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Topic

Symptom

A collection of 6 issues

Repetition & Isolation of a Symptomatic Element.

From Analysis Laid Bare, By Jacques-Alain Miller. Let us introduce her a little dialectic [...] It is because there is the obstacle that there is repetition, but it is because there is repetition the obstacle is perceived and isolated. (p. 14) What I think Miller is getting at is that when

Vincente Palomera on Symptom v. Drive

Continuing to read from the essay What May I Expect From Psychoanalysis? by Vicente Palomera, which I posted about earlier this week. Links On page 6 of the document, under the heading Symptom and Repression, Palomera points out that the symptom and the drive are separate phenomena. The symptom is

A path

From L’étourdit (1972), ‘A Bilingual Presentation of the First Turn’ Summer 2009, via Lacan in Ireland. One can discourse in a thousand ways about the analyst. Rightly or wrongly. And if it is wrongly (which never fails to be the case), it is better to traverse its impasses and

Vicente Palomera on turning misery into ordinary unhappiness

From the essay What May I Expect From Psychoanalysis? by Vicente Palomera, which I posted about earlier this week. Freud has been variously paraphrased as saying that psychoanalysis could treat neurotic misery, but that it could not treat ordinary human unhappiness. [...] This is a phrase of terrible realism and pessimism,

The Symptom: Then & Now

From I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing, by Christopher Bollas. In the essay he traced the origin of the idea of citizenship and, having outlined some of its properties, he concluded that ambivalence towards the contemporary state had seeped down into a private loathing of being a citizen in the

Is the Unconscious Real? No!

From Reading A Symptom, by Jacques-Alain Miller. The Unconscious is a Fundamental Hypothesis: The unconscious that lacks Being is represented by a hypothesis, an idea, a theory. It lacks Being. It always slips away, eluding our conscious attempts to contain, control, or understand it. The unconscious could be said to