| Lutecium a non-school of Lacanian/Freudian Psychoanalysis San Francisco, California |
| Rebecca's Newsletter - July 7, 2007 |
Dear Colleagues,
I write Lutecium Psychoanalytic Training Group’s first newsletter with much joy, anticipation, and caution as this is a beginning of a
new International venture. I write with much excitement and possibility, and at the same time with a recognition that beginnings are
foundational guides for our future. I wish to thank Jacques Siboni M.D., Director of Training, for his patience, diligence, and long
term commitment to the Transmission of Lacan-Freudienne Psychoanalysis. I wish to thank Kristopher Lichtanski Ph.D., former
Assistant Dean at New College of California, for his unfailing support in the gradual building of an international psychoanalytic
group. I welcome and look forward to working with Carmen Brown, our Director of Admissions, who has sustained much
encouragement and support through the years and has taken such good care of students. I would like to say a very heartfelt
thank-you to eight years of many New College students who have steadily encouraged the construction of Lutecium, this new site
for psychoanalytic training. Your courage has been contagious. Where is the transmission of psychoanalysis without students?
Words, tone, sound, carry - particularly for psychoanalysis - a certain gravity, a history, a memory that remains of the past. Words
also carry what Derrida refers to as the arch trace. The arch trace is the aspect of words “inscribed on the soul of the learner”
that gives rise to speech and writing in an attempt to capture this trace that lingers within inscription. The trace enables, calls for
differentiation, to inscribe it; to inscribe the trace through the differentiation that speech and writing permit.
Words can carry such a volume of a deeply personal and intimate resonance that I believe we seek - on our treks to the highest
universal abstract peaks of critical and philosophical discourses, to the treacherous underwater swimming through the dream
work, through our veiled and distorted perceptions and images that connect to our innermost feelings. We read, we write, we talk,
we interpret in our search to find the right words. Some of us haven’t stopped trying to catch “truth” through our interest in the
unconscious. Staying close to that region of the unconscious which is never completely tamable, decipherable or known, we try to
catch glimmers of “truth.” Why are some of us drawn to such unruliness? How is a “hovering attention” transmitted such that we
can hear words in their attempt to order the unconscious, conceal the unconscious, and at the same time convey the unconscious
beyond the logical order of language?
Lacan is specific in his statement that the unconscious is structured like a language; not just like language, but like a language.
Lacan indicates that the unconscious has an organization that rests outside our conscious time and language logic continuum. I
hope to explore these ideas more deeply in my upcoming workshop “Time and Sound on the Way to Subjectivity.”
In our increasingly “oral” times, how do we account for the fact that so many elaborate and complex discourses, emails, text
messages, the rapid rates of communications that eat up the last words before the next erasure has on our capacity to hold a
thought? To hold our own thoughts? How do we speak, respond; how do we sound in the midst of so much “communication” and
activity? How do we incorporate the frenzy without being so threatened by annihilation? How do we (sw)allow communications
without drowning, and how do we drink up the sounds, the words, theoretical discourses, the knowledges permeating our global
interactions in a way that enables our vibrancy- our revitalization-our revolution? Lutecium calls for a commitment to bring the
radical work of psychoanalysis to impoverished communities, to immigrants, to developing countries, to our increasing class of
poor, to those who would never know of psychoanalysis without strong passionate commitment to offer transmission to Others.
Lutecium’s intention is to generate a space that will electrify our own psychoanalytic discourse in such a way that we can maintain
a deep respect and reverence for transmission of the historical analytic passage through the quality of our engagement with
discourses. To do this we intend to plug in to our times through our most provocative and contemporary feminist theory, race
theory, transnationalism, queer theory, and film theory and through our art worlds so that we can return to Lacan and Freud with
an awareness and acknowledgement of the edge of discourse. For example, Dr. Kristopher Lichtanski’s workshop will address
“Analytic Consequences of Attactions and Repulsions towards ‘the Sexual Deviant:’ Deconstructing the Strange Relationship
between Psychoanalysis and Nonprivledged Sexuality,” and our film offering led by Eric Essman, M.A. along with Jacques Siboni,
M.D. will address how Magical Realism is serving American audiences at this point in time. Our Film Event night is entitled:
“Magical Realism; Glimpsing Mystery through Mortality, Mutilation and Fantasia.”
We hope Lutecium’s offerings ignite a provocation to speak and write to this arch trace that resounds in the currency of our times.
