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The analyst and the School: A restless and asymmetrical association of pluralities

Alexander Karkar Member of the School. The Freudian School of Melbourne, School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis¹

There has been a lot of talk within The Freudian School of Melbourne of late – talk which, in orienting itself around the implementation of changes to the structure of the School’s annual conference, and following significant renovations made to its Foundations of Psychoanalysis Seminar, may begin to resonate with the tremor of torque, David Pereira’s formulation of a saying or enunciation which twists itself free from what has been said.David Pereira. Analyst of School and Director of the Freudian School of Melbourne.²

A School of psychoanalysis, which could perhaps be described as a collective assemblage of enunciation,A term coined and deployed in staggering ways in Deleuze, G., & Guattari. F. A Thousand Plateaus, London: Bloomsbury, 1987.³ insofar as it sustains a flow of discourse through the transference of work, does not content itself with simply being a School of analysts, but deploys itself restlessly in the direction of becoming one. It is within the nervous tension of this torque that the Freudian School of Melbourne is stirred and agitated into a direction.

Let us then acknowledge our debts in this direction, as David Pereira’s torque itself compels us to do, and devote ourselves briefly to an analysis of the spirit in which the School was formed and continues to form – namely, as a de-formation of the foundations which compel us to suppose a knowledge of what the School, and as a corollary psychoanalysis, is.

The task of the School concerns the transmission of psychoanalysis – transmission being a term not unrelated to torque, each invoking a shifting into gear which might drive analytic doctrine out of a stasis of familiar conventions, and into new registers, territories, and possibilities for mobility. The enigmatic basis for this transmission as a widening of the horizons of analysis has been the subject of discussions in several of the School’s recent meetings, and in constituting the subject of the present paper will take its direction from two tough currents still tossing the waves of analytic discourse, as well as putting wind in the sails of the School which perhaps does more than simply not sink within it.

These tough currents now have names: Oscar Zentner and David Pereira, two analysts of the School – one its co-founder and former director, having since stepped aside from that position, and the other one of its current co-directors. Both have been responsible for the theoretical direction of the work of the School at one time or another – never alone, moreover, but in pairs with other analysts at their respective periods of founding and appointment.

But can we really speak of two analysts here? Can we speak of the one forming a continuity with the other, if indeed we have invoked a legacy in which the School was formed and continues to form as a deformation – the deformation, that is, of a persistent order of a former knowledge? If we can speak of them as two, and moreover continuous, then surely they are thus with respect to a common knowledge, a common lineage or ancestry to which we, members, analysts, and analysts in formation, share in an analytic genepool stretching back to Lacan and Freud before him.

The question I wish to explore in this paper, therefore a question which circulates within the talk of the School – and other schools as well, as is evidenced by the subject of the recent Dublin conference – is the following: what is the status of a psychoanalytic group, or to pose it differently, are psychoanalytic alliances possible?The 2018 Dublin Conference was entitled The Symptom of the Psychoanalytic Group and the Transmission of Psychoanalysis.⁴ Can analysts form a coalition through a common allegiance to psychoanalysis, and is this allegiance the basis of an analytic School and of the transmission of psychoanalysis? Lacan’s formulation, that there is no such thing as a sexual relation, would seem to suggest that he himself did a lot more than simply doubt that any such coalition of psychoanalysts could be formed if this inaugural discovery of psychoanalysis was to be preserved – or better, to be worked.

If he did a lot more than doubt it, moreover, then as an effect of submitting this doubt to a thorough reading was able thereby to produce something more from it.

*

In the opening chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write:

“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Bloomsbury, 1987, p. 1.⁵

Not two, then, but several. Perhaps not really a crowd either – as one discovers reading further into this non-book – but a multiplicity. But before getting this deleuzian-guattarian multiplicity to explain why it is not two, let us first ask whether it is so different for psychoanalysts within a school of psychoanalysis. Indeed, might the same assertion not apply when speaking of the authors Freud and Lacan, of whom one might hesitate before proposing that the two of them wrote the book on psychoanalysis together?

