Refusing to Bow: From Society to School

Duane Rousselle

For three years, spreading Lacanian psychoanalysis in Pakistan, a provision for Eros has been installed through what has been called our “Pakistan Psychoanalytic Society.” The ‘scattered and ill-assorted’ confront the pitfalls of group experience and raise a question concerning the relationship of psychoanalytic transmission and group experience. It’s a question that has emerged against the backdrop of a responsibility to which it has remained mostly unwavering, namely to persist in the training of analysts via the mechanisms of analysis, cartels, supervision, not without accepting as legitimate the Pass in the School of Lacan.

The Society would not bow before the temptation to replicate existing social discourses within the country. Its aims have been to widen the scaffolding which has served as the very counterpoint which originally provided its appeal: psychoanalytic discourse. Jacques-Alain Miller said in his course “The Analyst’s Banquet”: “[t]he question is ‘can analysts only make a society like any other, like non-analysts (who do it so very well, especially through identification)?” Or, can they install psychoanalytic coordinates for themselves?

A trap has been discovered: its steering cartel or committee are also those who, due to experience or knowledge, or both, are placed into the expecting role of governance, deliberation, and decision. Its 'plus-one,' namely the President, is therefore subjected to questions, just as any member or guest, even a demand: the subject-supposed-to-know the political maneuvering appropriate to the Society. A Society, being implicated in politics, to a greater or lesser degree, and being a portal into the experience which it promotes, thereby stands always with one foot outside of its mission. One reason couldn’t be more clear: the financialization of its activities, a factor among many others, which invites either a democratic solution, or else an apparently autocratic one. The latter being more desirable only on the condition that the President recognizes the role into which he has been placed, which is that of the Subject Supposed to Know. Liquidation of this effect will do nothing for the spread of psychoanalysis anymore than it would to an analysis proper.

After Lacan was excommunicated from the Société Française de Psychanalyse, his move was not to found another “Society.” He founded a “School.” It was a shift not only in name but also in the fundamental logic of the psychoanalytic group. Non-analysts were invited, subject to the ascendence of its cartels (what Miller playfully referred to as “micro-societies”). In the PPS, an executive cartel has been formed on the basis of each members’ work in prior years within the Society, and in its interests; analysis with someone proximate to the School, and; acceptance, not through the demand of the Other, of the responsibility of spreading Lacanian / Freudian psychoanalysis in the country, thereby establishing a psychoanalytic field which is always and necessarily Freudian.

The steering cartel, separated from general membership, and from the wider circle, cannot but be in a position of hierarchy from the standpoint of existing society. General members, being decidedly affixed as proven "repeaters," at least provisionally, have worked in the prior year in the Society's interests and are willing to register their desire and commitment to do so in the year ahead. Taken together: the steering cartel, or established repeaters, whose transference to psychoanalysis and the School is manfiest through action; general membership, whose role offers an opportunity to which each may raise themselves into, and; the wild circle, which is a proxy or interface between existing discourses and the one that is now coming into formation. At least one with transference to the School, who raises questions of the Society, is, for reasons that are not entirely appropriate, called "President."

In the years ahead, a test of the Society will concern its stability, to begin with through its programming. Thus, the effectual implication of the Society is that it is divided as if by necessity from the School to which it nonetheless intends a linkage. It is regrettable, it seems to me that this is an insurmountable division. Miller has said:

“This is why a School is not an Analytical Society. What makes a School different is that it doesn’t necessarily have people working at the top. The Society is supposed to be headed by people who have worked, who are already retired, or who can be retired. In a School, you don’t retire. And, precisely, what we’ve preserved, at difficult times in the School of Lacan, was the chance to establish transference to Lacan’s work -- not to block the ways of transference to Lacan’s work.”

By way of concluding, I leave in suspense a recent question concerning the emergence of an object, money. It is an object of stasis within the society: money in the bank, what to do about it? To Lacan, having indicated a possible fetishistic dimension to money, might be added an autistic one. Lacan said: “this thing which has no use value, which only has exchange value, what value does it preserve when it is in a safe? [...] What is this inside that seems to make what is locked up in it completely enigmatic? Is it not in its way, with respect to what constitutes money, is it not an inside that is altogether outside, outside of what constitutes the essence of money?” Money, locked away in a safe, is an objet a which does not circulate. A question might be raised of the Other, therefore: within which field might that money circulate if not for the promotion of psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan?