This seminar will focus on the necessity of subjective topology in psychoanalysis through an emphasis on the two major operations of the psychoanalytical cure: analysis of the fundamental fantasy and sublimation. To do so, we will take up the three fundamental discoveries of Lacan: subjective division (barred subject, associated with the moebius strip), the borromean knot (the support of neurosis), the clover knot (the support of psychosis). Starting from there, the seminar will refer to the necessities of psychoanalytical practice by showing how psychoanalysis can use the Borromean knot to think through the structure of the unconscious.

We will discuss how transmitting the truth of analytical experience requires a knowledge that gives us access to symbolic castration, or in Freudian terms, a reduction to our secondary narcissism. This is linked to analysis of the fundamental fantasy. This knowledge also involves sublimation, which reduces the jouissance that destroys us. Psychoanalytical practice needs a consistency in analytical knowledge is needed for our practice. We will also discuss how such consistency must be supported by a theory that makes sense and a topology that brings some certitude.

This seminar will refer to:
Freud, The Ego and the Id
Lacan, Seminar 19: …Or Worse
Freud, Case of Elisabeth von R (from Studies on Hysteria)

Jennifer Yusin is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Philadelphia, and Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy and Director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Drexel University. Her most recent book, A Psychoanalytic Approach to Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 2023), analyses the concepts of sex and gender, showing how sexual difference is characterized by ongoing transformations of spatiality and body, and of essentiality and normativity. Yusin develops subjective topology as a methodology showing how sexual difference is linked to transformations of sex and body. Through this, Yusin highlights how it is necessary to reformulate sex, gender, and sexual identities in psychoanalytic theories and in the practice of psychoanalysis.