Question of the Society

The following is a transcript of “Question of the Society: Society, School, Psychoanalysis,” addressed to the Pakistan Psychoanalytic Society.

Wild Psychoanalysis

You are invited to know about the Pakistan Psychoanalytic Society. Moreover, the Pakistan Psychoanalytic Society is invited to know about itself.

Many of you will have come to know about the Society through its public activities. These have been efforts to establish an opening for psychoanalysis from within the existing discourses of this country. We are the first, and currently the only, psychoanalytic training pathway inside of Pakistan. It is a decidedly Freudian pathway, the reason for which is clear enough: as a matter of definition, the psychoanalytic field is Freudian. Our orientation, without compromise, is Lacanian; which means that it is based upon the teachings of Jacques Lacan, who, in 1964, when he founded his psychoanalytic School, called for a “denunciation of the deviations and compromises that encumber [the] progress [of psychoanalysis] while degrading its use.” It was a call for a return to Freud.

We are not one year old as a Society; as a circle, we are three. The measure of our progress will not be in years since birth but in the active steps taken to install and defend coordinates for psychoanalysis in the context within which we act for ourselves. Taking measure, then: the Society, being an invention of the Circle, has introduced a foothold against what Freud called “wild psychoanalysis.” It has done so through efforts to link with the School of Lacan, through its public activities, and through the promotion of cartel work.

In any case, in these last few years, have we not followed in the footsteps of Freud? Another dimension of wild psychoanalysis, other than the betrayal of its technique due to inadequate training; there is also psychoanalysis as practiced without the Other of its profession, including other analysts. Freud’s text, titled “Wild Psychoanalysis,” was published in 1910, the same year as the founding of the International Psychoanalytic Association. In it, he wrote:

[I]n view of the dangers which may be anticipated from the practice of ‘wild’ psychoanalysis for the patients as well as for the subject [der Sache] of psychoanalysis, no other course was left to us. In the spring of 1910, we founded an international psychoanalytic society, in order to be able to disclaim responsibility for the acts of all who do not belong to us, and who call their medical practice ‘psychoanalysis.’

Freud’s appeal, in the establishment of an international psychoanalytic society, can be read as an act of responsibility for psychoanalysis. What does a Society make possible for the transmission of psychoanalysis, and what does the School of Lacan introduce that the Society cannot establish through its institutional practice?

The Subject of the Society

The Pakistan Psychoanalytic Society has not been without provisions for psychoanalytic transmission: it has never been without a meeting place, people who’ve opened space for its work, and companions who accompanied its passage from the university and clinical establishments into the psychoanalytic circle. The conditions from which the Society has emerged are not the same as those conditions which sustain analytic discourse. Another discourse has been adopted, one which distinguishes the Society from the others. This is a psychoanalytic Society, which, I think, has been a site for the installation of psychoanalytic coordinates. The manner in which I’m speaking today is an expression of those efforts, and should not, therefore, be regarded as another effort to open up pathways from within discourses other than the one in which I’ve now been inscribed.

I am speaking from within the discourse into which I have been inscribed, raising a question of the coordinates that constitute my position within it. I raise a question of the psychoanalytic society, effectuating the work of the society. To raise the question assumes that there is indeed a subject of the Society. I suppose that there is a subject of the Pakistan Psychoanalytic Society, and that there is also a desire. And I suppose that this desire is interpretable.

Lacan outlined a social logic of small groups peculiar to the study of psychoanalysis, named “cartel.” We have inscribed this logic to a greater or lesser extent as the organizing principle of our Society. There is, therefore, the cartel, named “executive committee.” The word “executive” at least brings with it a sense of action. It has been formed by those who have taken it upon themselves to orient the activities of the Society, which means, those who have declared a desire to work in the interests of the Society by transmitting psychoanalysis. And, in turn, the Society recognizes those who have undertaken this:

• The Society’s secretary, and its cartel delegate, is Ruqayya Abdul Qadir.

• The Society’s treasurer and clinical seminar coordinator is Anita Hassan.

• The Society’s reading seminar coordinator is Moonis Azad, PhD.

• The Society’s second reading seminar coordinator is Muhammed Abdullah Ali Farhan.

  
  

In the year prior, each was referred to colloquially as a “repeater,” and more playfully as a “repeat offender.” … Their offence was only to have fallen from the university and psychological clinics into psychoanalysis. This year there has been an expansion of transmission, even if our activities are fewer in number. There has also been an expansion of membership. New repeaters have emerged, based upon their work in the prior year: Shaftain Nasser, Romaise Munawer, and Karishma M. Iqbal.

