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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 psychoanalytic session becomes possible that is coherent with the theory and practice of Freud and Lacan. (For more details see below: "The Question of Psychoanalysis")

1) What is a cartel ?

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 an 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.



Preface to George Canguilhem's

What is Psychology?


The name George Canguilhem is contemporaneous with the introduction of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and Marxism in France. His What is Psychology? first appeared in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1958 in an era of postwar France in which psychology was largely contested in its project and scientific pretensions. It remains with Georges Politzer's Critique of the Foundations of Psychology (1928) and Sartre's Sketch of a Theory of Emotions (1938) part of the French tradition seeking to establish a concrete definition of Man on the basis of phenomenological, existentialist, psychoanalytic, and Marxist perspectives. During this time, Daniel Lagache responded with a theoretical counterattack - The Unity of Psychology (1948) -  whose goal was to reorganize psychology in the hopes of establishing a unified program in the French university. For according to Lagache, it was necessary to conjoin experimental psychology and clinical psychology, respectively its naturalist and humanist traditions, under One unified psychology.

The Question of Psychoanalysis

When people seek to inform themselves on psychoanalysis, they are not so much asking about what psychoanalysis is, or for general theoretical knowledge on the subject, but more urgent questions primarily guided by a need to address their suffering. The typical inquirer, therefore, just supposes that the doctor is the one who knows, while they only bear the burden of their unhappiness. This common comprehension is so often infiltrated with preconceived ideas about psychotherapeutic 'talking-cures', psychological counseling, and psychiatric prescription drugs, that it becomes clear that not only does the question of psychoanalysis lack an answer, but the question itself has been so obscured and misdirected that it has left many indifferent to the practice. If the question of what psychoanalysis is, is to be revived — not merely as a scholarly transmission or an advertisement, but as a preliminary to its cure — one must first work out an adequate way of formulating it.

1 — What is Psychoanalysis?

* Being Normal: An Investigation into the Causality of Depression

                                                                                                                                                                                        By Robert Groome

In these series of articles we have begun to address the problem of normality as itself involved in the causality of depression.  By normal we understand not someone  who knows what he wants and follows a process of accumulating wealth and health countering death and insanity, but that peculiar modern normality discovered by Freud in a society of consumption: where the ego, in its claim to 'good sense' and 'life', becomes auto-destructive of its health, wealth, and others. Although the clinical problems of the normal have been long known among psychoanalysts, they are just beginning to enter into popular psychology: in a new book, The Price of Privilege, the American psychologist Madeline Levine claims that affluent children, with parents earning more than $130,000 a year, have "three times the rate of depression and anxiety disorders as ordinary teenagers, as well as substantially higher rates of substance abuse, cutting and suicide". The popular psychologist Oliver James, who is set to publish in January a new book, Affluenza, about the mental cost of wealth, warns that it is not affluence alone that "translates into greater happiness or mental health", but the quality of early parental care. The London Times, psychology investigator John Cornwall writes:"Depression in children, it is becoming increasingly clear, is not only a consequence of family dysfunction, marriage break-ups, child abuse, and combinations of genetic and environmental disadvantage. Depression can lurk and flourish in the minds of "normal" children whose parents deliver them to £5,000-a-term day schools in top-of-the-range 4x4s. Childhood psychological misery can be found in an ambience of back-to-back improving activities – from flute lessons to tennis training to private maths tuition; in the pony club and on the junior ski slopes. When such children falter and fail, turning to forms of self-hatred and self-harm, will their striving, over-anxious parents wake up to their own failings and inadequacies?"[11/12/06].  No doubt, these short internet articles  are not exhaustive, but can only claim to inform beyond the current confusion reigning on the subject.

Depression: The Democratic Symptom

  The symptom dominating our modern democracies is depression, specifically manic depression, more commonly known as bi-polar disorder. Suspended in the oscillation from apathy to impulsiveness, the sadness of being out of place and out of time, the shame of a liberty which would only recognize itself in abuse, many have been left fixed in imperatives to merely calm the symptom through the use of a substance (legal or illegal medications), forms of relaxation (hot tub therapy, spiritual retreats, sleep therapy, etc.) or physical doping (spinning, boot camp therapy, coaching, and so forth). In spite of the tranquility imposed by such measures, a recent World Health Organization study estimates that over eleven million people have this illness and concludes that by 2020 the leading cause of disability and death will be depression. What then, does contemporary psychoanalysis have to tell us about the ‘illness’ of depression? And how does its entry into the problem differ from the management of symptoms and the imperatives of calm?

(Depression continued)

fig 8 yellow

Does Psychoanalysis Intellectualize the Emotions?

Contrary to what is habitually presumed, psychoanalysis is not the intellectualization of one's life or emotions, but the one contemporary discourse that does not ‘de-realize’ passion and suffering into the mere expression of emotions or feelings of pain. To see how this is so, it suffices to observe what happens in the communication of an emotion in everyday life: there is a moment which always goes beyond a mere spontaneous feeling and requires a clarification, not only to oneself, but to others.  In this respect, an emotion is always encountered two times: as emotion and as ‘thinking of emotion’. Without pushing this analysis any further, it is simple to recognize that this 'thinking of emotion' does not introduce anything exterior or alien to the emotions, but rather situates the problem and necessity of their expression vis-a-vis the ‘other’. Indeed, for every emotion there is already a sign of emotion which is said to express it: happiness = a smile, sadness = a frown, etc.

(Clinic continued)