What is Psychoanalysis?

What is Psychoanalysis?

What is psychoanalysis: the inquiry could echo the response “It is what it is,” yet this is an answer equalling the reply of a god, which psychoanalysis is not, neither is a panacea representing a tyrannical oath promising to cure one’s suffering with a special modus operandi- techniques are the weapons of those who cannot understand freedom and responsibility, and with whom philanthropy collects a dreadful meaning; and, within these musical notes of thought, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, any decent psychoanalysis cored on those ethics, in general, represents the human right to speak up, to form one’s own ways of life- and death. From the moment one attempts, or, even worst, to answer that question – What is psychoanalysis – in the formula of one statement for the minds of all, with the confidence of the dictator, one does practise at the very best case scenario a bad psychotherapy- for, psychoanalysis, is something created with each one of the analysands, as much as the analyst who is gratified to lack of memory so to accommodate that novel desire by the subject of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis cannot be but a plasmatic breathing liberty within a geometry of motion, within the process of which, a subject creates the soil for its own idiomatic tongue: that is why it is an enigma, not to be answered but to be formed, which, among other things, paints the beauty and the plurality of human subjectivity. A subject begins by conversing the speech into silence.

Languages

Psychoanalytic treatments and consultation in English or Greek.

London Office

The psychoanalytic practice is located in London at the following address, and opposite the British Museum:

91 Great Russell Street

Bloomsbury

London

WC1B 3PS

 

On the Symptom

Symptoms treated by Psychoanalysis: Life.

Discontents- that is a symptom, which makes a subject bear an incomparable weight, in one way or another. Unique individuals have unique ways of discontent although the outcome- filtered in the cultural discourse- may appear the same in the violent forms of grouping, turning what ought to be private into something indiscriminate out of context with one’s personal experience as if the subject itself were the symptom to a brilliant theory of an illness. In Lacanian orientation each voice is inimitable, and each symptom is a subject, an outcome of the body’s exposure to language beyond the general formulations of cause and effect- this is the affect of a cause, which, in time, has shaped the body into a discursive one: in fact, not one but another one.

What is the Oedipus myth, if not the structuring of the question “What does it mean to be a human?” a question that outshines the illuminations of both biology and cognition- in fact, and, to be defined: it is a different biology: for biology means the word of life; if it is more apposite, life speaks. Although the word analysis relates to destruction, which is, breaking down into the smallest agencies, it is apropos to describe it as creation, a formation, one that Lacan utter as the direction for the formation of analysts as well, not in mass production but as one by one. In this manner each one’s symptom exists- beyond the statistical silence of individuality, but one by one, dissimilar.

 

The only certainty being one’s anxieties, manifested through a number of symptoms, only to be categorized into a group of syndromes and such we tend to become: yes, if this is the declaration of a manifesto equal to the ethical guiding principles of a slave. Subjects’ symptoms are the results of a discourse that has marked the entrance of their bodies within the social discourse, and the rebellion towards the demand of subjection, not subjectivity, is the topology of the indication of the symptom, which is, faithfully to the steps of the act, the instant of the subject’s next performance. The entrance into analysis, or, better stated, the crossing towards this path happens not because of the violence of the symptom but because of the symptom’s malfunction, or, if it is favored, the subtraction of enjoyment from the indication of agony, with gratification- one it static: panic attacks, anorexia, boredom, repetition of failed relationships and incidents- no, these do not need cognition because it is their cognition that brings about their failure, doomed into a system of mastery between ideal goal and disillusionment.

 

We have rushed too much, so much that we have forgotten that speech, as much as in the myth of Oedipus, has been the marking and seminal reference to one’s destiny, written yes but not ours and certainly not the only form of writing- for, when analysand read they actually sculpt: a novel truth. The hastening towards an ideal led to the loss of a place, not a place to bring to a standstill, but, on the contrary, one from where we choose our departures. When a subject reaches that elastic point of departure, psychoanalysis is, does not become, only a moment. No more than an act.

Contact Details

For Psychoanalysis at the London office, you can use the following contact details:

Phone number: 02032396979

Email: petrospatounas@freudianletter.com

On Psychoanalysis’ Theory

On the Theory of Psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis does not exist- it is not solid; it is oriented until it is dissolved again: as much as the analyst; this orientation is the other side of Lamella. In the beginning there is the deed- one that it is not without speech, a tongue that stutters its letters and hesitates when it encounters its desire, yet igniting the proposition of inflowing into analysis; it is accompanied by the dissatisfaction and questions that do possess their question marks; this is the ingress into analysis, into what has been until that moment without time, not because it has not been calculated but because it was infinite.