Of course, not unlike A Thousand Plateaus, the discourse of psychoanalysis does not easily constitute itself as a book. Lacan’s Ecrits, as he himself describes it, is unreadable. And what does Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as an unknown knowledge and the primacy of overdetermination which bears fruit within it ultimately say about authorship and the legibility of significations?

If these things are unreadable, perhaps it is because what they demand is a different kind of reading.See Pereira, D. ‘Being in love and psychoanalysis: On reading Lacan’, Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, 15, 1994; where he explains the proposition that Lacan’s writings were “made not to be read” – that is, made not to be read “according to the conventions of reading.”⁶ On this score Lacan, employing the term equivocation to elucidate the direction towards which the act of interpretation orients itself, hints at what the status of this reading of the unreadable might be. And it is to the effect that, in his return to Freud, Lacan resists the temptation to take refuge in an unequivocal fixation of signifiers to significations, instead deploying a critique to find the true endorsement of analytic experience in what is overdetermined within it. To put it differently, through his reading of Freud, Lacan always aims to draw several from two, to cut signifiers loose from the symmetry of their supposed determinations to unleash a multiplicity of senses and voices.

Reading Lacan’s return to Freud on these terms, Oscar Zentner puts forward a “heretical proposition,” striking what he refers to as a “dissonant note for the occasion” on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Freud – that “from Freud to Lacan there is no continuity.”

“Undoubtedly there are common grounds between the two, but only a posteriori, after the extraction and isolation of some concepts of the Freudian theory from its main theoretical body. Such a de-contextualization warrants the question of whether, after this process, the so-called concepts remain the same. Our dissonant note holds that this is rather improbable, and as such, our heretical position is that from Freud to Lacan there is no continuity.”Zentner, O. ‘From the Freudian Unconscious as Cause to the Lacanian Unconscious as Gaffe’, Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, 23, 2007, p. 364.⁷

Such a dissonant note tentatively locates Lacan’s reinvention of psychoanalysis in a line of flight moving away from Freud’s body of work the closer he interrogates it. The dissonant note is one which sounds the discord between Freud and Lacan, which could be recast in terms as Lacan’s chromaticisation of Freudian tonality, activated through this “de-contextualization” – or in the terminology of the deleuzian-guattarian collective, deterritorialisation – namely, of parts of Freud’s theory from the contextual territory of its significations. Such a deterritorialisation or de-contextualisation allows for fragments of the analytic discourse to pursue a destiny, it could be said, that might not be a semblance.

One can put this chromaticisation of Freudian tonality into sharper relief if we continue to modulate this manoeuvre Lacan makes in his reading, his return to Freud, which is far from representing a fidelity to or continuity with the Master, rather inscribing what Zentner refers to as a “point of no return to Freud.”

“Certainly [the so-called return to Freud] restores the Freudian field, but not the Freudian unconscious, because as he [Lacan] stated elsewhere, Freud was not Lacanian.”Zentner, O. Ibid, p. 366. ⁸

Freud was not Lacanian, and the Lacanian unconscious is not of Freud. The symmetry between Freud and Lacan thus takes a turn at this point of no return. Pereira perhaps puts this in a different way when he says that Lacan’s return to Freud effected an over-turning. Whatever turn-of-phrase we employ, this infamous return is from the first a manoeuvre which precipitates a discontinuity, a non-reconcilability between one psychoanalyst and another, permitting us to read a discordance where one may be tempted to suppose an allegiance.

*

In his seminar Psychoanalysis, Philosophy & Theology David Pereira undertakes the explosive admixture of Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of foams with some of the more hardened notions of Lacanian psychoanalysis – an undertaking which, far from making allies of Sloterdijk and Lacan, has perhaps found a chemistry between them which has produced many curious and wonderful things.

