Interviewer: “Does psychoanalysis lead to a cure? Is it a therapy?”

Jacques Alain Miller: “Without a doubt, psychoanalysis has therapeutic effects. There is no question of entering into analysis ‘to see’. It requires a determined desire, and that existence is a suffering ... for you. However, these effects may only be obtained on the condition that you question the very notion of cure, because for the human condition, there is no cure.

As for Cognitive Behaviour Therapies (CBTs), they are training and conditioning techniques and not at all

NEW RELEASE!

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVIII, On a Discourse that Might not Be a Semblance, translated by Bruce Fink and edited by Jacques-Alain Miller

“The title is, at first glance, enigmatic. Clue: it concerns men and women - their most concrete, amorous and sexual relations... in everyday life, as well as in their dreams and fantasies. It has nothing to do with what biology studies under the heading of sexuality, of course. Must we leave this field to poetry, novels, and ideologies? Lacan attempts to provide a logic for it here - one that is quite

“We cannot fail to feel and sense that something must be the cause of this deficit, and that this something is not simply the registration of the experience of impasses in meaning, but rather the lack of something that founds meaning itself, and that what is lacking is ... a signifier – something that presents itself as giving the law its authority.

By ‘law’, here, I mean that which is properly articulated at the level of the signifier, namely the text of the law. Saying that there has to be a person there in order to sustain the authenticity of

“With a psychoanalytic praxis indexed on jouissance rather than on the signifier, different structures become different ways of treating jouissance, and of enjoying language. The analytic treatment must therefore take its bearings from the subject’s position of jouissance ... rather than on repressed meaning. A clinical orientation on jouissance as it is ciphered in the subject’s discourse foregrounds singularity, and so dignity. Subjects are not to be cured; they are neither deficient nor helpless victims of their family circumstances.

We recall

“Let us suppose, then, that a child’s ego is under the sway of a powerful drive demand which it is accustomed to satisfy, and that it is suddenly frightened by an experience which teaches it that the continuance of this satisfaction will result in an almost intolerable ... real danger. It must now decide either to recognise the real danger, give way to it and renounce the drive satisfaction, or to disavow reality and make itself believe that there is no reason for fear, so that it may be able to retain the satisfaction. Thus, there is a conflict

“What is the famous traumatism we began with, the famous primal scene that enters into the subject’s economy, which is in play at the heart and on the horizon of the discovery of the unconscious?

What is it, if not a signifier?

The living being is grasped ... as living, as alive, but with this gap or distance, that is precisely what constitutes both the signifying dimension’s autonomy and the trauma or primitive scene. What is this, then, if it’s not this life that grasps itself in a horrible apperception of itself, in its total

Dogs in psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud’s very first Chinese Chow puppy was Lün-Yug, a gift from Dorothy Birlingham. She arrived into the populous Berggasse 19 household to live alongside Wolf, Anna’s adult German Shepherd, in 1928.

Lün (with Anna’s assistance) composed ... this letter of introduction:

“Lun-Yug has heard tell of the greatness of Wolf. She has heard of his indomitable courage and fearlessness in facing innumerable foes, whether they be great or whether they be small. She has learned of his lonely and companionless days and she

Sigismund Shlomo Freud was born on this day 167 years ago.

His 20 year-old mother Amalia was besotted, thought him a child prodigy, and called him ‘my golden Sigi’. His 40 year-old father Jacob, himself already a grandfather, was rather less enamoured, and upon finding ... his 7 year-old son urinating in the parental bedroom declared, ‘that boy will never amount to anything’. Freud was nominated for 13 Nobel Prizes during his lifetime; one of them for literature. He wrote 900 love letters to his fiancée Martha, which Ernest Jones considered

Véronique Voruz on love:

“All day, every day, we hear variations on the theme of love:

‘I love one who does not love me, I don’t desire the one I love, I can have sex with anyone except the one I love, I can only have sex with him if I think about him having sex with her ... I can only have sex with her if I think of a prostitute, I love him more than he loves me, he never says the right things, he loves me for my looks, she loves me for my money, I don’t believe her when she says she loves me, I complain about him all day long but I cannot do

“Freud and Lacan taught us about the different ways in which the speaking being can defend himself from unconscious knowledge: repression, foreclosure, denial. But there is also misrecognition, resistance, forgetting, and beautiful indifference. These are new forms of ... denial, among which we could place: refusal, hatred & disenchantment with the unconscious, as well as self-affirmation, insofar as it plugs the gaps of this knowledge in the intervals of speech. Among those who think they can be what they say, there are some who fundamentally

“In the 1970s, possibly ahead of his own time, Lacan announced the rise of the object to the social zenith.

