Getting Real: EuroFederation of Psychoanalysis at PIPOL 8, Brussels, July 2017

Since last autumn (2016), as part of a team across Europe, I have been helping to prepare short texts in readiness for a meeting in Brussels in July. These meetings happen every two years and present a mixture of practical work (based on the work we do with people who come to consult us as psychoanalysts – that is, people who are suffering in some way, and who want to know something about why things go wrong), and also work which aims to interpret and intervene in the current social dimensions of our fast-changing world. 

This regular work of editing, translating and writing little bits with my colleagues helps me to get to know them, their work, the literature, and something about the countries where they live and work, and vice versa. This creates a great opportunity to get a fresh perspective on what would otherwise be too familiar. I can make use of my colleagues abroad to see my own situation via their points of view. 

By publishing some of this work here on this blog I hope to open up this work to other people who might not come across it otherwise. Some of you might be interested enough to go to the main website of the PIPOL 8 Congress. Who knows, you may even come to Brussels for PIPOL 8. 

In this first piece Brussels-based psychoanalyst Patricia Bosquin-Caroz  gives a quick introduction and invites you into the theme (translated by my colleague Raphael, from the Dublin-based group, ICLO).  The second paragraph (translated by me and John) kicks off with a reference to Ken Loach's latest film (I, Daniel Blake). This film, as I think you will know, demonstrates the problem rather well. The bureaucratic machinery of the modern state presents a formidable obstacle to real human beings, or 'speaking beings' (parlêtres – a new word invented by Lacan by bring two other words together, parle and être) as we say.  Loach describes the highly machine like way that the 'government + business agency' operates and how this results in a double disguise to the cynical strategy of deterring people from claiming rather than facing up to the truth and doing something about it.

If, like me, you are looking for ways to resist this transformation of modern life into a grinding and thoughtless machine that mashes up truth and produces ever more lies, then you could do a lot worse than read a few short articles that are being produced outside of this machinery, that is, outside of all norms. I'll be posting a few more pieces every week leading up to the meeting in July, and interspersing them with other pieces that relate more directly to the UK. 

Janet Haney, practising analyst member of the New Lacanian School, and representative for London for the EuroFederation of Psychoanalysis. 

My Way n°1 My Way, the Newsletter of PIPOL 8, follow us - Patricia Bosquin-Caroz On the 1st and 2nd of July 2017, PIPOL 8, the 4th Congress of the EuroFederation of Psychoanalysis, will take place in the heart of the capital of the institutions of Europe: Brussels. Its theme, “A Non-Standard Clinical Practice”, is one which is in-phase with the era of the push to the generalised norm, not by way of promoting this, but to make a hole it. Currently in Belgium and France, and tomorrow throughout Europe, the bureaucracy of the health services imposes its standardised managerial logic onto the field of mental health; this imposition is founded on a single norm: Evidenced Based Practice. The aim of the Congress, as well as the preparation towards it, is intended to be both political and clinical. It seeks to assert the dimension of the symptom which is outside the norm and which runs counter to the modern ideal of the normal man. It will demonstrate how psychoanalytic practice, in its orientation within the various institutions of the medico-psychosocial field, forges a place for the invention, uniqueness, singularity and incomparability of each one. Not without the dimension of the transference, the only institution at stake in the analytic experience. Each week, My Way will speak to you about norms and that which is with-out norm [hors-les-normes]. In each issue you will find no more than four or five concise texts, along with photos and videos etc. These will be progressively rolled out and arranged under the various rubrics of the blog: Contemporary Erotica - Child and Adolescent - Autism - European Politics - The Normal Delinquent - A Practice of the Body – Parenting – Segregation - etc. There are sixteen in total, the content of which will originate from colleagues throughout the many regions of the EuroFederation. All the articles will be available on the blog, which you can visit at www.pipol8.eu. Check-in each week for the work in progress towards PIPOL 8! Patricia Bosquin-Caroz, Director of the 4th Congress of the EuroFederation. Translated by Raphael Montague My Way 1, by Céline Aulit (9 November 2016) Ken Loach’s latest film hit the screens a few days ago. This time the director, who specialises in portraying those forgotten by the system, depicts, with a certain sarcasm, the contemporary absurdity that bars the way of the singularity of the subject – something that ultimately profits the protocols of health care and the classifications in the DSM. This is the ground that Valérie Pera-Guillot covers in this first issue of the Blog. The emergence of the singularity is, as Annaëlle Lebovits-Quenehen nicely sums up, precisely what the analytic discourse aims at. Singularity is our bastion of resistance! The more the subject is smoothed out and has his or her jouissance eradicated, the more that jouissance makes itself heard. Neus Carbonell underlines this in the context of the clinic of autism. The Pipol 8 Blog is now in business, and in it you’ll find snappy, sparkling testimonies, little nuggets of outside-the-norm, which, at the invitation of Philippe Hellebois, evoke the ambiguity of language, itself a powerful argument against the discourse of the master. Translated by Janet Haney and John Haney