“The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find the essence, which must have been that of ancient theatres. And, in fact, wrestling is an open-air spectacle; for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky, it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light… wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.” This is what Barthes says.

We are gathered here today to discuss another kind of wrestling: the wrestling of establishing a new psychoanalytic institute with a name that demands careful attention to the challenges of analytic transmission, and a wrestling with the unknown that never rests in the comfort of completion. As David Lichtenstein recently put it in a private communication, “So in the French world, at least, the challenges regarding training are directly linked to the history of splits in the schools. We don’t know yet what it would mean ‘to get it right’ but we do think a necessary step is to approach it as a work in progress–a problem to be continually studied and considered and worked on–rather than one where we as the leaders know the way to do it.”

As in any individual psychoanalytic treatment, the spirit of inquiry and the critique of the authority of knowledge guide the principles on which Pulsion’s training is built. For example, we can consider how Pulsion’s annual fall symposium and early summer clinical days inform each other. Pulsion’s symposium introduces a problematic that has social and clinical implications. RH, Pulsion’s clinic, takes it into the clinic for further elaboration. The clinical days, such as these today, mark the end of a yearly cycle and generate new questions for the institute to consider, which may advance the inquiry and inform Pulsion’s symposium the following fall.

In specific, Pulsion’s inaugural symposium in the fall of 2022 proposed an idea and a question: where do we see the repudiation of the feminine in our days both in the clinic and in society. We took this question to the RH Clinic, where we further elaborated on the clinic of disaffected concrete speech and the technique of transitional psychoanalysis. You will hear about all of this today and tomorrow.

To think, to theorize and to practice — these are tasks we can’t undertake alone. Even though we are alone in wrestling with the abject terror of the Real of the unconscious on the couch and behind it, Pulsion proposes that a new collective is an imperative of our days. Psychoanalysis has suffered enormously from the narcissism of minor differences.

D. Anzieu elaborated on Freud’s idea of the group illusion in drawing a connection between the group and the dream. First, the dream, the individual illusion par excellence, is produced in sleep, a state in which the cathexis of external reality is withdrawn. Anzieu tells us that training groups also take place in a situation of cultural isolation, outside social and occupational life during a period that interrupts the rhythms of everyday life. External reality is suspended as it is at this moment that we gathered here today. In this withdrawal, an over-cathexis of the group is taking place in the only reality present: the here and now. The group thus becomes a libidinal object.

Speaking of groups, Pulsion is our new libidinal object. However, Pulsion has an older sibling group, RH. RH, even though it is a clinical group practice, has been running psychoanalytic seminars for years and out of this came the need for a new psychoanalytic institute that could carry on this Pulse for inquiry.

Pulsion is creating a new “we.” Its name, however, places this new collective right at the border, whatever that border may be. Those of us who gathered at the beginning envisioned the structuring of this training to be a very complex task. Even though we have prepared a curriculum, which you can see posted on our website, that stays true to the ethos of Pulsion, we know very well that the wrestling of molding a training in which differences remain an open space for generativity is a very complex task that requires constant attentiveness, perhaps in the same way you attend to a newborn.

New parents don’t sleep much. I can say that Pulsion’s board of directors, which includes today’s panelists, has given and continues to give an inexhaustible amount of energy to the new training.

This training aspires towards the following guidelines:

The candidate is an equal participant in their formation to be an analyst. It is about time where we need to move away from the infantilism of candidates.
Becoming a psychoanalyst is an ethical decision that emerges from the individual’s wrestling with their own unconscious desire and it is not just another training or certification.
Therefore, even though the training follows the format of an LP psychoanalytic training, the progression of the candidate is guided by individual choices.

More specifically, the personal analysis and supervision of the candidates are the fundamental cornerstones of their training. It is here that progression is witnessed. The seminars, on the other hand, are the “plateias” where the cohorts and the different groups meet to exchange with each other and with the faculty.

Since ancient times, and despite the changes, the plateia remains an important part of the culture from which I come. It continues to serve as a gathering place for locals and visitors alike, providing a sense of community and connection to the past in gazing towards the future (as depicted in the Gyzis painting in our flyer). We hope that our seminars, symposia, and clinical days resemble some of the generativity and the buzz of a plateia.

Writing forwards the notion of show, don’t tell. The presentations today are designed with this principle in mind.

Tonight you will hear of how we conceive of a supervision of a case. With different supervisors, you will experience the differences embedded in each supervisor’s training and analytic experience, how the same clinical material is read differently. Tomorrow we will present what has been generated in our RH plateia this year.

