The Pain(s) of Existence: Lacanian Investigations. Keynote Address: Russell Grigg (Melbourne) APPI Annual Congress. 22nd November 2014

Transcription

1 The Pain(s) of Existence: Lacanian Investigations Keynote Address: Russell Grigg (Melbourne) APPI Annual Congress 22nd November 2014 Royal College of Anaesthetists Merrion Square, Dublin 2

2 [i]t is this eccentricity of desire with respect to any satisfaction that allows us to understand [...] its profound affinity with pain. This is to say that at the limit, that which desire purely and simply borders [...] is this pain of existence... Lacan, Seminar V, 23 April 1958 Desire, whatever its form, is not a pathology, even when subjects complain of it Soler, 2014

3 Introduction How should we conceptualise, theorise, and work with the pains of the speaking being today? In the work of psychoanalysis we are familiar with the conversion pains of the hysteric, the harrowing and often fatal psychical pain of mourning and melancholia, the sufferings of the painful neurotic discomfort of desire, and increasingly, the piercing agony of the symptoms outside the social bond, those that act as the bearers of autistic jouissance. And while we are thinking about pain, let us not ignore the ones who are required to live with long-term physical pain and/ or with the acute and chronic pains of the tumours, the cysts, and other irruptions/eruptions in and on the body which they come to speak about with the psychoanalyst. In today s market of suffering psychoanalysis is alone it seems, in its practice of not prescribing a painkiller for the pains of existence. In this way, we can agree with Soler when she claims that psychoanalysis is in direct conflict with the operation of capitalist bio-power. Psychoanalysis does not concern itself with curing the instruments of the market (the subjects who make up the labour force), reducing symptoms and removing psychic pain so that subjects flourish (sic) under capitalism: this reveals the always subversive, political face of psychoanalysis. This is one of the reasons why we don t force the anorexic to eat, or the melancholic to smile, for example. However, charged as it is with the reconfiguration of the speaking being s relation to jouissance that allows for a passage from discomfort to satisfaction, psychoanalysis is wholly engaged with the mobilising of a position for the speaking being which is, let us say, less painful, even if not pain-free. How, after all, do we speak about pain in the specifically psychoanalytic clinic?

4 Programme Registration Chair s Welcome Panel 1 Civilization and its Discontents: Eve Watson To Malaise or not to Malaise: Sexuality and Symptom in Contemporary Culture Phil Hanlon The Pain of (Organisational) Change Nadezhda Cherukova Working with New Subjectivities: the barbarred subject? Coffee Keynote Address Russell Grigg A New Theory of Melancholia Panel 2 Inhibition/Symptom/Anxiety: Alan Corcoran Inhibition and Obsessional Neurosis Carol Owens Sex-folly-ation (Don Juan s Desire and the Jouissance of the Nymphomaniac) Magda Kurzawska The Pain of Silence A Case Study Lunch Panel 3 Body (Disability/Disorder/Disarray) Sarah Meehan Modalities of embodiment: From dichotomies of difference to irreducible vulnerabilities Marie Walshe The Other Stage? Therese Maguire When I don t have words : A psychoanalytic exploration of the subjective impact of Alzheimer s Disease Tea Panel 4 The Real of Suffering: Treatment and Limits Marlene ffrench Mullen There is suffering; it is what it is! The singular in the direction of the treatment Ann-Marie Clancy Hell is o/other People: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of an Addicted Subject Medb Ruane Ireland s Unspeakable Real Victoria Sargent Pain turns to Murder Closing remarks Wine and Canapés Reception

5 Abstracts in considering how psychoanalysis intervenes, as one leading psychoanalyst puts it, as an emergency discourse in capitalist discourse. Eve Watson To Malaise or not to Malaise: Sexuality and Symptom in Contemporary Culture In one of his clearest and uncompromising texts, Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud clarifies the painful stakes of civilising the drives and replacing the power of the individual by the power of a community. This paper examines these subjective costs in light of contemporary civilisation which is assuredly not that of austere earlytwentieth century Vienna and is perhaps better characterised as being full of sex and sexuality as well as full of malaise produced by the discourse of capitalism. In this light, the sexual symptom is a point in which discourse fails and is a point of exception outside of the established social bond and, as such, is a refusal of the body to conform to established norms. With the injunction to enjoy having superseded injunctions tending toward (desiring) restraint, what kinds of restrictions and sublimations are facilitated by contemporary capitalistic culture for the contemporary subject? These considerations are important Nadezhda Chekurova Working with New Subjectivities: the barbarred subject? The world over we come across an idea where subjects who speak a different tongue are perceived as alien or foreign. The Greeks referred to non-greeks, for example, as barbaroi, emphasizing the very sound - we could say the signifier - they heard as bar bar. Beyond the usual narrative of natives and foreigners, and drawing on its contemporary assumptions about otherness coming from the dominating normative discourse, one could argue for the emergence of a new mixture of culture and language subjectivities. Using examples from popular culture, this paper will take a psychoanalytic approach to examine the discourse of the speaking being inhabited by desire. The complaints and pains of such subjects are often understood in light of economical, political or social points of view. How can we conceptualize this suffering from a psychoanalytic perspective? This enquiry will open space for discussing the ethical aspects of working with the subject in question and his/her discontents.

