Course Description

Since Lacan's return to Freud it is no longer possible to assume an analytic practice and theory in the same way. Rather than claiming to go beyond Freud in a neo- or post-Freudian therapy, or rejecting analytic theory altogether as 'non-science', it is necessary to isolate what analysis comes to bear upon. One perilous way to avoid an act of foundation is to read Freud speculatively: that is to say, to remain within the transfers of analysis – its psycho-cultural panache, its interpersonal relations, therapeutic commerce and educative institutionalization – without founding its theory. For if the motor of analysis is the transfer, this is not to say that being in a transfer guarantees that analysis has effectively taken place. Indeed, one may remain a very long time in an analytic transfer without the least bit of analysis (see Freud's Analysis Terminable and Interminable). What our course and intervention aims to account for is how both a progress in the cure and analysis effectively takes place not in an ad hoc manipulation of the transfer, but in a theory that comes to bear on the truth of its method. Freud discovered that the unconscious is produced in a double lecture in the sense that any writing implies an equivocation of pronunciation that requires a method of deciphering similar to that used by Champollion to decipher the Rosetta Stone. Since the practice of an analytic theory implies this method, the current day resistance to theory is not something new or limited to the psychotechnician, but is nothing other than a resistance to reading and writing that is witnessed both clinically in the current rise of autism and artistically in the current replacement of the text by spectacle. Our course shows how the contemporary topological clinic was introduced by Lacan as a way to return to what is systematically bypassed by the modern psychotherapies: the place of reading and writing theory in the analytic cure.

Detail From Previous 2009 Topology and Psychoanalysis I

As an initial probe, in proclaiming, "Analysis here" – there is already a crucial difference between an identity (analysis) and its presentation (here).  This difference is crucial: the difference between the presence of an analytic act and its absence makes room for a fantasy, or more extensively, the fantasy object of analysis.  One way to deny the fantasy of analysis and the problem it poses, is to suppose that the theory of analysis is already present in the institute, in the library, and in the mind of the analyst.  To account for the fantasy of analysis it is not a question of de-supposing such knowledge – this would be to deny the transfer – but of determining a just mode of working with it. Indeed, should the problem of presentation be taken for granted, then the naive idea that all one need do is apply a psychoanalytic knowledge is met with predictable obstacles. For neither the absence nor the unreality of the fantasy will have effectively been given a place in the construction of a theory. What is perilous in such a detour is that the fantasy of analysis will have been replaced by the idea of analysis: a dis-incarnate Geist or Spirit of Freud that an institute and its disciples propagate as a heritage. Paradoxically, it is precisely in such a 'spiritualization' that one may read psychoanalysis counter Freud in order to assimilate it into being just one more sub-discipline of psychology and psychotherapy – and not as implicating a fantasy and real that is both anti-psychological and beyond a concept of Man. Here one may also read psychoanalysis counter Lacan by claiming him "too intellectual" or "too theoretical", and thus not amenable to the technician's dream of 'applied psychoanalysis'. Yet, to attempt to practice analytic theory at the 'applied' level, is to remain within the transfer – not to construct it – and to adopt the position of ritual: a neutralization and acting out of the fantasy of analysis as both self-knowledge and an access to the secret power of a commercial and educative filation. What is risky, is to call such a formation, 'practical' or 'clinical', for in such cases the formation of a psychoanalytic theory, if there still is one, is reduced to a general set of codes and conventions that either works absolutely – in the charm and discourse of a Master – or does not work at all. For in such a speculation, there is neither need to introduce the anxiety of a subjective position that the presentation of an analytic theory implies, nor the need to account for the fantasy of analysis as such. For instance, just as the unconscious is not there, there is no conventional or institutional guarantee for a psychoanalysis to exist. Yet, for a psycho-technician locked in the transfer such anxious questions may be avoided: the presentation of a theory may be by-passed, or rather theory is only re-presented and read objectively, while the analytic session itself is reduced to the expression of an emotion that has more to do with drama lessons than the analytic act. The word 'theory' in such cases means nothing more than the philosopher's 'idea' – a dis-incarnate and contemplative idea of theory that does not isolate the fantasy as implying an absence, a body, language, or imaginary necessary to its presentation and practice. By confusing a psychoanalytic theory with a psychoanalytic philosophy, by assimilating the presentation of an analytic theory to a discussion or expression of ideas, the modern day technician can only practice analysis by re-incarnating its 'spirit' in the guise of 'others' – as patients and clients.  We will call this dominant idea of analysis an ideology, while adopting the position of Lacan that "what the ideology of psychoanalysis suffers from today is the lack of an adequate topology".

Our course aims to introduce an adequate topology for the practice of an analytic theory. The extent of the course will cover three main theories: 1) Graphs, 2) Surfaces, and 3) Knots. Although these three theories correspond to periods of the analytic work of Lacan, our emphasis is not of a historical or erudite level.  Rather we will show how each of these theories correspond to a psychoanalytic notion, respectively, 1)' Symptom, 2)' Libido-Fantasy, and 3)' Drive.  We will supplement the classes with readings from Lacan and Freud.