Starting with his Spheres trilogy, Sloterdijk maps a process of deformation – the deformation, namely, of the concentric and bipolarised forms of society and subjectivity into a-centric and multipolar networks and processes which he calls foams. In order to grasp the implications that the introduction of the concept of foams might have for the conceptualisation of the psychoanalytic group, let us first consult Sloterdijk on what the meaning of a group or society might be when conceived on the basis of a concentric and bipolar continuity between its subjects:

“Only as long as societies hypnotise themselves as homogenous units, for example as genetically or theologically substantiated national peoples, can they view themselves as monospheres united through their origins (or by an exceptional constitution).”Sloterdijk, P. Foams: Spheres, Volume 3, Semiotext(e), California, 2016, p. 54.⁹

We might thus repose our question in the luxury of Sloterdijk’s lyrical foam, as to whether a School or society of psychoanalysts finds its guarantee in a common origin or in this form of an “exceptional constitution” (Freud and Lacan’s doctrines forming something like first and second amendments respectively) in relation to which psychoanalysts might gather themselves into monospheres, “hypnotising themselves as homogeneous units.”Freud speaks at length about the homogenisation of group members under the effects of hypnosis in his ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, while Lacan has described a “hypnotic symptom” in the psychoanalytic group as the basis for his School’s becoming an institution, which we will discuss further on. ¹⁰

For does this formation of allies around a common constitution – this form-allies-ation, if I may, of psychoanalysts – does it not ultimately subtract something essential from analytic experience insofar as it might otherwise premise itself on the singularity of an act whose authorisation comes not from a common ideal or exceptional constitution, but rather emerging in the face of a real in excess of a constitution sui generis – an excess which is encountered precisely within the impossibility of alliance?

So what might the status of a School of psychoanalysis then be if not that of a hypnotised solidarity (recalling that Freud very early on distanced himself from the practice of hypnosis)? How might we conceive the functioning of a School which pursues a discourse that might not be semblance, and thus may not foreclose for its members the very challenge of reading the unreadable and thus of the subversion of formalliesation? Sloterdijk, echoing the deleuzian-guattarian multiplicity – not two, but several – offers us the words that we might appropriate to conceptualise the functioning of a School that does not permit itself to be condemned to the stasis of a form. His polysphereology invites the reader to reckon with societies explicated as foams, or:

“…restless and asymmetrical associations of pluralities of space and processes whose cells can neither be truly united nor truly separate.”Sloterdijk, P. Op. cit, p. 54.¹¹

If we can begin to think of the analytic School in terms of foams, it is thanks to the work of David Pereira and the chemical reaction that his philosophico-analytic alchemy has produced through the stirring and agitation of the concept of psychoanalytic formation – a term somewhat hardened by the weight and rigidity of form – recomposing it through polyspheric uplift and aeration. From his cross-pollinated reading of Sloterdijk and Lacan, we are offered instead the lighter, airier and precariously pluralistic foamation of the psychoanalyst, a production which begins to speak of a multiplicity beyond form or a formal constitution. Thus if there is such a thing as analytic formation, it is not a process which culminates in the final stasis of a form – neither that of a psychoanalyst, nor that of a School of psychoanalysts. Formation or foamation constitutes a process productive not of a continuity or formal symmetry between like-analysts, but rather gives rise to the psychoanalyst as a singularity, as a One, discontinuous and asymmetrical with respect to each other analyst.On the distinction between psychoanalysts (plural) and the psychoanalyst (singular), see Pereira’s address to members of the Freudian School of Melbourne in his director’s report, 2016.¹²

The question we started with thus returns to us: what is the nature of the analytic group, and are alliances between analysts possible – hypnosis or no? For in a School conceptualised as a network of foams, whereby each psychoanalyst is already several – neither truly united nor separate, discontinuous both between and within themselves – it no longer makes sense to talk about analysts as allies or even as individuals, rallied around a shared constitution and constituting their practice on the basis of the same formal materials. Nor does their association obey the symmetry characteristic of enemies. Rather, it could be said that they are a-symmetrically composed as anti-allies, or even – an-allies.

Here it could be said that where the formalised association between common and definitive entities (like-analysts) reaches its limit, a proper and infinitive function – anallies – may come to attune itself to the dissonant asymmetry of a free association, in the shape of a dividend, moreover, of the alliance that it decomposes.In a letter of 1980, Lacan famously made the claim with respect to his School, “I expect nothing from individuals, and something from a functioning.” See Lacan, J. ‘The Other is Missing’, Television, Norton, New York, 1990, p. 133.¹³ A free association, therefore, which comes to be initiated in a different sense in each instance: analysts do not take-turns analysing, coordinating interpretations like an ally-oop (Freud sets up the shot, Lacan slam-dunks it). Rather, in the deformative movement from two to several each one ups-the-anti in turning-the-tables on psychoanalysis itself – in their own way and as co-conspirators – in the destabilisation of the very constitutional precedent upon which their supposed alliance is formalised, as a definitive alliance between individuals.