6 Phil Hanlon The Pain of (Organisational) Change This paper will examine the modern organisation and the (constant) demands it makes of employees as a consequence of change. The paper will address the impact of globalisation and new organisational configurations at the level of the Subject: how technology is changing the nature of work and the social bond; the demand for the employee to adopt an appropriate organisational persona; and finally how all the above require a new understanding of the nature of change at the level of the Subject and consequent requirement for containment. Russell Grigg A New Theory of Melancholia I think that Freud was wrong when he said that melancholia resulted from the inability to overcome the loss of an object. In this paper I will argue that the opposite is the case: it is the inability to separate from the object that characterises at least a certain kind of melancholia. I ll mention some clinical support for my view. I ll also argue that mourning should be understood as the difficult work of memorialisation, which gives us a better understanding of the nature of mourning as well. Alan Corcoran Inhibition and Obsessional Neurosis Within the psychoanalytic clinic the pain of existence can take many forms. One such form we encounter in the clinic of obsessional neurosis is inhibition. This specific pain of existence constitutes a real problem for the subject and the treatment. These subjects are unable to live as they experience their existence as being towards death. By exploring the character of Mr. Stevens in the movie The Remains of the Day, the paper will draw out aspects of the clinic that we encounter when treating such subjects. The paper and presentation will highlight how as clinicians we might work with inhibition and the very real problems that these analysands pose for us. Carol Owens Sex-folly-ation (Don Juan s Desire and the Jouissance of the Nymphomaniac) Lacan s equivocation of sexe-folie /sex madness with s exfolie, the reflexive form of the verb to exfoliate, forms a punctuation in his remarks about the sexual relationship, the Imaginary and the fantasy, at the very end of the first session of his 25th seminar The Moment to Conclude. I m going to take this equivoque as my starting point in order to examine and critique something of the constitution,

7 representation, and signification of the contemporary symptom otherwise referred to as sex addiction tied as it is to a particular desire, a particular jouissance, and a particular psychic pain. Examining the films in which sex addiction is represented between 2011 and 2013: Thanks for Sharing, Shame, Don Jon and Von Trier s Nymphomaniac, will allow me to make a number of remarks in which I will attempt to relocate sex addiction as sexfollyation (thanks to Dan Collins for his translation of the equivoque into English preserving each of Lacan s nuances), and along the way I will examine Don Juan s desire and, as promised, the jouissance of the nymphomaniac. Magda Kurzawska The Pain of Silence A Case Study Silence is an inseparable element of the psychoanalytic practice. Both, the analysand s silence and the silence of the analyst, has been conceptualised and theorised in various ways during the past hundred years. Whether we think of silence as resistance, communication, or as creativity on the analysand s side, or we see it as a technical manoeuvre, as a type of punctuation, or the psychoanalytic act on the side of analyst, silence is always complex, difficult and painful. In my paper I will use the case of a patient whose pain puts him to sleep for a week or two, so he does not have to talk about it, in order to illustrate the different modalities of application of the silence in psychoanalytic experience. Silence, I claim, is a way of speaking about pain. Sarah Meehan Modalities of embodiment: From dichotomies of difference to irreducible vulnerabilities The subjects of physical pain and disability (two discrete but sometimes overlapping categories) are inexhaustibly complex. I d like to touch on some of the many narratives they provoke across different discourses, from the psychoanalytic to the medical,while enquiring why certain narratives seem to predominate over others. Although the area of psychosomatics is discussed frequently, a corollary issue, that of the somato-psychic aspect of disease/ pain/ disability is less frequently addressed in literature and debate. Could this be related to the difficulty of representing physical pain in language or an anxiety provoked by encountering corporeal difference, an anxiety that signals to a vulnerability underpinning all embodiment?

