The debates that Lacan engages with on psychoanalytic technique in this essay continue in similar form more than 60 years later. His personal exasperation, the gravity of his tone, and the tragi-comedy he depicts of mid-century psychoanalysis, are, on the one hand, absolutely applicable to today’s milieu in fascinating ways, while, on the other hand, given that we are in a new moment defined by the decline of psychoanalysis, can strike one as prophetic and pitiful. The psychoanalysts, even as the public and the major institutions abandon them, continue to wage their narcissistic wars of minor differences, without making much of the theoretical headway that Lacan calls for in this paper. As Lacan says, “what is at stake is… less a standard, than standing” (p 327). Even as that standing has been lost, in part because of the fevered attempt to maintain it and not the pathway of the Freudian cure, psychoanalysis rages on.
Jamieson Webster, Ph.D.
Day:
Friday April 1, 2016
Location:
CIIS, 1453 Mission, San Francisco, Namaste room
More info here.