 

Many One could refer to a method, an old one, out of use- yet how can free speech be out of use: it is, when one is somehow dead, or, a mere Master attributing demands to its own echo. Lacanian Psychoanalysis does not refer to a system, neither to magic- perhaps we could, if we think of the authority of words to shape our lives; only in this sense. Psychoanalysis is not an application, neither a technique or a secret knowledge applied on a subject’s life experience- it is not even about clichés we have been exposed to throughout the decades after Freud’s discovery of the Unconscious; and certainly, it is not about being an “instead of.”

 

It is in itself, not what it is, but, what it becomes, and with each analysand the testimony is altered. Itself, it is an occurrence through which a subject constructs, or reconstructs in a different fashion, not memories, but the points of location through which subjectivity, that is, no more than being a person, is hearted: one can murmur a different kind of time, one counted with heart beats, and yet again one is to form a question. What makes a heart beat- this is not a riddle towards a biologist, for, when the subject suffering from anorexia enters analysis, what we are ethical into addressing is not the imaginary skeletal body but the obesity in the mirror- from this does the subject in question suffers. That is the geometry of motion of psychoanalysis and its flowing place within civilization.

Links to Freudian Psychoanalysis

These are a few links to other websites related to Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis:

 

LACANIAN FORUM

A Forum for transmission of psychoanalysis in the Lacanian orientation, in London, UK.

 

LACANIANS IN PRAXIS

Lacanians In Praxis is a website for various Lacanian psychoanalysts offering psychoanalytic treatments, mainly in different areas of London.

 

THE SCHOOL OF THE FREUDIAN LETTER

The School of the Freudian Letter is a school of analysands dedicated in the formation of analysts and desiring subjects.

 

Cyprus Society of the SFL

The website of the Cyprus Society of the SFL.

 

LACANONLINE.COM

LacanOnline.com is a site for exploring psychoanalysis through the work of Jacques Lacan.

 

Blog Index

On the Pilgrimages of Psychoanalysts

To a God that is unconscious: not προσκύνησις but pros-kinesis, a towards the motion that is desire and not stasis, from the name to the letter and the transliteration of the contrivances of desire to which analysts’ bodies are dedicated so to domicile the legal residence of the signified subject’s purpose of speech, which is silence and not onomatodoxy, for, to create one does not need the name∙ and the orientation of silence is the act, in particular, because the subject has spoken: the Lernean hydra of the signifier, cut and scanned, simulacrum of the repressed desire’s mimeograph and the symptom’s elevation on its square power, which is not mathematical and in the schematic resolution of the circle- that, that which is repeated and shapes the subject’s periphery: that is not to say that psychoanalysis is a contemplative orientation, for, the letter is without a father and never repressed, a-pparently: the idiosyncratic ways of the psychoanalysts, those of peregrines, not of the Other, nor the Same, but of the Alien- that which has come from afar and zoomed in, because it has no body, the Ousia, which is a breath, a letter, and an object- that which causes desire because of its ways articulating the aim of the drive and the itineraria from the signifiers to the letters.

 

And, the subject has learnt the alphabet, one that is never the equivalent to an epithet’s geographical formula and only to that which coruscationises the vernacular ethics: intended for, it is perversions that divulge the approach to the signifiers and the letter- be that of their kinesis-  and not psychosis, because, the flight on the letter has  been actually a within, an entering to that which is monument only in the sense of its plasmatic appearance: psychoanalysis is contained into the letter only if it becomes breath, dueled and practiced from the signifier to the letter and the direct experience of the object, that which caused desire and relocates the source of the drive: it starts from the No-Body but not with musicality, for, if it becomes a mantra then, as it has been said, it will do damage to the lugs, that, and those, lugs, and heart, which is only ethical and pendulates like desire: the drive is initiated once again when the orientation of the subject is nowhere to be found∙ it becomes, then, a body event, once again not eventuali-sing the body in this world∙ that is the result of those analysts who have never danced and are not acquainted with what is kinesis- with this it is urged to converse of the act of desire and not murmur it- such is the manner of the Pharisee, not of the Gentile nor the Alien, because the Letter and the Breath relate not to identification or disintendification but to that ember which orders itself to ride the death drive towards life: this is the Ergon: what is being: it is what Ethics will make it, for, this Logos does not reason God.

 

And, the devout delusion of the cut, that which the pious may parallax with Πλάνη, does not announce the letter- neither does it create spaces for that which supposed to be a mark on the speaking body, for a body is never of speech but spoken∙ one does practice the Syncope on the diaphones’ diphthongs: the Ascesis of Monophthongization is in the expanse for he who embodies the amulet of the communal, the nature of that phonetic organ which is of the marvelous as much as is of the signifier, heals the Gaze of flattery but does not compliment the manners to which desire formulates the upper dot, because it is Τέχνηand not Φύσις that bequeaths the tactile members of perpendicularising motion, to which the French verse libre shows its deference to both the structure and Poetics of novelty and love for the letters: and if analysts assent to the celebration of anxiety of how is it to be of this wet ground and life, be that in attendance with each mouthful of air, then, then they will be memorable with the assessment of the Being Silent, of that who is at work, and who knows that desire is not intervocalic and not without long vowels: the hunc locum of the Letter’s way is feminine and asexual: certainly not hysterical because within the signifiers the Real reveals its metathesis: and if there is a new analytic intervention, that ought to be foreshadowing: interpretation has been resurrected but analysts are inadequate to laugh with it∙ no less than Lazarus- that is a pilgrimage one has to embark on.


