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Trauma’ is a term that has long been used in medicine and surgery. It comes from the Greek τϱαŭμα, meaning wound, which in turn derives from τιτϱοσχω, to pierce.
‘Trauma’ is a term that has long been used in medicine and surgery. It comes from the Greek τϱαŭμα, meaning wound, which in turn derives from τιτϱοσχω, to pierce. It generally means any injury where the skin is broken as a consequence of external violence, and the effects of such an injury upon the organism as a whole; the implication of the skin being broken is not always present, however–we may speak, for example, of ‘closed head and brain traumas’.
In adopting the term, psycho-analysis carries the three ideas implicit in it over on to the psychical level: the idea of a violent shock, the idea of a wound and the idea of consequences affecting the whole organisation.
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973) The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press – Reprinted by Karnac Books 1988
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The materiality of the unconscious is made, not of learning, but of things said to the subject, that have hurt him, and of things, impossible to say, that make him suffer…Unconscious memory parasites the living [being] and alters its potency.
The materiality of the unconscious is made, not of learning, but of things said to the subject, that have hurt him, and of things, impossible to say, that make him suffer.
As soon as man speaks, he is submitted to the question of his truth and his most intimate identifications come to respond to the paradoxes of his link to what he says and to what has been said to him. The materiality of the unconscious is made, not of learning, but of things said to the subject, that have hurt him, and of things, impossible to say, that make him suffer. The opposition between the principles of the nervous system’s functioning, arising directly from the laws of biology and physics, and the register of another causality for founding psychology, is thus posed. Unconscious memory parasites the living [being] and alters its potency.
Éric Laurent. Uses Of The Neurosciences For Psychoanalysis. La Cause Freudienne no. 70, December 2008.
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the exploitation of desire, this is the big invention of capitalist discourse.
...capitalist discourse implies a particularization of desire, treated as if it is a demand. Whereas in classic discourse desire is singular in that it cannot be solved by means of the signifier, the capitalist discourse suggests that particular solutions for dealing with subjective division actually exist: the market is there to satisfy customers' demands. Consequently, at the point of desire, the capitalistic logic leads to exploitation: “the exploitation of desire, this is the big invention of capitalist discourse” (Lacan, 1973a, p. 97, my translation). This discourse exploits desire by treating it as a specific question to be answered by means of practical solutions. The superego command characteristic of capitalist times concerns an obligation to satisfy desire via consumption (McGowan, 2004). The market provides streams of products and services that are there to answer peoples' demands. Lacan suggests that this has a tranquilizing effect: “we couldn't do anything better so that people comport themselves with a little tranquility” (Lacan, 1973a, p. 97, my translation).
S Vanheule - Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian. Psychoanalysis Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. Front. Psychol., 09 December 2016.
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My depression points to my not knowing how to lose... What is more, the disenchantment that I experience here and now, appears, under scrutiny, to awaken echoes of old traumas, to which I realise I have never been able to resign myself.
My depression points to my not knowing how to lose...
Nevertheless, the power of the events that create my depression is often out of proportion to the disaster that suddenly overwhelms me. What is more, the disenchantment that I experience here and now, cruel as it may be, appears, under scrutiny, to awaken echoes of old traumas, to which I realise I have never been able to resign myself. I can thus discover antecedents to my current breakdown in a loss, death, or grief over someone or something that I once loved. The disappearance of that essential being continues to deprive me of what is most worthwhile in me; I live it as a wound or deprivation, discovering just the same that my grief is but the deferment of the hatred or desire for ascendency that I nurture with respect to the one who betrayed or abandoned me. My depression points to my not knowing how to lose – I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss? It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being – and of Being itself. The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.
Julia Kristeva - Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Columbia University Press; Reprint edition (1989).
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The unconscious is not a non-conscious, pre-existing memory. It is the emergence, in the very moment, of signs of this real…signs that testify to what in one’s own conduct or intention escapes the I and the identifications of the subject, where one finds it difficult to recognize oneself as identical to oneself.
Psychoanalysis isolates the symptom’s rebellious dimension against a reductionism of this part of the human which cannot be measured, which insists and reiterates all the more as one does not want to know anything about it. Lacan pinned it as object a.
New symptoms are taking shape. These are all answers, protests that demonstrate the impossibility of one’s self-identity, the impasses of control and of self-management of emotions, thought, stress, anxiety and trauma.
The analytic orientation knows the over-determination of these symptoms by the effects of speech on the body. The unconscious is not a non-conscious, pre-existing memory. It is the emergence, in the very moment, of signs of this real which does not belong to the organism; signs that testify to what in one’s own conduct or intention escapes the I and the identifications of the subject, where one finds it difficult to recognize oneself as identical to oneself.
