The Association de la Cause freudienne in Belgium gathered last weekend for its Annual Assembly in a packed hall, cheerfully hosted by our president Céline Poblome-Aulit, to hear Virginie Leblanc-Roïc teach us about manic-depressive psychosis. The enlightened enthusiasm that reigned in the meeting room is a testament to how hard our Belgian colleagues are working to welcome you to PIPOL 12 !
If the psychoanalyst causes his desire in a rather manic-depressive way, as Virginie Leblanc-Roïc reminded us with reference to L’Étourdit, it is because his fundamental position concerns the object of lack that Lacan indexed by the small a. An object that causes desire when it is lacking but can precipitate the subject into identifying with it when it is not extracted, leaving the subject open to the death drive.
In this issue of the blog for PIPOL 12, Katty Langelez-Stevens points out that the contemporary tendency of the family is to reduce itself more and more to the core represented by the child. It is the child as object plus–de–jouir that founds the family, and not the other way round ! But for Lacan, the essential thing lies in the family’s residual function, which, linked to a desire, is the only way to transmit what will make up the subjective coordinates of this child. But what of this residual function in the age of unbridled neoliberalism ? This is the question addressed by the other texts in this issue, each in its own way showing how psychoanalysis turns the discontent in the family into a point of articulation that relaunches the circuit of speech, and even of writing.
Based on a reading of Laure Murat’s book on Proust, Laurence Maman shows that it is less a question of separating oneself from one’s family than of separating oneself from the part taken in family jouissance. In reading Proust, the author glimpses the part she has taken in what was her aristocratic prison, which required her to speak in order to say nothing, in order to maintain her jouissance in the un-said.
There is a secret tear in the family [fa(m)ille], a flaw [faille], that Emmanuelle Chaminand Edelstein points out in the work of Blandine Rinkel, who discovers a desire to go elsewhere to get out of the mortifying silence of the familiar. Underneath the apparent reassurance of the familiar, there is a feeling of strangeness that tells us that when we approach the intimate, the extime is never far away.
If a man is a prisoner of language, as Xavier Gommichon reminds us, we are now swimming in globish – which autists are fond of – the new globalised lalangue that accompanies the globalised family, caught between the flow of migration and the flow of data. In this double flow, the landmarks of transmission are profoundly blurred, requiring patient elucidation by the psychoanalyst. This is why psychoanalysis in institutions seeks to include families in the field of plural practice, which presupposes a position where each person is incomplete, as Jean-Philippe Cornet argues, emphasising that this work aims to loosen the phantasmatic grip in order to produce a new bond.
Thus tyrannical individualism, which today rivals the totalitarianism of the multitude, leads to a certain failure of the family as a discourse. This is the analysis of Graciela Schnitzer, who asks what could temper the jouissance of the One. Here again, the aim is to reintroduce the wandering subject into the circuit of true speech, leaving room for the discontent and the incurable.
Translation: Ana-Marija Kroker