That resounds in us. We intend to bring an interactive live feed into our seminars in order that our work can be exposed and
informed by distant locations. We intend to offer interactive cartels and workshops to enable our students to participate in the
larger world context through which we are affected. In particular, we are interested in hearing from our neighbors in Western
Europe, as well as Africa, India, Cuba, Eastern Europe, China, Russia, Middle East, Asia, Australia, New Zeland…
How do we recognize Other, not as the menacing superego authority that forces us through fear into empty contractual relations in
the world –which by the way is a weak definition of law, of the symbolic, phallus - rather, how do we entertain the larger more
spacious and calmer concept of Lacan’s Other? Other as those knowledges that we have no idea about, that emanate from alien
cultures. Other as the unconscious that remains mystery, Other as language, and most importantly for a Lacanian project, how do
we understand “Desire” as desire of the Other?
Lacan believed that desire precipitates the break in our relationship to objects when we inhabit language. At that moment when
language cuts in as substitute for our direct experience of objects, we are forced to navigate desire as languaged beings barred
from envelopment, absorption, and merge of our primordial object. Desire catapults us towards those particular traces and
potentials that we perpetually seek, beginning with the very moment that language separated us from potential fusion.
As humans we are not satisfied with simply being a replaceable or exchangeable object to meet or satiate sexual drive. Rather, we
desire to be entangled with the Other at the same level and intensity of human wanting that occurs within us. We seek recognition
in our effort to mediate desire. Language, signification, becomes the locomotion of desire that reveals the “very human way” that
we attempt to negotiate this oedipal loss in the “tabooed” world through which we are initiated.
The losses on our way to becoming subjects - the nostalgia that becomes heightened particularly through our senses - causes
yearning. Deep human yearning. Through symptoms, through sublimation, we seek as languaged beings to find the perfect
object. We fail. We cry. We speak. We grasp at trying to find the right words to explain or justify, or defend against these misses,
these failings. We never find just the right word either. We move from signifier to signifier, riding desire through the surface of
language that both eclipses but at times reveals the unconscious and our particular way of handling desire. What has been torn
from us and what we have been given instead? When do we as subjects resign ourselves to our desire, when do we derail it? How
do we speak about this critical castration and trauma in a such way that we can find particular words that lead to a certain freedom
- not just from the loss, but from the words, the dramas, the narrative we use to describe, call up, and relive the repetition of this
disruption by language again and again? Where is another word, a new word, a new possibility?
It is precisely because words reside at the most precarious brink of our relationship to Other, to our objects, that Freud and Lacan
placed the significance of language, of speech, of words, as the surface structure that most close veiled the unconscious. It is the
intervention through these surfaces that enables the latent content to become manifest. It is not just the dream images that offer
clues, it is the linguistic construction of the dream; it was not just past memories, it was the reconstruction of the past that reveals
the unconscious. We wish to return our attention to language in order to more precisely listen to the subtleties of the unconscious
that we can decode through a particular type of analytic listening.
How do we open to desire in an analytic training program when the words, the programs, the ideas of others, so easily fill up
infantile needs and demands preventing the certain kind of speech necessary for transmission, an exchange that provokes
language before aborting and evacuating its possibility, its potential? How do we provoke the subject’s response rather than
using the subject as a mouth piece, an ornament, an extension, a tool to satisfy idealized transferences to the institution,
academic discourse, to “psychoanalytic thought.” This is indoctrination not psychoanalysis as this has become an increasingly
dominant national theme that seeps through all of our organizations, left wing academics as well as our more “conservative”
psychoanalytic Institutions. By opening up our learning to international psychoanalysts that will be headed up by Jacques Siboni,
M.D., we will be able to become more conscious of our culture’s social and political impact on the evolution of psychoanalysis. Dr.
Jacques Siboni’s upcoming workshop entitled “Pinpointing Transmission” will describe transmission and its relationship to the
subject and to the Institutionalization of psychoanalysis. This is an event that will be most helpful to those of us who find a paradox
in the analyst as maverick, the analyst as company “man.” Jacques will speak poignantly to the tensions between these locations.
