Editorial
Everyone who has at some time taken up a reading of Seminar XI will be familiar with the story of Choang-tsu included in it, a reference that contributed to the view of Lacan as a kind of Zen Master. To remind you, the story that Lacan recalls for his audience concerns a man, the aforementioned Choang-tsu, who falls asleep and dreams that he is a butterfly and who, upon waking, wonders whether perhaps he is a butterfly who is only dreaming that he is Choang-tsu. Despite the apparent absurdity of this fleeting thought, Lacan says it is enough for us to be able to infer from it that Choang-tsu is not mad – and this because it testifies to the incompleteness of this subject’s identification with ‘Choang-tsu’, that ‘Choang-tsu’ does not cover all that he is. And it is this seed of doubt, planted in the beat of time between the opening and closing of a butterfly’s wings, a dreamer’s eyelids, and the fleeting space which it wedges open, that prevents the cascade towards a ‘Return to Schreber’.
While this little story might be taken up as just one more useful reference in orientating our practice, its appearance here serves rather to underline the danger inherent to any discourse closed onto itself, one which only makes its ever-ready ears available to its own ‘little voices’. It’s remarkable really that Lacan’s comments made in the early Sixties – that, when dreaming, he is a butterfly for nobody while it is whilst he is awake that he is Choang-tsu for others and truly caught up in their butterfly net – are not more readily taken on board today in a world in which we are more than ever the prey of the various networks … the networks of radio, television, internet and mobile- (cell-) phone. …Continue reading
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Contents:
THE LETTER 22 (Summer 2001) pages 1-8
Introduction
This brief report is intended as a record of a quite unusual psychoanalytic meeting, which took place recently in a country that has had very little exposure to the discipline.
Curiously, and I think unintentionally, it appears to have been the event which coincided most closely with Jacques Lacan’s centenary which occurred on the day before it began, on Friday the 13th. But this was by no means an explicitly Lacanian meeting and a variety of psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic tendencies were represented, especially on the Chinese side but on the Western side also.
The Symposium was the brainchild of Ed Robins and was prompted by a five-day workshop he had conducted at the Medical University of Beijing the previous year. The high-point of that visit was the way in which he demonstrated in a few brief sessions, conducted though an interpreter, that a nine-year-old inpatient who was being treated as a schizophrenic was really acting out a profound distress associated with the death and burial rites of his beloved grandmother. So impressed were the authorities of this very biologically oriented institution, that the idea of an international psychoanalytic meeting was suggested and promptly organised by Ed and his wife Lian-Pey Robins, who provided the perfect liaison with the Chinese side. Central to the whole enterprise was Teresa Pai, a Taiwanese psychoanalyst, who single-handedly, throughout the symposium provided a consecutive translation…
THE LETTER 22 (Summer 2001) pages 9-29
Dream interpretation constitutes a central axis of psychoanalytic treatment. According to Freud, analysts need to approach the manifest dream content as a form of pictographic writing, similar to a rebus, and should not be misled by the visual image of the representation. Freud also links the dream script to ancient forms of expression and even singles out Chinese as the writing system that comes closest to the composition of the dream text. Drawing on Freud’s own comparison and the linguistic features of Chinese characters, this paper investigates whether Freud’s portrayal of the manifest dream content maintains its validity beyond the boundaries of Western alphabetic writing systems. Given the peculiarities of ancient Chinese dream interpretation, as exemplified in the Yu-sia-tsi, and the majority of semantic-phonetic symbols in contemporary Chinese, I argue that Chinese dreams are likely to contain ideograms instead of actual rebuses, and that these ideograms will exploit phonological rather than semantic connections. The composition of a Chinese dream is, therefore, radically different from that of a Western dream, and dream interpretation should proceed along the opposite path as that advocated by Freud: from phonology to logography and from sound to signification.
* * * *
The birth of psychoanalysis is commonly associated with the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in November 1899. Although Freud had introduced the term ‘psychoanalysis’ in 1896, The…
THE LETTER 22 (Summer 2001) pages 30-38
By way of an introduction
In what follows, firstly we will speak about the sacred character of the body, and its consequences for representation, mainly in writing. Chinese writing has the advantage of showing the direct relation between body, image and speech, that is, the relation between ideographs and phonographs common to calligrams. Most importantly the holiness characteristic of the body has consequences for every person who wishes to care for others, and in particular for those who wish to care for children.
* * * *
Why have the body and the representation of the body in all eras and civilisations been considered as holy? Our hypothesis is that what is holy corresponds to the unconscious investment of the body. In the mother’s desire to have a child, the child’s body replaces the phallus that she has been deprived of. Freud calls this ‘penis envy’. However, because the phallic signification of the child’s body is incestuous, it is repressed and reappears in a mystified way in a sacred, religious dimension. Our body has been the object of maternal desire and hence, we are not our body, but we have it. We ignore what our own body is like, and that is why the mirror, our external perception by others and their love, matter so…
THE LETTER 22 (Summer 2001) pages 39-58
By way of introduction
Freud made use of hieroglyphics (in dream analysis), whilst Lacan drew inspiration from Chinese writing. Having studied the basics of this, Lacan went so far as to say, ‘it is perhaps only because I studied Chinese in the past, that I can now call myself Lacanian’.