Yves Vanderveken, Congress Director, “The unconscious and the brain, nothing in common”, 13 and 14 of July 2019, Brussels.
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Speech goes via the body and, in return, it affects the body that emits it… It affects it in the form of phenomena of resonance and echo. The resonance and echo of speech in the body are the real, both of what Freud called the ‘unconscious’ and the ‘drive’. In this sense, the unconscious and the speaking body are one and the same real.
Speech goes via the body and, in return, it affects the body that emits it. In what way and in what form does speech affect the body that is its emitter? It affects it in the form of phenomena of resonance and echo. The resonance and echo of speech in the body are the real, both of what Freud called the ‘unconscious’ and the ‘drive’. In this sense, the unconscious and the speaking body are one and the same real. I’m going to say it again so that this essential punctuation doesn’t elude us. There is equivalence between the unconscious and the drive insofar as both terms have a common origin which is the effect of speech in the body, the somatic affects of language, of lalingua.
Henceforth, the unconscious at issue is not an unconscious of pure logic but, so to speak, an unconscious of pure jouissance. To designate this new unconscious, Lacan forged a new word, a neologism that is starting to repeat, the parlêtre, which is altogether distinct from the Freudian unconscious that belongs to the ontological and ethical order, as we have seen. On the contrary, the parlêtre is an ontic entity, because this entity necessarily has a body, since there is no jouissance without a body. The concept of parlêtre hinges – this is what I am putting forward – on the originary equivalence between unconscious and drive.
Jacques-Alain Miller - Habeas Corpus. World Association of Psychoanalysis Congress 2018. Translated by A. R. Price.
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the exploitation of desire, this is the big invention of capitalist discourse…
...capitalist discourse implies a particularization of desire, treated as if it is a demand. Whereas in classic discourse desire is singular in that it cannot be solved by means of the signifier, the capitalist discourse suggests that particular solutions for dealing with subjective division actually exist: the market is there to satisfy customers' demands. Consequently, at the point of desire, the capitalistic logic leads to exploitation: “the exploitation of desire, this is the big invention of capitalist discourse” (Lacan, 1973a, p. 97, my translation). This discourse exploits desire by treating it as a specific question to be answered by means of practical solutions. The superego command characteristic of capitalist times concerns an obligation to satisfy desire via consumption (McGowan, 2004). The market provides streams of products and services that are there to answer peoples' demands. Lacan suggests that this has a tranquilizing effect: “we couldn't do anything better so that people comport themselves with a little tranquility” (Lacan, 1973a, p. 97, my translation).
S Vanheule - Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian. Psychoanalysis Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. Front. Psychol., 09 December 2016.
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What the melancholic subject misperceives in her attachment to the lost object is that the object in itself, objet a, was always-already lost.
Slavoj Zizek - Melancholy and the Act. Critical Inquiry Vol. 26, No. 4 (Summer, 2000), The University of Chicago Press
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What then is the alternative to relieving anxiety? Doesn’t anxiety also indicate a crucial point for the subject? The special status of anxiety among the affects was stressed by Freud, and Lacan formulated it concisely in the following way: anxiety is an affect that does not lead astray. It guides the neurotic subject towards the real.
Relieve Anxiety? Such a question can only be formulated from the position of psychoanalysis. It is a question that is not posed by medicine. It is an evidence, for medicine, that the symptom is something that must be relieved. Anxiety is a just another symptom that must be relieved. Psychoanalysis, on the one hand, only considers as its aim the elimination of symptoms once their function is established and, on the other hand, it distin- guishes the function of anxiety from that of the symptom. Posing the question of relieving anxiety imme- diately separates psychoanalysis from medical care.
What then is the alternative to relieving anxiety? Doesn’t anxiety also indicate a crucial point for the subject? The special status of anxiety among the affects was stressed by Freud, and Lacan formulated it concisely in the following way: anxiety is an affect that does not lead astray. It guides the neurotic subject towards the real. For the neurotic subject, if there were no anxiety there would be nothing but a theater of shadows. The hysteric subject reduces the world to its semblants and its intrigues; the obsessional sees the world through a veil. Both find themselves exiled from the sentiment of life. If anxiety does not lead astray, it is because it poses the right question, the question of desire. We experience anxiety when we do not know what the Other wants of us. It is in this sense that anxiety is not without an object. The presence of the Other as such is in question. Lacan renders clear the evolutions in the Freudian theory of anxiety. From the first studies of anxiety neurosis up to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, anxiety is the presence of the desire of the Other as such.
Eric Laurent - Clinical Practice and Its Concepts, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MENTAL HEALTH AND APPLIED PSYCHOANALYSIS, 13.
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A psychoanalytic session is the place in which the most stable identifications by which a subject is attached can come undone.
