Analysis,
the Arts and the Well-spoken.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
T.S. Eliot
…the resonances of literature and the significations
involved in works of art … Freud found his inspiration,
ways of thinking, and arsenal of techniques therein.
Jacques Lacan
Let us suppose that one has an interest in psychoanalysis
and the unconscious. It might lead to free association
in pursuit of a knowledge of the particular, wherein
lies a tortuous if not torturing tale. But lead also
towards the meaning of words, those spoken in the theatre,
written in books, precipitated in poetry, given form
in sculpture and re-presented in painting. What an incomplete
but exciting list of the ‘Arts’ as manifestations
of speech!
Such an interest took Freud, the atheist in chains,
to stare all day at the Moses of Michelangelo in a dark
Roman church. As it demanded of him in the exposition
of his clinical cases and theories a constant reference
to the great historical figures of literature and philosophy.
As it took him to question the ascent of civilisation
and the illusions of the future out of the traditions
and texts of mankind’s mythological origins.
As it took Lacan in his own turn, via Hamlet’s
neurosis and Antigone’s sacrifice through the
love of Socrates to the odyssey of Joyce. To even pose
the question of who watches whom in confronting an art
work. Why not heresy, to describe the look on the face
of Bernini’s Saint Teresa as an expression of
the enigma of sexuality?
How could it be otherwise that between these fields
structured by the logic and grammar of language, the
arts and analysis, that an indispensable intersection
is defined. What are the possibilities and the risks
of addressing this conjunction which is also a disjunction?
The task is the well-spoken. To hear it, to say it and
to recognise it.
The School welcomes the questions and discussion that
will follow the presentation of papers by members and
analysts at this Annual Homage to Lacan. It opens its
work and invites those who share an interest in the
manner in which psychoanalysis and the ‘Arts’
inform each other.
Abstracts:
The Enigma of Rose Sélavy
Madeline Andrews
A man can never expect to start from scratch;
he must start from readymade things, like even his
mother and father.
Marcel Duchamp
The art of Marcel Duchamp has been characterised by
his critics as resistant to categorisation, interpretation,
systemisation and in effect, a body of work constituting
an enigma. The birth of Duchamp’s feminine alter
Rose Sélavy, whom according to the critic M.
Neumann sprung fully formed from Duchamp’s cerebral
faculties in 1920 (like Athena from the head of Zeus)
was an extension of that impossible oeuvre. This paper
cross examines works by Duchamp, Benjamin, Freud and
Lacan, towards questioning the art of the psychoanalyst.
Is it a writing of the impossible that traverses the
field of the readymade?
Snapped by the Image: The Inverted Art of
the Photograph and the Artifice of Psychoanalysis
Peter Gunn
There’s something sphinxlike about these
images, as if one were looking at dreams as yet uninterpreted.…
The pictures seem to dramatise their muteness.
Caleb Crain in The New York Review, May 1 2008, discussing
an exhibition ‘The Art of the American Snapshot,
1888-1978.’
We see that every day, types who recount to you
that their first masturbation – they will always
remember it – has tremendous presence on the
screen. Basically we understand very well why that
has great screen presence, because it does not come
from inside the screen.
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Third’
The central image in the Wolf Man’s primal dream
is composed. It is an everyday family snap; a group
sitting, albeit these are wolves in a tree. But there
is something more here to disturb the quotidian, something
which makes the Wolf Man wake up, screaming. What tells
for him is the dramatic muteness of the look. It is
by this that he is rivetted as the Wolf-Man. This paper
will explore the link between what a photograph tells
and what it is that is telling in a psychoanalysis.
Freud and Faust: Sympathy for the Devil
Michael Plastow
Now fills the air so many a haunting shape,
That no one knows how best to escape.
Goethe: Faust, Part II (cited as epigraph to Freud’s
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life)
In return for an immortal soul, the Devil has
many things to offer which are highly prized by men:
wealth, security from danger, power over mankind and
the forces of nature, even magical arts, and, above
all else, enjoyment—the enjoyment of beautiful
women.
Freud: A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis.
Throughout his work Freud drew heavily on the writings
of Goethe, but most particularly that of Faust, Goethe’s
account of the pact made with the devil by this learned
man. Citations and references to this work are dispersed
throughout Freud’s opus. But can we discern a
particular direction in Freud’s use of this work?
In any case, the reading Freud gives of Goethe’s
poem is far from the moral interpretation made by others.
We could propose that, from Faust, in different places
and in different ways, Freud is able to elaborate something
of the very itinerary of psychoanalysis itself.