Recalling now Lacan’s redressing of interpretation as an act of equivocation, where a signifier is uprooted from its signification to unleash a multiplicity of senses and voices, the equivocated sign is rendered discontinuous to a signifying constitution which would otherwise substantiate an analytic common sense – thus subverting, in the parlance of the present paper, the formalliesation of analysts. It follows that analytic formation or foamation, insofar as it might hinge upon the psychoanalytic act qua equivocation, would not be a prescribed process deployed toward a formalised outcome (invoking the critique levelled by Lacan against ego-psychology as a reproductive formalisation of alliances effected through the analysand’s identification with their psychoanalyst). Rather, to the extent that the term formation has meant something different from formalisation since its initial deployment by Lacan, the analyst can really be said to be the outcome of the deformation of such reproductive identifications – namely, the deformation of the proportionality between two like-entities into the restless and asymmetrical disproportionality of several singularities – via a process of speech, moreover, brought under the influence of the transference.

*

Which brings us to the next part of this paper, and thus to an important moment in psychoanalytic history where this comfortable continuity between two seems to have short-circuited the transmission of a restless multiplicity, the shifting into gear which might otherwise have driven psychoanalytic doctrine into “uncharted waters.” Oscar Zentner speaks of this moment in his paper Lacan: Caracas Station,Zentner, O. ‘Lacan: Caracas Station’, Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, 25, 2016.¹⁴ in which he interrogates an error made by Lacan in his Seminar XXIV of 1976-77Entitled L’insu que sait de l’une-bevue s’aile a mourre.¹⁵, where the latter incorrectly writes his formula for the discourse of the psychoanalyst in the following way:

It is known, of course, that the four discourses are neatly organised in such a way that each one is articulated through a rotating series of quarter turns, forming a closed circuit:For example, see Lacan’s Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.¹⁶

Thus in writing the discourse of the psychoanalyst incorrectly, Lacan does not merely mistake one discursive organisation for another – which would maintain something of a duplicitous proportionality – but disorganises a fundamental organisation, giving rise to a disproportionate exception to his signifying constitution. As in his own return to Freud which was an over-turning, his own discourse of quarter-turns slips out past a point of no return, rendering Lacan discontinuous with his own teaching, and leaving his audience and himself in a palpable state of restlessness.In L’insu, Lacan notes that a number of his students contacted him about the error, and Lacan seems to devote considerable time to dispelling the myths of its significance. ¹⁷ With the erroneous formula, analytic discourse emerges as analytic discordance, where it could be said that it ceases to justify its existence in relation to any signification, whatsoever.

Jacque Allain-Miller, present in the audience at this moment, restores some sense of symmetry and continuity to this restlessness with the assertion: “that is not how you wrote it last time.”Miller’s correction of Lacan’s error can be found in Cormac Gallagher’s translation of Lacan’s Seminar XXIV, p. 100, however this version omits the specific comment quoted above. Zentner refers the reader to Ornicar?, 16, 1978, p. 13.¹⁸ After Miller alerts the room to this mistake, Lacan wastes no time in correcting it by re-writing the analytic formula in the way it was known to be written, thus restoring it to convention. Here, Zentner proposes that through this exacting correction of Lacan’s error by Miller, something novel in Lacan’s teaching – something outside of the order and organisation of a former knowledge – while it had taken place, did not come to pass. To pass, we might add, a point of no return. Where something began to restlessly torque its way free, a reference to a former knowledge “plots a point, fixes an order,” turning Lacan’s discourse back before it’s too late by having the disordered and displaced take place within an order of analytic common sense.Regarding what is here being referred to as ‘common sense’, Oscar Zentner (op. cit, 2016) points out that the present episode took place not long before Lacan dissolved L’ecole freudienne de Paris, Lacan himself stating that his School ‘had turned towards sense, thus becoming a Church’, (my italics).¹⁹