What happens when the “idea” of inclusion is taught, but time and time again the action of exclusion is wielded in brutal and cruel
ways. I am observing how immigrants and gays are reacting to the news that they will not be issued permanent residence if they
test HIV+. How is this not discrimination based on illness? I have just finished reading a book entitled “The Colony” by John
Tayman wherein he chronicles the exile of all of those diagnosed with Leprosy to the Island of Molakai. It was the “deadliest”
medical segregation in American History. How do these contradictions of the message of inclusion and the action of exclusion
trickle down into our Psychoanalytic Institutions where the homogeneity across class, race, sexual orientation, sends an obvious
message regarding perhaps a heightened concern with “contamination”? There is a growing tendency towards segregation in
conservative as well as leftist discourses.
A capacity for incorporation is necessary for a transmission to take place. The provocation of speech is necessary for
transmission to take place. A certain degree of suppleness is necessary to revere the complex exchanges that occur between
ourselves and others within a psychoanalytic training that is carried through supervision, didactic seminars, case conference, and
a personal analysis that expands rather than constricts the possibility of free association, of new speech.
Can we value and withstand the stammering, utterances, unformed ideas, and silences that enables new speech within others and
within ourselves? Can we bear to listen to accents, to foreign languages, to foreign ideas? Can we learn new languages? Is it
possible to enjoy the sounds of our learning, particularly when they catch us unaware, by surprise? The Other - catching us off
guard -Parapraxis- the destabilization of the subject by his/her own emissions irrefutable evidence of the unconscious speaking.
It is my feeling that we are living in fragile times, that the question of explosions of self constructs at the level of national and global
identity effects us all in extremely deep subliminal and unconscious ways. The transmission of psychoanalysis can only be assured
if we challenge our own legitimacy, our own guarantee, if we open up our work our speech, our vulnerability to Other within and
without. If we allow and invite all others in, while we search for the right words. I invite you to write me back. To use our blog. To
respond to this very provocation. Please talk to each other. Please write. Write to any and all of us.
While I believe we need to be rigorous about our efforts to transmit psychoanalytic knowledge, why not enjoy the sound of each
other’s learning on our way to these “right” words. I anticipate a playful, serious, and at times even joyful exchange of words
through an insistence on reverence and openness to the ways that we all sound as we struggle together to find the right words.
Isn’t this the work of psychoanalysis?
Welcome to the beginnings of Lutecium Psychoanalytic Training Group. We invite you to meet our faculty and staff in person at
our Open House or write us to find out more about us and our offerings. Until next time, be well.
I write Lutecium Psychoanalytic Training Group’s first newsletter with much joy, anticipation, and caution as this is a beginning of a
new International venture. I write with much excitement and possibility, and at the same time with a recognition that beginnings are
foundational guides for our future. I wish to thank Jacques Siboni M.D., Director of Training, for his patience, diligence, and long
term commitment to the Transmission of Lacan-Freudienne Psychoanalysis. I wish to thank Kristopher Lichtanski Ph.D., former
Assistant Dean at New College of California, for his unfailing support in the gradual building of an international psychoanalytic
group. I welcome and look forward to working with Carmen Brown, our Director of Admissions, who has sustained much
encouragement and support through the years and has taken such good care of students. I would like to say a very heartfelt
thank-you to eight years of many New College students who have steadily encouraged the construction of Lutecium, this new site
for psychoanalytic training. Your courage has been contagious. Where is the transmission of psychoanalysis without students?
Words, tone, sound, carry - particularly for psychoanalysis - a certain gravity, a history, a memory that remains of the past. Words
also carry what Derrida refers to as the arch trace. The arch trace is the aspect of words “inscribed on the soul of the learner”
that gives rise to speech and writing in an attempt to capture this trace that lingers within inscription. The trace enables, calls for
differentiation, to inscribe it; to inscribe the trace through the differentiation that speech and writing permit.
Words can carry such a volume of a deeply personal and intimate resonance that I believe we seek - on our treks to the highest
universal abstract peaks of critical and philosophical discourses, to the treacherous underwater swimming through the dream
work, through our veiled and distorted perceptions and images that connect to our innermost feelings. We read, we write, we talk,
we interpret in our search to find the right words. Some of us haven’t stopped trying to catch “truth” through our interest in the
unconscious. Staying close to that region of the unconscious which is never completely tamable, decipherable or known, we try to
catch glimmers of “truth.” Why are some of us drawn to such unruliness? How is a “hovering attention” transmitted such that we
can hear words in their attempt to order the unconscious, conceal the unconscious, and at the same time convey the unconscious
beyond the logical order of language?
