idea – as the current governor of CA shows – but these 'intuitions' are rarely developed. 

Here, the 2008 of PLACE cartel aims to ask: What is it to educate? govern ? or psychoanalyze ?

Does one have to have a "conception of Man" to educate, govern, or psychoanalyze?  Do these ideas of education vary according to the ideas that one  can have of the 'essence' of Man ?  Or is this 'conception of Man', with a tighter grip, actually a defense against something more important: a certain anxiety that one is seized with when attempting to educate, govern, or psychoanalyze?  Is the goal of education to make and complete the individual?  Or does one more or less always end up educating oneself to the extent that one can ? At what point does the formation of a school and education naturally introduce clinical and therapeutic questions? If an educator, just as a therapist, is someone who thinks they are there to help others, how is this perspective guided by a conception of Man ?  No doubt, a certain amount of education is necessary for humans to support being around each other, but what is lost in such attempts to educate through socialization?

What is the difference in this regard of governing/educating to analyzing?  Does the analyst, unlike the therapist, attempt to teach anything or do good for anyone? Does psychoanalysis fall back into psychotherapy the moment it acquires a conception of Man ?  What does a conception of Man, whether spiritual, behavioral, genetic, etc., serve to trivialize the moment it is taken as a given ?

Initial probe: the moment the recognition of desire is misrecognized as a desire to be recognized as a type of ego – the educated man, the good  citizen, sports hero, artist, balanced kid, etc. – the problem of desire is assimilated to what deviates from the norm: the uneducated man, uncivilized, unathletic, unartistic, unbalanced, etc.  What is artificial – or in-human – in such descriptive typologies is obvious.  For example, today it can not be determined whether the yearly augmentations of mental syndromes found in the DSM-X (the psychotherapist’s Diagnostic Statistics Manual) are the result of the discovery of more mental disorders (biological or cultural), or the result of an increasingly abusive conception of Man.

In relation to governing and educating, the profession of analysis is new,  and the analysts have very well realized the difficulty of their position.  So much so, that many fall back onto the position of the educator and governor in improvising forms of psychotherapeutic counseling. In fact, like the current governor of California, this pirouette does not prohibit certain improvisations from achieving  effects, even if those involved would have little idea of what it is they are doing or if these effects are towards a progress.  What is this generalized, " I do not know how any of this works ..." or ignorance, which the modern educator, governor, and analyst is engaged ?

II – The Discourse of Science: From Conception of Man to Place of the Subject

Our cartel would like to situate these questions in theory and practice, while extending the question to that of the scientist – which Freud never attempted, but was accomplished in Lacan’s reading of Freud. 

What is the anxiety of the scientist? What is it when at the beginning of 2008 both Cloned Beef and the movie Legends arrive on the market place?  What  is it that the scientist, in the wake of a certain ignorance of the effects of their theory, must at strategic points be restricted by ethical committees ?  But with a second take, might these anticipatory scenes of destruction and horror themselves be a way of defending against a certain anxiety?  Is this anxiety a way that the scientist recognizes, beyond his/her knowledge and its possible horrific effects, that there is is something real  in what s/he is working on ?

What is this real ? How does the  anxiety and ignorance of a real confront the educator, governor, psychoanalyst, and scientist – not simply as what works or achieves itself in the successful "conception of Man", but in what does not work  with such conceptions ?

Our first cartel seeks to put the Lacanian notion of the real to the test, while developing its ramifications for those involved in education, government, science and psychoanalysis.  We will conclude by showing how it has become possible with Lacanian anlaysis not to confuse a Place of the Subject with a Conception of Man.


The Topological Clinic of Lacanian Psychoanalysis



Part I :   The Art of Psychoanalytic Speech               








The Generalized Borromean

A Topological Sketch Of Lacan

                   

June 26th, 2006 Le Monde:


For the first time, the graphic oeuvres and manuscripts of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) will be put on sale, Friday, June 30th in Paris, at Art Curial.  Exhibited since the 23rd of June at the Hotel Dassault, some 130 pieces are visible at
www.artcurial.com. [Jacques Lacan enters into the Market Place of Art/ Clarisse Fabre]


What has been said?

This collection of largely topological work has been offered by Jean Michel Vappereau and is estimated 450,000. Euro. It is not surprising that the family of Lacan is opposed to the auction, as they have kept under close guard any effective reference to Lacan’s topology.

Jacques Roubaud, student of Raymond Queneau, and member of OULIPO, describes the collection as follows: "in regard to these documents, there appears a Lacan very well different than the easy caricature that is often made of him by opinion. We see him impassioned to do something else besides saying what one thinks  [...] so that one demonstrates to oneself what can not be said".