It is curious that institutional language has taken hold, an argot, as it were, with such signifiers emerging as “repeaters” and “repeat offenders.” These are signifiers of the Society, and no one has been excluded from taking them up. They outline something of an orientation that has settled into the Society, a signal of its progress from the wilderness. There is one signifier that’s not been used as frequently, though I’ve tried to put it into circulation, namely Surakh, which is the Urdu word for hole, spelled “h-o-l-e.” Immediately after the Society was announced, I introduced the signifier of the hole into our institutional language. In 1975, Lacan said not only that “the signifier makes a hole,” but he added that “the unconscious is the Real […] insofar as it is holed.”

We can say that the hole circumscribes an impossibility, around which the signifying order and the analytic discourse are necessarily organized. Lacan concluded: “my discourse is founded on a hole.” The question is whether the Society can sustain itself in relation to the hole, by placing it as the agent of its discourse, or will the Society necessarily seek a mode of retreat through identifications, routines, or other answers, already settled; worse, will the Society abandon the field, returning each one to the discourses from which they’ve fallen, … to fend for themselves?

I am isolating three signifiers, each written in lower case letters: repetition, which is a variation on repeating, routine, which is a mode of repetition captured by the imaginary, and stability. We’ve discussed the question of repetition, which seems to me to be necessary for a psychoanalytic Society. As for routine, Jacques-Alain Miller elaborated its consequences in both Freud and Lacan’s calling into question any routinization of the transmission of psychoanalysis: there is always the danger, says Miller in his course, of the psychoanalytic Society falling into routine. As for the third signifier, stability, I’m introducing it after extracting it from Lacan’s teaching so as to bring it to bear on the conditions necessary for sustaining analytic discourse. Stability therefore operates against the temptation for repetition to fall into routine.

The development of Statutes is therefore secondary to the analysis of the desire of the Society. Lacan had said to the Italians, who sought to establish a School, that the test of their efforts would involve stability. Stability, then, in terms of the ability to maintain analytic discourse. He said: “in order to make a seat of psychoanalytic discourse, the society must be put to the test, which will be settled on the basis of its stability.” Im the psychoanalytic Society, it is not a question of deliberation, of whether or not agreement or disagreement will prevail, nor a matter of whether one should exclude difficult personalities in our midst; the question is whether or not there is a subject of the Society which faces the test to defend analytic discourse or retreat.

Freud and the Group

Lacan noted that Freud’s analysis of group formations, of what distinguished the crowd from the group, came ten years after the establishment of his International Psychoanalytic Association. In his text, titled “The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956,” which you can go read if you wish, Lacan stated the following:

We must begin with the remark, which has never before been made, to the best of my knowledge, that Freud started the International Psychoanalytic Association along its path ten years before he became interested, as we see in his text Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in the mechanisms that make an organic group, such as the Church or the army, like a crowd.

Lacan continued:

Had he become attentive to these [group] effects earlier on, Freud would no doubt have wondered about the field left to the dominance of the function of the boss, in an organization which, in order to sustain his very speech, certainly could, as in the models he studied, strike a balance by resorting to a symbolic link — that is, to a tradition and a discipline — but not in the same manner, since the objective of tradition and discipline in psychoanalysis is to call into question their very crux, along with man’s relation to speech.

What is Lacan proposing here? He’s proposing the following: that the questioning of tradition and discipline in psychoanalysis is itself part of the tradition and discipline of psychoanalysis. It is a question raised regarding that which repeats in the form of routinization, and its implications for the stability of psychoanalytic discourse. The hole that has been opened up within existing discourse through the Freudian device known as the unconscious, leads away from the sort of group which, according to Freud, thinks in images, without critical faculty, knowing neither doubt nor uncertainty, without any limits and so without impossibility. Moreover, Freud had been led to conclude that “groups never thirst after truth but instead demand illusions, and cannot do without them.”

What is the relation of the subject of the Society to psychoanalysis? What does the psychoanalytic Society want from psychoanalysis? The Society’s subject is not reducible to its individual members, though the question concerns each insofar as I suppose that the question produces effects for them. This is not without interest for psychoanalytic transmission, which means this: a psychoanalysis taken as far as possible toward its conclusion. Lacan repeated, though never in quite the same way, that the end of analysis concerns the passage from analysand to analyst. For example, in Seminar XV: “the analysand who has come to the end of the analysis in the act, if there is one, carries him to become a psychoanalyst.” Can the subject give an account of the passage from analysand to analyst? There is a device within the School, named the “Pass,” which places this possibility into question.

Desire of the Group

Jacques-Alain Miller, in his text, which you can find on our website, titled “The Turin Theory of the Subject of the School,” stated the following, with respect to the Italian case of establishing a School:

The Italian School does not yet exist from the legal point of view. From the subjective point of view, it does indeed exist, and we come together under its signifier. What is the status of the School before it becomes a legal subject? It is caught up in a desire, it comes into being in the form of a desire before coming into being in the form of a legal subject. It is this that has to be circumscribed. It does not only exist in the form of a vague or abstract desire, it exists already in the form of School events, that is, conversations, meetings, conferences, publications, the creation of multiple entities of transmission and research, and in the new articulation given to entities already in existence.