Lacan is specific in his statement that the unconscious is structured like a language; not just like language, but like a language.
Lacan indicates that the unconscious has an organization that rests outside our conscious time and language logic continuum. I
hope to explore these ideas more deeply in my upcoming workshop “Time and Sound on the Way to Subjectivity.”
In our increasingly “oral” times, how do we account for the fact that so many elaborate and complex discourses, emails, text
messages, the rapid rates of communications that eat up the last words before the next erasure has on our capacity to hold a
thought? To hold our own thoughts? How do we speak, respond; how do we sound in the midst of so much “communication” and
activity? How do we incorporate the frenzy without being so threatened by annihilation? How do we (sw)allow communications
without drowning, and how do we drink up the sounds, the words, theoretical discourses, the knowledges permeating our global
interactions in a way that enables our vibrancy- our revitalization-our revolution? Lutecium calls for a commitment to bring the
radical work of psychoanalysis to impoverished communities, to immigrants, to developing countries, to our increasing class of
poor, to those who would never know of psychoanalysis without strong passionate commitment to offer transmission to Others.
Lutecium’s intention is to generate a space that will electrify our own psychoanalytic discourse in such a way that we can maintain
a deep respect and reverence for transmission of the historical analytic passage through the quality of our engagement with
discourses. To do this we intend to plug in to our times through our most provocative and contemporary feminist theory, race
theory, transnationalism, queer theory, and film theory and through our art worlds so that we can return to Lacan and Freud with
an awareness and acknowledgement of the edge of discourse. For example, Dr. Kristopher Lichtanski’s workshop will address
“Analytic Consequences of Attactions and Repulsions towards ‘the Sexual Deviant:’ Deconstructing the Strange Relationship
between Psychoanalysis and Nonprivledged Sexuality,” and our film offering led by Eric Essman, M.A. along with Jacques Siboni,
M.D. will address how Magical Realism is serving American audiences at this point in time. Our Film Event night is entitled:
“Magical Realism; Glimpsing Mystery through Mortality, Mutilation and Fantasia.”
We hope Lutecium’s offerings ignite a provocation to speak and write to this arch trace that resounds in the currency of our times.
That resounds in us. We intend to bring an interactive live feed into our seminars in order that our work can be exposed and
informed by distant locations. We intend to offer interactive cartels and workshops to enable our students to participate in the
larger world context through which we are affected. In particular, we are interested in hearing from our neighbors in Western
Europe, as well as Africa, India, Cuba, Eastern Europe, China, Russia, Middle East, Asia, Australia, New Zeland…
How do we recognize Other, not as the menacing superego authority that forces us through fear into empty contractual relations in
the world –which by the way is a weak definition of law, of the symbolic, phallus - rather, how do we entertain the larger more
spacious and calmer concept of Lacan’s Other? Other as those knowledges that we have no idea about, that emanate from alien
cultures. Other as the unconscious that remains mystery, Other as language, and most importantly for a Lacanian project, how do
we understand “Desire” as desire of the Other?
Lacan believed that desire precipitates the break in our relationship to objects when we inhabit language. At that moment when
language cuts in as substitute for our direct experience of objects, we are forced to navigate desire as languaged beings barred
from envelopment, absorption, and merge of our primordial object. Desire catapults us towards those particular traces and
potentials that we perpetually seek, beginning with the very moment that language separated us from potential fusion.
As humans we are not satisfied with simply being a replaceable or exchangeable object to meet or satiate sexual drive. Rather, we
desire to be entangled with the Other at the same level and intensity of human wanting that occurs within us. We seek recognition
in our effort to mediate desire. Language, signification, becomes the locomotion of desire that reveals the “very human way” that
we attempt to negotiate this oedipal loss in the “tabooed” world through which we are initiated.
The losses on our way to becoming subjects - the nostalgia that becomes heightened particularly through our senses - causes
yearning. Deep human yearning. Through symptoms, through sublimation, we seek as languaged beings to find the perfect
object. We fail. We cry. We speak. We grasp at trying to find the right words to explain or justify, or defend against these misses,
these failings. We never find just the right word either. We move from signifier to signifier, riding desire through the surface of
language that both eclipses but at times reveals the unconscious and our particular way of handling desire. What has been torn
from us and what we have been given instead? When do we as subjects resign ourselves to our desire, when do we derail it? How
do we speak about this critical castration and trauma in a such way that we can find particular words that lead to a certain freedom
- not just from the loss, but from the words, the dramas, the narrative we use to describe, call up, and relive the repetition of this
disruption by language again and again? Where is another word, a new word, a new possibility?