8 Marie Walshe The Other Stage? The modern analysand is a knot of three: enjoyment, body and death. The body in all its reiterative pleasure has become the contemporary anderer Schauplatz. For this analysand, only psychoanalysis - a metonymical discipline, not a science of signified and metaphor - tolerates the enjoyment contingent on such suffering. In times of trauma, procedures and rituals offer a set of signifiers, Symbolic fort s and da s, to bridge the gap between Real and Imaginary. The response by the cognitive and scientific and pharmaceutical paradigms has been to injunct against suffering and anguish. Only psychoanalysis offers an arc towards an S2. An articulated experience becomes immediately Other- symbolically or imaginarily represented, in signifier or symptom - it is metonymised into a symptom or metaphorised into a delusion - but it is Other. If not, it is a passage or an acting out, a staging - still for the Other but the subject s agency is not the same. I will use examples from my clinic to elaborate upon this movement from act in the body to representation in language. This movement is a movement of the lacking subject through the graph of desire - or as Soler more appropriately calls it the graph of Witz. Therese Maguire When I don t have words : A psychoanalytic exploration of the subjective impact of Alzheimer s Disease...If I don t have words, if I don t have access to words, will I be thinking? How can I know and understand what I m feeling if I have no words to describe it? [...] I ll miss words, and more important, I ll miss the feelings they trigger and the nuances of life they describe. These are the words of Richard Taylor PhD. Richard is a person with dementia of the Alzheimer s type and in this paragraph, following his diagnosis, Richard contemplates what life will be like when his illness progresses and he is no longer a speaking being. Using Lacan s theses of the emergence of subjectivity as inscription in language and by means of two case histories, this paper will explore how psychoanalysis can inform our understanding of the progression of Alzheimer s Disease as a fading of subjectivity from the symbolic order with a reversion to a state analogous to pre-oedipal fragmentation.

9 Marlene ffrench Mullen There is suffering; it is what it is! The singular in the direction of the treatment There is suffering and its relief is not straightforward. Freud at the end of Studies of Hysteria concludes: The best we can hope for is a transformation of hysterical misery into common unhappiness. He asserts A psychoanalytic operation consists therefore not so much of the removal of what is pathological as in the establishment of conditions that are more likely to lead the course of the process in the direction of recovery. (Italics mine). According to Lacan, the best a psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy can do is to lay bare the principles in which each one of us believes his experience is grounded. (Sem 11, p.35) The task analysts have set before them is therefore not to assure or provide happiness for their clients but to engage with the question of how to effect a difference in the analysand s subjective position in order to allow him to come to terms with the experience of his own division. There is suffering and in the face of it, we encounter impotence and impossibility. There is a limit point beyond which there is only a savoir faire. In this paper I would like to explore how this limit point is conceptualised in our work using clinical illustrations from the Interpretation of Dreams and Seminar VI. Ann-Marie Clancy Hell is o/other People: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of an Addicted Subject Drawing on my recent thesis Hell is o/other People A Psychoanalytic Exploration of an Addicted Subject I will draw from this research to comment on the theme of this Congress. You may notice the title carries an existential element which comes from Sartre s Huis Clos. The pain of existence, which Sartre speaks of at length throughout his work, is met and managed by the subject through interaction which his or her environment. As Freud has told us repeatedly, managing unpleasure is a necessary component to feeling pleasure. Dublin born Rachael Keogh wrote a short autobiography on her life; describing her family life she shows the reader how she sought to avoid the o/other via an allencompassing heroin addiction. She chose to put her body through severe physical pain because engaging with her loved ones caused her intense psychic pain. The paper will examine Robbert Wille s definition of psychic pain in relation to Rachael s story and consider the place of the analyst in inflicting and containing pain in the psychoanalytic practice.

10 Medb Ruane Ireland s Unspeakable Real The harrowing story of Migrant X s rape, pregnancy and request for an abortion led thousands to call for a repeal of the Irish Constitution s 8th Amendment. Migrant X was force fed after attempting to starve herself to death, then later delivered by C-section in an Irish hospital, yielding a very premature boy into the care of the HSE. Is psychoanalysis overwhelmed by such stories? How might its methodologies articulate them? This paper will seek to voice some questions about Ireland s unspeakable real. Victoria Sargent Pain turns to Murder A child murdering another child is unimaginable to the human mind, as was evident in the public s reaction to the murder of James Bulger aged two, killed by then ten year olds Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. In my recent thesis Why Some Children Kill? A Psychoanalytic Investigation I use the life story of both these boys, as presented by Blake Morrison in As If, in order to investigate if psychoanalytic theory can offer any insight into why a crime of this magnitude can be committed by someone so young. The thesis in part examined the individual s interpersonal relationships and in particular the importance of the mother-infant relationship and how it may contribute to either the exacerbation or management of aggressive tendencies leading to murder. Robert S.G. Wille in his paper On the capacity to endure pain asserts that the child s ability endure psychic pain is as a result of a mother who is emotionally attuned. However what happens for the child when the mother is not emotionally attuned? In this paper I will argue that in the case of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables their inability to endure psychic pain may have been a factor in the murder of James Bulger.

