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There is no proportion – There are detached pieces

If there is no such thing as the sexual relation, what is there? There is the singular, in each one.

It is well known that there is no such thing as a parlêtre (speaking body) without a body and without a language. It is well known that the symbolic is no longer what it was and that the imaginary does not limit itself to the corporal image of the premature body; there is a beyond that we have been seeing in our clinic, when something from the image does not work. Hence our compass towards know-how, not without a knowing-how-to-say, perhaps takes its orientation from what each speaking-being teaches us: the analysands and the analysts. As an example, what each detached piece teaches us about the symptom outside-sense, about the different ways of coping with what does not exist, is a teaching that each One brings to our clinical, political and epistemological research today.

One of the key coordinates for keeping up-to-date in the investigation of the analytic field is Psychosis. “Ordinary Psychosis and the others, under transference” is the main subject for the next WAP Congress, and this means that it is the right moment to return to the soundness of the structural clinic, as a means of approaching ordinary psychosis, which, though not a Lacanian concept as such, Miller extracts from Lacan’s last teaching.

What is it that cannot be accommodated by the classic categories? What is it that supports each one? With these and other questions that arise in our consulting rooms, in the practice of psychoanalysts of today, we have some indication of what changes are occurring in the 21st Century. This was proposed by Miller in the presentation of the theme of the 10th Congress of the WAP in Rio, in 2016 – I quote: “This metaphor – the substitution of the Lacanian parlêtre for the Freudian unconscious – fixes down a scintillation. I propose that we take it as an index of what is changing in psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century, when it has to take into account an other symbolic order and an other real besides those upon which it was established”.

There is then, a path marked by clues of our time, which form the coordinates of a differential clinic with its unique phenomena, the indefinite, the not-all, and inventions. All of them in their triple externality1 – the social, the bodily, and the subjective – account for the shift from the Freudian unconscious to the parlêtre, and for the effects of the current discourse. Nowadays, the established discourses are “not enough”, and although it is true that everyone is delusional, the path of psychosis teaches us about a private, invented delirium. These subjects go from one disconnection to another, or they identify intensely, rigidly, whether in the workplace, in the family, or bodily.

Today, bonds mutate at a vertiginous rate, this is something we learn from our clinical practice and what serves as an agent for each. That is why our reading is carefully gauged when it comes to the transferential relationship with an analyst. Thus, with some detached pieces, and without taking refuge in the “asylum of ignorance”2 in order not to know, Miller shows us the state of research of a category that, some twenty years on, summons us to talk in après coup (retroaction) – under transference – and in a transference to work, as “there is” a wide field of epistemic-clinical transformations, with more questions than answers for now.

(Translated by: Alicia Hadida Miami, USA. Reviewed by: Isolda Alvarez)

1 Miller, J-A., “Ordinary Psychosis Revisited”, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 26 (2013), p. 42

2 Ibid.