Towards Ghent

Towards Ghent
Bernard Seynhaeve

The theme of our next Congress, Interpretation: From Truth to Event will once again deal with a clinical question.

Interpretation was already the subject of one of our Congresses ten years ago. The theme is back again, this time clarified by Jacques-Alain Miller’s reading of the latest Lacan, which is one of the reasons why it will be inscribed as the logical follow-up to the previous Congresses. 

But for our School – for the NLS – there is another reason, one more difficult to perceive, that I situate outside of this logic. Indeed, it seems to me that this theme has an eminently political dimension to it, as the title and the argument written by Éric Laurent imply. Let us see.

I’ve been trying to move ahead with the questions that torment me. What are they?

Since our last Congress in Tel Aviv, my first unrelinquishing question has been the following: Do we need the presence of bodies, those of the analyst and the analysand in order to undertake analytic treatment according to Lacan’s teaching? The answer may seem obvious at first, and yet it is not. This question arose – it came up when I was not expecting it – when I met with the colleagues of a Group. Someone said to me, “You will see, sir, that one day there will be AS’s that will have done their analysis by Skype.” It’s a political question, now come up in our School in concrete terms. For those who were there, let them remember the debate that we had in Tel Aviv during our Annual General Meeting about the use of Internet (Skype) in treatment.

Is the physical presence of the psychoanalyst and the analysand necessary in the transference?

Another question arises in view of Ghent. It is tied to the previous one. Interpretation in the era of the parlêtre – no longer in era of the subject – that is to say, interpretation that takes into account the very last Lacan, aims to disrupt the defense. The defense is precisely that which joins lalangue and the body, namely the sinthome. Hence this other question: What is a body?

These two questions are knotted: do we necessarily need the presence of bodies to do an analytic treatment?

These questions in particular will need to be addressed during our Congress in Ghent.