It is precisely because words reside at the most precarious brink of our relationship to Other, to our objects, that Freud and Lacan
placed the significance of language, of speech, of words, as the surface structure that most close veiled the unconscious. It is the
intervention through these surfaces that enables the latent content to become manifest. It is not just the dream images that offer
clues, it is the linguistic construction of the dream; it was not just past memories, it was the reconstruction of the past that reveals
the unconscious. We wish to return our attention to language in order to more precisely listen to the subtleties of the unconscious
that we can decode through a particular type of analytic listening.
How do we open to desire in an analytic training program when the words, the programs, the ideas of others, so easily fill up
infantile needs and demands preventing the certain kind of speech necessary for transmission, an exchange that provokes
language before aborting and evacuating its possibility, its potential? How do we provoke the subject’s response rather than
using the subject as a mouth piece, an ornament, an extension, a tool to satisfy idealized transferences to the institution,
academic discourse, to “psychoanalytic thought.” This is indoctrination not psychoanalysis as this has become an increasingly
dominant national theme that seeps through all of our organizations, left wing academics as well as our more “conservative”
psychoanalytic Institutions. By opening up our learning to international psychoanalysts that will be headed up by Jacques Siboni,
M.D., we will be able to become more conscious of our culture’s social and political impact on the evolution of psychoanalysis. Dr.
Jacques Siboni’s upcoming workshop entitled “Pinpointing Transmission” will describe transmission and its relationship to the
subject and to the Institutionalization of psychoanalysis. This is an event that will be most helpful to those of us who find a paradox
in the analyst as maverick, the analyst as company “man.” Jacques will speak poignantly to the tensions between these locations.
What happens when the “idea” of inclusion is taught, but time and time again the action of exclusion is wielded in brutal and cruel
ways. I am observing how immigrants and gays are reacting to the news that they will not be issued permanent residence if they
test HIV+. How is this not discrimination based on illness? I have just finished reading a book entitled “The Colony” by John
Tayman wherein he chronicles the exile of all of those diagnosed with Leprosy to the Island of Molakai. It was the “deadliest”
medical segregation in American History. How do these contradictions of the message of inclusion and the action of exclusion
trickle down into our Psychoanalytic Institutions where the homogeneity across class, race, sexual orientation, sends an obvious
message regarding perhaps a heightened concern with “contamination”? There is a growing tendency towards segregation in
conservative as well as leftist discourses.
A capacity for incorporation is necessary for a transmission to take place. The provocation of speech is necessary for
transmission to take place. A certain degree of suppleness is necessary to revere the complex exchanges that occur between
ourselves and others within a psychoanalytic training that is carried through supervision, didactic seminars, case conference, and
a personal analysis that expands rather than constricts the possibility of free association, of new speech.
Can we value and withstand the stammering, utterances, unformed ideas, and silences that enables new speech within others and
within ourselves? Can we bear to listen to accents, to foreign languages, to foreign ideas? Can we learn new languages? Is it
possible to enjoy the sounds of our learning, particularly when they catch us unaware, by surprise? The Other - catching us off
guard -Parapraxis- the destabilization of the subject by his/her own emissions irrefutable evidence of the unconscious speaking.
It is my feeling that we are living in fragile times, that the question of explosions of self constructs at the level of national and global
identity effects us all in extremely deep subliminal and unconscious ways. The transmission of psychoanalysis can only be assured
if we challenge our own legitimacy, our own guarantee, if we open up our work our speech, our vulnerability to Other within and
without. If we allow and invite all others in, while we search for the right words. I invite you to write me back. To use our blog. To
respond to this very provocation. Please talk to each other. Please write. Write to any and all of us.
While I believe we need to be rigorous about our efforts to transmit psychoanalytic knowledge, why not enjoy the sound of each
other’s learning on our way to these “right” words. I anticipate a playful, serious, and at times even joyful exchange of words
through an insistence on reverence and openness to the ways that we all sound as we struggle together to find the right words.
Isn’t this the work of psychoanalysis?
Welcome to the beginnings of Lutecium Psychoanalytic Training Group. We invite you to meet our faculty and staff in person at
our Open House or write us to find out more about us and our offerings. Until next time, be well.
| On Finding the Right Words |