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An extraordinary observatory

In recent years, there has been a call for qualitative research in addition to quantitative research. When we can observe that a change occured within therapy, it is interesting to understand what this transformation has been and to grasp the cause of this change. The latter is a question that also concerns analysts and for which Lacan has developed a specific research method: the procedure of the pass. We believe that the testimonies of the pass can be an interesting addition to study Lacanian psychoanalysis. The purpose of this article is to review this procedure. What is this procedure and what are the historical and theoretical frameworks. We provide a brief illustration and some critical notes in this procedure.

Towards Gay Science: The End of Analysis as the Analysis of the End

In an attempt to account for the end (the goal, the direction) of the psychoanalytic treatment, Jacques Lacan has formulated quite a few principles and ideas over the course of his seminars and writings. Amongst these principles, the notion of the ‘traversal of the fantasy’ has come to occupy a priviliged position, despite the fact that it is effectively a hapax in Lacan’s works. This paper offers a succinct study of an alternative principle, which is rarely recognised in the context of discussions on the end of analysis, notably the principle of the signifier of the barred Other S(Ⱥ). The study of this principle generates the thesis that the end of analysis may be conceptualised as the analysis of the end, which constitutes the point where knowledge becomes ignorance, and the point where the symbolic order becomes ‘de-phallicised’. In the discourse of the analyst, the analysis of the end re-appears in the place of the product, where the master signifier symbolises the function of loss. For the knowledge of the psychoanalyst, this implies that a knowledge in the place of truth can only be maintained as a gay science, in the Nietzschean sense of a poetic, joyful and amusing knowledge.

In The Course Of Events Everything Will Become Clear: Repetition and Temporality in Lacan’s early Seminars

This paper looks at how the concepts of repetition and temporality were being conceptualised at the early stage of Lacan’s work in terms of his interest in cybernetics, and explores how repetition and temporality were being brought together within the overarching framework presented in the postface to the seminar on The Purloined Letter. Consideration is given to how Lacan theorises the automatic, autonomous nature of unconscious contents, their timeless indestructible character, and the distinction between conscious and unconscious memory. Adding to this Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, the author looks at the difficulties in conceptualising a psychoanalytic notion of time within the context of repetition compulsion.