I propose that this statement can be brought to bear upon the question of the psychoanalytic Society. What does our society and its activities make present of a desire for psychoanalysis? What does it manifest in terms of the relationship of the Society to the School?

On the question of the Society’s desire, there is also the possibility of identification. Freud placed identification at the centre of his analysis of group formations, and his reading of Dora’s cough offered him a relatable example: the symptom was interpreted as an identification with her father. Identification thus provided an answer to the question of being, suturing the hole in being. Lacan had added that “there is a beyond to identification,” which is taken up, according to Lacan at one point, in the passage of analysand to analyst. For Freud, something analogous to identification occurs in groups, particularly when they transform from crowds via the establishment of a leader: libidinal ties to its leader, or else libidinal relations to the others, its members.

Miller’s theory of the subject of the School asks what in the life of the group cannot be reduced to identifications. The School’s challenge to the Society is not one which asks for it to forgo Eros, but to preserve each one’s relation to psychoanalysis as if it were a fact of psychoanalytic transmission. Hence, Thanatos, death drive, preceding the Society, returns, but precisely in the Eros of the Society. Collective formation within the School is not premised entirely upon a principle of dissociation, that is, of subjective loneliness in the cause of psychoanalysis … a cause worth defending. In this way, the transmission of psychoanalysis seems to depend upon the elevation of the cartel, and in the manner in which each takes up analysis and supervision for themselves; without discounting, also, the fact of the “pass” as a measure of progress in analytic transmission.

By way of concluding, I would like to quote another passage from that text by Miller:

A community came out of Freud’s desire which took the form of a Society, the analytic Society, of which the bedrock is the savage horde described in his text Totem and Taboo. This is linked to a father who is a living signifier, from which follows, after his death, the constitution of a fraternal syndicate, an elite of comrades, a mafia in a word, around his grave. Everything indicates that Freud’s desire was retained in the Oedipal logic, where the existence of a universal [community] is sustained by its antinomy with the one-who-is-not-like-the-others.

I am isolating the “one-who-is-not-like-the-others” to the dignity of a concept. It is a one of pure difference in relation to other signifiers, that is a signifier one. One apart from the group, and yet, like Georg Simmel’s “stranger,” in his modern sociological essay, is nonetheless a member without belonging to the group. The “one-who-is-not-like-the-others” is one apart, set apart, as it were, from the Eros of the group, and yet, nonetheless, precisely, within the group. In Freud’s Oedipal logic, this is the one who is the father, or the leader. However, in the cartel, the one-apart is functionally taken up by the role of what is called a “plus-one,” that is, one who provokes elaboration of work for each one within the group according to their own solitary relation to psychoanalysis. It is a function which promotes the circulation around a hole, and due to which, evokes desire. The cartel is a provocation which utilizes the hole to establish a movement from identification toward transference, that is, not to the subject-supposed-to-know but rather to the work of the School whose product is psychoanalytic knowledge.

How can this effect be preserved in a Society, and to what extent? What lessons does it provide to the psychoanalytic Society? While the plus-one and the cartel do not guarantee that the group will escape its own identifications, nor its libidinal relations across cartelsands; it avoids the crowd while including provisions for provoked elaboration. In part, this distinguishes the School from a Society, organized around shared identification. Lacan’s invention of the School does not therefore render the analytic Society unnecessary. Rather, it establishes a place from which the Society can extract questions of itself concerning what sort of collective formation serves the transmission of psychoanalysis within the particular context in which each Society finds itself; it does this by promoting the singular relation of each one to psychoanalysis as a profession.

Miller concluded: “Lacan’s desire went beyond the Oedipus, and from him came, not an analytic society, but a School.” In other words, the analytic Society is by its very nature tempted by the model of Oedipus, and by the retreat into existing discourses such as the International Psychoanalytic Association. This does not imply that the Psychoanalytic Society is without a necessary function for the transmission of psychoanalysis. It is from the Society that a subject emerges in its relation to psychoanalysis, a subject which can be circumscribed, and which can be brought up against the question of the School and psychoanalysis. Hence, alongside the three signifiers I mentioned earlier, to be written in lower case letters, namely repetition, routine, and stability, I am introducing the following additional three signifiers, each written, as is customary, with the first letter capitalized: Society, School, and Psychoanalysis.

The Remaining Question

The question which remains: what does the Pakistan Psychoanalytic Society want from psychoanalysis? I am not intending to announce or establish a new program of work as a separate line of activity alongside existing work […] I am raising a question that modulates ongoing work. The question of the Society is precisely this one, what does the Pakistan Psychoanalytic Society want from psychoanalysis? […] It’s not a question I’m imposing upon the Society, […] it’s the question that the Society is asking. Duane Rousselle