A psychoanalytic session is the place in which the most stable identifications by which a subject is attached can come undone. A psychoanalyst will authorize this distance from one's customs, norms, and rules to which analysands constrains themselves outside of sessions. He will authorize a radical questioning of the foundations of each one's identity. He is able to temper the radical nature of this questioning by taking into account the clinical specificity of each subject who addresses himself to him. He takes nothing else into account. This is what defines the specificity of a psychoanalyst's place when he upholds this questioning, opening and enigma in any subject who has sought him out. He therefore does not identify with any of the roles that his interlocutor wants to make him take on, nor with any place of mastery or ideal that already exists in civilization. In a sense, an analyst is one who cannot be assigned to any other place than the place where desire is in question.
Eric Laurent. Guiding Principles for Any Psychoanalytic Act • World Association of Psychoanalysis Congress in Comandatuba in 2004.
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The objective is not so much an unveiling of truth in itself, but an invention in the relationship of the subject with language which restores the desire and the possibility of action and of the social bond.
the essential thing is to help the subject to get out of the entanglements and impasses from which his body suffers when his relationship with language and truth is too hampered. The objective is not so much an unveiling of truth in itself, but an invention in the relationship of the subject with language which restores the desire and the possibility of action and of the social bond.
Gueguen, P-G. (2009) ‘The Plunge of the Symptom in Hypermodernity’, Lacanian Compass, 1, pp. 5–12.
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The speaking being who addresses us is a whole. He is first of all a being of language: if he suffers today from what the DSM calls depression, if he has suicidal thoughts, they result from a very special entanglement, which is old although it may have been recently reactivated, between language and the regulation of the jouissance of the body.
in the treatment of depression and the prevention of suicide, we admit the phenomena inventoried by the empiricist doctrine (sadness, self-devaluation, etc.) but we do not isolate them from the whole of the state of the patient. The speaking being who addresses us is a whole. He is first of all a being of language: if he suffers today from what the DSM calls depression, if he has suicidal thoughts, they result from a very special entanglement, which is old although it may have been recently reactivated, between language and the regulation of the jouissance of the body.
Gueguen, P-G. (2009) ‘The Plunge of the Symptom in Hypermodernity’, Lacanian Compass, 1, pp. 5–12.
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Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.
Helene Cixous - The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs. Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976)
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Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real
The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.
Judith Butler - Undoing Gender. Routledge; (16 Sept. 2004)
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Lacan is therefore totally opposed to the idea, current in ego-psychology, that the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to strengthen the ego…By undermining the fixity of the ego, psychoanalytic treatment aims to restore the dialectic of desire and reinitiate the coming-into-being of the subject.
Lacan is therefore totally opposed to the idea, current in ego-psychology, that the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to strengthen the ego. Since the ego is ‘the seat of illusions’ (S1, 62), to increase its strength would only succeed in increasing the subject’s alienation. The ego is also the source of resistance to psychoanalytic treatment, and thus to strengthen it would only increase those resistances. Because of its imaginary fixity, the ego is resistant to all subjective growth and change, and to the dialectical movement of desire. By undermining the fixity of the ego, psychoanalytic treatment aims to restore the dialectic of desire and reinitiate the coming-into-being of the subject.
Lacan is opposed to the ego-psychology view which takes the ego of the analysand to be the ally of the analyst in the treatment. He also rejects the view that the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to promote the adaption of the ego to reality.
Dylan Evans - An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis - Routledge; (2 May 1996).
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[Anxiety] is really the typical symptom for all forms of emergence of the real…
— Lacan J.: La Troisieme. Seventh Congress of the Freudian School. 1st November 1974. Rome.
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What concerns psychoanalysis is not the real past sequence of events in themselves, but the way that these events exist now in memory and the way that the patient reports them.
Retroaction (Fr. après coup)
Lacan’s term après coup is the term used by French analysts to translate Freud’s Nachträglichkeit (which the Standard Edition renders ‘deferred action’). These terms refer to the way that, in the psyche, present events affect past events a posteriori, since the past exists in the psyche only as a set of memories which are constantly being reworked and reinterpreted in the light of present experience. What concerns psychoanalysis is not the real past sequence of events in themselves, but the way that these events exist now in memory and the way that the patient reports them. Thus when Lacan argues that the aim of psychoanalytic treatment is ‘the complete reconstitution of the subject’s history’ (S1, 12), he makes it clear that what he means by the term ‘history’ is not simply a real sequence of past events, but ‘the present synthesis of the past’ (S1, 36). ‘History is not the past. History is the past in so far as it is historicised in the present’. Hence the pregenital stages are not to be seen as real events chronologically prior to the genital stage, but as forms of Demand which are projected retroactively onto the past. Lacan also shows how discourse is structured by retroaction; only when the last word of the sentence is uttered do the initial words acquire their full meaning.
Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge. 1996.
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