Hamlet’s Act and the 'Fury of the
Feminine Soul'
Sarah Jones
For Lacan Hamlet's prevarication before the act he
is destined to complete refers us not only to a particular
situation of desire, but also to the nature of desire.
Affected by the absence of sufficient rites of mourning,
Hamlet finally accedes to his act, but only after firstly
himself receiving a fatal blow. We consider how Lacan
presents this fatality of desire in his reading of Hamlet.
Notes from Beyond the Sonata of the Unconscious
Michael Currie
‘What is the art of the improvising musician?
Whilst music can provide a colouration of the symbolic
or an exaggeration of the drama of the imaginary, music
itself is not an affair of representation – nothing
in speaking about music is music itself. Yet much emphasis
is laid on the spontaneous production of a ‘solo’
within jazz and other improvising traditions, and this
occurs within a highly structured set of musical rules
and conventions. I will discuss where, beyond the craft
of the manipulation of the materials of music, the art
of the jazz musician can be located in psychoanalytic
terms.’
For the love of a story: psychoanalysis
and creative writing
Alicia Evans
Creative writers and the field of literature have offered
much to psychoanalysis, as illustrated by the stories
associated with the psychoanalytic concepts of the Oedipus
complex and narcissism, and with Freud’s references
to Goethe’s work, amongst others. However, one
might wonder what it is that psychoanalysis has to offer
creative writers and their readers. What is offered
by this paper is an analysis of the love of stories;
a love that can both be brought to a creative writing
piece and further produced by it. In this paper, there
will be an exploration of this love of stories, from
a psychoanalytic perspective.
The Ob-scene
David Pereira
Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which
upsets the physical state associated with self-possession;
with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality.
Bataille
The poet must become a seer … by a long,
immense and reasoned disordering of all his senses.
Rimbaud
… the voice is free to be something other
than substance.
Lacan
Why, in the course of an analysis, though not unheard
of in life’s general course, do some words, sounded
in particular ways, and in certain moments, carry an
exceptional weight not exhausted by their meaning?
Such a question will be taken up with reference to
the notion of obscenity as implying a return to a particular
function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis;
an ob-scene which appears as propitious with respect
to a disturbance, a dis-ease, within the body of language.
The Word and the Thing in Psychotic Art
Christiane Weller
In the Ethics-Seminar Lacan contends "'Die Sache
ist das Wort des Dinges.' Or in French. "L'affaire
est le mot de la chose ('The affair is the word of the
thing.')"
The thing has a limit function, it anchors the signifying
chain. The thing functions as an eternal promise of
something more in reference to the object by conjuring
up a truth. We might translate the thing into the Name-of-the-Father,
the law, or the Other. The signifier therefore is presupposing
the thing as its vanishing point. The lack of this phallic
signifier is according to Lacan responsible for the
occurrence of psychosis.
What happens when the truth of the thing is lacking,
when there is nothing left to represent it in its
truth, when for example the register of the father
defaults?
Lacan Psychoses.
The paper will investigate the notions of word and
thing and how they are represented in psychotic art.
The jouissance of The Gambler
Linda Clifton
I cannot understand how you can gamble while travelling
with a woman with whom you are in love.
A failure to understand, an implied contradiction
between love and gambling. These words were written
to Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1862 by his brother and surely
continue to be rewritten in countless variations by
those affected by the passion of the gambler –
a passion that forgets love.
Freud’s Dostoevsky and Parricide with
its albeit controversial analysis of Dostoevsky’s
mania for gambling records once again the debt of psychoanalysis
to literature. Freud places his bet squarely in the
field of sexual meaning: the ‘vice’ of masturbation
is replaced by addiction to gambling; the passion for
play is an equivalent of the old compulsion to masturbate.
In making a reading of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler
- while attempting to avoid the psychobiographical sins
of the father - I will highlight Dostoevsky’s
brilliant rendition of the gambler’s passion and
its incompatibility with love. In bringing into play
Lacan’s propositions regarding jouissance
as that which is good for nothing, the sexual relation
which is not one and the limits of love, I will propose
that an analysis of The Gambler invokes an
Other jouissance that resists interpretation
within the field of sexual meaning.
"Mere Air, these words, but delicious
to hear"
Malcolm Morgan
"Mere Air, these words, but delicious to hear"
(Sappho)
W.H. Auden, in his poem, In Memory of Sigmund Freud,
says that psychoanalysis, for the analysand at least,
is "like a poetry lesson." What is the nature
of the nexus between psychoanalysis and poetry? This
paper explores the relationship between poetry and psychoanalysis,
bringing into relief the reverence paid to poetry by
Freud, and investigating the links and differences between
poetry and the well spoken word in psychoanalysis.
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