11 Biographies Eve Watson, Ph.D. is Head of Psychotherapy Programmes at Independent College on Dublin s Dawson St. and is also a psychoanalytic practitioner working in a Dublin city centre practice, Leeson Analytic Centre. Published in Irish and international journals in the areas of psychoanalysis, critical psychology, sexuality studies, poetics, and critical theory, she holds a Ph.D. in psychoanalysis and is currently co-editing a book entitled Clinical Encounters: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory due to be published in She is a registered practitioner member of A.P.P.I. and is a member of the Executive Committee, the Scientific Committee and Editorial Board of Lacunae. She is also affiliated with the American-based APW (Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups) and annually coorganises conferences and events such Melancholia in November 2014, the annual Irish Psychoanalytic Film Festival and the A.P.P.I. Annual Congress. Dr. Phil Hanlon is a senior lecturer in organisation development (OD) and Head of Department of the Graduate Business School in the Dublin Institute of Technology. She has extensive experience of Higher Education including programme design, delivery and management. Phil has particular expertise with postgraduate and executive level students. She holds qualifications in the areas of management, marketing, psychotherapy and learning and teaching. She undertook her doctorate on the role of intuition in strategic decision making in Nottingham Trent University. Phil is a Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalyst and a member of the Association for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Ireland (APPI). She has a long standing interest in the unconscious and its impact at the level of the subject and at the level of the organisation. She has a particular interest in the incorporation of a psychoanalytic perspective to business / OD modules for executives and senior managers. Nadezhda Chekurova is a psychoanalytic therapist based in Dublin. She graduated from Sofia University with a degree in Social Work and continued her education, receiving an MPhil in Psychoanalytic Studies (TCD) and an MA in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Independent Colleges Dublin. She regularly participates in reading groups and seminars.

12 Russell Grigg practices psychoanalysis in Melbourne and teaches philosophy at Deakin University. He has been a major influence introducing Lacanian psychoanalysis in Australia. A member of the Ecole de la cause freudienne (Paris) and the Lacan Circle of Melbourne (Melbourne), he has been closely involved in the translation of Lacan into English, having translated Lacan s Seminar III The Psychoses and Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis and collaborated with Bruce Fink on the translation of Écrits. His books include: Female Sexuality (1999), Lacan, Language and Philosophy (2009), and with Justin Clemens, Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reading Seminar XVII (2006). He has published on questions of logic, language, and ethics, as well as on clinical issues concerning psychosis and neurosis. Alan Corcoran holds an MA in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and a BA in Philosophy. He is a practicing psychoanalyst/psychotherapist at the Donnybrook Therapy Centre. He is a Registered Practitioner member of the APPI and is a Pre-Accredited member of the IACP. Alan has been an active member of the APPI Scientific Committee since 2011 helping to organise seminars and conferences. He is currently completing a training program as part of the APPI Research Laboratorial and is a member of the Dublin Lacan Study Group. Carol Owens Ph.D. (psych.) is a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic supervisor in private practice in North County Dublin. She is a Senior Lecturer on the Psychoanalytic programmes at Independent Colleges Dublin and is Subject Head for Psychoanalysis there. She is a Registered Practitioner member of the A.P.P.I. and serves on the Training Committee where she is currently at work on training initiatives for the organisation. She is the current Chair of the Scientific Committee of the A.P.P.I. She is founder and convenor of the Dublin Lacan study Group. She edited The Letter: Lacanian Perspectives on Psychoanalysis from , the Annual Review of Critical Psychology on Lacan and Critical Studies in 2009, and has served on the editorial board of Teoria, critica y psicologia since its inception. She has presented work at numerous conferences, workshops and seminars and has published articles/book chapters on Lacanian theory/practice; Lacan and Žižek, and encounters between Lacanian theory/practice with queer theory, critical psychology, and critical management theory. She is currently working on a book about enjoyment.

