Thomas Svolos - Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis

If psychoanalysis will survive in the twenty-first century, my wager is that it will be Lacanian psychoanalysis. Now, today, the survival of psychoanalysis is very much in questionthe fall or decline or failure of psychoanalysis, especially in the United States, is accepted now as a fact, and issues associated with the historical trajectory of psychoanalysis, not just Lacanian, and not just in the United States (though that is a focus of mine) will be touched on throughout many of the chapters below. That said, even Jacques Lacan himself, at the peak of his influence in Europe, when psychoanalysis was a dominant discourse in Western European society, did not believe that psychoanalysis would triumph (in fact, as I will argue in this book, the desire of psychoanalysis to triumph in the United States was the very cause for its downfall), and merely posed questions about the possible survival of psychoanalysis, when future subjects, in the face of the growing anxieties in the world, would want, rather, something else (which he identified as religion; Lacan, 2013, p. 64). That said, a statement of a wager on Lacanian psychoanalysis in the United States is perhaps an odd starting point for a discussion of psychoanalysis, given that Lacanian psychoanalysis, at least as a clinical practice, is only just barely established in the United States.

With this book, I hope to articulate why I would like to bet on a possible future for Lacan and psychoanalysis in the US. This argument is developed from different perspectives and in different formsdistinct, yet related paths of inquiry. Some of the papers, especially the first two chapters, will directly address this question through an examination of the reception of Lacan in the US and a review of some of the ways in which Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a unique response to some of the more pressing clinical, or subjective, demands of our time (Indeed, in that sense, functions also as a general introduction to the book itself, introducing and providing context for many of the concepts developed in greater detail in later chapters).

Much of the book, parts , stages this in a different way, through explications of specific ways Lacanian concepts have developed as a reading of the clinicaland indeed even broader psychic and socialphenomena of our moment in history. My belief is that now, in the twenty-first century, we are in a particular historical era, postmodernity, with its own social and economic and cultural logic, but also with features that might be identified in the psyche, or the subjective field. Psychosisan increasing clinical phenomenonand addictionitself oft described as a veritable contemporary epidemicare given longer treatment, but other chapters will address central concepts such as trauma, fantasy, the symptom, the body, and transferenceapproaching these concepts from the standpoint of this historical moment.

My development of these concepts is of course Lacanian, but I want to specify it further as Millerian, in that I have found the work of Jacques-Alain Miller the most vital entry point for an approach to Lacanian psychoanalysis and the reading of the texts of Lacan, in addition to which I want to acknowledge Miller's own contributions to psychoanalysissay, in the development of concepts such as extimacy, generalized foreclosure, and the notion of ordinary psychosis. For me, as a young clinician, working in my clinical practice at a certain point in my formation as a psychoanalyst, my discovery of the literature associated with Miller and those working together with him in the Schools of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP) was critical in orienting me in my practice, through their written work but more importantly by inspiring me to reach out to Miller and other Members of the Schools of the WAP. For, I assert that it is not through texts, but, most importantly, through the life of the School itselfthat unique collectivity through which psychoanalysts gather in a process of what we might call continuous formation or the continuous reinvention of our practice in the face of the very changing nature of the psyche itselfthat what we might ineptly call the theory and the very praxis of psychoanalysis can evolve to meet the demands of those who come to us with requests for help. It is to the work of and through exchanges with Miller and colleagues that I owe much of my inspiration, and these texts are an effort to bring Millerian psychoanalysis into the American psychoanalytic discourse. I want to add, though, that this is not a systemic or general introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis in the Millerian orientation, however. Psychoanalysis is transmitted, well, above all through psychoanalysis itself, and supervision, and cartels, and our various encountersCongresses, Study Days, and especially the Testimonies of the Passand not through texts. Texts, however, may serve as the entry point to psychoanalysis, especially for students, how one is introduced to psychoanalysisbut texts such as this are merely residues of that work, derogatorily referred to by Lacan with the neologistic