Lectures And Interviews

Freud begins his Constructions in Analysis by defying the analytic practice that functioned upon the principle of “heads I win, tail you lose”, in an attempt to refrain the reduction that psychoanalysis was undergoing back then to an analysis of resistances-a tragic misinterpretation of his earlier uncovering of the compulsion to repeat. Along his endorsement of Freud’s position on the matter in “il n’y a de résistance que dans l’analyste”, Lacan begins his October Proposition on a similar wager, picturing analysis as a chess challenge of which the first and last moves require a guarantee that the analyst does not come out a winner-as in a successful psychotherapist. Although the direct antagonists in both of those figures of the analytic challenge are the analysand and the analyst, the real opponents they represent are the discourse of the master and its gap. Is the pass, therefore, a staging of how the analysand becomes an analyst, or is it a guarantee that the analyst remains an analysand? Is it a pass for analysis to end, or one for it to be continued against its reduction to an analysis of resistances? What is it in the order of rites that the pass attempted? No rite could do without answering the question of what makes a passage, here is one that, for a moment, attempted to pose it.

Dr. Tal's latest book, "The End of Analysis," demonstrates that the notions of mourning, renunciation, liquidation of transference, and traversal of fantasy cannot serve as a settlement for the castration complex but are rather prey to the castration complex itself. Psychoanalysis remains incomplete as long as it has not surpassed them as fantasies sustained by psychoanalytic ideology. In other words, the analytic procedure must pull psychoanalysis out of this therapeutic tradition for it to be complete and to instigate an attempt of its renewal. Dr. Tal revisits Freud’s and Lacan’s underpinnings in the Enlightenment project, in order to formulate the problem of transference on proper dialectical foundations in Descartes and Hegel. This talk will be geared towards practitioners as well as scholars of psychoanalysis and philosophy, exploring political implications for how we conceive of the end of analysis.

Joining the 2023 BICAR Summer School virtually, psychoanalysts Gabriel Tupinambá and Mohamed Tal will briefly introduce their recent books, the former’s The Desire of Psychoanalysis: Exercises in Lacanian Thinking (2021) and the latter’s The End of Analysis: Dialectics of Symbolic and Real before entering into a discussion with Nadia Bou Ali about the broader threads of the limits and challenges of psychoanalysis. What is the political import of psychoanalysis in a moment of rampant fantasies of the end (of the world)?

Along the many trials Lacan submits anxiety and the object a to in Seminar X, a revision of the concept of neurosis was being operated. Rather than distinguishing neurosis from perversion according to the classical postulate of the acceptance of castration versus its disavowal, Lacan reshuffles this distinction by posing the lack of the object as the object itself, stating that the castration of the complex (which is the object’s exchange) and the identification that unfolds from it are only acceptable for the pervert. As a result, Lacan adopts perversion as matrix (for fantasy at large, as for the Oedipus complex) against which neurosis may be re-defined as a perversion of perversion, or a perversion of the pervert’s use of fantasy.