  1. Your proposition: ‘The letter is without a father and never repressed.’Lacan: ‘it’s only the signifier that is repressed.’ The letter is therefore not a signifier. (I am not saying this is correct or that we should hold to this. I am only following the logic.)this leaves us with two elements that could represent the letter, namely the (a) and an affect. But one could already count the object as affect, as affect of enjoyment. Freud had a name for affect: Triebregung or drive impulse, drive-motion (motion is being used in your text above.)The affect could never be repressed (Freud, ch III, ‘The Ucs’, the metapsychology paper, 1915)It could be displaced and connect to another signifier. Freud called this a false connection in the last decade of the 19thC, I forget where. The Triebregung is not repressed but disguised by displacement. Freud only thought of the drive as repressed and unconscious as long as he defined it as a signifier sitting somewhere on the fence, between psyche and soma. He made overwhelming use of the term drive-impule (motion)which allows for displacement. The fact that it is not repressed means that the subject experiences the affect of jouissance constantly. Apologies for not writing this too clearly, but you brought too many things into my head. Richard K

  2. The circle that shapes the subject’s periphery

    The circle in Euclidean geometry is the set of all points in a plane, that are at a given distance from a given point, the centre. The distance between any of the points and the centre is called the radius. Following Petros’ reference to the circle “that which is repeated and shapes the subject’s periphery” in relation with the symptom, I would add that the center of the circle, as in the geometrical circle, does not exist, but it is around that which the circle is constituted: it ex-ists. That would lead me to Lacan’s metaphor of the onion: one can peel away all the alienating layers of identity, with tears if need be, but after the last layer there is nothing left (Lacan 1991 [1953-1954])*. This was said in a way to describe that there is no authentic personality under these alienating imaginary built layers, but in my opinion there is something missing from there, the only thing that is authentic: the circle’s center, the drive. I would follow Freud on that, describing the symptom as the grain of sand around which an oyster forms its pearl (Freud 1978 [1905e], p.83)* the drive around which signifiers are built.

    Returning to Euclidean geometry, the periphery of this circle, the periphery of subject’s symptom, is given by an equation in relation to the radius from this drive centre:

    Periphery = 2 x π x Radius

    So, if every term is multiplied by “2” that means that the final result, the periphery, can be divided by “2”: the result has a binary dimension.

    The interesting thing about the other two terms, is that although π is considered a constant, a fixed value, and the Radius can have a variable value (the bigger it is, the bigger the periphery), in fact the term that cannot be described is the constant one: the π .

    π in mathematics is an irrational number, that is a number that cannot be expressed as ratio of two integers, cannot be represented as a simple fraction, cannot be represented as terminating or repeating decimal. In simple words, if we try to represent π with its complete arithmetic value, this value has uncountable number of digits that have no repetition pattern. It is a series of digits that “does not cease to write itself”, so the π as letter, “does not cease not to write itself”, it belongs to the real. Greeks described irrational numbers as “ά-λογος”, translated as “inexpressible”, or, closer to the original meaning, “speech-less” or “without reason”. In our description, π could represent an S1, the Name-of-the-Father, the π as “Πατέρας” without an “Other of the Other” or the letter that “is without a father” as Petros mentions.

    The place left for the value of the Radius, that is variable or interchangeable, is the S2 signifier: if attached to the π as S1 can describe the periphery of the circle.

    Petros also mentions “the Lernean hydra of the signifier” and after that “the symptom’s elevation on its square root”. I would say that the cut head of hydra of signifier would give a signifier’s elevation on its square root, another equation related to the geometrical circle, describing its area:

    Area = π x Square Radius

    the area of subject’s symptom.

    Angelos

    * I am not sure about the references – I haven’t read them from the originals

  3. The geometry of the subject is constantly changing. Sometimes it is Euclidean, sometimes Riemannian, sometimes Lobachevskian, etc… So sometimes parallel straight lines never meet, and sometimes they do meet. So the subject is a bit of an enigma, as in the Enigma machine. If you do not know the initial conditions (i.e. Das Ding) the best you can hope for is to fumble around, like a drunk (Cf. Dawkins concept of the drunk walk) but somehow you get there. Like a Letter. Which means that the Letter is nachtraglich. 🙂

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