Now, it may be that this “that’s not how you wrote it last time” is just an innocent correction of a forgivable mistake, no doubt the sort of correction we could all be prone to making in response to such an obvious slip of the pen. However, let us recall that Lacan had often referred to himself as the analysand of his audience, thus placing the audience in the position of analyst. Picture yourself for a moment as an analysand lying on the couch and uttering something or other, before being interrupted by your analyst with the words: “that’s not how you wrote it (or said it) last time.” Imagine, long after being told to say whatever comes to mind, suddenly being taken to task by your analyst as to an inconsistency in your speech, in the flow of free associations which is nothing if not a flux of inconsistencies!

Now open your eyes. I am reminded of a moment in the Psychoanalysis, Philosophy & Theology seminar – let us not forget this tough current of direction – where I heard it spoken how it is that one might discern the precipitation of an atmosphere of transference within the treatment. Precisely, that is, at the point that the analysand’s articulation of their history loses its consistency and ceases to obey the conventions of order, organisation, or chronology – disrupting the status of knowledge for the subject. Transference, the field in which analysis plays out, is materialised as a disorganisation of speech, a discontinuity of speech from the circuitry of history or former knowledge, unwedded from what was said “last time” – allowing, let’s say, for the emergence of a restless and asymmetrical (free) association of pluralities. Thus, it may be that what was at stake in the correction exacted upon Lacan’s error was a categorical rejection of the transference.

*

In his 1994 paper Being in Love and Psychoanalysis: On Reading Lacan, David Pereira takes up the question of how the supposition of and allegiance to a conventional Lacanian discourse acts as an obstacle to reading Lacan:

“If the writing made not to be read questions a conventional reading, then the love at play in the supposing of a knowledge, the love that Lacan poses as an obstacle to reading, is a conventional, let us say, limited love which by no means exhausts the field of love.”Pereira, D. ‘Being in love and psychoanalysis: On reading Lacan’, Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, 15, 1994, p. 58.²⁰

To the extent that Lacan’s erroneous formula falls outside of the conventions of his discourse, it could perhaps be said that it constitutes a writing made not to be read – not to be read, that is, according to the conventions of reading. Thus, the correction that this error was met with may have constituted a conventional sort of reading marked by a certain fidelity or allegiance to a supposed knowledge. As stated above, such a fidelity to a supposed knowledge concerns a limited or conventional form of love – what we have come to term in the present paper as a proportionate or symmetrical coalition between two.

What took place, of what may otherwise have come to pass, in the correction of Lacan’s error of L’insu concerned a restless and asymmetrical association, precipitated in the emergence of an inconsistency, becoming subjected to a conventional form of love/reading which supposes that there is a sexual relation after all – a consistency and continuity between two, and which, we might add, thus seeks to formallies in that love.Something Lacan says further along in the aforementioned letter of 1980, seems to touch on this question of a reading that establishes the convention of a coalition between like-analysts, albeit not without ambiguity: “Yes, the psychoanalyst holds his act in horror. This, to such an extent that he negates, disavows, and renounces it – and curses whoever reminds him of it, Lacan Jacques, lest his name be mentioned, even calls for the scalp of Jacques-Allain Miller, odious for having shown himself to be the at-least-one to have read him. Without anymore attention than needed to establish ‘analysts’.” (my italics). See ‘The Other is Missing,’ Television, New York: Norton, 1980, p. 135.²¹ This type of formalliesation was identified by Freud as the hypnotic effect of the group closing in upon itself as a homogenous unit, church or institution, and which Lacan testified to witnessing in his own School, the École Freudienne de Paris, prompting his ultimate dissolution of it:

“Lacan’s concern is with the ‘hypnotic symptom’ in the psychoanalytic group; the love and loyalty attached to his person, the lack of criticism, the paralysis and lack of initiative, all of which contributed to his School being rendered an institution.”Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 58.²²

