Almanac of Psychoanalysis; Psychoanalytic Stories After Freud and Lacan - Review

Style, Fall, 1998 by James M. Mellard

Ed. Ruth Golan, Gabriel Dahan, Shlomo Lieber, and Rivka Warshawsky. Tel Aviv: Groupe Israelienne de l'Ecole Europeene, 1998. 227 pp. $25.00.

Initially, because of how it is situated within what Elisabeth Roudinesco calls "Lacanian legitimism" (428), the Almanac of Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic Stories after Freud and Lacan may seem as interesting for the politics it exhibits as for the essays and other pieces included in it. The volume is a collection of eighteen texts produced by the Israeli Group of the European School of Psychoanalysis. The group intends to produce, each year if possible, a new volume such as this one. It includes a brief introduction by the editors, but more important is the volume's thematic introduction. It is by Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent. Laurent is the titular president of the European School of Psychoanalysis of the Freudian Field. Miller is the son-in-law of Jacques Lacan. He and his wife Judith in effect inherited the family business. Together, they created the Cause Freudien and l'Ecole de la cause freudienne (the School of the Freudian Cause). Because they head the parent organization of that "Lacanian legitimism," Miller, as the clinician, becomes the head at least symbolically of all such organizations, of which there are several dozen around the world. Thus it is with considerable warmth that the editors of the Almanac express their gratitude to both Miller and Laurent for allowing the group to use their jointly delivered talk as the thematic point of departure for this volume. With Laurent and, especially, Miller at the head of the table of contents, the editors mean to suggest that all the essays in some fashion belong within the legitimized school of Lacanian theory and practice That claim, if indeed it is that, is perhaps more important to the members of the Group than to literary critics interested in Lacanian theory.

The keynote piece by Miller and Laurent is called "The Other Who Does Not Exist and His Ethical Committees." Published originally in La Cause Freudienne 35 (February 1997) and translated into English by Michele Julien, Richard Klein, Kevin Polley, Mischa Twitchin, and Veronique Voruz, it came from the seminar of 1997 conducted in Paris at the School of the Freudian Cause. The main theme of the seminar was the crisis of ethics in a time when all seemingly agree that there is no primally grounded Other, no god or first cause or foundational law. The editors of the Almanac claim this crisis lies at the center of their collection, for they insist that "psychoanalytic practice must address this Real crisis while at the same time upholding the inexistence of the Other" (13). In the essays in the collection, the authors attempt - not always very directly - to connect this thesis to issues ranging from sexual identity to child psychosis to anorexia, modern art, and logic and mathematics. To manage these topics, the editors divide the collection into sections under the headings "Today's Civilization and the Discontents about the Real," "The Answer of Psychosis," "Concerning the Object," and "Interpretation and Truth." Some of the more interesting essays in the collection are Gabriel Dahan's "The Clinics of Management," Colette Soler's "Plus-Un of Melancholy," Laurent's "From Saying to Doing in the Clinic of Drug Addiction and Alcoholism," Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger's "Supplementary Jouissance," and Riva Warshawsky's "The House, the Car, the Camera, the 'Sudden Attacks': A Clinical Case."

But however much any of these hews to the thesis of the introduction, none of them does as much as Miller and Laurent to make this volume worth purchasing or to clarify the politics within which the volume is situated. Because it outlines the latest version of the history of Lacanian theory, Miller's section of that introduction alone explains the politics and makes the Almanac worth buying. Given Miller's status as the one who speaks now as the reigning "Father" of "Lacanian legitimism," it is perhaps more important to present his history of the "new" Lacan than to address any of the other essays at all, however attractive some of them may be. Thinking within the context of Civilization and Its Discontents and Freud's persistent theorization of the Oedipus complex, Miller aims directly to locate Lacanian theory as the basic ideology of a postmodern culture (or "civilization," the word he typically uses) very different from that of the nineteenth century (which, Miller says, lasted until the end of World War I). Because the Symbolic order is different in the Victorian and the postmodern epochs, the orders (Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic) forming the Borromean knot of subjectivity itself relate differently. As Lacanians and others know, Lacan uses the famous schema L to represent the "structure" of the subject. The "L" is a simple rectangle containing a cross whose points originate in the corners. The two vectors of the cross represent the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The point where they cross represents the "hole" from or through which the Real might irrupt (this "hole" sounds much like the fabulous "wormholes" of science fiction through which subjects enter alternate universes).