Roland Dumas, former head of state and family friend of J.M. Vappereau, wrote as an introduction to the auction catalogue:"The Borromean Knot became for Lacan simultaneously a symbol, an instrument of research and an eternal interrogation". 

Yet, Vappereau explained that Dumas wanted him to give his collection to the National Library, but he preferred that it circulate in the public at the level of an art auction, and not merely, or no longer, in the halls of a society of souls (museums, libraries, universities, etc.). Vappereau has further indicated that he intends to use the monies received from the auction to buy an apartment in Paris to house and exhibit works of psychoanalysis.


What are the ramifications?

What are the implications when psychoanalysis today can claim to fabricate and transmit something like an object of art, and no longer simply offer itself as ‘applied psychoanalysis’, i.e., a critique of art and society?

No doubt, just as the purists might not stand the idea that a sacred object of art would be offered for sale, or that a genius of culture would find his je ne sais pas quoi made calculable in an auction, there will be those who will bemoan this public sale as a desacralization of the oeuvre of Lacan, just as they have always been scandalized by Lacan’s use of short sessions and the abandonment of the couch for a more delicate topology. Yet, is Vappereau’s strategy a Warholian gesture to commercialize Lacanian psychoanalysis to the highest bidder? Is this a sale "without conscience"?  Or with a tighter grip on the subject, is it an attempt to reveal precisely where psychoanalytic topology finds its point of application: a place where semblance is not merely dreamt of, culturized, and critiqued, but constructed, calculated, and deciphered in a work of what used to be nameable only in the guise of an Art event?

From Art and Political Economy to Topology and Psychoanalysis

If we follow Lacan, then "art is the place most close to the symptom", which is to say, that what is called art discovers a symptom where truth is lacking, if not opposed to, a transmission of knowledge. Moreover, we must simultaneously recall how Lacan constantly brought this out in a reference to Marx’s conception of alienation: "Marx discovered the symptom" and "the symptom has a political order". Yet, if the symptom has an order, it is not merely in a politics of action or the calculation of a vote, but in the calculation of an incalculable: that is, in the calculation of a surplus value produced in an act or work. It is true that Marx had only attempted to bring out the problem of a symptomatic truth by using the differential calculus of his age, but his calculation not merely of an economy, but a political economy, set the stage for what Lacan would begin to trace with a more supple mathematics of topology and knot theory. While the surrealists, post, and neo-freudians had gone beyond atomistic psychology by theorizing the free energy of free association as the key to a dynamic theory of the dream-image (and no longer as a secondary waste product), they were hampered by a method that confined the scope of deciphering to either an interpretation of culture or natural science. Lacan, on the contrary, had rendered account of the formal basis of such a deciphering succinctly by paralleling Poincaré’s and Cantor’s definition of modern mathematics:

I do not know if I have already said it somewhere but mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things
. (Poincaré)

The essence of mathematics resides in its liberty.
(Cantor)

Join to this Poincaré's definition of topology as a "theory of badly drawn figures" and one very well has an introduction to Lacan’s project for topology and psychoanalysis.  (to be continued on this site and in our seminar below).


Part II - A Topology of the Man without Qualities                         Aug. 4, 2006



Lacan was preceded by Freud who, in the generalization of Marx's theory of work, maintained that it was not a concept that could be regulated to the domain of an alienated consciousness of labor relations, but denoted a work of the signifier that had moved into the dream. For with Freud's theory of the dream, one does not go to sleep to rest, but in order to ‘work’. Otherwise said, Freud explains that the dreamer is someone who, in preparing for sleep, removes his clothes, wig, false teeth, etc. and enters into work just as Musil’s "Man without qualities": a pre-reflexive subject, glued to an economy, where judgment is lacking, where a work of the dream and not the dream becomes primary. In displacing the function of the interpretation from the dream to its work, Freud reveals a certain 'machine of vision' productive of a series of functional values without anything human. Or rather the value of 'humanity' is only recognized negatively through an incalculable: a market collapse, 'magical thought', an intuition, a 'slip of speech', an unexplainable of 'genius', etc. Yet, if the royal road to the unconscious was still for Freud by way of the dream, an analysis of the work of the dream would lead Lacan (and Althusser) to formulate a more positive case of the perfect worker as the achievement of an absolute dreamer: the disenfranchised of our modern cities, the immigrant worker to the land of plenty, the artist become careerist (the 'Rimbaud effect'), art become merchandise (the 'Warhol effect'), the analyst-analysand become therapist-client, all of whom, once torn away from the place of their birth achieve a peculiarly modern form of success in the dream of public recognition.  If one could still at the time of Freud call the professional success of both the artist and analyst a sublimation, by the time of Lacan it had already received the denomination of a sinthome .

