Issue 66-67 (Autumn 2017/Spring 2018) Pages 65-68

Conference: ‘Why was psychoanalysis founded by an emigrant?’

9th December 2017 in Marino Institute, Dublin

Morning Discussion

Patricia McCarthy: I have two comments. My first comment is addressed to Malachi – Malachi, given that we suffer from a passion for ignorance, all of us, leaving us all, at the end of analysis, having to tolerate a certain ‘I don’t want to know anything about it’, my comment touches a bit on Cormac’s opening question on the difference between founding institutions of learning as opposed to the founding of psychoanalysis. Given that we suffer from this passion for ignorance, isn’t it necessary then for us to speak about the discourses, and the psychoanalytic discourse in particular, in order to better get our bearings?

Dermot Hickey: Is your question specifically to Malachi’s paper?

Patricia McCarthy: Not necessarily, because the two papers we’ve heard to date, both on hysteria, might seem a little distant from the title of the conference, namely, how to speak about the founding of psychoanalysis and why it was founded by an emigrant.

Malachi McCoy: Patricia, I have something written here that we discussed in the work of the seminar group on New Studies on Hysteria. Just to read you a short paragraph from it. The unchanged persistence of the hysterical discourse constitutes the greatest opposition to what it would be to enter into a psychoanalytic discourse. So in that sense then isn’t the founding of psychoanalysis to do with the individual person … through the subject and beginning to speak, doesn’t the hysteric choose not to speak?

Patricia McCarthy: But is it possible to speak about a founding of psychoanalysis? I suppose that’s my bigger question.

Malachi McCoy: That’s the pivot of today’s conference.

Barry O’Donnell: Thank you both very much. There’s a lot in what both of you are saying. I was just interested Ros, in the point you were making about the oral drive. You took that as an example and the way that…