The conventional or “hypnotic” love in question here, therefore, is that which formalises or colonises discourse through a conventional reading, which becomes the basis for a like-minded coalition, paralysing the inaugural effects of speech, of a properly psychoanalytic discordance which otherwise awaits the “subject of a reading”That is, an unconventional reading. Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 61. ²³ that its very fumbling calls into existence from the real:

“This subject of a reading is not one which exists prior to a reading, but a subject produced in relation to such an encounter with the text.”Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 61.²⁴

The type of encounter that is being referred to here is precisely an encounter with a discordance in the text which inaugurates this subject of a reading – not of a prior, former existence, but as the correlate of an unconventional type of love materialised in the transference. While this subject of a reading might be construed itself in terms of the equivocation of the status of knowledge within the transference (outlining the figure of the analyst as subject supposed of knowing), we might nevertheless come to confer on this peculiar field its proper and infinitive function, as anallies, here where the analytic act tends in the direction of a maximum of discontinuity and disproportionality – of restlessness in the text, as in love.

A heterogeneous movement, tending in the direction of a maximum of discontinuity and disproportionality, is a direct homage to what Lacan called the desire of the psychoanalyst, which he describes as deploying itself towards “the attainment of a maximum of difference” – the difference, namely, between the cause of desire and the ideal or personification of continuity that is supposed to animate it in a dialectic of proportion. In attempting to pin Lacan’s articulation to what was said the last time, love is rendered continuous within the limited field of fidelity and allegiance. The restless agitation of this proportionate or partial love precipitates in the transference an “axis of desire” that twists itself free from the guarantee love finds in an imaginary consistency with a common knowledge – activating the co-conspiratorial maximalisation of inconsistency in speech – a restlessly asymmetrical free association of speech, or torque.‘And, it is precisely such a movement which is impeded by the One of partial love – the Sphairos (sphere) of eros as definitive of the unifying function of love.’ (my italics). Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 60. ²⁵

Here, when invoking the term desire in connection with love, we might find our bearings in the various works of Deleuze and Guattari, in understanding by this a desire no longer wedded to the classical lack of the erastes (the lover) – a lack which drives possession and conquest of the other – but rather a desire bound to the axis of production, the production of a surplus which escapes the limits of the known and accountable.See Deleuze, G., & Guattari. F. Anti-Oedipus, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, where they refer to processes of ‘desiring-production’, or the productive and pragmatic multiplicity that becomes of desire when it is liberated from any reference to a constitutive lack.²⁶ What is at stake in the transference is an unconscious knowledge not accountable to a last time, but which emerges as a novelty, a never before, an inconsistent and even monstrous difference-in-itself which manifests in the fabled episode of L’insu as a blunder in the text, a deformula – and which, in emerging, demands a reading.

It is what Oscar Zentner reminds us is at stake in Lacan’s point of no return, his “de-contextualization” of the Freudian unconscious as no longer playing host to a signifying determinism, producing the Lacanian unconscious as gaffe: the slipping out or passing through of the “never intended, never expected, never to be assimilated,” ¬forever unsettling the build-up of “said-iment” in the restless flows of speech and language.

The practice of psychoanalysis transpires as a co-conspiracy through this restless field of transference, a nonsensical type of love articulated through a desiring production disorienting itself from a determinate object of knowledge, and driven in the direction of the production of an indeterminable cause. A love that may allow for a maximum of discontinuity and disproportionality to come to pass, or as Pereira writes, a love that may:

“…push us to the point of an encounter with a lack in the text – the text as absolute Other – and produce a point of discordance.”Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 61.²⁷

This “lack in the text,” to reiterate, understood not as the classical lack underpinning an unassuageable possession and conquest, but the lack of a common, absolute, and definitive sense in the text, as Other, to which Miller, in 1977, could pin his Eros. From this discordance between two brought about by the lack of or disruption to a common sense, a way may be opened for a restless and asymmetrical free association of pluralities to fall through, if not a lack, then a crack in the text as Other – for the coming to pass of the psychoanalyst and the School of psychoanalysis.

