2011/2012 KRING VOOR PSYCHOANALYSE VAN DE NLS: Les samedis de la NLS / The NLS Saturdays

Reading a SymptomFirst Saturday, 22 October 2011 in Ghent, with Jean-Luc Monnier
Jean-Luc Monnier will open the series of NLS Saturdays with the title « The Intelligence of the Symptom » The question of the symptom is a crucial one, to the extent that what we could call the unique thinking of the cognitive behavioural therapy, allied with the power of the pharmaceutical industry and the neurosciences, tends towards accelerating the annihilation of the clinic as it has been constructed over the last twocenturies. In his lecture given in Milan on the 30th of March 1974, Lacan says the following: “It is not because we will say the things that I say, that this will make us more intelligent; because intelligere means knowing how to read things at the level of what one hears, at the level of what is said, at the level of the facts, because there are no other facts than what is said: this is knowing how to read.”In the presentation given by Jacques-Alain Miller in April this year in London, of the next congress of the NLS entitled “Reading a Symptom”, he connects the ‘putting it well’ (le bien-dire) with the ‘knowing how to read’ (le savoir-lire) to characterise the analytical operation. “I would readily maintain that ‘putting it well’ in psychoanalysis amounts to nothing without ‘knowing how to read’, that the ‘putting it well’ proper to psychoanalysis is founded on ‘knowing how to read’.”We will see in which way these two corresponding sentences – the second is more precise because it concerns the analytical operation itself – are inscribed in a shaking up ofboth, the ‘nature’ of the symptom and the aim of interpretation.Jean-Luc Monnier