Not only did Lacan find the same ambiguity in Chinese characters as in the signifier – thus re-enforcing the claim that the unconscious is structured like language – but he went further and placed emphasis on the particular dimension specific to the written word. He demonstrated (for example, using Edgar Poe’s The Purloined Letter) how the instance, the insistence of the letter determines the subject’s wishes. Each individual is determined by the letters from language, whether poetic or scientific, relative to his personal life story. Lacan was himself taken in by the letter when he invented a form of writing specific to analytical discourse.
Recognising the specificity of the written word in speech and language has led to a new clinical approach since Freud, used for example amongst children faced with learning problems in respect of reading and writing. This specificity opens up a new approach to a question that has never been totally resolved: that of the link between the Oedipus complex and the child’s curiosity regarding the difference between the sexes. This question raises problems for the child later (it is the driving force behind his sexual theories), and is also an object of research for the psychoanalyst. Taking these issues into consideration, one can better identify care demands in child psychoanalysis. …
THE LETTER 22 (Summer 2001) pages 59-74
Introduction: the moral stance
Perversion is without any doubt one of the most difficult clinical categories, both as regards its study and the possibility of treatment. If we want to say something useful about it, we need to clear up a number of obstacles beforehand, in order to be able to study perversion as such. There are at least three difficulties: first of all the habitual moral reaction; secondly, the difficulty in differentiating typical human polymorphous sexuality with its perverse traits on the one hand from the perverse structure on the other hand, as one of the three possible structures of the subject; thirdly, we have to be aware of the omnipresence of the male gaze, which amounts to a phallic magnifying glass.
Let us start with the moral reaction. The so-called good neurotic does exist1 and probably the good psychotic also. The good pervert, however, seems to be a contradictio in terminis. The sympathy that is felt for his victim implies a moral rejection of the perpetrator. This rejection has been endorsed by the connection between perversion, child abuse and incest. As a result, the possibility of sustaining both an objective gaze and an unbiased treatment is seriously impaired, and this goes for our dealings with both the perpetrator and the victim.
Concerning the perpetrator, this rejection makes it impossible to see that the pervert himself presents a moral model, because he – just like any other believer – denies the lack of the Other by presenting himself as the…
THE LETTER 22 (Summer 2001) pages 75-96
In Lesson XXI of the seminar Anxiety, Lacan observes of a particular type of anxiety that it is not possible to speak about it without provoking at least some echo of it. He was referring to his audience. For my part I can only say that it is certainly true for the speaker. The prospect of this talk has provided an excellent forum for an encounter with some of the most salient aspects emphasized by Lacan, notably the connection for the neurotic subject between anxiety and the expectation of the other. The fact that one is called upon, expected to produce something, obsesses the neurotic. In the seminar Identification, Lacan suggests two ways out of this dilemma. Either one courageously refuses to feed oneself into the enigma of what the other might want, and fires ahead anyway, or else …! What follows falls into the latter category.
What interests me most in this topic is a kind of double truth, which emerges about the subject as object. On the one hand there is the possibility of finding shelter from anxiety, of palliating its corrosive bite in becoming or remaining more object than subject. On the other hand it is precisely anxiety that dismantles all shelters, and what then stands revealed is a dramatically different and radically uncomforted version of the subject as object. It is because it exemplifies something of this…
THE LETTER 22 (Summer 2001) pages 97-116
Introduction
This brief report is intended as a record of a quite unusual psychoanalytic meeting, which took place recently in a country that has had very little exposure to the discipline.
Curiously, and I think unintentionally, it appears to have been the event which coincided most closely with Jacques Lacan’s centenary which occurred on the day before it began, on Friday the 13th. But this was by no means an explicitly Lacanian meeting and a variety of psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic tendencies were represented, especially on the Chinese side but on the Western side also.
The Symposium was the brainchild of Ed Robins and was prompted by a five-day workshop he had conducted at the Medical University of Beijing the previous year. The high-point of that visit was the way in which he demonstrated in a few brief sessions, conducted though an interpreter, that a nine-year-old inpatient who was being treated as a schizophrenic was really acting out a profound distress associated with the death and burial rites of his beloved grandmother. So impressed were the authorities of this very biologically oriented institution, that the idea of an international psychoanalytic meeting was suggested and promptly organised by Ed and his wife Lian-Pey Robins, who provided the perfect liaison with the Chinese side. Central to the whole enterprise was Teresa Pai, a Taiwanese psychoanalyst, who single-handedly, throughout the symposium provided a consecutive translation…