Postscript

In his paper Lacan, Caracas Station, Oscar Zentner argues that the erroneous formula which was subjected to a corrective formalisation in 1977 – “that’s not how you wrote it last time” – managed to be transmitted 3 years later in his Caracas seminar, when Lacan botched it again, this time saying the word frog (la grenouille) instead of toad (le crapaud) when describing Bramantino’s painting of the Madonna.A painting which itself is known for having departed from established convention by depicting the Virgin passing a palm to someone who is not a martyr. In the foreground of the painting lies a dead toad, not a frog, symbolic of the devil. See Zentner, O. ‘Lacan: Caracas Station’, Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, 25, 2016, p. 19.²⁸ Crucially, no one in Caracas corrected Lacan’s mistake, which may have allowed for a love to be realised not in a common signifier representative of a knowing subject, but in an error which was the insignia of a knowledge that was missing and thus of the impossibility of a common understanding. “Kata-Holon (according to All) Lacanian theory, that simply does not exist.” See ibid. p 25.²⁹ Zentner thus proposes that by not being corrected in Caracas, Lacan’s audience allowed for the possibility of a reading. As outlined above, it is the coming to pass of a discordance in analytic doctrine that “produces this subject of a reading, for the text.”Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 61.³⁰ Sloterdijk puts forth a not dissimilar proposition that again we may commandeer for the purposes of our argument:

“It is only with reference to such passing-through of the foreign that a tenable concept of what subjectivity could mean can be articulated in our time” [my italics].Sloterdijk, P. Bubbles: Spheres, Volume 1, Semiotext(e), California, 2011, p. 30.³¹

For Sloterdijk, the only tenable concept of subjectivity is one which may no longer rest upon the supposition of a prior existence, thus raising the question of subjectivity to the dignity of a foreign, and future affair. It concerns an articulation that passes from the future into the present, a voice which torques in foreign tongues, twisting a collective assemblage of enunciation free from a mode of relation constrained within the contextual dimensions of a conventional love and reading. Where a crack appears in the text, as Other, the certitude of a relation, a communication, in reference to a context or common tongue, can no longer be guaranteed, and here the future meaning of subjectivity may be written anew, in our time, through the reading of this unreadable writing. Did the founder of this School, The Freudian School of Melbourne, encounter in Caracas such a writing, a discordance in a passage of doctrine where, from a crack in the Other, Lacan let slip a croak – la grenouille! And as an effect of submitting this insolent croak to a reading, was able to produce something from it – something discontinuous with respect to what was said, the relation of something, let’s say, beyond a ributtal.

Today, we participate in the work of a School that may still be riding on the wave of an error and its interpretation. A School whose currents of direction agitate an association to torque its way free from its own conventions – evident in its history with a founder’s stepping-aside and more recently in the disassembly of its foundational Seminar – agitations which may activate a treatment of the ‘hypnotic symptom’ which threatens to seize the psychoanalytic group in the cohesion of a formalised structure. Perhaps it is in this sense that the Director’s report, distributed to members of the School early on in the year, invites us to engage the psychoanalytic act “as it applies its methods to the School itself,” provoking a confrontation with its conventions, its “structures and limits in such a way as to force them to fracture and break in the direction of the creation of the new.”Pereira’s address to members of the Freudian School of Melbourne in his director’s report, 2018. ³² Such an act, which is no doubt held in horror before such crucial questions as the deformation of the School’s Homage Conference – a convention of speech and writing whose concentricity may be imposing a certain constraint upon the passage of the foreign and unreadable – such an act might allow for the disorganised articulation of the School as a free association that restlessly sets itself the task of turning the tables on psychoanalysis, and upping-the-anti on psychoanalysts!

References

¹ Member of the School. The Freudian School of Melbourne - School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. ^

² David Pereira. Analyst of School and Director of the Freudian School of Melbourne. ^

³ A term coined and deployed in staggering ways in Deleuze, G., & Guattari. F. A Thousand Plateaus, London: Bloomsbury, 1987. ^

⁴ The 2018 Dublin Conference was entitled The Symptom of the Psychoanalytic Group and the Transmission of Psychoanalysis. ^

⁵ Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Bloomsbury, 1987, p. 1. ^

⁶ See Pereira, D. ‘Being in love and psychoanalysis: On reading Lacan’, Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, 15, 1994; where he explains the proposition that Lacan’s writings were “made not to be read” – that is, made not to be read “according to the conventions of reading.” ^

