Abstracts:

About psychoanalysis
Madeline Andrews

Who speaks for psychoanalysis? Is it possible to speak about psychoanalysis? Can it be pre-empted through the dissemination of a knowledge? Given the speaking being’s resistance to knowledge (a refusal to know) the effects of an encounter with a psychoanalyst supposed of knowledge, cannot be prescribed. The supposition of the transference is an event that renders any description of psychoanalysis as an artefact, opposed to artifice and the act, a phallacy. To speak about psychoanalysis is to bandy about at its peripheries. This paper considers, at the marginal seems of this peculiar, passionate relation, the difficulty psychoanalysis has had, in speaking for itself.

On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Analysis of the Child
Ron Ingram

Theoretical constructions of what constitutes an analysis, and exclusion criteria which determine what it is not, only produce definitions which fail. In a similar way, parents’ definitions of their child fail them both as parents and their child. For any analysis of the child to occur, the parenting discourse must be heard to locate where the child is situated, and for the parents to reclaim what is theirs from the child and what is their own as parents.

The Psychoanalyst is Simple
Peter Gunn

In the locus where the unspeakable object was rejected into the real, a word made itself heard, in coming to the place of what has no name… resembling in its opacity the exclamations of love, when, running short of signifiers to call the object of its epithalamion, it employs the crudest imaginary means. ‘I’ll eat you up… Sweetmeat!’ ‘You’ll die… Bitch!’
Lacan, ‘On A Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’

…‘in mathematics [my mathematician friend remarked] one does not say what one is speaking about… one quite simply speaks it… hence a certain air of pretence [de faire semblant]’…
Lacan, Seminar XIII, lesson of 8th June 1966

What is the psychoanalyst? That is, in order that the possibilities of an analysis not be foreclosed, but prior to any supposition of his position in the transference, what stance must the psychoanalyst, if he dares to declare himself as such, take vis-à-vis the challenge posed by the other? This paper will argue, paradoxically, that, as a first approximation, the psychoanalyst, so-named, can only hold up if he keeps to the order of simplicity which the language of love imposes.

In want of a story: Being seen in the public mental health system
Ben McGill

What place has psychoanalysis in the public mental health system? There is transference no doubt - patients are transferred as objects of knowledge – transferred to the ones who know.

Can there be an intervention that cuts the tie of the patient with their position as object of knowledge?

For those who present to the emergency departments, with their suffering made flesh, the body is the object offered as enigma to a knowing look. Is this an offer that can’t be refused?

For patients seen and not heard can there emerge something other than more meat for the body of knowledge?