When the Other was the reference of social discourse, our society had ideals, ideas, principles, repressions, etc. When the object organises discourse, our society is ... commanded by the so-called ‘surplus jouissance’. What does this mean? To put it simply it’s a type of subjectivity which is organised around the achievement of satisfaction, a satiety which is never fully accomplished, but which people believe in blindly because the discourse

“In actual fact, the contemporary State is no longer concerned, as was the Church of yore, to insist upon any particular kind of inward moralisation among its members, finding it enough to demand a particular type of conduct, compliance to social laws and the maintenance of ... external conventions. What is insisted upon is no longer a moral state of being, but merely a moral kind of behaviour, each one have to act ‘as if’ he were motivated by respect for others, and all he need guard against is being detected in any breach of moral code.”

“In an analysis it will be a matter of taking responsibility for what we had to deal with, the responsibility to understand in the first sense: to answer for that, to say something about it. This is what allows a subject to differentiate him or herself from it. Talking about ... what happened, already is to no longer be the silent or passive victim of the assault, it is to differentiate yourself from the position of victim which can otherwise freeze a subject in their suffering and prevent them from overcoming it.

@jamplus on Jacques Lacan and writing:

“Jacques Lacan wrote. He wrote from time to time. He did not say that his listeners read him. He said that they didn’t read him. He considered his writings as ‘the deciduous parts’ of his teaching. This is how he put it in ... Rome in 1967. Caduque: obsolete but also deciduous in the sense used perhaps also in Seminar X to link castration to the body and no longer just to symbolic lack. Deciduous means that he regarded his writings as that which had fallen from his teaching. For him, writing is not

“What is my hysteric’s desire? It’s what opens up for her, I won’t say the universe, but an entire world that is already quite vast indeed, by virtue of what one can call the dimension of hysteria latent in every kind of human being in the world. The hysteric finds herself ... initially going straight to the point by means of anything that can pose as a question about her own desire, what I have called the x, the inexpressible desire, with whatever might happen in this order to all her hysterical brothers and sisters – and it’s on that, as Freud

“Freud invented psychoanalysis under the aegis, as it were, of the reign of Queen Victoria, a paragon of the suppression of sexuality, whereas the twenty-first century is seeing the vast spread of what is called ‘porno’, which amounts to coitus on show in a spectacle that is ... accessible to anyone on the web by means of a simple click of the mouse. From Victoria to porno, we have not only passed from prohibition to permission, but to incitation, intrusion, provocation, and

“The ego is an organisation. It is based on the maintenance of free intercourse and of the possibility of reciprocal influence between all its parts. Its desexualised energy still shows traces of its origin in its impulsion to bind together and unify, and this necessity to ... synthesise grows stronger in proportion as the strength of the ego increases. It is therefore only natural that the ego should try to prevent symptoms from remaining isolated and alien by using every possible method to bind them to itself in one way or another, and to incorporate

Jacques-Alain Miller on Love:

Interviewer: “Lacan said that love is always reciprocal. Is this still true in the current context? What does that mean?”

@jamplus: “This sentence gets repeated over and over without being understood, or it gets understood the wrong way round ... It doesn’t mean that it’s enough to love someone for him to love you back. That would be absurd. It means: ‘If I love you, it’s because you’re loveable. I’m the one that loves, but you’re also mixed up in this, because there’s something in you that makes me love you. It’s

“Freud was not an idiot.

His idea of the primordial father is, of course, a stupidity if you read it as a literal anthropological hypothesis. But not if you read it as a fantasmatic creation that has what Freud called ‘psychological reality’.

We have a symbolic father term ... that is, an authority; and a castrated father, but these always have to be accompanied by this primordial aspect, which can act in different versions. It can be a fantasy that determines your dreams. Isn’t this a wonderful example of how Lacan was right when he

“Between any man and any woman, nothing is written in advance, there’s no compass, no pre-established relationship. Their encounter isn’t programmed like it is between the spermatozoon and the ovum; it’s got nothing to do with our genes either. Men and women speak, they live ... in a world of discourse, that’s what’s decisive. The modalities of love are extremely sensitive to the surrounding culture. Each civilisation stands out for the way it structures the relation between the sexes. Now, it so happens that in the West, in our societies which are

“When I went back to her, she parted her hands, looked at me, smiled, let go of her thumb, and went to sit on her pillow: she played with one of my hands. I held out a rubber sailor to her: she put out her hand several times to take it, but let it go immediately. This happened... twice in a row; the third time she flung it to the end of the crib. She refused to take the cracker the nurse held out to her; the nurse left it in the crib, but Nadia did not touch it at all. She seemed, overall, less aware of her surroundings.

So this was the beginning, which