⁷ Zentner, O. ‘From the Freudian Unconscious as Cause to the Lacanian Unconscious as Gaffe’, Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, 23, 2007, p. 364. ^

⁸ Zentner, O. Ibid, p. 366. ^

⁹ Sloterdijk, P. Foams: Spheres, Volume 3, Semiotext(e), California, 2016, p. 54. ^

¹⁰ Freud speaks at length about the homogenisation of group members under the effects of hypnosis in his ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, while Lacan has described a “hypnotic symptom” in the psychoanalytic group as the basis for his School’s becoming an institution, which we will discuss further on. ^

¹¹ Sloterdijk, P. Op. cit, p. 54. ^

¹² On the distinction between psychoanalysts (plural) and the psychoanalyst (singular), see Pereira’s address to members of the Freudian School of Melbourne in his director’s report, 2016. ^

¹³ In a letter of 1980, Lacan famously made the claim with respect to his School, “I expect nothing from individuals, and something from a functioning.” See Lacan, J. ‘The Other is Missing’, Television, Norton, New York, 1990, p. 133. ^

¹⁴ Zentner, O. ‘Lacan: Caracas Station’, Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, 25, 2016. ^

¹⁵ Entitled L’insu que sait de l’une-bevue s’aile a mourre. ^

¹⁶ For example, see Lacan’s Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. ^

¹⁷ In L’insu, Lacan notes that a number of his students contacted him about the error, and Lacan seems to devote considerable time to dispelling the myths of its significance. ^

¹⁸ Miller’s correction of Lacan’s error can be found in Cormac Gallagher’s translation of Lacan’s Seminar XXIV, p. 100, however this version omits the specific comment quoted above. Zentner refers the reader to Ornicar?, 16, 1978, p. 13. ^

¹⁹ Regarding what is here being referred to as ‘common sense’, Oscar Zentner (op. cit, 2016) points out that the present episode took place not long before Lacan dissolved L’ecole freudienne de Paris, Lacan himself stating that his School ‘had turned towards sense, thus becoming a Church’, (my italics).^

²⁰ Pereira, D. ‘Being in love and psychoanalysis: On reading Lacan’, Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, 15, 1994, p. 58. ^

²¹ Something Lacan says further along in the aforementioned letter of 1980, seems to touch on this question of a reading that establishes the convention of a coalition between like-analysts, albeit not without ambiguity: “Yes, the psychoanalyst holds his act in horror. This, to such an extent that he negates, disavows, and renounces it – and curses whoever reminds him of it, Lacan Jacques, lest his name be mentioned, even calls for the scalp of Jacques-Allain Miller, odious for having shown himself to be the at-least-one to have read him. Without anymore attention than needed to establish ‘analysts’.” (my italics). See ‘The Other is Missing,’ Television, New York: Norton, 1980, p. 135. ^

²² Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 58.^

²³ That is, an unconventional reading. Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 61. ^

²⁴ Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 61. ^

²⁵ ‘And, it is precisely such a movement which is impeded by the One of partial love – the Sphairos (sphere) of eros as definitive of the unifying function of love.’ (my italics). Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 60. ^

²⁶ See Deleuze, G., & Guattari. F. Anti-Oedipus, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, where they refer to processes of ‘desiring-production’, or the productive and pragmatic multiplicity that becomes of desire when it is liberated from any reference to a constitutive lack. ^

²⁷ Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 61. ^

²⁸ A painting which itself is known for having departed from established convention by depicting the Virgin passing a palm to someone who is not a martyr. In the foreground of the painting lies a dead toad, not a frog, symbolic of the devil. See Zentner, O. ‘Lacan: Caracas Station’, Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, 25, 2016, p. 19. ^

²⁹ “Kata-Holon (according to All) Lacanian theory, that simply does not exist.” See ibid. p 25. ^

³⁰ Pereira, D. Op. cit. 1994, p. 61. ^

³¹ Sloterdijk, P. Bubbles: Spheres, Volume 1, Semiotext(e), California, 2011, p. 30. ^

³² Pereira’s address to members of the Freudian School of Melbourne in his director’s report, 2018. ^