PUBLICATIONS
SCILICET

Everyone Is Mad

Scilicet
WAP
2023

Lacan’s second clinic broadens the concept of the symptom, inherited from Freud, by including, in an essential way, those symptomatic remainders that persist at the end of analysis and which led Freud to take into account an ineliminable part of the symptom. This is why Lacan called it sinthome, restoring the old spelling – s. i. n. t. h. o. m. e. – as what is properly the name of the incurable. In effect, the sinthome names that which will never change, that from which we will never be cured, because it is precisely that which underpins our existence, that is to say, that which sustains us in life, our radically singular mode of jouissance.

In a sense, then, Lacan had anticipated the consequences of the contemporary ideology of universal egalitarianism, which take the form of a generalised depathologisation. Today, in fact, it is the clinic itself, taken as a whole, that is being called into question, always under the suspicion of promoting segregative categories.

Does this mean that psychoanalysis is a phenomenon of civilisation in perfect alignment with the movement of the world? No, contrary to current ideological prejudices that deconceptualise the clinic, tending to bank on the will of subjects on the basis of a denial of the unconscious, Lacanian depathologisation does not erase clinical structures; on the contrary, it highlights the contours of the mode of jouissance. The clinic here is not aimed at for its own sake. It rather serves as an instrument for orienting ourselves in the interpretation that is at the heart of the analytic method.

The contributions in this volume, the fruit of a sustained elaboration in the small group that Lacan called a cartel, examine, one by one, both the conceptual foundations and the practical and clinical consequences of the proposal under consideration. Under the co-ordination of Gustavo Stiglitz, 23 cartels, 112 psychoanalysts and 7 editors from all over the world worked on the preparatory texts for the XIVth Congress of the WAP, directed by Gil Caroz and Ligia Gorini. These texts, each in their own way, demonstrate that if psychoanalysis resists the movement of civilisation evoked here, it is in the name of analytic practice, which does exist and whose offer deserves to last. Yes, psychoanalysis is a praxis whose value goes far beyond its therapeutic effects, as the cause of an unprecedented desire.

Christiane Alberti
President of the WAP

Scilicet. Everyone Is Mad, WAP, a publication of the New Lacanian School, 2024.