On the poster concocted for our next Congress, Family and Its Discontents, we can notice the cutting of the signifier dis-con-tents (mal-aise, in French), which indicates a caesura that emphasises the inherent discomfort in the structure of the family itself.
The dis-con-tent, not considered as a simple dysfunction, but as a structuring residue, a remnant without apparent value – a waste, a secret, a cut within the language, a danger. The French word aise refers to what is nearby [1] and, de facto, innervates the bonds that one and the other try to build to make family. Everything, within the family, seems to converge on that point of unease: from the one that seeks an inscription within it to the one that wishes to get rid of it, to avoid it or to make oneself heard from it.
The six texts of the present issue bear witness to the discontent as a multifaceted transmission agent: Eleonora Renna underlines that what ties a family is the misunderstandings of lalangue, those little bits that are sang past one’s ears as a familiar melody. Rosa Godinez shows that the family is a place where danger occurs, to the point of madness: a mother with a ferocious superego triggers an irreversible loss. Elisabeth Marion describes how a detail taken from a picture can upset the course of a life that only psychoanalysis allows one to get on with, through another thread. Claudia Iddan considers the family as a function of residue, in a singular transmission, through an assemblage of desires. It is out of a nothing, a mere nothing, that Cinzia D’Angelis invites us to question the residual function of a transmission.
If the family is at the heart of the analytic treatment itself, it is out of residues, of bits of memories, of secrets, of timeless remnants that it operates. What are these remnants that escape the meaning, if not stumps of the Real cluttering each subject? Lacan gives it a catchy formulation: “This real, the real at issue in what is called my thought, is always an odd or an end, a core. It is certainly a core around which thought embellishes, but the mark as such of this real is that it doesn’t tie on to anything. This at least is how I conceive of the real.” [2]
From this perspective, psychoanalysis as a treatment – treatment defined as a transformation from an initial state of the residue to another form of the residue [3], doesn’t seek to eliminate the discontent, but rather to make use of it, to operate from this remnant. It allows, from the family residue that reeks of death, to draw a lighter outline, to inflect the path of those bits of real. It is up to the subject to inscribe within it, in accordance with the contingency of his history, the style of his destiny.
A quiet moment over tea? A ride by car, in the subway or the train? Get yourself connected to the last PIPOL12 podcast : Faire famille à l’adolescence, with Philippe Lacadée. You will hear the cutting of the signifier “ dé/tachement “, as Freud introduces it as a decisive operation in adolescence, not without paradox.
Switch to PIPOL12 mode ! https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/podcast-pipol
Translation: Manuela Rabesahala
Proofreading: Tracy Hoijer-Favre
[1] From the verb Adjacere, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue française, Bloch, O. & von Wartburg, W., Paris, PUF, 2002.
[2] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, The Sinthome, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2016, p. 104.
[3] Cf. Miller J.-A., « La matrice du traitement de l’enfant au loup », in De Halleux B. (s/dir.), Quelque chose à dire à l’enfant autiste. Pratique à plusieurs à l’Antenne 110, Paris, Editions Michèle, 2010, p. 24.
