The WAP recognises seven Schools, located in 33 different countries on different continents. These seven schools are autonomous bodies in the way they are run and in their politics of psychoanalysis, but all their members have in common: their theoretical references, their concern for the rigorous formation of the analyst, their way of practising psychoanalysis, and their doctrine on the end of analysis. The School One is the name of this common orientation of psychoanalysis. The decision to create the School One was taken during the WAP’s second congress in Buenos Aires in 2000. Its members, living in different social and cultural milieus, feel themselves to be, one by one, forming the School One, sharing psychoanalysis as their destiny. The School One is not an institution; it has neither headquarters nor status. It is an experience without borders, a translinguistic experience, which aims to keep the Lacanian orientation and psychoanalysis alive.
I find it more interesting to think of this School assembly in relation to the analytic session than to think of it from a sociological perspective, as an assembly of members of a liberal profession.
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Sur le mutualisme”, Comment finissent les analyses.
Always, from the outset, the Lacanian orientation has been the anti-Babel, it has been the possibility of communication between psychoanalysts, and with the public; it is the pursuit of the great analytic Conversation, a conversation not too unworthy of that of mathematicians or even of philosophers.
Jacques-Alain Miller
If there is a Lacanian orientation it is because there is no Lacanian dogma, [. . .] there is only a continued Conversation with the founding texts of the event Freud, a permanent Midrash that ceaselessly confronts experience with the signifying framework that structures it.
Jacques-Alain Miller
At the heart of the School, there is the presence of the question: What is an analyst?
Jacques-Alain Miller, El nacimiento del Campo Freudiano.
“Preamble”
On 21 June 1964, reaffirming both the validity of the psychoanalytic experience and the necessity to re-establish the Freudian principle in theory and in practice, Jacques Lacan simultaneously introduced the notion of an unprecedented associative form: in place of the Society which had become traditional, based on the mutual recognition of didacticians, he proposed the School, whose members would find in the recognition of an irreducible non-knowledge –S(⒜)– which is the unconscious itself, the impetus to pursue a work of elaboration oriented by the desire for an invention of knowledge and its integral transmission, what Lacan was later to call the matheme. On this foundation of the abyss, covering it with his own name, he established his School and called for the reconquest of the Freudian Field.
“Lacan’s appeal resounded beyond the dissolution of the School he had founded – resounded beyond his death, which occurred on 9 September 1981 – resounded far from Paris, where he lived and worked”. Those were the words, on 1 February 1992, of the Pact of Paris, drawn up at the time when the École de la Cause freudienne, the Escuela del Campo freudiano de Caracas, the École européenne de Psychanalyse du Champ freudien, and the Escuela de la Orientación lacaniana del Campo freudiano decided to converge in the World Association of Psychoanalysis, which had just been founded by Jacques-Alain Miller. Today –at a time when for twenty years the Encounters of the Freudian Field have regularly punctuated and re-launched the life of an international community that they have greatly contributed to bringing into existence; after eight active and laborious years within the WAP; in the wake of a crisis that we have gone through and overcome together; and while two national schools are in development in Spain and Italy – the time has come to take the next step: it will be the foundation of what has already found a name, the School One of the WAP.
On the initiative of Ricardo Nepomiachi, the EOL Council in Buenos Aires adopted a draft declaration to which it proposed that any WAP member wishing to become a member of the School One should subscribe, following approval by the World Association Council. The WAP Council, meeting in Paris on 22 January 2000, endorsed this initiative and decided to offer for discussion by the members of the World Association, within the framework of their Schools, the following text, inspired by the EOL draft.
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Miller J.-A., « Sur le mutualisme », Comment finissent les analyses. Paradoxes de la passe, Navarin éditeur, 2022, p. 284-295.
What is a Psychoanalysis?
Psychoanalysis is the specific deployment of speech invented by Freud. It is first and foremost an experience which consists of saying freely what comes to light in the formations of the unconscious, in dreams, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, and in existence as a whole. It consists of showing the subject that he is saying more than what he thinks he knows. It results in a gain in knowledge about what we ourselves have often misinterpreted, and which has blinded us and made us prisoners of ourselves.
This singular experience of speaking aims at finding one’s way with unconscious desire, i.e., that which one experiences most intimately (dreams, fantasies, our little secrets…), and which does not necessarily fit the norm. It is about finding sufficient satisfaction to live, a point of agreement with oneself, one’s being of authentic desire, in relation to the world and to others. This might be the chance of a lifetime, in any case the occasion for a beautiful escape.