Lacan's topology began to respond to the Man without Qualities, not by a critique of aesthetic values, sensation, error, and intuition, but in a psychoanalytic interrogation of the function of the trait and writing.  Thus, the question became rephrased: instead of speaking of the truth of art in terms of transcendence, what would it mean to begin to bring out its immanence: a certain Thing or chose-psy that begins to be calculated – as uncalculable surplus or jouissance – in the world of art ? What is the complicity between sublimation and psychosis ? between Qualities without a Man and the Man without Qualities?( Freud implies that, at least in part, the art 'event' relies on the recognition that the artist is showing the audience that s/he is able to live off an enjoyment and is not subject to its renunciation in order to be employed).

Such an interrogations become necessary once it is recognized that the correspondance between the society of souls (the state, universities, libraries, museums, art-fairs, economy, etc.) and the artist has never been antagonistic, but supportive, despite the complaints.  For the  triple correspondance between religion, philosophy, and art are an attempt to give a sign or value – a morality, an idea, a secret truth, a dollar sign, etc. – to the Work (oeuvre) or Event. Yet, could we not interrogate this work, its enjoyment, act and nomination immanently, as such, and not merely in the retroactive transmission of values and ideals of the artist ( as achievement of the soul, as genius of culture, sublime creature, hero, transcendence, etc.). In such conditions, speaking of the art object as the becoming conscious of its truth -– through a critique of semblance and quality – no longer suffices or rather it has become routine: the image of Man transcends into Qualities without Man: the shocking, the beautiful, the unique, the secretive, etc. .  What must be asked today is what is their connection ? Are they only held together in the mirror of art – ultimately in a commerce of values – just as it is promised in the mirror of psychotherapy? Or more importantly, is it possible to map out an Event and Act that is constantly effaced at the moment one begins to speak of its sign, values, ideals,qualities, etc. ?  Said otherwise, must we pose with Musil, that the Man without Qualities discovers himself in Qualities without the Man or can we begin to pose the problem of the Event, Act, and Trait otherwise ?

To begin to respond to this problem in a less thematic way, we abbreviate it here with Lacan's structural axiom of the subject of the Trait: the signifier represents a subject for another signifier ?

(to be continued at monthly seminar and upcoming articles)

R. Groome

Summer 2006
Santa Monica




The Writing of Catastrophe:
From Natural Disaster to Social Psychosis

 (a work in progress)

Why is it so difficult to speak and write of Catastrophe ?

Every epoch asks this perenial question: Why have we lost our artists, philosophers, journalists, scientists, and statesmen who would be able to write one verse, play, or analysis of Catastrophe that would enlighten the public ?   Where are our modern day tragedians ?

Our brief article would like to sketch a response to this difficult question not simply by talking about Catastrophe, but by opening a dialogue with Catastrophe, that is to say, by making room for a discussion on the difficulties of speaking and writing of Catastrophe.  For in every natural and cultural catastrophe there is an Other Catastrophe that goes unheard of or is misread by the common journalistic and humanitarian response to disaster.
(continued)


Open Letter to Badiou  [9/2004]

0 - From Psychoanalytic Classicism to the Topological Baroque

Badiou's readings of Lacan are sufficiently important to have elicited a recent series of conferences in 2003 at UCLA entitled: Lacan and the Real, Lacan's Anti-philosophy, and The Mathemes of the Real,  and in 2004 at UC Irvine.  Owing to the unusual perspicacity of the commentator as much as to the exceptional difficulty, if not incomprehensible nature of the Lacanian corpus, his readings give rise to several problems.

(Badiou continued)


Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in France Today  [6/2004]

In September of 2003 the French National Assembly voted unanimously and without public debate for a bill known as the “Accoyer Amendment” to regulate the practice of psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis, in France. The following articles and interview, translated from Le Monde, came in response to what seemed to psychoanalysts to be a hasty and ill-considered move on the part of the French legislative body.

 (Accoyer continued)

• Regulate the Unconscious? [pdf download]

• On the Social Utility of the Ear [pdf download]

• Interview with Paul-Laurent Assoun [pdf download]


Thinking Wrongly about Freud  [5/2000]

(What every schoolchild should know . . .)                                    By Ika B. Roub 

The reception of psychoanalysis in the grand public is a baffling episode in the intellectual history of the twentieth century, an episode which is not finished and will have no doubt to be followed closely in the twenty-first.  As such, the Los Angeles Times and the Skirball Cultural Center, are to be applauded for presenting a series of articles on Freud and psychoanalysis (3/30-31/2000) and a family art workshop on "Freud: Inkblots and Dreams" (at the Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA)

(Skirball continued)