The Circle for the Lacanian Orientation of Omaha
Reflections on a Social Birth

Pam Jespersen-Elliott
Gary Marshall

The Circle for the Lacanian Orientation was born out of the specific desires of four people, each of whom came together from different professional orientations with their inherent titles and responsibilities. There were two psychiatrists with definite interests in psychoanalysis, one college professor whose interest was in public administration and a therapist who had practiced many years in a clinic. Each of us was searching for a less prescriptive way of working in our practices and in the institution. Our desire to hear more about Lacan developed through either our own analysis or through reading Lacan’s intriguing and enigmatic writings.

The “nom de pere” of this circle is Tom Svolos, an AP of the NLS. Tom gave his first Seminar in 1999 on the Schreber case. Several years of Seminars followed. The actual birth of CLOO began to foment in 2004, when several of us came to listen and participate in a Seminar that Tom initiated dealing with the controversial debate from the 1920’s on femininity presented in Female Sexuality by Russell Grigg.

The specific signifier of a Circle held meaning with the implication of an open and fluid dialogue. Each year we have seen new ideas emerge which have included holding yearly Seminars: the 2004 Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups’ Yearly Conference; Jean-Pierre Klotz’s delightful presence for a week culminating in the Seminar on Transference; this year’s Seminar by Alexandre Stevens on Childhood Psychosis, Autism, and the Place of the Analyst in the Institution; and hosting the 3rd Clinical Study Days in the United States. This initiative by the World Association of Psychoanalysis to hold Clinical Study Days in this country helped us forge friendships with members of the NEL in Miami, and the New York Freud Lacan Analytic Group. Lacanian Analysis is seeing a rebirth in this country, even on the plains of the Midwest.

A desire for international connections within the AMP has provoked three of us to travel to London, Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Bergen (Norway), Rome, Buenos Aires, and now Athens. Each Congress or Seminar has left us with a renewed commitment to transmit Lacanian Analysis to our constituents and a desire to maintain ties to our colleagues in other countries.

Our combined experiences of teaching and seeing patients have traversed a lot of territory. We have witnessed the rise and now believe, the gradual fall of CBT because prescriptive treatments leave no room for subjectivity. Perhaps in our country CBT has run its course. Pharmacotherapy has almost stripped the psychiatrist of personal interaction with patients. Psychiatry residents and clinicians struggle with their passion to really hear what a patient is saying perhaps because the demand of the patient is now formulated around the pill, a promise to fix whatever is missing. None of the promises for happiness have set well in our Circle. Perhaps it could be said that each of us are aware of our own particular lack which sustains our desire to regurgitate this discourse of the master. The position we each have in our work, has shifted in recognition of our division as human beings. Rather than speak as the expert, analytic discourse emerged with its emphasis on the subjectivity of the client.

An ethic has also emerged to maintain the unique “y mettre du sien,” or “a putting something of ourselves into the work” as Lacan so aptly mentioned in his introduction in the Ecrits . This notion is an emphasis on the singular as each of us formulates our own truth and the impact that has in the way we communicate with one another in our meetings.

Our regular work this year in the Circle commences three Fridays a month, each with a different focus. One Seminar is led by Tom Svolos. This year he led a reading of Seminar XX Encore. The second Friday is devoted to reading papers from the Courtil and preparing for the visit of Alexandre Stevens. A recent example of clinical application arose out of a case where a woman had more that twenty years of repeated, unwanted hospitalizations combined with electroconvulsive therapy. Our Circle had just read the excellent article by Zenoni, The Psychoanalytic Clinic in the Institution, part of the collection of Courtil Papers. The group discussed this patient and how the analyst could intervene differently to allow a relationship to the institution based on a demand coming from the patient herself, something specifically emphasized in the paper. In the past, the patient would wait until she was psychotic and almost catatonic and would have to be hospitalized. The patient subsequently was able to name the institution as a representation of safety and a retreat from her hectic world. She then asked for hospitalization prior to reaching this critical state, which of course made her treatment belong to her. The third Friday is the work of our Cartel, “Transference in Clinical Practice.” Clinical material has been circulated internationally and commented on which has afforded us a remarkable experience to prepare for Athens.

Our Circle and the interactions with each other sustain and have fed an appetite to “Eat the Book” of Lacan, of course an impossibility. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan uses this metonymy “the hunger in question, sublimated hunger, falls in the space between the two…object and aim…because it isn’t the book that fills our stomach… but that the book became me…in order for this to take place…you must pay with a pound of flesh…Of him who ate the book and mystery within it, one can, in effect, ask the question: “Is he good, is he bad?” That question now seems unimportant…the important thing is what will transpire once the book has been eaten.” In the midst of our Circle, each of us has begun to define our own desires and new questions for the years yet to come.

2/18/2007.

¹Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. (1966). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. (Translated by Bruce Fink.) WW Norton and Company, NY. NY. 2006. pages 9-10.
²Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Seminar VII. (1959-1960). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. (Translated by Dennis Porter.) WW Norton and Company, NY, NY. 1992. pages 322-325.