Psychoanalysts in Close Touch with the Social

Antonio Di Ciaccia and Judith Miller²


Psychoanalysts in Close Touch with the Social: an engaging title, which calls for engagement.

This engagement does not concern psychoanalysis as such, whose logical consequences are becoming ever more tangible in our culture, society and the ways of our times. This engagement concerns psychoanalysts and, with them, the health clinicians and practitioners and the social workers who find backing and resilience in psychoanalysis.

The question of the application of psychoanalysis in the social field was posed as early as 1910 and the answers proposed, at the time and since, whether short-lived, insufficient or misleading, are all instructive.
This question is still insisting today, Psychoanalysts in Close Touch with the Social reformulates it: it involves each citizen’s right to become familiar with his unconscious, to encounter therefore a psychoanalyst trained in the clinic under transference, at a time when some others, for wont of ready made answers, think they have found a way out in the cognitive-behavioural or pharmacological therapies, and others claim to impose them.

Today, the psychoanalysts of Lacanian orientation are not limiting their practice to the confines of their private consulting rooms, nor even to its equivalent in the institution. In order to answer for the new symptoms that hypermodern civilisation is inducing, they are committing themselves to making the analytic experience available to each and everyone, one by one. By remaining firm with regard to the principles of their practice, far from bracing themselves in the name of the complexity of the psychic apparatus with a theory frozen in an imaginary that fossilises this practice, they are determined to support a new clinic, to account for it and maintain the experience of psychoanalysis as a lively experience of the speaking being. Through this, they are falling in step behind Jacques Lacan, who freed their practice of standards and protocol. Bolstering themselves with his teaching, they are betting on an analytic practice adjusted to the particularity of the case, as the analytic act implies, applied or not to therapeutics, as much in the Psychoanalytic Centres for Consultation and Treatment (CPCT) as in other health institutions, existing or future.

The stakes of the third European Meeting of the Freudian Field, the third step of the International Programme of Applied Psychoanalysis of Lacanian Orientation (PIPOL), are to elucidate and draw clinical lessons from the paths suitable for offering the subject of our times a place where his speech will be listened to, not to format or standardise him, but on the contrary to enable him to inscribe the singularity of his own invention in the social Other by modifying his symptom to suffer from it less, even by building it into what Lacan named his sinthome.

¹School Member Analyst (AME) of L’ École de la Cause Freudienne - ECF and La Scuola Lacaniana di Psicoanalisi del Campo Freudiano – SLP.
²President of The Freudian Field of Psychoanalysis.