by Roxanne Moutselou | Vol 42 (3) 2024
Summary: This article argues that knowing the ‘know-how’ as ‘knowing-how-to- control’, how to direct the treatment, extends beyond the ‘how-to’, the purely clinical dimension, mastering one’s subtlety of skills, and chattering about its supposed ethical groundings in the name of the nature of mental illness. It most importantly lies in the ethical implications of knowing the stake in knowledge – its own particular nature – as the constant of an impasse. The contemporary emphasis on the necessity of ‘control’, as evidenced in the ongoing debates on ‘regulation’ and ‘supervision’, and of ‘love’, in the research literature on ‘transference-love’ and ‘therapeutic relationship’, appears to designate ‘cure’ as a product of a harmonious relationship between the two. The article, by showcasing how Lacan’s work goes beyond Freud, capturing logic, attempts to the present inquiry into the stake in knowledge in ‘psy’ therapies is essentially an inquiry into its impasse insofar as ‘control’ and ‘love’, as knowledge effects, are complementary delusions rendering talking therapy pragmatically possible.
by Veroniek Knockaert | Vol 19 (4) 2001
This article offers a close reading of Lacan’s text “Variantes de la cure-type”. Starting from the notion of deviation implicit in the title of this work, it is situated in the context of the institutional crises that marked the history of psychoanalysis in France in the period between 1953 and 1964. A second step dismantles the question of variations on the standard-cure as a pleonasm. In an attempt to avoid the aporia this implies, Lacan recenters the question around the position of the analyst in the field that founds itself in the relation of the subject to speech. The notion of narcissism as a function of the death drive and as the basis of knowledge is then introduced. Where common knowledge functions as a shield, a symptomatic manifestation of our own passion for ignorance, it has to be concluded that in the formation of the analyst a changed relation to knowledge holds a central place, a relation that permits the analyst to find his standard in a docta ignorantia.
by Josée Roymans | Vol 19 (3) 2001
This article investigates the Lacanian notion of the “desire of the analyst”. Several topics are discussed concerning this enigmatic desire. First of all, the author argues against the conception that the analyst has no desire to cure. Also discussed is the notion that the views of the analyst about “health” have ethical and technical consequences. The author conceives health here as a matter of wanting to know about one’s own unconscious. One of the crucial paths towards this knowledge is via transference, as the encounter between two supposed knowing subjects. The ways in which the transference is evoked, its relationship to love, the paths it follows, its ending and modalities of interpretation are discussed.
by Antonio Di Ciaccia | Vol 19 (3) 2001
The formation of the psychoanalyst is not the formation of the psychotherapist. On the one side psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are different. On the other side psychoanalysis includes a therapeutical side. But then that the State can see psychoanalysis as a form of psychotherapy – as it is the case in Italy – in fact it is the psychotherapy who receives her place and her validity, as she is inserted by the power of the word, that the field of psychoanalysis defines and circumscribes.
by Jeroen Donckers | Full text, Vol 22 (3/4) 2004
This article deals with the formidable challenge of repetition for therapeutic or educational care. Two forms of repetition are differentiated: one driven by the Oedipal life drive, the other by the death drive. Through a close reading of the classic myth of Oedipus Rex, the encounter of these forms of repetition is demonstrated. This myth also offers three main perspectives from which this work may be grasped: good, truth and writing. Originating in a project for abandoned children in a school for special education (De Sassepoort), the possible benefits of assisting children through writing is supported.
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