13 Magda Kurzawska is a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist and has undergone her academic and clinical training at respectively: Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan, Poland, University College Dublin and Independent Colleges, Dublin. She is a Conditional Registered Practitioner Member of the Association for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Ireland [APPI]. For the several years, Magda, working as a team member of Merchants Quay Ireland, has been involved in the application of the psychoanalytic principles in the field of addiction treatment. As a bilingual therapist Magda is also interested in the phenomenon of immigration and has been involved in psychotherapy research on the influence multilingualism has on the psychoanalytic clinical practice in the multicultural society. Magda works in private practice in Dun Laoghaire. Sarah Meehan holds a B.A In French and Economics and her final dissertation focused on Lacan and French literature. Since then she has had a long running interest in psychoanalytic theory and it s correlation with other disciplines. She is a member of the Dublin Lacan Studies Group and the Monkstown Freudian Group. Marie Walshe, B.A., M.A. (Clin.), Grad. Dip. PsyAn. Studies, Cert. Family Therapy, Reg. Pract. APPI, MCPI, is a fully accredited Registered Practitioner Member of the Association for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Ireland [APPI] and a Practitioner Member of the College of Psychoanalysts of Ireland (CPI). She is Clinical Tutor and Senior Lecturer on the Psychotherapy programmes in Independent Colleges and has lectured on their MA in Dispute Resolution programme. Her articles have been published in academic and peer journals. Marie gained her clinical experience in the adult psychiatric units of the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, St. Ita s in Portrane and Our Lady s Hospital in Naas. She received supplementary training at the Rotunda Hospital in the treatment of fertilityand pregnancy-related disorders, and at the Mater Hospital Pain Clinic in the treatment of chronic pain conditions. As an inaugural member of the A.P.P.I. Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis Group, Marie received supervision from the Espace Analytique in Paris. In 2008, she completed a Certificate in Family Therapy to inform her work and has now extended her practice to work with couples.

14 Therese Maguire is Clinic Director at The Psychotherapy Clinic, Dun Laoghaire. She is a practicing Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and a graduate of Psychology from Queens University, Belfast. She holds a Masters Degree in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from Independent Colleges, Dublin, and is a Conditional Registered Member of the Association for Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy in Ireland, APPI. Therese is also a member of the APPI training committee. Her interests include the psychotherapy of later life, dementia and the effects of long term care giving. She regularly presents to the medical and caring professions on the impact of long term care giving and she guest lectures on the Dementia Champion s programme at Dublin City University, DCU. Marlene ffrench Mullen is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Co Wicklow for the last 10 years. She is a Registered Practitioner of APPI and a member of ICLO. She is at present Hon. Secretary of APPI and chair of APPI training committee. She has participated and tutored on the various programmes for continuing Studies organised by APPI. Ann-Marie Clancy has just completed her Masters in psychoanalytic psychotherapy from Independent Colleges and graduates next weekend. Prior to this, she studied English and Humanities at undergraduate level in St. Patrick s College in Drumcondra. Ann-Marie has always had an interest in individuals who speak about their lives and is grateful to have trained in a capacity that allows her to be nosey. While she works with a wide variety of clients in a psychological/ psychotherapeutic centre in Dublin, she also has a keen interest in addiction. She volunteered in a city centre community based drugs project and wrote her Master s thesis on Toxicomania. She hopes to study further in Systemic Psychotherapy in London and begin to work with couples and families who have dependency issues. She is delighted and quite nervous to be presenting today. Medb Ruane, Ph.D., works psychoanalytically in private practice in Dublin. She is a Registered Practitioner member of APPI and serves on its Executive Committee, on the Editorial Board of Lacunae as incoming editor, and as an online editor for APPI publications. She served on the Scientific Committee, was editor of The Review and contributed to APPI s PoF, PCS and

15 Laboratoire. She is a member of the Mental Health Tribunals and has lectured in psychoanalysis at DBS and Independent Colleges. Previous research grants include the Irish Research Council/UCD, Dublin Business School and The Arts Council seminar presentations include What is Psychoanalysis? (IMMA/NCAD), Bracha Ettinger (NUI Maynooth) and Melancholia (UCD/ GREP/Humanities Inst.,/APPI, IFPP, IIPP). Her 2013 Congress paper on le Brocquy s Dream of Joyce is in the current Lacunae. Victoria Sargent has recently completed her MA in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Independent Colleges and is currently a group cofacilitator on behalf of the Merchants Quay aftercare program in Coolmine Therapeutic Community. She has gained her clinical experience at Soilse Addiction Rehabilitation Service and throughout her career as a Social Skills Coach of young people and a SATU Volunteer with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre.

16 You are all warmly invited 21 to celebrate APPI s st Annual Congress with a wine and canapés reception at front cover: Detail from The Temptation of St. Anthony by Matthias Grünewald (c )