The roundtables are designed to highlight generational differences. The first round table is composed of beginning level therapists while the second roundtable forwards some of Pulsion’s faculty. Each one brings different listenings, and it is their exchanges that stimulates more questions to be pushed forwards to our fall symposium as a new libidinal object of investigation.

Click here for Introductory Remarks, Vaia Tsolas, Clinical Days 2023 pdf format

Lacan, in a late paper from 1972 called L’Etourdit said, speaking about the difficulty of the analyst theorizing the unconscious which rejects him, especially insofar as we take it as truly unconscious—with everything that the un implies:

“For we must say it, the unconscious is a fact in as much as it is supported by the very discourse that establishes it, and, if only analysts are capable of rejecting its burden, it is by distancing from themselves the promise of rejection that calls them to it, this in the measure that their voice will have had an effect on it.”

It’s a stunning statement for me to the extent that he is saying that the burden of theorizing what is essentially impossible to theorize, impossible to touch, impossible to know, what rejects us, or repudiates us (in fact if one thinks of Freud’s paper “Analysis Ending and Unending” this is the question of the so-called negative therapeutic reaction—that the patient will not receive from us their cure, rejects us) namely the unconscious, we are the one’s capable of rejecting this burden, because we take it on, but we do so by distancing ourselves from the promise of rejection that calls us to it… How? We distance ourselves to the extent, and in the measure, that we know that our voice has had an effect on the unconscious—to know this, to remember it. This is not only with patients, but in the theoretical work we do supporting what Lacan calls the discourse of the psychoanalyst. The whole text L’etourdit is about, as he says towards the end, the way that analysis is continually born from saying, saying again, the etour, dit, the turns or turning of speech, that coils or wraps itself around the real. In a way, your questions are desperate questions, but your case presentations are something else. The questions are born of an experience of this impossibility in work with patients, and the burden of theorizing or thinking it, but… the case studies speak to the measure in which you already feel your voice has had some effect on these patients, has touched on an aspect of repudiation.
In language one often finds a fascinating history of repudiation, usually around the advent of the modern subject of science, meaning that words reverse meanings, or repudiate an earlier meaning. For example, smiling used to be not the pleasantry that it embodies today but actually something offensive. There wouldn’t be smiling, and certainly not smiling in teeth in painting before the 18th century. Smiling came from an idea of a change in the face on the way to laughter, and it’s not clear if this laugh is friendly or not, and in fact smile is often closer to smirk, to scorn. Railing, similarly, of course is the horizontal bar on a fence, but is linked to the meaning of rule, guide, in a straight line, like ruler. But it is also a bird, Raler, which means to rattle, linked to its cry. Which brings us to the other meaning of rail, to speak vehemently or complain bitterly, from railler, which also means to joke.

Smiling and Railing feel very close to me.. The dream is a fascinating work of condensation, a most holophrastic screaming, railing.

In these presentations that feel dead, that you wonder so much how can they begin with this much repudiation, how can I not be a second casualty, these are remarkable signs of the spoken life of the drive, in otherwise very obsessional pictures, and the presence of a joke, a deathly, aggressive, joke, but a joke nonetheless. Love-hate, this sign of absolute repudiation, we can get the closest to it, Lacan remarks in the same paper, only through the comic. Both of them have a desirous “look at me” cry for love. And then follows all the jokes. Railing, railing. Ruling, pinching, pressing, darting, pushing. Up against the limit. At which point the whole configuration has to vanish: and with it all speech, all identity, all recognition, all understanding. What can they take-on of this action to the breaking point in their very dream life? The patient who lies down as if dead, the woman who works incessantly.

Treatment touches this limit again and again. But the difference between pure disappearing, which certainly happens in a life and in culture more broadly, is that the patient came and said it to you, and you heard it, even perhaps marked it. That difference is enough. We have to know this. This is how we attend to this forever rejection, and we take distance from this rejection which calls us to it.

This also is the importance of psychoanalytic training, of psychoanalytic colleagues, psychoanalytic working together, to keep us in this delicate balance, speaking to one another, so we are not overcome by the feeling of repudiation, of rejection. One has to wonder here about where psychoanalytic groups and trainings fail—when they reject, when they repudiate—in some aspect of their functioning. Hopefully we’ll take up this question more at the end.

Click here for Panel Comments, Jamieson Webster, Clinical Days 2023 pdf format