Things “seen or heard”: the Freudian Rupture, Infans, the Individual Myth of Neurosis, and the Beyond of Oedipus in the Analytic Experience

 

This seminar sets out from the effraction of the object and its inscription in the experience of the speaking being as one of being a subject of and subject to speech and language. The course will return to Freud’s early work on the experience of infancy in “Three Essays on Sexuality” in order to rediscover the nature of the (lost) object at work there. 

 

Our reading of Freud’s “Three Essays” re-orients us to the ways in which the analytic experience unfolds in the fields of desire and jouissance carved out by the lack or hole where the lost object appears. It is in those fields, opened up by being a subject of speech and language, that the speaking being is forever cut off from the rails of instinct and instead delivered over to an experience of the drive and the logic of the signifier. We will approach the Freudian and Lacanian concept of “castration” in terms of that experience and logic, and thereby link the Freudian rupture to Lacan’s so-called “non-rapport” of the sexual relation that becomes ever more central in Lacan’s teaching following Seminar XI.  

 

The seminar affords a path for thinking through the importance of Oedipus for the psychoanalytic clinic as well as a way to think beyond that myth. Beyond Freud’s dream of Oedipus, we will consider other fundamental myths of psychoanalysis (the myth of the father of the primal scene, the myths and histories of Moses and Monotheism). 

 

In conclusion, the seminar proposes that these myths orient the analytic experience to the necessary and logical consequence of the speaking-being’s experience of trauma in things “seen or heard,” and shows how their articulation in the talking cure constitutes the subject of a censored unconscious where that which is at stake is activated between the straits of the unsayable and the signifier.  

 

Readings:   

Freud, S.  “Three Essays on Sexuality” (1905) Volume VII, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud  

Freud, S.  Moses and Monotheism (1939) Volume XXIII, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 

Freud, S. “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1937) Volume

XXIII, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 

Lacan, J.  Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Lacan, J. Seminar, Seminar XII, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis

Lacan, J. Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

Lacan, J.  Seminar XX, Encore

Lacan, J. (2006). “Beyond the ‘Reality Principle,” Écrits.

(2006). Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton.

Lacan, J. (2006). “The function and field of speech and language,” Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton.  

 

Faculty: Christopher Meyer, PhD, Analyst of the School

Dates and Times: September 2023-June, 2024. 4th Saturday of each month beginning September 23, 10am-12pm Pacific Time, no December meeting.

Location: Online, possibly hybrid, location TBD 

Fee:  $60.00 per class/students $40.00, or LSP Tuition 

Contact: Christopher Meyer, PhD, (323) 930-9662, cmeyerwoeswar@gmail.com

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Christopher Meyer, PhD is an Analyst of the School, Supervising analyst, Faculty of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, and he is the current President and Chairman of the Board of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis.  He is a member of the Freudian School of Québecm and a founding member of the California Psychoanalytic Circle of the Freudian School of Québec.  He has a private practice in psychoanalysis and consultation located in Los Angeles, California.

Email:  cmeyerwoeswar@gmail.com

Tel:  (323) 930-9662